“Save our souls! We are delirious from suffocation. Save our souls, hurry to us!..” Terrible in its piercing power, the poetic image from V. Vysotsky’s poem better than any description expresses the essence of the sensational book that you are holding in your hands. These are stories about Soviet people who suffocated in dying submarines, in cities destroyed by earthquakes, who burned alive among the wreckage of crashed planes, realizing that their death would remain unknown to the world. Because all information about such disasters - and there were many of them - was immediately classified as “Top Secret”, so as not to disturb the idyllic picture of an exemplary socialist society. The Soviet media reported far more about the devastating American tornadoes than about the 1948 Ashgabat earthquake, which destroyed the populous city. What can we say about catastrophic events on warships and submarines, at missile ranges! Now this policy of silence seems strange, because the dedication and heroism shown during the disasters were worthy of becoming an example of loyalty to the highest ideals of human relations. And that is why there is such a need for books that lift the veil of secrecy not only over the earthquakes in Ashgabat or Spitak, the Chelyuskin tragedy or the death of the Komsomolets submarine, but also over those events that remained not entirely clear even to their participants...