The book “The Vanquished” by Irina Vladimirovna Golovkina is a novel from the life of the Russian intelligentsia during the dictatorship of Stalin. The author writes: “There is not a single fictitious fact in this work - one that I would not have gleaned from the surrounding reality of the 30s and 40s.” But for all its documentary nature, the novel is still a work of fiction, and not a simple chronicle of real events. The civil war ended in Russia. The country was destroyed, many people died - from war, from hunger, disease and devastation, many ended up in emigration. There were people left from the so-called “former”, those who survived in this terrible whirlpool, mostly widows, children, and old people. Many of them never came to terms with the new government, but they had to live and raise their children and grandchildren, who were not accepted into educational institutions, fired from their jobs, and sometimes sent to camps. Hunger, unemployment, humiliation, and anxiety darkened the future lives of these people, but, like ice water tempers hot steel, the catastrophes of the revolution only mothballed, strengthened the principles of aristocracy in some people, rekindled the fading Orthodox faith, the shaky love for the fatherland. A certain internal conscious and unconscious opposition to all the trends of the new era appeared. The author of the book, surprisingly simply and clearly, without any vulgarity, managed to talk about the tragic pages of the country’s history. Thousands of people were arrested, exiled very far from their homes, many of them never returned. The faith, character and upbringing of people who found themselves in dungeons or exile helped them to survive, and those who were destined to die, did so with their heads held high, undefeated. And the hearts of those who still lived remained in that old Russia. Her distant image, several decades of nightmare, was associated with childhood, peaceful life, where everything was as it should be for people.