Another of Krasnov's novels was his 1927 work "Za chertopolokhom" ("Behind the Thistle"), a future history set in the 1990s that imagined a post-Communist Russia ruled over by a restored monarchy that had built an enormous wall around the entire empire to prevent any and all contact with the West. Through set in the future, the emperor who has chosen to isolate Russia from the West bears a strong resemblance in both appearance and personality to Ivan the Terrible. The novel begins with the Soviet Union launching an invasion of Eastern Europe sometime in the 1930s, which was to be started by an unleashing of an immense quantity of poisonous gases. However, the Soviet Air Force accidentally unleashed the deadly chemical gases on the Red Army, killing millions while setting off forest fires. Despite or perhaps because he had been defeated by the Red Army, Krasnov tended to portray the Red Army as an incompetent military force in his writings. The masses of corpses lead to an outbreak of plague, which rendered the borderlands of the Soviet Union uninhabitable for decades and led to a monstrous thistle standing several feet high growing up to in the borderlands. After the disaster, the rest of the world assumes that there is no life left behind the thistle.