This book is about wars, revolutions and coups, about the scary and funny, about life and death. But first of all, this book is about people who find themselves witting or unwitting witnesses and participants in crisis and often fateful events. For several years in a row, one of these witnesses was Mikhail Zygar, a journalist from the Kommersant publishing house. He entered the Uzbek city of Andijan immediately after the suppression of the rebellion that took place there, now almost forgotten. I followed the revolutions in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan and never saw their end. I visited Iraq and met the victims of the war going on there - they turned out to be both Iraqis and Americans. He spent several weeks in Tallinn, just during the fight for the Bronze Soldier, and walked along the Lebanese-Israeli border under fire from Katyusha rockets. But most importantly, wherever the reporter Zygar went, he always discovered that wars and revolutions are not at all what they seem. And life and death are separated from each other by just a step or less, just as the terrible is from the funny, the world is from the crisis, and reality is from the myth.