Igor Vasilyevich Bestuzhev-Lada is a well-known Soviet and Russian historian, sociologist, and futurologist, author of several dozen monographs and brochures, and over two thousand articles in periodicals. During the war years, he was a teenager; he lived through evacuation and worked at a military factory. At the end of the war he returned to Moscow, where he saw many things that are shown in the famous film “The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed.”
The author tells about the heroic and dark sides of wartime—about selfless labor and criminality in the rear, about lives full of deprivation for ordinary citizens and, far from poor, the life of the nomenklatura. He also writes about strange, sometimes unexpected decisions made by the party and Soviet leadership. His memoirs of those years are especially interesting because the sharpened perception of a teenager here is combined with the deep reflections of a person who lived a long life and learned much. In A4 PDF format, the publisher’s layout has been preserved.