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Author and presenter Vladimir Tolts

"The Case" by Alexey Lazarev
(The hero of the novel "War and Peace" and his prototype)

I have long noticed: the stories of historians about what they are currently working on, what they are looking for and thinking about more often are much more interesting than belated publications of the results of this work. (The time difference has an effect, or what?...) Hence, probably, my long-standing intention: to acquaint listeners with what learned historians are currently working on, with what has not yet been published.

Today is the first experience of such acquaintance.

...

Our program today includes a radio presentation of the still unpublished work of the Moscow historian Andrei Yurganov, “The Case” of Alexei Lazarev (The hero of the novel “War and Peace” and his prototype).

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“The battalions shouted: Hurray and Vive L Empereur! Napoleon said something to Alexander. Both emperors got off their horses and took each other’s hands.”

Nikolai Rostov saw such a scene in 1807 in Tilsit, where he arrived dressed in civilian clothes.

The ardor had not yet cooled down, the nerves had not calmed down, Denisov was in the hospital! And here is peace... In the margins of the manuscript of the novel "War and Peace" Leo Tolstoy noted:

"Rostov does not dare to be disappointed, but is confused and observes: Alexander is a man, Napoleon is an Italian singer."

The scene that Nikolai Rostov saw became very important for the entire novel: it absorbed the main philosophical questions that tormented the heroes of the novel, forcing us, the readers, to immerse ourselves in the artistic reality of War and Peace.

“On the parade ground, Napoleon approached Alexander and said: “Sir, I ask your permission to give the Order of the Legion of Honor to the bravest of your soldiers.”

Rostov doesn’t like Napoleon: his harsh voice, short stature and words:

“To the one who showed himself bravest during the war,” added Napoleon, emphasizing each syllable...

- “Your Majesty will allow me to ask the colonel’s opinion?” said Alexander and took several hasty steps towards Prince Kozlovsky, the battalion commander...

- “Who should I give it to?” - Emperor Alexander asked Kozlovsky quietly in Russian.

- “Who do you order, Your Majesty?” - The Emperor frowned with displeasure and, looking around, said:

- Yes, you have to answer him.

Kozlovsky looked back at the ranks with a decisive look and in this glance captured Rostov as well.

"Isn't it me?" - thought Rostov.

"Lazarev!" - the colonel commanded with a frown; and the first-ranked soldier, Lazarev, smartly stepped forward."

Leo Tolstoy did not come up with anything: this story was taken almost verbatim from the “Description of the Second War of Emperor Alexander and Napoleon” by the famous military historian Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky.

It is also known that subsequently, the French ambassador in St. Petersburg Caulaincourt invited Lazarev to his balls and dinners and gave him ribbons of the Legion of Honor.

But let's get back to the novel:

“Where are you! Stop here!” voices whispered to Lazarev, who did not know where to go. Lazarev stopped, looked sideways in fear at the colonel, and his face trembled, as happens with soldiers called to the front.

Napoleon turned his head back slightly and pulled back his small chubby hand, as if wanting to take something. The faces of his retinue, having guessed at that very second what was going on, began to fuss, whisper, passing something to one another, and the page, the same one whom Rostov saw yesterday at Boris’s, ran forward and respectfully bent over the outstretched hand and, without making it wait a single second, put an order on a red ribbon into it. Napoleon, without looking, clenched two fingers. The Order found itself between them. Napoleon approached Lazarev, who, rolling his eyes, stubbornly continued to look only at his sovereign, and looked back at Emperor Alexander, thereby showing that what he was doing now, he was doing for his ally. A small white hand with an order touched the button of soldier Lazarev. It was as if Napoleon knew that in order for this soldier to be happy, rewarded and distinguished from everyone else in the world forever, it was only necessary for him, Napoleon’s hand, to deign to touch the soldier’s chest. Napoleon just put the cross to Lazarev's chest and, letting go of his hand, turned to Alexander, as if he knew that the cross should stick to Lazarev's chest. The cross really stuck."

The plot center of the episode is Rostov’s thoughts:

“A painful work was going on in his mind, which he could not complete to the end. Terrible doubts arose in his soul. Then he remembered Denisov with his changed expression, with his humility and the whole hospital, with these severed arms and legs, with this dirt and disease. It seemed to him so vividly that he now felt this hospital smell of a dead body that he looked around to understand where this smell could come from. Then he remembered this smug Bonaparte with his white hand, who was now the emperor, whom Emperor Alexander loves and respects. Why the torn off arms, legs, killed people? Then he remembered the awarded Lazarev and Denisov, punished and unforgiven. He found himself thinking such strange thoughts that he was afraid of them .

