Political autobiography is associated in the book with the assessment and analysis of the significance of events in which the author participated or witnessed. Bypassing the nomenclature levels of the communist hierarchy, he - a professor of physics at the university - became part of the highest political elite of the agonizing USSR, and then in the state position of the head of Belarus, which revived its independence. Perhaps this determines his non-trivial assessment of the significance of the world-famous politicians, public, cultural and religious figures with whom his fate brought him together, as well as his vision of the prospects for the political and geopolitical development of the post-Soviet space.