Travels in Siberia (42 page)

[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, but 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 Alexander’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!”

Of course they failed—disastrously, spectacularly. Almost better to avert your eyes. None of them even managed to die gloriously. When the time came they did not do one thing right. The wife of the British ambassador,
traveling the city’s streets after the event, was horrified to see the “pools of blood on the snow, and spattered up against the houses.” But the blood was not the conspirators’; in St. Petersburg the major ones did not suffer any serious injury, so more likely the blood belonged to the deluded soldiers whom they had persuaded to follow them to the Senate Square with the lie that the rebellion was to reinstate the rightful emperor, Konstantin. The soldiers, who revered the tsar, probably would not have gone along otherwise.

Prince Trubetskoy, the designated dictator, turned out to be a no-show. On the fateful day, he inquired about taking the oath to Nicholas, then sought refuge in the Austrian embassy. Yakubovich, the implacable assassin, wandered around the square cheering for Konstantin, then said he had a headache and left. Then he came back, dithered some more, and left again. None of the other rebel officers had the rank of Trubetskoy, so no one knew who should take command. A firebrand named Kakhovsky shot and killed the redoubtable governor-general of St. Petersburg, M. A. Miloradovich, when he tried to talk the troops into laying down their arms. Kakhovsky killed another high-ranking officer after that. The standoff in Senate Square lasted for hours, and as the day was waning, one of Nicholas’s generals told him he must clear the square with gunfire or else abdicate. Reluctantly, Nicholas gave the order, and canister shot tore the Decembrists’ troops apart. Soldiers who tried to escape across the frozen Neva were drowned when cannonballs shattered the ice below them. Bodies littered the square.
“Voilà un joli commencement du regne!”
said Nicholas.

The Southern Society’s rebellion had a better chance of success because its planning had been more thorough and more troops followed the conspirators. But in the south the government got lucky by arresting Pavel Pestel on December 13, before the uprising began. With him gone, Sergei Muraviev-Apostol’s troops turned on him, while his brother Ippolit and an assistant, Kuzmin, shot themselves; et cetera, until the southern uprising’s complete collapse.