Negotiations with the coordinator of the aggro—an сверхцивілізація that has waged a thousand-year galactic war for Earth—end for Alexander Shulgin in another dangerous adventure. The matrix of his consciousness is sent into a parallel reality, right at the beginning of 1938, the time of the height of the Yezhov terror in Russia, where Shulgin—now the commissar Shestakov—joins local battles of the moment, first with the NKVD and then with his long-standing alien opponents.