What do we know about “times of stagnation”? “That’s it! It was quite recently,” those whose youth occurred in those years will say. “Well, it was... It was quite a long time ago. The Soviet Union still existed then,” those who were born at the end of the eighties, on the eve of the disappearance of this very Union, will say. But for both those and others, Marina Aromshtam’s book “The Decembrist’s Wife” may turn out to be a revelation. This is an attempt to comprehend oneself and one’s generation (that which later participated in perestroika and the events of the 90s), looking in the mirror of women’s reality. “The Decembrists wanted to kill the tsar. The Narodnaya Volya wanted to kill the tsar. Lenin’s brother wanted to kill the tsar. Usually men performed feats. But there were also women: Sofya Perovskaya, the first female regicide in Russian history, the symbol of fierce feminism, the fulfillment of desires for equality of rights. But then for some reason I stopped liking her. More precisely, I did not want to imitate her deadly feminism. I thought there were women’s feats. Special women’s feats are like the feats of the wives of the Decembrists. My grandmother betrayed my grandfather. My mother refused to go with my father to the North. But with me everything will be different. I will pay off for them with Fate.”