The book was based on materials from the family archive - memoirs, diaries, letters, photographs, as well as documents from the archives of the NKVD-KGB-FSB, which the authors managed to get acquainted only in 1998-2000. As a result, a story about many and many people connected with family, professional and friendly ties turned out. And broader is the story of the twentieth century, how it affected concrete human destinies, as seen not from the heights of historical science, but in a direct collision with its great and small events. The post-revolutionary years and the romance of dreams of a new society, the Great Terror and the Second World War, the thaw and the mastery of virgin land - all this is somehow experienced by the heroes of the book, and now appears before the reader in details and details that can be easily erased by time and left forever.