This book by Leonid Kostomarov is a tragic story about the ten years he had to spend in captivity. As a result of a miscarriage of justice (or intent?), a twenty-five-year-old graduate of the Bauman School was sentenced to death for complicity in a murder to which he had nothing to do. He miraculously escaped execution, receiving in return fifteen years in a high-security zone. Here he wrote this unusual epic novel, which amazes with the depth of understanding of the characters and destinies of people locked in the zone for many years, if not for life. There are no halftones in the description of the orders, mores, rituals, life and peculiarities of relationships between people in this nightmare world; this is a tragic large-scale panorama of life behind barbed wire, a terrible in its truth decoding of the “black box” of the Evil Zone.