About the book: 2012 / The memoirs of Vladimir Fedorovich Romanov are a happy example of the memories of a figure from the “second echelon” of the state elite of the Russian Empire at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. Refraining from the pathos and polemics characteristic of the memoirs of major statesmen (S. Yu. Witte, V. N. Kokovtsova, P. N. Milyukova, etc.), the author describes in detail, objectively and not without literary talent the events of which he was a contemporary and eyewitness he was there for almost half a century, from 1874 to 1920, while studying at the gymnasium and university in Kyiv, serving in the central institutions of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, departments of communications and land management in St. Petersburg, working in the Red Cross in the First World War, staying in Ukraine during the Civil War before leaving for emigration. The reader is presented with a whole gallery of representatives of different strata of Russian society - provincial nobility, metropolitan bureaucracy, public figures. At the same time, the memoirs of V.F. Romanov contain characteristics not only of the most outstanding persons, but also of little-known ones, information about which is absent or almost absent in the memoir literature. Written in exile, the manuscript of the memoirs was transferred by the author to the Russian Foreign Historical Archive in Prague and, after 1945, it entered the Central Archives of the Russian Federation (now the State Archives of the Russian Federation). The text of V.F. Romanov’s memoirs, due to their inaccessibility and obscurity, has so far been little used by researchers and has never been published. For all those interested in Russian history.