book about the most notorious criminal cases of the Soviet era. Many materials were not previously published and were first issued from the archives personally to the author. Thanks to access to these documents and communication with eyewitnesses, Eva Merkacheva managed to restore pictures of the trials of the last executed in the USSR, the maniac Fisher, of the only child shot in Soviet times, Arkady Neiland, of the executioner Antonina Makarova, nicknamed Tonka the machine-gunner, of Berta Borodkina, who covered tables to Leonid Brezhnev himself - the only one sentenced to capital punishment under the economic article. Throwing a bridge to the past is not only interesting and informative, but also useful for understanding the processes that are taking place in judicial practice today. Each chapter is accompanied by archival illustrations from criminal cases and court materials - they give the reader the opportunity to immerse themselves in the atmosphere of the events described and see with their own eyes the original protocols of interrogations, handwritten sentences, certificates of execution of the death penalty and how volumes of cases looked like, victims, criminals and crime scenes. The book ends with the only pre-Soviet case of the "queen of the thieves' world" Sonya the Golden Hand, from which the author's interest in the topic of judicial investigations began.