In this book, the famous philosopher Mikhail Ryklin tells the story of his family, for which the October Revolution was a turning point and in many ways a defining event. The author's great-uncle Nikolai Chaplin was a leader of Soviet youth in 1924–1928, when the coup in Russia was perceived as the first step towards world revolution. After the collapse of these hopes, Nikolai and his brothers and their comrades (Lazar Shatskin, Beso Lominadze, Alexander Kosarev), like millions of compatriots, became victims of the Great Terror - the Stalinist repressions of 1937-1938. Also tragic is the fate of the author’s grandfather Sergei Chaplin, a Soviet intelligence officer who was arrested in the case of his older brother, who, together with the future famous artist Georgy Zhzhenov, traveled from the Leningrad “Crosses” to the Kolyma mine and was ultimately shot. However, this book also has another, internal plot, based on reflections on the circumstances of a hundred years ago, on the incomprehensible manifestations of social and personal behavior of private people and Soviet society as a whole: the dramatic events of the early 20th century are in the past, but does this mean that they can't happen again?