The new novel by the famous Novgorod writer-historian Sergei Dmitrievich Trifonov tells how, during the First World War and the Civil War, a young Russian officer Sergei Pavlovich Pavlovsky was formed into a cruel, bloody bandit and murderer. At the end of 1920, having become the military deputy of Boris Savinkov, the head of the anti-Soviet People's Union for the Defense of the Motherland and Freedom, Pavlovsky, who simultaneously carried out tasks for French and Polish intelligence, carried out reconnaissance and sabotage raids with his detachment into Soviet Belarus, Smolensk, Pskov and a number of other provinces of the RSFSR, leaving behind burned villages and hamlets, hundreds of corpses of civilians... After in July 1922, Pavlovsky’s gang captured and plundered a small district town in the Novgorod province, its path was interrupted by the GPU and units of the Red Army.