Decembrist revolt

• 1. Introduction

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  The Decembrist revolt was a failed coup launched in Saint Petersburg on a single December morning in 1825, when roughly 3,000 soldiers refused to swear loyalty to a new tsar and stood their ground in Senate Square. By nightfall, artillery loaded with grapeshot had shattered the rebellion. Five of its leaders would hang. Hundreds more would be marched in chains to the mines of Siberia. Yet the uprising that lasted less than a day would haunt Russia's ruling class for the rest of the century.

  Who were the men who brought soldiers into a public square and dared to challenge the most powerful autocracy in Europe? What drove liberal noblemen and decorated military officers to risk everything on a conspiracy they knew was badly organized? And what happened to the ideas they carried eastward into exile? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Liberalism Under Alexander

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  Count Mikhail Mikhailovich Speransky was the major advocate for reform inside Alexander I's government. During his years at the center of power, Speransky helped shape the Ministry of the Interior, pushed for the reform of religious education, and worked to strengthen the state's hand in economic development. His influence grew substantially from 1808 onward. Then, as Napoleon's armies menaced Russia's borders, rivals at court turned on him as a dangerous liberal, and by 1812 he was forced into exile.

  Alexander I himself had raised expectations. In the early years of his reign, liberalism enjoyed a degree of official encouragement, and officers returning from the Napoleonic Wars were emboldened by what they had seen. The suffering of peasant soldiers gave many of them a new view of serfdom. Some Decembrists expressed their contempt of court life by wearing cavalry swords to balls, a pointed signal that they had no intention of dancing. They committed themselves to academic study and identified openly with reform movements abroad.

  In 1816, several officers of the Imperial Russian Guard founded the Union of Salvation, formally titled the Society of the Faithful and True Sons of the Fatherland. Pavel Pestel joined and gave the society a sharper revolutionary edge. The group's charter resembled those of the Italian carbonari. After internal tensions and rumors about the tsar's intentions toward the capital and serfdom, the society fractured. Yakushkin, who had privately contemplated killing the emperor, left when his fellow members refused to act on such rumors.

  A successor body, the Union of Prosperity, adopted a more moderate charter modeled on the German Tugendbund. It was still considered illegal and was likened to a masonic lodge. A mutiny in the Semenovsky Regiment in 1820 prompted the leadership to formally suspend all activity in 1821, but two clandestine groups survived the suspension.

• 3. Two Societies, Two Visions

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  From a garrison town called Tulchin in Ukraine, Pavel Pestel led the Southern Society toward a radical program: abolish the monarchy, establish a republic, redistribute land by placing half under state ownership and dividing the rest among the peasants. Pestel and his followers rejected the American federal model as a threat to any future Russian or United Slavic federation, though they embraced the American revolutionary model as a template.

  The Northern Society, based in Saint Petersburg and led by guard officers including Nikita Muraviev, Prince S. P. Trubetskoy, and Prince Eugene Obolensky, took a different line. Its political goal was a British-style constitutional monarchy with a limited franchise. It envisioned that a republic might follow one day, but only according to the expressed will of the people. The Northern Society opposed calling for the execution of the imperial family and favored abolishing serfdom in a manner that preserved landlords' rights to the land, modeled on the Baltic provinces settlement.

  Nikita Muravyov's draft constitution was notably similar in structure to the United States Constitution. Pestel's followers would not agree to it; they refused to sanction a federation. They imagined Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine folded into a unitary Poland roughly matching the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, free from Russian interference.

  A third current entered the picture in 1823, when the Society of United Slavs was established in what is now Zviahel in Ukraine. Its unwritten program envisioned an equal federation of Slavic and Vlach peoples stretching across much of central and eastern Europe. In September 1825, this society merged into the Southern Society, adopting the Southern program while the Southern Society acknowledged the federalist aspiration in return.

• 4. The Morning at Senate Square

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  Emperor Alexander I died on the 1st of December 1825 by the new style calendar. The oath situation that followed was genuinely chaotic: parts of the military had already sworn allegiance to Konstantin, not knowing of his private renunciation two years earlier. When Konstantin made his refusal public and Nicholas stepped forward to claim the throne, the Northern Society moved.

