The Secret Audience

"Natan Yakovlevich Eydelman (1930–1989) was an outstanding—and at the time famous—Soviet historian and popularizer of historical science. More precisely, he was a historian of Russian free-thinking… Everything said about his double role (a scholarly article plus a current political subtext) fully applies, for example, to articles ‘After Peter I’s Death…’ (1974) and ‘The Secret Audience’ (1985). Excellent historical studies: the first about the tradition of autocratic power established by Peter I and—forever remaining in Russia/USSR— as its supporting and constitutional principle; the second about Pushkin’s meeting with Nicholas I in the Kremlin on September 8, 1826, described as a meeting of the Poet with the Autocrat—a humiliating attempt to tame him, since the meeting itself was merely an ideological measure to expand the tsar’s popularity.

Eydelman’s method is shown here in all its brilliance: painstaking search for details, systematic consideration of all versions and testimonies, their slow reading and scholarly criticism, psychological immersion into the characters of historical figures, and an attempt to present them as if in front of one’s eyes. And above the text— the leitmotif: Power and Freedom…"

Mikhail Zolotonosov