In this edition of the book (the first was called "Word and Fate"), the author, while maintaining the main goal of his historical and documentary research in the search for "unknown in the known," introduced a lot of new things. For the first time, counting on the mass reader, it was told about the "missing" Decembrist S. Nechaev, the biography of the rest of the heroes was replenished. Their fates, it would seem, are so different in life opportunities, reunited with their sometimes dramatic, but always passionate service to the Motherland the people.