The first organization to lay a basis for the Decembrist revolt was founded in St. Petersburg in February 1816 by nobles who were all officers of the Guard. Two branches of the organization evolved and underwent somewhat independent development. The northern branch, based in St. Petersburg, on the whole favored a constitutional monarchy; the southern and more radical wing, based in Tulchin in the Ukraine, wanted a republic. The former was led by Nikita Muravyov, a young officer who had been among the first to enter Paris after Napoleon’s defeat; the latter, by Pavel Pestel, a regimental colonel and a veteran of Borodino and the European campaigns.
Muravyov drafted a constitution which envisioned a bicameral National Assembly, regionally elected legislatures, trial by jury, emancipation of the serfs, and a reorganization of the country into a federation of thirteen regions – in emulation of the original pattern of the United States. Pestel’s credo, on the other hand, provided for the overthrow of the tsar – by regicide, if necessary – abolition of the monarchy, its replacement by a republican form of government, and (to ensure an orderly transition while the republic was being formed) the introduction of a “temporary dictatorship.” Pushkin was one of Pestel’s early admirers but later wrote that he had “Napoleon’s profile but Satan’s soul.”456 Nevertheless, nearly all the conspirators, north and south, were rather naive young idealists, most of them in their mid-twenties (Pestel in 1825 was just thirty-three), and profoundly ambivalent in their aims. The age-old aristocracy to which they belonged had bred in them a certain hereditary, if reluctant, loyalty to the monarchy, which half-paralyzed their will to challenge it and see their sedition through.
Yet they were reckless at the game they played. Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish poet and a kindred revolutionary spirit, attended a meeting at one of the conspirator’s apartments in St. Petersburg in October 1825:
An old servant opened the door. “They are all in there,” he whispered, pointing to a room at the end of a very long passage.
There must have been more than a dozen people in the room, but at first I could not distinguish anything because of the dense blue haze of pipe and cigar smoke. They were sprawling on sofas and on the deep windowsills; [two] sat cross-legged, Turkish-fashion, on a Persian carpet on the floor. The officers had undone their tunic buttons and stiff collars, the civilians wore voluminous cravats a la Byron; some were dressed like Directoire dandies. Through the wide-open windows swirled great white puffs of St. Petersburg fog.
An intense youth, pale-complexioned, with a prominent forehead, a face like Shelley, lifts a glass – “Death to the tsar.” The toast is received with emotion... Everyone drinks except me, a Pole and a guest... They sing... “One, two knives, One, two, three, Long and sharp...”
The rhythmic chant flows through the open windows for all to hear. A glow of a lantern out on the quay suddenly lights up the room. The chant stops abruptly, as fear sobers them up.... I can almost hear the sinister cry of a raven, a raven circling the gallows.457
Rather more scathingly, Pushkin remarked:
‘Twas all mere idle chatter
‘Twixt Chateau Lafite and Veuve Cliquot.458
The die, however, was cast. On November 19, 1825, Alexander I died unexpectedly at Taganrog in southern Russia, and in the confused interregnum that followed – in which Alexander’s two younger brothers, Nicholas and Konstantin, swore allegiance to each other but neither assumed the throne – the conspirators had their chance. But the moment had come before they were prepared to take advantage of it, and the uncertainty about the succession itself proved both a temptation to and a ruin of their plans. In the first place, the conspirators were not immediately sure how to frame their rallying cry, or against whom to frame it; and secondly, they had only the vaguest notions as to whom they could count on outside their own circle for support. Nor had they settled on the degree of violence they were prepared to use. As a result, although Alexander’s death had long been imagined as a pretext for action, their hastily improvised plot was crippled at once by misgiving and doubt.
On December 14, the conspirators mustered their adherents (about two thousand strong) in St. Petersburg’s Senate Square, hoping to prevent the accession of Nicholas I, in whose favor it had been learned that the elder, Konstantin, had abdicated in advance. But the tsar had already been sworn in secretly, and the poorly organized rebels were easily dispersed by loyal troops. A subsequent insurrection in the south was also crushed. Trials for high treason followed in which 121 were charged, 31 imprisoned, and five (including Pestel) hanged. The rest were sent in chains to Siberia – some to distant towns like Turukhansk, Berezov, Pelym, and Narym, but most in penal servitude to the silver mines of the Transbaikal in the district of Nerchinsk.
History might not have accorded the Decembrists any particular glory except for the luster that, in the aftermath of their debacle, attached to their name. Although they had faltered in Senate Square, they would prove steadfast in exile, and it was there that their legend was really made. Most demonstrated a determination to make the best of their situation, showed conviction in defeat, and scorned the idea, as one put it, of exchanging their fate “for a gilded yoke.”459 But neither their fate, nor history’s recollection of it, would have been quite the same had not eleven Decembrists also been followed into exile by their wives and fiancées. This act of brave devotion did more than anything else to romanticize their cause, and although tsarist officials tried in every way to dissuade the women from their purpose – by depriving them of all their titles, privileges, and civil rights, by making their banishment permanent, and obliging them to leave their children behind – they would not be deterred. Six of the women abandoned a total of thirteen children to the care of relations, and seven would eventually lose eleven or more children in exile. Even Nicholas I was moved, and confessed, “Their devotion is worthy of respect.”460
One of the women was Katerina Trubetskaya, the daughter of a count. Raised in stupendous splendor, she had lived with her husband, Sergey Trubetskoy, in a house in St. Petersburg furnished with marble floors that had come from the emperor Nero’s Forum in Rome. In Chita, she cheerfully rented a room in the dilapidated shack of a local Cossack with fishskin windowpanes and dirty mud floors. More remarkable was Maria Volkonskaya, a descendant of Mikhail Lomonosov and the daughter of a hero of the Napoleonic Wars. A beautiful young woman with a smooth, olive complexion, dainty figure, and lustrous curly black hair, she had many suitors (including Pushkin), but at the age of eighteen had married Prince Sergey Volkonsky, an officer who could trace his bloodline back to Rurik but was twice her age. In their first year of marriage, they were seldom together, and Maria knew nothing of the conspiracy in which he was involved. But a few days after she gave birth to their first child, Sergey was arrested and subsequently remanded to Siberia. Without hesitation, Maria packed up all her belongings in a sledge and followed after him, leaving her newborn child behind. The morning after she reached the silver mines of Nerchinsk in Eastern Siberia, 4,000 miles from home, she set off for the shaft where her husband was toiling, escorted by the prison commander and two guards. “I stepped down into total darkness,” she recalled.