The Unión Soviética is the setting of the eastern-front campaign that transforms Adrián Gallardo’s volunteer service from an imagined route back to boxing into prolonged exposure to combat, loss, and uncertainty. The novel places the country at the convergence of his military ambitions, the División Azul’s costly battles, and the later survival of men whose wartime identities follow them into postwar Spain.

The eastern front and Adrián’s enlistment

Adrián arrives near Leningrad expecting that the front will bring him into contact with Lieutenant Navarro, a fellow boxer. Instead, Navarro is assigned to another sector, while the German offensive against Leningrad keeps the front under sustained pressure. Adrián’s hoped-for encounter is postponed for months; the waiting becomes a persistent source of frustration, interrupted by the demands of trench life and artillery fire. He begins the campaign as an alférez, the rank he had held at the end of the Spanish Civil War, and becomes a lieutenant without gaining military distinction beyond his reputation as a professional boxer.

Adrián’s desire to fight in the Russian front is stated plainly when an officer notes his languages. He objects that he wants to go east and cannot see how speaking languages will help there. That ambition does not mean he understands what the campaign will demand. Near Leningrad, military service puts distance between him and the Spanish places, boxing rooms, and civilian life to which he hopes to return.

Pokrovskaya and the delayed reunion

After the German assault on Stalingrad fails, Hitler suspends the Leningrad offensive and gives up the attempt to advance, maintaining pressure on the city instead. With the front stabilized, Adrián returns to Pokrovskaya for a week’s leave at headquarters. In the officers’ dining room, a familiar voice calls to him before he recognizes the speaker: Navarro. Their reunion comes only after months of separation across different sectors, and the brief scene makes the vast distance between the Spanish boxers’ earlier lives and their wartime posting tangible.

Adrián’s return to military duty follows a short convalescence. He writes a long letter to Pirulo, apologizing for his mistakes and describing the reunion, the fighting, his suspension, and his renewed determination to train and box professionally. He sends it to the Gimnástica Ferroviaria gym on Calle Barbieri in Madrid and leaves for the front believing he has already overcome the hardest part. That confidence is overturned by the Battle of Krasny Bor.

Krasny Bor and the end of the imagined return

The División Azul pays heavily for stopping the Soviet offensive and maintaining the siege of Leningrad: in eleven days in February 1943, its losses amount to half the troops engaged, and a thousand men are captured. Adrián is among those who make it back to Pokrovskaya, where the survivors are welcomed as heroes even as the prospect of defeat appears increasingly difficult to avoid.

Exhausted and hungry after the battle, Adrián goes first to the post office. One letter is his own, returned with an indication that Pirulo is absent or unknown at the address; the other, from the Gimnástica Ferroviaria, explains why. Pirulo is in prison. The gym’s owner says that the former legionnaire had been arrested after police found propaganda he was keeping at home for a friend. The news breaks through Adrián’s belief that the eastern front is a nightmare separate from his real life in Madrid. The letter connects the suffering of Krasny Bor to the civilian world he had imagined waiting intact on Calle Barbieri. His hoped-for return to boxing has already been altered by political repression and by the battle’s losses.

From the Soviet front to Estonia

The novel’s eastern European wartime geography extends beyond Adrián’s service near Leningrad. In summer 1943, the Klooga concentration camp opens in northern Estonia as a satellite facility of Vaivara, the central camp in the SS-administered system there. Vaivara lies 27 kilometres from Narva, near the Soviet border, where the German army faces the advance of Soviet forces. Klooga’s population fluctuates between two and three thousand prisoners during its year of operation. Most are Jewish people transported from the Vilna ghetto in Lithuania in freight trains in August and September 1943; later arrivals include prisoners from the Kaunas and Salaspils ghettos, as well as Jews and Roma from other places and about a hundred Soviet prisoners of war.

By September 1944, the narrative has moved to the Narva front in Estonia. Adrián is among a formation addressed by a Flemish commander, but understands only a few of the words. He has learned German from Jan Schmitt and can understand more when the arriving officer, Ernst Kleiber, speaks, yet he still does not know what the call for volunteers is for. The episode places the limits of Adrián’s understanding alongside the shifting front and the increasingly multinational forces in which he serves.

Narrative significance

The Unión Soviética is not merely a distant destination in Adrián’s account. It is the place where the future he imagines—returning to Madrid and resuming boxing—is repeatedly delayed, then made uncertain by combat and the arrest of the man he hoped would train him. Pokrovskaya and Krasny Bor give that reversal concrete form: a reunion with Navarro briefly reconnects him to boxing, while a returned letter from Madrid makes clear that the civilian world has not remained separate from the war.

The eastern-front material also sets personal survival beside mass violence. Adrián’s return from Krasny Bor is treated as fortunate, while the account of Klooga records the imprisonment and murder of thousands in the same broad region of German-Soviet conflict. The movement from the siege near Leningrad to Estonia enlarges the scale of the war beyond any one soldier’s experience, without making those experiences interchangeable: Adrián’s campaign, Jan’s place in the wartime network, and the prisoners of Klooga occupy sharply different positions within it.