In the second part of the book, "The Peasant Militia–Defender," you’ll meet again the heroes you already loved from the first book—Mikhailo and Stepka—and you’ll also learn about the great feat of the Russian people who liberated Moscow from Polish interventionists.
After the failure of the first popular militia led by Prince Dmitry Trubetskoy, the boyar Prokopy Lyapunov, and the Cossack ataman Ivan Zarutsky, new forces rose to fight the hateful invaders. They were led by Kuzma Minin, the head of the Nizhny Novgorod zemstvo, and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky. In October, the militia units under their command drove the Poles out of Moscow, and this event foreshadowed the end of the Time of Troubles.