About the book: year / In recent decades, intellectual spears have been intensively broken in the struggle to gain a “national idea.” At the same time, politicians, writers and publicists, as a rule, do not overburden themselves with knowledge of historical reality, often distort the facts, and sometimes even do without them. The historian Sergei Volkov approached the issue differently. He did not create “concepts”, but tried to compare two realities – the Russian Empire and the USSR – using historical material. And only after that evaluate: what is modern “eraphy” made of?».