The Decembrist Pavel Pestel: Russia's First Republican

The Decembrist Pavel Pestel Russia’s First Republican Patrick O’Meara The Decembrist Pavel Pestel Also by Patrick O...

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The Decembrist Pavel Pestel Russia’s First Republican

Patrick O’Meara

The Decembrist Pavel Pestel

Also by Patrick O’Meara: K. F. RYLEEV: A Political Biography of the Decembrist Poet SERGEI M. SOLOVIEV, HISTORY OF RUSSIA Vol. 37: Empress Elizabeth’s Reign, 1741–1744 (translator and editor)

The Decembrist Pavel Pestel Russia’s First Republican

Patrick O’Meara

© Patrick O’Meara 2003 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–98455–2 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data O’Meara, Patrick, 1947 The Decembrist Pavel Pestel: Russia’s first republican/Patrick O’Meara. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–98455–2 1. Pestel’ Pavel Ivanovich, 1793–1826. 2. Decembrists – Biography. 3. Russia – History – Decembrist Uprising, 1825. I. Title DK209.6.P42O45 2003 947⬘.073—dc21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

2003050901

To Claire, Stephanie and John who make it all worth while

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Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

A Note on the Text

x

Part I

1

The Formative Years

1. The Roots of Decembrism

3

2. Education and Upbringing Parentage Childhood At the Corps of Pages

9 9 11 13

3. Military Service In Western Europe At Second Army HQ Colonel of the Vyatka Infantry

17 18 20 29

4. The Political and Social Environment Family, faith and freemasonry Politics, society and ideology

37 37 43

Part II

49

In the Decembrist Secret Societies

5. Pestel and the Decembrist Movement The Union of Salvation The Union of Welfare in Tulchin St Petersburg meeting: January 1820 Moscow Congress, May 1821

51 51 56 61 66

6. Ideologist of the Decembrist Movement: Russian Justice Genesis and composition Pestel’s agenda Pestel’s Russian style Assessments of Russian Justice

72 73 79 84 86

7. In the Southern Society Formation: from the Union of Welfare to the Southern Society

89

vii

89

viii Contents

Organisation and structures Recruitment Aims of the Southern Society Pestel’s influence

96 100 102 106

8. Pestel and the Northern Society The liabilities of disunity In St Petersburg Pestel after St Petersburg

114 114 118 121

9. The Polish Connection First contacts with the Polish Patriotic Society Formal negotiations and Pestel’s role Last attempts to reach agreement

124 125 129 136

Part III

From Aspiration to Retribution

139

10. The Planned Coup d’état and Provisional Government The fate of the imperial family The ‘cohorte perdue’ The Bobruisk and Belotserkov plans Pestel’s role The planned coup The provisional revolutionary government Pestel’s ‘crisis’

141 142 144 147 148 151 154 158

11. Arrest, Investigation and Sentence Pestel’s arrest The ‘arrest’ of Russian Justice Under investigation Pestel’s execution

161 161 169 171 177

12. Pestel and the Roots of Russian Republicanism Pestel as revolutionary Settling of accounts Conclusion

185 185 189 191

Notes

196

Bibliography

224

Index

229

Acknowledgements My thanks are due to the University of Dublin, Trinity College, for periods of study leave and for funding, particularly to the Trinity Trust and the Arts and Social Sciences Benefaction Fund for grants to assist research trips to Moscow and St Petersburg. I am grateful for the visiting scholarships and fellowships I have enjoyed while researching and writing this book at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, Washington DC, the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University, Canberra and Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. I am immensely grateful, too, to Professor V.A. Fedorov of Moscow State University for encouraging the project in its early stages and to Peter Beevor, Tommy Murtagh and Ewa Sadowska, who generously read entire drafts and made many useful suggestions from which the final version has benefited considerably. Such shortcomings as remain should be debited to my account. Finally, I would like to thank my editor at Palgrave for timing the publication of this book, long in preparation, to coincide with the 300th anniversary of the founding in 1703 of St Petersburg, a city so closely and so poignantly associated with Pavel Pestel and the Decembrists. PATRICK O’MEARA

ix

A Note on the Text A note on transliteration I have used a modified form of the transliteration system used in Oxford Slavonic Papers, omitting diacritics from names in the text (Pestel, Novosiltsev, Muraviev) but retaining them in references (Pestel’, Novosil’tsev, Murav’ev). In referring to Romanov family members, I have used the anglicised forms Alexander, Nicholas, Constantine and Maria, and in all cases I have preferred Peter to Petr. The ‘Italian’ Decembrist I have called Poggio in the text but Podzhio in transliterated references.

Dates Dates are given in Old Style (Julian Calendar) which lagged 12 days behind New Style (Gregorian Calendar) in nineteenth-century Russia. For example, the Decembrist uprising in St Petersburg took place in 1825 on 14 December (OS) but on 26 December (NS).

Abbreviations GARF Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation). f. ⫽ fond (collection) op. ⫽ opis’ (inventory) ed. khr. ⫽ edinitsa khraneniya (item) d. ⫽ delo (file) l. ⫽ list (folio); ll. ⫽ listy (folios) Vd Vosstanie dekabristov. Materialy i dokumenty. Dela verkhovnogo ugolovnogo suda i sledstvennoi komissii, A.A. Pokrovskii. M.N. Pokrovskii, M.V. Nechkina, V.P. Kozlov, S.V. Mironenko (eds) (Moscow, 1925–2001), 19 vols.

x

A Note on the Text xi

I became a republican to the core of my being and could see no greater Well-being or higher Blessing for Russia than a republican system of government. When I discussed this matter with those who shared my way of thinking we started to picture the happiness, as we understood it, that Russia would then enjoy. As we did so, I must admit that we became so delighted and excited that we were all prepared not only to accept but to actively propose everything needed to achieve the full realisation, complete reinforcement and implementation of this order of things. (Pavel Ivanovich Pestel’s statement of 12 January 1826 to the Investigating Committee into the Decembrist affair, Vosstanie dekabristov. Materialy (Moscow-Leningrad, 1927), vol. iv, p. 91).


Part I The Formative Years


1 The Roots of Decembrism

The Russian Empire at the beginning of the nineteenth century covered a vast territory extending from the Vistula and eastern Poland, taking in the whole of north-east Asia, across to the Bering Straits and beyond to Alaska. The population of this huge landmass doubled from 30 million around the time of the French Revolution to almost 60 million in the space of 50 years. But with its enormous expanse and large population Russia was economically among the most backward of countries. This was largely due to its political and social structure. By the 1830s tsarist autocracy held absolute sway over an estimated 20 million serfs or one-third of the entire population of the empire. To this must be added a further 15 million peasants bound by various categories of servitude. It was the enserfed peasantry which formed the basis of Russia’s rigid social structure, prolonged her parlous economic state and stifled the development of her still primitive political culture. To implement its rule, the imperial court in St Petersburg maintained, largely at the serfs’ expense, a costly and inefficient bureaucratic and military apparatus. In spite of these evident social and political deficiencies the dawn of a new century, marked by the accession in 1801 of the charismatic and reputedly liberal young Tsar Alexander I, generated a mood of unprecedented optimism in Russia. There was a widespread confidence, to a considerable extent fostered by the tsar himself, that he would initiate long overdue and badly needed social and political reform. The tsar’s political course, however, was hesitant and conservatively inclined and his ultimate failure to fulfil his early promise gave rise to the impatience and disappointment that were the main sources of the growth from 1816 of the political secret societies which came to constitute the Decembrist movement. It culminated in the first armed political rising in Russian history and its name derives retrospectively from the month in which the 3

4


insurgency occurred in St Petersburg in 1825. The movement consisted of a sequence of secret societies, modelled on Masonic lodges, the first of which, the Union of Salvation, was headed by young army officers Sergei Trubetskoi, Nikita Muraviev and his cousin Alexander Muraviev. Recently returned from the post-Napoleonic Wars of Liberation in Western Europe and impressed by European political and social institutions, they were typical of the patriotic and idealistic sons of the gentry anxious to initiate and implement fundamental changes in Russian politics and society. In 1818 Trubetskoi and the Muravievs formed a new, more broadly based society, the Union of Welfare which recruited more than 200 members. In 1821 its governing directorate declared the Union defunct as a way of ridding the organisation of unreliable and unwanted members. This move resulted in the division of the rump of the Union of Welfare into two parts. These were the Northern Society, which was formed largely by junior officers of the guards regiments stationed in St Petersburg, and the Southern Society whose members were drawn from the regiments of the Second Army based in Ukraine at Tulchin. Both groups soon started to elaborate constitutional projects for a new Russia. While both agreed that autocracy and serfdom would definitely have to go, they disagreed on the future shape of Russia’s social and political institutions. The acknowledged leader of the Southern Society, Colonel Pavel Pestel, drew up a programme he called Russian Justice which envisaged the establishment of a dictatorial ‘Provisional supreme revolutionary government’. Essentially a military junta, it was to implement a constitution whereby Russia would become a strictly centralised republic with a unicameral legislative assembly which would guarantee all citizens of Russia fundamental civil rights. However, a very different future for Russia was set out in the Constitution of the leader of the Northern Society, Nikita Muraviev. According to this, a constituent assembly would be convened to determine the institutions of state but the Muraviev programme already defined Russia as a constitutional monarchy with a powerful federal structure similar to that of the United States. It further envisaged the division of the country into 15 states with a bicameral legislature consisting of an appointed state duma and an elected chamber of peoples’ representatives. Although the Northern and Southern societies kept in constant touch with each other, their discussions about a concerted plan of action made negligible progress. This was despite the presence in St Petersburg of a small ‘cell’ of Southern Society members which acted as intermediary between the directorates of the two societies. The impasse reached between Pestel and Muraviev over their respective projects for Russia’s

The Roots of Decembrism 5

future was in no way alleviated by the former’s visit to St Petersburg for protracted negotiations in 1824. The only points of agreement reached were that representatives of the two societies should meet again in 1826 to find a way forward and that the death of Alexander I, who was still only 45 years old in 1824, would be the signal for action. But the Southern Society had its own problems. Its organisational complexities were compounded by the location of two of its branches in the Ukrainian villages of Vasilkov and Kamenka, both far enough away from Tulchin to be an added inconvenience. Until 1822, it also had a small outpost in the Moldavian capital, Kishinev. Matters were made still worse by the fact that Pavel Pestel resided not in Tulchin, the location of the Second Army’s headquarters, but 60 km away in the village of Lintsy where from 1822 his Vyatka Infantry Regiment was quartered. In an effort to counter the difficulties posed by distance, members of the Southern Society met and conferred at the January (Epiphany) trade-fair in Kiev in 1822 and in the following three years. At the 1823 conference Pestel first enunciated his republican platform, placed regicide firmly on the Decembrists’ agenda and outlined his revolutionary plans for the transformation of Russia’s rural economy. The ‘third conference’ of 1825 saw Pestel conduct negotiations on future collaboration with a delegation from the Polish Patriotic Society. Inexorably, information about illicit secret activity began to spread beyond the closed circle of the conspiracy’s membership and, in due course, as a result of traitors’ reports, the existence of the secret societies and the identities of many of their members became known to the authorities. However, it was not betrayal that brought about the rapid dénouement of the nine-year-old movement but the unexpected death of Alexander I in the Black Sea town of Taganrog on 19 November 1825. It was generally expected that he would be succeeded by the next in line to the throne, his brother Constantine. However, in 1823, at Alexander’s insistence, Constantine had renounced his right of succession in favour of their younger brother, Nicholas. The latter was for some curious reason never informed of these arrangements with the result that, on hearing the news of Alexander’s death, he and Constantine immediately swore allegiance to each other. This confusion precipitated a two-week interregnum during which the Decembrists in St Petersburg, under the energetic leadership of the poet Kondratii Ryleev, decided to make their move. The death of Alexander I was, after all, the agreed signal for action. They learned that the swearing of the loyal oath to Nicholas by all the regiments in St Petersburg was scheduled for 14 December. By that afternoon 3000

6


insurgent troops under the command of 30 officers and the direction of six civilian members of the secret society were drawn up on Senate Square awaiting further instructions. Nicholas and his generals, nervously imagining the number of mutinous troops to be four times greater than it actually was, were at first thoroughly disconcerted. As things stood, there was a real possibility that the Decembrists would seize the Winter Palace and the Peter-Paul Fortress and place the imperial family under arrest. However, the failure of their elected commander, Colonel Prince Sergei Trubetskoi, to appear on Senate Square broke the chain of command thus enabling Nicholas to take advantage of the insurgents’ confusion. It took only a few salvos of artillery to disperse them before the early onset of darkness. There followed a wave of arrests which continued over the next weeks. After preliminary interrogation in the Winter Palace, where Nicholas himself participated in the arraignment of the ringleaders, they were incarcerated in the Peter-Paul Fortress. On 17 December 1825 the Investigating Committee into the Decembrist affair convened for the first time and met on 145 further occasions until its adjournment exactly six months later on 17 June 1826. The numbers arrested swelled early in January 1826 following the failure of the second Decembrist uprising, that of the Chernigov Regiment in Ukraine, led by Southern Society members Sergei Muraviev-Apostol and Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin. Unlike the uprising in St Petersburg on 14 December, it extended over six days from 29 December. After some initial success the insurgents were eventually overwhelmed by the superior force of troops loyal to Nicholas I. Pavel Pestel played no part in either uprising, having been escorted from Tulchin to St Petersburg on 26 December following his arrest two weeks earlier. Having interrogated 579 men, the Investigating Committee passed its findings in respect of 121 prisoners to the Supreme Criminal Court which imposed sentences of hard labour and Siberian exile according to 11 categories of culpability. Five prisoners, placed ‘beyond category’, were sentenced to death and hanged on 13 July 1826. Among these was Pavel Pestel. In 1856, following the death of Nicholas I and to mark the coronation of Alexander II, the surviving Decembrists were amnestied and permitted to return to Russia from Siberia. In the meantime however, about two-thirds of them had perished in exile. The Decembrists are considered to be the fathers and first martyrs of the Russian revolutionary movement because they were the first generation to combine an ideologically based assault on autocracy and serfdom with the resolve to achieve their goals by force. The executions and the protracted sufferings of those exiled to Siberian lead mines added to the aura of martyrdom.

The Roots of Decembrism 7

The Decembrists’ failure, however, also cost Russia dear. As well as losing many of its brightest and best sons to the scaffold and Siberia, the Decembrist conspiracy impelled Tsar Nicholas I along a reactionary path from which for 30 years he never veered. It thereby accelerated the parting of the ways between the court of Nicholas I and those members of the nobility increasingly alienated from it whose loyalty had hitherto been unwavering. Autocratic power in Russia was more than ever suspicious of proposals for modernisation and change and so routinely rejected them. The result therefore, paradoxically, was to delay such long overdue social reform as the abolition of serfdom for which the Decembrists, and Pestel in particular, had agitated over 40 years before Alexander II at last decreed it in 1861. Pavel Ivanovich Pestel, the Decembrist movement’s ideologue, has rightly attracted the attention of many of Russia’s foremost historians and their works are frequently cited and discussed in the following pages. Among the earliest was N.P. Pavlov-Silvanskii whose 16-page essay on him in the Russian Biographical Dictionary (1902) was a landmark in the still emergent historiography of the Decembrist movement. It contained a remarkably full indication of the interpretative challenges posed by Pestel’s personality and motives as well as the first published summary of Russian Justice.1 An obituarist of Pavlov-Silvanskii remarked that even in 1906 it was difficult to gain archival access to Russian Justice ‘for fear, it seemed, that its release would precipitate the collapse of the entire Russian empire’.2 Pavlov-Silvanskii was also the first historian to gain access to the Pestel family letters and to discover the tender link between Pestel and his remarkable mother, Elizaveta Krok, who was the subject of an article he had drafted before his death.3 Among the other outstanding writers on Pestel was B.E. Syroechkovskii (1881–1961). Like Pavlov-Silvanskii, he had intended to publish a book on Pestel but ended up contributing a number of authoritative articles which tackled the complex issues of Pestel’s ideological evolution and leadership role. Syroechkovskii’s penetrating studies range from the development of the Decembrist’s political views to his conversion to republicanism: they are listed in the Bibliography. His pioneering work on Russian Justice, as well as that of S.N Chernov, N.M. Druzhinin and A.A. Pokrovskii, is discussed in Chapter 6. In some of her earlier articles, the doyenne of Soviet historiography on the Decembrist movement, M.V. Nechkina (1910–85) presented a rounded picture of Pestel as a flawed revolutionary plagued by doubts amounting from the end of 1824 to a ‘crisis’. In her later works, however, Pestel acquired a less nuanced ‘socialist realist’ profile of an unbending fighter

8


for freedom, ‘correctly’ reacting against Russia’s feudal backwardness and only marginally inspired by Western ideas, an approach which became typical of much of Soviet historiography well into the 1970s.4 His Lutheran faith and his breakdown in the Peter-Paul Fortress were studiously ignored. The liabilities of the continuing ideological and organisational disunity between the Northern and Southern societies were played down and replaced by exaggerated and unsubstantiated claims of their harmony and united revolutionary resolve. There were exceptions to this tendency, in the works, for example, of S.S. Landa and V.V. Pugachev, which are discussed in due course.5 Another Decembrist specialist from the same more recent generation of Russian historians, A.V. Semenova, has written several important articles, also listed in the Bibliography. Her work adds significantly to our understanding of Pestel’s family circle, the Decembrist’s role both in the Southern Society and in the Second Army and his plans for Russia’s future government. However, apart from one or two popularising biographies, Pestel surprisingly has still not been the subject of a dedicated monograph.6 The present work is an attempt to remedy this gap in the literature by offering as full a portrait of Pestel, ‘warts and all’, as the sources will allow. The book is based on unpublished archival sources, on the 19 volumes of published documents of the Investigating Committee (Vosstanie dekabristov. Materialy i dokumenty) and the extensive, informative and endlessly entertaining Decembrist memoirs, details of which will be found in the Bibliography. It has also relied on an indispensable reference work, the Who’s Who of the Decembrists compiled by S.V. Mironenko, to whom every scholar in the field is enormously indebted.7 The greatest challenge this formidable array of sources presents the biographer of Pavel Pestel is the obligation to reconcile conflicting evidence and views as to this remarkable figure’s enigmatic character, motivation and intentions, the extent of his influence on the Decembrists generally and his role as the movement’s ideological leader, issues which have remained hitherto, after all, obdurately elusive.

