This book is a chronological narrative of the experiences of Evgenii Moniushko, who lived through and survived the first year of the siege of Leningrad and who served as a junior officer in the Red Army during the last 18 months of war and the first year of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia and Hungary. As such, it provides an intensely human view of daily army life in both combat and garrison duty and unique perspectives on the conditions he and other soldiers endured while in army service.