Stout Hearts (This Happened Near Rovno)

The emotional climax of this book is a piece of German police paperwork. Nikolai Kuznetsov - the intelligence officer who spent two years in Rovno in the uniform of a Wehrmacht lieutenant, shot the Reich Finance Adviser, kidnapped General Ilgen and killed the deputy governor of Galicia in a Lvov street in daylight - disappears in March 1944.

Medvedev does not know what happened to him. What he has is a telegram found afterwards in the papers of the Lvov Gestapo: a Soviet partisan, a spy and wrecker, active for a long time in Rovno with impunity, shot with two accomplices. He quotes it without comment and writes the next sentence himself: "Thus died Nikolai Kuznetsov, our comrade-in-arms."

The only account of his death is the one written by the people who killed him, in their vocabulary. He prints it whole because it is all there is.

And the book cannot print three letters. NKVD: zero occurrences. Chekist: zero. State Security: zero. Medvedev was a colonel of the NKVD commanding a special-purpose detachment of its Fourth Directorate, parachuted in and tasked from Moscow. The English reader is given a commander, a detachment and an airfield, and no institution at all.

Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, in the Library of Soviet Literature, undated. Translated by David Skvirsky.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.