2 Education and Upbringing

Family upbringing and education are generally held to be the crucial formative experiences of our lives. Parental influences and role models in particular are said to shape and mould individual development from childhood through adolescence to adulthood. Such reconstruction of Pavel Ivanovich Pestel’s education and upbringing as our sources will permit, provides an indispensable prelude to our study of the mature Russian army officer, political thinker and Decembrist conspirator. This chapter explores, therefore, Pestel’s family background and circumstances, focusing particularly on his parents, and his education at the elite Corps of Pages.

Parentage Pavel Ivanovich Pestel was one of over twenty descendants of immigrant German families, including Andrei Rozen, Ivan and Mikhail Fonvizin, Aleksandr fon-der Brigen, Ivan Focht, Vasilii Tizengauzen and Ferdinand Volf, to become involved in the Decembrist movement. The Pestels came to Russia from Saxony early in the eighteenth century during the reign of Peter the Great. Pavel Ivanovich’s grandfather, Boris Vladimirovich, appears to have initiated the family’s tradition of service at court in the reign of Empress Elizabeth in 1751. He became St Petersburg’s Master of Posts ( pocht-direktor), was ennobled in 1781 and died in 1811.1 His son, Ivan Borisovich, was born in Moscow in 1765.2 After a short spell in the Saxon army of Stanislas Augustus, he entered the service of Catherine the Great in 1782. A well-educated man, he rose rapidly to succeed his father in 1789 as Moscow’s Master of Posts, aged 24.3 Then, in 1798, Tsar Paul I appointed him to the same post in St Petersburg. In Alexander I’s reign he held the post of Governor-General of Siberia from 1806 to 1819 and was 9

10 The Decembrist Pavel Pestel

made a state-counsellor in 1816. In his official capacity he enjoyed direct and frequent access to his imperial master, who instructed him to report to him directly on Siberian matters. Ivan Borisovich was pleased to recall that ‘there was no end to the expression of favour and approval of the manner of my service and the Sovereign’s great kindness towards me was the talk of the town’.4 But his good standing kindled widespread jealousy and prompted attacks from his numerous enemies, making life in St Petersburg ‘a real torment’ for him. His fall from grace began in April 1817 when he nearly lost his Siberian post to the incorruptible Lieutenant-General G.I. Glazenap who, in December 1815, had been appointed Officer-in-Command of the Siberian Corps. Following an official inquiry, however, Pestel’s reputation was fully vindicated.5 But his reprieve was only temporary. In March 1819, on the death of Glazenap, Pestel was replaced as Governor-General of Siberia by the disgraced favourite, M.M. Speranskii. I.B. Pestel remained at court until finally brought down by charges of negligence instigated by Speranskii. These included complaints that he had given too much power to local governors, had connived at their corrupt practices, even taking bribes himself, and – worst of all – that he had governed Siberia from the distant comfort of his St Petersburg home. For good measure, Speranskii pronounced him to have ‘one of the emptiest heads’ he had ever known.6 This was not the first time in his career that Ivan Borisovich had been the victim of denunciation. During the reign of Paul, Count F.V. Rostopchin, Governor-General of Moscow, one of those high officials envious of Ivan Borisovich’s position at court, had successfully intrigued against him by implicating him in a fictitious conspiracy of the sort which the emperor all too readily accepted as fact.7 Ivan Borisovich’s own declared motives for holding high office were, needless to say, purely altruistic. He wrote to his son Pavel: ‘High office brings just one great joy: the possibility of making more and more people happy.’8 While Ivan Pestel may not have been a model governor-general, the memoirist and conservative journalist, Nikolai Grech, no friend of the Pestels, grossly exaggerated when he suggested that during his term of office ‘Siberia groaned under a most cruel yoke’ and that ‘Pestel surrounded himself with crooks and rogues’. Equally extravagant is Grech’s observation that ‘the pre-eminent conspirator (P.I. Pestel) was the son of that cruel-hearted pro-consul who was the enemy of every free idea and of every noble impulse’.9 After his enforced retirement in 1822, which for him represented a bitter personal blow as well as financial disaster, Ivan Borisovich returned in June 1823 to his modest Smolensk estate, Vasilievo. There he

Education and Upbringing 11

devoted his energies to the advancement of his sons’ careers and to the endless struggle to repay his debts. These had accrued, as his daughter later claimed, because (pace Speranskii) he had consistently refused to supplement his income by taking bribes in the manner so endemic to the Russian civil service. Indeed, the contrast in fortunes between the highly placed official and the disgraced pensioner could hardly have been more complete, as is clear from a report commissioned by Nicholas I on the circumstances of the Decembrists and their families. The document noted that the former courtier had no property, and lived on his pension (‘generously granted by the merciful sovereign’). His wife (Elizaveta Ivanovna) owned a small estate with 149 peasants which, however, after the ravages of 1812 and several successive years’ crop failure generated no revenue. On the contrary, as we learn from the report, the peasants sought financial assistance from their owner.10 Pavel was apparently the only one of Ivan Borisovich’s four sons not to remain indifferent to his parents’ financial plight. In a letter to them of 13 March 1822 he offered to pay off his father’s debts and in August the following year he generously sent him 2000 roubles, a sum amounting to more than twelve months’ salary.11 Pavel Pestel’s mother, Elizaveta Ivanovna (nee Krok), was the daughter of a minor German writer. Gifted and intelligent, a devoted mother of a close-knit family, she herself tutored the young Pestel until he was twelve years old.12 She was ambitious for all five of her children but particularly for her favourite son, Pavel, of whom she was enormously proud.13 A family friend, Anastasiya Ivanovna Kolechitskaya, has left an affectionate portrait of Elizaveta Ivanovna in a diary entry of 4 January 1826 in which she describes her as ‘a woman of remarkable intellect, possessing knowledge of which few women could boast’, and a skilled conversationalist in whose company ‘one could derive such pleasure and learn so much’.14 However, Nikolai Grech, with a characteristically backhanded compliment, recalled that while she was ‘intelligent and not merely educated but erudite’ she nevertheless ‘instilled in her children, especially her eldest, Pavel, both arrogance and inordinate ambition, combined with cunning and secretiveness’.15 Grech, however, confirmed that it was Elizaveta Ivanovna who took charge of Pavel’s early education.

Childhood The future Decembrist was born in Moscow on June 24 (July 5) 1793 and educated at home until he entered the Corps of Pages (Pazheskii korpus) in


St Petersburg in 1803. His studies there were interrupted from 1805 by a four-year visit with his younger brother, Vladimir, to his ‘clever and enlightened’ grandmother Krok in Dresden, where his secondary education continued under a local teacher, A. Seidel.16 The Krok household was very much a German equivalent of the Russianised Pestels: conservative and middle class, to all intents and purposes insulated from the political upheaval of the years of Austerlitz, Tilsit and Erfurt and only superficially affected by the French presence in Saxony at that time. There was little enough here to arouse any freethinking notions in the mind of the young Pestel. Unfortunately we do not know what Seidel taught the Pestel boys during their years in Dresden, but on their return to Russia Pavel, whose critical faculties evidently developed early, wrote to his grandmother complaining about the uselessness of much of what they had been taught. He lamented the lack of ‘relevant’ tuition and the time that had been wasted on trifles.17 But for all Pestel’s precocious misgivings, his parents must have considered it an advantage for at least part of their sons’ education to be obtained abroad, though Ivan Borisovich urged the boys not to forget where their true allegiance lay. He wrote to them: ‘I am very glad to hear from Seidel that you continue to love your fatherland … Russia has been our fatherland for a hundred years.’ He expressed the same idea some years later, when he told them how pleased he was to hear that they were not neglecting their Russian, ‘so essential for you in your fatherland, the service of which in time … should always be the most important object of your education’. In his letters to them he impressed upon his young sons that a central part of such service would be to help those less fortunate than themselves.18 This sense of honour and service was a theme on which grandmother Krok also elaborated in her letters to the boys.19 Of passing interest as an indication of young Pavel’s linguistic prowess is the fact that he corresponded in English with one Wm. Jackson, resident in Moscow, who wrote: ‘I desire you would always write to me in English, and not harbour the thought of not writing well. Your last letter was tolerably well wrote (sic).’20 The only other glimpse of Pestel at this time which our scant sources allow us is again provided by Grech who recalled seeing him on his return from the Europe of Napoleon in 1810. Pestel claimed to have seen Napoleon and when Grech asked him how the emperor looked, the 17-year-old Pestel laughingly replied that, like his father, he had put on weight. The memoirist doubted that Pestel’s period of education in Dresden could be blamed for his subsequent involvement in the Decembrist conspiracy. After all, his younger brother Vladimir was not only an officer of the Emperor’s suite on 14 December 1825 but went on


to enjoy a successful service career and became Governor of Crimea.21 On his return from Dresden and while he was preparing to return to the Corps of Pages, Pestel wrote a lengthy essay entitled ‘The topography of Russia’. Preserved in archives, its neat presentation and careful binding provide a clear reflection of parental pride in young Pavel’s educational achievements.22 Pestel’s German relatives had given him some experience of life outside Russia, and his knowledge of German and French gave him continuing access to Western European culture. From his parents he had also inherited Lutheranism to which he would turn, especially in the last year of his life. However, Ivan Borisovich was most insistent that his sons should be useful Russian citizens and, perhaps as a result of his own career disappointments, he was very ambitious for them all, but particularly for Pavel.

At the Corps of Pages In July 1810, Pestel resumed his studies at the Corps of Pages where he showed himself to be an exceptionally gifted student. The Corps was founded in 1759 to prepare young men for service at the court of Elizabeth, and in 1802 was reorganised along the lines of a military academy. Pestel joined it just as it was relocated to new premises which later housed the prestigious Suvorov Military Academy. The Corps of Pages was one of a number of military academies in St Petersburg attended by 125 future Decembrists, including the First Cadet College, the Second Cadet College and the Naval Cadet College. Curiously, Pestel’s parents opted against sending Pavel to the Lutheran boarding school, Peterschule, on Nevskii Prospekt, which was attended by the Decembrists M.A. Fonvizin, A.F. Brigen and A.A. Kryukov. Pestel was among 24 graduates of the Corps of Pages who were subsequently brought before the Investigating Committee into the Decembrist affair.23 In his memoirs, one of them, Alexander Gangeblov, recalled his student days at the Corps of Pages from 1813 to 1821. He had a low opinion of the school’s teaching which consisted of dreary rote learning. With very few exceptions the officer cadets studied not from intellectual curiosity but solely in order to become army officers.24 Pestel was evidently among the rare exceptions. One of his most influential teachers was Carl Theodor Hermann who stimulated the boy’s developing interest in history and political economy. Karl Fedorovich German, to give him his Russian name, was born in Danzig in 1767, the son of a Prussian official, and studied at Goettingen University. He came to Russia in 1795 and occupied posts in


the Academy of Sciences and then in the St Petersburg Pedagogical Institute. However, in 1821 he fell victim to the wholesale purge of schools and universities and was banned from teaching for his ‘harmful tendencies’.25 In spite of the government crackdown on educational establishments at this time, these schools, in the recently expressed view of a British historian, ‘created nothing less than a new class: the military intelligentsia’.26 Pestel later testified to the Investigating Committee that he had ‘a special penchant for political sciences’, and that he had studied them extensively at the Corps.27 Here German encouraged his pupils to read from a wide range of major authors in the political and social sciences. His reading list included works on political economy and state administration. Among them were Montesquieu’s De L’Esprit des Lois, John Locke’s Treatises of Government, Rousseau’s Du Contrat Social, Mably’s On Legislation or the Principle of Laws, Filangieri’s Art of Legislature, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Jeremy Bentham’s treatise, Introduction to Principles of Morals and Legislation. While we cannot be absolutely certain which of these works Pestel read, his enthusiasm for political science led him to some familiarity with the main ideas of all these authors.28 He evidently read voraciously, convinced that without a wide-ranging knowledge ‘it was not possible to be of use to oneself, to one’s society or one’s country’.29 This interest seems to have been awakened at an early age by reading in his parents’ library which contained works by progressive French publicists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including Voltaire, Rousseau, J.-F. Marmontel, Saint-Simon, as well as books on European history, military history, mathematics, physics and geography.30 In Dresden, too, Pestel would have made a somewhat precocious acquaintance with current European literature on which he was to build later as a serving officer in post-Napoleonic Western Europe. In his memoirs, the Decembrist Nikolai Lorer comments on the extensive library which Pestel had amassed by the time they met in 1824 at Lintsy, near Tulchin in Ukraine, where the HQ of the Second Army were located. Pestel’s room was lined with shelves of books particularly on politics and economics. ‘What this man had not read in his time and in how many foreign languages, I just do not know’, Lorer remarked with undisguised admiration.31 In his interesting attempt to reconstruct Pestel’s library, the Soviet historian P.A. Zaionchkovskii produced an inventory of 64 titles. He concedes, however, that in the light of such contemporary evidence as Lorer’s, the collection was likely to have been considerably larger than this.32 V.I. Semevskii includes in the list of the most influential of the authors with whose works Pestel was familiar the names of Destutt de Tracy, d’Holbach, Hélvetius, Condillac, Diderot,


Beccaria, de Stael, Sismondi, Machiavelli and Say. We shall return to the subject of Pestel’s reading in Chapter 5 when we consider the sources of his draft constitution, Russian Justice. Meanwhile, Pestel graduated top of his class, well on his way to becoming ‘one of the most highly educated people of his day’.33 In December 1811 the emperor himself examined the Kamer-pages; Pestel came first, with V.F. Adlerberg second.34 But his brilliance aroused the jealousy and hostility of many, including Director Klinger. Like Chatskii, the hero of Alexander Griboedov’s play Gore ot uma (‘Woe from Wit’), it was Pestel’s misfortune to be clever. He was that rare pupil of whom his teachers used to remark: ‘The others study, but he understands.’35 Even so hostile a commentator as Grech was constrained to admit that Pestel’s performance, particularly in sciences and languages, was ‘incomparably superior to Adlerberg’s’.36 It did not help that the Pestels were regarded as upstarts anyway – particularly by those who resented so-called ‘Germans’ at court – and Pavel’s success was an additional irritant among his peers, most of whom considered themselves to be his social superiors.37 Klinger favoured the second cadet, also of German descent, Vladimir Adlerberg for the top placing. It was a matter of some consequence, since the top cadet could expect to be commissioned as a second lieutenant, while the rest passed out with the lower rank of ensign. Klinger now put Adlerberg forward for this prestigious preferment, whereupon Pestel’s father protested and enlisted the support of no less a figure than Count Aleksei Arakcheev, the tsar’s powerful chief executive. Perhaps as a negotiating ploy, Arakcheev pointed out to the tsar that while Pestel had received no grant from the treasury, Adlerberg had already enjoyed tuition and maintenance at the state’s expense.38 Although the tsar had been personally impressed by Pestel’s examination performance, he had received a report on him from Klinger, apparently encouraged by the Dowager Empress, Maria Fedorovna, which was very damaging. It alleged that Pestel was a recalcitrant individual and that: He has been observed more than once conversing in a manner quite unsuitable for a student of the Corps of Pages; furthermore, he protested against the punishment of a classmate by the Corps’ authorities. He likes to influence his classmates; is self-dependent and reticent. For good measure Klinger added that Pestel was generally critical of the Corps’ regulations and had been heard to discuss various taboo


subjects: specifically the significance of the tsar’s anointing at his coronation, the injustice of serfdom and the desirability of the equality of all the people.39 In spite of this highly compromising denunciation, the tsar ruled that the marks awarded should stand and confirmed Pestel’s place at the top of the list.40 But the damage to Pestel’s reputation was done and, almost certainly as part of the compromise struck with the pro-Adlerberg faction, although he was the best student he did not in the end pass out from the Corps of Pages with any higher rank than the rest of his class.

