Revolt Sows Seeds for Russian Revolution

If the north’s ideas were innovative, the south’s were sweeping and extreme. Led by the radical idealists Colonel Pavel Pestel, Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Muraviev-Apostol, and Sub-Lieutenant Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin, the Southern Society presaged a Marxist scenario in which the monarchy was to be violently overthrown; land was to be taken from the nobility and redistributed among the peasants; the state was to become a revolutionary dictatorship that would transform society to its liking. Pestel, an “ardent Jacobin” as the historian Anatole Mazour describes him, laid out his beliefs in an 1821 document titled Russian Justice, which contained such dynamic lines as “welfare for all, not for a few but for the majority,” “land is common property of the human race and not of private persons,” and the dramatic “nothing remains but to destroy society prior to any action.”

It was the Southern Society that pressured its sister organization in the north to stage an armed confrontation, as many in the latter party did not want to take this route. Pestel specifically visited St. Petersburg in 1824 to (unsuccessfully) demand that both organizations rejoin as a single radical group, and by 1825 the southerners convinced their brethren to help assassinate Alexander I in the summer of 1826, capitalizing on the transition period to occupy the government and implement reform.

But chance had it that Alexander died abruptly of typhus on Dec. 1, 1825. Constantine, Alexander’s eldest son, had renounced the succession in 1823, preferring to remain as viceroy of Poland. Thus the throne fell to Nicholas, who was deeply unpopular in the military for his intense conservatism. After some confusion about Constantine’s status as emperor, Nicholas scheduled for the Imperial Army to take the oath of allegiance to him on Dec. 26. The Northern Society viewed this date as its deadline for action, as an oath of allegiance to Nicholas would have been contrary to its cause.

Taken aback by Alexander’s unexpected disappearance from the scene, the agitators had a small window for action. In the month following the tsar’s death the Northern Society hastily arranged to congregate at Senate Square on the 26th. Members began communicating with as many soldiers as they could, seeking to discredit Nicholas among the armed forces in the St. Petersburg area. The society hoped to bring with it soldiers from at least six regiments and two elite detachments.

On the 26th, the revolutionaries got barely half of the soldiers they had hoped for. Trubetskoi and most of the other leaders didn’t show up. After trying to negotiate with the rebel troops and witnessing Pyotr Kakhovsky murder two officers, Nicholas made short work of the Decembrists. The Southern Society’s efforts in other cities suffered similar fates. Pestel, Ryleyev, Kakhovsky, Bestuzhev-Ryumin, and Muraviev-Apostol were hanged in July 1826 and buried on Goloday Island in the Neva. The other leaders were banished to Siberia.

These events shaped much of Russia’s intellectual life in the 19th century. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that the Decembrist revolt was the single most important turning point in the history of the Russian Empire. Prior to 1825, meaningful critique of government and policy had been kept to a minimum, due either to the former’s extensive censorship program or simply belief in leadership. The tsar had traditionally enjoyed semi-divine status and was regarded as the “father” of the Russian people: a God-given, incontestable, ruler. The Decembrists openly called into question not only disagreeable attributes of Russian society but also the state that governed it. Their objections to the condition of Russia and its regime became the centerpiece of a new generation of reformers.

By the mid 19th century, reform advocates had separated into the two general camps. One followed the precedent of the Northern Society; the other of the Southern Society.

The first camp consisted of intellectuals and government figures who acknowledged the necessity for improvement, but sought to adjust the existing system to achieve it. Alexander II, for example, was open to ideas that his father Nicholas I had been (understandably) alienated from. It was Alexander who realized the Decembrist dream of the serfs’ emancipation four decades after the rebels had first petitioned the cause. Alexander loosened disciplinary policy in the military, expanded the scope of local government, and improved a badly managed law system.

Another notable descendant of the Northern Society was Pyotr Stolypin, a steadfast monarchist who recognized the need for change at the turn of the 20th century. Stolypin undertook an aggressive but peaceful reform campaign as Nicholas II’s prime minister. He worked tirelessly with the newly established Duma to draft legislation acceptable to both the tsar and elected representatives. Stolypin enthusiastically launched programs to improve the distribution and use of agricultural land. He advised the tsar, with mixed success, to consolidate strip-system plots into larger farms, import European methods of land improvement and irrigation, and introduce a more effective credit system for peasants. These and others, including Nicholas’ finance minister Sergei Witte, occupied a stream flowing from the Northern Society.

The other camp, that which found intellectual ancestry in the Southern Society, despised the “gradual reformists.” By the mid-19th century truly radical factions were emerging within the Russian Empire. One of these was the belligerent Norodnaya Volya (The People’s Will), which pressed for the formation of a representative legislature, universal suffrage, and complete redistribution of wealth among the peasantry (Lenin’s older brother, Dmitri Ulyanov, was a member).

Narodnaya Volya took inspiration from Pestel’s Russian Justice, with the oft-quoted motto “Nothing remains but to destroy society prior to any action.” The group turned to terrorism, targeting government facilities, conservative bureaucrats and army officers, wealthy men, and the Emperor. In 1881, Narodnaya Volya successfully assassinated Alexander II. In 1911, after more than a dozen attempts on his life, Stolypin too was assassinated by radicals.

That the Southern Society was the spiritual precursor to the Bolsheviks, there is little doubt. Lenin is famous for armed revolution and regicide, of which the south was the more enthusiastic advocate. However, the Bolsheviks appreciated the Northern Society and tended to view the Decembrist movement as a whole. Bolsheviks openly venerated the Decembrists as their forefathers. In 1925 they renamed Senate Square “Decembrist Square” for the centennial of the revolt; it retained this name until 2008. Goloday Island was renamed “Decembrists’ Island” in 1926; it still bears this name.

In 1826, after the trials and executions of Decembrist leaders, Nicholas I invited Alexander Pushkin to the Winter Palace to converse. The discourse between the two reportedly continued for almost three hours, an unusually long audience. Solomon Volkov describes the scene: “The emperor’s question to the poet was, ‘Pushkin, would you have taken part in the rebellion on December [26th], if you had been in Petersburg?’ Pushkin replied honestly and boldly that without any doubt he would have been in Senate Square with the revolutionaries. ‘All my friends were there.’ ” Nicholas forgave Pushkin for his honesty. It was unprecedented, indeed unthinkable, for a citizen to express opposition in the presence of the tsar.

The Decembrist revolt was the first crack in the tsar’s authority, and its descendant revolution of 1917 completed what began in 1825. These shivering idealists, silenced in their time, made an indelible mark in Russian history.