A terrible summer of 1941. German troops took Smolensk and advanced toward the Dnieper— the “lightning war” led to the rout of RKKA career units in the border districts. Only near Pskov—where concrete pillbox bunkers of the “Stalin Line” were embedded in the ground—did the Wehrmacht stop, meeting fierce resistance. A veteran of the Chechen war, military pensioner Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai Glovatsky finds himself slipping into the past to block the enemy’s road to the city of Lenin. Now the course of the war may go differently—if there is no blockade, Leningrad will become the “cradle” of the future Victory, and the powerful KV tanks rolling straight from factory workshops to the front will pave the way for the Red Army westward, to Berlin!