Wars are always started by politicians, and it is politicians who end them. What is the reason for the victory of the Bolsheviks and the defeat of the White movement? The fact is that on the one hand there were politicians, and on the other hand there were no politicians. There were honest officers. Patriots. But not politicians. Boris Vladimirovich Nikitin, whose memoirs you are reading, was a very knowledgeable person. In 1917, he was appointed acting chief of counterintelligence of the Petrograd Military District. Nikitin had access to the most secret documents. His memoirs are an important historical document containing a lot of interesting details. What distinguishes his book from other memoirs is: • A detailed description of the entire course of the Bolshevik uprising in July 1917. • A description of Petrograd in the first weeks after February 1917 and the changes that took place in the city and with people as events unfolded. • An interesting story about service in Dikaya division.• Description of the pages of the White struggle in Dagestan, where a detachment under the command of L.F. Bicherakhov defended the Caucasus from the Turks and Bolsheviks. However, not being a politician, Nikitin could not understand the secrets of the collapse of our state. Talking about the financing of the Bolsheviks by the Germans, he does not notice the assistance to the revolutionaries from the Entente, although it was this assistance that led to the collapse of Russian statehood. The pages of memoirs dedicated to Lenin and even Stalin must be read with the understanding that the book was written in exile and published in the capital of France in 1937.