Reading these lines, Moscow historian Andrei Yurganov notices...

Andrey Yurganov:

There really is some kind of mystery of existence, for which War and Peace are natural forms of human existence. Rostov, in his fear, somehow childishly, but deeply, felt that something inexplicable had been revealed to him, and like a child feeling his helplessness in front of the unknown, he switched to the rhythm of life that was familiar and understandable to him: having drunk in company, Rostov “very inappropriately, according to the concepts of his interlocutors, but very consistently in the course of his thoughts,” said: “Our business is to do our duty, to chop and not think, that's all..."

Alexey Lazarev is a type necessary for the artistic reality of the novel, because in the system of such “coordinates” - from the insignificant lucky soldier to the unlucky hero Denisov - the whole drama of War and Peace is visible, which, not by chance, frightened Rostov with its incomprehensible logic...

Vladimir Tolts:

So, several years ago, Andrei Lvovich Yurganov, whom you just heard, discovered in the military-historical archive a large-scale court case not of a soldier, but of a guards officer, Alexei Lazarev.

It is clear from the case that Alexey Evdokimovich Lazarev began serving in the Russian army on June 1, 1790 in the Yekaterinburg infantry regiment. By origin - from soldiers' children who had the right to study in military schools, receive an education, then becoming petty officials, and extremely rarely - officers. There is no date of birth of Lazarev in the formal list, but there is a note: in 1816, when the list was compiled, he was 41 years old. Sometimes in such formal lists a description of appearance was given, but it is not here. True, we know for sure - Lazarev’s height was extraordinary.

On the first sheet of the “case” there are symbolic notes: in ink - “began” , “decided in 1825” . And in pencil, barely noticeable: “To the archive” ... Lazarev was put on trial in October 1819 “by the highest order” of Alexander 1...

On September 25, 1819, the III Department of the Inspectorate Department of the General Staff of His Imperial Majesty wrote a circular letter to the Audit Department, received on September 29th. It reported:

“His Imperial Majesty deigned to command: the guards disabled N1 company of ensign Lazarev, for the beatings he inflicted on the provincial secretary Musorin and the bourgeois woman Shchipacheva, to try a military court of the arrested person. About this highest will, offering the Audit Department for information, I let you know that for the proper execution of it, it was communicated with him to Mr. Commander of the Guards Corps." Signed: "General Zakrevsky on duty."

The author of the essay about Lazarev, Andrei Yurganov, draws our attention to one important detail: the emperor personally ordered the trial of Lazarev, who was “arrested.”

On October 1, 1819, the Audit Department of the General Staff of His Imperial Majesty received a report from the commander of the Guards Corps. In it he wrote:

“Mr. Duty General of His Majesty’s Main Staff informed me that the Emperor, upon the most submissive report of Mr. Adjutant General Vasilchikov on September 1st of September 2nd about the beatings inflicted on the disabled guards company No. 1 by Ensign Lazarev, to the provincial secretary Musorin and the bourgeois woman Shchipacheva, to give the highest command deigned to judge Warrant Officer Lazarev for the said act in a military court."

The initial "sentiment" of the Military Court was harsh -

"... according to the force of the military article 146 (that is, the military article of 1715) and the decree of the 1775 year of April 28, sentenced to deprivation of an arm..."

“No one,” writes Andrei Yurganov, “of course, was going to cut off the ensign’s hand; such a cruel formula no longer corresponded to the spirit of Alexander’s time...”

After the trial, Lazarev was placed under arrest and kept on guard by the temporary Senate departments.

Time passed. A year has passed. Second.

Only at the very beginning of 1822 did they finally notice this: and in the stationery papers of the General Staff a pressing question arose: “Why is the case about Lazarev going on for so long?”

From the bowels of the chancellery came a document entitled: “Information on the reasons why the case being carried out against warrant officer Lazarev has not yet been completed.” This “Certificate” was compiled in the Ordinance House on January 4, 1822. A day after this document was written, it was read by Prince Pyotr Mikhailovich Volkonsky, who imposed the resolution:

“Please don’t write nonsense... don’t waste the paper in vain”...

