In a discussion with Anatoly Lunacharsky, the People's Commissioner for Education, Lenin articulated a specific plan to create monuments that would be accessible to the people, nurture thought, and remind them of heroic events and prominent figures from the world of culture and the revolutionary struggle.

One of the first monuments in the Soviet Union was the Obelisk, located in the Alexandrovsky Gardens in the Kremlin. Its unveiling took place in 1918, on the eve of the first anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution.

On the façade of the Obelisk, the names of nineteen famous thinkers, fighters for the happiness and freedom of the peoples, are engraved: Marx, Engels, V. Liebknecht, Lasalle, Bebel, Campanella, Melie, Winston, Moore, Saint-Simon, Veyan, Fourier, Jaurès, Proudhon, Bakunin, Chernyshevsky, Lavrov, Mikhailovsky, Plekhanov.

The authors of this book, Dmitry Valovoy and Henrietta Laspina, speak to us in a simple and understandable manner about these socialists and revolutionaries, whose names are immortalized in the first revolutionary monument of the world's first socialist state.