The hero-guard Luchkovsky serves the main “devil” with faith and truth—the one who plunged the country into lawlessness and repression. Not all at once, and not everything, he understands, since he too is a child of the century and was formed in the Stalinist era. The more painful his realization, the more keenly he feels the secret meaning of the “law of preservation of guilt,” which applies to everyone who lived in those terrible times: both executioners and victims.
The combination of plot lines reminds the reader of the main thing: blood does not destroy blood, and social reorganization leads to the desired result only when it guarantees freedom for each individual person.