Ночевала тучка золотая

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In 1944, two brothers, Kol'ka and Sashka, find themselves among 500 children from a Moscow orphanage sent to the depopulated North Caucasus. The twins, aged eleven, have been shaped by war and life in an orphanage, becoming streetwise yet still yearning for love and tenderness. They initially believe the adults' promises of a paradise awaiting them. However, their arrival in the lush region is overshadowed by ominous explosions in the nearby mountains. Armed Chechens, resisting deportation, fiercely oppose the Russian colonizers, and their vengeance tragically impacts the innocent. In a brutal attack, nearly all the children are killed, leaving Kol'ka as the sole survivor, saved by a Chechen boy. The author, Anatolij Pristavkin, draws from his own experiences as an orphan, revealing the emotional weight of these memories that he struggled to articulate until he felt compelled to share them. The narrative, published in 1987, garnered global recognition, translated into over 30 languages, and earned the author a State Prize.