Tales of Imperial Russia: The Life and Times of Sergei Witte, 1849-1915History and biography meet in Tales of Imperial Russia, a study of the late Romanov Russian Empire, told through the figure of Sergei Witte. Like Bismarck or Gorbachev, Witte was a European statesman serving an empire. He was the most important statesman of pre revolutionary Russia. In the Georgia, Odessa, Kyiv, and St. Petersburg of the nineteenth century, he inhabited the worlds of the Victorian Age, as young boy, student, railway executive, lover