Russian Conspirators in Siberia E-Book

Andreas von Rozen

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 372

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Following Napoleon's defeat, a generation of young Russian officers was acutely conscious of the backward social and political conditions in their own country, compared to those in France. Taking advantage of the confusion after Alexander I's sudden death, on 14th December 1825 the officer-conspirators gathered their troops in St Petersburg to demand, among other things, a constitutional monarchy. The revolt's suppression was brutal: executions, hard labour and perpetual exile for the 121 ringleaders, many of whom belonged to Russia's wealthiest and most influential families. But thanks in part to the wives who joined them, the Decembrists maintained coherence as a group, and those who survived for the new Tsars amnesty in 1856 returned home as living legends. The Estonian Baron Rozen was scarcely more than a bystander at the veents of December 1825, but he was punished alongside the ringleaders and shared their fate. His account of the rebellion itself, of the years in Siberia and his subsequent exile, remains the best primary source for what happened. First published in his native German in 1869 (and in English in 1872), this vivid, accurate memoir stands as a fascinating precursor to the testaments of later political prisoners such as Mandelstam, Ginzburg, Solzhenitsyn and Havel.

Leseprobe

RUSSIAN CONSPIRATORS IN SIBERIA

RUSSIAN CONSPIRATORS IN SIBERIA

A Personal Narrative

by Baron Rozen

A Russian Dekabrist

With a Preface by

John de Falbe

Elliott & Thompson

London

CONTENTS

Preface to the New Edition

Preface to the 1872 Edition

CHAPTER I

The Revolt of the 14th December, 1825

CHAPTER II

The Court of Inquiry and Examination

CHAPTER III

The Sentence and its Execution

CHAPTER IV

The Journey to Siberia

CHAPTER V

Prison Life at Tschita

CHAPTER VI

Our Departure to Settle in Petrowski

CHAPTER VII

In the Prison of Petrowski

CHAPTER VIII

From Petrowski to Kurgan

CHAPTER IX

The Years of our Settlement in Kurgan

CHAPTER X

From Siberia to Grusia

APPENDIX

Sketch of the Secret Societies in Russia, 1815-1825

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

The 1872 text has been preserved together with Mildmay’s transliteration of Russian names and places. The only exception is the author’s name, which has been inserted on the title page – the original has only Baron R – and altered accordingly throughout the text. It was felt that altering many of the proper names to their more familiar modern forms (e.g. ‘Muraviev’ for ‘Murawjew’; ‘Kiev’ for ‘Kiew’) would risk introducing new errors and confusions. Slight additional changes have been made where the original text was itself inconsistent. A map has been provided for the present edition and it appears on page 190.

PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION

On 14th December, 1825, the first day of Nicholas I’s reign, 3,000 men gathered in St Petersburg’s Senate Square intending to force the new Tsar into accepting some kind of constitution. They were not sure what the constitution should consist of, nor even what they should do next, but the circumstances had seemed ripe. But their leader, Prince Trubetskoy, had not shown up; things had not gone well for them. Still, they refused to disperse. The Governor General of St Petersburg, Miloradovich, was shot and killed when he tried to approach, likewise Commander Stürler. The Metropolitan Serafim went out in episcopal robes to try spiritual influence, but the situation was ugly and the Father of the Church was advised to go away and pray. By 3.00pm, as the light began to fail, Nicholas ordered grapeshot to be fired and the ringleaders to be rounded up. ‘Violà un joli commencement de régne,’ he remarked as the bloodbath began.

The new Tsar stayed up all night to interrogate those who were brought in and it was soon evident that the plot was the work of people whom he knew and trusted. Here was the abject Prince Trubetskoy, whose nerve had failed him; Nikita Muraviev, who at seventeen had been among the victorious troops entering Paris; Prince Obolensky; the talented Ryleev; a young Estonian officer called Baron Rozen from whom he had expected so much...

Matters were made worse over the next few days as news came in of a parallel rebellion near Kiev, led by Sergei Muraviev-Apostol, a diplomat’s son. It appeared in fact that there were two separate secret societies, the Northern and the Southern, and even a third known as the United Slavs. The southern rising was crushed but its relation to events in St Petersburg was disturbing. A Captain Pestel had been arrested, and he appeared to be a Jacobin with dangerous influence. Among his associates was Prince Sergei Volkonsky, who had been one of the Tsar’s aides at Tilsit and whose mother was the dowager empress’s closest confidante.

