In the newspapers he was called the “hellish chieftain”; journalists were in a hurry to describe the daring raids and robberies committed by him. The policeman and gendarmes tried their best to grab him, but even if they succeeded, he escaped - both from prisons and from penal servitude. Denikin and Petliura, French and German, Greek and Romanian counterintelligence unsuccessfully tried to find his trace in Odessa captured by the interventionists. It seemed that he was shining, that a special star was protecting him, because, despite all the efforts of his enemies, he remained alive and continued to throw in their faces: “I am Kotovsky!” A new novel by a recognized master of Russian prose.