Using a wide range of archival materials and historiographic sources E.E. Sheremeev bit by bit recreates the biography of a bright magazine list, secretary of the Samara provincial zemstvo council (1897-1918) and the leader of the cadets of Siberia in 1918-1919. - Alexander Konstantinovich Clafton, who contributed to the cultural and moral awakening of the Samara province, the opening of the Pedagogical Institute in Samara (1911) and the University (1918), initiated the government information form A.V. Kolchak in 1919. The example of his fate reflects the main directions of the country's development, the stages of evolution and deformation of liberal ideology at the beginning of the twentieth century. After the trial of the Kolchak government in May 1920, in an appeal to the head of the Soviet government V.I. Ulyanov-Lenin, A.K. Clafton wrote:... "for the sake of all my life devoted to journalism and zemstvo, to serve the people, for the love of the Motherland, which carried us fatally on the path of political struggle, I pray... The All-Russian Central Executive Committee to spare me, Shumilovsky, Larionov and Cherven-Vodali, who were sentenced by the tribunal to be shot.... We are waiting for the mercy and generosity of the working people..." The petition for clemency was rejected and on June 23, 1920, Clafton was gone, and his name was extinct from Russian history for many decades...