There is a reference in Rozen’s memoirs which can be used to illuminate just how deeply the conspiracy penetrated the establishment. Describing the first days of his captivity in the Winter Palace, he mentions that he was joined ‘for some hours by another compromised man, Colonel Rajewsky’. This was Alexander, the elder son of General Raevsky, the man known as the ‘hero of Borodino’. He features in War and Peace, together with his sons who were drummers. Such a man embodied loyalty to the Tsar: rebellion would have been unthinkable. But one of his sons-in-law was Prince Volkonsky, who was sentenced to 20 years hard labour followed by exile for life. Against her family’s wishes, the distraught General’s daughter Maria followed her husband to Siberia where she became known as the Princess of Siberia. (She is the subject of Christine Sutherland’s wonderful biography.) Another of his sons-in-law was Mikhail Orlov, who had negotiated the surrender of Paris: he escaped punishment with the Decembrists, but he was thought to have been involved with them. The General’s half brother Vasya Davydov (their mother was a niece of Potemkin) was sentenced along with Volkonsky, and the General knew – and subsequently reviled – many of the others. His sons, however, were exonerated, as was their friend Pushkin, although all were under suspicion to begin with because of their friendships with several of the rebels.

Napoleon’s final defeat had been greeted with joy in England, but feelings among his Russian conquerors were more complicated. The Tsar desired jubilation, but he and his successors found that control of minds was more problematic than control of actions. The generation of young men who fought in the Napoleonic Wars had come across ideas among the French that they admired: liberté, égalité, fraternité. Returning to Russia, they were disgusted by the political and social conditions that still existed there. Early in his reign, Alexander I had been sympathetic towards the idea of reform, but his attitude hardened against all kinds of dissent. He was an autocrat in an Empire whose population consisted mostly of peasants living in a state of quasi-slavery. He was supreme ruler; source of all power, prospect of advancement and, ultimately, wealth. Such a state of affairs was mediaeval, and yet Russia had just defeated France, the harbingers of the Enlightenment. Captain Yakushkin of the Semenovsky Foot Guards (who was sentenced to 20 years hard labour and banishment for life) described how, as his regiment returned to Oranienbaum, the Tsar set off in pursuit of a peasant who happened to be in the way, ‘wrenching his horse forward and brandishing his sword... We simply couldn’t believe our eyes. We felt so ashamed for our beloved Tsar.’

It was widely believed that reforms were necessary, but open discussion was impossible and the nascent intelligentsia had no choice but to resort to secret societies. Real dangers attended discovery – exile, stripping of rank and privileges – but many of those who belonged to the new societies were young, idealistic, and familiar with danger from the battlefield: they were not so easily intimidated. The Northern Society was centered on St Petersburg and linked with Moscow. Led by Muraviev and Ryleev, it was a group of like-minded friends who disliked autocracy and slavery and believed that change was essential. They were constitutional monarchists rather than regicides, but the prospects for any change at all were so remote that no urgency was yet attached to coherence. They had no reason to foresee the level of organisation that events suddenly demanded. The Southern Society had more philosophical substance thanks to Pestel, its leader, who wrote a constitution for the republic he envisaged. Since he was executed, his memory is overshadowed by those who lived on, but he was clearly perceived as brilliant by his contemporaries. He had distinguished himself at Borodino; gifted men were drawn to him. Pushkin described him as ‘one of the most original minds I have encountered’, and even Rozen, a model of calm reason, spoke of him with respect in old age although he probably never met him.

The amateur musings of the Northern Society were brought together with the Southern Society’s more radical designs by the unexpected death of Alexander I and the protracted confusion over his successor. It was customary for those in service to swear an oath of allegiance to the new Tsar, and so oaths were quickly sworn for Constantine, who was expected to succeed his dead brother. But Constantine was in Warsaw, showing no desire to occupy the throne. There was a secret agreement, it appeared, in which Alexander had allowed Constantine to renounce his right of succession in favour of their younger brother, Nicholas. It took Nicholas a fortnight to step forward, however, which provided the conspirators with a unique opportunity to rise up. Now they had a pretext, for a serious oath of allegiance could not immediately be superseded by an oath of allegiance to someone else. It was this point which Rozen focussed on, and which he presented to the troops whom he wished to draw into support of the rebels. While there can be no doubt that the problematic oath grated on Rozen’s sense of honour, there was certainly a measure of expediency in his insistence, and in that of other conspirators. The very reverence that simple soldiers felt for their Tsar was turned to account by the rebels with the confused oath, for it enabled them to present Nicholas as a usurper.

