The Decembrists

Vasily Timm painted the Life Guards Horse Regiment on Senate Square during the rising of 14 December 1825. Later oil, Hermitage: this is a reconstruction of the morning, not a sketch from the ice. Do not ask the canvas to do Taganrog. The last article closed on Alexander in Paris and a Holy Alliance. This page is what happened when that emperor died without a direct male heir and officers who had seen France tried to spend the victory at home. They were primarily members of the upper classes with military backgrounds; some had participated in the Russian occupation of France after the Napoleonic Wars. They failed. Five were hanged. Others went to Siberia. Nicholas I’s reign begins in the next article. Keep this one as the square, the interregnum, and the societies that led to both.

Alexander died in Taganrog on 1 December 1825, 19 November Old Style. The death triggered a succession crisis because he had no direct male heir. His brother Constantine was next in line but had previously renounced his rights to the throne. Nicholas was to become the next ruler according to a manifesto from 1822, but it remained unpublished. After Constantine reaffirmed his renunciation, Nicholas decided to publish the manifesto and become emperor. On 26 December 1825 — 14 December Old Style — conspirators staged the Decembrist rebellion, attempting to defend Constantine’s rights against Nicholas. The Northern Society, taking advantage of the brief but confusing interregnum, staged an uprising, convincing some of the troops in St Petersburg to refuse to take a loyalty oath to Nicholas I and to demand instead the accession of his brother Constantine.

A few of the conspirators had been Freemasons. Some were members of the secret patriotic, and later revolutionary, societies in Russia: the Union of Salvation (1816), the Union of Welfare (1818), the Northern Society (1821), and the Southern Society (1821). Pavel Ivanovich Pestel had fought in the Napoleonic Wars and returned with a sense of Russia’s backwardness; he joined the Union of Salvation in 1816 to discuss reforms and a constitutional monarchy, and in 1818 organized a Union of Welfare branch at Tulchin. Kondraty Fyodorovich Ryleyev, poet and revolutionary, served abroad and led in the revolt. Sergey Ivanovich Muravyov-Apostol, army officer and republican, was recruited to the Southern Society in 1822, headed its Vasilkov council, and by late 1825 advocated assassinating the tsar. Those names are Britannica’s. This page will not invent a manifesto’s full text.

An anonymous nineteenth-century portrait shows Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich. Use it as the brother the troops were told to demand, then return to the square. A later likeness is not the unpublished manifesto of 1822.

Constantine had renounced. The troops on the square were told to defend his rights. The confusion of the interregnum was the opening. Nicholas appeared as emperor in the middle of a refusal to swear. Another insurrection by the Chernigov regiment in the south was also quickly defeated. Muravyov-Apostol learned of the Northern Society’s defeat on 14 December, then organized and led a rising in the south from 29 December. An extensive investigation in which Nicholas personally participated ensued. It resulted in the trial of 289 Decembrists and the execution of five of them. Britannica names Pavel Pestel, Sergey Muravyov-Apostol, Pyotr Kakhovsky, and, in the same cluster of lives, Kondraty Ryleyev and Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin among the men who died in July 1826. The Russian Empire page says five were hanged and others sent to Siberia. This article will not invent the scaffold’s mechanics.

Through their martyrdom they provided a source of inspiration to succeeding generations of Russian dissidents. That is Britannica’s definition, not a later novel. The men were not a peasant army. They were not Pugachev. They were guards and officers, some of them poets, some of them republicans, standing in a capital square with a confusing succession as their pretext. They wanted Constantine named, or they wanted more than Constantine: constitutions had been talked about in the societies since 1816. Pestel had discussed a constitutional monarchy in the Union of Salvation. The Southern Society was radical and antimonarchical. The Northern Society used the interregnum. Muravyov-Apostol, Britannica records, had been planning a military rising in the south when he learned of 14 December; the Chernigov attempt was that second try. The failure was quick. The investigation was long. Nicholas personally participated. Speransky, returned to usefulness, sat on the special tribunal that tried them and drafted a letter that secured a significant reduction of the sentences the tribunal had imposed. Five still died.

