In notes, diaries and memoirs, we see in detail the past era, filled with many little details of everyday life that allow us to recreate the situation and better understand the actions, living conditions, and at the same time the thoughts and aspirations of the people who lived then. Among such precious evidence are the memoirs of A.M. Garaseva, allowing us to see Russian life in a new way in the past 20th century. For a number of years, A.M. Garaseva, a former anarchist, was the secret secretary and closest confidant of A.I. Solzhenitsyn during his work in Ryazan on the “GULAG Archipelago”. Her memoirs, written fascinatingly and vividly, tell about unknown or forgotten people and events of Russian life: the “lawlessness” of the first revolutionary years, prisons and exiles of the 20s and 30s, about the Moscow winter of 1941-42, front-line and post-war Ryazan, the collapse of Stalin's despotism and friendship with A.I. Solzhenitsyn.