While the affair was investigated, most of the prisoners were kept in solitary confinement in the St Peter & Paul Fortress, in near darkness. Nicholas himself took a close interest in every aspect. He examined individual confessions and annotated them with instructions on how to proceed, suggesting lines of questioning and alterations to the conditions of their imprisonment. Then in July, 1826, Pestel, Ryleev, Kakhovsky, Sergei Muraviev-Apostol and Bestuzhev-Ryumin were sentenced to be hanged (at a time when there was officially no death penalty in Russia). A further 121 men were sentenced to varying terms of hard labour in Siberia, followed by exile, in many cases for life. They travelled post – to remove them as fast as possible – in chains.

Two aspects of the tragic fiasco that became known as the Decembrist Revolt or (under the Soviets) the First Russian Revolution, were conspicuous to contemporaries and remain so now. The first is that the rebels were regarded as the brightest stars of the rising generation. Some were aristocrats like Trubetskoy, Volkonsky, Obolensky and Odoevsky; all were extremely well connected in a society where connections mattered. They were bright, energetic achievers, many of them related by marriage or blood to one another. Among them were several pairs of brothers, numerous cousins and in-laws. To have these people removed at a stroke was a catastrophe not only for Russia but also for the tiny 1% of people who formed ‘society’ – who governed and administered the Empire, who wrote and read books. Few families were not affected, and they were not allowed to talk about it.

For the other salient aspect was the Tsar’s extreme vindictiveness, a tacit recognition (despite his invective) that the rebels were not idle troublemakers but people who mattered. The Polish poet Mickiewicz, who was a close friend of Ryleev and in Moscow at the time of the revolt, wrote of ‘the shudder of horror that ran through Russian society at the draconian severity of the sentences’. The Tsar declared the rebels to be scum. He wanted them to be forgotten. The sentences reflected very clearly that forgiveness was not to be looked for, and that families wishing to retain Imperial favour – and all did – should abandon their criminal sons. Yet Nicholas, least of all, forgot the Decembrists. All aspects of their subsequent lives were referred back to him; no detail of diet, dwelling or occupation was too small for his concern. And the memory of the Decembrists, as they were called, lay beneath the surface of Russian life for a generation.

It was partly Nicholas’s desire to dispose conclusively of his amis du quatorze which proved, in the end, to be their salvation (in so far as they were saved). The first few were sent to the silver mines at Nerchinsk, some 500 miles east of Lake Baikal, but a year later they were brought in with their comrades at Chita, 100 miles to the West. The Tsar had taken advice to confine the Decembrists together, perhaps because they could be more easily overseen, or because he regarded them as incorrigibles who should not be given any opportunity of contaminating anyone else. In any case, the preservation – indeed the strengthening – of their group identity helped the Decembrists to endure their fate. It also presented to posterity a coherence that the group would not otherwise have had.

Nicholas appointed as commandant a loyal, elderly old soldier called Colonel Leparsky, who was glad of the extra pay. But Leparsky was unexpectedly benign. If the ‘gentleman revolutionaries’ in his care behaved and made it possible for him to return good reports to the Tsar, he would do what he could to alleviate their circumstances. It was understood by all the Decembrists from the start that escape was out of the question. If they didn’t starve, or were not found by the nomadic Buriats and exchanged for bounty, their escape would invite the Tsar’s interference and destroy the delicate balance in which their comrades existed.

One of the most celebrated aspects of the Decembrists’ exile is the role played by their wives. While the Tsar advised that wives of the Decembrists should divorce their wretched husbands and remarry – and several did – it was customary for wives of convicts to be allowed to follow their husbands to Siberia and share their lives. Nicholas made it difficult for the women – they had to leave behind their children, forfeit their titles, money and the right to return to European Russia – but he did not prevent them from going. Eleven women followed their husbands (six left behind a total of thirteen children) and they made a significant contribution to the whole group. The convicts were forbidden to write letters, but the women did so on their behalf. They were also able to obtain books and journals, and a limited amount of money. It was through them that the men maintained contact with the world outside, and that news about the men filtered back to the West. This situation only prevailed thanks to Leparsky, who allowed it on the understanding that his concessions would not be abused, which they were not. It was inconvenient for Nicholas’s intentions that several of the women were resourceful, strong, and rich.

The Decembrists later looked back to the period at Chita with great affection. Although the place was small and they were kept hugger-mugger, they were still young and the relief of finding themselves together with a benign commandant was very sustaining. Aware of the situation’s oddity – the best minds of a generation being sent to the back of beyond without prospect of return – they made the best of it: they organised all kinds of lecture courses among themselves, studied, and made music. But after two years they were all moved another 250 miles further west to a specially built prison called Petrovsky Zavod. There each prisoner had his own cell (albeit without natural light), and wives were permitted to spend the night. The forced labour was never onerous (again, thanks to Leparsky) but conditions were nevertheless harsh. 22 of the children born to Decembrists in Siberia died. And as the years passed it became harder to ignore the future’s bleakness.

