This book lifts the curtain on the eventful, complex inner life of the editorial office of perhaps the most famous Russian newspaper. The author has something to tell - he worked at Izvestia for twenty-seven years, going from reporter to editor-in-chief. Of all the subjects, Vasily Zakharko chose for the book the most conflicting, but also the most topical - how the editorial board in Soviet times strove for freedom of speech, how it achieved independence from the state in August 1991, how it took advantage of this status already in democratic Russia and how it was forever lost. These were the years of both the national glory of the newspaper and its deep drama, to say the least - tragedy.