This book was written seventy years ago, but it appears before the domestic reader, essentially, for the first time. The English edition, published in 19391, does not fully convey the original and did not reach every Soviet special storage facility, so even historians used it extremely rarely. To non-specialists, the name of Vladimir Iosifovich Gurko means little at all. Meanwhile, Gurko’s detailed analytical memoirs “Features and silhouettes of the past: Government and public during the reign of Nicholas II” should rightfully take one of the first places in the vast corpus of memoir literature published by Russian bureaucrats. This publication repeats the book of the same name in the “Russia” series in memoirs" (New Literary Review, 2000).