Book description
Following Napoleon's defeat, a generation of young Russian officers
was acutely conscious of the backward social and political conditions
in their own country, compared to those in France. Taking advantage of
the confusion after Alexander I's sudden death, on 14th December 1825
the officer-conspirators gathered their troops in St Petersburg to
demand, among other things, a constitutional monarchy. The revolt's
suppression was brutal: executions, hard labour and perpetual exile
for the 121 ringleaders, many of whom belonged to Russia's wealthiest
and most influential families. But thanks in part to the wives who
joined them, the Decembrists maintained coherence as a group, and
those who survived for the new Tsars amnesty in 1856 returned home as
living legends. The Estonian Baron Rozen was scarcely more than a
bystander at the veents of December 1825, but he was punished
alongside the ringleaders and shared their fate. His account of the
rebellion itself, of the years in Siberia and his subsequent exile,
remains the best primary source for what happened. First published in
his native German in 1869 (and in English in 1872), this vivid,
accurate memoir stands as a fascinating precursor to the testaments of
later political prisoners such as Mandelstam, Ginzburg, Solzhenitsyn
and Havel.
