The author is a popular political commentator, winner of a number of journalism awards, has been working for Izvestia for the last few years, and is familiar to most people from his comments on the Odnako program. Although the title says ‘the Rhine is wonderful’, the book will focus on ‘Russian topics’ – after all, what else can Russians talk about when they meet by chance on the banks of a distant German river? The book is structured in the form of conversations (dialogues), which is unusual for post-Soviet literature. The second section (‘New Research’) consists of reviews and articles on events in recent years in the modern history of Russia.