In 2005 I went to Moscow's biggest bookshop to browse for books in the politics and history department. I looked at what was written about us. As an insider, I knew how the things were and wanted to see how they were interpreted. I was shocked! Books covered every angle: kind, evil, clever, silly. I looked through piles of them, but none of them had got it even close. What I saw was that people wrote categorically about things they could not possibly know about. For example: ‘Kasianov came to Putin and said:…Putin replied:…Kasianov objected.’ Was the author there? No. How did he know? Who told him that? Putin or Kasianov? Had he said something like ‘according to a source close to Putin’…But no. Not at all. Many facts were simply wrong and actors’ motivations were misrepresented. Since I knew most of the people depicted in that book well, I was pretty sure that this particular person could not have said what was attributed to him, especially since I knew what he did say. In some instances I was in the middle of the events and I knew that what was described in the book simply didn't happen…And then I thought, ‘If there is so little resemblance to reality in the books describing a fairly recent period, when the witnesses are still alive and can remember what happened, what about history books? How much of them is likely to be true?’ It's a scary thought. Perhaps the best we can hope for is a more or less smooth narrative. Who needs to know what really happened, apart from a narrow circle of academics? Is it even important?