  Prince Sergei Trubetskoy was elected as the rebels' interim ruler. On the morning of the revolt, officers led approximately 3,000 men into Senate Square, drawn from the Life-Guards Moscow Regiment, the Grenadier Life Guards Regiment, and the Naval Equipage of the Guard. They refused to swear allegiance to Nicholas I and proclaimed their loyalty to Konstantin instead. They expected the rest of Saint Petersburg's garrison to join them. Nobody came.

  The revolt was almost immediately leaderless. Trubetskoy abandoned the square entirely. His second-in-command, Colonel Bulatov, also vanished. The rebels hastily appointed Prince Eugene Obolensky in his place. For hours, roughly 3,000 rebels faced about 9,000 troops loyal to Nicholas outside the Senate building, while a large civilian crowd gathered and fraternized with the rebels without joining the fight.

  Nicholas sent Count Mikhail Miloradovich to negotiate. While Miloradovich was delivering a public address to the rebels, Pyotr Kakhovsky shot him in the back; Yevgeny Obolensky then stabbed him. A squad of rebelling grenadiers under Lieutenant Nikolay Panov broke into the Winter Palace but failed to hold it and pulled back. After a cavalry charge by the Chevalier Guard Regiment foundered on the icy cobblestones, Nicholas ordered three artillery pieces to open fire with grapeshot. The rebels broke and ran. Some tried to regroup on the frozen surface of the Neva, where artillery fire shattered the ice beneath them.

• 5. Revolt in Ukraine

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  While Saint Petersburg was quieted by artillery, the Southern Society's arm in Ukraine was only beginning to stir. The society drew its membership from army officers and landowners of Left-bank and Southern Ukraine, Sloboda Ukraine, and Volhynia. A joint operation with the Northern Society had originally been planned for 1826, but Alexander's sudden death pushed the timetable forward.

  The police struck first. The day before the Senate Square confrontation, acting on intelligence about treason, authorities arrested Pavel Pestel in Tulchin. It took the Southern Society two weeks to learn what had happened in the capital. During that interval, other leaders were arrested one by one.

  On the 10th of January 1826 by the new style, Sergey Muravyov-Apostol led the Chernigov Regiment in open revolt. Members of the United Slavs freed some of the arrested comrades by force; one of them, Muravyov-Apostol himself, assumed command of the uprising. He captured Vasilkov without difficulty. Within five days, however, government forces equipped with artillery and grapeshot crushed the rebellion. More than 3,000 people connected to the Ukrainian uprising were placed under arrest.

• 6. Trial and Punishment

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  The court tried participants from three organizations: 61 from the Northern Society, 37 from the Southern Society, and 23 from the United Slavs. The sentences handed down covered a vast range. Five men were condemned to death by quartering, though the punishment was commuted to hanging. Thirty-one were sentenced to beheading, also eventually commuted. Below these were sentences of cashiering, lifelong exile with hard labor, and descending terms of exile with labor ranging down to demotion to the ranks. The court had determined before any verdict was announced that hanging was the intended fate of the principal leaders.

  About 120 members of secret societies received punishment outside the formal trial process, including imprisonment in fortresses, demotion, and transfer to active military operations in the Caucasus. Special commissions handled the cases of enlisted soldiers: 178 were sentenced to run the gauntlet, 23 received other forms of corporal punishment. The remaining soldiers, numbering around four thousand, were formed into a combined guards regiment and dispatched to the Caucasian theater.

  The contrast between officers and lower-rank participants was stark. The "soldier-Decembrists," lacking noble standing, bore the full weight of punishment. Many received thousands of lashes. Those who survived that ordeal were marched to Siberia on foot, chained alongside common criminals.

• 7. Life in Siberian Exile

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  The first party of Decembrist convicts set out for Siberia bound for the mines at Nerchinsk. Among them were Prince Trubetskoy, Prince Obolensky, Peter and Andrei Borisov, Prince Volkonsky, and Artamon Muraviev. Nikolay Vasil'yevich Basargin left Saint Petersburg in poor health but wrote later in his memoirs of the journey with a cheerful tone, praising ordinary people encountered along the road and the commanding landscapes of the interior.

  Fifteen of 124 Decembrists convicted of state crimes were sent directly to isolated locales such as Berezov, Narym, Surgut, Pelym, Irkutsk, Yakutsk, and Vilyuysk, places populated mainly by Siberian peoples including Tunguses, Yakuts, Tatars, Ostyaks, Mongols, and Buryats. The largest group was sent to Chita in Zabaykalsky Krai. Three years later they were transferred to Petrovsky Zavod, near Nerchinsk, where Siberian Governor-General Lavinsky argued that concentrating prisoners was the easiest way to maintain surveillance and limit their contact with local populations.

  Petrovsky Zavod's rigid layout forced the Decembrists into smaller, separated groups. Casual congregation ended. Yet at Chita, before the transfer, the men had built a genuine community: teaching each other foreign languages, arts, and musical instruments, assembling libraries and running symposia. The commandant of Petrovsky Zavod, Stanislav Leparsky, largely failed to enforce the original labor sentences; criminal convicts carried out much of the actual work. Most Decembrists left Petrovsky Zavod between 1835 and 1837, settling near Irkutsk, Minusinsk, Kurgan, Tobolsk, and Yalutorovsk.

  Settlement brought its own indignities. Police watched, regulated, and recorded every movement. Dimitri Zavalishin was imprisoned for failing to remove his hat before a lieutenant. Authorities investigated Prince Shakhovskoi for heresy because of his interest in natural sciences. Correspondence was screened by officials in Siberia and by the Third Division of the political intelligence service in Saint Petersburg. Decembrist Bestuzhev described this mail as bearing a "lifeless... imprint of officiality." Most exiles lived off an allotment of 15 desyatins, roughly 16 hectares, of poor land with little equipment.

  The wives of many Decembrists gave up their social privileges to follow their husbands east. Gathering under the leadership of Princess Mariia Volkonskaia, they waged a campaign of petitions addressed to General Leparskii and Emperor Nicholas I. By 1832 they had secured formal cancellation of labor requirements and, among other concessions, the right for husbands to live with their wives in private quarters. Maria Volkonskaya, wife of Sergei Volkonsky, followed him to Irkutsk. There Sergei adopted peasant dress and wore an untrimmed beard as a rejection of Peter the Great's reforms; he farmed the land at his settlement in Urik alongside peasant neighbors. Maria established schools, a foundling hospital, and a theater for the local population.

• 8. Legacy and Cultural Memory

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  On the 26th of August 1856, Alexander II granted the Decembrists amnesty and restored their rights and privileges. Their children recovered even titles that the fathers themselves never regained. Yet many of the surviving exiles chose not to return. Some were too old or too poor. Others had built lives in Siberia and found European Russia's political climate more stifling than the relative openness of the east.

  The Decembrists' decades in exile had permanently changed Siberia. They founded schools for indigenous populations, the first opening at Nerchinsk. They introduced crops previously unknown in those regions, including vegetables, tobacco, rye, buckwheat, and barley, and brought hothouse cultivation methods with them. Trained physicians among them organized medical services. Their settlements became intellectual centers through which books, newspapers, and political writing from European Russia began circulating to populations that had previously had little access to them. Dimitry Zavalishin played a direct role in shaping Russian Far East policy from within Siberian administration.

  Back in European Russia, the revolt was a proscribed subject throughout Nicholas I's reign. Alexander Herzen defied that prohibition by placing the faces of executed Decembrists on the cover of his radical periodical Polar Star. Alexander Pushkin addressed poems to his friends among the Decembrists. Nikolai Nekrasov wrote a long poem about the Decembrist wives; his father had served alongside Decembrists in Ukraine. Leo Tolstoy began a novel about the liberal movement that eventually transformed into War and Peace.

  In the Soviet era, composer Yuri Shaporin set the revolt to music in an opera called Dekabristi, with a libretto by Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy, himself a descendant of Decembrist Nikolay Turgenev. The opera premiered at the Bolshoi Theatre on the 23rd of June 1953. Alexandre Dumas co-wrote a novel called The Fencing Master in 1840 with Augustin Grisier, a fencing master who had witnessed the revolt firsthand. Those who returned west after amnesty threw themselves into support for the Emancipation Reforms of 1861, the very abolition of serfdom their movement had demanded. Serfdom was officially abolished that year, and representative parliaments came to Russia and Finland in 1905, nearly a century after the men in Senate Square first raised the demand.