serfs. To the liberal officers, Alexander seemed like one of them: a man of progressive and enlightened views.
The Emperor appointed his adviser Mikhail Speransky to draw up plans for a constitution that was largely based on the Code Napoleon. Had Speransky got his way, Russia would have moved toward becoming a constitutional monarchy governed by a law-based bureaucratic state. But Alexander hesitated to implement his minister’s proposals and, once Russia went to war with France, they were condemned by the conservative nobility, which mistrusted them because they were ‘French’. Speransky fell from power - to be replaced by General Arakcheev, the Minister of War, as the outstanding influence on Alexander’s reign in its second half, from 1812 to 1825. The harsh regime of Arakcheev’s military settlements, where serf soldiers were dragooned into farming and other labour duties for the state, enraged the men of 1812, whose liberal sympathies had been born of respect for the soldiers in the ranks. When the Emperor, against their opposition, persevered with the military camps and put down the peasants’ resistance with a brutal massacre, the Decembrists were enraged. ‘The forcible imposition of the so-called military colonies was received with amazement and hostility’, recalled Baron Vladimir Steigel. ‘Does history show anything similar to this sudden seizure of entire villages, this taking over of the houses of peaceful cultivators, this expropriation of everything which they and their forefathers earned and their involuntary transformation into soldiers?’40 These officers had marched to Paris in the hope that Russia would become a modern European state. They had dreamed of a constitution where every Russian peasant would enjoy the rights of a citizen. But they came back disappointed men - to a Russia where the peasant was still treated as a slave. As
Volkonsky wrote, to return to Russia after Paris and London ‘felt like going back to a prehistoric past’.41
The prince fell into the circle of Mikhail Orlov, an old school friend and fellow officer from 1812, who was well connected to the main Decembrist leaders in the south. At this stage the Decembrist movement was a small and secret circle of conspirators. It began in 1816, when six young Guards officers formed what they initially called the Union of Salvation, a clandestine organization committed to the establishment of a constitutional monarchy and a national parliament. From the start the officers were divided over how to bring this end about: some wanted to wait for the Tsar to die, whereupon they would refuse to swear their oath of allegiance to the next Tsar unless he put his name to their reforms (they would not break the oath they had already sworn to the present Tsar); but Alexander was not even forty years of age and some hotheads like Mikhail Lunin favoured the idea of regicide. In 1818 the society broke up - its more moderate members immediately regrouping as the Union of Welfare, with a rather vague programme of educational and philanthropic activities but no clear plan of action for revolt, although Count Orlov, a leading member of the Union, organized a brave petition to the Tsar calling for the abolition of serfdom. Pushkin, who had friends in the Decembrist camp, characterized their conspiracy as no more than a game in these immortal (but, in Tsarist times, unpublishable) lines intended for his novel
’Twas all mere idle chatter
’Twixt Chateau-Lafite and Veuve Cliquot.
Friendly disputes, epigrams
Penetrating none too deep.
This science of sedition
Was just the fruit of boredom, of idleness,
The pranks of grown-up naughty boys.42
Without a plan for insurrection, the Union concentrated on developing its loose network of cells in Petersburg and Moscow, Kiev, Kishinev and other provincial garrison towns like Tulchin, the headquarters of the Second Army, where Volkonsky was an active member. Volkonsky
had entered Orlov’s conspiracy through the Masonic Lodge in Kiev -a common means of entry into the Decembrist movement - where he also met the young Decembrist leader, Colonel Pavel Ivanovich Pestel.
Like Volkonsky, Pestel was the son of a provincial governor in western Siberia (their fathers were good friends).43 He had fought with distinction at Borodino, had marched to Paris, and had returned to Russia with his head full of European learning and ideals. Pushkin, who met Pestel in 1821, said that he was ‘one of the most original minds I have ever met’.44 Pestel was the most radical of the Decembrist leaders. Charismatic and domineering, he was clearly influenced by the Jacobins. In his manifesto
By 1825 Pestel had emerged as the chief organizer of an insurrection against the Tsar. He had a small but committed band of followers in the Southern Society, which had replaced the Union of Salvation in the south, and an ill-conceived plan to arrest the Tsar during his inspection of the troops near Kiev in 1826, and then march on Moscow and, with the help of his allies in the Northern Society in St Petersburg, seize power. Pestel brought Volkonsky into his conspiracy, placing him in charge of co-ordinating links with the Northern Society and with the Polish nationalists, who agreed to join the movement in exchange for independence should they succeed. The Northern Society was dominated by two men: Nikita Muraviev, a young Guards officer in 1812, who had built up good connections at the court; and the poet Ryleev, who attracted officers and liberal bureaucrats to his ‘Russian lunches’, where cabbage soup and rye bread were served up in preference to European dishes, vodka toasts were drunk to Russia’s liberation from the foreign-dominated court, and revolutionary songs were
sung. The Northern Society’s political demands were more moderate than those of Pestel’s group - a constitutional monarchy with a parliament and civil liberties. Volkonsky shuttled between Petersburg and Kiev, mustering support for Pestel’s planned revolt. ‘I have never been so happy as I was at that time’, he later wrote. ‘I took pride in the knowledge that I was doing something for the people - I was liberating them from tyranny.’46 Although he was in love with, and then married to, Maria Raevsky, he saw very little of his beautiful young bride.
Maria was the daughter of General Raevsky, a famous hero of 1812 who had even been praised by Napoleon. Born in 1805, Maria met Volkonsky when she was seventeen; she had extraordinary grace and beauty for her years. Pushkin called her the ‘daughter of the Ganges’ on account of her dark hair and colouring. The poet was a friend of the Raevskys and had travelled with the general and his family to the Crimea and the Caucasus. As one might expect, Pushkin fell in love with Maria. He often fell in love with beautiful young girls - but this time it was serious, judging by the frequency with which Maria appeared in his poetry. At least two of Pushkin’s heroines - Princess Maria in
How I envied the waves -
Those rushing tides in tumult tumbling
To fall about her feet like slaves!
I longed to join the waves in pressing
Upon those feet these lips… caressing.47
Volkonsky was given the task of recruiting Pushkin to the conspiracy. Pushkin belonged to the broad cultural circles of the Decembrists and had many friends in the conspiracy (he later claimed that, had it not been for a hare that crossed his path and made him superstitious about travelling, he might well have gone to Petersburg to join his friends on Senate Square). As it was, he had been banished to his estate at Mikhailovskoe, near Pskov, because his poetry had inspired them:
There will rise, believe me, comrade A star of captivating bliss, when Russia wakes up from her sleep And when our names will both be written On the ruins of despotism.48
It seems, however, that Volkonsky was afraid of exposing the great poet to the risks involved - so he did not carry out this promise to Pestel. In any case, as Volkonsky no doubt knew, Pushkin was so famous for his indiscretion, and so well connected at court, that he would have been a liability.49 Rumours of an uprising were already circulating around St Petersburg, so, in all likelihood, the Emperor Alexander knew about the Decembrists’ plans. Volkonsky certainly thought so. During an inspection of his regiment, the Emperor gently warned him: ‘Pay more attention to your troops and a little less to my government, which, I am sorry to say, my dear prince, is none of your business.’50
The insurrection had been scheduled for the late summer of 1826. But these plans were hastily brought forward by the
