The subject of the article is the state of the historiography of the reign of Emperor Paul I, in particular, one of the most significant and controversial legislative acts of this monarch — the Manifesto of April 5, 1797. A brief overview of the impressive historiography devoted to the fleeting and tragic reign of Catherine the Great’s son suggests that the debate about the nature of domestic policy of the monarch, and, in particular, about the problem of serfdom, its place and role in the settlement of this issue by the Russian absolutism in the previous and subsequent time, is far from being resolved. This also applies to the assessment of the Manifesto of April 5, 1797. Despite the significant expansion of the range of studies focused on this document in recent years, historians have not reached unanimity. In a number of works there is a clear idealization of both the image of the Emperor himself and his policy on peasantry. Rather than being a Conservative seeking to protect serfdom from damage, Pavel Petrovich is presented as a Progressive, who marked the beginning of the implementation into practice of the idea of gradually alleviating the condition of privately owned peasants, culminating in their complete liberation. Supporters of the latter version cite as the main argument the above-mentioned edict of the Emperor. However, the analysis of the Manifesto text, the program documents of Tsesarevich Paul, the historical situation when the decree was published and applied in practice, as well as the assessment of the key points of the Emperor’s internal policy established in historiography allow the author to enter into polemics with this point of view. Therefore, the main task of the work is to draw the attention of researchers to a number of points that have been neglected by modern historians, and try to give a more objective and balanced view on the problem of assessing the Manifesto and the entire Paul’s policy on peasants. The novelty of the study lies in the combination of the historiographic review and the textual analysis of the decree that leads to an understanding why the historiography has provided such conflicting assessments of Paul’s reign, and demands further in-depth research.