You hold this book in your hands and think: - What is it about, is it worth reading? By profession, I am a director of popular science cinema, I have made almost 50 films. This book is about only one thing. But the most difficult thing in my creative biography. The film is called “Two Steps from the Pole” and it was filmed at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean just 800 kilometers from the pole. An amazing, largely unknown to science, underwater world was recorded by the eye of our movie camera almost at the freezing point of sea water - minus 1.7 degrees. This is the border between life and death. Here in the Arctic, it is almost everywhere. In these cold latitudes, entire expeditions have more than once disappeared without a trace, and the mysteries of their disappearance have not yet been solved. This book is about the pioneers of the North, whose names are on polar maps, and those unknown people who laid their paths among the vast hummocks for future conquerors of the Arctic. Yes, today satellites constantly keep the entire gigantic Arctic territory in the sights of their optical eyes. But to this day, the high latitudes remain a Territory of Inaccessibility, where a person, among the cold and ice, is always in danger. At times, many pages of this book were given to me with pain. I wanted to talk only about the filming of the film, but it turned out to be about the difficult fate of the Motherland and about the people, about the heroic and truly tragic fates of those who are so missed in our troubled times.