When their terms of forced labour came to an end, prisoners went off into exile with mixed feelings. Together they supported one another, but, for many, exile proved much harder as they were sent to remote places without kindred spirits: some went mad, some perished in misery alone. Some took the only quick route out offered by Nicholas, which was to serve as private soldiers in the Caucasus; a number were killed there. But others, Rozen among them, were luckier, and found themselves in places where they could make a living, and where they still had one or two of their old comrades for company. There they expected to end their days. But the Tsar died, and in 1856 his son, Alexander II, declared an amnesty. About thirty Decembrists were still alive. All but two returned to the West, mysterious heroes of resistance to autocracy.

Baron Andrey Rozen was not even Russian. Born in 1800, he was a Baltic German whose family, for many generations, had led a rather grim existence as Estonian landowners with a tradition of Russian military service. From childhood he had been conscious of the unsatisfactory situation of the peasantry because of a sequence of brutally suppressed uprisings, but he did not expect to be able to do anything much about it. Educated to value honour, authority hard work and the ready performance of duty, Rozen put these virtues at the service of the Tsar. Too young to take part in the Napoleonic Wars, he enrolled in the First Cadet Corps in St Petersburg in 1815 and, three years later, he joined the Finland Life Guards as an ensign. His military career was unspectacular – it was peacetime, and he was not rich – but his competence was noticed in 1824 by the new Head of the First Infantry Division, the Grand Duke Nicholas, and then it began to look more promising. In April 1825 he married Anna Malinovskaya, whose family came from the Ukraine. Although mildly disapproving of autocracy and serfdom, he seemed set for a conventional, respectable career.

But eight months later he was in a dungeon.

Rozen’s biographer, Glynn Barratt, says in The Rebel On The Bridge that he ‘was by instinct and training a Liberal, in the context of that word’s earliest meaning... he believed in the essential right and the effectiveness... of free institutions, and... untrammelled human reason.’ Rozen was, above all, reasonable, and he expected others to be so. He ‘not only held that all men should be treated with respect and charity, he treated all men in that light.’ The Tsar did not. The rebels on Senate Square might not be agreed about much but Rozen believed that they shared this fundamental outlook. Although he knew many of the conspirators, he himself had only a tenuous connection with the Northern Society. In old age, attempting to explain why people like himself had supported the rebels on 14th Dec, 1825, he offered ‘they held it to be a point of honour to share danger with men whom they had known to be devoted, noble champions of modern ideas... they had worked with the best of their time.’ It was obvious from the start that the Revolt was a disaster, but instead of stepping away (as he could have done), Rozen could not bring himself to betray the ideas of truth and reason which he associated with the rebels.

Not that he supported them very actively either. He and his section of sharpshooters refused the new oath of allegiance in the morning of the 14th. At 10am he went up to the rebels and found that Trubetskoy was absent. Returning to barracks, he ordered all troops to take up arms to ‘help their comrades’. As the battalion (1000 men) emerged into the yard, the Brigadier appeared and gave orders for the regiment to swing left onto St Isaac’s Bridge. They supposed that they were about to be called on to fire at the rebels. At this point, Rozen led his company to the centre of the bridge and ordered them to halt, thus successfully blocking the way for the troops behind. There they stayed in the cold for the next three hours at Rozen’s command, in clear disobedience of his senior officer. It brought little practical help to the rebels, who were swiftly defeated anyway, but it was a clear signal of sympathy to them and was interpreted as such by the Tsar.

Most of the sentences announced by the panel appointed to investigate the Revolt were commuted by the Tsar in a display of false clemency Rozen was one of very few whose sentence was not altered. Although his role had been slight, he found himself punished as one of the main participants. No reason was ever given for this but it was thought to represent the Tsar’s personal disappointment in him. In Siberia, however, and afterwards, his significance to the Decembrists was much greater than it was on December 14th – a justification, perhaps, for the Tsar’s disappointment. It was Rozen who ran the artel at Chita, the system by which everybody pooled their resources for equal redistribution. Since some prisoners were rich (via their wives), in particular Nikita Muraviev, Trubetskoy and Volkonsky, and some had nothing at all, this was of immense importance to many individuals and further bound them together as a group. It was Rozen who negotiated with Leparsky; Rozen who administered the vegetable gardens where Volkonsky and Poggio worked; Rozen who was entrusted with the logistics of moving the prisoners from Chita to Petrovsky Zavod, making camp each night and feeding them. Wherever possible, he applied himself to improving the quality of life. His self-discipline was observed with wonder – his Russian comrades put it down to his Teutonic origins – but he was respected as a model of honour, probity and efficiency.

