In the book, the author is a teacher at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute, a well-known researcher of the history of Nikolaev Russia - talks about the role of the Russian Empire in suppressing the revolutionary movement in Western Europe in the year of the "spring of peoples," about the emergence of protest moods within various strata of Russian society - peasantry, workers, students, intelligentsia, about the beginning of the penetration of Marxist literature into Russia.