The essay is dedicated to the fate of a scientist who for many years preferred to keep silent even in special scientific literature: the largest Mongolian scholar, linguist and diplomat, corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Nikolai Nikolaevich Poppe, and later - professor at the American University of Washington in Seattle Nicholas Poppe. An outstanding researcher who enriched domestic and world science with a huge number of works, N.N. Oppe as a person and a public figure is assessed ambiguously in the book.