Russia did not “fall out of history” in the 20th century. This century has become for our country a time of long overdue historical leap: the country has modernized, transformed from agrarian and rural to industrial and urban. The modernization of the Soviet era was “conservative”, “instrumental”: it added a hammer to the sickle, but, relying on outdated social mechanisms and preserving them, it did not contribute to the development of modern institutions of a market economy and political democracy and therefore remained incomplete. This is the main idea of the book by Anatoly Vishnevsky . The famous Russian demographer and sociologist offers his reading of the lessons of the recent past, understanding the social history of the Soviet Union as a conservative modernization project that has reached a dead end, and warns against its repetition.