The execution of the partisan prisoners is a turning point in the novel’s account of revolutionary violence: a sentence carried out at a remote forest platform becomes a confrontation over authority, loyalty, and the possibility of protest. The scene’s abrupt shifts—from the condemned men’s terror to Vdovichenko’s defiance and the final volley—make the machinery of punishment visible without resolving the political conflicts that produced it.

Setting and Sentence

The execution takes place on a cold morning at a high rocky platform in the forest. Its edge is ringed with upright granite boulders, which Yurii Andreievich had once thought bore the marks of human construction and might have belonged to an ancient place of worship. In this setting, the partisan leadership carries out the death sentence against eleven men identified as ringleaders of a conspiracy and two male nurses condemned for brewing vodka.

The scene is preceded by a meeting arranged between Yurii Andreievich and Dr. Lajos at a White-built blockhouse near Fox's Thicket. When the doctor arrives, he waits by the earthworks and climbs into the watchtower, looking through the empty machine-gun slits toward the forest beyond the river. The surrounding landscape—frost-hardened earth, dry willow leaves, and sharply divided bands of coniferous and deciduous trees—places the execution within a region already shaped by military occupation and partisan conflict.

The Condemned and the Escort

Twenty loyal partisans, including members of the commander's bodyguard, escort the prisoners to the platform. The armed guards form a semicircle and drive the condemned men toward the edge, where there is no way forward except over the precipice. The prisoners have been disarmed since their arrest; after their prolonged questioning, imprisonment, and maltreatment, the narration describes them as having lost their human appearance.

The guards have not searched the men again before the execution. To do so, the account explains, would have seemed both unnecessary and degrading to people already facing death. That decision becomes consequential when Rzhanitsky, an old anarchist and friend of Vdovichenko, suddenly fires three shots at the guards, aiming at Sivobluy. He misses. The guards' continued restraint toward a former comrade delays an immediate response, but Rzhanitsky then throws down his Browning. It discharges a fourth time and wounds Pachkolia in the foot.

Panic and Protest

Pachkolia's cries disrupt the procession. Pafnutkin and Gorazdykh lift and drag him so that the others will not trample him, but the commotion spreads: the condemned men plead, pray, curse, and call for mercy. Young Galuzin, still wearing his yellow-braided school cap, takes it off, kneels, and edges backward while repeatedly bowing before the guards. He begs to be spared, says that he has not yet lived, and pleads to see his mother once more.

Others direct accusations at Sivobluy, calling him a traitor and invoking his alleged betrayals of successive loyalties. Vdovichenko, despite being at the edge of death, does not join the pleas. He stands with his head high and addresses Rzhanitsky as a fellow anarchist. He argues that their protest will not reach the new authorities, predicts that history will expose their deeds, and presents the condemned as martyrs for their ideals. His speech turns the execution into an explicit dispute over who may claim fidelity to the revolution and who will be judged by posterity.

The Volley and Its Meaning

The guards fire a volley of twenty shots at a command audible only to them. Half the condemned men are struck down, most dying immediately; a second salvo kills the rest. Galuzin is the last to stop moving. The scene ends not with a negotiated reprieve or a clear political resolution, but with the prisoners' deaths and the visible completion of the sentence.

The execution is one of several narrative forms through which the novel renders the upheaval: elsewhere, Yurii Andreievich reports on army disintegration in a letter, records his thoughts in a makeshift diary, and later receives a delayed letter from Tonia. These shifts between public violence, private writing, and correspondence place the execution within a fragmented account of historical experience rather than a self-contained political explanation. In his later notes, the doctor conceives of history as an invisible, continuous growth, like a forest changing beneath the appearance of stillness. Set against that image, the execution is history's visible violence: decisive in its immediate human consequences, yet not an explanation of the larger transformations still unfolding.