Abroad Alexander’s initial liberalism in France quickly faded as he and the Austrian chancellor Metternich became the prime movers behind the Holy Alliance. The Holy Alliance included Prussia and France as well as some lesser states in an agreement with Russia and Austria to fight the hydra of revolution wherever it appeared, such as the revolutions in Spain and southern Italy in 1822–23. French and Austrian troops suppressed these attempts at constitutional order, but for Russia the greatest challenge came when the Greeks rose in revolt against their Ottoman masters in 1821. Catherine and even Paul had encouraged Greek revolts against the Turks earlier on in expectation of Russian territorial gains in the Balkans, and now the occasion presented itself to satisfy Russian aims in the area. Alexander hesitated, even though many of the Greek leaders were politically quite conservative. Metternich finally convinced him that the Turks were the legitimate rulers of the Balkans, and that the Greeks deserved no more support than the Spanish rebels who fought against their king. The Greeks were left to fight on alone, in defiance of obvious Russian interests in weakening the Turks and supporting an Orthodox people.
The conservative turn in Alexander’s thinking came in the wake of the 1812 victory over Napoleon, but in other sectors of Russian society the same events had the opposite effect. Among the officers of the Russian army – young noblemen with European education – the great victory brought an enormous pride in their country and its people, and gave them tremendous confidence in themselves. As the army moved west in 1813–14, many of them saw Western Europe for the first time, and with an almost universal knowledge of French and German were able to observe and investigate unfamiliar phenomena in detail. They dined in Parisian cafes, read newspapers, attended lectures, and met their counterparts in French and German salons. They came prepared, for their education had familiarized them with the basis of European thought – Kant and Montesquieu, Goethe and Rousseau. They read the latest works of the French liberal leaders Germaine de Stael and Benjamin Constant, the conservatives Chateaubriand and de Maistre, and they learned about English experiments in popular education. Some followed the debates of the English parliament in the French press, and others looked at more exotic systems by studying the constitutions of the United States and the state of Pennsylvania.
After the heady years of victory and fuller acquaintance with Western European life and thought, the return home was a cold bath for many. They knew that serfdom had been a matter of debate and condemnation since the mid-eighteenth century and that Napoleon had abolished it in Poland and the Prussian reformers in their own land. Russia was now for the first time the only European country to have such an institution. Furthermore, their own tsar, as everyone knew, had insisted on a constitution for the French, and within his own empire for Poland and Finland. What about Russia?
From about 1816–17 groups of young officers began to form more or less secret literary and debating societies with the aim of continuing the intense dialogue and reading of the war years. The first was the Union of Salvation, with only some thirty members, utilizing rituals imitated from the Freemasons to keep their actions deeply secret. There were already serious political discussions at this stage, and soon there were even more. In 1818 they founded a larger secret society, the Union of Welfare, which even had a literary society associated with it, the Green Lamp. Reading poetry, writing theater reviews, and drinking parties were as much part of the movement among these young officers as politics, but by 1821–22 they began to move toward more concrete plans of action and to write constitutions for the future. By 1825 there were two centers of this activity. In St. Petersburg, where most of the guards regiments were stationed, several hundred officers formed the Northern Society, with the aim of overthrowing the monarchy and proclaiming a constitutional state. The majority, led by Nikita Murav’ev, a captain in the Guards General Staff, wanted a constitutional monarchy and a legislature elected on a property-based franchise. More radical was the poet and ex-guards officer Kondratii Ryleev, an official in the Russian-American company that administered Alaska, who moved toward republicanism. Farther south, a similar radicalism inspired Pavel Pestel’, colonel of the Viatka Infantry regiment, and other officers of the army stationed in the Ukraine close to the Ottoman frontier. Pestel’ compiled an elaborate constitution for a democratic republic along Jacobin lines. Tactically there were many disagreements as welclass="underline" should the army be the basis of a revolt? How much should they tell the troops? Was it enough to just remove the tsar, or did they need to kill him? And was that right? The disagreements were never resolved because they seemed too distant. The conspirators were still actively recruiting and expected Alexander to live a long time.
The new police forces and the various repressive policies failed to detect the presence of the conspiracy until it was much too late. In the summer of 1825 the all-powerful Arakcheev was immobilized by personal disaster: his longtime housekeeper and mistress, a monster of sadism, was murdered by his serfs. The general was plunged into despair, increased by the discovery that she had been embezzling large sums of money and had convinced him that her son by one of her lovers was Arakcheev’s. In the southern army an officer of English origin named Sherwood sent in a secret report naming many of the conspirators, but it was too late.
On November 19, 1825, the tsar suddenly died at the age of only forty-seven. Alexander had been on tour of the Crimea and died at Taganrog, far from the capital or any other large city and word did not reach St. Petersburg until December. The first consequence was confusion. By the succession law of 1797, the heir to the childless Alexander should have been his younger brother Konstantin, the tsar’s viceroy in Warsaw. Unknown to virtually everyone, Konstantin had abdicated the throne in 1822 by agreement with Alexander and left papers to that effect with the Council of State. Thus the heir would be the next brother Nicholas, but Alexander had never bothered to tell him about it. Thus the news came as a shock to Nicholas, who insisted on hearing formally from Konstantin himself. While couriers raced back and forth between St. Petersburg and Warsaw, Nicholas ordered the troops quartered in the city to swear the oath of allegiance to Konstantin and refused to take the throne. Finally a definitive answer came from Warsaw, and Nicholas ordered a new oath for December 14.
The conspirators knew most of this, as they included in their ranks officers with frequent duty in the Winter Palace. They decided to forestall Nicholas and bring out the troops in revolt in the morning before the administration of the oath. The rebels assembled on the Senate Square, only a block from the Winter Palace, and demanded that the throne go to Konstantin, a tactic designed to give time for a seizure of power. Nicholas refused to budge now that he knew that he was legally the tsar, and he called in loyal troops. For most of the short December day the two bodies of soldiers faced one another in the falling snow, and several attempts to resolve the issue failed. Finally, as sunset approached in the afternoon, Nicholas gave the order to fire, and the artillery dispersed the rebels. The first attempt at revolution in Russian history was over. Nicholas now had to decide what to do with the rebels, and how to rule the country.