The ShiK publishing house presents the novel by Ekaterina Matveeva, the first work of fiction by an author who went through the difficult path of Stalin’s hard labor - “The story of one convict and other convicts, convicts, and also some freewomen.” Again the Gulag, again Stalin’s camps? Yes. - The Gulag, Stalin’s camps, but here, first of all, is a work in the genre of Russian classical prose, and not memories limited to one fate, this is the result of long thoughts, this is a novel with artistic merits that place it among rare literature for our time, with living images with skillfully revealed dramatic collisions. This is a polyphonic work, a cross-section of our society in its mirror reflection in the Gulag and the mirror reflection of the Gulag in “free life”. The author is looking for an answer to the burning question of our time: why did the seemingly indestructible monolith of the communist regime collapse overnight, where and why did the “believers” in its justice and indestructibility disappear like shadows. And yet, above all, this is a novel, the development of the plot of which holds the reader’s unflagging interest from the first to the last pages.