When Sergei Witte died on February 28, 1915, the chairman of the Council of Ministers, Ivan Goremykin, and his senior colleagues gathered at Witte's apartment in Petrograd the same day to mark his passing, and his funeral two days later was attended by the entire government and diplomatic corps. Tsar Nicholas II, however, made no public expression of sympathy to Witte's widow and wrote to the empress that he felt “true … peace” at the news of Witte's death (214). Ella Saginadze's book analyzes the polarized opinions about Witte—Russia's most successful finance minister and the architect of the constitutional reforms of 1905—in the decade after his death, but this is much more than a book that charts the final years of one of imperial Russia's greatest political figures. As Saginadze shows, Witte was the emblem for a crucial and deeply-controversial strand of Russian thinking and the place that he occupied in Russia after his departure from office in 1906 demonstrated the continuing arguments over his intellectual and practical legacy.

Utilizing a wide variety of press sources, Saginadze sets out the foundations of Witte's reputation while he was still in office, showing how as finance minister he was highly regarded for his courage and energy, as well as for the breadth of his activity. At the same time, however, Witte's enthusiasm for Russia's economic modernization came under severe criticism from Russian nationalists who saw his encouragement of capitalism as revealing pro-Jewish sympathies. Witte's personal life—he had spent his youth in Odessa and his wife was Jewish—meant that the virulent antisemitism that permeated many elements of conservative discourse in Russia found him a target. The far-reaching reforms of 1905 also divided Russian opinion: Saginadze shows how liberal opinion rejoiced at the October Manifesto that introduced an elected Duma to Russia, while conservatives regarded it as a catastrophe for Russia. The passions provoked by Witte and what he represented were vividly demonstrated in January 1907, when members of the far-right Union of the Archangel Michael placed a bomb in the chimney of Witte's apartment in St Petersburg. The device was discovered before it exploded, but reaction to the assassination attempt from the right suggested that Witte himself, desperate for attention, had cynically organized the whole affair to gain publicity. Witte clung to the hope that he would make a return to power, especially after the assassination of Stolypin in 1911, and rumors swirled among his sympathizers that he would be called out of retirement to put Russia back on the track towards the reform that he had set out in 1905.

The final part of Saginadze's book deals with the onset of war in 1914 and how Witte continued to be a controversial figure right up until the end of his life. Witte argued that Russia was in no condition to fight a major war, and he pressed for a rapid peace with Germany and Austria-Hungary. His attitude led to Witte being labelled as a Germanophile by his opponents, and provided a further opportunity for the right to discredit him in the months before his death. Witte was exceptional as a Russian statesman; unlike men such as Mikhail Speranskii and Mikhail Loris-Melikov, he continued to be a figure of great public interest after leaving office, and maintained a prominent public profile. While Witte himself continued to harbor the hope that he might return to power in some shape, the intense controversy that he continued to arouse until his death was not simply a result of his own personal craving for self-publicity, but a demonstration of the fact that the reform agenda he had pursued during 1905 continued to resonate across Russian society. Witte was a man who aroused strong passions among both supporters and critics, and Saginadze's book shows how after leaving office, the arguments that he stimulated were a proxy for much wider currents in Russia's politics. This excellent book shows the contours of post-1905 Russia through the prism of the man who had been the prime creator of Russia's economic and political structures at the start of the twentieth century. It gives real insight into the heat and fervor of Russia's politics as the bitter arguments of 1905 and its legacy continued to be fought over.