About the book: 2019 / St. Petersburg was created by Peter the Great as an alternative to sleepy boyar Moscow, as a point of assembly of a new empire, as an instrument for suppressing the Horde order. An experimental territory, a poisonous hybrid of Ulaanbaatar and Rome, Beijing and Stockholm, which arose in the Swedish swamps, the new city turned out to be alien to the rest of Russia with its imperial duplicity, it was a city of officials and for officials. Erected on the bones of its builders, it always flourished at the expense of nomads who abandoned their measured life in the provinces and rushed to the damp, foggy city for a piece of bread. The entire history of St. Petersburg, its conspiracies and coups, its construction and life, its art and tragic essence are a consequence of the birth trauma of the city itself. A city that turned out to be of no use to anyone, which cast out the Decembrist rebels, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, betrayed by the tyrant Stalin, which even Hitler was not interested in, gave the world the most immoral model of the state - Putinism.