Diary of Pyotr Aleksandrovich Valuev (1815-1890), Minister of the Interior at the court of Alexander II, will be of interest not only to historians and literary scholars, but also to a wide range of readers, since it covers the activities of the government in a special period of Russian history, saturated with the most important historical events. The abolition of serfdom (1861), transformations along the path of turning Russia into a bourgeois monarchy, the assassination attempt on Alexander II (1866), the wave of a powerful revolutionary democratic movement - all this is covered in the diaries of P. A. Valuev. The records are almost entirely from the author's period as Minister of the Interior (1861-1868).