One of Oleg Mityaev’s songs contains the words «The bureaucratic age rules us», the meaning of which lays beyond the limits of everyday understanding. For Russia, for example, the twentieth century was indeed a bureaucratic century, when the state dominated the society and the individual in all spheres with varying degrees of rigidity. This book contains biographies of our compatriots who lived at that time — different people, not legendary at all, who were commonly forced to choose one path or another, often in dramatic circumstances. What moral qualities did the sketches’ protagonists possess to retain the ability to follow their conscience? The author tried to avoid myth-making and moralistic narratives, offering readers to evaluate the characters’ behavior in real historical contexts.