One topic editors of first four editions of V.I. Lenin's works carefully avoided was Bolshevik leader's testimony before Provisional Government's Extraordinary Investigatory Commission on 26 May 1917 (o.s.). No mention of commission or of Lenin's nine-page written deposition to it is to be found in these editions. In 1962 editors of fifth edition, his supposedly Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Complete Collected Works), were only slightly less reticent. The deposition itself is absent from text of volume XXXII, which covers period from 2 May to 8 July 1917, and his appearance before commission is not included in detailed chronology of life and activity of V.I Lenin at end of volume. Buried in one of endnotes, however, are three short paragraphs from his testimony in which he sought to explain his actions in 1914 when he defended Roman Malinovskii, a member of his Central Committee and leader of Bolshevik fraction in IV State Duma, against widespread rumours that he was an agent of tsarist police.l The fact that Lenin's judgement in 1914 was proven wrong when police files were opened in March 1917 explains why original deposition and a contemporary copy of it remained unpublished in two Soviet archives for more than seventy years. Under influence of glasnost, this blank spot in Lenin's biography was finally illuminated in 1990 and 1991 with publication of both documents in two leading Soviet journals.z And in 1996 Richard Pipes published an English translation of what purported to be a third archival copy.3 The fact that these documents differ in content raises an important question concerning veracity of material now pouring out of Russian archives. It is intention of this article to discuss relatively unknown history of Extraordinary Investigatory Commission, background and content of Lenin's testimony before it, and provenance of three archival versions of that testimony which have recently come to light. When Alexander Kerenskii became Minister of Justice in new Provisional Government, his first and one of his more important acts was to create an Extraordinary Investigatory Commission (Chrezvychainaia sledtvennaia komissiia). Announced on 4 March, only two days after abdication of Nicholas II, commission was officially charged on 11 March with the investigation of malfeasance in office of former ministers, chief administrators, and other persons in high office of both civil and military and naval services.4 Kerenskii asked N.K. Murav'ev, a Social Democrat and well-known Moscow defence lawyer, to chair seven-man commission and he gave him authority of an assistant minister of justices The initial vice-chairs, S.V. Ivanov and S.V. Zavadskii, were both former members of Russian Senate. The composition of rest of commission was overtly non-political and it fluctuated during course of next eight months. Its members generally were drawn from intelligent men of independent character who had previously served as procurators in various imperial Russian courts 6 Academician S.F. Ol'denburg became commission's secretary, poet Alexander Blok edited its protocols, and E.V. Tarle provided historical advice. Much of work of commission was done by twenty-five legally trained investigators who collected government and police documents, interrogated former tsarist officials, and took written depositions from witnesses of varying political persuasion. The setting for commission's work was incongruous, to say least. After finding its initial quarters in Senate too cramped, commission moved to Winter Palace. On formal occasions it met in a large hall on first floor of tsar's former residence surrounded by footmen and porters still wearing imperial livery and protected by soldiers from elite Preobrazhenskii Regiment. …