A portrait of the twilight years of Isarism by Count Sergei Witte (1849-1915), the man who built modern Russia. Witte presents incisive and often piquant portraits of the mighty and those around them--powerful Alexander III, the weak-willed Nicholas II, and the neurasthenic Empress Alexandra, along with his own notorious cousin, Madam blavatsky, the priestess of the occult.