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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.12: The Decemberists

So we get to start this week by doing a little roundup of errors. It’s never easy to quickly race through a thousand years of history, and I have stumbled in a few places over the last few episodes. Like last week, for example, as many of you pointed out, I said that Moscow was the capital of Russia, which of course it was not the capital of Russia. We know that the capital of Russia was St Petersburg. Second, I said that tsarevitch was the title for the heir to the throne, and this is also not true; the proper title for the air to the throne was tsesarevich.

And while we’re here, I also want to make clear that Peter the Great changed the official title of the ruler of the Russian Empire from tsar to a more modernized adaptation of the word emperor. So calling the rulers of the Russian empire tsars is technically an informal designation, but the usage is so widespread that I am just going to roll with it and often use tsar and emperor interchangeably. Meanwhile, a few people have told me that two episodes back, I fell too credulously for some of Empress Catherine’s own debunked propaganda. The historical consensus is that her son Paul, the future Tsar Paul the First, was indeed the son of her husband Peter the Third, not one of her lovers. She strongly implied in her memoirs that the father was one of her lovers, rather than her long since overthrown and dead husband, but that was just Katherine being Katherine. So I’m going to go back and rerecord those bits and then people will come along later and say, why are you starting the episode like this? You never made those mistakes. Well, yes I did.

And then finally pronunciation is always going to be a work in progress. It’s always a work in progress. So if you come around to correct my pronunciation, I am listening, it will get better. I usually go from, ugh, to, eh, over the course of a series.

And while we’re here not yet getting started, and because this is the first episode where actual specific dates are important, we do need to talk about the calendar problem. As a part of his modernization/westernization efforts, Peter the Great ditched Russia’s old calendar and decreed that starting January, the first 1700 Russia would adopt the Julian calendar. But of course by then, western Europe was switching over to the Gregorian calendar, creating a running date discrepancy for the next 200 years or so. Now the Russian calendar is going to change again over the course of this very series, because the Bolsheviks would adopt the recording calendar beginning in 1918. So this means that when we talk about Russian history between 1700 and 1918, there is a difference between the contemporaneous Russian date of an event and the date as it lands on the Gregorian calendar. Russian dates tend to arrive about 12 days earlier than their European counterparts. So in the history books, you will see dates marked as either OS or NS meaning old style and new style so that is clear what date is being referred to. This means that everyone working in the era gets to decide for themselves which dating system they would like to use. And I am going to follow along from the notion that I would like to mark the date as the actors themselves understood them. If Lenin is looking at a calendar, I want to talk about the calendar Lenin is looking at, not some retconned revised calendar. So I will be using the old style dates until the big switch comes in 1918 and thereafter use the new style. Now there are pros and cons both ways, but the big thing this gets us is that the February Revolution will still take place in February, rather than March, and the October revolution will take place in October, rather than November, and most importantly, we will be talking about the dates as the Russian participants themselves understood them. Now, either way, the Decemberists, who we’re going to talk about today, would still be the Decemberists, but this is the first episode we’ve come to where a play-by-play of events require specific dating, and I just want to let you know that from here on out, we are on the old style Julian calendar.

Okay, with all that said, let’s finally get to it.

Now, events from last week’s episode, coincided with events from the end of series three on the French Revolution. Well today’s episode would fit alongside events that we covered in series five, on Spanish American independence, series six on the July monarchy, and now that I look at it, some of the early episodes of series seven on 1848, because today’s events fit right in with the run of liberal revolutions that erupted around 1820. And if you listen to all that, talk about revolts and mutinies and revolutions in Spain and Portugal, Italy, and Greece, and said to yourself, you know, when that jerk Duncan gets to Russia, we better get a whole damn episode about the Decemberists, well, here we are: a whole damn episode about the Decemberists.

So, the origin of the Decemberist revolt of 1825 lies in the great patriotic war to expel Napoleon from Russia in 1812, and the subsequent campaigns that carried the Russian army all the way to the Champs-Élysées. Young officers from the cream of the Russian nobility, well-educated and fluent in French and often German, experienced the rest of Europe, some of them for the first time. They mingled and drank with fellow allied officers. They saw how other people lived. They literally dined in the cafes of Paris. And by the time they were dining in the cafes of Paris, they were pretty fired up with victorious pride. It was the Russians who had broken Napoleon where everyone else had failed. Considering themselves, the liberators of Europe, they expected to bring a sense of political liberation and economic progress with them back to Russia, I mean, how could they not?And when they returned home full of pride, new ideas, and grand expectations, they found that Russia was still just the same. And they were frankly ashamed by what they saw. As one future Decembrist put it, why did we free Europe to put chains on ourselves?

