Nikolai Lorer

Born 1795; died May 1873, in Poltava. Gentry revolutionary; Decembrist.

Lorer served in the Lithuanian Life Guards Regiment from 1813 and saw service with them in the foreign campaigns of 1813-14. In 1822 he became staff captain of the Moscow Life Guards Regiment. In the spring of 1824 he was admitted to the Northern Society of Decembrists. That same year, on the insistence of the society’s leaders, he was transferred with the rank of major to the Viatka infantry regiment, commanded by P. I. Peste!’, and he became an active member of the Southern Society of Decembrists. Lorer functioned as secretary to Pestel’ for the society’s affairs. He was sentenced to 12 years at hard labor (the term was reduced to eight years), which he spent in the Nerchinsk mines; from 1832 he lived in an exile settlement in Kurgan. In 1837 he was assigned to the Caucasus as a private. Upon retiring (1842), he occupied himself with literary activity.