Benedict Sarnov is one of the brightest critics and literary scholars of the sixties, now a famous writer, author of twenty-six books. During the years of stagnation, it was not published for about twenty years. Currently actively published. One of its main themes can be defined as follows - artistic intelligentsia and tyranny. It deeply explores the mechanisms of fear, compromise and resistance. This book contains non-fictional stories of relations with the Stalinist machine of repression and Stalin himself, both ordinary people and famous: actress Okunevskaya, writer Shklovsky, poet Smelyakov, playwright Erdman, writer Bulgakov...