The Use of V. N. Pepelyayev's Diary Entries on His Activities in Siberia and the Far East, 1918–1919, in Historiography

This study focuses on the diary entries of V. N. Pepelyayev (1884–1920), a member of the Central Committee of the People's Freedom Party and later the Head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the anti-­ Bolshevik Russian government. The increased attention to the diary is due to V. N. Pepelyayev’s prominent position in the hierarchy of the counterrevolution power during the Civil War in Russia. The vivid ideological coloring of the events, the straightforwardness and sharpness of V. N. Pepelyayev's statements, as well as the fact that the diary ended up in the hands of political enemies shortly after the author's execution, contributed to the speculative use of the text. The objective of this article is to address the adequacy of the reception of Pepeliaev's diary entries in historiography of the 1920s–2010s. The author studied the archival collections of the State Archives of the Russian Federation and the State Archives of the Novosibirsk Region; five versions of the diary's publication, and works of researchers, in which the ego-document is presented as the primary source of information. It allowed him to conclude that V. N. Pepelyayev 's diary entries have been incompletely used in historiography; a revision of the text based on the handwritten original is still relevant as well as a comprehensive analysis of the diary’s contents.