In 1953, Anatolii Vel'min, Parisian representative of a newly organized Russian Archive at Columbia University, asked Baron Mikhail Alexandrovich Taube, former Professor of International Law at St. Petersburg University, Senator, and former Advisor to the Imperial Minister of Public Education, to write a memoir about everything that he had witnessed and participated in during his long life. The Archive pledged to pay $100 for its first ‘commissioned memoir’. Of the three hundred memoirs now in the Bakhmeteff Archive, over one hundred date from the time of this ‘memoir initiative’. Baron Taube's reminiscences will be published by the Russian Publishing House ROSSPEN in 2005.