One of the biggest points of shame was the realization that Russia was really two Russias. There was one Russia that these young noble officers were a part of: wealthy and educated Russia. Based in St. Petersburg, facing Europe, speaking French to each other. The other Russia was the mass of common peasants: backwards. Illiterate, most of them serfs bound to the land, and considered little better than slaves. The officers who would form the core of the Decemberists were appalled by this division. The patriotic war of 1812 and the March to Paris would not have been possible without the sacrifice, suffering, and bravery of the common Russian peasant. They had all been brothers, sisters, and comrades in this great struggle, and here they were, being sent home to a life of enslavement, and here we are, being encouraged to go back to treating them like dogs rather than fellow Russians. They thought this cruel, inhumane, and not a little bit ungrateful. So the emancipation of the serfs became one of the two most important goals for our future Decemberists.

 But emancipation was not strictly a humanitarian project. Our young liberal officers saw the economic and material progress in the Rhineland and in France, and recognized that Russia would never be able to follow their lead if they still clung to the institution of serfdom. serfdom prevented the population from moving away from mere subsistence agriculture. The budding modern industry our young Russian officers had seen in the west was possible because new manufacturing businesses were able to draw in free peasants to be workers. But this simple ability to physically move from one place to another was legally impossible in Russia. And then beyond all that, there was the fact that the two Russias were divided between a wealthy aristocracy and a dirt poor peasantry, there practically was no middle-class to speak of. No one to be the productive engine of a new economy, nobody to be the consumer class for the products of such a new economy. So in the minds of our liberal officers, the emancipated serfs, free to move and to grow and to pursue their own lives, would become the core of a future Russian middle class. And thus, freed from ancient bondage, would help propel the Russian economy into the modern age.

Now, all of this was then married to a belief that political liberalism was the great motivating spirit of the times. Because they did not want to just liberate the serfs, they wanted to make everyone equal, and that meant abolishing not just serfdom, but aristocracy. To make the two Russias one Russia, free and equal in rights. So on the political front, this brings us to the other most important demand of the Decemberists: constitutional government. An end to the humiliation of absolutism, where life was governed by the whims of an emperor, not the rights of free people who deserve dignity and respect. And if you remember from our episodes on 1848, that was one of the big political questions: constitution. Do you have one or not? In Russia, they did not.

Now early on, there was no reason to doubt that a constitution would eventually arrive in Russia. Tsar Alexander’s liberal sympathies were well-known: he ruled the Finns as a constitutional monarch; he insisted that the defeated French get a constitution — or at least a charter of government — and after the Treaty of Vienna, he signed on to rule the new kingdom of Poland as a constitutional monarch, so surely Russia itself would be next. But what will wind up driving the Decembrists more than anything else as the years went by was a sense of dashed hopes, unfulfilled expectations, and bitter disappointment that it did not go that way.

It started to not go that way, right away. As we’ve previously discussed, in September of 1815 Tsar Alexander led the other great powers of Europe into signing the Holy Alliance, wherein they agreed to rule Europe on the basis of justice, love, and peace, with Chancellor Metternich, who would soon enough have Tsar Alexander’s ear, making sure that the opposite of justice, love, and peace was understood to be liberalism, secularism, and constitutions.

But still. Our young liberal officers came back to Russia in 1815 and 1816 full of hope and energy. Many of them joined Masonic lodges, where social equality and enlightened progress were the order of the day. But for a smaller group, Masonry was not enough, and in early 1816, six of these young comrades got together and founded something they dubbed the Union of Salvation, and later the Society of True and Faithful Sons of the Fatherland. Now, I am intentionally avoiding, overwhelming you with a bunch of random names that you’re just going to forget anyway, so let’s not worry about the random list of names you’re just going to forget anyway.

Now the concrete platform of these guys is a bit murky, but for sure we know that they want a constitutional government and the abolition of serfdom, that’s what they believe they were organizing to achieve. Now to keep their discussion secret and to give this all an air of romance and mystery, they borrowed oaths and rituals and practices from the Freemasons, from the German League of Virtue and from the Italian Carbonari. The Union of Salvation eventually grew to just over 30 members, with the most important recruit being a guy whose name I am going to give you, that is Pavel Pestel, who would prove to be one of the most radical and influential of the Decemberists.

