Sergei had a special admiration for the Decembrists, and we drove to the most famous place to visit in Chita: the Decembrist Church.

The so-called Decembrist Church was in fact the meeting place of the Decembrists who had been exiled that year. Today, it is open to the public as a museum.

The museum is a small two-storey wooden building, the upper floor is smaller than the lower floor, and the appearance is somewhat like a tower. The wooden façade is painted black.

Looking at the ancient buildings in the cold temperature of Chita in January, Sergei sighed to me how the Decembrists lived and struggled in this deserted Siberia.

The museum displays portraits of the Decembrists who were exiled here, and the docent is a talkative and funny old lady in her 60s. Sergei and I listened attentively as she told us about the life of the Decembrists in exile and their lives here.

One cannot ignore the role of the Decembrists in the study of Russian history.

The Decembrists were a group of aristocrats engaged in revolutionary activities in Russia in the twenties of the 19th century.

He was exiled in December 1825 for launching Russia's first armed uprising to overthrow the Tsarist autocracy and serfdom, hence the name "The Decembrists".

At the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, with the development of capitalist relations, serfdom in Russia gradually disintegrated.

The victory in the Great Patriotic War against Napoleon in 1812 further aroused patriotic fervor. Inspired by the bourgeois revolutions in France and Europe, some upright young aristocratic officers, especially those who had gone west to France, became increasingly dissatisfied with the domestic political realities and germinated a desire to "transform the motherland."

In 1816, Muravyov and Bister, the young officers of the aristocracy, founded the first secret political group, the Society for National Salvation, in Petersburg.

In 1818, a second secret society of 200 people was formed in Moscow, the Happiness Society.

The members of these two secret societies, who enthusiastically propagated democratic ideas and opposed autocracy, were dissolved one after another due to differences in the methods of struggle.

At the same time, some members of these two groups in southern Russia formed the Southern Society under the leadership of Bistel.

They often met in secret, read progressive literature, and advocated the elimination of the royal family, the abolition of serfdom, and the establishment of a unified republic.

Their main program was fully embodied in Pistel's Russian Truth, the first draft constitution of the republic in the history of the Russian revolutionary movement.

On November 19, 1825, Tsar Alexander I died suddenly, and the Decembrists decided to advance the date of succession of Nicholas I. Duke Trubetskoy led the uprising.

On December 26 (the 14th day of the Russian calendar), the officers of the uprising led more than 3,000 soldiers to the Senate Square in Petersburg, but Trubetskoi fled. Nicholas I immediately mobilized his army, bombarded the square with artillery, bloodily suppressed the uprising, and killed quite a few of the people gathered around the square.

After news of the Petersburg uprising reached the South, the members of the Southern Society launched an uprising of the Chernyigov Corps in Ukraine on January 10, 1826, which soon failed.

The Decembrists were made up of aristocratic youth and intellectuals with democratic ideas. Influenced by the French bourgeois revolution, they were a group of romantic social reformers with humanistic ideas, and in the process of preparing the uprising, they also attached importance to the quality education of the people, carried out literacy campaigns, criticized the tsarist government's bureaucratic surveillance system for scholars and teachers, opposed the restrictions imposed by the tsarist officials on the development of domestic culture and science, and set up schools for the children of soldiers, the children of serfs in their own domains, and the children of the urban poor.

After the uprising was suppressed, Nicholas I personally presided over the trial. The captured Decembrists were optimistic, calm, heroic and unyielding.

On July 12, 1826, Peterstel, Ryleyev, Sergei Muravyov, Bestuschev and Kakhovsky were hanged in Petersburg.

121 insurgents were exiled to Siberia.

The first uprising of the Decembrists against autocracy in the history of Russia failed. However, their spirit of fighting bravely for their ideals and causes, not avoiding life and death, and consciously going to the trouble in order to awaken the new generation has written a glorious chapter in Russian history and set a glorious example for the revolutionary movement that followed.

Lenin spoke highly of the Decembrists as "the first generation of Russian revolutionaries".

The Decembrist uprising was a great blow to the tsarist autocracy in Russian history, and it was different from previous revolutions with peasant uprisings as the main body.

The Decembrists were far superior to the former in terms of cultural and educational level, political literacy and foresight, means of political struggle, and organizational ability.

Lenin called the Decembrists "aristocratic revolutionaries"

Twenty-one were exiled to the sparsely populated, cold and barren Siberia for hard labor, and it is worth mentioning that many Decembrist wives voluntarily abandoned their privileged aristocratic life and chose to go into exile with their husbands.

The value of the Decembrists lies in the fact that they are not only devoted to theoretical construction and public opinion propaganda, but also to revolutionary practice.

They completely betrayed the class from which they came, betrayed the system they had defended, consciously linked the fate of the country and the nation with themselves, were not afraid of bloodshed and sacrifice, heroically launched the first attack on the Russian autocracy, and advanced the process of political modernization in Russia.