Matvey Muravyov-Apostol in his youth received an excellent education at a prestigious boarding school in Paris in France, knew several foreign languages. After the Decembrist uprising, Matvey Muravyov-Apostol was convicted and sent to Siberia. He was in the city of Yalutorovsk, Tobolsk province, from 1836. In Yalutorovsk, he read a lot, for many years conducted meteorological observations, strictly recording the data obtained in a journal. In 1838, with the permission of the Governor-General of Western Siberia and the consent of the Yalutorovsk governor, he bought a house from the heiress of the tradesman Belousov and settled there with his family. There they lived until 1856. The house itself was build in 1795. 10 years after the purchase, Muravyov-Apostol made a room from the vestibule and put a brick oven in it. Once Matvey Ivanovich had the idea to tell the descendants about the history of the house he owned and about the exiled Decembrists who lived in the city of Yalutorovsk. On August 18, old style, 1849, he put the note in a wine bottle, the neck of which was corked. The Decembrist hid the message in a room that he made from the entrance.

Seven years after that, Matvey Muravyov-Apostol forever said goodbye to Yalutorovsk and its inhabitants forever. Leaving the place of settlement, he never revealed his secret to anyone. A bottle made of dark green glass for many decades has become a reliable place for keeping the ‘Testament of the Decembrist M.I. Muravyov-Apostle to future descendants’.

The item was discovered by accident in 1935. The first director of the museum, Ivan Ozolin, received an apartment in the house in which, according to his assumption, the exiled Decembrist lived. When he started repairing the brick oven, under the wooden block of the subfloor, he found a glass bottle tightly sealed with a cork and a letter inside. The letter is written in even calligraphic handwriting on both sides on paper that has almost retained its original appearance. In black ink, the author narrated about the former owner of the house, the tradesman Belousov, from whom ‘it was bought by the State Criminal Matvey Ivanovich Muravyov-Apostol…’. The Decembrist lists the names of all his associates and the time of their arrival in Yalutorovsk, recalls those who are already buried on Yalutorovsk land. The message of Muravyov-Apostol ended with the words: ‘for the benefit and pleasure of future archaeologists… all the best in the world, I am placing this note on August 18, 1849.’ This historical find served as the basis for the opening of the Museum in Memory of the Decembrists in Yalutorovsk, which became the country’s first museum dedicated to these brave Decembrists.