You are unlikely to like this book - it is about unpleasant things. Falsified faith, deceived hopes... A book for those who are not afraid to understand Russia with their minds and are inclined to doubt generally accepted canons. The famous political scientist D. Oreshkin shows how these generally accepted evidences are constructed, why they are introduced into mass consciousness, and what happens to consciousness as a result. The specific object of the study is Stalin and the USSR, but not as real historical phenomena, but as epic images living their own separate lives. The author risked combining geographical, historical, economic-sectoral and sociocultural approaches for the sake of general political scientific conclusions. It is impossible otherwise: the postulates of the Soviet faith are based on official figures and facts. And what the facts and figures themselves are based on, you cannot find out without detailed economic, historical and geographical analysis. Our “obviousness” naively believes that statistics reflect objective reality. In pre-revolutionary Russia this was approximately the case. But not in the USSR! A substantive analysis shows that figures and facts in the country of victorious socialism served a more important task. They served as the basis of a new faith and a heroic epic designed to prove the advantages of the Stalinist regime. Soviet numbers became part of Soviet ideology. The question remains open: is the transformation of statistics into a digital ornament on an ideological icon a sign of social progress or vice versa? Material results, cleared of epic layers, force one to lean towards the second point of view. Sorry.