The book by Kondraty Birkin (P.P. Karataev), an almost forgotten Russian writer, offers readers a rare opportunity to feel the atmosphere of palace secrets, intrigues and scandals in Russia, England, Italy, France and other states in the period of the 16th–18th centuries. After After the death of the sovereign and Grand Duke Vasily Ivanovich (December 4, 1533), we in Russia had exactly the same disorder as in France under Francis II or in England under Edward VI. In the name of the infant heir, the kingdom was ruled: first by his mother, Empress Elena Vasilyevna Glinskaya, and after her death - by quickly successive temporary workers, seditious boyars, who with servile servility developed vicious inclinations in the infant heart of the future Ivan the Terrible, and with their intrigues and atrocities sowed in the same heart hatred of the boyars, which later expressed itself in unheard-of atrocities.