On December 25, 1991, at 19:38, the flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was lowered over the dome of the Senate of the Moscow Kremlin. And the next day, there, in the Kremlin, a session of the Council of Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR adopted a declaration on the formal legal dissolution of the Soviet Union. So quietly, almost routinely, the 70-year history of the last empire of the 20th century ended. Two and a half decades have passed since then - a whole generation... The further in time we move away from those days, the warmer we feel about the shadows of the deceased power. The more often and more confidently we hear around us about a major geopolitical catastrophe in relation to the events of twenty-five years ago. And this is already an unwholesome and myrrh-streaming property of human memory, it is a sign of deceived expectations and an unhealed illness. This is the diagnosis of today. People reach for the past when not everything is going well in the present.