On a cold night in November 2011, in a field outside Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine, a gang of thugs stormed a Soviet scientific research institute, beat and humiliated the staff and burned the place to the ground. None of it was real. Well, some of it was. The institute was a film set — a working re-creation inspired by the Moscow institute run by the pioneering quantum physicist Lev Landau. It claimed, at the time, to be the largest set in European cinema history. Some of the thugs were actual neo-Nazis, led by real-life Russian fascist Maksim Martsinkevich, who would...