The Soviet Union in our country does not want to become the past: academia and publicists, television and conversations in the kitchen, nostalgia of those who lived in the USSR, and romantic dreams of young people - the topic of "real socialism" remains relevant for everyone. Again and again we ask ourselves questions about what Lenin and his associates did - the great revolution that opened the way to a new world, or the coup that took us off the "pillar road of history"? Who was Stalin: a bloody tyrant? leader of a great state? both? Was there an alternative to the gulag and repression, and was it carried by Trotsky or someone else? And most importantly: was the Soviet Union a country of socialism, or was it some other system? And what is he, the theoretically verified ideal of socialism?