1. They were the inheritors of a dissident tradition that goes back as far as Pushkin and the Decembrists in Russia. Some explicitly saw themselves as representative of historic values, whether they were the exiled Solzhenitsyn or an Estonian intelligentsia which looked back admiringly to its forbears in the nineteenth century, Herderian cultural nationalists.

2. Polezhaev was arrested not long after the Decembrist uprising, not for participating in any Antimonarchist conspiracies, or even for his explicitly liberal poetry, but rather for writing Sashka, a ribald parody of Evgenii Onegin, The poet was later canonized by the likes of Alexander Herzen as a "dekabrist bez dekabria." Peschio demonstrates that Polezhaev's text was politically dangerous