This book is about heroes. About the soldiers and officers who, with excellent courage, sparing no effort and blood, with their own bayonets drove into the wild Caucasian heads the understanding that the Russian Empire would not allow anyone to commit robbery within its borders. This book is about generals, tsarist generals, who, in the most difficult conditions, with small forces, but with great courage, step by step pacified the Caucasian highlanders. This is a book about intelligence officers and diplomats, or rather one of them, the hero of the war with Napoleon, the former hussar Sergei Novitsky, a close friend of the legendary General Madatov, already familiar to the reader from Vladimir Sobol’s books “The Black Hussar” and “Caucasian Glory.” And of course this book is about General Madatov himself, whose courage no one has surpassed in the entire history of the Russian Empire.