Confrontation (TV series)

Confrontation
Directed by	Semyon Aranovich
Written by	Yulian Semyonov
Starring	Oleg Basilashvili Andrei Boltnev
Music by	Alexander Knaifel
Cinematography	Valery Fedosov
Production company	Lenfilm
Release date	1985 (1985)
Running time	392 min.
Country	Soviet Union
Language	Russian

Confrontation or (Russian: Противостояние, translit. Protivostoyanie) is a 1985 Soviet six-part television film directed by Semyon Aranovich based on the novel by Yulian Semyonov.

Two parallel storylines unfold in the film. One takes place in the late 1970s in the USSR and the other during the Great Patriotic War on the territory of Poland and Nazi Germany.

...A dismembered human corpse is found in the bushes near the road leading to the airport of Nardyn. Police colonel Vladislav Nikolaevich Kostenko comes from Moscow to investigate this heinous and unusual crime. Soon the taxi driver Grigoriy Milinko gets linked to the murder. But thanks to the investigation of the police major Kardava, assistant of Kostenko, it turns out that the real Grigoriy Milinko, Marine of the Red Army, was killed and dismembered in the area of Wrocław in 1945. Finger prints of "Milinko" found in Nardyme are sent to East Germany, where in the Berlin archive is found data on the real culprit.

This is Nikolai Ivanovich Krotov, a traitor who in the summer of 1941 defected to the German side. In an effort to prove his loyalty to the Nazis, he even carried by himself the wounded political leader George Kozel who was subsequently shot. Krotov trains in the special commando school Abwehr and then is flung into the rear areas of the USSR with special scouting assignments. Soon the traitor tries to rob a German female jeweler with whom he resided and is sent to a concentration camp. But there Krotov continues to "work", this time as a provocateur. Due to his denunciations a large group of Soviet prisoners of war who have been trying to organize an underground resistance in the concentration camp is shot and Krotov gets released. In 1945 as part of Vlasov's Army Krotov is involved in the defense of Wrocław but then deserts. When he kills Grigoriy Milinko and steals his documents and military uniform, Krotov enters the ranks of the Red Army, and after the war goes to the northern regions of the USSR, to Nardyn, where finds a job as a taxi driver.