The book contains 22 essays about the mysterious circumstances of the death of famous statesmen and people of literature and art in the history of Russia: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Alexander Radishchev, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Alexander Blok, Savva Morozov, Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Lenin, Peter Wrangel, Sergei Kirov, Joseph Stalin and others. The events in the book cover the period from 1584 to 1953. The work is non-academic, there is no scientific apparatus in it. But the author tried, as far as possible, to take into account all the most important sources, to take into account various, often opposing points of view.