The action of Viktor Suvorov's action-packed story "The Snake-Eater," the prequel to the novels "Control" and "Choice," takes place in 1936 in an atmosphere of an ongoing struggle for power, intrigues and conspiracies within the leadership of the USSR. The story tells about the very beginning of the process of taming Stalin's punitive machine of the Soviet Union; the reader learns about the circumstances under which fate brought together the main characters of the novels "Control" and "Choice" and what price each of them had to pay for unlimited power and the ability to control the fate of other people.