by Frazier
A block away is another Decembrist house-museum. It was the house of Sergei Volkonsky, whose importance to the Decembrist movement and nobility of birth almost equaled Trubetskoy’s. The Volkonsky family descended from a prince, later a saint of the Orthodox church, who fought the Mongols in the fourteenth century; Sergei Volkonsky’s mother, Alexandra Repnina, also happened to be the tsar’s mother’s highest-ranking lady-in-waiting and closest friend. Like Ekaterina Trubetskaya, Maria, the young wife of Sergei Volkonsky, voluntarily shared his exile. Nikolai Nekrasov’s poem “Russian Women,” in praise of the Decembrist wives, compared Maria Volkonsky to a saint. Pushkin rhapsodized that her hair was more lustrous than daylight and darker than night. Tolstoy, whose mother was a Volkonsky and who came from the generation that followed the Decembrists, thought so highly of Sergei Volkonsky that he is said to have based the character of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky in War and Peace on him and to have used the letters and journals Volkonsky wrote during the Napoleonic Wars to help create the character.
The Volkonsky house-museum is large and imposing, in a Russian château style, though it’s not a work of art like the Trubetskoys’. Its displays consist mainly of portraits and photographs of the Volkonsky family and the families of other Decembrists. The elderly lady guide who took us through gave us the biographical details of everybody. Zinaida Trubetskoy, born to Sergei and Ekaterina in Siberia in 1837, survived to 1924, long enough to receive a government pension granted by Lenin himself in honor of her revolutionary father. Among the ancillary characters, the museum also had the only picture I’ve ever come across of Georges-Charles d’Anthès, the French army officer and ballroom roué who killed Pushkin in a duel. Had there been matinee idols in d’Anthès’s day, he could have been one, with his wavy blond hair.
For a while Tolstoy planned to write a book about the Decembrists, but he set the idea aside because all official papers relating to them were in secret archives and thus unavailable for his research. After the Revolution of 1905, when documents withheld under the tsars became accessible, Tolstoy was seventy-seven years old and no longer able to take on such a big project. Why the Decembrists interested him is easy to grasp. Though their revolution fell apart and though their punishment was a humiliation and a waste, the Decembrists were inspiring nonetheless. Of the hundred and some Decembrists judged most culpable by the Committee of Inquiry that followed the suppression of the uprising, only three were over forty years old. Almost all the Decembrists were of the same youthful generation in 1825; and if I had to pick one generation as the greatest in Russian history, theirs would be it. Alexander Herzen hailed them as “a perfect galaxy of brilliant talent, independent character, and chivalrous valor—a combination new to Russia.” Of those Decembrists declared the most dangerous—in other words, the most prominent among them—the greater number would live out their lives imprisoned or exiled in Siberia.
They began their young manhood by beating Napoleon. Most of them were or had been officers in the army of Tsar Alexander I, who could claim to be the liberator of Europe for outlasting the French emperor’s invasion of Russia; following up the French retreat with his army of 110,000; fighting Napoleon at Vitebsk, Vilnius, Lutzen, Dresden, Kulm, and Leipzig; contributing to the French defeat at Waterloo; and winning for Russia the top position among the allied nations that finally brought down the Napoleonic Empire. Throughout the war, Alexander’s officer corps performed outstandingly, its members vying with one another in acts of bravery. The young lieutenants and captains and adjutants were proud of their country and loved their emperor. When they led their troops in the grand victory march down the Champs-Élyseés, no Russian officers in history had ever enjoyed such glory.
Being in France during the four-month occupation dazzled them, too. When it came to ideas, the countries they had liberated were far more up-to-date than their own; now the Enlightenment, which previously had been allowed to penetrate Russia in only the tiniest doses, belatedly hit them head-on. They had been educated well, if narrowly, in Russian military academies. They knew classical authors, and like most of the Russian gentility spoke fluent French. Their travels in the war opened them to writers like Adam Smith, Condorcet, Benjamin Franklin, Montesquieu, Walter Scott. In France, their emperor magnanimously dissuaded the other allied powers from punishing the conquered country with harsh conditions, and he let the French choose the type of new government they preferred. Away from home, Tsar Alexander acted like a liberal monarch. He even talked about ending serfdom in his own country, a passionate cause among many of his young officers.
