This is the story of sixty years of my life in the USSR and Russia from my birth in 1957 to my departure for emigration in 2017. Childhood and youth, friends and enemies, work and travel, love and loneliness, art and life, successes and mistakes, victory over communism and a new life in free Russia, then an unsuccessful struggle against the establishment of a dictatorship and the return of totalitarianism. Private sketches of the surrounding life and the view of a contemporary and participant on the historical events of that time. I finished this book just a month before Russia's vile attack on Ukraine and the beginning of this terrible, unthinkable war. Unfortunately, my diagnosis of Russian culture was fully confirmed, the war threw the country far into the past, and the book now reads like a story about a long-gone era in the history of Russia, the world and, of course, mine.