"Fish rots from the head" - this folk wisdom is suffered by the entire history of Russia, from Rurik to the present day. When a healthy elite is at the head of the state, which serves the people, and not their own skin interests, the country surprises the whole world with unprecedented rates of development - remember at least the great Stalin era. Alas, such power is the exception rather than the rule, as evidenced by the collapse of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Why does our "elite" decompose with depressing regularity and degenerate into a parasitic class that destroys the Fatherland over and over again? How the Russian nobility turned from a pillar of the throne into freeloaders and destroyers, and the vaunted intelligentsia - into "g... nation "? A new book by a leading historian and publicist of patriotic forces answers all these questions!