"Crocodile" is terrible, amazing, necessary for ignorant youth as a warning, an antidote, as an antidote. Marina has a journalistic acumen - she plunged headlong into this world, isolated from normal life, which exists next to us and which we almost do not notice. She lived in the lair itself in the role of a spy and brought out from this bottom her terrible and somewhat cold story. Marina Akhmedova is not talking about young Western intellectuals indulging in cocaine in the dazzlingly clean toilets of modern Moscow City offices. She obtained a story in a semi-legal manner from the very bottom, from such a bottom of life that Alexei Maksimovich himself had never dreamed of. She talks about those who sit on a “crocodile”, from which it is impossible to “get off”, because the destruction that it produces in the body is monstrous and irreversible, and it is not, as a rule, children from “decent” families who fall into these “crocodile paws”. families,” and those from the gateway are the most vulnerable, deprived of a normal family, loving parents, dropped out of society and unnecessary neither to society nor to themselves. “Guard! – Marina Akhmedova shouts. - Help! Save!" It screams differently than people of my generation would write. No, perhaps she doesn’t scream at all - she reports rather coldly about what is happening, because, having stood in this rotten corner of life, she knows that these people cannot be saved. Lyudmila Ulitskaya