Rozen’s first child, Yevgeniy, was born while he was still in the St Peter & Paul Fortress. He saw him once, in July 1826, and told his wife not to follow him until the child could walk. Leaving Yevgeniy with her sister in Moscow, Anna rejoined her husband in Siberia in August, 1830, as they were making their way from Chita to Petrovsky Zavod, their new prison. Konrad was born in 1831 (named after Ryleev), and in July the following year, Rozen’s term of hard labour ended.

They were fortunate in being sent to Western Siberia (the other three who left that year went east). The journey was eventful – near shipwreck on Lake Baikal; another baby born en route – but they arrived without mishap in Kurgan, some 250 miles north of the Aral Sea, in September, 1832. There Rozen’s memoirs ought to run aground, for he should have had nothing to write about. Nicholas intended these convicts to eke out meagre existences and die forgotten. ‘When I had reached the end of our long journey,’ he wrote later about his arrival in Kurgan, ‘the thought that here I must end my days as an exile, and my wife and children must spend-their whole lives, made my heart sink within me.’ But four years later an accident provided a way out – and ensured, incidentally, that his memoirs continued to be riveting.

Rozen was allowed to leave Kurgan because he could not walk without the aid of a crutch. Despite this disability, the Tsar sent him to the Caucasus as a foot soldier, the only route out of exile that he would countenance. So in late 1837 Rozen hobbled into Georgia where he was reunited with his eldest son. There he remained for almost two years before the Tsar at last conceded that he might as well go home. And in August, 1839, after a fourteen year odyssey, he returned with his family to Estonia.

The memoirs stop there, but Rozen lived for 44 more years. Until the amnesty of 1856 he had to stay at home in Estonia – he wasn’t even permitted to go to church in the nearby town. He devoted himself to educating his children (who still had no rights to property or citizenship), to farming and to watching the progress of Estonian land reforms. After the amnesty the family moved to an estate inherited by his Anna near Kharkov in the Ukraine, where he farmed. Following the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, Rozen served for two three-year periods as a local Arbitrator of the Peace, a position of considerable responsibility and influence after the reforms. But gradually his mind turned back towards the defining experience of his life, the Decembrist Revolt.

In Kurgan and the Caucasus Rozen kept diaries, and he corresponded faithfully with several of the Decembrists who remained in Siberia. By the1860s he began to think that someone should bear witness to what had happened for posterity. Since no one remained who was likely to do it as well as himself, he came to regard it as his duty to write a sustained, balanced account. He wrote in German and it was from that edition that his memoirs were translated into English in 1872. A slightly different Russian version was published (in Russia) in 1870. Subsequently he published several articles on individual Decembrists and their families in Russkaya Starina. This journal published short testimonies by other aged Decembrists but none were as comprehensive as Rozen’s. Generally regarded as accurate and fair by his contemporaries, his account remains the primary source for the events associated with the Decembrist Revolt.

The Decembrists’ immediate political influence was entirely negative. Russia was subjected to a tyranny more oppressive than ever, a climate which nurtured a new generation of revolutionaries that the ageing Decembrists deplored. Most of the Decembrists gave up politics by teatime on 14th December, believing that the Revolt was a mistake. While they kept faith with their motives and one another, they held few political views in common besides a general belief that emancipation of the serfs was desirable.

When Nikolai Bestuzhev said that the Tsar’s decision to keep the Decembrists together allowed them ‘to exist politically beyond political death’, he referred to a group identity whose influence was more subtle and diverse. In Siberia, where they were revered, the Decembrists had direct cultural influence through their study of language, customs, shamanism, botany, medicine, horticulture and many other things. In Western Russia, Nicholas forbade the press from making any reference to the Decembrists or their whereabouts, but they were championed, from his exile, by Herzen. Thanks to him, by the 1870s the Decembrists occupied a place in the public imagination as martyrs to autocracy, but they have had other literary appearances. In the 1820s Pushkin, who was almost a Decembrist (in fact he was treated by them with caution because he was so indiscreet), alluded to them. In 1856 Tolstoy began a novel called The Decembrists, which by 1863 had turned into War and Peace, a tale that amounted to not much more than a prologue to his original conception. Had he continued his story as he first intended, Pierre Bezukhov would certainly have been in the silver mines at Nerchinsk by 1826. One wonders if Rozen ever read Tolstoy’s work, but Nekrasov’s poems about the Decembrists would not have encouraged him. More recently, the Estonian novelist Jaan Kross appears to have drawn on Rozen in spirit, if not in name, in The Czar’s Madman, and the Decembrist myth hovers in the wings of Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia.