Andrei Yurganov, who found the “Lazarev case” in the archive, offers us:

Let's try to understand this document from the inside: what really are the “reasons” for the delay?

“Invalid Guards Company No. 1, Ensign Lazarev, was brought to a military court at the local Ordinance House by imperial order in October 1819 for beatings inflicted on an official and a bourgeois woman. This trial was completed and submitted for consideration to the commander of the Life Guards garrison battalion, Major General Gordeev, on September 30 1820, but on May 24, 1821 it was returned to add why from that time until September various persons involved in this case were sought through communications, from whom testimony was again taken from the defendant, and from some explanations were demanded through the Novgorod civil governor, then in the article lists it was shown: for September, that this case was of the Life Guards; The Grenadier Regiment was accepted from auditor Ilyin on September 21 by auditor Klimov, who is considering it."

The Certificate noted one extraordinary event: Lazarev was released from arrest once. And although the Certificate itself did not report in detail what happened on March 6, 1821, other documents from this case show that Alexey Lazarev was, as they said, “released to his wife,” but to whom, apparently, he did not reach... At 11 o’clock in the evening, “going into the house of Lieutenant-Commander Leyman, he asked the people of his hunters to become soldiers, promising each 2 thousand rubles and demanded paper from the janitor and ink"! “And when he was taken by the police, he was interviewed by a private bailiff and said that he had been sent by His Imperial Highness Mikhail Pavlovich to look for an absent cavalry guard soldier.”

It turned out:

"... Lazarev committed this act in a fever, because at the same time he was sent from the office of the chief police chief to a military land hospital. When he woke up, they asked him about what had happened: but he said that “he knew nothing.”

The following months in Lazarev’s life were similar like twin brothers: the machine for executing court and other decisions, judging by the Certificate, was in no hurry...

Finally, on July 11, 1822, the report of the Audit Department was sent to Alexander 1. From this document it was clear that:

“The ensign of the guards company of the Preobrazhensky Regiment arrived on July 13, 1819 from Pavlovsk to St. Petersburg, went into one house, wanting to find his acquaintance, whose brother owed him 63 rubles, and “when the bourgeois Shchipacheva living in that house answered his, Lazarev’s, question about Bocharov, she answered that he was not at home, Lazarev beat her, Shchipachev, on the cheeks and once in the yard on the head with a sword hilt."

But that's not all. Another incident happened on the street:

“The provincial secretary of the Senate, Musorin, who was passing by, asked about the reason for the fight, then Lazarev beat him too, and then hit him two more times at the quarter warden.”

From Shchipacheva’s testimony in 1819:

"... when warrant officer Lazarev, having come to the house, asked the townsfolk who were here if Bocharov was at home, at that time she came out of another room, Lazarev scolded her, and then said “get out” and, hitting her twice with his fist, pushed her into her room, which is why she went with a request to the quarter warden, and when returning from him she met Lazarev on the street, where he beat her with a sword hilt on the head, and then, turning to the provincial secretary, Musorin, who was on this occasion, he beat him too; but this one, without doing any rudeness, shouted only “guard” against Lazarev .

From Musorin’s testimony in 1819:

"... he never called ensign Lazarev indecently, did not beat him with a cane and did not have it with him at all, and when he passed by the house of the merchant Chernyshev and, seeing that Lazarev was beating Shchipacheva, he asked about the reason for such a fight, but Lazarev in response called him a serf, hit him in the ear and several more times on the head, in which he referred to the merchants Chernyshev and Sigovikov, and what’s more Lazarev hit him two more times in the house of the quarter warden, when his wife and the provincial secretary Borodina were there."

From the testimony of eight townspeople:

"... Ensign Lazarev, having arrived at the apartment, asked if the tradesman Bocharov was at home; but when they told him that he was not, he sat down on the bed and ordered to call the hostess Shchipacheva, who, when she arrived, sat down opposite him, which Lazarev was upset about, as they believe, he asked first where Bocharov was, and then who she was, and ordered her to get out, but Shchipacheva stubbornly told him that he couldn’t kick her out of his apartment, why Lazarev, having taken her by force, pushed her into another room, and after hesitating a little, he left; he didn’t curse her in front of them, didn’t hit her on the cheeks or head, she didn’t run out into the street, didn’t go to the warden, and in their presence Lazarev didn’t meet her a second time, didn’t hit her with a sword scabbard, or hit her with anything, Likewise, Musorin didn’t beat the provincial secretary in their presence, and they didn’t hear about it, and the landlady didn’t complain about anything.”

