If we talk about the genre of the book, then this is a tragedy. Tragedies based on personal testimony, interrogation reports and memories of those people who, by the will of fate, dealt with the Cheka-OPTU. The vast majority of documents have remained a “closed secret” until today. Who, for example, knew that back in 1919, an entire counterintelligence operation was carried out against a sick and half-deaf man of whom all of Russia was proud, as a result of which he ended up in the basements of the Lubyanka? The name of this man is Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky. How about this paradox of history: the fate of Lenin, and therefore the entire country, although not for long, was absolutely in the hands of the inveterate bandit Yakov Koshelkov. There are many such stories in the book, and they are all kept behind the steel doors of secret archives. What unites them is the most terrible and most inevitable thing in this world—death. Someone died at the hands of the executioner; someone, having passed the test in the Magadan and Vorkuta camps, still survived. But all the same, the years allotted to him were death - death in installments.