There is an opinion that secret societies rule the world, and the history of the world is a history of confrontation between secret alliances and societies. All of them have existed for centuries. The very fact of their secret activities gave these organizations an aura of the supernatural and mysterious. The book by historian Boris Sokolov tells about outstanding figures of secret unions and societies of the world, starting from the legendary founder of the Rosicrucian Order, Christian Rosenkreutz, and ending with the Freemasons of various lodges. The reader is in for a lot of unexpected things, since sometimes members of secret societies turn out to be famous people whose belonging to one or another organization would be difficult to imagine: Count Saint-Germain, James Anderson, Ivan Elagin, King of Prussia Frederick the Great, Nikolai Novikov, Russian commanders Alexander Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov, Kondraty Ryleev, George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman and many others.