Lazarev did not plead guilty.

He really was in the house of the tradesman Sazhin and asked Shchipacheva about Bocharov, but when he received the answer that he was not there, then “without any abuse or fighting he went out.” Moving away from the house, he met a man unknown to him, dressed in a private dress, who, having caught up with him, said, “What the devil.” Taking offense, Lazarev turned around and spat. And he swung his cane at him and hit him on the shoulder. “After which he (Musorin) ... ran to an unknown house, and shouted that he would show him who he was and what his uniform was like!” “Lazarev, feeling offended, he went after him in order to reveal who the person who had offended him was, who then came out dressed in a uniform." And he added that Musorin insultingly called him a general - "and this was brought against him unfairly"!

The Sovereign Emperor was asked to familiarize himself with the main judgments of the guards authorities regarding the case of warrant officer Alexei Lazarev.

According to the brigade commander of the Guards Invalid Brigade, Major General Gordeev 1st (who was already retired at the time of writing the report) , “for the indicated violent crimes” he (Lazarev) should be deprived of his (Lazarev’s) ranks and all his insignia and sent to the army.”

But the head of the “troops left in St. Petersburg, adjutant general” Pavel Vasilyevich Golenishchev-Kutuzov spoke differently. Golenishchev-Kutuzov proposed: consider detention as sufficient punishment and dismiss from service...

Reading the case of the Preobrazhensky warrant officer today, Andrei Yurganov notices...

Andrey Yurganov:

We will never know what Lazarev was thinking about while in the guardhouse. Did he remember his life?.. Did he regret anything?.. One thing can be said with confidence - he had something to remember...

"Great Chancellor
Alexey Lazarev
Grenadier of the Imperial Russian Guard
Preobrazhensky Regiment.

Brave Grenadier! You have the good fortune to receive at Tilsit the Order of the Golden Eagle of the Legion of Honor from the hands of my Supreme Sovereign, His Imperial and Royal Majesty, Emperor of France, King and Patron of the Union of the Rhine. His Imperial and Royal Majesty, wishing you to have written evidence of His respect for you, which He has for the entire Imperial Russian Guard, has honored me with His command to inscribe and send to you this patent, which testifies to the honor you have received.

His Majesty also wished me to inform you that you will receive every year, starting from the first of July of the last year, a pension of one thousand francs belonging to the Golden Eagle of the Legion of Honor.

It gives me great pleasure to inform the brave man of this sign of favor towards him from my emperor Lacenedo.

1807 October 22".

For prison inmate Lazarev, this letter sounded like a fairy tale. “But,” notes Andrei Yurganov, “even “good fairy tales” have their “villains”...

By order of Konstantin Pavlovich, in 1809, then non-commissioned officer of the Preobrazhensky Life Guards Regiment Alexei Lazarev was deprived of the Order of the Legion of Honor for “the daring acts he committed against Sergeant Major Tiravin and was demoted without trial to the rank and file,” and transferred to the Azov Infantry Regiment.

So Lazarev is no longer a lucky man, but rather a victim of the arbitrariness of high authorities: even if he was guilty, the formula “without trial” is always unfair. In addition, the Order of the Legion of Honor, with all the possible reservations that Konstantin Pavlovich was also awarded it and had some rights to participate in the affairs of the Legion, was still French, not Russian. Alexey Lazarev is a warrior who knows the price of victories and defeats: was it necessary to insult him like that?

Both Musorin and Shchipacheva - the investigation has not yet ended - have already asked to destroy their lawsuit, promising that in the future they will forever forget about this story. And Lazarev, as the investigation found out, after a quarrel with Shchipacheva, on the same day he returned to her house (!) at 9 pm “and... in a drunken state, he lay down and spent the night.”

It would seem that if even the witnesses no longer remember such insignificant events, then it is the emperor’s job to put an end to this story. But that was not the case...

A year has passed.

And another year.

Lazarev was still in the guardhouse. On May 23, 1824, the ruler of the office of the duty general of the General Staff of His Imperial Majesty asked the Audit Department: “For what reason exactly is Ensign Lazarev being held on Sennaya Square?” Oddly enough, the answer was given correctly: the most humble report - at the emperor’s confirmation...