After kind of floundering around and not achieving much, they decided in 1818 to fold the Union of Salvation, and rebrand themselves the Union of Welfare, or Union of Prosperity, depending on which translation you prefer. This new society was meant to be more out in the open, and it pretended to have no political agenda at all. It was just a club encouraging social improvement and four relatively innocuous spheres: philanthropy, education, justice, and economic progress. And plenty of the members who joined the Union of Welfare only ever heard about that outer program. But there was an inner political program that still aimed to force through some kind of constitutional government, emancipate the serfs, and Institute a bunch of political, economic, and social reforms. Among the inner members who did know the score, there were always arguments about whether a constitutional monarchy was good enough, or whether they were going to have to go the full republic. Were they’re going to be able to work with the Romanovs? Could they trust them, or would the Imperial family have to be, uh, liquidated?

But as conspiratorial and secretive as they were, there were still a general sense among these guys that they were the future, that the tsar was likely sympathetic to at least their more modest aims, and what they were really preparing themselves for was to be the future leaders of a reborn Russia.

But around 1820, they started becoming very disillusioned. It had now been five years since they had all defeated Napoleon together and things were not just stuck in the mud, they seem to be going backwards. The tsar’s personal liberalism was nowhere evident, a constitution, nowhere on the horizon. Then, when the liberal revolutions in Spain and Italy broke out, Tsar Alexander was firmly in Metternich’s camp saying we need to crush them, how can I help? The tsar was soon pledging a hundred thousand Russian troops to back up the Austrians in Italy, he offered to send 150,000 more tramping across Europe to suppress the Spanish liberals. And even when their Orthodox co-religionists in Greece rose up against their old enemy the Ottoman Empire, the tsar was persuaded by Metternich not to get involved. It was starting to feel like the tsar was maybe not their secret friend so much as a major obstacle in their way.

This conservative turn started to be felt at home as well, and a reactionary grip seemed to be tightening around Russia. Universities fell under conservative control, students and professors were watched, censorship of journals and books increased. In the army and this growing reactionary attitude turned its attention on the elite Semenovsky Regiment in 1820. Many of the leaders of the union Of Salvation and the successor Union of Welfare were in this regiment, and in addition to its reputation for bravery and valor, it was also known for embracing the alleged liberal spirit of the times. The government now viewed them with suspicion. So in 1820, the well liked commander was replaced with a hard nosed German who brought back draconian discipline and previously abolished corporal punishment. A company inside the regiment protested the new rules, and they were arrested as a group. So, then the whole regiment protested, which led to even more arrests. Soon enough, the suspect officers of the regiment were dispersed to other garrisons, with many of the key actors in the coming Decembrist revolt winding up down South in Ukraine.

After the Semenovsky Regiment incident, the inner circle leaders of the Union of Welfare got together for a conference in Moscow in 1821 and voted to disband. But this was purely for show. In the increasingly reactionary climate, they wanted to first, throw the government off their trail; and second, ditch all the members of the Union of Welfare they considered to be unreliable, either because they were suspected of being government spies, or because they were not actually committed to the real program. But those who were actually committed to the real program regrouped into two camps that were soon dubbed the Southern Society and the Northern Society. And you will sometimes see them called the Southern Society of the Decemberists, but remember: the December part hasn’t happened yet. They have no idea that in the future, we are going to call them all the Decemberists.

After this split, the two societies developed on parallel but still distinct tracks. The Southern Society was based in the Ukrainian garrison town of Tulchyn, and as I said, some of the Semenovsky officers wound up down there and they were joined by Pavel Pestel, now the leading light of the whole operation. The men in the South tended to be more radical; they were avowedly Republican, they were more open to the idea of regicide as a necessity. Meanwhile, the Northern Society was based in St. Petersburg, and those guys were of a standard liberal, noble variety. They were more into reform, and insisting that constitutional monarchism was a necessity that Russia wasn’t ready for a republic, that they could work with the tsar, they didn’t have to just put a bullet in his brain. Now, I don’t want to overstate this distinction between North and South, because every one of the Decemberists had their own version of the program. There were regicide inclined republicans in the North, and cautious reformers in the South. But in general, there was this split. Radical republicans in the Southern Society, moderate constitutional monarchists in the Northern Society.

So the Northern and Southern Societies stayed in touch and debated tactics and strategy, and were trying to iron out their differences, because they were starting to look at the summer of 1826 as a good time to make a move, do something. But then in the late fall of 1825, they were hit, along with the rest of Russia, with the shocking news that Tsar Alexander was dead.

