About the book: 2012 / On the page of one of the volumes of the first edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which belonged to Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, in the margins of the text that was directly related to To academician-linguist, archaeologist, ethnographer, historian, organizer and leader of many scientific and educational institutions, traveler Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr (1864/65-1934), the Kremlin leader wrote a few years after World War II: “Language is the matter of the spirit.” Doctor of Historical Sciences Boris Ilizarov decided to take this unexpected statement as a tuning fork for his new book about Stalin. The author was the first to raise all the surviving materials about the linguistic epic in the Stalinist archive, studied book editions with notes from the Secretary General, preserved in his personal library, as well as materials from the archive of Academician Marr, which had lain in oblivion for more than half a century. But the discussion itself is only an episode in the history of Russia in the mid-twentieth century, as well as one of the strokes in the political biography of Stalin. What is much more important is that, together with the heroes of the new book, Boris Ilizarov is trying to discern the thinnest threads that connect each of us born on planet Earth with the ancient past of humanity, with the past when humanity was illuminated by the first flashes of consciousness.