Alexander Radishchev

Alexander Radishchev (1749–1802) was a Russian writer and social critic. Sent to the University of Leipzig in the 1760s, he returned steeped in Enlightenment ideas and entered Catherine the Great's civil service. In 1790 he privately printed A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow, a fierce attack on serfdom and autocracy that Catherine condemned as Jacobin sedition.

Arrested and sentenced to death, he was exiled instead to Ilimsk in Siberia until 1797. Pardoned under Alexander I, he briefly helped draft legal reforms but, broken by persecution, took his own life in 1802.