To Atone with Blood

The novella “Atone for Blood,” by front-line writer Vyacheslav Leonidovich Kondratiev—one of the leading authors of military-themed works—printed in 1991 in the magazine “Znamya,” takes readers back to the difficult wartime years. When, for every village burned to the ground, sometimes tens of thousands of soldiers died, and surrounding fields were thick with snowdrops—how those piles of corpses were called then by local residents.