Above all, the Decembrists are attractive: in their disposition towards freedom, in their naïve determination to effect change, in their courage, in their adaptability. Perhaps because their ideas were never developed it has been easy for later generations, such as Herzen or the Bolsheviks, to project their ideas onto them. However tenuous the theoretical link, the story of the Decembrists can be conveniently hitched to a wide range of causes because it exemplifies resistance to autocracy, and nobility under persecution. The Decembrists belong to a distinguished line of people who rejected tyranny at the cost of their own freedom, for moral rather than overtly political reasons. The pseudo-legal aspects of their trial and the absence of religious elements make them seem modern, but it is also the record of their experiences which puts them in the same tradition as later enemies of tyranny like Ginzburg, Solzhenitsyn and Havel. Since Rozen’s is the primary voice of the Decembrists, and every generation needs to be freshly inspired by tyranny’s opponents, it is a fine thing to see his memoirs in print for the first time since 1872.

John de Falbe

PREFACE TO THE 1872 EDITION

The subject of this book will be new to many of its readers; the rising of the soldiers at St. Petersburg in 1825 is but little known or remembered, and there are few people who are aware of more than the fact that those who took part in the insurrection which broke out in the December of that year are called Dekabrists1 in Russia, and that they made a vain attempt to take advantage of the succession of Nicholas to the throne to effect great political changes.

When these notes were first made, the author had no idea of their going beyond his own immediate circle – his children, his nearest relatives, and the companions with whom he had spent the most memorable years of his life, the years of his imprisonment and residence in Siberia and Caucasia. Meanwhile times and circumstances have so entirely changed that there is reason to think that this account might be interesting to the public; most of those who were our judges are dead, and of the 121 comrades who were condemned on account of the conspiracy of 1825 only fourteen are still alive, and but three of those took any part in the events of that fatal December day; so there is no reason why these notes should not now be published.

These events now have nothing but an historical interest, and the recalling of them cannot be looked upon as revolutionary, or in any way dangerous to the State, either by the Government or the public. The only result will be to make the real facts known, and to give those who take an interest in the fate of the Dekabrists some account of their characters and way of life.

There is certainly no lack of writings upon the subject; many of my comrades have published fragments in Russian upon that period.2 Baron Korff has put out an official statement, Kowalewski has written a work discussing the part taken by Count Bludow in the Inquiry Commission, and finally, T. H. Schnitzler has given detailed, and for the most part trustworthy, accounts of what took place; to say nothing of other writers, as Ancelot, Lesure, Dupre de St. Maure and Custine.

I feel that many of my companions, had they wished to do so, would have been much better qualified than I am to describe our experiences. A complete relation of all those events has hitherto been wanting – nothing, in fact, was known of our fate in Siberia; besides which, the books above named were entirely restricted to the Russian public. It is very unlikely that those who are yet alive will trouble themselves to give any account of their lives; it has therefore fallen to me, one of the few survivors, to spend part of my remaining days on earth in giving a plain but truthful narration of what I have gone through myself, as well as what I have seen and heard.

I have confined myself almost exclusively to my own experiences, and only added here and there what I have heard from authentic sources and from reliable authority. That I have been faithful to the truth, and have avoided all party feeling, will be acknowledged not only by those who know the events here alluded to, but also by my readers, who, I trust, will see that I feel neither bitterness nor anger in thinking over the trials I have suffered, but that I have only lasting gratitude for all the unfailing kindness which has been shown to me and my comrades in grievous times. I know well enough that men’s characters and actions are very much determined by the spirit of the times, and the circumstances surrounding them, which may make us feel hardly towards those who have been harsh towards us.

Yes, I would entreat my readers – and especially those among them whose hearts burn with indignation and grief as they read my narrative – always to bear in mind the circumstances under which we were condemned and punished: they will then see there was reason enough for our having been treated thus. The same explanation also holds good for those who see names dear to them taking part in deeds which would certainly not be done now.

I need say no more of these recollections of my own, and my dear companions’ lives and sufferings. After many false and unjust judgments of us Dekabrists, and also of our opponents, have been sent forth to the world, the truth and nothing but the truth must be told. Even in our own days, when the great reforms which have taken place in Russia bear witness to the need which existed for them, so curious an episode from the history of the past, brought out in all its details, cannot fail to be interesting, – in narrating which it is hoped that the author will be exonerated from all wish to do more than give a true and faithful account of the trials and struggles endured by himself and his friends.

