It is easy and simple to squander the inheritance acquired by generations of ancestors. It is much more difficult to return the lost. As a result of the 1917 revolution and the subsequent foreign intervention and the Civil War, Russia lost a number of territories. In place of the national outskirts of the empire, limitrophe states arose - Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, where militant Russophobia became the main ideology. Acting as a zealous master, during his reign, Stalin managed to return to the state a significant part of the lost lands. This is told by the new book of the St. Petersburg historian Igor Pykhalov, the author of the bestsellers "The Great Slandered War" and "For what Stalin evicted the peoples."