The book by the Honored Military Pilot of the USSR, Hero of the Soviet Union, Colonel General Vasily Vasilyevich Reshetnikov is a fascinating story about aviation in the 1930s-1940s, about great people of a great era, with whom the author was personally acquainted, and historical events in which personally participated, about Chkalov and Baidukov, Levanevsky and Gromov, Golovanov, Sudets, Molodchy and other “Stalinist falcons”, about Soviet air records and the creation of Long-Range Aviation, about air travel across the North Pole that shocked the whole world and bombing raids on Koenigsberg, Danzig and Berlin , about war and peace, victories and defeats, ups and downs, about those who “fly and lived ahead of their time” and were “doomed to heroism.”