The life of Moscow at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries is diverse and contradictory. The cozy patriarchality of Moscow life explodes here with the boots of a new time, the inevitable heavy tread of a century of electricity and metal, world wars and revolutionary upheavals. The author of the book, attracting extensive documentary material, immerses the reader both in the peaceful leisurely rhythm of merchant and bourgeois Moscow at the end of the 19th century, and in the pre-storm atmosphere that was felt in the Mother See at the beginning of the twentieth century.