3 Military Service

The theme of military service is central to the political biography of any Decembrist: there were only a handful involved in the conspiracy and the uprisings in St Petersburg and Vasilkov who were not either serving or former army officers. After their arrest, the first of many forms and written statements they were required to complete was the formularnyi spisok or service record. This provides a military curriculum vitae, detailing regimental affiliation, promotions and awards obtained, campaigns and battles fought. Although not always free from error and imperfect recall, this particular document is a vitally important source of reference for historians of the Decembrist movement. Its importance is reflected in the fact that it always occupies first place in the files (dela) of individual Decembrists, whether in archives or as published in the series Vosstanie dekabristov. Dokumenty. (The Decembrist Uprising. Documents.) This chapter considers the impact made on Pestel by the experience of Western Europe he gained as a serving officer during the Wars of Liberation from 1813 to 1815. It traces his military career, particularly with regard to the problems delaying his promotion, and investigates the reasons for the ambivalent attitudes to him on the part of some of his key superior officers and Tsar Alexander himself. As already mentioned, in spite of Pestel’s proven skills and high intelligence, which certainly earned him the respect and admiration of some, there were many who viewed him with suspicion and dislike. A major concern of this chapter is, therefore, to assess the extent to which this divergence of perceptions was the result of personality differences, professional jealousy or misgivings about Pestel’s reckless radicalism and suspicions of his probable involvement in secret political societies.

17


In Western Europe In December 1811 Pestel was commissioned with the rank of ensign in the Lithuanian (Litovskii, later Moskovskii or Moscow) Guards Regiment, as were the other seven members of his class at the Corps.1 His father advised him to lose no opportunity to establish useful contacts: ‘The more well-known acquaintances a young man has as he enters society, the better will be the opinion formed of him.’2 Such advice was repeated at intervals over the next twelve years: Pestel’s adherence to it was soon to be tested. Within a few months, in September 1812, he had experience of active service against Napoleon’s army at the Battle of Borodino, where he was seriously wounded in the leg. To his father’s great delight, he received from the commander-inchief of the Russian army, Fieldmarshal Kutuzov himself, the coveted award of a golden sword bearing the inscription ‘For Valour’.3 His regiment was among those which pursued the retreating French across Europe, and participated in the Battle of Leipzig (1813). Here, too, Pestel distinguished himself in action and was again wounded. The citation accompanying his decoration read: ‘Assigned to General of the HorseGuards Count Vitgenshtein, [Pestel] conveyed his commands to places of danger with outstanding promptness and fearlessness, obtained reliable information about the enemy’s movements and through his personal example of fearlessness encouraged the lower ranks to defeat the enemy.’4 From the front line, Pestel kept his parents abreast of the latest developments, as we can see from this remark in a letter from his father, dated 13 June l813: ‘The truce is certainly to your advantage, my dear Paul, since you can profit from it to take better care of your wound.’ His mother, Elizaveta Ivanovna, wrote a few weeks later to express her ‘extreme satisfaction’ with his letters and his conduct.5 Pestel’s exposure to Western Europe made a deep impression on him as it did on so many of his comrades. The marked contrast the young Russian officers and men noted between their backward motherland and the countries of Western Europe through which they marched finds frequent mention in the Decembrists’ responses to the Investigating Committee and later on in their memoirs. For many of the young officers this experience amounted to what might be termed a ‘defining moment’ in their personal development. Profound feelings of patriotism fired their desire to contribute somehow to political and social progress in Russia. It was in this sense, as the Decembrist M.I. Muraviev-Apostol famously put it, that ‘we were the children of 1812. We were moved from the heart to sacrifice everything, even life itself, out of love for our homeland.’6

Military Service 19

A comment of the Decembrist I.D. Yakushkin on the effect of this experience is quite typical: ‘The period spent abroad during the campaigns there focused my attention for the first time on Russia’s social structure and compelled me to see inadequacies in it.’7 This realization, as a Soviet historian stressed, ‘was the first step in a lengthy process of intense quest and discussion which culminated in the creation of a secret revolutionary society in Russia’.8 In August 1813, Pestel was appointed adjutant to the officer mentioned in his Leipzig citation, General Count Peter Vitgenshtein, who was destined to become Commander-in-Chief of the Second Army. Pestel served out the remainder of the Napoleonic campaign with him in Germany and France, spending some time in Paris, and indeed was to remain on his staff up until the time of his arrest in December 1825.9 From Pestel’s service record, we learn that he fought with distinction at Buttelstedt, near Weimar (22 October 1813), and was awarded the Order of St Vladimir (4th class) and the Austrian Order of Leopold (3rd class). In the 1814 campaign, countering Napoleon’s doomed offensive against the Prussian General Gebhard von Blücher, Pestel was awarded the Baden Order of St Anne (Second Class) and the Prussian Order ‘For Merit’ for his conduct at the battles of Bar-sur-Aube and Troyes, fought in February of that year. He was among a number of future Decembrists who served his country with distinction during the Napoleonic campaigns.10 When Pestel joined his staff, Vitgenshtein immediately had him transferred from the Lithuanian to the Horse-Guards (Kavalergardskii) Regiment in which he served until December 1819.11 The count clearly had a very high opinion of his young adjutant. The Decembrist Peter Svistunov, a member of the Southern Society’s ‘cell’ in St Petersburg, recalled a remark made by Vitgenshtein to his brother-in-law: ‘Among our regimental commanders, Pestel is an exception. He can turn his hand to anything. Whether you gave him an army to command or a ministry to run, he would do it with the utmost competence.’12 But a revealing glimpse of Pestel’s arrogant character is provided by Grech’s account, if true, of an incident in which Pestel, while serving with Vitgenshtein in France, had dispersed a mob of looting Bavarian troops by turning a detachment of Cossacks on them with their whips. When a Bavarian officer attempted to intervene, Pestel with brutal decisiveness had him whipped too. It was one thing to have looting soldiers whipped, since military punishments for the ranks at this time were draconian. However, to inflict violence on an officer of an allied – or even an enemy – army was a major infringement of military etiquette. Vitgenshtein apparently had the matter hushed up, since it would


undoubtedly have gone badly for Pestel had such unbecoming conduct come to the personal attention of the tsar.13 Early in 1817 Pestel was stationed in Mitava (Mitau), Courland, where he remained for over a year, until the spring of 1818. While there, he met a famous Courlander, the octogenarian Count Peter Pahlen. Formerly military governor of St Petersburg, he had been the leader of the palace coup of 11 March 1801 which resulted in the murder of Tsar Paul and the accession of Alexander I. For his involvement in the affair, Pahlen was treated with almost suspicious leniency, being merely dismissed from court service and banished to his Mitava estates. In his memoirs, Lorer records that the old count got to like Pestel and used to talk openly to him. Noticing in him even at that stage the first indications of revolutionary aspirations, Pahlen on one occasion said to him: ‘Listen, young man! If you are hoping to achieve anything by means of a secret society, just forget it. Because if there are twelve of you then the twelfth will inevitably be a traitor! I speak from personal experience, and I know what the world and people are like.’14 As Lorer himself bitterly remarked, Pahlen’s prophecy proved to be remarkably accurate: not only was the December uprising in St Petersburg doomed to betrayal, but a few days earlier, Pestel himself was arrested at Tulchin HQ on the word of a traitor. The historian Natan Eidelman has commented on the intriguing relationship between the veteran conspirator and his young ‘apprentice’, contrasting the nature of the coups of 11 March 1801 and 14 December 1825, and the effect on Pestel of their meeting: ‘For Pestel his acquaintance with Pahlen was above all significant for the broadening of his historical-political experience.’15 The Decembrist Ivan Gorbachevskii put it much more simply in his memoirs: ‘Pestel was the pupil of Count Pahlen, nothing more, nothing less, and was an outstanding conspirator.’16 However, his arrest before the uprisings in St Petersburg and Vasilkov suggests the opposite. Had Pestel heeded Pahlen’s warning about the inherent weakness of conspiracies and the inevitability of betrayal, he might well have found a less vulnerable way of promoting his political agenda.

At Second Army HQ On General Vitgenshtein’s appointment in 1818 to the command of the Second Army, Pestel was posted with him that September to its

Military Service 21

headquarters at Tulchin, a village in the Bratslav district of the Podolsk region in Ukraine, 250 km southwest of Kiev, in the southern part of the Bug valley. Russia had seized it in 1793 from the Potocki family during the second partition of Poland. Ivan Borisovich, who followed his son’s career with keen attention, deriving the utmost pleasure from Pavel’s considerable success, wrote to him to express his delight at Vitgenshtein’s appointment, confident that Pavel’s own career would advance accordingly. Similarly, Ivan Borisovich hoped that the rapid rise of another influential acquaintance, General P. D. Kiselev, would also be to his son’s advantage. Kiselev, a favourite of Alexander I, was appointed Chief-of-Staff of the Second Army in February 1819 to serve under General Vitgenshtein. Ivan Borisovich thus calculated that Pavel could not fail to impress the two most senior generals in the Second Army and so gain swift promotion to the rank of colonel.17 Meanwhile, however, Pestel’s next move came in December 1819 when he was transferred to the Smolensk Regiment of Dragoons with the rank of captain. Kiselev was indeed greatly impressed by Pestel’s abilities, entrusted him with particularly sensitive and challenging missions, and soon came to count him among his personal friends at Tulchin.18 Over the next two years Kiselev frequently spent evenings at Pestel’s quarters. The atmosphere of the officers’ mess is finely evoked in the memoirs of Nikolai Basargin, who recalled: Tulchin was a little Polish town then belonging to Count Meczislaw Potocki, populated by Jews and Polish szlachta (gentry). Apart from military personnel and HQ officials there was no society there … We all tried to use our free time to further our intellectual and moral education. Our best entertainment was to be found on those evenings when we would gather and give each other some account of what we had been doing, reading, and thinking.19 However, Kiselev’s enthusiasm for Pestel did not bring the young officer the career benefits he might have expected from so powerful a patron. In fact his first attempts to secure Pestel’s promotion were unavailing. A letter from Kiselev to General A.A. Zakrevskii at Staff Headquarters (Glavnyi shtab) in St Petersburg refers to ‘the regrettable news’ of Pestel’s denied promotion and goes on to sing his praises: He is absolutely the only one of the whole bunch here who can be of any use. He is a bright young man with an excellent record who continues to behave in an exemplary fashion. I make use of him simply


because he is utterly reliable and does not shirk duty. Pestel has the kind of ability to make a success of any position he occupies. It is a pity that his rank does not permit him to assume the responsibilities of a general or staff commander, for he would discharge them well, having a good head and much enthusiasm.20 There was clearly a division of opinion over Pestel’s suitability for promotion at this point despite his undeniably impressive military record. Pestel knew of Kiselev’s regard for him from General A.Ya. Rudzevich, commander of the corps to which Pestel’s future regiment (the Vyatskii or Vyatka) was attached. Rudzevich’s own attitude to Pestel is reflected in his letters to his junior officer. Particularly striking is their remarkably affectionate tone, unusual even by the relatively gushing standards of Romantic epistolary discourse prevalent at the time. Rudzevich seems determined to outdo Kiselev’s protestations of affection for Pestel. Thus, Rudzevich wrote to Pestel: ‘P.D. Kiselev has told me that he has long known you by repute and has had a lot of good things to say about you’, and then proceeded to demand of Pestel, in unabashedly emotional terms, that he accept his love and devotion as well as Kiselev’s. As Rudzevich put it: ‘A bosom friend is a great thing to have, and so I also have the right to demand of you, my dear Pavel Ivanovich, that you remember who is totally devoted to you, that is your sincerely loving Rudzevich.’21 Rudzevich and Pestel corresponded quite frequently for three years from May 1819. The former made it clear that he derived considerable pleasure from Pestel’s letters and once chided him (in a letter dated 7 October 1820) for neglecting him and so denying him this enjoyment. Here again, the teasing manner of the reproach is striking: ‘Isn’t it naughty of you, my dearest Paul (Pavlik) to start forgetting me?’ Whether this was a matter simply of somewhat overdoing the ‘matey’ tone conventionally adopted by officers in their correspondence at this time, or whether there were deeper emotions in play, must remain a matter for conjecture. It is not surprising, in view of Kiselev’s high opinion of Pestel’s abilities, that during the spring and early summer of 1821 he sent the young adjutant on three important missions to Bessarabia to report back to HQ on the Greek uprising in the Danube principalities of the Ottoman Empire. The Russian government was particularly concerned about the fate of their Orthodox co-religionists there, so Pestel was required to monitor the Christian population in Moldavia. In one of his reports to General Kiselev, dated ‘no later than 15(27) April 1821’, Pestel wrote that the Greek insurrection was spreading from principalities on

Military Service 23

the islands of the Archipelago and that ‘the desire of the Greeks in the event of complete success is to create a federal republic similar to the American United Regions’. He also informed Kiselev of the acts of repression being perpetrated by the Turks against the Greek population of Constantinople.22 It was on one of these missions, in April, that Pestel’s famous encounter with Alexander Pushkin took place in Kishinev. Of particular interest here is Pushkin’s high opinion of the Decembrist which he recorded in a diary entry of 9 April 1821: ‘An intelligent man in the full meaning of the word. We discussed matters metaphysical, political, moral etc. He has one of the most original minds I know.’23 Busy as he was with his military duties, Pestel still managed to become actively involved in the Tulchin branch of the Decembrist secret society, the Union of Welfare, which he had joined on arriving at Second Army HQ in September 1818. At the end of May 1821, while he was on his Moldavian mission, his role in the secret society was gradually being exposed. A report detailing the activities, aims and membership of the by now defunct Union of Welfare was passed by Chief-of-Staff A.K. Benkendorf to Alexander I. Pestel was not actually named in this compromising report, but referred to obliquely as the ‘former adjutant of Count Vitgenshtein’. But twelve others, all St Petersburg members, were listed by name. Its author was M.K. Gribovskii, himself a former member of the Union of Welfare, now chief of the secret police force which had been formed following the Semenovskii regiment’s mutiny in St Petersburg the previous year (1820). Gribovskii stressed that the Union of Welfare no longer existed and that its papers had been destroyed. This may explain why Alexander chose not to act on the potentially highly compromising report, but apparently preferred to let sleeping dogs lie rather than draw unwelcome attention to them. Nevertheless, it must have been this report which checked the advance of Pestel’s military career and rendered Kiselev’s efforts on his behalf unavailing. The emperor ordered the postponement of Pestel’s imminent promotion to the rank of regimental colonel though, undoubtedly, the consequences of Gribovskii’s report could have been considerably worse. As it was, it seems to have had minimal effect on the Tulchin branch of the Southern Society which had replaced the Union of Welfare there. 24 There were no arrests and no apparent efforts to identify and suppress the Decembrists’ secret society either in Tulchin or in St Petersburg.25 In June 1821 Pestel was instructed by Kiselev to deliver his report on the Greek rising from the village of Skulyany on the Moldavian


border, 100 km east of Kishinev on the river Prut, to the tsar at Laibach (Ljubljana). Alexander had been conferring in the Slovenian capital with Emperor Francis I of Austria and his chancellor, Clemens von Metternich. The report describes a Greek secret political society originating in Vienna, headed by a secret directorate; it comprised a two-tier membership with those in the first tier empowered to recruit others while remaining ignorant of the identity of the rest of the membership. In this way, according to Pestel’s information, the society, headed by an aide-de-camp of the tsar, Prince Alexander Ypsilanti, came to number hundreds of thousands. Semevskii comments that Pestel’s report ‘somehow became well-known in St Petersburg and to various individuals’.26 Similarly, a Soviet commentator remarked that Pestel’s report, ‘the first reliable and detailed information about events in the Danube principalities rapidly became known to many in Tulchin and Kishinev and was read in the high-society salons of St Petersburg’.27 Given Pestel’s own involvement at this time in the organisation of the Southern Society’s conspiracy, he would himself have had an obvious interest in covertly furthering its aims by ensuring that what he was reporting about the Greek conspiracy reached a wide audience. In addition, it suited his subversive political ambitions to give an exaggerated idea of the scale of the enterprise. He quite probably, therefore, ‘leaked’ his own report. And for the same reason it was decidedly ironic that Pestel was the liaison officer chosen for the delicate task of reporting to HQ on the contribution of Ypsilanti’s organisation, the ‘Society of Friends’ (Philiki Etaireia), to the Danubian unrest. We can reasonably assume that Pestel derived considerable interest from his assignment. His letters to Kiselev probably deliberately exaggerated or misinterpreted the Ypsilanti affair.28 For example, he attributed the disturbances in Greece directly to Ypsilanti’s secret society and remarked: ‘If there exist 800,000 Italian carbonari, then, perhaps, there is an even greater number of Greeks united by a political aim.’29 He reported that the numbers claimed for Ypsilanti’s secret society equalled or even surpassed this figure. It was said to comprise 200,000 ‘leaders’ who each controlled up to six ‘citizens’. ‘From this it is clear that this political society has attained massive proportions’, Pestel concluded his report to the emperor.30 These are figures that, if even only approximately correct, must have perturbed St Petersburg and the Ottoman Porte alike. If Pestel actually believed the estimated numbers he reported, they may well have encouraged his hopes for the similarly rapid growth of the Southern Society at this early stage of its development. And there was perhaps

