determined to 'awake it from its slumber,' to prove themselves the heroes at home that they had been abroad. They spoke of themselves initially as 'Russian knights' and 'free gardeners' and considered vaguely everything
from building a web of canals between Russia's great rivers to annexing Serbia, Hungary, and even Norway.133 The Decembrist movement had its origins in the formation by guards officers early in 1817 of a 'Union of Salvation or of Sincere and Loyal Sons of the Fatherland,' and patriotic journals, such as Son of the Fatherland, were important media for the publication of their initial proposals for political reform.136
A romantic interest in the history and destiny of their own country was as important to these new radicals as it was to the new conservatives like Karamzin. 'History leads us,' wrote the Decembrist Lunin, 'into the realm of high politics.'137 He called himself 'the False Dmitry,' whose Westernizing policies he glorified in defiance of Karamzin, and he started the general Decembrist chorus in praise of the traditions of Novgorod.138
The parliament (sejm) of early Poland and Lithuania was glorified along with the assembly (yeche) of Novgorod. The aristocratic reformers had many links with Poland and Lithuania.139 Some of the more radical officers sublimated nationality altogether in such new brotherhoods as the Society of the United Slavs. Poland was a model for the hoped-for transformation of the entire empire, because it had been allowed to keep its sejm by Alexander I, who had appeared before it.140 From Lithuania came one of the first and most far-reaching plans for an ail-Russian constitution, Timothy Bok's Note to Be Presented and Read to an Assembly of the Lithuanian Nobility. Bok was arrested shortly after sending it to Alexander I in 1818, but his work helped put in circulation the romantic idea that genuine popular rule had existed throughout Eastern Europe prior to the German Drang nach Osten of late medieval times. The spontaneous and communal qualities of the Baltic peoples and their deep opposition to Germanic autocracy was a theme in the writings of the gifted Esthonian poet-Decembrist Wilhelm Kiichelbecker, which was echoed by the Decembrist poet Bestuzhev-Marlinsky and by the great Polish writer and friend of the Decembrists Adam Mickiewicz.141 There was also a tendency to glorify the Cossacks for their methods of 'gathering the 'eldest ones' from all tribes for the promulgation of laws in accordance with the spirit of the people.'142
Aside from their general bias in favor of increased constitutional liberties and some form of representative government, the Decembrist reformers were most concerned with turning the Russian empire into a federation. The^ United_States was generally the model, Nikita Murav'ev actually proposing that Russia be divided into thirteen original states with the Moscow and Don district serving as an oversized version of the District of Columbia.143 The change of the 'Union of Salvation' into the 'Union of Commonweal' in 1818 involved the adoption of a new decentralized organizational system among the reformers. The Moscow congress of the
various regional councils of the Union early in 1821 was the first nationwide, secret political meeting in Russian history, and it called itself a 'constituent duma.'
But in the early 1820's Alexander began to take alarm. The model for the 'Union of Commonweal' had been the radical German 'Union of Virtue.' In the face of unrest among these German students and a confused mutiny in 1820 within his own favored Semenovsky regiment, Alexander took drastic measures to cut Russia off from the Western Enlightenment: he purged professors and burned books, expelled the Jesuit order, and finally, in the summer of 1822, abolished all Masonic and secret societies.
Secret societies nevertheless continued to exist and to discuss the political questions that Alexander had himself once raised. Still faithful to the concept of reform from above, these groups focused their hopes for a constitutional monarchy on the heir apparent to the throne, the Grand Duke Constantine. A former Mason and long- time resident of Poland, Constantine was thought to be sympathetic with constitutional forms of rule; but when it became apparent after Alexander's death late in 1825 that Constantine's Prussian-trained brother Nicholas was to be the successor, the St. Petersburg reformers staged a large, confused demonstration on December 14 in the Senate Square, which was followed a few days later by an equally foredoomed if somewhat more protracted rising in the Kiev district.
Although the Decembrist movement is often regarded as the starting point of the Russian revolutionary tradition, it is perhaps more properly considered the end of aristocratic reformism: the last episode in the sixty-year period of political discussions that had begun when Catherine first convened her legislative assembly. The majority of Decembrists sought no more than to realize the original aspirations of Catherine and Alexander, to prod their nation into political and moral greatness commensurate with the military greatness assured by Suvorov and Kutuzov.
Most of these loosely affiliated reformers sought only some kind of constitutional monarchy with a federated distribution of power without any major changes in the economic or social order. One of the Decembrist leaders, however, did advocate a more radical course of action for Russia in the 1820's. In so doing, Paul Pestel, leader of the southern wing of the movement, identified himself less with the romantic age in which he lived than with the age of blood and iron which was to follow. He is the most original and prophetic of the Decembrists; a kind of lonely, halfway house between the Russia of Peter and Catherine and that of Lenin and Stalin.
Pestel gave more consideration to the problem of power than any of his reform-minded associates. He believed that a homogeneous, highly centralized state was necessary in the modern world. Nationalities that will
not assimilate (the Jews and Poles) are to be excluded from it; and all other nationalities are to be completely absorbed and Russified. He looked for guidance not to the romantic past traditions of Novgorod and the Cossacks, still less to what he considered the 'opiate' of an English- or French-style constitution. Rather he looked to Russia's first national law code, the Kievan Russkaia Pravda, which he made the title of his own major political treatise. Only uniform, rational laws could bring order out of chaos in Russia; and under current Russian conditions, this required radical social and political change: agrarian redistribution and the transfer of sovereign power to a unicameral republican legislature.
All of this was to be brought about by force if necessary and would require a kind of Jacobin network of organized plotters as well as an interim military dictatorship between the seizure of power and the full realization of 'Russian justice.'144 Pestel devoted great attention to matters of military reform and reorganization and made the most serious effort of any Decembrist to utilize the forms of Masonry for the purposes of revolutionary organization.145 He recognized the value of maintaining the Orthodox Church as an official unifying force in Russia, although he himself was a freethinker, with a partly Protestant background.
His extremism and preoccupation with power link Pestel with Lenin more than with his fellow Decembrists. His vague belief in the peasant commune as a model for social reorganization and his willingness to consider assassination as a weapon of political struggle form a link with the future populists and Social Revolutionaries. His program for resettling the Jews in Israel (though partly anticipated by Potemkin) represents a curious anticipation of Zionism by an unsympathetic outsider.
Yet for all his extremism Pestel bears certain similarities to the two other leading political theorists of the Alexandrian age: Speransky and Karamzin. Taken together, the three of them illustrate the diversity within unity of Enlightenment political thought in Russia. All three were patriotic former Masons who based their arguments on rationalistic grounds. Even if Karamzin was driven by a purely sentimental and conservative impulse and Pestel by a purely ambitious and revolutionary one (as their detractors contended), both wrapped themselves in the mantle of dispassionate, rational analysis and seemed to wear it with at least moderate distinction. All believed that sovereignty in Russia must be undivided, that government should impose order and harmony on the nation rather
