After twenty years in a Siberian labor camp, an extraordinary priest, Kiril Lakota (played superbly by Anthony Quinn), rises to become the first Russian pope in this speculative drama from 1968. With the world on the brink of nuclear war because of a Sino-Soviet conflict exacerbated by a U.S. trade embargo against the Chinese, Lakota must wrestle with self-doubt and his unfamiliarity with a strange and dangerous world he has been thrust into.