Under the gloomy northern sky, near stormy Ladoga, on an island at the source of the Neva, rises a distant outpost of the St. Petersburg land - the Shlisselburg Fortress. Built by the Novgorodians long before the founding of St. Petersburg, it became a terrible political prison in the imperial era. In damp casemates and towers blown by icy winds, crowned prisoners, disgraced nobles, and stern schismatics who preferred to die rather than betray their faith drank their cup of suffering. After the Decembrist uprising, Shlisselburg became a place of imprisonment for those who considered the path of revolutionary change to be the highest good for the Fatherland and did not hesitate to shed the blood of their neighbor in the name of their ideals. In the new book of the famous writer Nikolai Mikhailovich Konyaev, the reader sees whole worlds of unbearable suffering that bring a person to the brink of madness, worlds of hope and faith - both revolutionaries and royal crowned bearers who died at their hands...