The best general surveys of the final years of the monarchy are by Bernard Pares, who was both an eyewitness and a historian: Russia and Reform (London, 1907) and The Fall of the Russian Monarchy (London, 1929). There exists a sympathetic history of Nicholas II by S. S. Oldenburg, Tsarstvovanie Imperatora Nikolaia II [The Reign of Emperor Nicholas II], 2 vols. (Belgrade-Munich, 1939–49). It has been translated as Last Tsar: Nicholas II, His Reign and His Russia, 4 vols. (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1975–78). Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu’s three-volume The Empire of the Tsars and the Russians (New York-London, 1898) is a comprehensive survey of Imperial Russia in the 1880s. The reader may also wish to consult my Russia under the Old Regime (London-New York, 1974), which interprets the course of Russia’s political and social history.
There exists a unique source of testimonies by high officials on the last years of the old regime taken by a commission of the Provisional Government and published under the editorship of P. E. Shcheglovitov: Padenie tsarskogo rezhima [The Fall of the Tsarist Regime], 7 vols. (Leningrad, 1924–27). Selections from it have been published in French: La Chute du Régime Tsariste: Interrogatoires (Paris, 1927). A six-volume “chronicle” of the year 1917 edited by N. Avdeev et al., Revoliutsiia 1917: khronika sobytii [The Revolution of 1917: A Chronicle of Events] (Moscow, 1923–30), delivers much more than its title promises, for it contains a wealth of information from rare and unpublished contemporary sources.
Of the memoir literature on late Imperial Russia, the most outstanding are the recollections of Sergei Witte, Vospominaniia [Memoirs], 3 vols. (Moscow, 1960). The one-volume English condensation by Abraham Yarmolinsky, Memoirs of Count Witte (London-Garden City, N.Y., 1921), is a pale shadow of the original. Very informative on the mentality of the high Imperial bureaucracy are the recollections of State Secretary S. E. Kryzhanovskii, Vospominaniia [Memoirs] (Berlin, [1938]). The recollections of the liberal leader Paul Miliukov appeared posthumously: Vospominaniia [Memoirs] (New York, 1955) (in English: Political Memoirs, 1905–1917, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1967). Dmitrii Shipov, a leading liberal-conservative, wrote Vospominaniia i dumy o perezhitom [Recollections and Reflections on the Past] (Moscow, 1918).
The best study of the late Imperial bureaucracy unfortunately remains unpublished: Theodore Taranovsky, The Politics of Counter-Reform: Autocracy and Bureaucracy in the Reign of Alexander III 1881–1894, Ph.D. Dissertation, 1976, Harvard University.
On the peasants, outstanding are the personal observations of A. N. Engelgardt, Iz derevni [From the Village] (Moscow, 1987), and Stepniak [S. M. Kravchinskii], The Russian Peasantry (New York, 1888). Theodore Shanin’s The Awkward Class (Oxford, 1972) is a study of Russian peasants under tsarist and Communist rule.
