Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kostitsyn (1883–1963) is a man of a unique biography. Bolshevik in 1904–1914, leader of the university fighting squad, almost executed in Presnya after the December Uprising of 1905, he served a year and a half in “Kresty”. Then he lived in Paris, where he continued his education at the Sorbonne, and communicated closely with Lenin, who invited him to join the Central Committee. In 1917, he was a commissioner of the Provisional Government on the Southwestern Front and personally arrested Denikin, and during the days of the October Revolution he participated in the suppression of the Bolshevik uprising in Vinnitsa. Later he was a professor at Moscow State University, a member of the State Scientific Council, and director of the Geophysical Institute. In 1928 he left for Paris, from where he never returned. Working in France, he became one of the founders of mathematical biology. On the day of the German invasion of the USSR, he was arrested and spent nine months in the Compiegne camp, and after liberation he joined the Resistance movement. In his memoirs and diaries, he writes about various episodes of his eventful life.