Then the occupation ended, the officers went back to Russia with the army, and the door of their oppressive country slammed shut behind them. For young men who had just been in the sunlight for the first time, the experience was especially painful; having brought freedom to Europe, they could enjoy little of it themselves. Their emperor, once again in his own country, reverted to despotic type, shutting down their informal discussion groups, saying what they could and could not read, and making them report to martinet superiors. The officers found their situation degrading, intolerable.
Among the principal Decembrists, there are a lot of guys to like—for example, Sergei Muraviev-Apostol, who led the December uprising in the south and took full responsibility for its failure, and who remarked, when the wet rope attempting to hang him slipped off his neck and dropped him on the ground, “Poor Russia. We don’t even know how to hang people properly”; or Mikhail Lunin, who betrayed none of his comrades during his interrogation and who vowed in old age that as long as he had even one tooth left in his mouth it would be directed against the tsar; or Nikolai Bestuzhev, a sweet and companionable fellow who refused to allow the boy cadets from the Naval Academy to follow him when he led his men to the Senate Square on the day of the rebellion, thus saving the cadets’ lives, and who made clocks and taught agriculture and painted portraits and generally ameliorated life for everybody with him in Siberian exile.
The Decembrist I especially like, though, is Ivan Dmitrievich Yakushkin, a guards officer of wide acquaintance and popularity, whose memoir gives a vivid picture of the movement and the later sufferings that he and his comrades endured. Near the beginning of his book, Yakushkin tells of the moment during a parade in St. Petersburg when he and another officer fell out of love with their tsar:
[We] were standing not far from the golden carriage in which sat Empress Maria Federovna with the Grand Duchess Anna Pavlovna. Finally the emperor appeared, leading the guard division, on a glorious chestnut horse, with unsheathed saber, which he was ready to lower before the empress. We joyed at the sight of him, but in that very minute almost right in front of his horse, a peasant went running across the street. The emperor put spurs to his horse and sprang after the running peasant with unsheathed saber. The police corralled the peasant among their nightsticks. We could not believe our own eyes and turned away, ashamed for our beloved tsar. This was my first disillusionment with him; involuntarily I was reminded of the cat magically transformed into a beautiful woman, who, however, could not see a mouse without pouncing on it.
Progressive reforms that Alexander had been considering before Napoleon’s invasion stayed on the shelf after the war had been won; instead the tsar now busied himself with drilling his army, and with a road-building program that exacted onerous sacrifices from peasants and landowners alike, and (most unpopular of all) with a plan to militarize whole regions of the country under a system of military settlements whereby every male citizen would be a soldier and wear a uniform while the women grew provisions to supply the army. Peasants who hated and resisted the plan were attacked by troops, and many were killed. Officers in the tsar’s retinue reported his oft-stated contempt for his subjects. Alexander also spent a lot of time abroad or away from the capital and left the country in the charge of his cruel deputy, Count Aleksei Arakcheev. Russian tyranny has produced many creepy henchmen, from Ivan the Terrible’s feared toady Maliuta-Skuratov to Stalin’s NKVD chief Yezhov, bu
t of them all the dread Count Arakcheev possessed the most poetically sinister name.
An Arakcheev story, in passing: Herzen tells of the time the president of the Academy of the Arts proposed that Count Arakcheev be made an honorary member of the academy. When Alexander Labzin, the academy’s secretary, inquired what Count Arakcheev had contributed to the arts, the president didn’t know what to say. Finally he offered that Arakcheev was the man closest to the tsar. Labzin replied that, by similar reasoning, the tsar’s coachman, Ilya Baikov, should also be a member. “He is not only close to the Tsar, but sits in front of him,” Labzin noted. Evidently this mot later got back to Arakcheev; he ordered that Labzin be exiled to the city of Simbirsk in southern Russia.
