Stout Hearts is a true story of selfless deeds that in the telling sometimes sound like incredible adventures.
During the Nazi occupation of West Ukraine, the lovely town of Rovno was the residence of Erich Koch, "Reichskommissar of the Ukraine," murderer and hangman.
And in the nearby Sarny forests there was a camp of intrepid partisans assigned to intelligence work. People of different peace-time professions, they lived in strict secrecy and struck mortal fear into the hearts of closely guarded Imperial Counsellors and generals.
The hero of this book is a courageous scout named Nikolai Kuznetsov, who posed as Paul Sichert, a "compatriot" of Koch’s. What Kuznetsov did was so unexpected, daring and bold that, as the author writes, there was no need to resort to fiction.
Hero of the Soviet Union Dmitry Medvedev (1898-1954) fought in the Revolution and in the Civil War. From 1920 on he worked for many years in the Soviet Intelligence Service.
A few months after the outbreak of the Second World War, Medvedev and thirty-three volunteers from Moscow crossed the enemy lines and deep in enemy-held territory organized a partisan detachment, which fought its way through the Bryansk forests. Later, Medvedev led another detachment, which was landed by parachute in West Ukraine, then occupied by the Nazis. That was the scene of the events Dmitry Medvedev used as material for his books. The numerous exploits of the men of his detachment are related in Stout Hearts, Men of Iron, and On the Banks of the Southern Bug.