Russia, early 2000s. The investigations of the popular Moscow journalist Nikolai Selivanov aroused anger in the Kremlin, and the editor-in-chief sends him, “until the dust settles,” to a remote province to write about a city called Krasnoleninsk, which is dying after the curtailment of work at the city-forming enterprise, which everyone simply calls “the plant.” . Nikolai sets off without any enthusiasm, believing that this will be the most boring business trip of his life. He still does not know what horror awaits him... This novel is everything you wanted to know about Russia, but were afraid to hear. Its genre can be defined as a “documentary parable”: everything in this novel is true, literal or symbolic. However, one is intertwined with the other so closely that it is neither possible nor necessary to distinguish them.