The year 1824 passed. I wonder how many more years would have passed?...

On April 10, 1825, the St. Petersburg commandant reported to the Audit Department of the General Staff of His Imperial Majesty:

“Warrant Officer Lazarev, who was under trial at the St. Petersburg Ordinance House and was being held in the hospital guardhouse on April 4th by the Invalid Guards Company No. 1, shot himself to death...”

Andrey Yurganov:

In the literary text, Lazarev was meaningful, but devoid of real features; in “life” he acquired real features, but touching authentic documents does not make it possible to comprehend this life - this is a paradox.

What were the stable stereotypes of consciousness, how did the system of moral guidelines, value judgments, and so on and so forth differ?

Just one example is from this case: Shchipacheva sat down in front of the officer, and as the townspeople who observed the events of the “case” believed, this is where it all began. Either Shchipacheva was not obliged to stand in front of the guards officer, or the guards officer immediately seemed to her not to be a nobleman, and she did not stand on ceremony. Perhaps Lazarev’s whole life was implicated in this feeling of resentment for an inferior existence: he was given an order, then it was taken away, and he became a guards officer without being a nobleman. After all, Lazarev was offended by the fact that he, an officer, as it seemed to him, was insulted with the words “What a devil,” after all, he needed to find out “what kind of uniform” Musorin was?..

On the paper of the investigative case there are fragments of reality. To understand them, it is necessary to discover similar “shards”, collect them and recreate the mosaic canvas. In the meantime, we record only a fragment of the chaotic state of life found in the documents...

Vladimir Tolts:

“But even in such chaos,” says Andrei Yurganov, “something typical can be seen.” In his opinion, the court case of the unfortunate Lazarev shows what the judicial enforcement machine of the Russian Empire was like. Her inability to solve an insignificant investigative matter is a symbol, as they say now, of deep stagnation.

After all, the law to which the military court referred - the Military Article of 1715 - was created by Peter the Great. Since then, much water has passed under the bridge, but complete legislation similar to the Council Code of 1649 has never been created. Meanwhile, the Military Article of 1715, largely based on the norms of the Council Code of 1649 (at least in its first chapters), acted as legislation not repealed by anyone not only for military personnel, but even (in some cases) for civilians. (Does this remind you of anything, dear listeners?). Andrei Yurganov, this combination in a hopelessly outdated law of the provisions of the even more ancient Council Code and the “Order” of Catherine II, which by that time was also not a legal novelty, makes one think about the difficult paths of Russian legal proceedings...

Andrey Yurganov:

The “case” of Alexei Lazarev symbolically reflects the history of endless and equally unsuccessful attempts throughout the 18th century to create a uniform criminal and civil legislation for all subjects of the state.

Already on February 18, 1700, a royal decree was announced, which established a special Chamber on the Code - this commission was tasked with revising and correcting the Code of 1649.

But to command is one thing, but to implement is another matter: at that time there were no people so prepared to fully implement what was planned. The history of drawing up the Code of New Legislation for Russia began.

Vladimir Tolts:

The long list of efforts to modernize Russian criminal legislation, given further by Andrei Yurganov in his still unpublished article about Lazarev’s “case,” tired even me, a person accustomed to this kind of reading.

Sovereigns and empresses changed on the Russian throne, periodically showing royal concern for the creation of new laws, all sorts of commissions were created on this occasion, tormenting the paper of the generation of “nettle seed” - clerical workers... Already during the reign of Alexander 1st, who witnessed the awarding of Lazarev with the Order of the Legion of Honor, under the leadership of Speransky, the first Complete Collection of Laws of the Russian Empire was compiled in 45 volumes But the real Criminal Code (“Code on Criminal and Correctional Punishments”) appeared only in 1845 - 20 years after the unfortunate warrant officer committed suicide...

Comparing this desperately illegal act of his with the law that had become dead by that time, Andrei Yurganov reflects today:

Andrey Yurganov:

Lazarev committed suicide. According to the military article, he committed a serious crime. We must act accordingly. The military article gave the following explanation: a special procedure had to be performed on a suicide - “drag the body of the suicide through the streets or a camp and bury it in a dishonorable place” (article 164). An “interpretation” was attached to the Article. Its meaning was that “if someone commits a crime in unconsciousness, in illness, in melancholy, then bury this body in a special, but not dishonorable place. And for this reason, it is necessary that while such a suicide is buried, so that the judges are truly notified in advance of the circumstances and reasons, and through a sentence they would determine how to bury him.” Consequently, if we adhere to existing, and not conceivable, laws, then it is necessary to create a commission to investigate the circumstances of Lazarev’s suicide, which would decide whether to “drag” the body through the streets, or quietly bury it somewhere. And since it would never even occur to anyone to act independently - that is, in accordance with the spirit and letter of the law - it is hypothetically possible that a new “most loyal report” to Emperor Alexander would arise.

