Although the revolt was a proscribed topic during Nicholas’ reign, Alexander Herzen placed the profiles of executed Decembrists on the cover of his radical periodical "Polar Star". Alexander Pushkin addressed poems to his Decembrist friends, Nikolai Nekrasov, whose father served together with Decembrists in Ukraine, wrote a long poem about the Decembrist wives, and Leo Tolstoy started writing a novel on that liberal movement, which would later evolve into "War and Peace". In the Soviet era Yuri Shaporin produced an opera entitled "Dekabristi" (The Decembrists), about the revolt, with the libretto written by Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy. It premiered at the Bolshoi Theatre on 23 June 1953.