Ivan Prosvetov is a historian by training, a journalist, and an editor at Forbes since 2008. Author of investigative biographies “The Godfather of Stirlitz” and “Ten Lives of Vasily Yan.” The biography of the legendary illegal intelligence officer Dmitry Bystroletov is similar to an action-packed film. The illegitimate son of a count from the Tolstoy family, a sailor who emigrated with the White Guards, in longing for his homeland, he later accepted the power of the Soviets and voluntarily became its agent in Europe. With amazing dexterity, arrogance and luck, changing disguises (Russian student, Greek businessman, Hungarian count, English lord, Japanese intelligence agent), he carried out dozens of operations in different countries - from industrial espionage and obtaining foreign intelligence codes to recruiting informants and intercepting Hitler's correspondence and Mussolini (for the sake of the latter, she had to marry off... her own wife to an Italian colonel). Risking himself every day for the sake of a distant but native country, he lived under masks for more than 10 years - and upon returning home, he ended up under the skating rink of 1938 and spent the next 16 years in prisons and camps... The author of a dramatic novel with a similar plot would be reproached for excessive imagination and implausibility: “it doesn’t happen like that.” But the fact is that it all happened like that.