If you listen to military historians and memoirists, throughout the Great Patriotic War, smart generals did nothing but try to explain to the civilian tyrant how to act. Sometimes the tyrant listened to them - and then the Red Army won. Or he didn’t listen - and then catastrophic defeats happened. But is it all that simple? What should a head of state do if he understands that he cannot win the impending war and that his army is obviously unable to repel the aggressor? How can he save the country from capture, and the people from extermination? This task faced Stalin in 1941, and he found a way out, unprecedented, unique in its essence and grandiose in its plans... Elena Prudnikova’s new book not only raises one of the most complex and controversial themes of Russian history, but also for the first time since 1953, the play “Engineer Sergeev” by Beria’s executed deputy Vsevolod Merkulov, destroyed and removed from all libraries, is being published. During the war, it triumphantly went around all the leading stages of the Soviet Union (the Maly Theater opened its new scene), and then was banned and forgotten.