The book by writer, journalist and researcher of criminal subculture and grassroots folklore Alexander Sidorov contains essays about famous thieves and street songs - “Music is playing on Moldavanka”, “Sail on, our thieves’ boat”, “When I was a boy”, “ Mitrofanovskoye Cemetery”, etc. As in his famous book “The Song of My Murka”, the author talks not only about the history of the creation of the pearls of the “thieves’ classics”, but also about many little-known historical and everyday facts related to them. The reader will be able to learn a lot of interesting information about the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, about the development of legal proceedings at the dawn of Soviet power, about the rise and fall of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and also, if desired, understand such specific topics as the basics of hand-to-hand “hooligan combat”, classification of knives and daggers and the “cocaineization” of Russia in the first decades of the last century.