the top of the social hierarchy of mediocrity and mediocrity ("false idols"), clinging to power and feeling natural in it (for example, Stalin), really talented people experience collective envy and hatred. Being a talented careerist means being exceptional mediocrity. Periodic ritual exile and punishment of external enemies ("renegades") in the course of mass harassment demonstrate the cohesion of social cells and reproduce the mechanisms of subordination, these collective actions relieve the psychological burden of individual responsibility. As Oleg Kharkhordin noted, tight control by higher authorities, as well as total transparency of the collective's internal life, mutual control and violence protect cells from degenerating into a mafia or gang, which would have happened if they were given freedom of self-organization. Zinoviev considers the communist power in two planes: horizontal (social relations in the cellular structure) and vertical (hierarchy), the second is layered on the first. Power is reproduced "from below", at the level of the primary collective, where representation and democracy is exercised: people voluntarily join the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, members of the party are elected, they want to participate in power, the lower levels of the party influence the party top line. Despotic and informal power in social relations is literally everywhere. The cell structure leaves no room for law and politics: there are no parties or political competition, as well as political power. As Vladimir Berelovich wrote, Zinoviev consistently reduces the political to power, the power to the state apparatus, the apparatus to society. The state is not a political institution, but diluted socially, its only function is the reproduction of social relations. Since there are no social classes or interest groups in real communism, the ruling caste is not a social stratum or institution. The communist leadership is a "specific group" of several individuals. At the macro level, power turns into a dictatorship, but the supreme power is helpless in wanting to control everything. Zinoviev's views on the history of real communism, Stalinism and the figure of Stalin are set forth in the novel "The Wings of Our Youth", other works and speeches. The events of 1917 were more like the collapse of the Russian Empire than a revolution, and, like the Civil War, were only a "foam of history". The deep-seated processes Zinoviev considered the emergence and maturation of a new society: institutional and bureaucratic changes, the growth and complication of the system of