Historian and journalist, V. A. Bilbasov devoted the history of Catherine II, the rest of his life, after the government in 1883 closed the famous newspaper Golos, which he edited for 12 years, "for a harmful direction." The materials collected by the historian made it possible to present to the Russian society the image of Catherine the Woman, completely different from the common apocryphal legends generated by the long ban on access to the personal documents of the empress. The first volume of the book went out of print in 1890 and was immediately highly appreciated by historians and the reading public. However, the second volume (1891) was withdrawn from sale and destroyed by censorship on the personal instructions of Alexander III