The Decembrists

The Tsar Alexander I. went through the same evolution as his grandmother, Catherine II. He was educated by the republican, La Harpe, and began his reign as a quite liberal sovereign, ready to grant to Russia a constitution. He did it in fact, for Poland and Finland, and made a first step towards it in Russia. But he did not dare to touch serfdom, and gradually he fell under the influence of German mystics, became alarmed at liberal ideas, and surrendered his will to the worst reactionaries. The man who ruled Russia during the last ten or twelve years of his reign was General Arakchéeff — a maniac of cruelty and militarism, who maintained his influence by means of the crudest flattery and simulated religiousness.

A reaction against these conditions was sure to grow up, the more so as the Napoleonic wars had brought a great number of Russians in contact with Western Europe. The campaigns made in Germany, and the occupation of Paris by the Russian armies, had familiarised many officers with the ideas of liberty which reigned still in the French capital, while at home the endeavours of Nóvikoff were bearing fruit, and the freemason Friends continued his work. When Alexander I., having fallen under the influence of Madame Krüdener and other German mystics, concluded in 1815 the Holy Alliance with Germany and Austria, in order to combat all liberal ideas, secret societies began to be formed in Russia — Chiefly among the officer’s — in order to promote the ideas of liberty, of abolition of serfdom, and of equality before the law, as the necessary steps towards the abolition of absolute rule. Everyone who has read Tolstóy’s War and Peace must remember “Pierre” and the impression produced upon this young man by his first meeting with an old freemason. “Pierre” is a true representative of many young men who later on became known as “Decembrists.” Like “Pierre,” they were imbued with humanitarian ideas; many of them hated serfdom, and they wanted the introduction of constitutional guarantees; while a few of them (Péstel, Ryléef), despairing of monarchy, spoke of a return to the republican federalism of old Russia. With such ends in view, they created their secret societies.

It is known how this conspiracy ended. After the sudden death of Alexander I. in the South of Russia, the oath of allegiance was given at St. Petersburg to his brother Constantine, who was proclaimed his successor. But when, a few days later, it became known in the capital that Constantine had abdicated, and that his brother Nicholas was going to become emperor, and when the conspirators learned that they had been denounced in the meantime to the State police, they saw nothing else to do but to proclaim their programme openly in the streets, and to fall in an unequal fight. They did so, on December I4 (26) 1825, in the Senate Square of St. Petersburg, followed by a few hundred men from several regiments of the guard. Five of the insurgents were hanged by Nicholas I., and the remainder, i.e., about a hundred young men who represented the flower of Russian intelligence, were sent to hard labour in Siberia, where they remained till 1856. One can hardly imagine what it meant in a country which was not over-rich in educated and well-intentioned men, when such a number of the best representatives of a generation were taken out of the ranks and reduced to silence. Even in a more civilised country of Western Europe the sudden disappearance of so many men of thought and action would have dealt a severe blow to progress. In Russia the effect was disastrous — the more so as the reign of Nicholas I. lasted thirty years, during which every spark of free thought was stifled as soon as it appeared.

One of the most brilliant literary representatives of the “Decembrists” was RYLÉEF (1795–1826), one of the five who were hanged by Nicholas I. He had received a good education, and in 1814 was already an officer. He was thus by a few years the elder of Púshkin. He twice visited France, in 1814 and 1815 and after the conclusion of peace became a magistrate at St. Petersburg. His earlier productions were a series of ballads dealing with the leading men of Russian history. Most of them were merely patriotic, but some already revealed the sympathies of the poet for freedom. Censorship did not allow these ballads to be printed, but they circulated all over Russia in manuscript. Their poetical value was not great; but the next poem of Ryléef and especially some fragments of unfinished poems, revealed in him a powerful poetical gift, which Ryléef’s great friend, Púshkin, greeted with effusion. It is greatly to be regretted that the poem has never been translated into English. Its subject is the struggle of Little Russia for the recovery of its independence under Peter I. When the Russian Tsar was engaged in a bitter struggle against the great northern warrior, Charles XII., then the ruler of Little Russia, the hétman Mazépa conceived the plan of joining Charles XII. against Peter I. for freeing his mother country from the Russian yoke. Charles XII., as is known, was defeated at Poltáva, and both he and the hétman had to flee to Turkey. As to Voinaróvsky, a young patriot friend of Mazapa, he was taken prisoner, and transported to Siberia. There, at Yakútsk, he was visited by the historian Miiller, and Ryléeff makes him tell his story to the German explorer. The scenes of nature in Siberia, at Yakútsk, with which the poem begins; the preparations for the war in Little Russia and the war itself; the flight of Charles XII. and Mazépa; then the sufferings of Voinaróvsky at Yakútsk, when his young wife came to rejoin him in the land of exile, and died there — all these scenes are most beautiful, while in places the verses, by their simplicity and the beauty of their images, evoked the admiration even of Púshkin. Two or three generations have now read this poem, and it continues to inspire each new one with the same love of liberty and hatred of oppression.