Now Alexander was by no means an old man. He was still in his late forties. But his personality had gone a bit sour and peculiar of late. In the mid 1820s, he was more withdrawn, he was suspicious of things and people, he was turning inward towards his personal piety. He was maybe getting over the hassle of being tsar. In the fall of 1825, his wife, the Empress Elizabeth, got very sick and needed to take a trip down south for her health, and Alexander resolved to join her. But after spending some time together on the Sea of Azov, Alexander headed for a solo tour of the Crimea, and there became very sick with a sudden onset of typhus. After suffering for a number of days, Tsar Alexander the First succumbed on November the 19th, 1825. He was not yet 50 years old, and had been tsar for 24 years. The sudden death of the relatively young tsar gave birth to a persistent legend that he actually faked his own death and went off to become a pious hermit in Siberia named Feodor Kuzmich, attempting to atone for the death of his father, which, according to this legend, he was racked with guilt over.

Now, that’s of course crazy, but even crazier is what happened next for real. Alexander and Elizabeth had no legitimate children of their own, so by the law of succession, Alexander’s brother Konstantin was next in line. Konstantin, at that moment, was in Warsaw serving as viceroy of the kingdom of Poland. But unbeknownst to practically everyone, Konstantin had already renounced his right to succeed the throne. By 1823, there were letters signed by the tsar sealed in cathedral vaults attesting to this, but very few people knew about it, and it’s still an open question to this day who knew what when. Alexander’s sudden death left no time for a proper handling of this delicate pre-abdication by Konstantin, and the trouble really started when the next oldest brother, Nicholas, who was in St. Petersburg and now meant to be tsar, swore an oath to Emperor Konstantin and had other officers and state ministers do the same. So this created two weeks of confusion as Konstantin adamantly swore that he would not rule, and Nicholas saying everybody sworn an oath and I’m not going to take power unless I get assurances I won’t be stabbed in the back because somebody thinks I’m trying to usurp the throne. This two week interregnum is absolutely run through with factional maneuvering and hidden motives at court, but the upshot is that we have these two possible heirs, neither of whom seem to want to be tsar, and both of them are trying to swear an oath of allegiance to the other. In the midst of this confused interregnum, the members of the Northern Society, who were all high ranking officers of the guard and very well-informed about what was going on, decided, this is it. We may not be totally ready, but this is our chance, we have to take our shot. When word went round that Nicholas had finally decided to step up to the plate and he had resolved to get everyone to swear a new oath to him on December the 14th, our guys decided they needed to step up to the plate too.

One of the leaders, a poet, publisher, and former soldier named Kondraty Ryleyev, did not think they had much of a chance, but he was fired up by the idea of romantic martyrdom, that in their heroic deaths they would inspire future generations. He wrote, “An upheaval is essential. The tactics of revolution may be summed up in two words: to dare. If we come to grief, our failure will serve as a lesson to those who come after us.”

And so it would.

On December the 14th, 1825, the as of this moment rebel officers led 3000 men out into Senate Square in St. Petersburg. The stated reason was a refusal to swear the new oath to Nicholas, but the deeper aim was to use this moment of political confusion to force the state to accept constitutional government, legal equality, and in time, the abolition of serfdom, dreams they had dreamed for the last 10 years.

But this was an aborted revolt from the get-go. The officers had elected a stalwart and dependable comrade named Prince Troubetzkoy to be their leader. He had been around since the founding of the Union of Salvation all the way back in 1816. But Troubetzkoy straight up chickened out, he lost his nerve and didn’t show up. So the rebels out in Senate Square were a bit rudderless. Then the other army regiments that they expected to follow in their daring lead just never showed up. So as it turned out, the 3000 rebels in Senate Square were not the crest of a swelling wave so much as an isolated puddle, standing cold and alone and quickly freezing into ice. Soon enough, 9,000 loyal troops lined up against them, but neither side took any action. Then as the day progressed, civilians crammed in to get a look at what was going on as civilians so often do, and all that was going on so far was some chants of “Konstantin” and “constitution” from the rebel ranks.

Around noon, the new Emperor Nicholas, now ready to be emperor, personally came down to try to work things out peacefully. And he sent out the well like General Miloradovich out to address the rebels and convince them to lay down their arms. But in the midst of his speech, one of the more radical Decembrist officers shot him dead, which changed the mood quite a bit. The tsar ordered a cavalry charge to clear the square, but the horses slipped in the icy cobblestone and they had to retreat in disarray. Then around 4:00 PM with the last sunrise already disappearing, the tsar, frustrated, ordered artillery to fire grapeshot. Firing grapeshot into the packed square scattered the rebels, but it also killed a lot of soldiers and civilians pretty indiscriminately. Some of the soldiers and officers regrouped on the frozen Neva River, but further artillery bombarded the river, breaking the ice, killing a few men instantly, and drowning the rest. By nightfall, it was all over. Somewhere around 1200 people, civilians and soldiers, laid dead. The Decemberists of the Northern Society had taken their shot, and they had missed.

