History is multivariate. One can always imagine what would have happened if Nicholas II had not abdicated, or had not shot a workers’ demonstration in the center of the capital in January 1905. There will be several options, because from each event that took place or did not take place, not one possibility arises, but several at once. At the same time, the story is one-line. What happened has already happened, what happened is irrevocable and irreversible. As a matter of fact, the combination of multivariance and irreversibility, multilinearity and unidirectionality is what makes history so interesting. In this last case, the most interesting are those who lost in history, but survived. Vasily Vitalievich Shulgin was such a loser, but a survivor. A deputy of all four pre-revolutionary Dumas, a Russian nationalist, during the anti-Semitic Beilis affair, he took the side of a falsely accused Jew; participant in the White Guard movement, emigrant, Soviet prisoner, amnestied by Khrushchev; a pensioner who lived quietly in the city of Vladimir, who starred in two Soviet films, “Before the Judgment of History” and “Operation Trust”, in which he played himself, Shulgin in his declining years recalled his entire life, and Rostislav Krasyukov diligently wrote down these memories. Anyone who has read Shulgin's memoirs will agree that Rostislav Krasyukov managed to preserve Shulgin's intonation. She is recognizable. We recognize him himself, a losing politician who does not at all believe that he has lost forever. Forgiven by the Soviet regime, acting in propaganda films, he is confident that he is smarter than his victors, who, by chance, will carry out, and are already carrying out, great-power, nationalist policies. In everything that Shulgin said to Krasyukov, there is precisely this bright, frightening, and maybe encouraging feature. Nothing is ever completely lost, either in politics or in history. No one can be considered a final and irrevocable loser.