School expert, Doctor of Philosophy, President of the National Foundation ‘Russian Liberal Heritage’ Alexei Kara-Murza: ‘Memoirs’ by Vasily Alekseevich Maklakov (1869−1957) is one of the universally recognised pinnacles of Russian memoirism in the twentieth century. The point is not only in the uniqueness of the author’s figure — an outstanding lawyer, politician, public person. These memoirs contain a certain ‘super-task’ – as rare as the ambition of the author’s plan and the quality of its execution: to uncover and analyse the reasons as to why Russian society, which in the early twentieth century achieved unconditional progress (the acquisition of the Constitution and a fundamentally new type of statehood), was unable to retain its fruits and eventually fell victim to the ‘new barbarism’ that affected Russia for many decades.