The vast territory of Russia from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific coast has long been called Siberia. Cody Marsh, a famous American journalist who visited the Far East in 1920, published an article entitled “Introduction to the Russian Wild East.” Having started the list of “Siberian cities” with Vladivostok and ending with Nikolsk (the future Ussuriysk), the American journalist seemed to outline part of the “great circle arc” along which the lives of the heroes of this book passed. In fact, the “great circle arc” is a special term in navigation and represents the shortest line between two points on the surface of rotation (of the globe). But how could the rural boy Ivan Potopyak know about this when, together with other settlers, he looked at a homemade map on which the path from the village of Khodyvantsy in Ukraine to the village of Antonovka in the Amur region was drawn? But it was he who called this path the “arc of a great circle”...