1 The month of December is called in Russian ‘Dekaber’, hence the name Dekabrist, ‘December man’.

2 E. Obolensky: Notice of K. Rylejew; likewise Bestuchew. J. Puschtschin: The Lyceum and A. Puschkin. J. J. Kuschkin: The Trial before the Inquiry Commission. N. Murawjew: The Proceedings of the Inquiry Commission. Lunin: The Secret Society. Bassargin: Die Schule der Kolonnen. N. Turgenjew: La Russie et les Russes.

Chapter I

THE REVOLT OF THE 14TH DECEMBER, 1825

Early on the morning of the 27th November I entered the drawing-room of my dwelling, in which I had heard a noise. A joiner, who was employed at the Court, and to whom I had given the parquet to keep in order, was at work there. He asked me, with a mysterious look, ‘Have you heard of the great misfortune? The Emperor has just died at Taganrog.’ All those to whom I spoke of it that day, assured me of the truth of the fact. The sensation it created everywhere, I cannot attempt to describe. Our regiment assembled towards evening in the street opposite to our hospital. The colonel of the regiment, General C. J. Bistram, informed me, with a trembling voice, of the death of the Emperor Alexander, and congratulated us upon the new Emperor Constantine’s accession, waved his hat, and cried ‘hurrah.’ Tears were running down his cheeks, as well as those of many of the soldiers, especially those who had fought under Alexander in the Franco-German campaign, and whom he had always called his dear comrades. At his command the cheer resounded through the regiment; and we then returned to our barracks quietly but sadly. All the remaining regiments of Guards took the oath with the same feeling; grief overpowered every other sentiment. If the will of Alexander had been communicated to them in an official manner, the officers and privates would have taken the oath to the Grand Duke Nicholas quietly and willingly.

The fatal news had arrived at the Winter Palace at the moment that they were singing a Te Deum for the restoration of Alexander’s health. The Grand Duke Nicholas made up his mind at once to take the oath of allegiance to the Grand Duke Constantine, who was residing at Warsaw, and himself received the oath for his elder brother from the inner guards of the palace. Count Miloradowitch and Prince A. N. Galitzin, who knew the tenor of Alexander’s will, exerted themselves in vain to prevent his so doing, but Nicholas would not hear of any objection, and only replied shortly, ‘Whoever refuses to follow me and to swear allegiance to my elder brother, is mine and his country’s enemy’. The oath was taken throughout the kingdom without the slightest opposition; it was, nevertheless, everywhere known that Constantine had abdicated, and that a will of Alexander’s was in existence transferring the government to Nicholas. The knowledge of this fact lay like a heavy weight on the mind of the nation. False reports, conjectures, and expectations were daily arising, producing great fear and excitement throughout society. The members of the senate knew that, since the year 1823, a will of Alexander’s lay among their archives with this inscription in his own hand, ‘To be preserved till I demand it, in case of my death, to be opened before anything else is done.’ Of this will copies were kept for security in the archives of the Senate, the Synod, and the Cathedral of Uspenski in Moscow. It will be asked to whom the blame of this mischievous measure is to be attributed: Alexander, who had omitted to recognize Constantine’s resignation of the throne; the Senate, who had not acted up to their duty; or the Grand Duke Nicholas? Knowing as Nicholas had all along, of the existence of the secret societies, and the names of many of their members, he may have wished to avoid in this way any occasion of disturbance or discontent.

From a private point of view the members of the Senate might be justified in their motives, but certainly not in a political, for their duty was to act according to Alexander’s will, and to lay aside any personal feeling.

Had Alexander’s will been opened on the 27th November, it is my firm belief that all, without hesitation, would have sworn allegiance to the Grand Duke Nicholas; at all events, the rising would not have had the excuse of the second oath of allegiance – that oath which annulled the one of sixteen days before, and at the same time showed that the will of Alexander had not been respected, as it should have been according to the existing law.

The interregnum lasted from the 27th November to the 14th December. Subsequently this period of time was obliterated by a manifesto ordering the day of the Emperor Nicholas’s accession to be kept on the 19th November, the day of Alexander’s death.

The Grand Duke Constantine, to whom the whole kingdom swore allegiance, remained quietly at Warsaw, firm in his determination to resign; he received no congratulation, he opened no ministerial packets if the imperial title was added to the superscription of his name. The Grand Duke Michael had been sent to meet the new Emperor; he waited at the Livonian town of Neumal, for his arrival, or for reliable intelligence as to his abdication. In the meantime, everything at St. Petersburg was paralyzed by this painful state of expectation and uncertainty. No music was heard on parade, the women of the higher and middle classes wore mourning, requiems were sung in all the churches; no one could escape the universal depression.

