The First Breath of Freedom

Not a monograph but a documentary collection, and roughly nine parts primary source to one part editorial voice.

Vladimir Fyodorov has gathered the testimony, letters, memoirs, statutes and trial papers of the Decembrists - the noble officers who on 14 December 1825 marched insurgent Guards regiments onto Senate Square in St Petersburg against the autocracy, and who paid for it with the scaffold and the Siberian mines. Around the documents he supplies a preface, a long historical background essay, and headnotes opening each section and each figure.

That proportion is the book's strength. The programmes of the Northern and Southern Societies, the interrogation records, the letters from Siberia and the memoirs written long afterwards are here in quantity, in English, in one volume - and for most of this material there is no other accessible English source.

Its epigraph is Tolstoy's remark that the Decembrists are always interesting and stir the most serious thoughts and feelings, and the documents earn it.

The compiler's own prose fixes his moment: he writes of the first socialist state having celebrated its seventieth anniversary, which places the text in 1987, at the height of glasnost and in the year the Soviet Union began publicly reopening its own past.

Issued in the Library of Russian and Soviet Literary Journalism. Translated by Cynthia Carlile.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.