Decembrist Revolt (1825): Officers Against the Russian Tsar

The Decembrist Revolt was a failed uprising by liberal Russian army officers in St Petersburg on 26 December 1825 (14 December in the Russian calendar of the time). Taking advantage of confusion over who should succeed Tsar Alexander I, they led about 3,000 soldiers onto Senate Square to refuse allegiance to the new tsar, Nicholas I. The revolt was crushed by artillery within a day, but the Decembrists became a founding legend of the Russian revolutionary movement.

Background: officers and ideas

Many of the Decembrists were young noblemen who had fought against Napoleon. During the French invasion of Russia and the campaigns of 1813–1814 that followed, they saw Western Europe, with its constitutions, freer press and absence of serfdom. Returning home, they were struck by the contrast with a Russia ruled by an autocratic tsar, where millions of peasants were serfs bound to their masters.

Alexander I had raised hopes of reform early in his reign but grew more conservative after 1815. Disappointed officers formed secret societies: the Union of Salvation in 1816 and the Union of Welfare in 1818. After that was dissolved in 1821, two new groups emerged.

The Northern Society in St Petersburg, led by figures such as Nikita Muravyov, the poet Kondraty Ryleyev and Prince Sergei Trubetskoy, favoured a constitutional monarchy. The Southern Society, based among army units in Ukraine and led by Colonel Pavel Pestel, was more radical. Pestel’s programme, Russkaya Pravda, proposed a republic, the abolition of serfdom and a strongly centralised state.

The succession crisis

Alexander I died unexpectedly at Taganrog on 1 December 1825 (19 November Old Style). He had no sons. The next in line was his brother Grand Duke Constantine, who lived in Warsaw, but Constantine had secretly renounced the throne in 1822, and Alexander had confirmed this in a manifesto that was kept hidden.

At first Nicholas, the next brother, and the troops in St Petersburg swore allegiance to Constantine. Only after weeks of letters between the brothers did Nicholas accept the crown and order a new oath for 14 December. The northern conspirators decided to act that day, persuading soldiers that Constantine was the rightful ruler and that Nicholas was usurping the throne.

Revolt on Senate Square

On the morning of 14 December (26 December New Style), about 3,000 soldiers from the Moscow Life Guards Regiment, the Life Guards Grenadiers and the Naval Guards Crew marched to Senate Square, near the equestrian statue of Peter the Great known as the Bronze Horseman. They refused to swear the oath to Nicholas.

The rebels had no clear plan once they arrived. Trubetskoy, chosen as their “dictator”, never appeared. Military governor Count Mikhail Miloradovich, a hero of 1812, rode out to persuade the soldiers to return to barracks and was mortally wounded by the conspirator Pyotr Kakhovsky. Envoys sent by Nicholas, including the Metropolitan of St Petersburg, were turned away.

Nicholas gathered loyal troops, who greatly outnumbered the rebels. After hours of stalemate in the cold, and as darkness approached, he ordered artillery to fire grapeshot into the rebel ranks. The square was cleared within minutes, and soldiers who fled across the ice of the Neva were also fired on. Casualty figures are uncertain: official reports gave low numbers, while some later accounts put total deaths, including bystanders, in the hundreds or even over a thousand.

The southern rising and the trials

In Ukraine, Pestel had already been arrested on 13 December (Old Style). Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Muravyov-Apostol and Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin led the Chernigov Regiment in revolt at the end of December, but government troops dispersed it on 3 January 1826 (Old Style).

Nicholas personally took part in interrogations. A commission investigated several hundred people, and a special Supreme Criminal Court tried 121 defendants. On 13 July 1826 (Old Style) five leaders were hanged at the Peter and Paul Fortress: Pestel, Ryleyev, Muravyov-Apostol, Bestuzhev-Ryumin and Kakhovsky. More than a hundred others were sentenced to hard labour or exile in Siberia, and many soldiers were punished by running the gauntlet or transferred to the Caucasus.

Key people

• Nicholas I (1796–1855): the younger brother of Alexander I, who crushed the revolt on the first day of his reign and ruled Russia for 30 years.
• Pavel Pestel (1793–1826): colonel and leader of the Southern Society, author of its radical republican programme.
• Kondraty Ryleyev (1795–1826): poet and leading figure in the Northern Society, one of the main organisers of the St Petersburg rising.
• Sergei Trubetskoy (1790–1860): prince and colonel chosen as the rebels’ leader, who failed to appear on the square. He was sentenced to hard labour and returned from Siberia only after the amnesty.
• Sergei Muravyov-Apostol (1796–1826): lieutenant colonel who led the Chernigov Regiment’s revolt in Ukraine.

Myths and facts

A famous story claims that soldiers shouting for “Constantine and Constitution” thought that Constitution was Constantine’s wife. The anecdote circulated widely in the 19th century, but it cannot be verified and is generally treated as a legend that mocked the ordinary soldiers’ ignorance.

Another detail is better documented: at the execution in July 1826, the ropes of three of the condemned men broke and they had to be hanged a second time, an event that shocked many observers.

It is sometimes said that the Decembrists wanted a republic. In fact their aims differed: Pestel’s Southern Society called for a republic, but most members of the Northern Society hoped for a constitutional monarchy.

Consequences

The revolt shaped the 30-year reign of Nicholas I (1825–1855), which became a byword for conservatism. He created the Third Section, a political police, in 1826, tightened censorship and promoted the official doctrine of Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality. Serious reform had to wait for his son Alexander II, who carried out the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and pardoned the surviving Decembrists in 1856.

The revolt also showed the gulf between the educated nobility and the mass of the population. The soldiers on Senate Square had largely followed their officers without understanding their aims, and no popular rising supported them. That lesson, that a small conspiracy of officers could not change Russia on its own, was much debated by later reformers and revolutionaries.

Legacy

In Siberia the exiles founded schools, studied local life and were joined by about a dozen of their wives, whose devotion was later celebrated by the poet Nikolai Nekrasov. Alexander Pushkin, a friend of several Decembrists, wrote a verse message to the exiles, and Alexander Herzen made their memory central to Russian radical tradition.

Later revolutionaries saw the Decembrists as forerunners. Lenin, writing in 1912, treated them as the first stage of the Russian revolutionary movement, a movement of nobles cut off from the people. In 1925, on the centenary, Senate Square in Leningrad was renamed Decembrists’ Square; it reverted to Senate Square in 2008.

Timeline

• 1816: The Union of Salvation, the first Decembrist society, is founded.
• 1825, 1 December: Alexander I dies at Taganrog (19 November Old Style).
• 1825, 26 December: Revolt on Senate Square, St Petersburg (14 December Old Style).
• 1826, 15 January: The Chernigov Regiment’s revolt in Ukraine is crushed (3 January Old Style).
• 1826, 25 July: Five Decembrist leaders are hanged (13 July Old Style).
• 1856: Alexander II pardons the surviving Decembrists.

Why it matters

The Decembrist Revolt was the first open attempt in modern Russia to replace autocracy with constitutional government. Its failure hardened the regime of Nicholas I, while its martyrs inspired generations of Russian reformers and revolutionaries.