PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMr. Beer’s excellent book will for some time be the definitive work in English on this enormous topic ... Mr. Beer devotes 80 pages to a fascinating new account of the Decembrists that soberly delves into their tensions and personal weaknesses and tells of some of their conspiracies, drinking, debts and feuds. More important, Mr. Beer argues persuasively for a direct line between their story and the role played by the exile system in the eventual fall of the czars ... Mr. Beer provides a valuable sketch of life on Sakhalin island in the north Pacific, where late in the 19th century the apparat decided that convicts and exiles could more or less be dumped to fend for themselves—thus providing a perfect greenhouse for the exile system to flower into its purest moral expression.
