The book is dedicated to the activities of one of Stalin’s closest and long-term associates - Lev Mekhlis, who was a true alter ego - the second “I” of the leader. On all pages the reader will meet Stalin and Molotov. Voroshilov and Beria, Zhukov and Timoshenko, Gorky and Fadeev, dozens of other famous and ordinary characters of Soviet history of the 20-50s of the XX century. The action takes place either in the Kremlin office of the leader, or on the battlefield somewhere near Kerch; the picture of the plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks is replaced by a scene of the extrajudicial execution of generals in the fall of 1941; the tragedy of the people, full of the hardships of war and famine, is adjacent to the luxury that the Soviet nobility allowed itself. Was Mehlis the embodiment of evil or simply personified his controversial time? These questions are answered in the book by Doctor of Historical Sciences Yuri Rubtsov, created on the basis of archival documents that were recently kept in secret storage.