Do historical events depend on the individual efforts of a microcell of society - an individual person? And if they do, then how? How do peoples organize their political lives and do they deserve their governments? What starts a war? The author knows how to extract essential facts from different eras and find internal unity, which arouses the reader's interest. As his friend, poet, Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky wrote, Igor Efimov’s prose is “in line with the great tradition of Russian philosophical prose.” The famous Leningrad prose writer Igor Efimov wrote this book back in Russia, not hoping for publication. It was published in the United States in 1978 under the pseudonym Andrei Moskovit, and soon after that its author was forced to emigrate. Now that the state monopoly on ideology has been ended, the relevance of other, non-Marxist views on the course of human history increases immeasurably. This book is being published in the USSR for the first time. Designed for a wide range of readers.