The first English translation of Larisa Reisner’s writings on the Decembrist uprising. Written in 1925, a year before her death, for the centenary of the rising, these essays were Reisner’s first works of history, looking back on this turbulent period in Russia with a Marxist understanding of the past. Translated and introduced by Cathy Porter, the Decembrist writings are full of drama and imagination, building a compelling picture of the lives of the young poets, officers and aristocrats of Russia’s first revolution against the tsarist autocracy in 1825.

These essays on the Decembrist rising, which Viktor Shklovsky praised as the best things she ever wrote, were her last published works. Deeply researched from material in the Leningrad and Moscow archives available only after the Revolution, Reisner brilliantly captures the Decembrists’ secret criminal brotherhood, bound by class and the fear of discovery, their oaths and initiations, the intensity of their friendships, their allegiances and betrayals.

Simultaneously works of art, guides to action, sources of information and knowledge, and unique records of their time and place, these essays are introduced in detail by translator Cathy Porter who also compiled a bibliography and a dramatis personae of her main characters, most of whom English-speaking readers will be unfamiliar with. -Publisher