Kolman’s 1830s watercolour of the same square, from Benckendorff’s cabinet, is another later view: troops around the Bronze Horseman on 14 December. Use it as a second distance from the morning. Timm is oil and horses. Kolman is water and a monument. Neither is the oath refused in real time. The next article’s Benckendorff will run the Third Section. This page may note that the watercolour lived in his cabinet without making the police the whole story. The story here is the interregnum, the societies, the square, the Chernigov rising, 289 tried, five executed. Constantine’s portrait is the name the soldiers were given. Nicholas’s reign is what the failure produced.

Keep 1812’s fire out of this page except as the war that had taken some of these officers to France. Keep the Holy Alliance out of it except as the Europe they had seen. Keep the Crimean War out of it. The Decembrists are December 1825 and the hangings of 1826. They are not Nicholas’s thirty years. They are the morning on which those thirty years began, with cannon on a square and an investigation the new emperor ran himself. Readers who want Official Nationality and gendarmes will find them next. This article’s inventory should stay on the ice: Taganrog, an unpublished manifesto, Constantine’s refusal, Senate Square, Tulchin, Chernigov, five names, Siberia for the rest.

They used a dead emperor and a silent manifesto to refuse a living one. The square did not become a constitution. It became a martyrdom.

Paul’s 1797 male line had been meant to prevent this kind of morning. Alexander had no direct male heir. Constantine had stepped aside in a document not everyone had seen. Nicholas had to publish and to swear the capital at once. The Decembrists stood in the gap. That is the dynastic fact. The political fact is the societies that had been talking since 1816, while Alexander grew more religious and more ready to see rebellion. Paris had shown officers a different public life. Senate Square showed them what a Russian square would bear. It bore a refusal for a morning. It did not bear a new oath to Constantine as a path to a constitution. The hangings closed the path. The next emperor would try to freeze the country so that the path would not reopen.

Do not invent last words on the scaffold. Do not invent a crowd count. Do not invent the weather beyond what a later painter implies. Britannica’s dates and names are enough. 14 December Old Style, 26 December New Style, 1825. Five hanged in 1826, among them Pestel, Muravyov-Apostol, Ryleyev, Kakhovsky. 289 tried. Others to Siberia. Union of Salvation 1816, Union of Welfare 1818, Northern and Southern Societies 1821. Occupation of France as background. Interregnum as opening. Nicholas as the man who investigated. That list is the article. Timm, Constantine, Kolman are the pictures. The pull is the verdict without a quotation from the dead.

The next chapter of this book, Russia changes, will have revolutionaries of another generation. Do not smuggle them into 1825. The Decembrists are the first of a line of martyrs Britannica names; they are not yet Land and Liberty or the People’s Will. They are officers on a square. Stop this page before Official Nationality, before the Third Section as a system, before 1830 in Poland. Those are Nicholas’s tools and tests. This page is the rising that frightened him into using them. Kolman’s watercolour already lives in a gendarme’s cabinet. The next article can open that cabinet. This one should leave it shut, with the square still the subject.

Karl Kolman drew Senate Square in the 1830s for a cabinet that would belong to the police. A later watercolour, not the morning’s order book. Use it for the place, then put it aside.

Stop this page before Uvarov’s slogan and before a war in the Crimea. The Decembrists here are a death at Taganrog, a brother who would not take the throne, a square that refused Nicholas, societies with dates, five hangings, and a martyrdom that later dissidents would read. Timm’s horses are the official later oil. Constantine’s coat is the name shouted. Kolman’s monument is the square as a policeman’s souvenir. A confusing interregnum is not nothing. It is also not a constitution. The large Russia of the nineteenth century turns, on this morning, from a victor in Paris into an emperor who begins by firing on his own Guards.

Alexander had dreamed of good laws and kept the autocracy. The Decembrists tried to spend the European years on a Russian square and lost. Nicholas would not dream the same dream. He would hang five men, send others east, and then try to use whatever good ideas the investigation had found without sharing power. That bargain is the next reign. This article’s last inventory should stay on 14 December. No new code. No new charter. A square, a refused oath, and a name — Decembrists — that would outlive the morning.