I have already said that the Emperor Nicholas had knowledge of the existence of the secret societies,1 of their object and members, and that they were known also to persons of his immediate surrounding. It will at once be asked what measures were taken by him to anticipate the impending revolt? None whatever; everything was left to chance! In society, among the officers, all kinds of reports were circulated, which often contradicted each other; they grumbled about Alexander’s will, they discussed the right of Constantine to resign, and the magnanimity of Nicholas, who, for fear of infringing the claims of his brother, was unwilling to take advantage of the decided right to the throne conferred upon him by Alexander’s will. Nicholas, according to his own showing, believed that he possessed neither the love of his people nor of his troops.

On the 6th December I visited the inner guard in the Winter Palace. As usual on fête days, long rows of members of the household and officers stood in the saloons to salute the Imperial family on their way to church. No conversation was heard; isolated groups drew together and whispered anxiously.

On the evening of the 10th December I received a note from a comrade, Captain N. P Repin, begging me to come to him at once. It was late; I found him alone, walking up and down with his watch in his hand. In few words he imparted to me that the long-foreseen rising was at hand; a fitting opportunity was come for action, in order to avoid the risk of internal discord or a civil war. Speeches and argument would now be of little avail; material force was needed, – a few battalions and cannon they must have. He wished for my co-operation in raising our first battalion: this, as I only commanded one section,2 I roundly refused; the readiness of the subalterns to join might be depended upon, not so the captains of companies. An attempt was still possible, which was all the more likely to be successful, as it was asserted that Colonel A. F. Moller with his battalion would assist. The same evening I repaired with Repin to Conrad Rylejew’s; he lived in the American Company’s house, near the Blue Bridge. We found him alone, reading: he had wrapped a large handkerchief round him on account of a sore throat. In his look and countenance could be read his enthusiasm for the great cause; his speech was clear and convincing; he pointed out that the new oath to Nicholas now impending would cause great confusion among the soldiers, which, with little trouble, could be advantageously used to further their plan of a change of system. Soon after, Bestuchew and Tchepin Rostowsky entered. After a conference upon various propositions we separated, to have another consultation at the first opportunity.

On the 11th December, I found, to my great annoyance, sixteen young officers of my regiment at Repin’s, discussing the events of the day – they were partly initiated into the secret of the undertaking. I succeeded in calling our host into a side-room, where I represented to him how ill-advised was this hasty initiation of novices. He replied that in the moment of action they would be able to rely upon every one of those present.

Youth allows itself to be so easily carried away. It acknowledges no hindrance, no impossibility; the greater the difficulty and danger the greater the thirst for action. Among all those present, not one was a member of a secret society, save the host and me, and yet they all lent a willing hand to the projected enterprise.

On the 12th December I assisted at a conference at Prince E. P. Obolensky’s, at which the chiefs of the conspiracy residing at St. Petersburg took part; they deliberated upon the means at hand and the impending crisis. The chief command of the armed force was entrusted to Prince Trubetzkoy, in the event of an experienced leader not arriving from Moscow in time. It was decided to assemble the revolting troops on the Senate Square, to collect as many men as possible there, and, under pretext of defending Constantine’s rights, to refuse the oath of obedience and allegiance to the Emperor Nicholas; and, finally, if victory remained on our side, to declare the throne vacant, and appoint a Provisional Government consisting of five members, to which should belong, among others, N. S. Mordwinow and Speransky.3 This government, aided by the Diet and Senate, was to be at the head of affairs till men selected from the whole kingdom should have laid the foundation for a new Constitution. It was not yet known for certain from how many battalions or companies, or from which regiments, we could obtain support. In the meantime, the tumult which the new oath of allegiance would excite among the privates must, at all risks, be turned to account. The Winter Palace, the chief seats of Government, the Banks, and Post-Office were to be occupied by a sufficient body of troops to prevent disorder or individual action. In case the number of troops was too small, and the enterprise should be a failure, a retreat to the military colony of Novgorod, in which they would have a reserve, was intended. These measures were not found strict or decided enough. To all objections and suggestions the same reply was made: ‘You cannot have a trial of such an enterprise, as if it was a parade!’ All those who took part in this meeting were fully prepared to act. When I heard them confidently reckoning upon some of the battalions of my regiment, whose disposition I knew too well for me to place any dependence on them, I held it to be my duty to represent to them the difficulty – nay, impossibility – of attempting an insurrection thus unprepared. ‘There may be little prospect of success, it is true; but a step must be taken – a beginning must be made; strike at once, and the first blow will bear fruit,’ was the answer. The words, ‘A beginning must be made,’ still ring in my ear. The speaker was the enthusiastic Conrad Rylejew, one of the leaders of the conspiracy.