About the book: year / Saint-Exupery spent May 1935 in Moscow as a correspondent for the newspaper Paris-Soir: this was one of his first major journalistic works. The writer turned to journalism due to financial difficulties (French civil aviation was going through a difficult period of reorganization in the first half of the 1930s), but the journalist’s observations quickly became his most important source of literary creativity; This also applies to the Moscow essays, one of which, describing a night trip on a train on the way to Russia, was later included almost unchanged in the final chapter of Planet of People. Saint-Exupery sent five reports from Moscow, the first of which was published on May 3 . A day earlier, on May 2, 1935, France and the Soviet Union signed a Treaty of Friendship. It is not surprising that the general tone of the reports from Moscow for the French newspaper should have been sympathetic. However, the pathos of rebuilding the world for the better, carried on the banner of the Soviet system, was in itself extremely close to Saint-Exupery. The other side of Soviet reality in the mid-30s was incomprehensible to almost none of the Western intellectuals, and the first full-scale evidence of it was a book by Andre Gide a year later. For all that, Saint-Exupery does not distance himself from the unsympathetic features of the life of the USSR - for example, about Stalin’s ever-increasing autocracy, he writes in such tones: “This is a kind of power. One fine day, Stalin issued a decree that a decent person should take care of his appearance and that unshavenness is a sign of laxity. The next day, foremen in factories, heads of departments in stores, and professors in institutes did not allow unshaven people to work. /…/ On the streets of Moscow I have not seen a single policeman, a single soldier, a drinks seller, or just a passer-by who was unshaven. /…/ And it is quite possible to imagine how one day Stalin will announce from the depths of the Kremlin that a self-respecting proletarian should wear an evening suit. Russia will dine in tuxedos on this day.” (Our translation; when this essay was published in the USSR, such passages, of course, were omitted.) “Crime and Punishment...” first appeared in Russian in 1996 in a translation by E. and T. Kushner, which has little in common with the original. The translator of this publication thanks A. Karvovsky and N. Sabsovich for consultations. D. Kuzmin