My Dear Reader, if you have this book in your hands, then I must warn you that neither romantic stories, nor vivid plots or love dramas will be found on these pages but I can say for sure that you will learn a lot of new, though unpleasant things. Therefore, if you are not ready for unknown and unpleasant impressions, then you’d better put this book on the shelf, because there are plenty worthy authors around who can take you down to the magical world of literature. I want to tell you about the country of Uzbekistan, a former Soviet colony in Central Asia, about which you may have heard something, but in reality you don’t know anything. Uzbekistan is among the top ten countries with the worst conditions for human habitation and today, in the 21st century, an empire of fear, horror and lawlessness has been revived there, where the methods of Hitler and Stalin are embodied to destroy any dissent, suppress democracy and infringe on freedom of speech. In the arsenal of the rule of any dictatorial regimes there is always torture, concentration camps, extrajudicial executions. It would seem that the Nazi regime was destroyed as well as the communist leaders all over the world, but there are still some nooks on our planet where the red-brown methods of government are being revived, unfortunately with the tacit consent of the rest of the world. The list of rogue states is not so big, these are Turkmenistan, Russia, Eritrea, North Korea, Belarus, Iran, Cuba, Sudan, Venezuela and of course Uzbekistan, but this does not prevent .democratic” and .free” countries from cooperating with dictators and paying for this outrage with the money of their fellow citizens.

The main character of this book is Serge Ivakov, a young successful entrepreneur who was far from politics, but fell under the flywheel of the 1997-98 mass repressions in Uzbekistan and was convicted on trumped-up charges to 22 years in prison, where, according to the neo-Stalinists, he