Decembrist Revolt

On December 14, 1825, about 3,000 Russian soldiers gathered on Senate Square, in the center of St. Petersburg, and refused to take an oath of loyalty to the new tsar, Nicholas I. Their officers, many of them aristocrats who had fought in the Napoleonic Wars, demanded a constitution and the end of serfdom. By late afternoon Nicholas ordered cannon fire into the square, killing dozens and scattering the rest. Five leaders were hanged the following July, and more than 100 others were sent to Siberia in chains. The revolt failed in a single day, but the Decembrists became Russia's first modern revolutionaries. Every later generation of Russian rebels claimed them as ancestors.

How Russian officers turned against the tsar

The Decembrist leaders were not peasants or outsiders. They were young noblemen and guards officers who had chased Napoleon's army westward through Europe and entered Paris in 1814. In France and the German states they had seen constitutions, elected assemblies, and citizens who could not be bought and sold. They returned to a Russia where roughly half of the population were serfs, legally the property of their landlords.

Through the 1810s and early 1820s, these officers formed secret societies. The movement split into two main groups. The Northern Society, based in St. Petersburg and led by Nikita Muravyov, wanted a constitutional monarchy. The Southern Society, based in Ukraine and led by Colonel Pavel Pestel, wanted a republic. Pestel, a decorated veteran of the Battle of Borodino, had written a detailed plan for a new Russian state that included the abolition of serfdom and the redistribution of land. Both groups agreed on the need to abolish serfdom, but they never settled on a shared plan of action.

The opportunity came by accident. Tsar Alexander I died on November 19, 1825, without a son. The expected heir was his brother Constantine, but Constantine had secretly given up his claim to the throne years earlier. The crown passed to a younger brother, Nicholas. For about two weeks the army pledged loyalty to Constantine, only to be told to pledge again to Nicholas. The officers in the secret societies decided to act in the confusion.

How Nicholas I crushed the Decembrist revolt

On the morning of December 14, officers of the Northern Society led their regiments into Senate Square. They told the soldiers to refuse the oath to Nicholas and call out for "Constantine and Constitution." Some soldiers, who had little idea what a constitution was, reportedly thought "Constitution" was the name of Constantine's wife.

The plan fell apart immediately. Prince Sergei Trubetskoy, chosen to lead the revolt, lost his nerve and never appeared. The rebels stood in formation and waited. No one gave orders, and no one moved on the Winter Palace. Nicholas spent the day trying to negotiate. He sent generals and a metropolitan of the Orthodox Church to persuade the soldiers to stand down. Nothing worked. By late afternoon, with loyal troops outnumbering the rebels several times over, Nicholas ordered cannon fire into the square.

The grapeshot cleared the square in minutes. Soldiers who tried to regroup on the frozen Neva River were fired on again. At least 80 people died, including bystanders. Nicholas personally oversaw the investigation that followed. Of the 121 people brought to trial, five leaders were executed: Pestel, the poet Kondraty Ryleev, Sergei Muravyov-Apostol, Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin, and Pyotr Kakhovsky. They were hanged at the Peter and Paul Fortress in July 1826. During the execution three of the ropes broke. By Russian tradition the condemned should have been spared, but the governor-general in charge ordered new ropes and had them hanged again. More than 100 others were exiled to Siberia, most of them to hard labor. Eleven of the exiled men's wives gave up their own noble privileges and followed their husbands, a decision that became famous across Russia.

Why did the Decembrist revolt fail?

The Decembrists had too few men, too little coordination, and no clear leader. About 3,000 soldiers followed their officers into the square, but Nicholas gathered a far larger force to surround them. The conspirators had hoped more regiments would join once the revolt began. Most stayed loyal or stayed home. The Northern and Southern Societies had never agreed on a joint plan, and the Southern Society's own uprising, launched two weeks later by the Chernigov Regiment in Ukraine, was also quickly crushed.

The deeper problem was that the Decembrists had no support beyond the officer corps. They had done little to win over ordinary soldiers or civilians. A revolt by a few thousand soldiers, with no popular backing and no chain of command, had little chance against a tsar who held the rest of the army.

How the Decembrists shaped Russia's revolutionary tradition

Nicholas I drew one lesson from the revolt: any opening for dissent was an opening for rebellion. He built his thirty-year reign on censorship, religious orthodoxy, and a new secret police, the Third Section. The crackdown kept the throne secure for a generation, but the executions and the Siberian exile gave Russia's political opposition its first martyrs.

Alexander Herzen, who became Russia's most influential dissident writer, was fourteen years old when the Decembrists were hanged. He later wrote that their execution was the event that awakened his political consciousness. Vladimir Lenin, nearly a century later, put the connection in a sentence that became famous in Soviet Russia: "The Decembrists awakened Herzen. Herzen began the work of revolutionary agitation." The Bolsheviks treated the Decembrists as the beginning of a tradition that ran from 1825 through the populists and the revolution of 1905 to their own revolution in 1917.

The uprising failed on the day it happened. What lasted was the proof that even the tsar's own aristocratic officers could rebel against him, and the idea that Russia could be governed differently.