Without reading the “first”, it is very possible (after all, why not allow such a small thing!), Alexander could have received the “second”, from which he would have learned that due to the slowness of the entire judicial system, a man tragically died, and now he has to decide this “difficult question” - whether to drag the body of a suicide through the streets of the city or not, just bury it...

Vladimir Tolts:

But everything, as Andrei Yurganov writes, “turned out fine”: in the real case, a peculiar reaction to the news of Lazarev’s suicide arose - “decided”: it seems that the machine for executing the laws of the Russian Empire was already afraid of itself...

Our historian considers it symbolic that Lazarev shot himself in 1825. In a few months, the Decembrists will come to Senate Square... According to Yurganov, the Lazarev case is a particle of the objective background of general discontent. (It is possible that many of the future Decembrists even knew about the tragic fate of the guardsman).

I am, however, more impressed by another connection in the work of Andrei Yurganov, who regards the Lazarev case as a symbolic reflection of the essence of the entire Russian Empire - the connection between the bitter fate of a guards officer and the drama of the Russian Tsar.

After all, Alexander Pavlovich - our historian writes about this - at least since 1820, was in a state close to hypochondria. The events of the uprising of the Semenovsky regiment in October 1820 played a big role. Alexander, while in Troppau, was shocked by reports from Russia. On November 5 (17), 1820, he wrote to Arakcheev:

“You can easily imagine what a sad feeling it produced in me; an incident, one might say, unheard of in our army. It’s even sadder that it happened in the guards, and for me personally it’s even sadder that it was in the Semyonovsky regiment. But, having gotten used to talking to you with all frankness, I’ll tell you that no one in the world will convince me that this incident was invented by the soldiers or happened solely as show, from the cruel treatment of them by Colonel Schwartz... In my opinion, there are other reasons here... From all of the above, I conclude that there was an alien suggestion here, but not a military one... The purpose of the indignation, it seems, was to frighten...”

The emperor shelved the matter of secret societies that threatened him personally, and did not do anything... Upon the emperor’s return from Troppau, Adjutant General Vasilchikov hastened to inform him about the conspirators, but the tsar, remaining thoughtful and silent for a long time, then said that he himself once shared and even encouraged these “illusions and delusions.”

At the same time, he was given a note from Benckendorf, which described these secret organizations with amazing accuracy, but the tsar did not actually leave any notes and did nothing to prevent the unfavorable development of events for him. After Alexander's death, Benckendorf's note was found in the Tsar's office in Tsarskoye Selo...

Thinking about this depressive inactivity of the sovereign today, Andrei Yurganov says:

Andrey Yurganov:

His disappointment, or as his contemporaries said, “weariness with life,” was so deep that at times he simply did not strive to become the central link in the mechanism of power. And the state apparatus in some cases was unable to act otherwise than in the sphere of the absolute power of the monarch. Alexander’s near-depressive state (especially in the last year of his life), apparently, was, if not the reason, then certainly the impetus for the tragic outcome of the strange case of Alexei Lazarev.

Vladimir Tolts:

It is impossible to understand whether Alexander read this case or not, but the fact remains: for several years he did not react to the “most submissive report,” and the man, waiting for the imperial decision on a trifling incident, continued to be in the guardhouse.

“Memory,” writes Andrei Yurganov, “for some reason involuntarily makes us remember the “other” Lazarev from artistic reality, faithfully looking into the eyes of his emperor and waiting for orders from him.” Tolstoy, notes the author of the essay about the unfortunate Transfiguration man Andrei Yurganov, as if he knew in advance that the “genuine” Lazarev would never wait for them...

Time difference. Today we introduced you to the work of the Moscow historian Andrei Yurganov, “The Case of Lazarev,” which has not yet been published in Russia,” counting on continuing, from time to time, to arrange such presentations of the newest works of historians and researchers. So we are waiting for their proposals!