The fate of Vladimir Raevsky is amazing. A poet, a hero of the War of 1812, a friend of Pushkin in Chisinau, he truly became the “first Decembrist,” arrested four years before the uprising on Senate Square. “The Thinking Major,” the author of the works “On the Slavery of the Peasants” and “About the Soldier,” was accused of anti-government propaganda and spent six years in the fortresses of Tiraspol, St. Petersburg and Warsaw while the investigation was ongoing. Then he was exiled to permanent settlement in Siberia, signed up there as a “state peasant” and married a peasant woman. He wrote “Memoirs,” which were lost—it seemed forever, but then found in the 20th century. Talking about his hero, N. Y. Eidelman opens many unknown pages in the history of Decembrism.