This day in Russian history and the History of the world.

January 3

January 3, 1850: The execution of the members of Petrashevsky Circle was appointed.

Yet they were reprieved the last moment and the execution replaced with imprisonment and hard labour for the 'Petrashevists'. The Petrashevsky Circle was a Russian literary discussion group of progressive-minded commoner-intellectuals in St.Petersburg organized by Mikhail Petrashevsky.

Among the members were writers, teachers, students, minor government officials, army officers, and so on.

While not uniform in their political views, most of them were opponents of the tsarist autocracy and the Russian serfdom.

Among those connected with the circle were the writers Dostoyevsky and Saltykov-Shchedrin and the poets Pieshcheyev, Maikov, and Taras Shevchenko.

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