Russian Empire. The country of our great-grandfathers. A country that perished in the fire and chaos of the First World War. We know nothing about it - neither about the country, nor about the war. In this book, for the first time, I tried to paint an objective picture of the life of the Russian Empire during its last fifty years. I don’t want to tell the truth of communists or monarchists, the truth of Russians or non-Russians, the truth of the people or the tsars. I want to tell the truth about how the country lived, what it lived with, and why it could not withstand the trials that befell it. And I want to know the answers to questions that are important for us now: - Is democracy possible in Russia? — Is Stalin an accident or a tragic but logical outcome? — Were we really so poor that there was no other way out except revolution? — How different are we today from us then? What lessons have we never learned? The answers are here, in these books.