In 1908, the first issue of a publication was released in St. Petersburg, which was to become one of the most unique monuments of the late empire. "The Book of Russian Grief" is a documentary-literary collection dedicated to the memory of the victims of revolutionary terror; from 1908 to 1914, fourteen issues were published, printed in various printing houses in St. Petersburg.

It was prepared by an editorial commission established by the decision of the Main Chamber of the Russian People's Union named after Michael the Archangel: the chairman was State Duma deputy V. M. Purishkevich, and the secretaries were initially N. A. Kazarinova, then N. M. Yuskevich-Kraskovsky.

The idea was simple and, in its own way, grand: to gather under one cover the biographies of all those killed - from ministers to city guards. The first issue opened with essays on the deaths of Alexander II and Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, the second - on Interior Minister V. K. Pleve. But alongside the prominent names were gendarmes, police officers, bailiffs, village elders, and random witnesses to the assassination attempts. Each essay was accompanied by a portrait; for many provincial victims, this turned out to be the only surviving image.

The publishers did not hide their ideological task. They formulated the goal of the collection as a desire to forever preserve in the people's memory the names of those who perished for Orthodoxy, autocracy, and Russian nationality. The full title - "Monument to Russian Patriots Who Perished in the Struggle Against the Internal Enemy" - left no doubt: before the reader was not a neutral chronicle, but a tool of right-wing, black-hundred in its origin politics, where terror appeared not as a consequence of crisis, but as an invasion of a foreign force.
The project was interrupted by war. By the beginning of 1914, materials for several hundred more biographies remained unpublished, and after 1917, any mention of the heroes of the book became impossible. Today, the issues have been digitized and reprinted. For historians, this is a source of dual purpose: a collection of factual data about the terror of the 1900s and an accurate snapshot of the language with which right-wing Russia described its own demise.