In recent years, the penal units of the Red Army have become one of the main trump cards in the cheating deck of “liberal” revisionist historians, ready for any vileness in order to belittle the feat of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War. All records of historical “blunders”, absurd speculations and outright lies were broken by the television series “Penal Battalion”, which diligently pushes the idea that the penal units “won the war” (although in fact the number of penal units did not exceed 1.24% of the number of the Soviet Armed Forces) .This book, based not on propaganda cliches, but on archival documents and the memories of the penal prisoners themselves, refutes the most common and false of these myths - especially since real life is always richer than any film fantasy, and the true history of the penal companies and battalions of the Red Army is tragic, bitterness and intensity of passions surpasses the wildest fiction.