But wait, you say, there is still a Southern Society, right? And indeed there is, but it’s not going to go much better for them. Pavel Pestel had been arrested as a precautionary measure on December the 13th, and then it took almost two weeks for the men in the south to even learn about events in St. Petersburg. This news came in the midst of a flurry of arrest warrants, and so everyone realized their days as secret conspirators was over. It was now either insurrection or bust. On December the 29th, they were able to turn out about a thousand men, but they never got any bigger than that. And the next few days played out a lot like Hecker’s uprising played out in southern Germany in 1848 if you remember all that. The southern Decembrists were cut off from any other support, and with the authorities moving in fast, the southern rebels hesitated, then marched this way, and then that way, and after a few days had little to show for all this but increasing demoralization and a bunch of desertions. On January the third, 1826, they ran into a patrol loyal to the government who happened to have some artillery, and after a few artillery blasts, the rebel Decembrists were scattered, they were wounded, or they laid dead. In short order, 869 rebels surrendered, and a few scattered suicides added to the death toll. And that was the end — the real end, the final end — of the Decembrist revolt.

Once order was restored, tsar Nicholas convened an inquiry to get to the bottom of all this. Arrests and interrogations led to more arrests and more interrogations. Papers were seized and studied. They cast a wide net, bringing in intellectuals and sympathetic friends who themselves had nothing to do with the actual attempted military coup of December 1825, including the great Russian poet Pushkin, who had contact with, and whose work was enthusiastically read by, many of the conspirators.

But this was not necessarily kangaroo court justice and then just mass indiscriminate executions. Evidence and testimony were heard. Degrees of complicity were established. The common soldiers who were involved in all this were either sent off to fight in the Caucasus, or they were exiled to Siberia depending on the enthusiasm with which they had participated in the insurrection. Many of them were flogged, some of them flogged to death. Of the officers, 121 men were finally tried and convicted. Of those, 85 were sentenced to exile and hard labor in Siberia. 36 were sentenced to death. But the new emperor, wanting to start his reign with some clemency, commuted almost all the death sentences to hard labor and exile in Siberia and ordered the actual hanging of only five men, including the aforementioned Pavel Pestel, and Kondraty Ryleyev. And here even Ryleyev’s romantic death wish was on full display, and he begged to be the only man to die for the cause, a noble romantic martyr. But the tsar did not take him up on the offer.

When the five men were hanged on July the 13th, 1826, the first time they were dropped through the scaffold, three of the ropes broke, and Ryleyev allegedly barked, “Unhappy country, where they don’t even know how to hang you.”

He was properly hanged just a few minutes later.

Everyone else was then shipped off to Siberia and official discussion of the revolt of December 1825 ceased. The Decemberists soon turned into half forgotten legends. As I said at the beginning of the show, in terms of wider European history, the Russian Decemberists fit right into the mix of the liberal revolutionaries in Spain and Portugal, Italy, and Greece. They all represent a certain spirit of the times, and any discussion of this epoch must include the Decemberists. In terms of specifically Russian history, they act as a bridge between the two types of rebellion that Russian history is already well acquainted with: the palace coup on the one hand and the peasant revolt on the other. The Decemberists married the goals of a peasant revolt with the methods of a military palace coup. They absolutely wanted more than to just place their man on the throne, but they also never dreamed of inviting the people to join them. So it was somehow neither a palace coup nor a peasant revolt, but it was also both. And then finally, in terms of our purpose here of trying to explain the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and before that 1905, well, those guys knew all about what it happened with the Decemberists, despite official suppression of information, and those guys had their theory about why the Decembers had failed. About how maybe the Decembers had erred in trying to lead a people’s revolution without inviting the people to join them.

So we will pick up the story next time and finish our survey of Russian history with the imperial regime trying to figure out how to square the two Russias without inviting a revolution, especially given the great revolution of 1848, which swept right up to their doorstep and which the imperial regime helped decisively crush. But we will tell that story in two weeks, because even though I accidentally just took an unscheduled week off, my scheduled week off is still coming up, I’m flying back to France from the United States in a few days. So when we come back, we will catch up Russian history to the point where Marx and Engels and Bakunin and the rest of that first generation of hardcore social revolutionaries are running around, and we’ll get our first glimpse of what the tsars will try to do to forever and ever, at least for one more day, keep them at bay.