The book is based on the personal war diaries of soldier Vasily Churkin and messages from the Soviet Information Bureau. The reader has a rare opportunity not to listen to other people’s conclusions, but to independently compare the official view of the battle scenes with the view of them from the trench, as they say, in real time. The reports are correlated by date and place with the diary entries of Vasily Churkin. In this contrast, not only the “half-truth” of the official version becomes obvious, but also all its silences and outright lies. And all the more valuable is this diary, an undisguisedly truthful story about the war of its simple participant.