Military Secret

4 hrs. 17 min.

Language Russian

Author Arkady Gaidar

Narrator Valeria Lebedeva

Description

Arkady Gaidar began writing the story “The Military Secret” in the spring of 1932 in Khabarovsk, where he worked as a correspondent who traveled for the newspaper “Pacific Star.” At first, the writer planned to title the story “Such a Person.”

It’s not hard to see that by “such a person” Arkady Gaidar meant the hero of this story—the “kid Alka.” He gave him traits that later appeared in one of the heroes of the story “The Fate of a Drummer,” Slava Grachkovsky, and in Timúr Garayev from the story “Timur and His Team.”

So what is this “military secret,” which turns out not to be a secret at all? It is those character traits of Soviet people—collectivism, internationalism, readiness for a feat—that Arkady Gaidar saw in Soviet boys and girls, and which, after growing up, manifested with such brightness ten years later on the battlefields of the Great Patriotic War.