Just one step in June 1957 put an end to the brilliant government career of Dmitry Shepilov (1905-1995), then Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR and member of the CPSU Central Committee. Having then spoken at the party plenum against the emerging personality cult of Khrushchev, he thereby “joined” the so-called “anti-party group” (Kaganovich, Malenkov, Molotov) and very soon lost all his posts. But before that, on Stalin’s personal instructions, he developed a textbook on political economy; participated in the Great Patriotic War, which he finished as a major general and military commandant of Vienna; For four years he was editor-in-chief of Pravda. The author's independence of judgment on the pressing problems of the Soviet state, the frankness, and often paradoxical characteristics that he gives to the most important political figures of the USSR, allow us to read the pages of our history in a new way.