Not really. At best, the Soviet media tended to portray Alexander III's finance minister as a benign force that helped bring capitalism to Russia. Witte's name did not appear in Lenin's The Development of Capitalism in Russia nor did Lenin spend much time talking about Witte's signature policy to bring foreign loans to finance modernization. The Stalin era's Short Course likewise does not present Witte himself as terribly important to the overall trajectory of Russian history. This general disinterest continued in the post-Stalin period. The 1979 Great Soviet Encyclopedia entry for Witte does not have the same venom as it does for other tsarist ministers like Stolypin, but notes Witte allowed for the success of the bourgeoisie in the 1905 Revolution. This imparted a mixed legacy, as the Encyclopedia concludes:

Although he pursued a policy of accommodation, Witte was at the same time the initiator of punitive expeditions to Siberia, the Baltic region and Poland, and he sent troops from St. Petersburg to suppress the armed uprising in Moscow. In 1906 he obtained a loan of 2.25 million francs from French bankers. All these measures strengthened the position of the government in the struggle against the revolution. However, Witte found himself too far to the left for most of the dvorianstvo (nobility or gentry) and the upper stratum of the ruling bureaucracy and too far to the right for the bourgeois liberal circles of the Octobrists’ and Constitutional Democrats’ orientation.

Such an entry was not necessarily a condemnation of Witte, but rather locating him as a cog that carried through vulgar Marxist development of history as Russia transitioned from feudalism to a bourgeois capitalist order.

This disinterest in Witte was partly a function of the fact that Witte's tenure within the Russian government was contemporaneous with the actual foundation of the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP. Outside of significant Russian cultural figures and the occasional military figure from this period, the Soviet state was not as interested in drafting late nineteenth-century historical figures as would-be allies of progressive forces. Lenin and company provided a strong historical base for hero-making and a usable past that brooked few contemporary rivals. Peter I or Ivan IV's étatisme was more useful in this regard as they were akin to John the Baptist-like figures that built a strong Russian state. Once the state was established, there was little incentive for Soviet historians to lionize tsardom's executives and chief servitors. Furthermore, Witte's main tool financing industrialization- foreign loans- was also anathema to the Stalin period's notions of self-sufficiency and well-developed fear of foreign exploitation.

As such, there was little for the Soviet state to celebrate in Witte. Unlike Peter I, the Soviet picture of Witte was not of a figure who pushed against the confines of his socioeconomic epoch, but rather a man who embodied the various contradictions of a nascent industrial capitalism.