What Was the Decembrist Revolt of 1825?
On the morning of 14 December 1825 (26 December by the new-style calendar), about 3,000 soldiers of the Moscow and Grenadier regiments, led by about 30 officer-conspirators, marched into the Senate Square in St Petersburg, in the snow and the early twilight of the northern winter. The troops, who had been told that Tsar Alexander I had died and that they were about to swear loyalty to the rightful heir, refused to swear loyalty to Nicholas I and demanded a constitution. The revolt was suppressed the same afternoon, by artillery fire from the Peter and Paul Fortress and by the loyalist cavalry and infantry; the next day, 5 of the conspirators were sentenced to death, and 31 were sentenced to hard labour in Siberia. The Decembrist revolt was the first open military revolt in Russian history and the first serious political crisis of the imperial system (see Riasanovsky, The Russian Revolution, 1990; Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime, 1974).
The setting
The Decembrist revolt was the result of a quarter-century of political formation. The core of the conspiracy was the Imperial Russian Army, particularly the officers who had served in the Napoleonic Wars of 1805-1814. The officers had been exposed to the French Revolution, the Napoleonic reforms, and the various European liberal movements, and they had developed a political consciousness that the imperial regime had not anticipated.
The first Decembrist secret society, the Union of Salvation, was founded in 1816 by a group of young officers of the Guards Corps. The Union was reorganised in 1818 as the Union of Welfare, and was then broken into two more focused societies in 1821: the Northern Society, led by Prince Sergei Trubetskoy and the poet Kondraty Ryleyev, and the Southern Society, led by Pavel Pestel. The two societies had somewhat different programs: the Northern Society favoured a constitutional monarchy and the abolition of serfdom, while the Southern Society favoured a republic and the redistribution of land. Both agreed, however, on the abolition of serfdom and the establishment of a representative assembly (Riasanovsky, 1990).
The succession crisis
The opportunity for the revolt came on 19 November 1825, when Tsar Alexander I died of typhus in Taganrog. The succession was complicated: the legal heir, Alexander’s brother Constantine, had secretly renounced his claim to the throne in 1823, in favour of his younger brother Nicholas. The renunciation was kept secret, and the resulting confusion produced a brief interregnum. The Decembrists, who had been planning a revolt for some years, decided to act during the interregnum. They planned to bring their military units into the Senate Square, prevent Nicholas from taking the throne, and force the implementation of a constitutional order.
The plan was poorly prepared. Trubetskoy, who had been chosen to lead the revolt, did not appear on the morning of 14 December. The other conspirators — Ryleyev, the diplomat Prince Sergei Volkonsky, the officers of the Moscow and Grenadier regiments — tried to lead the revolt without him. The revolt, in any case, did not spread: the other military units of the Petersburg garrison, the sailors of the Baltic Fleet, the Cossacks, and the civilian population of the capital did not join the revolt (Pipes, 1974).
The revolt and the suppression
The troops of the Moscow Regiment, the first to arrive at the Senate Square, were already in mutiny. The officers of the Grenadier Regiment, led by Prince Andrei Belyaev and Sergei Muravyov-Apostol, brought the next wave. By 3 pm, the square contained about 3,000 soldiers, 30 officer-conspirators, and a handful of sympathisers. The tsar, who had taken personal command of the loyalist forces, opened negotiations with the rebels, but the negotiations quickly broke down. The tsar then ordered his artillery to fire on the rebels. By 5 pm, the square was empty, the rebels had surrendered, and the revolt was over.
The next day, 15 December, the leaders of the revolt were arrested. The investigation, led by the military governor of St Petersburg, General Mikhail Miloradovich, and the Senate, took about six months. The trial was held in the Senate in 1826, and 31 of the conspirators were sentenced to exile in Siberia. Five of the most prominent — Pavel Pestel, Kondraty Ryleyev, Sergei Muravyov-Apostol, Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin, and Pyotr Kakhovsky — were executed. The wives of several of the Decembrists — Maria Volkonsky, Ekaterina Trubetskaya, and others — followed their husbands into exile, and their stories became the central chapter of the Decembrist legend in Russian literature and culture (Riasanovsky, 1990).
The aftermath
The Decembrist revolt was the first open military revolt in Russian history, and it was a turning point in the development of the Russian autocratic system. Nicholas I, who had personally directed the suppression of the revolt, was deeply affected by the experience, and his reign was marked by an emphasis on order, discipline, and the suppression of dissent. The revolt contributed to the development of the official ideology of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality,” which Nicholas used to justify his conservative policies, and to the establishment of the Third Section of His Majesty’s Own Chancellery, the political police of the Russian Empire, in 1826.
The revolt was also the founding event of the Russian revolutionary tradition. The Decembrists became the first martyrs of the Russian opposition, and their example was invoked by every subsequent generation of Russian revolutionaries. Herzen and Ogarev, the founders of the Russian socialist movement, were directly inspired by the Decembrist example, and the socialist revolutionaries of the early twentieth century — including Lenin and the Bolsheviks — claimed the Decembrists as their intellectual ancestors. The 14 December date was commemorated in the Soviet Union as a national holiday, and it remains the symbolic beginning of the Russian revolutionary movement (Pipes, 1974).