Andrey Kolesnikov is an expert at the Carnegie Moscow Center, the author of several books, including “Speechwriters,” “The Seventies and Before,” and “Cold War on Ice.” His father, Vladimir Kolesnikov, an employee of the CPSU Central Committee, left short memories. And the son “answered for his father” - he wrote comments, personal and historical-sociological, to these memoirs. Pre-war childhood, war adolescence, post-war youth. Circumstances of arrests that did and did not happen. Love for a Jewish woman, the daughter of an enemy of the people, who became a wife in the era of the struggle against the “cosmopolitans.” Party worker career. A series of Soviet politicians passing through the narrative, as if through the corridors of the Central Committee building on Old Square... And portraits of close friends from the Soviet middle class, who experienced the war and the thaw, stagnation and perestroika, who accepted new times or did not come to terms with them. This book is an attempt understand the Soviet Atlantis, sunken but still sending signals from under the heavy waters of history, and the belated conversation between a son and his father about what was important in the lives of several generations.