The article is timed to the three anniversaries of the prominent statesmen of the Imperial Russia, Peter the Great (the 350th anniversary of his birth), P.A. Stolypin (the 160th anniversary of his birth) and M.M. Speransky (the 250th anniversary of his birth) in 2022. The author highlights general and special features in their activities and the context of their reforms. Common features include the undoubtedly modernizing nature of the initiatives of all three reformers, as well as the lack or obvious inadequacy of the social environment, which could support the reforms being implemented or planned. Peter the Great overcame this obstacle, firstly, with the help of his power resources, and secondly, by the radicalism of changes. In many respects this is the source of the ambivalence of his reforms. On the one hand, modernization of Russia was in line with what was happening at the same time in other European countries. On the other hand, Peter’s modernization led to strengthening of the archaic features of the autocracy. However, for Peter, the lack of social support was not a fatal insurmountable circumstance. Moreover, such a support was eventually formed as a result of his reforms. An altogether different fate was in store for the initiatives of Stolypin and Speransky. Support from the supreme power for both was inconsistent, and the political subjectivity of the potential recipient of the reforms was clearly insufficient or non-existent, which prevented them from implementing their plans. What was special about the changes carried out or at least simply conceived by Peter, Stolypin, and Speransky was the very context of these persons’ eras and thus the degree of maturity of both the social base of reforms and society as a whole for modernizing transformations. Special attention in the article is paid to Speransky’s projects. It examines their content and personality of the reformer. The author argues that reforms in Russia were often conditioned not by the level of socio-economic development but by political considerations.

The article is a publication of and extended commentary on Mikhail Kirillovich Gribovsky’s text. He was in charge of the Guards Corps’ secret military police service organized in the early 1820s, after the “Semenovsky history”. In 1822, he compiled a note which is kept in the Russian State Military History Archive. The commentary describes the prehistory of the creation of the secret police: Gribovsky’s activities, his brochure On the State of Landlords’ Peasants in Russia and its perception by contemporaries. The article provides general information about the service created by Gribovsky and peculiarities of its financing. It refers to Gribovsky’s note on the Decembrist Union of Prosperity (thanks to it Alexander I had information about this society) and his three more notes, published in the last decades. The author concludes that Gribovsky writes in his note about the attempts to fi nd the Brief Instructions to Russian Knights by M.A. Dmitriev-Mamonov, which were published in 1816 in limited edition and have not been preserved. He gives a brief history of the organization, the Order of Russian Knights, for which this brochure was compiled, and implies that this Order did not exist. Celebrities involved in the project of the Order of Russian Knights are listed. Despite the fact that the note is not signed, the author attributes it to Gribovsky on the basis of handwriting analysis and identifi es the likely person behind the abbreviation. The note shows how political police worked in Russia at the end of Alexander I’s reign. For example, the Gribovsky’s interest in the Order of Russian Knights was caused by the assumption that M.A. Dmitriev-Mamonov’s Brief Instructions to Russian Knights were, in fact, a charter of the Union of Prosperity.