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a hint of menace in the way Pestel chose to describe the Greeks’ uprising. He characterized it not as a ‘mutiny’ (myatezh) of the kind that had taken place in Spain in March 1820, when King Ferdinand VII was forced to restore the liberal constitution of 1812, or in Naples the following July, when the stability of Austria’s Italian provinces came under threat. Rather he chose a parallel closer to home, viewing it as ‘something akin to the struggle by means of which Russia’s princes had once dared to throw off the Tatar yolk’.31 Pestel concluded his report to Kiselev with a typical plea for his commanding officer’s approval: ‘I very much wish that you will be pleased with the way I have fulfilled your assignation. I greatly cherish your approval.’32 It seems that he need not have worried: Prince Volkonskii, on the tsar’s behalf, acknowledged receipt of Pestel’s report in a letter to Kiselev with the words: ‘I hasten to inform you that the Sovereign is most pleased with the clear presentation of all the details of this matter.’33 Furthermore, the tsar was apparently so impressed by the attention to detail and general clarity of the report that he asked his Foreign Minister, Count Karl Nesselrode, the identity of the talented diplomat who had drawn it up. On being informed, he remarked: ‘An army colonel (sic), indeed. So this is the kind of colonel I have serving in the army!’34 However, the emperor was not sufficiently impressed by Pestel’s report to allow his promotion to go ahead. Instead he delayed it by nearly two years. Letters written by the Chief of General Staff in St Petersburg, A.A. Zakrevskii, to Kiselev in particular bear this out. We have already referred to the latter’s disappointment at the delay in Pestel’s promotion as at July 1819. Yet several weeks before this Zakrevskii had sounded a warning note concerning perceptions of Pestel in army and court circles in St Petersburg: ‘It is being said here that Pestel, his (i.e. Vitgenshtein’s) adjutant, is doing whatever he likes with him. You had better take steps: the Emperor has not changed and will not be changing his opinion. It seems he has the measure of Pestel.’35 This remark suggests that Alexander was ill disposed to Pestel well before receiving Gribovskii’s report in 1821. Perhaps the tsar’s disposition stemmed from both his irritation at the poor showing of Pestel’s father as governor-general of Siberia and his recollections of Director Klinger’s damning reference on the brilliant yet recalcitrant pupil at the Corps of Pages. All the same, Kiselev did his utmost from Tulchin to dispel the cloud that was hanging over Pestel and in his correspondence with Zakrevskii over a two-year period he lost no opportunity to extol his protege’s virtues. In one reply Zakrevskii ironically assured Kiselev that he was


pleased to hear of his enthusiasm for Pestel but reminded him of what he had written in June (1819), adding cryptically that ‘time will reveal all’.36 There is no record of Kiselev requesting clarification of this remark. But his instinct prompted him to emphasise to Zakrevskii that his praise for Pestel related strictly to his intellectual and administrative qualities, having no bearing whatsoever on his moral or personal characteristics about which he would say ‘not a word’.37 Since he must have known that everything was taken into account in reviewing cases for promotion, moral and personal characteristics above all, Kiselev’s disclaimer is, to say the least, strikingly disingenuous. And indeed, not two months had elapsed before Kiselev did in fact volunteer an opinion on Pestel’s character, which he described angrily in a letter to Zakrevskii as ‘black as mud’. He told Zakrevskii that he had been right to warn him against Pestel and that reports he had received about this officer’s behaviour had forced him to revise his view of him.38 The content of these evidently damaging reports is unfortunately not known. There was clearly something about Pestel’s character and behaviour that gave rise to ambivalent and conflicting perceptions of him. In a letter written some five weeks after his outburst to Zakrevskii, Kiselev was once again taking Pestel’s side, defensively rejecting the suggestion that Pestel’s ‘special qualities’ included self-seeking ambition. Nevertheless, this was precisely a charge that would be levelled against him by many of his fellow conspirators.39 In December, Zakrevskii again informed Kiselev that a request for Pestel’s promotion to regimental commander of the Horse-Guards had been rejected.40 By September of the following year, 1820, Zakrevskii’s tone had become considerably blunter: ‘Rumours are reaching me that you are unpopular in the army and that you spend most of your free time with Pestel … What exactly are the ties of friendship binding you to Pestel, knowing as you do his character and morality about which you have written to me several times?’41 Curiously, Kiselev ignored the warning and in 1821 was still supporting Pestel’s promotion. It would be interesting to know how Kiselev might have responded to Zakrevskii’s perfectly understandable question. At all events, there was clearly something about Pestel that Kiselev found irresistible. Equally, Pestel held Kiselev in very high regard. This is apparent, for example, from a letter of 15 November 1822. In it Pestel praises the general’s command of the Second Army and urges him to return from leave to rejoin his troops ‘who even in your great severity have seen only evidence of your fairness and love for the common good. It gives me pleasure to say this to you because it is an expression of my feelings for you.’42

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Meanwhile, in February 1821, Kiselev wrote to Zakrevskii to complain about promotion procedures generally in the Second Army, protesting specifically about the rejection of Pestel and the failure to promote ‘for excellence 13 deserving officers in an army of one hundred thousand men’. A letter written the following June reflects Kiselev’s incredulity at headquarters’ (in effect, the tsar’s) persistent refusal to sanction Pestel’s promotion. This was in spite of the personal promise Alexander I had given Kiselev in mid-May, a promise that was presumably annulled when, days later, Benkendorf handed the emperor Gribovskii’s compromising report about the Union of Welfare.43 Zakrevskii replied from Tsarskoe Selo at the end of June, confirming that the promotion of Pestel and another officer was to be held over.44 Once again, in July 1821, Kiselev found himself obliged to inform Pestel in the most sympathetic terms that his application for a regiment had been unsuccessful. To my great regret, my dear Pestel, I have had unpleasant news that will be very disappointing to you. I have received a paper from Zakrevskii (I am sending the original to you) from which you will see that your unlucky star continues to dog you. I am deeply upset, even more perhaps than you are. I have just written to Peter Volkonskii [Chief of General Staff] to express my opinion without mincing my words. Do not lose heart, my dear friend, and have faith in the fairness of the Emperor and the sincere good wishes of your devoted Kiselev.45 In his reply, Pestel shrugged off this blow and assured Kiselev that he was by now too used to such setbacks to pay them the slightest attention.46 Pestel had clearly been aware of the cloud hanging over him for some considerable time. In November 1819 Kiselev had written to Zakrevskii: ‘[Pestel] knows that the Supreme Power has come to a less than favourable conclusion about him.’47 As Kiselev’s biographer points out, in spite of the support given Pestel by both Kiselev and Vitgenshtein, his military career seems to have been blighted by his own shortcomings. These are referred to obliquely in their correspondence, but the full details do not emerge in Kiselev’s surviving papers.48 Nevertheless, a few weeks before receiving Kiselev’s letter of July 1821, Pestel had heard from General Rudzevich the following: ‘I knew before I received your letter that you had been promoted to the rank of colonel and appointed to the command of the Vyatka Regiment. I congratulate you most heartily on this and I’m terribly pleased that you will be continuing to


serve under my command so that I may have the opportunity to show you my true love.’49 We may infer from this that while Rudzevich had unofficially got to hear that Pestel’s promotion was in the pipeline, Kiselev was receiving direct and accurate information about its actual progress. Historians have long debated the extent of Kiselev’s knowledge of Pestel’s participation in secret political activity. Kiselev must have known of the Southern Society’s existence because he actually had Pestel and others placed under surveillance. In July 1821 he established a secret police detachment, as he explained in a letter to Zakrevskii: ‘It has performed many useful services, for it has uncovered many circumstances by means of which persons and actions are shown in their true light. The spirit of the age compels us to strengthen this section which is why I have taken certain measures.’50 However, even this may have been a ploy on Kiselev’s part to protect a junior officer with whom he was on such friendly terms by ensuring that he alone had control over surveillance of him. It would also render Kiselev less vulnerable to charges of slack security in the event that persistent rumours of illicit political activity in the Second Army should prove to be true. It may well be, therefore, that in return for such increased vigilance Kiselev was in fact subsequently spared the unwelcome attentions of the Investigating Committee. His awareness of growing liberalism among his officers is reflected in a letter of 22 January 1822: ‘Remove from military service Shakhovskoi and all those who do not act according to the spirit of the government … They are extremely dangerous in the regiments. The spirit of the age is spreading everywhere and a certain ferment of minds is noticeable.’51 It is certainly clear that Kiselev’s regard for Pestel was undiminished by his awareness of the officer’s involvement in the Union of Welfare and then in the Southern Society. Kiselev’s tacit sympathy for the conspirators’ outlook is reflected in Basargin’s comment that ‘not only did he not oppose but he encouraged the serious direction being taken by the youth of Tulchin’. Basargin recalled how Kiselev would join in their discussions and ‘although sincerely devoted to the emperor, regarding him as his benefactor, he always spoke seriously and frankly, agreeing that there was much that needed to be changed in Russia, and he listened with pleasure to Pestel’s cogent and frequently blunt judgements’.52 Ivan Yakushkin recalled that ‘Kiselev knew beyond any doubt about the existence of the secret society but turned a blind eye to it’.53 Nor was Pestel the only Decembrist Kiselev had on his staff; among others were Basargin, Burtsov, Baryatinskii, Cherkasov, Kryukov and Avramov.54

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For its part, the Southern Society evidently considered Kiselev at best not unsympathetic to its cause and had definite plans for him after the successful coup, designating him Governor-General of Moscow. Yakushkin’s memoirs state that Pestel had even read out to Kiselev extracts from his Russian Justice. According to this account, Kiselev once observed to Pestel that in his draft constitution he had vested too much power in the tsar, and that Pestel had taken Kiselev’s use of the word ‘tsar’ to mean executive power. Another Decembrist, V.K. Tizengauzen, claimed to have heard that Pestel had told Kiselev of the Southern Society’s plans, that Kiselev had thanked him for his trust and warned him to be more careful. Given such potentially compromising testimony it seems extraordinary that after his arrest Pestel was never directly questioned about his relationship with Kiselev.55 Kiselev emerged unscathed by the investigation into the Decembrist affair as did other independently minded grandees such as M.M. Speranskii, the admiral and senator N.S. Mordvinov and ‘pro-consul of the Caucasus’ A.P. Ermolov. This was probably because the government did not want such high-ranking military and civil figures to be publicly associated with rebels. All the same, the official attitude to Kiselev in St Petersburg early in 1826 was distinctly chilly. The new emperor, Nicholas I, made known his displeasure with him for effectively covering up a plot in which so many of his staff officers had been involved.56 Ultimately, however, there is nothing to suggest that Kiselev’s own advancement to high office after 1826 at the court of Nicholas I was in any way affected by his imprudent friendship. His potentially compromising association with Pestel seems to have ended following his promotion to adjutant in the emperor’s suite after the successful imperial review of the Second Army in September 1823.57

Colonel of the Vyatka Infantry The reluctance in St Petersburg to validate Pestel’s promotion came to an end on 15 November 1821. At the relatively early age of 28, Pestel was appointed to the command of the Vyatka Infantry Regiment, reputed to be the most undisciplined and run down in the Second Army.58 His assignment to this particular regiment was no doubt a poisoned chalice and may be taken to reflect the court’s ambivalent attitude towards Pestel. He may well have been considered to be a vexatious individual but his energy, efficiency and effectiveness had now been found an outlet. It is clear that these were the qualities sought in the new commander of so demoralised a regiment. Pestel’s corps commander, his good friend


and admirer General Rudzevich, certainly took the positive view that the new colonel would be equal to the task of revitalising the unit. He wrote to him with a confident prediction: ‘I am sure that the Vyatka Regiment, with just the commander that it needs, will soon come to life, take on quite another aspect … and rank among the best in the division.’59 Pestel, however, was initially less convinced. The regiment was based from 1822 in the village of Lintsy, 60 km from Tulchin. Although Pestel’s promotion and new appointment had been anticipated, its outcome actually brought him scant satisfaction. Since December 1819 he had been a captain ( podpolkovnik) in the Smolensk Regiment of Dragoons. He therefore considered that his transfer to the Vyatka Regiment at a point when he was the ‘most senior of the senior officers in the Smolensk regiment would be a new kind of demotion (unizhenie). It will look as though I have been found incapable of commanding a cavalry regiment’, he complained to Kiselev.60 Pestel soon overcame whatever humiliation he may have felt and had the good sense to thank Kiselev warmly for all he had done for him.61 He was evidently determined to rise to the challenge facing him, and set about his new task with vigour. In order to transform the regiment in line with his own exacting aspirations, he instituted improvements in weapon training and in the welfare of the men under his command, even using his own money where necessary. Evidence of the industry and dynamism he applied to his new mission is an archival file containing 500 folios of material on his military activity.62 He ordered his quartermaster to increase the regiment’s complement of tailors and cobblers. He imposed restrictions on the use of corporal punishment and urged his company commanders to avoid punishable misunderstandings by expressing themselves more clearly to their men. The Decembrist M.S. Lunin provides a romanticised portrait of Pestel as enlightened beneficiary of the Russian soldier: ‘Our soldiers, having discovered the provenance of the reforms whose beneficial consequences they are now experiencing, do cherish the memory of the man who, having shared their labours and after shedding his own blood on the battlefield, spared no effort to ensure their welfare and success.’ From this it will be obvious that Lunin’s was a notable contribution to the mythology of Pestel which developed after his execution.63 But Pestel had specific ideas about reforms for the entire army. These emerge from a number of his notes on the matter, as recalled in Lunin’s memoirs. They include proposals for the reduction in size of the standing army in peacetime, together with a reduction in the overall number of regiments and in the length of military service. There are also memoranda

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on pay increases for officers and men; improved care and support for veterans and their families and stricter financial controls to reduce the level of peculation. Pestel elaborated his ideas in a number of papers including Russian Justice, ‘Memorandum on state governance’ (Zapiski o gosudarstvennom pravlenii), and ‘Memorandum on the organisation of the armed forces’ (Zapiska o sostave voisk) all of which are published in volume seven of the series Vosstanie dekabristov. Dokumenty. Lunin was to claim in 1840 that Pestel’s proposals were to be implemented ‘with more or less significant changes’ by Nicholas I as the core of the military reforms then under review. This was undoubtedly an exaggerated view of Pestel’s contribution though Nicholas I may well have had sight of Pestel’s confiscated papers. The regiment’s condition improved rapidly under Pestel’s command, as was noted in a review as early as January 1822. He considered an essential prerequisite for continued amelioration to be a selective purge of his officers. Pestel did not suffer fools gladly, particularly when they were officers in his regiment He described some of them in a letter to Kiselev of February 1822 as ‘mediocre, slack, demoralized and inexperienced’. He appended a list of those he considered it imperative to have transferred to other regiments as soon as possible. For example, he pressed Kiselev to relieve him of one Gnoevoi for continually intriguing and for the threat to discipline presented by his repeated criticism of the army!64 Coming from Pestel, both these charges seem disingenuous to say the least. The difference between him and Gnoevoi was that Pestel apparently had no difficulty keeping his private political aspirations entirely separate from his public military career. Kiselev was more accurate than he realised when he once jocosely finished a letter to Pestel with the words: ‘Goodbye, Machiavelli!’65 Pestel impatiently reiterated his demands for better personnel two weeks later, this time naming reliable officers he wished to co-opt to his regiment to replace the dead wood. ‘You cannot imagine’, he concluded in mitigation of his impatience, ‘how much I want the regiment to become a good one in order to vindicate your choice of me as its commander’.66 Things did not move nearly rapidly enough for Pestel: over a year later he was still emphatically pleading his case for better officers to be transferred to his regiment and complaining that the most talented were being creamed off by his rivals.67 However, just six months after Pestel’s appointment, his divisional commander, Prince A.V. Sibirskii, commented highly favourably on Pestel’s obvious ambition for his regiment which had already proved noticeably effective, and expressed his gratitude in anticipation of further impending improvements.68


