Lev Alexandrovich Tikhomirov (1852–1923) was born in Gelendzhik on the Black Sea Coastal Line of Circassia, where his father served as a military physician during Russia's campaign against the Adyghe (Circassian) people. His memoir, Shadows of the Past, begun in 1918 and published posthumously in 2000, recounts life on the Coastal Line from the 1840s through the Crimean War period. It is a work of Russian imperial self-regard — written by a former revolutionary turned monarchist ideologue, for an audience that shared his conviction in the justice of Russian expansion. That is precisely what makes it useful as a historical document. 

The memoir records, without apology and often with pride, the operational methods by which Russia reduced Circassian presence in the western Caucasus: the burning of auls along the Vulan and Mezyb rivers, General Wagner's punitive expeditions that destroyed settlements throughout the 1850s, the forced disarmament of Circassians even at civilian market sites, and a practice the author himself names without apparent discomfort — that crimes committed in the field "were pinned on the Circassians and prompted no investigation." Tikhomirov also notes that after the Crimean War the mountain peoples (Circassians) paid for their resistance "without receiving the slightest help from their European allies and without being protected by even a single word in the peace treaty concluded with defeated Russia." He records this as a historical fact. It is this absence of moral reflection that gives the memoir its documentary value. 

Tikhomirov glorifies the Coastal Line campaigns; he was remembering. The destruction of Circassian villages, the silencing of civilian life behind fortification walls, the abandonment of a people by the international order that had encouraged their resistance — these appear in his pages as the natural backdrop of a Russian childhood on the frontier. For researchers working on the Circassian Genocide, Shadows of the Past offers the unguarded voice of the perpetrating civilization, recorded from the inside.