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In the June 1917 Kerensky offensive, Shklovsky, an assistant commissar of the Provisional Government on the Southwestern Front who had earlier served in and trained armoured-car units, led wavering soldiers across the Lomnica River in an attack. He was shot in the stomach and received the St George Cross. The episode shows a commissar in a disintegrating army moving men forward by going first himself.
Shklovsky compares himself to a falling stone that cannot stop its fall but can think about how it falls. The narrator gives up any claim to control events or judge them from above. What he keeps is exact observation of his own trajectory from inside the catastrophe, which turns helplessness into a form of precise testimony.
The book carries Shklovsky's idea of ostranenie (making the familiar strange) into its account of history. Alongside explicit explanations of military collapse and political failure, it sets short, broken paragraphs of physical detail side by side, such as famine-era Petrograd residents burning furniture for heat. The fragmentation lets such details register as strange rather than fading into routine hardship.