In this book dedicated to Bogdan Knunyants, revolutionary, chemist, publicist, the action takes the reader from the chemical laboratory of the late nineties of the last century to a modern laboratory, from Nagorno-Karabakh - in Baku, Tiflis, Moscow, Petersburg, London, Geneva, from a single prison cell - in the hold of the ship, on which the twenty-eight-year-old hero, convicted in the case of the first St. Petersburg Council of Workers' Deputies, flees from lifelong exile.