In Soviet history textbooks, the Decembrists are praised as martyrs and founders. Leninism describes itself as the fulfillment, dialectically, of their dream of freedom. Their sacrifice is ahead of the communist sacrifice. Deformed into a caricature, the Decembrists are attached to the structure of propaganda. Their words are mutilated, their ideas amputated: the image that the communist era imposes on their movement is born. Like Herzen, the Decembrists are confiscated by the regime, which is building a citadel of state lies. Their failed revolution is, in the book of the USSR, the first sign of October.

The Decembrists in the intellectual and political history of Russia are the end of the road and the beginning, and their image is much more nuanced than the party and state literature of real socialism would suggest. They are the end of the road, as their failed campaign to overthrow Nicholas I in December 1825 is the latest coup attempt in a series of Russian politicians. Because the greatest danger that the king can face is the noble entourage. In the absence of a mechanism to limit power, the only way to eliminate the bearer of absolute power is through assassinations and conspiracies.

Regicide is one of the specialties of imperial Russia. Catherine the Great and her grandson Alexander I owe their throne to the removal of their predecessors. The wife eliminates the husband, and the son the father. The annals of Russian tsars recall the times of Ivan the Terrible, beyond the deceptive glare of lights. From this point of view, the conspirators of 1825, almost all aristocrats, are part of this historical series. They are not creating a revolution in the European sense, but using a palace coup that will fail.

beginnings

But the Decembrists are not only the end of the road, but also the beginning, it is a prelude to another Russian history, the history of rebellion, sacrifice, martyrdom. They go further, establishing a tradition that will captivate the young Herzen. The Decembrists aim much further than those who changed and killed countries in the past. They are the first revolutionaries that Russia learns about, and the tragedy that happened after their adventure shapes the entire historical destiny.

The Decembrists are the sons of 1812. Aristocrats and officers, they are marked by the terrible trials of the French invasion and the messianic heroism it awakened. The Decembrists are born in the environment made possible by the albeit timid reforms of Alexander I. The image of another Russia, less repressive and more educated, seems completely unbelievable at these moments.

Contact with the West acts as a catalyst. European societies project an image of government that contrasts with the stark austerity of the Russian Empire at home. The temptation of revolutionary imitation is born in these moments, when Russian officers are advancing on Paris. Their identity has been shaped by these years. The horror of serfdom and the freezing of tsarism became unacceptable to them. Their elimination becomes the goal of those who opened underground organizations.

The Decembrists are radicalized in their conspiratorial actions by the collapse of the hopes born in this period, which turns out to be illusory: the reformer tsar becomes the oppressor tsar, and all attempts to codify changes under Speransky’s impulse collapse. abandoned. The Kazon Order returns to the imperial style of government.

The Decembrists, especially thanks to the presence of the poet Ryleev, are romantics, and their romanticism is similar to the romanticism of a whole generation, which on both sides of the Atlantic strives for the elimination of absolutism, imagining, albeit dimly, a different future. Admirers of the United States, readers of the Declaration of Independence, looking with admiration but reserve at the American federal model, the Decembrists are moved by the same energy that animates Simón Bolívar in his American odyssey. From the point of view of European politics, they are conspirators who are undermining the basis of the “Holy Union,” and can only be understood if we associate them with those who in Italy, France, or Germany are following the same path of secret association.

Romantic and nebulous, enchanted by the freedom of the idealized Russian past, but at the same time motivated by their own readings, the Decembrists are, from an intellectual point of view, a veritable continent on which the elements and dilemmas that will mark the Russian imagination can be found. There is a liberal-conservative branch in their movement that proposes a monarchical and parliamentary approach, preparing the emancipation of the serfs, as there is a whiff of Jacobinism presaging 1917 through Pavel Pestel.

The figure of Pestel is, from all points of view, the most strange and visionary figure. Pestel’s vision is a vision of the dictatorship that should follow the tsar’s removal. Pestel is a mixture, not at all paradoxical, of republican radicalism and Russian nationalism. His project is centralizing and quite hostile to Polish aspirations. Because relations with Poland and other Slavic nations are one of the points of ambiguity of the Decembrists. Although the Decembrists were close to Adam Mickiewicz in his exile, they are reticent to outline a future that includes a restored Poland. Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro