In August 1856, thirty years after their revolt, an imperial amnesty brought the Decembrists’ exile to an end.
The comparative comforts allowed to many Decembrists contrast so remarkably with what was suffered by political prisoners in Stalin’s Gulag that some of the luster of their fortitude has since worn off. One of the characters in Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle exclaims: “The wives of the Decembrists – do you think they performed some heroic feat?” And the actual conditions of their exile (with certain exceptions) were not very harsh. Even within the exile system itself, their treatment was notably indulgent, in obvious deference to their former pedigree and rank. Yet it cannot be denied that they had stood up to the autocracy on behalf of democratic ideals, were deprived of the splendor to which they had been born, and endured without recanting. And their own sacrifices were ennobled by those made voluntarily by wives and lovers on their behalf.
In time, the Decembrists were perceived as kinds of martyrs, as one of them, Dmitry Zavalishin, had foreseen this in advance. “I am certain that we shall perish,” he declared, “but the example will remain.”469 And Pushkin, looking beyond their bungled plot, paid tribute to a future he imagined would be theirs:
Deep in the Siberian mine,
Keep your patience proud;
The bitter toil shall not be lost,
The rebel thought unbowed…
The heavy-hanging chains will fall,
The walls will crumble at a word;
And Freedom greet you in the light,
And brothers give you back the sword.470
Indeed, to some degree by their example the coming revolutionary struggle in Russia was legitimized. In the same year that Nicholas I died, Alexander Herzen founded his revolutionary journal, Polar Star, which featured portraits of the five hanged Decembrists on the cover and claimed to inherit their cause. The standard code used by prisoners to communicate with one another through cell walls also became known as the “Decembrist alphabet” (although no Decembrist may ever have used it) in which the letters were mentally pictured as a square and indicated by tapping their coordinates.
The government did what it could to delay the new day. The deportation of dissidents to Siberia increased, and in 1833 the death penalty was decreed for any exile who committed a serious political crime. A “Statue on Punishments” in 1845 also made “corrective” exile more common for political offenses.
Literary societies and other gatherings where opinions might be freely exchanged were considered seditious, and in 1836, for example, one writer was declared insane by the authorities for challenging the official view “as set forth by the Minister of Education, to the effect that ‘Russia’s past is admirable, its present more than magnificient; as for its future, it is beyond anything that the boldest imagination can picture.’ ”471 But “thinking is like gunpowder, dangerous when pressed,” as the Decembrist Alexander Bestuzhev remarked,472 and, inevitably, secret political societies began to form. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, for example, belonged to the small Petrashevsky Circle which debated Utopian Socialist ideas. The group posed little immediate threat to the tsar, but on the night of April 23, 1849, several members were rounded up, imprisoned, and eventually tried for crimes against the state. Fifteen were condemned to death, including Dostoyevsky, who found himself one morning at the Semyonovsky Drill Grounds with a hood over his head, facing a firing squad. In a cruelly orchestrated denouement, his sentence (and that of the others) was commuted at the last moment, to penal servitude in exile. Some were sent to the mines of Nerchinsk, others to distant Siberian towns. Dostoyevsky spent four years at hard labor at the prison at Omsk, after which he also had to serve for a time as a private in the frontier guard at Semipalatinsk.
Nevertheless, the views of Utopian Socialists like Fourier and Saint-Simon found increasing numbers of disciples on Russian soil. Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War had revealed its glaring backwardness and did much to finally discredit the oppressive rule of Nicholas I. The accession of Alexander II in 1855 brought a general desire for change, and in response the tsar embarked upon a series of modernizing reforms. He granted an amnesty, allowed the press (in a limited way) to comment on controversial issues, and on February 19, 1861, freed some 23 million serfs. Subsequently, the emancipation was extended to about 8 million peasants settled on state and Crown lands. A number of judicial abuses were also eliminated, restrictions on foreign travel eased, and military rule in Poland relaxed. But even as progress was being made, the extremely circumscribed and conditional way in which the emancipation of the serfs was carried out embittered reformers throughout the empire, and popular discontent increasingly acquired a more revolutionary cast. After its leaders supported the Polish revolt in 1863, the tsar reacted harshly, imposing martial law, and empowering the police to break up any gathering in a private house where more than seven people were assembled. More than 18,500 Poles were also exiled to Siberia.
Some of these staunch Polish patriots refused to accept their fate. In June 1866, seven hundred staged an uprising in the Transbaikal where they hoped to liberate other political prisoners working in the mines and escape through China to the sea. Taking several lakeside villages and stations as far as Mysovaya, they seized carts, horses, arms, money, and food, and destroyed some bridges and the telegraph line. But the tsar’s troops caught up with them, defeated them in a pitched engagement, and hunted down those who scattered into the woods.
After an attempt on the life of Alexander II in 1866, there was a new wave of arrests and deportations, but in the early seventies a more radical generation of dissidents emerged. One of the more celebrated was Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who during his incarceration in the Fortress of Peter and Paul had written What Is to Be Done? (1863), a semi-socialistic novel that became the touchstone text of Russia’s restless youth. Exiled to Siberia, Chernyshevsky did time at the Usolye salt mines near Irkutsk, then at the silver mines of Nerchinsk. After his term at hard labor came to an end, he was transferred to Vilyuysk, a remote northern settlement of four hundred Yakuts and “Yakutized Cossacks” surrounded by swamps.
The attempt to suppress progressive ideas was useless. In the spring of 1874, thousands of young idealists left their revolutionary circles, study groups, jobs, schools, and homes to “Go-among-the-People,” as they called it, in a peaceful effort to educate the populace about issues of political and economic change. In the ensuing crackdown almost a thousand were arrested, and two mass trials were staged in the capital, which resulted for many in imprisonment and exile. Four years later, on January 23, 1878, Vera Zasulich shot and fatally wounded General Fyodor Trepov, the military governor of St. Petersburg, and an era of revolutionary terror began. The following August the main underground revolutionary group, Land and Liberty, split into two factions, with the majority reuniting in Narodnaya Volya, or the People’s Will, a terrorist organization inspired by the Fenian Irish revolutionaries and their use of dynamite tactics to win independence from Great Britain. Making no secret of their aims, the People’s Will issued a manifesto that condemned the tsar – “for all the blood he has spilled and for all the torment he has caused” – to death.473 All sorts of security precautions were taken to protect him – the timetables of his specially fortified train were repeatedly changed, and he drove around in several armorplated carriages (acquired from Napoleon III) so heavy they killed the horses that had to pull them. Nevertheless, after several failed attempts to shoot him, to derail his train, and even to blow up the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, the inexorable day of execution, March 31, 1881, finally arrived.