The ambition which impelled Pestel towards the successful transformation of the Vyatka Regiment did not prevent him from finding the time for courtship and contemplating marriage. There is, it is true, little personal information which has survived in Pestel’s archive apart from two sketchy episodes. First, back in the autumn of 1815 he had received a letter from his father angrily refusing his blessing to marry a young woman with whom he had a relationship in Mitava. When in 1818 he was posted to Tulchin, he left her behind with their baby son. All Pestel’s efforts to make the boy his legitimate heir foundered on Ivan Borisovich’s refusal to acknowledge him as his grandson. After Pestel’s execution, Tsar Nicholas had the boy taken from his mother and sent to a state boarding school under the name Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov and, as part of his vindictive campaign to ‘unperson’ the executed Decembrists, ordered the destruction of every document connected with the child.69 Pestel’s relationship with the young lady in Mitava was only temporary. In the summer of 1821 he signalled a more significant commitment in announcing his intention to marry Isabella, daughter of Count I.O. Vitt, who was then commandant of the military colonies in Southern Russia. Socially this could have proved an advantageous match for Pestel while professionally it might have boosted his promotion prospects at the time. It seems likely that his appointment to the command of the Vyatka Regiment caused him to lose interest in getting married. At any rate, nothing more is heard about Isabella or of his intentions to marry her beyond his father’s dismissal of the countess, Isabella’s mother, as a ‘complete fool’, and the count as a ‘base intriguer’. Of Isabella herself he remarked scathingly: ‘she is a fairly attractive person, but must once have been considerably more so.’70 Ivan Borisovich’s poor opinion of Vitt was shared by Pestel’s close collaborator and brother officer, Aleksei Yushnevskii, who warned Pestel through Lorer against having anything to do with him.71 Pestel seems to have followed their advice. However, three years later in October 1824, his mother wrote to him that at 31 years of age, ‘mon vieux célibataire’ (‘my old bachelor’), it was high time he was married.72 That he was never to find the opportunity to do so no doubt testifies to his singlemindedness: apart from his involvement at this time in political activity within the emergent Southern Society, he subordinated everything else, including his personal life, to the improvement of his regiment. Pestel’s success as new broom in the Vyatka Regiment was not achieved by leniency: on the contrary, he acquired the reputation of an exacting commanding officer who was not above harshness. One historian writes of the ‘iron discipline’ Pestel quickly imposed on his regiment. Colonel Pestel himself recalled: ‘I began with the staff- and senior officers; I treated

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them with extraordinary strictness, frequently dispatching battalion commanders to the front. I could not at first demand much of the lower ranks because they were not trained and this was no fault of theirs.’ However, when they were too slow to improve due to ‘inherent sloth’, after one of his inspections he subjected all the non-commissioned officers to strict punishment in line with the harsh military code which was then in force.73 His severity, he felt, was responsible for the continued desertions from his regiment even though the overall number was falling appreciably. Pestel refers to this problem in a letter to Kiselev, ascribing its persistence to his strictness, despite the fact that he had improved his men’s rations to the extent of giving them meat and was constantly asking to be notified of any cause for complaint.74 Following his arrest, disgrace and execution there was a feeling among some members of his former regiment that, in view of his cruel treatment of the men, he had got no less than he deserved.75 The bluntest expression of this point of view is that of the Decembrist I.I. Gorbachevskii, who claimed in his memoirs that: Pestel never looked after his officers and oppressed his soldiers in the most terrible way, thinking that he would thereby arouse their hatred for the government. But exactly the opposite happened. The soldiers were only too glad to be rid of him and after his arrest lodged complaints against him. It is incomprehensible how he failed to see that the soldiers would not blame their oppressed state on the government but on their own commander.76 A younger contemporary who was not himself a Decembrist, the memoirist Dmitrii Kropotov, made a similar claim, albeit rather more moderately expressed. He suggests that Pestel was deliberately hard on his troops in order to incite them against the emperor: ‘Let them think that it is not we but the higher command and the Sovereign himself who are the cause of excessive discipline.’77 But accounts of Pestel’s conduct as commander are conflicting. Another Decembrist, Baron Andrei Rozen, published an article in which he refuted Kropotov’s suggestion and defended Pestel’s standing as a commander, citing the view of one officer that he was very fair and treated his men well.78 This assessment is corroborated in the memoirs of V.S. Pecherin who recalled that officers in his father’s regiment were always trying to get transferred to Pestel’s regiment where, it was said, ‘freedom, dignity and honour’ were to be found.79 Late in 1826, almost a year after Pestel’s arrest, a court official reported that ‘all lower ranks


and officers’ regretted their former commander’s fate, and ‘with deep sighs and tears affirmed that never had there been nor would there be again such a commanding officer’.80 Certainly, Pestel took his military duties very seriously, as many of his fellow officers noted. For example, Lorer, a major under Pestel’s command, recalled Rudzevich remarking: ‘I am surprised that Pestel concerns himself with square-bashing (shagistika), when such a clever man is really only fit to be a minister or an ambassador.’81 Even the sceptical Grech was impressed by his military record, describing him as ‘brave in battle and magnanimous afterwards’.82 But if, as Kropotov maintained, the men of the Vyatka Regiment were glad to be rid of him, it seems they found his replacement, Colonel E.I. Tolpygo, even worse. One complaint on the files of the Third Department (Nicholas I’s secret police) about Tolpygo read: ‘He wants to expel the spirit of Pestel from us; but we’d sooner he gave up his own ghost than we gave up Pestel’s!’ Tolpygo did, in fact, obligingly die soon afterwards, in December 1826.83 Something of Pestel’s own attitude to command comes through in his replies to the Investigating Committee. Experience convinced him that ‘strictness alone can eradicate entrenched sloth and gross negligence’ and that ‘success vindicated this view’. He reinforced his self-portrait as an aloof and stern commander by claiming always to have treated his officers strictly and seriously, never entering into conversation with them. As for the men, he had always subscribed to the view that they should never speak unless first addressed by an officer, and that officers and men alike should never presume to question his orders. In this way he sought to inculcate absolute obedience.84 While not all of his improvements met with appreciation, in the estimation of one regimental historian, Pestel ‘accomplished more in nine days than his predecessors had over as many years’.85 He could not have achieved his transformation of the regiment without the co-operation of his men. He was a diligent officer with exacting standards which he imposed on himself and expected of others. The result was that while some detested him for his strictness, most understood the reasons for it and thus respected him. By the time of his arrest in December 1825, the Vyatka Regiment was considered to be one of the finest half-dozen in the entire Russian army. Recognition of Pestel’s remarkable achievement as commander came as early as September 1823 when the tsar, having inspected the hitherto lacklustre regiment, commented: ‘This is superb: just like the Guards!’ For the excellent state of Pestel’s troops Alexander I presented him with 3000 desyatiny (about 8000 acres or 3250 hectares) of land.86 However,

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Pestel did not succeed in taking up this generous award prior to his arrest. But after his death, his family did not forget the grant and, following many years of petition, it was at last assigned to his niece who received land in Samara province, 800 km southeast of Moscow on the Volga river. The land thus passed to the Pestel family despite a suggestion made in March 1826 by Major-General P.A. Kladishchev, commander of the 1st Brigade of the 18th Infantry Division, to I.I. Baikov at Second Army HQ that it should be sold off and the proceeds used to offset Pestel’s debts, some allegedly owing to the coffers of the Vyatka Regiment.87 Pestel was obliged to refute allegations of financial irregularities while imprisoned in the Peter-Paul Fortress. A number of charges were made by Capt. A.I. Maiboroda of the Vyatka Regiment in the course of his denunciation of Pestel which had precipitated the colonel’s arrest on 13 December 1825. Pestel was invited to comment on them by General I.I. Dibich, a member of the Investigating Committee, on 7 February 1826. That same day Pestel wrote a detailed point-by-point rebuttal of Maiboroda’s allegations, stressing that the improvements he made to his regiment had been at considerable personal expense. He strenuously denied misappropriating a single penny of money allocated for uniforms and provisions for his men, arguing that the army actually owed him money.88 By the standards of the time, Pestel’s military career was not an unqualified success. It is true that he attained the rank of regimental colonel at the age of 28, and quickly vindicated his delayed promotion by restoring the fortunes of the third-rate Vyatka Infantry Regiment. Yet were it not for his complex personality and the conflicting assessments to which it gave rise among importantly placed contemporaries, there is every reason to suppose that his record as a serving officer would have been considerably more distinguished. In line with his own expectations and his success at military academy, he should have been promoted to colonel at least two years earlier and, moreover, to the command of a prestigious cavalry regiment rather than the run-down Vyatka Infantry. Two of his fellow conspirators, for example, did comparatively better: Sergei Trubetskoi was 26 when he was promoted colonel, while Sergei Volkonskii achieved this rank at 23 and was a major-general at 25. Interestingly, the character of Pestel’s leadership in the Second Army finds close parallels and disconcerting echoes in his role in the Decembrist movement. Both as an officer and a conspirator he acquired a reputation for authoritarian management and aloofness together with intimidating intellectual verve, stubbornness and impatience. He placed enormous demands on himself but on


others too. While such qualities tended to foster grudging respect for the regimental commander, they gave rise to feelings of resentment among fellow officers who were also members of the Decembrist secret societies. In time, and in this context, his potential assets would prove major liabilities.

4 The Political and Social Environment

A full account of the most important formative influences on Pestel requires a closer examination of Pestel’s relationship with his parents, his attitude to religion, to Freemasonry, and of his ideological formation and the development of his political convictions. Pestel’s perception of the negative features of life in Russia resulted from a complex of circumstances in his own upbringing, education and family background, some of which have already been referred to. These particular circumstances combined in Pestel to lend an especially sharp focus to his assessment of the social and political environment in the Russia of his day.

Family, faith and freemasonry Among the most important contributory factors during the formative years of Pestel’s adolescence was, reasonably enough, the influence of his parents. Their closeness was reflected in their frequent exchange of letters. His father’s career difficulties apart (as outlined in Chapter 2), Pestel enjoyed an emotionally and materially secure and warm relationship with his mother and father, apparently uncomplicated by any significant tensions. Historians looking for psychological or sociological clues to explain Pestel’s subsequent behaviour would find him a disappointing case study precisely because everything about his family background and upbringing seems to fall into so conventional a pattern.1 Pavel Ivanovich, as well as being the eldest, was evidently the favourite of the Pestels’ four sons. He also had a younger sister, Sophie, whom he adored and who in return idolised him. While Pavel was a student at the Corps of Pages he received a stream of encouragement and advice from his father. Several months after the painful competition with Adlerberg at the time of his graduation from the Corps in December 1811, his father 37


wrote to him: ‘Even your enemies admire your erudition … There’s no-one to compare with you and Adlerberg.’2 Nearly seven years later when, as General Vitgenshtein’s adjutant, Pavel Ivanovich left in September 1818 for Tulchin in Ukraine, his concerned father wrote after him: ‘Your departure, my dear Paul, has caused me more pain than you can imagine.’ The following January, Ivan Borisovich seized the opportunity to send to his son a New Year gift of three pounds of tea and 500 roubles through the good offices of Vitgenshtein, who was returning to Tulchin from the capital.3 It was a solicitude that Pavel Ivanovich reciprocated. Although busy reforming the Vyatka Regiment and heavily involved in the activity of the Decembrists’ Southern Society, on 13 March 1822 Pestel wrote to his father from Tulchin. In this letter he offered to pay off all his father’s outstanding debts. He urged him to bequeath the modest Smolensk estate to Sophie, to transfer the youngest son, Alexander, to the Kharkov Regiment of Dragoons, and to leave the other two, Vladimir and Boris, to take care of themselves.4 Although Pestel was careful to keep his illicit political views and activities from them, his parents were aware of the new social and political ideas that were agitating the younger generation and quite possibly, therefore, their eldest son too. His father, for example, wrote to warn him to steer clear of any involvement with subversive elements: ‘It is being said here that there are people plotting in the Second Army. Although I do not believe it, my duty as father, friend and patriot is nevertheless to warn you to be careful with whom you associate. These are dangerous people, and all honest men should beware of them.’ He expressed this view in even stronger terms in a subsequent letter: ‘Keep your distance, my dear Pavel, from these people and their evil intentions. Your army is known to be a possible source of them. They must be considered diabolical people who spread incorrigible evil both in private and public life.’5 Ivan Borisovich may have known more than he was prepared to admit, having perhaps received reliable information from his many contacts. Or else his warning reflects the remarkable accuracy and wide currency of the rumours of subversive activity in the Second Army. In similar vein, there is a revealing passage in a letter to Pavel Ivanovich from his mother written three years later: ‘How grieved I would be to have to learn that any of my sons could be numbered among the so-called “liberals” who in general, and particularly in our country, are synonymous with fire-raisers.’6 It is as though Elizaveta Ivanovna was trying to warn her son that he really was playing with fire. Tragic though perhaps not entirely unexpected fulfillment of this passing thought reached her less than nine months later with the shattering news of Pavel’s arrest.

The Political and Social Environment 39

The context in which Elizaveta Ivanovna had made this remark was a discussion about religion which, apart from practical advice and domestic matters, was the dominant theme of their correspondence. Pestel had received a strongly Lutheran upbringing. His parents, particularly his mother, being themselves very devout, were anxious that Pavel should not lose his way spiritually in the modern world with its fashionable rejection of traditional religious precepts and institutions, and its experimentation with new ones, such as Freemasonry, Bible societies, pietism and mysticism. It is an oversimplification to maintain, as Soviet historians generally did, that religion was irrelevant to the Decembrists’ experience, and therefore irrelevant to subsequent historical analyses of it. Some Decembrists, it is true, did reject the Orthodox Church, but most did not; and a few (e.g. M.S. Lunin) embraced Catholicism. For some, such rejection was only temporary and religious convictions were restored by the trauma of arrest and imprisonment. This is precisely what occurred in the case of the poet, Kondratii Ryleev, whose experience is a good illustration of the pattern of religious re-awakening following incarceration in the Peter-Paul Fortress. Pestel himself was frequently visited in his prison cell by a Lutheran pastor. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century atheism was not commonly espoused in Russia, and it is incorrect to suggest that an entire generation, or at least its most ‘progressive’ elements, did so as a way of reacting to the negative features of Arakcheevshchina. Religion figured to a greater or lesser extent in the intellectual and emotional make-up of every Decembrist and therefore to leave it out of account is an unacceptable distortion of the record.7 Perhaps in opposition to his parents’ unquestioning and unshakeable religious beliefs, Pestel became sceptical about Lutheranism. While at the Corps of Pages and as a junior army officer, he wrestled with his scepticism and gave the matter considerable thought. He shared his doubts with his parents who frequently accompanied their letters with lengthy quotations from the New Testament in an effort to clarify his concerns.8 During 1818 Pestel mentioned in a letter to his parents that he had met Baroness Julie de Krüdener, the fashionable propagator of mysticism, whose teachings had so captivated the impressionable Emperor Alexander. In his reply, Ivan Borisovich, recognising an opportune convergence of his son’s career prospects and their shared religious interests, advised Pavel that this could be a highly beneficial connection. This was because Baroness Krüdener was an old friend of the Pestels and her current closeness to the tsar might be used advantageously to promote Pavel’s career.9 In an exchange of letters dating from this period, father