Like many of the Founding Fathers in America, many of the Decembrists were Masons. Officers saw one another at Masons’ meetings, at meals in the officers’ quarters while on duty, at social events in the capital and in Moscow, and during long visits to friends’ estates in the country. Among themselves they talked endlessly about what was wrong with Russia and how it could be reformed—about the evil of serfdom, the wretchedness of the peasants’ condition, the unfairness of the common soldiers’ twenty-five-year service terms, the corruption of public officials, the disrespect for the individual, the ignorance and reactionary attitudes of the old guard. One day a small group of intimates during such a conversation resolved to form a secret society whose goal would be to work with all its strength for the good of Russia. Specifically, the secret society would strive for the emancipation of the serfs and the introduction of constitutional monarchy.
From this beginning, the secret society grew and spread and evolved over the course of nearly a decade. Hundreds of young men—many more than were involved in leading the events of December 1825, or than went to prison afterward—would belong to the organization over that time. For some years in the beginning, the society was called the Union of Salvation. Then that organization was dissolved, a new constitution replaced the previous one, and the name became the Union of Welfare. Officers transferred to serve in the south of Russia started a branch of the secret society there. Its members had less patrician origins than their friends in St. Petersburg, and the two groups’ political philosophies differed in ways that were never reconciled. Both agreed on the need for overthrowing the tsar at the first opportunity. The two branches were known as the Northern Society and the Southern Society.
Pavel Pestel, an officer who had been seriously wounded at the Battle of Borodino, became the moving spirit of the Southern Society. Of all the Decembrists, he was among the very few who could qualify as a political thinker. Pushkin called him “one of the most original minds I know.” Many of the members of the Union of Salvation could not stand him and dissolved the organization partly so that Pestel would think the movement was over and go away. He just kept on working with his comrades in the south, however. In testimony after his arrest, Pestel said that he had been very influenced by antimonarchical theories of government put forth by Destutt de Tracy in his book Commentaire sur L’Esprit des Lois de Montesquieu. Scholars believe this book to have been partly or largely written by Destutt de Tracy’s collaborator, Thomas Jefferson, who also saw to its publication. With such politics, Pestel could be described as well to the left of most Decembrists. Herzen summed him up as “the socialist before socialism.” He wanted no kings and a republican form of government. Yakushkin said of Pestel, “Of all of us he alone in the course of ten years, not weakening for a minute, labored diligently in the business of the Secret Society.”
The Northern Society, in keeping with its aristocratic membership, met less often and did less in general than its southern counterpart. The Petersburg members at the society’s core were Yevgenii Obolensky, Trubetskoy, Nikita Muraviev, Nicholas Turgenev, Mikhail Lunin, and the poet Konrad Ryleev. The new Russian constitution that Nikita Muraviev drafted for the Northern Society had been modeled directly on the U.S. Constitution. It called for a federation of thirteen states and two provinces. Pestel did not like that constitution, saying it favored wealth.
The maneuverings and debates and membership changes of the Union of Welfare in its northern and southern branches are more complex than I’m going into here, of course. Essentially, the movement drew the most talented and energetic young men in Russia, men eager for change without knowing exactly what it would be or how to bring it about. Their moment of political activity would be brief. But they would prove to be mythopoeic out of all proportion to their political success. Their lives and times would provide a source of poems and short stories and novels, flowing into the great nineteenth-century surge of Russian literature that began with Pushkin. In that richness they resemble the American cowboy, whose actual existence on the plains of the West was small compared to the myths he spawned.
The officers were dashing, in other words. So well did the adjective apply to them that these dashing young officers might be said to have epitomized the phrase. Officers would continue to be dashing for a while after the Decembrists’ generation, until perhaps the arrival of motorized warfare; I don’t believe young officers are ever described as dashing today. Like few young officers before or after, those of the Decembrists’ generation dashed. They drank champagne, went to balls, broke hearts and had theirs broken, gambled away their estates on the draw of a card. Though dueling was illegal, they dueled. Some of their personal dramas were great romantic tragedy but enacted in real life—for example (and most famously), the Novosiltsov-Chernov duel.
