Rasputin - a simple monk from Siberia or the devil? The scandal surrounding him and the Tsar's family only further undermined the final years of Imperial Russia.

The Ninth Circle is a story about punitive psychiatry that arose in the USSR at the initiative of F. Dzerzhinsky in the early 1920s. Decades passed, and thousands of completely innocent people sat in Soviet special hospitals and nothing changed.

The book is dedicated to examining the problems around the development of Soviet political culture in the after war years. The author looks at this development specifically through the MVD and the development of Soviet patriotism.

George Frost Kennan (February 16, 1904 – March 17, 2005) was an American adviser, diplomat, political scientist, and historian, best known as 'the father of containment' and as a key figure in the emergence of the Cold War. He later wrote standard histories of the relations between Russia and the Western powers.