Penal battalions won the war! Penal units were the main striking force of the Red Army! Penalties were suicide bombers, “cannon fodder”, Soviet kamikazes, who were specially thrown for slaughter - to storm obviously impregnable positions head-on, “clear mines with their feet” and fill the enemy with corpses! These “black” anti-Soviet myths replaced the ceremonial Soviet ones. They are trying to pass off this lie as “trench truth.” This dirt, offensive to real front-line soldiers, pours out in torrents from newspaper pages and television screens. A new book by a leading military historian, one of the first to turn to the forbidden “penalty” topic, leaves no stone unturned from all these myths. Objectively and impartially, based not on scandalous rumors, sensational speculation and propaganda cliches, but on archival documents and evidence from the penal prisoners themselves, the author restores the true history of the penal units of the Red Army from the moment of their creation on the initiative of L. Trotsky until 1945, showing specific examples , what role they played on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War and who actually won the war.