Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13, 1 (Winter 2012): 217–31. Articles Defenders of the Motherland or Defenders of the Autocracy? MIKHAIL LOUKIANOV AND MIKHAIL SUSLOV Iosif Iosifovich Kolyshko, Velikii raspad: Vospominaniia (he Great Disintegration: A Memoir), ed. Igor´ Vladimirovich Lukoianov. 464 pp. St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2009. ISBN-13 978-5981873317. Matthew Rendle, Defenders of the Motherland: he Tsarist Elite in Revolutionary Russia. xii + 274 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. ISBN-13 978- 0199236251. $99.00. Aleksandr Vital´evich Repnikov, Dnevnik L. A. Tikhomirova, 1915–1917 (he Diary of L. A. Tikhomirov, 1915–17). 440 pp. Moscow: Rosspen, 2008. ISBN-13 978-5824308969. he three works under scrutiny make a valuable contribution to the revisionist discussion of the prerevolutionary Russian elite’s social and ideological adaptability to modernity. While Matthew Rendle’s Defenders of the Motherland conceptualizes the nobility’s responses to the revolution of 1917, the publications of L. A. Tikhomirov’s diary and I. I. Kolyshko’s memoirs, conspicuously titled he Great Disintegration, partially support and partially modify Rendle’s indings by demonstrating that ideological adaptation stood behind social adaptation. As a result, the most inluential and eloquent representatives of the regime’s “defenders” gave themselves over to pessimism. he cleavage between the modernization of social and intellectual practices was an important factor in the alienation of the late imperial Russian Right from the tsar. Soviet historians used to consider the Russian Right of the early 20th century a subsidized political group, organized by the police to secure mass support for the autocracy. According to this viewpoint, after the downfall of