Alexei Novosiltsov and Konstantin Chernov were brother officers and friends. Novosiltsov came from a high-ranking and wealthy family, while Chernov’s family, though noble, was poor. Chernov had a beautiful sister, whom he introduced to Novosiltsov. The two fell in love. Novosiltsov told the sister he would marry her, and then went away with her, and they lived as man and wife. Soon after, he informed his mother of his decision to marry Mlle. Chernova. The mother, appalled at the match, said no. Thus brought to heel, Novosiltsov suddenly became unavailable to his one-time intended. To numerous pleas from both Chernov and the young woman, he made no reply. Chernov, having no other choice, then challenged Novosiltsov to a duel. Novosiltsov accepted and the duel occurred. Each man fired to kill; each mortally wounded the other. Afterward, from their deathbeds, each man sent a message forgiving the other and declaring friendship. The young woman entered a convent.
Her desolation, and that of Chernov’s mother, can be imagined. The mother of Novosiltsov mourned her only son by building two churches, one on the site of the duel and another on her estate. She had pictures of the young man all over her house, and drawings done by him, and a full-length portrait of him in her parlor. Nine years after his death she was still deep in mourning, with “her affections . . . fixed on another world,” said James Buchanan, the U.S. ambassador; during his time in St. Petersburg, the future American president met and became a friend of the bereaved Mme. Novosiltsov. Whether by then she had decided that her son might have been better off disadvantageously married but still alive Buchanan did not say.
Sworn oaths meant a lot to these young men. How seriously they took them might be hard for us to understand today. In fact, sometimes they went overboard. Yakushkin laughed about how some of his comrades in the secret society became caught up in devising obsequies for the induction of new members, with “exorcist-like oaths” and swearing on the Gospels or on the sword—“comical in the extreme,” Yakushkin said. From the outset, all the society’s members had agreed that, given the horribleness of the current tsar, to whom they had already promised their allegiance, they would under no circumstances swear allegiance to the tsar who succeeded him.
Unexpectedly, this resolve met its test in late November 1825, when Tsar Alexander I died of malaria during an inspection tour of his troops in the Crimea. At the news, everybody in the society understood that now they must act, although they were not really prepared. Adding confusion to the moment was the fact that Russian officialdom did not know who Alexa
nder’s successor would be. Alexander had no children, so his successor should have been his younger brother, Konstantin. Konstantin had secretly renounced the throne, however, back in 1823, the memory of the murder of his father, Tsar Paul, evidently having dampened his enthusiasm for the honor. Nicholas, the third brother, had been designated as heir, but for some reason Alexander had not announced the decision publicly. And on top of that, Nicholas himself was at first hesitant to take the throne. As a result, for almost three weeks Russia had no tsar. Some of the troops had already been administered the oath of allegiance to Konstantin. Then Nicholas decided he would be tsar after all. A new date for the oath-taking ceremony, this time to swear allegiance to Tsar Nicholas I, was set for December 14.
On December 12 and on the evening of the thirteenth, uproarious meetings of the secret society took place in members’ apartments in St. Petersburg. In Yevgenii Obolensky’s rooms on December 12, the suggestions or objections of people who tried to speak reason in the clamor met with the shout-down, “You can’t have a rehearsal for an enterprise like this, just as if it were a parade!” Konrad Ryleev rose to new levels of eloquence, as his stirring words, “A beginning must be made,” cut through the noise. At the meeting in Ryleev’s rooms the next evening, the poet’s face, “pale as the moon but lit up by some supernatural light, would vanish, reappear, and vanish once more in the stormy waves of that sea in which simmered various convictions, many passions,” a participant later recalled. Prince Trubetskoy drew up a manifesto to be read in the Senate following the seizure of power and made plans for the takeover of the palace and the arrest of Nicholas and his family. A character named Yakubovich, whose violent temperament many of his comrades had feared to unleash, promised to kill the tsar himself. Prince Alexander Odoevsky cried, “We shall die, oh, how gloriously we shall die!”