This book is the first edition in Russian of the work of the famous American historian, professor at Harvard University Merle Feineod, written exclusively on the basis of the Smolensk Archive, an insignificant part of the documents of the Smolensk Lip-Coma and Zapobkom of the CPSU (B.), Taken out of occupied Smolensk by special forces of German troops, re-seized from them at the end of the war by the Americans and stored at the National Archives in Washington. Published in 1958, Feineod's research has become a truly "handbook" for several generations of Western Sovietologists. The book will be useful to everyone who studies, teaches and is simply interested in the history of the Smolensk region, especially since it is presented in the presentation of one of the founders of the totalitarian model in the study of the past of Soviet Russia.