On the picture he stands with a rifle near to two well-dressed girls with dolls. He is our father with his two sisters in year 1906. The rifleboy became a colonel in the red and soviet army, but, for personal feelings, never was a fighter, nor even a soldier. The book is about this story. Very few is said about the girls as, by the way, about all the women of his life, except for this mother. Family, children were not so important. Although the author went through numerous landscapes, narrative descriptions of roads, cities, rivers and seas are almost inexistent. Think about the transsiberian railroad on which he travelled from one end to the other more that ten times; and there were other trips to Crimea, to Caucasus, to the Baltic... All of this is just a background.

The book is written in the sixties of the twentieth century when our father was sixty. It is his first epistolary creation. Vladilen, our eldest brother, helped him. Likely, he gathered the family's memory from other elder members that we, younger children, did not meet. And yet, Volodia is no more alive. Pavel Ivanovitch devoted the last part of his life to writing diaries. Will we have enough strength and health to hand over, as Volodia has done with this book, the contained thoughts and valuable information, at least to grandsons? That we cannot say. Pavel Ivanovitch has four grandsons and one grand daughter - Aliona. All grandsons, especially the senior - Pavel, were alike him in their childhood. All, except the youngest - Serafim - that was born after his grandfather died, live outside St. Petersbourg. Two of them - Mitia and Aliocha - even hardly read in Russian. Life made it that way. Pavel Ivanovitch did not seek "foreign places" for his relatives. Very little is dedicated to foreign horizons in his diaries. To visit some place was not a goal from him, even less was he interested in belongings. He travelled in his mind with his imagination. All he achieved was by reading and thinking out. Events around the world and "western" opinions about the Soviet Union (listening to "Voice of America", to the BBC, ...) interested him more that anything else during his last years. He wanted to know, to perceive, and liked to argue with his relatives and other people. He wished to convince of communist ideas superiority and of the necessity to protect them on his native land. The groundwork of these thoughts and how they grew in his mind is narrated on the pages of this book.