российское дворянство

The article analyses «Home Notes Journal – a source of a memoir type, unpublished and insufficiently explored dealing with the siege of Orenburg during Pugachev's Rebellion of 1773–1775. The purpose of this article is to examine the source from the author`s social psychology not from its actual side. The work aims to reconstruct the author's perception of the rebels, his interpretation of the nature of the historical event, its social basis and its causes.

The article deals with the history of the Russian noble family of Behteevs from the end of the XV century until the revolution of 1917 and the civil war in Russia that followed. The author studies the most famous Yelets-Voronezh branch of the Behteev family, the representatives of which played an important role in the history of the Russian state for several centuries.