and son discussed the existence of God, belief and non-belief, Ivan Borisovich warning his son against the bleak prospect held out by the delusion of atheism.10 From Easter 1825 there appeared to be a genuine reawakening of Pestel’s religious faith. Following his arrest and in response to a standard question regarding religious observance, he told the Investigating Committee that the previous Easter he had made his confession and taken communion for the first time since 1820. His father wrote on 20 May 1825 expressing his great satisfaction at Pavel’s description of how he had celebrated Easter in Tulchin.11 Writing to her son in August, Elizaveta Ivanovna noted the influence on him of the German theologian Dreseke, while Ivan Borisovich, responding around the same time to Pavel’s most recent letter, reiterated his delight at his son’s renewed religious convictions.12 Nevertheless, in spite of such positive signs, Pestel’s doubts resurfaced so that only a few weeks later Elizaveta Ivanovna wrote him a long letter in which she tried to resolve some of his anxieties about the articles of faith and the authority of the church. And Ivan Borisovich’s short-lived delight turned to prayerful dejection.13 Whether or not such concerned letters helped Pestel in his pilgrim’s progress, it is certain that he gave religion and his own spirituality a great deal of thought. His preoccupation with religious matters finds further reflection in a draft of a lengthy memorandum entitled ‘On the Upbringing of Soldiers’ Children in the Guards’. The central concern of this document was precisely such children’s religious education with which Pestel was deeply dissatisfied. His view that ‘God’s law … should … be the guide of a schoolchild’s every action’, led him to reject ‘boring rote-learning of the catechism’ reinforced by ‘frequent severe punishment’ as entirely counterproductive methods. With typically Protestant emphasis he recommended instead Bible-reading as the surest way of ‘inculcating in right-minded youngsters love and respect for Christian teaching’, since the Bible contains ‘so many truths so clearly and vividly expressed’. The freethinking Pestel considered that the development of the children’s understanding was far more likely to be achieved through Bible study than by the sterile memorising of catechisms. The memorandum concludes with a conventional affirmation of the moral validity of Christian values in society, which would have rejoiced his parents’ hearts and which, indeed, he would have shared with them. This affirmation finds further reflection in the introductory chapter of Russian Justice, as we shall see in Chapter 6. The draft on the education of soldiers’ children is unfortunately undated, but we may suppose that it


was written after he had been appointed to the command of the Vyatka Regiment in November 1821, and represented one aspect of the ideas he was developing for its complete overhaul.14 As part of his exploration of the spiritual world and undoubtedly in response to current fashion, the nineteen-year-old Pestel joined a Masonic lodge in 1812 and remained a member until 1817. He later denied to the Investigating Committee that there was any significance in the fact that he had not returned his Masonic insignia which were still in his possession at the time of his arrest: ‘They remained totally forgotten among my belongings … I regarded them as trifles from my younger years and I saw in them nothing of value or importance.’15 This may be so, but the influence of the Masonic ideals of philanthropy and universal brotherhood, of covert Masonic ritual and symbolism clearly found an echo in the Decembrists’ own secret societies. Freemasonry had first appeared in Russia in the early eighteenth century when Masonic lodges were opened during the reign of Peter the Great. Their main focus was on the development of personal moral virtue through the exploration of the ideas of such influential mystics as Louis Claude de Saint-Martine and Emanual Swedenborg. Russian Freemasonry typically emphasised the cultivation of the Masonic ideals of self-knowledge and self-perfection and attached particular importance to ritual and philanthropic acts. By the early nineteenth century Russian Freemasonry, its revival encouraged by Alexander I from 1803, attracted ever larger numbers of adherents to its lodges, particularly to the Grand Lodge of Astraea in St Petersburg, which numbered 25 local lodges by 1822, when they were suddenly suppressed by imperial ukaz. In his seminal study of the Decembrists and Freemasonry, V.I. Semevskii calculates that Pestel was among the 20 per cent of Decembrists sentenced in 1826 to have been at some time freemasons.16 Most Decembrist-Masons had resigned from their lodges well before the 1822 ukaz was implemented. They were clearly dissatisfied with what they perceived to be Masonry’s passive social role and were conversely attracted to the more obviously political orientation of the first Decembrist secret societies: the Union of Salvation and, after 1818, the Union of Welfare. One historian of Russian Freemasonry suggests that Pestel’s Masonic ranking was of the Fifth Grade, that is, Scottish master. Another has claimed that he was a member of the Scottish lodge ‘Sphinx’, of the Masonic order of St Andrew.17 Until early in 1817 he was, in fact, a member of the ‘United Friends’ (Amis Réunis) a lodge which conducted its business in French; in February he joined the ‘Three Virtues’, because, as he explained to the Investigating Committee, it was


Russian-speaking.18 These were both St Petersburg lodges of the Union of Astraea. Among his fellow Masons in the former were the writer and diplomat, A.S. Griboedov, the future chief of Tsar Nicholas’s Third Department, A.K. Benkendorf, and the philosopher, P. Ya. Chaadaev. In his memoirs, another of them, the conservative journalist Nikolai Grech, recalled seeing Pestel at lodge meetings.19 Pestel was one of ten members of the Decembrists’ first secret society, the Union of Salvation, to be a member of ‘The Three Virtues’. But his association with this lodge lasted only about a month and ceased when his regiment was posted early in 1817 to Mitava in Courland.20 Although brief, his association with the lodge proved significant. In his depositions to the Investigating Committee, he names four members of the Union of Welfare from whom, in 1816, he had first heard about the establishment of this secret political society in Russia: Nikita Muraviev, Sergei Trubetskoi, Fedor Glinka and Mikhail Novikov.21 The two former had become members of the ‘Three Virtues’ lodge in January of 1817 and 1816 respectively, while the two latter were members of another lodge, ‘Michael the Elect’. Thus, Pestel’s transfer of his affiliation from Amis Réunis to ‘Three Virtues’ in 1817 most likely stemmed not only from his claimed linguistic preference for Russian but also from his desire to associate with like-minded masons. Their cultural orientation moreover was perhaps closer to Russia than Europe and thus more in tune with Pestel’s own growing political awareness and national consciousness. Despite Pestel’s claim in his testimony to the Investigating Committee that from early 1817 he had nothing more to do with Masonry, some four years later, while on his mission to Bessarabia in 1821 to report on the Ypsilanti uprising, he did in fact renew his contact with it. In the Moldavian capital Kishinev he met the Decembrists M.F. Orlov and V.F. Raevskii who were both members of the Astraea lodge, ‘Ovid’. Its master was another member of the Union of Welfare, P.S. Pushchin, a brigadier under Major-General Orlov’s command. Some sources suggest that Pestel was himself directly involved in setting up the Kishinev lodge with a view to turning it into a branch of the Southern Society.22 Alexander Pushkin joined ‘Ovid’ in 1821 and renewed his acquaintance with Pestel. The poet recorded in his diary: ‘Only a revolutionary like M. Orlov or Pestel can love Russia, in the same way as only a writer can love her language. Everything must be created in this Russia and in the Russian language.’23 Pushkin’s unequivocal identification of Pestel and Orlov with revolution suggests that the discussions in the Kishinev lodge must have been predominantly political. This is consistent with


the arrest of V.F. Raevskii in Kishinev in February 1822 for sedition among the troops. Raevskii as a consequence is known as the ‘First Decembrist’. In her letter of 31 March 1825 cited earlier, Pestel’s mother eloquently expressed a conventional view about the limits of what men might achieve sub specie aeternitatis. She urged that ‘youthful ambition’ should find sufficient outlet in the discharge of civic duty in the service of one’s country and sovereign. This, she concluded, should be enough to satisfy ‘a man of virtue and piety and to make him wait in tranquillity the moment when he will be called before the Judge Eternal’. But by the time this letter was written, Pestel was entirely out of sympathy with such views. He had moved too far down the road of reformist intentions, propelled by his own youthful ambition, to give serious consideration to such earnest maternal appeals for moderation, submissiveness and conservatism.

Politics, society and ideology Pestel’s extensive testimony to the Investigating Committee shows him to have been an intelligent and critical observer of developments in politics and society both in Russia and Western Europe. The views he expressed and the way he articulated them reveal a disciplined and logical mind which would have adorned one of the universities established by Alexander I earlier in his reign. Nor, in a different place and at another time, would these ordinarily have been views for which a brilliant young regimental colonel might be arrested, interrogated for six months and then executed by hanging. But as it was, Pestel risked a response in the pages of Russian Justice to a Zeitgeist which was quintessentially Western European with his plan for the development of Russian government and society along constitutional and overtly republican lines. It was a response by definition incompatible with the polity of an intensely conservative absolute autocracy. The tsarist system was traditionally assiduous in its protection of the status quo, and remained implacably hostile towards even the mildest discussion of any reform of existing political and social structures. Hence when such discussions resulted in the two uprisings in St Petersburg and Vasilkov, the wrath of the challenged tsar knew no bounds. The information Pestel gave to his interrogators allows further insights into the influences acting on him during the formative years of his adolescence and early military career. He was affected by the political science course given by Professor German at the Corps of Pages.


German’s courses gave him access to the political history of Europe since the French Revolution, recognised only 20 years after its occurrence as a watershed in European history from whose consequences even autocratic Russia’s immunity could not be guaranteed. German’s lectures provided Pestel with the conceptual framework on which he was to build through independent and wide reading. The influence of Professor German is further evident in the considered and analytical responses Pestel gave to questions concerning his perception of the contemporary political scene in Russia and the West. Pestel began his reply to the Committee’s question about the origin and growth of revolutionary ideas with a prudent reservation: ‘It is very difficult to answer this question, for my response will have to go beyond the bounds of discussing the secret society.’ He proceeded to indicate some typical trends in recent history, notably overthrown monarchs, exiled rulers and numerous coups d’état. He cited the significant role of political literature and the consequent general growth in political awareness among educated Russians. He continued, at his most brilliantly donnish: Moreover, every age has its distinctive features. Ours is remarkable for its revolutionary ideas. From one end of Europe to the other, one and the same thing is apparent, from Portugal to Russia, not excluding a single country, even those two extremes, England and Turkey. The whole of America presents the same spectacle. This spirit of transformation everywhere induces, so to speak, an intellectual ferment (fait bouillir les esprits). He denied that members of the secret societies had held any kind of monopoly of this ‘spirit of transformation’, and argued that it was the common property of an entire generation which had lived through a particularly turbulent period of European history.24 His claim finds support in the observation of the Decembrist M.A. Fonvizin that, following the War of 1812, ‘many officers of the guards and general staff passionately studied and read mainly political works and journals, as well as foreign newspapers which so dramatically reported the struggle of the opposition with the government in constitutional states. Digesting these bold political systems and theories, it was quite natural that they wanted to see them applied to their fatherland.’25 The shock waves that continued to reverberate around the continent after Napoleon, recognised no national borders. As well as providing the single most important impetus to the growth of secret societies in Russia, they precipitated a series of revolutionary outbreaks throughout


Europe. These included uprisings in Portugal in 1817 and 1820, and the revolt in Spain, also in 1820, which resulted in constitutional guarantees by Ferdinand VII and the liquidation of the notorious Inquisition. In Naples the insurrection of 1820, inspired by the success of Rafael del Riego and Quiroga in Spain, was put down by Austrian troops following Ferdinand’s appeal for assistance to the Holy Alliance. In addition there were uprisings in Piedmont (March 1821) and in Greece, as Pestel himself had good reason to know since he had been sent on a military factfinding mission to Moldavia in 1821. Thus the insurgent Decembrists of 1825 were not alone. These political events made a deep impression on Pestel and provided him with ‘irrefutable proof of the instability of constitutional monarchies’, and of the failure of monarchs to honour the terms of the constitutions they had themselves granted. Pestel wished to make clear to the Investigating Committee that there was nothing surprising in the decision taken by many young Russians to become involved in secret societies in order to effect fundamental political changes in Russia after the defeat of Napoleon. It was a Russian response, however premature and crudely articulated, to a powerful pan-European urge for change. It spoke of a deep desire to reassert national identity and sovereignty in the wake of the shattered imperialist designs of Napoleonic France. Reflecting on the origin of his own desire for change, Pestel traced the development of his political awareness to the short-lived restoration in 1814 of the House of Bourbon. He described his subsequent reactions to this event as ‘epochal’ in the development of his political outlook. He observed that what the French Revolution and then Napoleon had achieved was largely preserved after the Restoration, and their legacy was generally recognised as beneficial with the establishment of equality before the law, the Codes, the Concordat, the departmental system and representative institutions which all remained in place. This appreciation had led him to take a positive view of revolution and its potential to change things for the better.26 He was confirmed in his thinking by extensive reading in political and historical literature which resulted in a specifically republican outlook. In this regard the writing of the French ideologue philosopher, Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) was particularly influential. The example of the United States also made a powerful impression on Pestel. As he remarked in his depositions to the Investigating Committee: ‘All the newspapers and political essays so strongly commend the growth of welfare in the North American United States, ascribing this to the state structure, that it seemed to me clear evidence of the excellence of the republican


system.’27 This confidence in the United States as the model for the political regeneration of Russia and Europe was shared too by Destutt de Tracy who expressed his concern for ‘less advanced countries’ of Europe, and in correspondence with Thomas Jefferson wrote that he awaited ‘the avenger from America’.28 Indeed, the notion of republicanism was the basis of the French ideologist’s thought, and was crucial in persuading Pestel to abandon thoughts of a constitutional monarchy in favour of a Russian republic, a process that will be analysed more fully in the discussion of Russian Justice in Chapter 5. Pestel referred to European hopes placed in the American system in the concluding paragraph of his report to General Kiselev on the Greeks’ struggle for independence (1821). In his subtle assessment he revealed one significant detail about the Greeks’ political aspirations which envisaged the republican system as the best means of accommodating ethnic diversity: I consider it not superfluous to add to this that the Greeks’ desire, in the event of total success, consists in the formation of a federal republic, similar to the United States of America. The similarity does not lie in the supreme administration but in the fact that every particular region will have its own administration with its own laws, and will only act with the others in common state affairs. This idea of the Greeks is based on their realisation of the extraordinarily large variation in morals, customs, concepts and entire ways of thinking of the various peoples inhabiting Greece.29 The potential parallels with the multinational Russian Empire were presumably not lost on Kiselev and those in even higher places who read Pestel’s report. However, the federal system was not to find its way into the highly centralised Russian republic of Pestel’s Russian Justice. In addition, Pestel was impressed by the history of the ancient republics of Greece and Rome, and by the medieval Russian city-state of Novgorod with its essentially democratic political institutions and culture. For him and many other Decembrists Novgorod stood as a poignant and inspirational symbol of what Russia might have become had she not fallen victim to Muscovite autocracy.30 Pestel was also influenced by what he saw and experienced at first hand. There were a number of aspects of life in Russia which perturbed him and which would help determine the course of his underground political career, as he informed the Investigating Committee: My thoughts and attention turned to the position of the people. The slavery of the peasants always did have a strong effect on me. So did


the great privileges of the aristocracy which I viewed, so to speak, as a wall standing between the monarch and the people, concealing from the monarch for its own selfish purposes the true position of the people.31 In common with so many other Decembrists, Pestel placed the emancipation of the serfs and the amelioration of the condition of the peasants high on his list of priorities for political and social reform. A local historian, I.V. Maiorov, born in the same district of the Smolensk province where the Pestels had had their estates (now named Pestelevoi), reports that while he was attempting to discover what kind of landowners they had been, he was told in 1888 by one of the eldest and most literate peasants in the village that ‘our master P.I. Pestel together with MuravievApostol and others had been hanged by Nicholas I for wanting to emancipate the serfs’ (my italics). According to Maiorov, back in 1815 Pestel had abetted the bailiff Tikhon in burning the compromising rent-arrears book: ‘Returning home, Tikhon told the peasants what had happened. Of course, everyone was very pleased and praised their masters, much to the envy of their neighbours who lived under a severe regime.’ Maiorov’s investigations led him to conclude that ‘memory of the Pestels is still alive in the locality’, and that ‘the old men proudly pass on to the young ones the story about the unpaid rents and the land they received free of charge’.32 In a personal effort to further the cause of serf emancipation, Pestel sought to give liberty to his serf servant, Ivan. But he met considerable parental opposition in this endeavour, particularly from his mother who was the legal owner of the serfs on the Pestels’ estates.33 Many other Decembrists shared Pestel’s desire to distance themselves from serfdom, among them N.I. Turgenev, I.D. Yakushkin and K.F. Ryleev. The latter was the instigator of the celebrated and ultimately successful attempt to persuade Count D.N. Sheremetev to grant liberty to a talented young serf writer, A.V. Nikitenko, who subsequently became Professor of Russian Literature at St Petersburg University and ranks among the best Russian diarists of his age.34 Apart from serfdom, Pestel was dissatisfied with a number of other social and political issues. These included ‘the privileges of various annexed regions’ (a reference to the granting of constitutions by Alexander I to Finland in 1809 and Poland in 1815), the military colonies; the decline in trade, industry and national wealth; injustice and corruption in the courts; and the crushing burden of military service for the common soldier. All this amounted in Pestel’s view to ‘a picture of national misery’. Against this professed compassion for the peasantry and declared sensitivity to justice and fairness it should be


remembered that Pestel was himself responsible for establishing in his Vyatka Regiment an especially harsh regime of military service for the ‘common soldier’. It may be that he saw himself as a victim of a system in which there were, in Speranskii’s famous view, only slaves of the tsar (the aristocracy) and slaves of the landlords (the enserfed peasantry). In any case, it was Pestel’s predominantly negative view of Russia’s socio-political condition that aroused his ‘inner protest’ against the government.35 Similar diagnoses of Russia’s ills are to be found in the testimony of numerous other Decembrists. Pestel enumerates here grievances and reflects emotions that were common to an entire generation of young Russian officers.

