Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow

Journey From Petersburg to Moscow (in Russian: Путешествие из Петербурга в Москву), published in 1790, is the most famous work by the Russian writer Aleksander Nikolayevich Radishchev. The work, often described as a Russian Uncle Tom's Cabin, is a polemical study of the problems in the Russia of Catherine the Great: serfdom, the powers of the nobility, the issues in government and governance, social structure and personal freedom and liberty. The book starts from an epigraph about The Beast who is "enormous, disgusting, a-hundred-maws and barking", meaning the Russian Empire. Journey represented a challenge to Catherine in Russia, despite the fact that Radishchev was no revolutionary: merely an observer of the ills he saw within Russian society and government at the time. The book was immediately banned and Radishchev sentenced, first to death, then to banishment in eastern Siberia. It was not freely published in Russia until 1905. Written during the period of the French Revolution, the book borrows ideas and principles from the great philosophers of the day relating to an enlightened outlook and the in particular contemporary understandings of Natural Law.