Emperor’s sudden death and the succession crisis caused by the refusal of the Grand Duke Constantine to accept the throne in December 1825. Pestel resolved to seize the moment for revolt, and with Volkonsky he travelled up from Kiev to St Petersburg for noisy arguments with the Northern society about the means and timing of the uprising. The problem was how to muster the support of the ordinary troops, who showed no inclination towards either regicide or armed revolt. The conspirators had only the vaguest notion of how to go about this task. They thought of the uprising as a military putsch, carried out by order from above; as its commanding officers, they based their strategy on the idea that they could somehow call upon their old alliance with the soldiers. They rejected the initiatives of some fifty junior officers, sons of humble clerks and small landowners, whose organization, the United Slavs, had called upon the senior leaders to agitate for an uprising among the soldiers and the peasantry. ‘Our soldiers are good and simple’, explained one of the Decembrist leaders. ‘They don’t think much and should serve merely as instruments in attaining our goals.’51 Volkonsky shared this attitude. ‘I am convinced that I will carry my brigade’, he
wrote to a friend on the eve of the revolt, ‘for the simple reason that I have my soldiers’ trust and love. Once the uprising commences they will follow my command.’52
In the end, the Decembrist leaders carried with them only some 3,000 troops in Petersburg - far less than the hoped-for 20,000 men, but still enough perhaps to bring about a change of government if well organized and resolute. But that they were not. On 14 December, in garrisons throughout the capital, soldiers were assembled for the ceremony of swearing an oath of allegiance to the new Tsar, Nicholas I. The 3,000 mutineers refused to swear their oath and, with flags unfurled and drums beating, marched to Senate Square, where they thronged in front of the
Within hours the ringleaders of the insurrection had all been arrested and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress (the police had known who they were all along). The conspirators might still have had some chance of success in the south, where it was possible to combine with the Poles in a march on Kiev, and where the main revolutionary forces (something in the region of 60,000 troops) were massed in garrisons. But the officers who had previously declared their support for an uprising were now so shocked by the events in Petersburg that they dared not act. Volkonsky found only one officer who was prepared to join him in the call for a revolt, and in the end, the few hundred troops who marched on Kiev on 3 January were easily dispersed by the government’s artillery.53 Volkonsky was arrested two days later, while
on his way to Petersburg to see Maria one last time. The police had an arrest warrant signed in person by the Tsar.
Five hundred Decembrists were arrested and interrogated, but most of them were released in the next few weeks, once they had provided evidence for the prosecution of the main leaders. At their trial, the first show trial in Russian history, 121 conspirators were found guilty of treason, stripped of their noble titles and sent as convict labourers to Siberia. Pestel and Ryleev were hanged with three others in a grotesque scene in the courtyard of the Fortress, even though officially the death penalty had been abolished in Russia. When the five were strung up on the gallows and the floor traps were released, three of the condemned proved too heavy for their ropes and, still alive, fell down into the ditch. ‘What a wretched country!’ cried out one of them. ‘They don’t even know how to hang properly.’54
Of all the Decembrists, none was closer to the court than Volkonsky. His mother, the Princess Alexandra, could be found in the Winter Palace, smiling in attendance on the Dowager Empress, at the same time as he sat, just across the Neva river in the Peter and Paul Fortress, a prisoner detained at His Majesty’s pleasure. Nicholas was harsh on Volkonsky. Perhaps he felt betrayed by the man he had once played with as a boy. Thanks to the intervention of his mother, Volkonsky was spared the death sentence handed down to the other leaders. But twenty years of penal labour followed by a lifetime of compulsory settlement in Siberia was a draconian enough punishment. The prince was stripped of his noble title and all his medals from the battlefields of the wars against France. He lost control of all his lands and serfs. Henceforth his children would officially belong to the category of ‘state peasants’.55
Count Alexander Benckendorff, the Chief of Police who sent him into exile, was an old school friend of Volkonsky. The two men had been fellow officers in 1812. Nothing better illustrates the nature of the Petersburg nobility, a small society of clans in which everybody knew each other, and most families were related in some way.* Hence the shame the Volkonskys felt on Sergei’s disgrace. None the less, it is
* In 1859 Volkonsky’s son Misha would marry the granddaughter of Count Benckendorff. One of his cousins would marry Benckendorff’s daughter (S. M. Volkonskii, O
hard to comprehend their attempt to erase his memory. Sergei’s elder brother, Nikolai Repnin, disowned him altogether, and in the long years Volkonsky spent in Siberia he never sent him a single letter. A typical courtier, Nikolai was worried that the Tsar might not forgive him if he wrote to an exile (as if the Tsar was incapable of understanding the feelings of a brother). Such small-minded attitudes were symptomatic of an aristocracy which had been brought up to defer all values to the court. Sergei’s mother, too, put her loyalty to the Tsar before her own feelings for her son. She attended the coronation of Nicholas I and received the diamond brooch of the Order of St Catherine on the same day as Sergei, with heavy chains around his feet, began the long journey to Siberia. An old-fashioned lady of the court, Princess Alexandra had always been a stickler for ‘correct behaviour’. The next day she retired to her bed and stayed there, crying inconsolably. ‘I only hope,’ she would tell her visitors, ‘that there will be no other monsters in the family.’56 She did not write to her son for several years. Sergei was profoundly wounded by his mother’s rejection: it contributed to his own rejection of the mores and the values of the aristocracy. In his mother’s view, Sergei’s civil death was a literal death as well.
Maria’s family was just as unforgiving. They blamed her for her marriage and attempted to persuade her to use her right to petition for its annulment. They had reason to suppose that she might do so. Maria had a newborn son to think about and it was far from clear whether she would be allowed to take him with her if she followed Sergei to Siberia. Besides, she did not appear to be entirely happy in the marriage. During the past year - only the first year of their marriage - she had hardly seen her husband, who was absent in the south and preoccupied with the conspiracy, and she had complained to her family that she found the situation ‘quite unbearable’.58 Yet Maria chose to share her husband’s fate. She gave up everything and followed Sergei to Siberia. Warned by the Tsar that she would have to leave her son behind, Maria wrote to him: ‘My son is happy but my husband is unhappy and he needs me more.
It is hard to say exactly what was in Maria’s mind. When she made her choice she did not realize that she would be stripped of the right to return to Russia if she followed Sergei - she was told only when she reached Irkutsk, on the border between Russia and the penal region of Siberia - so it is possible that she was expecting to return to Petersburg. That indeed was what her father thought. But would she have turned back if she had known?
Maria acted out of her sense of duty as a wife. Sergei appealed to this when he wrote to her from the Peter and Paul Fortress on the eve of his departure for Siberia. ‘You yourself must decide what to do. I am placing you in a cruel situation, but