Part II In the Decembrist Secret Societies


5 Pestel and the Decembrist Movement

Pestel’s concern for his country’s social and political development was shared by many of his generation whose outlook had been moulded by much the same formative experiences. It is therefore understandable that he should have sought some way of canvassing the views and influencing the minds of others. The most convenient way of so doing was through the officers’ dining clubs. These had developed during and immediately after the Wars of Liberation in imitation of those which existed in the messes of allied forces’ regiments. Such dining clubs formed, in Russian regiments, the embryo of the earliest Decembrist secret societies: the Society of True and Loyal Sons of the Fatherland or the Union of Salvation, and the Union of Welfare. The very names of these organisations attest also to the Masonic influence behind their formation, especially with regard to their organisational secrecy and conspiratorial ethos. This chapter describes the role Pestel played in the two successive secret societies, the Union of Salvation and the Union of Welfare, which were the precursors of the Northern and Southern Societies. Analysis of his contribution focuses on his struggle to secure broad acceptance in the secret societies both of his radical aims and of his leadership. It also highlights the emergence of a disciplined political conspiracy from the social circle in the officers’ mess in the Second Army’s HQ at Tulchin, and considers the surfacing tensions, confusions and contradictions within the conspiracy to which Pestel’s personality increasingly gave rise.

The Union of Salvation Pestel became involved in informal gatherings of young like-minded guards officers in St Petersburg in 1816 when, in the winter of that year, 51


he was recruited by a Masonic acquaintance, Mikhail Novikov, to an organisation dedicated initially to the discussion of the reform of serfdom. This was the Union of Salvation, which had been founded just a few months earlier in February and is generally held to be the first properly constituted and formally structured Decembrist organisation. Little is known about Novikov, a nephew of N.I. Novikov, the celebrated eighteenth-century publisher and ‘enlightener of Russia’. Historically speaking, Mikhail Nikolaevich Novikov’s main significance lies in his drafting of the first republican constitution in Russia.1 It is clear from Pestel’s testimony that Novikov’s convictions about the need for a Russian republic, which he elaborated in a manifesto, predated his own and exerted considerable influence on the development of his political outlook: ‘Novikov told me about his republican constitution for Russia. But at this stage I was still arguing in favour of a monarchy, though later I began to reflect on his views and to concur with them.’2 It seems, however, that Novikov made little or no impact on the framing of the secret society’s constitution, having in any case left St Petersburg for Ukraine at the end of 1816 on his appointment as secretary of the office of the Governor-General of Ukraine, N.G. Repnin. He did not live to participate in the uprising of December 1825, having died in 1824 aged 47. Pestel testified that Novikov’s constitutional project was distinctively republican in framework and was influenced by the constitution of the United States.3 Pestel recalled meeting other active members of the Union of Salvation at this early stage of its development, including Nikita Muraviev, Prince Sergei Trubetskoi, Fedor Glinka, Pavel Lopukhin, Alexander Muraviev, Sergei and Matvei Muraviev-Apostol, Prince Ilya Dolgorukov, Prince Fedor Shakhovskoi, Ivan Shipov and Mikhail Lunin.4 Their deliberations were politically quite moderate, though from the point of view of the authorities little short of treasonous, since any discussion of political or social reform was by definition the exclusive prerogative of Alexander I who, at this stage of his reign, seemed loathe to exercise it himself. In fact the discussants – Muraviev and Trubetskoi in particular – had the idea of presenting the Emperor for his consideration with proposals which were consistent with his reputedly liberal inclinations. There was no intention at this early stage to pursue any more drastic course of direct action. Glinka testified to his interrogators that Pestel had told him more than once that he had heard from ‘important people that the Emperor had already ordered Novosiltsev to draw up a constitution’ and was intending to instruct Speranskii to produce one too.5 Furthermore, in 1817 Pestel and Trubetskoi firmly rejected a proposal from Alexander Muraviev,

Pestel and the Decembrist Movement 53

director of the Union of Welfare in Moscow, that they should assassinate the emperor there, having selected Ivan Yakushkin by lot to carry out the mission.6 In fact, whatever reforming intentions Alexander may have had earlier in his reign, especially during the ascendancy of Mikhail Speranskii, were irrevocably extinguished by Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and his subsequent overthrow. The tsar saw his mission as co-architect of the new European order enshrined above all in the principles of the Holy Alliance. This messianic conceit provided him with a convenient pretext for virtually abandoning domestic policy to his ministers, particularly Aleksei Arakcheev who personified reactionary rule in post-Napoleonic Russia. From the start, Pestel was an influential figure at meetings of the secret society. Because of the increasing diversity of opinion within it as to precise aims and the means of achieving them, a small committee was established, which included Pestel as its secretary, to explore ways of improving its organisation.7 Pestel, at the helm of this steering committee, whose other members were S.P. Trubetskoi, I.A. Dolgorukov and F.P. Shakhovskoi, began to give the Union a more specific sense of direction. It was Pestel, as most sources agree, who was largely responsible for writing its constitution, drawn up in February 1817.8 Although the constitution has not survived in its entirety, close examination of relevant testimony and memoir literature makes it possible to reconstruct its essentials. The two main planks of the Union’s platform were the replacement of tsarist autocracy by a constitutional monarchy, and the abolition of serfdom by prevailing on the majority of the Russian nobility to petition the tsar. It did not take long however, as Pestel informed the Investigating Committee, for them to realise that it would be ‘impossible to persuade the nobility to do so’.9 His preoccupation with the minutiae of the organisation’s plans prompted the celebrated jibe of Mikhail Lunin, an active member of the Union, that Pestel ‘was going to write an encyclopedia before getting on with the revolution’.10 The Union specifically excluded foreigners from its ranks and called upon its members to combat the influence of foreigners in Russian state affairs generally. This position is consistent with Pestel’s decision to leave a French-speaking Masonic lodge at this time in favour of the all-Russian ‘Three Virtues’, as noted earlier in Chapter 4. Such an exclusive, nationalist stance was oddly at variance with the Western European provenance of the organisation and of the social and political aspirations which had underpinned it in the first place. This stipulation reflects opposition to the enduring German influence in the civil service, the teaching profession and, above all, in the army, and coincides with the emergence


of a re-awakened national consciousness in post-Napoleonic Russia. Subsequent events were to show, however, that the Union of Welfare’s expressed resentment of foreigners did not extend to the exclusion of foreign ideas or to ignoring events in Western Europe. The inspiration provided, for example, by the federal republican system of the United States and the revolutionary upheavals in various parts of Europe after Napoleon’s downfall was to prove especially powerful. Having abandoned the idea of achieving the peaceful transformation of Russia through its existing political institutions and the agency of Alexander I, the Decembrists began to plan a coup d’état. The Union of Salvation’s constitution stipulated that the natural death of the emperor and the moment of his successor’s accession to the throne would be the signal for action. The main drawback of this contingency was not only the relative youth of the tsar who was, after all, only 40 years old in 1818, but also the absolute unpredictability of his death. Remarkably, however, this scenario remained unchanged for eight years and was the strategy finally acted upon when Alexander I died so unexpectedly of natural causes in November 1825. Pestel’s conviction as to the justice of their cause gave the main impetus to the Decembrists’ initial tentative steps. Posted with his regiment to Mitava, Courland, early in 1817, he organised a small branch of the Union of Salvation there, comprising five members in all.11 Ivan Yakushkin was to recall Pestel’s single-mindedness and his steely cast of mind which was combined with an indestructible strength of purpose: Pestel always spoke intelligently and stubbornly defended his opinion; he always believed the truth of his own views as one would normally believe a mathematical truth. Nothing ever deflected him. Perhaps this is why alone of all of us for ten years, without ever weakening for a moment, he worked so hard for the cause of the secret organisation. Once he had persuaded himself that the secret organisation was the best way of achieving the desired end, it became a part of his very existence.12 Pestel’s stubborn, even dogmatic sense of his own infallibility makes it easy to see how this might have alienated the other conspirators from him and made him less receptive to alternative points of view. Another Decembrist, Nikolai Basargin, recalled similarly that Pestel: ‘spoke convincingly, expressed his thoughts with such logic, cogency and conviction that it would have been difficult to resist his influence.’13 Nikita Muraviev testified that among those who came under Pestel’s spell was his younger


brother, Vladimir, who was a member of the society only briefly in 1817 without, however, taking part in it.14 During the investigation, Pestel chose to rebut vigorously allegations of his brother’s association with the secret society: these in any case do not appear to have had any serious effect on his subsequent career. Vladimir Ivanovich was made a senator in 1845, and a privy councillor in 1855.15 Pestel’s influence and singlemindedness is reflected also in the testimony of Ivan Shipov, a member of the Union of Salvation recruited by Pestel. He told the Investigating Committee that in the many conversations he had with Pestel in the course of 1816, the latter used to stress, in an echo of his father’s advice, that it was ‘the duty of every right-thinking individual to educate himself to be useful to the service and to the fatherland’.16 From the outset, Pestel’s uncompromising style combined with his desire to dominate made him intolerant of those who questioned or opposed his views. His insistence on the need to pursue clearly defined political goals, if necessary by radical means, brought him into conflict with moderate members of the Union of Salvation such as Prince Sergei Trubetskoi, who envisaged winning popular acceptance of the secret society’s objectives by ‘gradually influencing public opinion’. Even though Pestel had not yet become a republican, nor expressed his controversial ideas about the need for a revolutionary provisional government, his reference to the positive achievements, following the French Revolution, of the dictatorial Jacobin Committee of Public Safety alarmed the moderates. As Trubetskoi’s memoirs relate: ‘The protest against this was universal; it left behind an unfavourable impression which could never be eradicated and gave rise to a lasting distrust of Pestel.’ MajorGeneral Mikhail Orlov, an active member of the early Decembrist organisations and head of the Kishinev section of the Union of Welfare, also wrote of the ‘general lack of confidence’ in Pestel.17 There is evidence, then, that even at this early stage of the Decembrist movement’s development Pestel was not trusted. The lack of trust prompted by his radical views was increased by a lack of clarity as to Pestel’s motives: was it simply that he was driven by self-seeking ambition to become the Robespierre of the revolution? Or was his developing republican ambition for Russia too far ahead of its time to be properly understood by his contemporaries? This early mistrust of Pestel was, unfortunately, to persist throughout the history of the Decembrist movement and would prove a major factor in the failure of the secret societies in St Petersburg and Tulchin to unite at his instigation and under his leadership. By the autumn of 1817 the Union of Salvation in St Petersburg and Moscow had fallen into disarray. Therefore, the more active of its


members, particularly Nikita Muraviev and Trubetskoi, decided while Pestel was in Mitava to reform the organisation. In drawing up a new constitution they were greatly influenced by a recently obtained copy of the statutes of the German Tugendbund (‘Society of Virtue’), an organisation dedicated to encouraging the moral regeneration of German society after the defeat of Napoleon. This constitution took its name from the colour of its binding, and so became known as Zelenaya kniga ili ustav Soyuza Blagodenstviya (‘Green Book or the Code of the Union of Welfare’). The society which replaced the Union of Salvation took its name from the sub-title of the Green Book – the Union of Welfare. The Green Book proved to be unexpectedly controversial and in fact contained the seeds of the Union of Welfare’s own imminent destruction.

The Union of Welfare in Tulchin Following his transfer to Tulchin in the autumn of 1818, Pestel soon started to exert there the same authority and influence as he had in the north. Nikolai Basargin’s memoirs describe how Pestel dominated these early meetings of the Union of Welfare: ‘His lucid, logical mind directed our discussions and frequently reconciled disagreements.’18 It was on his initiative that an evening reading circle began to meet to give officers at the headquarters of the Second Army an opportunity to acquaint themselves with the seminal literature on politics, political economy and philosophy. They discussed the principal works by such authors as Filangieri, Machiavelli, Say, Adam Smith, Montesquieu and Pierre Laromiguière.19 Basargin recalled that members of the Tulchin section ‘had a more serious intent than simply amusing themselves … On such occasions we usually talked about contemporary events and topics. We often discussed abstract matters and in general shared with each other our thoughts and our knowledge’.20 Basargin also stressed the intimate comradeship of such evenings and the significance of this for the Tulchin members over and above even the political objectives of the society: Although the aim [of the Union of Welfare] was known to everyone, for most members it was secondary. The main thing was the close bond that formed amongst us. We would meet every evening without fail and each give a detailed personal account of what had been of special interest to him that day. Since we had no desire to give this up, we agreed to continue our society in Tulchin.21 Such glimpses of these meetings reveal their relaxed atmosphere which gave rise to the warm comradeship of the officers’ mess enjoyed by


Chief-of-Staff Kiselev, who was not a member of the Union of Welfare. Nevertheless, members of the secret society did not confine their activity merely to mess-room chat: Pestel was to claim that this was a busy time for the Union of Welfare, especially for the drafting of its constitution.22 When Pestel arrived in Tulchin in September 1818, he was already a member of the Union of Welfare, having joined it a few months previously in St Petersburg.23 According to some reports, he had not been entirely happy when the news of the reorganisation of the secret society reached him at his army post in Mitava at the end of 1817. This was because he had hoped that his own proposed constitution for the new Union of Welfare would be adopted rather than the Green Book. What was Pestel’s attitude towards the organisation? Nikita Muraviev’s opinion was that Pestel ‘did not acknowledge the new Union and functioned separately according to different rules’.24 One commentator has remarked that although Pestel was not in sympathy with parts of the Union of Welfare’s constitution, he nevertheless as a leading member of the Tulchin section kept in touch with the executive board of the Union of Welfare in St Petersburg.25 Even so, Muraviev’s reference to Pestel’s reluctance immediately to recognise the new Union either in Mitava or later in Tulchin does point to a certain independence of action on his part.26 Pestel’s objection to the Green Book was that it laid too much emphasis on pious calls for philanthropic social work and too little on the pressing need for political activity in furtherance of their aims. Muraviev himself had doubts about this aspect of the Green Book’s programme since by this time neither he nor Pestel any longer believed in the possibility of a peaceful solution of the peasant question. Their pessimism was reinforced by the failure of the Governor-General of Ukraine, Prince N.G. Repnin-Volkonskii, to arouse the interest of the Ukrainian nobility in the idea of serf emancipation.27 It may well be that Pestel received inside information about this lack of support from M.N. Novikov, secretary of Repnin’s office, who had recruited Pestel to the Union of Salvation. Pestel apparently remained convinced that the Green Book was not a true representation of the aims of the Union of Welfare and was not intended to be and ‘its contents were nothing more than a simple evasion of the real aim in case the society was discovered. It was something to show new members initially: but they did not see all of it once they had joined’.28 On the other hand, the reservations he had at the time did not amount to an insurmountable obstacle to his acceptance of the Green Book. Pestel testified that, ‘the Union of Welfare was set up in Moscow with the Green Book which was sent to us in St Petersburg. We accepted it and thenceforth the Union of Welfare began to function, while the former organisation and its statutes were liquidated’.29


