One topic the editors of the first four editions of V. I. Lenin's ‘collected works’ carefully avoided was the Bolshevik leader's testimony before the Provisional Government's Extraordinary Investigatory Commission on 26 May 1917. No mention of the commission or of Lenin's nine-page written deposition to it is to be found in these editions. In 1962 the editors of the fifth edition, his supposedly Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, were only slightly less reticent. The deposition itself is absent from the text of volume 32, which covers the period from 2 May to 8 July 1917, and his appearance before the commission is not included in the detailed ‘chronology of the life and activity of V. I. Lenin’ at the end of the volume. Buried in one of the endnotes, however, are three short paragraphs from his testimony in which he sought to explain his actions in 1914 when he defended Roman Malinovskii, a member of his Central Committee and the leader of the Bolshevik fraction in the Fourth State Duma, against widespread rumours that he was an agent of the tsarist police. The fact that Lenin's judgement in 1914 was proven wrong when the police files were opened in March 1917 explains why the original deposition and a contemporary copy of it remained unpublished in two Soviet archives for more than seventy years. Under the influence of glasnost', this ‘blank spot’ in Lenin's biography was finally illuminated in 1990 and 1991 with the publication of both documents in two leading Soviet journals.