Reading "The Empire Should Die" I'm still trying to maintain my practice of writing two notebook entries a day - one devoted to new words and another one devoted to work with a context. It simply means that I write two different structures: separate sentences and sort of a story. However, every time I struggle with choosing a topic\I have some difficulties with choosing a topic for a narrative. It's not so easy when you've already written about 500 entries. This time I'd like to write about a book I'm currently reading. Its title is "The Empire Should Die" and It was written by the young and talented Russian journalist Michael Zygar. This is a wide picture of the Russian life not long before two Russian revolutions of 1917. Michael wrote it in a popular style but referring to\with reference to a broad range of historical sources. He claims that that "inevitable tragedy" wasn't inevitable at all, and he tries to view the historical process through the roles the most prominent Russian people of that time played in that tragedy. It's easy to read and it absorbs you completely. I also remembered our poor and miserable textbooks we used when we were Soviet schoolboys. The history looked like something that started exactly in 1917 with the most significant and leading role of the Communist party and Vladimir Ulyanov-Lenin. However, it's so clear today that the country was full of brilliant and charismatic people - businessmen, artists, scientists and liberal activists - and this enormous contradiction between all of them and the old, absolute Russian monarchy was the sole for revolutions. I like that time - the beginning of 20th century - not only because of flourishing Russian culture, but also because we completely lost that country later on. The World War I and consequent revolutions destroyed everything the empire had managed to accumulate to that moment. The rest of the history of the 20th century in Russia was the history of suffering and tremendous number of human casualties due to the experiment the Communist Party organized in 1917. A handful of bandits managed to use the situation of national strife and сame to power for a long period of 70 years. However, nothing can be hidden and the historical truth will be rediscovered sooner or later.