Scouts

A secret trophy obtained in 1942 in the Caucasus could have made the soldiers of the Führer invincible. Atomic charges created by German scientists in 1944 were capable of sweeping cities away, and new ballistic missiles could reach any point on Earth and deprive the anti-Hitler coalition’s top command of its highest leaders. And then nothing would have stopped Hitler from making the Reich great again. After the failure of the Allied landing in Normandy, this scenario began to seem absolutely real. But all three projects were brought to full readiness in Königsberg, which was stormed not by ordinary fighters, but by somewhat unusual ones—the scouts of Captain Filin’s group. Thanks to their feat, Nazi plans were thwarted in 1945, but the details of the operation survived only in closed archives.

In 2022, Soviet historian Leonid Zimin, trying to understand the cause of this injustice, unexpectedly realizes that he has stumbled onto a secret that mysteriously connects people’s comfortable present with their heroic past. A little later, Zimin understands that he is about to—accidentally—rewrite the official history of the Soviet Union! But it’s too late to turn back; Leonid must go all the way, just like those scouts in 1945.