“Alternative history” in this “historical fantasy novel” is set within a distinctive “frame” made from the work’s first and third parts: the first provides the prehistory of Decembrism—in the tradition of palace coups carried out by the Guards—while the third explains why “everything was as it was.”
The second, actually alt-historical, part of the novel is the shortest. It is devoted to the theme of a hypothetical victory by the Decembrists in 1825. Following the initiating event—the death of Emperor Nicholas Pavlovich and the August imperial family during the assault on the Winter Palace—there comes a three-page authorial “script of further events” after the success of the December revolution in St. Petersburg...