A book about the most high-profile criminal cases of the Soviet era. Many of the materials have never been published before and were personally provided to the author for the first time from the archives. Thanks to access to these documents and interviews with eyewitnesses, Eva Merkacheva was able to reconstruct the trials of the last person executed in the USSR, the maniac Fischer; the only child executed during the Soviet era, Arkady Neiland; the executioner Antonina Makarova, nicknamed 'Tonka the Machine Gunner'; and Berta Borodkina, who served Leonid Brezhnev himself and was the only person sentenced to death for economic crimes. Building a bridge to the past is not only interesting and informative, but also useful for understanding the processes taking place in judicial practice today. Each chapter is accompanied by archival illustrations from criminal cases and court records, allowing the reader to immerse themselves in the events described and see firsthand the authentic interrogation reports, handwritten verdicts, death penalty execution certificates, and the appearance of the case files, victims, criminals, and crime scenes. The book concludes with the only pre-Soviet case of the 'queen of the thieves' world,' Sonya Zolotoy Ruchka, which sparked the author's interest in forensic investigations.