Pestel was actively assisted in setting up the Tulchin branch of the Union of Welfare by I.G. Burtsov, a member of the Union’s executive board, who arrived in Tulchin in May 1819 as General P.D. Kiselev’s adjutant. Together they immediately started to recruit members, among them, N.K. Komarov, A.G. Nepenin and Dr. F.B. Volf.30 Other officers identified in Pestel’s testimony as recruited at that time were: Colonel F.G. Kalm, Colonel S.G. Krasnokutskii (who by 1825 was a senator with the rank of ober-prokuror, in whom the Northern Society vested certain misplaced hopes), A.P. Yushnevskii, Colonel P.V. Avramov, Aide-de-Camp V.P. Ivashev and Lt-Col. I.N. Khotyaintsov.31 In his depositions, Komarov named a total of 20 members of the Tulchin section.32 A fascinating insight into the recruitment process is to be found in the testimony of F.B. Volf, an army medical officer, who became closely acquainted with Pestel soon after they had both arrived in Tulchin in September 1818. Volf was among his very first recruits: Once when we were alone he began to read to me several passages from the Green Book named the ‘Code of the Union of Welfare,’ saying there was a society which was taking care to spread culture and civic virtues. My ardent youth was enraptured by such ideas and I was far from suspecting anything criminal in it. He made me promise not to tell anyone else about it, and I borrowed the book. Reading it at home, I was unable to grasp what was set out in it and found it very obscure. Nevertheless, the thought of getting involved in cultural matters and the spread of virtue did not cease to captivate me. Two or three days later I returned the book to Mr. Pestel and told him of my pleasure and of my readiness to join this society, but asked for time to think it over. This was the start, Volf wrote, of their frequent conversations ‘about the Union of Welfare, the spread of culture, and the freedom of peasants’.33 Of particular interest here is Volf’s description of the furtive initial approach and the thrill of anticipation of personal involvement in ‘cultural activity’ and ‘the spread of civic virtue’, undiminished by the incomprehensible Green Book, but fired by youthful enthusiasm for a dimly perceived cause. The inability of this young officer to grasp the complexities of the social and political changes Russia needed as envisaged by the leadership of the secret society suggests that many new recruits to the secret society failed to realise the seriousness of what they were getting drawn into. Pestel’s considerable powers of persuasion


would normally prove sufficient to overcome any reservations on the part of those, like Volf, whom he sought to recruit. Once they were members of the Tulchin branch, Pestel would attempt to win them round to his point of view on all major matters of concern to the secret society. Apart from Pestel, the most active figure in the Tulchin section, as indicated earlier, was I.G. Burtsov, even though Burtsov himself modestly named Yushnevskii and Komarov as the most influential members after Pestel.34 Pestel recalled that he and Burtsov initially worked harmoniously together to build up the secret society in the Second Army.35 But serious differences soon arose between them. These stemmed from fundamental disagreement over the long-term aims of the society and the means of achieving them. Burtsov’s views were much more moderate than Pestel’s and were generally in line with the relatively uncontroversial ideas of the Green Book on philanthropic and cultural activity. They were nonetheless ideas which had considerable appeal to those who, like Volf, were introduced to them and Burtsov was adept at winning adherents to them. Burtsov’s subsequent disillusionment with conspiratorial activity resulted in his withdrawal from the secret society in 1821 allegedly ‘in order to concentrate on his professional duties’.36 This is how Burtsov himself described his withdrawal of support for Pestel to the Investigating Committee: I arrived in Tulchin in May 1819 and found Pestel who had already been there six months, recruited Komarov to the society and together we all began to increase the number of members. I acted in the same spirit as before, while Pestel initially shared my outlook but later began gradually to oppose it, inciting his friends to do likewise by both cajoling and convincing them. He maintained that hundreds of years were needed to shape attitudes, but that we had to change the system so that attitudes might change too. However, I adhered unswervingly to my former position, considering it the greatest happiness to succeed in my lifetime in improving even to the smallest extent the moral outlook within my small circle of activity. The scale of discord in the views of founder members convinced me that a society of such divergent elements could not exist. And so I resolved to bring about its destruction.37 Burtsov certainly exaggerated his own power within the organisation and his boast that he intended single-handed to destroy it rings hollow. Nevertheless, the longer Burtsov’s influence persisted, the more insistent


were Pestel’s objections to the Green Book, as was his determination to impose his will and leadership on the Tulchin section of the Union of Welfare. Once again, Volf’s testimony provides a vivid picture of this process: As time passed, when the society was referred to, it was increasingly in terms of statutes, with talk of the need to improve laws in Russia, of a constitution. From this point the innocent aim of the Union of Welfare began to disappear. It became a political society with a goal I knew about: namely, to try and introduce a constitution by means of a general acceleration of education and recruitment of members.38 Pestel’s own thinking between 1817 and 1819 about the shape such ‘statutes’ might take finds some reflection in his memorandum, ‘A note on state government.’ This draft, dating from the winter of 1818–19, has survived only in part, and is chiefly concerned with forms of legislature, of the defence of the state and military reform.39 It gives no indication of Pestel’s imminent conversion to republicanism. Pestel now found himself increasingly opposed in the Tulchin organisation, particularly by Burtsov and M.A. Fonvizin, for not being moderate enough. The Investigating Committee noted that Fonvizin and Pestel ‘had disagreements on many issues which frequently ended up in clashes of personality’.40 There is, then, a considerable body of evidence to show that Pestel’s personality, which many Decembrists found uncongenial, proved a major and continuing liability in his struggle to gain acceptance for his objectives within the Decembrist movement as a whole. In spite of pressure from the disaffected Burtsov, Pestel’s ideas about the future governance of Russia reached no conclusive change during 1819. His memorandum of January or February 1820, ‘A brief speculative review of state governance’ (Kratkoe umozritel’noe obozrenie gosudarstvennogo pravleniya), suggests he had not abandoned the concept of a constitutionally limited monarchy. But his careful consideration of Russia’s future course and his drafting and revision of many plans and programmes were already leading him towards republicanism. As he informed the Investigating Committee, Tulchin, ‘with its remoteness from high society’, provided him with just the environment and time he needed to crystallise his views.41 The process of Pestel’s shift towards a republican vision of a future Russia is an important stage in his intellectual and political biography and is the subject of the chapter on Russian Justice which follows.


St Petersburg meeting: January 1820 Pestel’s increasing impatience with the philanthropic aims of the Union of Welfare, as laid down in the Green Book, found its clearest expression the meeting of the Union’s executive board in St Petersburg in January 1820, which was attended by some 14 members.42 He had been in the capital since November 1819, ostensibly on official business accompanying General Vitgenshtein as his aide-de-camp, and had been taking the opportunity to visit members of his family. During this period he had frequent talks with St Petersburg members in which he canvassed support for his own increasingly radical platform. As Glinka recalled, he revelled in such discussions and ‘loved to draw others into them’.43 The main thrust of Pestel’s contribution to this important meeting was his attempt to persuade the board to discard the moderate political ideas on which the Green Book was based and instead to adopt the republican model as the basis for the social and political transformation of Russia. With all the zeal of a neophyte Pestel now urged republicanism on his colleagues. Among those who heard his passionate advocacy were the sons of some of Russia’s most distinguished aristocratic families, and one can only wonder at Pestel’s daring in his attempt to convert them to his republican cause. They included Count F.P. Tolstoy, Prince I.A. Dolgorukov, N.I. Turgenev, M.S. Lunin, F.N. Glinka, I.P. Shipov, S.I. and M.I. Muraviev-Apostol, N.M. Muraviev, S.M. Semenov and at least three others. This is an extract from Pestel’s account of the event: Prince Dolgorukov, opening the meeting which took place in Colonel Glinka’s flat, proposed that the Board should request me to put forward all the advantages and disadvantages of both monarchical and republican governments, so that each member could then declare his judgments and opinions. And this is what happened. Finally, after lengthy exchanges the discussion was concluded and it was announced that a vote would be taken with each member indicating whether he wanted a monarch or a president, the details to be worked out in due course. Each then explained the reasons for his choice, and when it came to Turgenev’s turn he said in French: ‘Le président – sans phrases’, that is, a president without further ado. In the end everyone unanimously accepted a republican government. During the discussion only Glinka spoke in favour of a monarchical government, proposing the Empress Elizaveta Alekseevna. This resolution of the executive board was passed on to all other boards, including Tulchin’s. From this point republican ideas began to gain dominance over monarchical ones.


Dolgorukov’s invitation to Pestel to address the meeting presumably stemmed from discussions held prior to it in which the latter had argued in favour of a Russian republic. Now he was given the opportunity to develop his ideas to the assembled members of the Union of Welfare. Due allowance must be made for Pestel’s partial account of events as he reported them to the Investigating Committee. There is, for example, an apparent contradiction between the unanimity he claimed for his republican position and Glinka’s monarchist standpoint. Pestel dismissed as illusory the idea of limiting the monarchy by means of a constitution, hitherto regarded as the most obvious aspiration and the most acceptable alternative to the existing autocracy.44 He claimed that his own passionate support for Russian republicanism won many converts to its cause.45 Given Pestel’s categorical assertion about the outcome of the January meeting, it is understandable that Soviet historians, who tended to take Pestel’s statements to the Investigating Committee at face value, felt justified in regarding it as seminal to the subsequent course of events. The claimed ascendancy of republicanism from this point was crucial not only to the Decembrist movement but to the future of the entire Russian revolutionary movement. Nechkina’s verdict is typically emphatic: ‘The Union of Welfare was the first organisation in the history of the Russian revolutionary movement to take the decision to fight for a republican form of government in Russia (1820)’. She deemed it ‘a big step forward from the constitutional-monarchical programme’ of the Union of Salvation, one which ‘began to make the Green Book look obsolete’.46 Similarly, I.V. Vasiliev, writing in 1971 about the Tulchin section, declared: It would be difficult to exaggerate the historical significance of the meeting of the executive board and of the resolution it adopted. Pestel’s report on the advantages and disadvantages of the monarchist and republican systems turned a new page in the Decembrist movement – from vague notions about the form of the governmental structure of a reformed Russia or from a constitutional monarchy – it made the transition to republicanism. Without doubt, this was an outstanding event in the political outlook of Russian revolutionaries.47 A notable exception to this prevalent view in Soviet writing was the judicious assessment of S.S. Landa. He rightly pointed out that in his testimony generally, and specifically on this question, Pestel tended to see matters in terms of his experience of the Southern Society


in Tulchin. This was not necessarily or invariably representative of the Decembrist movement as a whole.48 What is at issue here is recognition of the first authentic emergence of republicanism as a formal item, tabled by Decembrists of the Union of Welfare, on the political agenda of the Russian revolutionary movement. However, according to Pestel’s own remarks, the conclusions reached at this particular meeting of the executive board did not necessarily amount to a binding political directive for very long: It was generally the case in the Union from start to finish that no single rule was consistently in force and that no one idea was consistently in the minds of the members, and that very often what was decided one day would come up for discussion and argument the next. It is therefore impossible to say with absolute certainty which form of administration the Union would in fact finally have chosen.49 There is an almost audible note of exasperation in Pestel’s assessment. His own elevation of the outcome of the meeting at Glinka’s to the status of a final ‘resolution’ must be regarded as an overstatement despite the uncritical endorsement of certain historians. The position is further complicated by the fact that there were some influential members of the St Petersburg section, most notably Nikita Muraviev, who at this stage shared Pestel’s republican views, only to revert later to their earlier monarchist convictions. Moreover, as was naturally quite common in the records of the Investigation Committee, there were conflicting testimonies about the meeting itself from those who had themselves participated in it. An important example is Nikita Muraviev’s claim in his testimony, remarkably similar to Pestel’s own reservations, that the January meeting’s preference for a republic ‘had no influence on the subsequent thinking of the members, who after this meeting frequently changed their ideas’.50 The personal confrontation (ochnaya stavka) between Glinka and Pestel, of the sort routinely arranged by the Investigating Committee to clarify conflicting testimony, casts further light on the disputed matter of the status of the ‘republican resolution’. For his part Glinka insisted that the meeting had been no more than a kind of academic political science seminar, a view with which at the time, he claimed, Pestel had concurred. As if to underline the unreliability of Pestel’s testimony about what had in fact taken place, Glinka followed the confrontation with a letter to the Committee. In it he maintained


that Pestel had been remarkably vague about the precise time, day, month and even the season of the year in which the meeting had taken place and about how many and precisely which members had attended it. Therefore his claim – that he had prevailed on the meeting to accept the idea of a Russian republic – must also be suspect. Glinka’s depositions also contain the record of a confrontation between Pestel and another member of the Union of Welfare, Stepan Semenov, on just this point. Semenov claimed that Pestel had spoken in favour of the United States’ model, but that the majority at the meeting had rejected the possibility of a similar system of administration.51 Semenov’s own depositions in fact provide the most detailed account of Pestel’s participation in this meeting: Pestel demonstrated the superiority over all the others of the governmental system of the United States of America. Everybody agreed with Pestel that it was the best of all the then known systems. But when the discussion turned to the possibility of introducing such a structure of government to Russia, the opinion of the majority of members was negative. Glinka strongly urged that it would be impossible to establish a republican system in Russia, where monarchist principles were so deeply rooted in the consciousness of the people. This argument did not end in general agreement and it was decided to continue discussion of the matter at the next meeting.52 Glinka’s view of the meeting is further supported by the testimony of S.I. Muraviev-Apostol, who described it as a ‘polemical discussion’ about the advantages of a republic over the monarchy. Similarly, in his testimony A.F. Brigen stressed the ‘theoretical’ nature of the discussion, the theme of which was ‘so abstract and undefined that it was impossible to foresee any practical goal’. The January discussion, dominated by Pestel’s voice, in Brigen’s view reflected ‘nothing else but Mr. Pestel’s desire to dazzle us with his knowledge’.53 There was, however, a dichotomy between Pestel’s advocacy of republicanism at the January meeting and his continued support for constitutional monarchy as expressed, for example, in his ‘Speculative Review’ – also known as ‘A social and political treatise’ – which dates from this time. In his sophisticated attempt to resolve it, Landa cites the testimony of M.S. Lunin. Lunin gives as the main conclusion arising from the discussions of Pestel’s submission on republican government the idea of ‘a constitutional system with limited executive power of a monarch or a president, without differentiation between one or


the other’. As N.I. Turgenev put it to Pestel, according to Brigen’s account of the meeting: ‘A presidential administration is excellent, but the main thing on which everything rests is national representation.’54 In other words, the question of the titular head of state – monarch or president – was secondary to the main issue: the struggle for a Rechtsstaat, a constitutionally based, legally ordered system of government for Russia. The fact of the matter is that the Decembrists, meeting in St Petersburg in January 1820, reflected a position typical of, for example, early nineteenth-century French liberal thought which regarded substance (constitutional monarchy or republic) as more important than form (presidential or royal rule). Thus Benjamin Constant, the liberal champion of political reform in France who had a huge following in Russia at this time, was interested not so much in democratic rights as in the organisational system of political power. Whether that system was headed by a monarch or a president was of less immediate concern. Consistent with this is the fact that Pestel himself prepared two versions of the first edition of Russian Justice, one for a constitutional monarchy and the other for a republic. Although many members of the Union of Welfare were albeit temporarily convinced by Pestel’s eloquent exposition of the advantages of a republic, in the end they were not driven by democratic considerations and on the whole were equally ready to settle for the prospect of a constitutional monarchy. There is, therefore, little in the sources themselves to suggest any need for a revision of the view of Pavlov-Silvanskii dating from 1910, that Pestel’s visit to St Petersburg in 1820 was for him only a qualified success. A pivotal point in the history of the Union of Welfare it undeniably was, because here Pestel for the first time argued the case for a Russian republic, making a strong impression in particular on Nikita Muraviev and Sergei Muraviev-Apostol.55 But it proved beyond even Pestel’s powers to persuade the members of the Union to become republicans themselves: ‘Between 1819 and 1821 the Union of Welfare is to be viewed as a society of innocent liberals’, as Pavlov-Silvanskii so succinctly put it.56 It should be noted, however, that some of these ‘innocent liberals’ went so far at the time of the January meeting as to discuss the question of regicide. Nikita Muraviev’s albeit informal submission, supported by Pestel, on the need for regicide as a prerequisite for the establishment of a republic, sparked off an even more furious controversy than Pestel’s republican proposals had at the full meeting of the executive board. For all the difficulties of interpretation posed by the reconciling of conflicting statements, the fact remains that by the spring of 1820,


Pestel’s own political position was proving uncomfortably radical for many of his confederates in the Union of Welfare. For example, at the St Petersburg meeting he first mooted the idea of the establishment of a provisional revolutionary government following the successful coup d’état, regarding it as a mechanism essential to suppress ‘anarchy and disorder’. Nikita Muraviev’s claim that he alone had supported the idea shows that this was another highly controversial suggestion which generated a good deal of unease among those to whom Pestel addressed it.57 His growing espousal of the republican cause was to many even more disconcerting. Many Decembrists, particularly in St Petersburg, never managed to bring themselves to accept the idea. It was the cause of a profound and irreconcilable schism in the movement, greatly contributing to the winding up of the Union of Welfare and the formation of the Northern and Southern societies. Such is the measure of the impact, both negative and positive, which Pestel had on the Decembrist movement at this stage of its development. Pestel returned to Tulchin from St Petersburg at the end of May 1820 to inform the Union’s section there of the newly adopted ‘republican resolution’. It was opposed, according to him, only by Burtsov who had serious doubts about the possibility of creating a Russian republic. Pestel also brought back with him from St Petersburg, incidentally, some new ideas about improving the organisation of the section, partly with a view to preparing for the Moscow congress of the Union of Welfare which was scheduled for January 1821.58 Some reorganisation was in fact also necessitated by the growth in membership of the Tulchin section during 1820. By the end of that year its ranks had increased to number 30 members, including A.P. Baryatinskii, M.A. Fonvizin, S.G. Volkonskii, V.L. Davydov, N.V. Basargin and N.A. Kryukov. This made it the largest of the Union of Welfare’s three branches.59

Moscow Congress, May 1821 At this time, the activity of the secret society in Tulchin was overshadowed by the personal antagonism between its two leading figures, Pestel and Burtsov. The sources reveal that they were divided as much by personal antipathy as by ideological outlook. According to Burtsov, Pestel would lose his temper every time he (Burtsov) so much as touched one of his papers. Yushnevskii confirms that Pestel saw in Burtsov ‘a strong opponent of his political views’, while Basargin writes of ‘the endless arguments of Colonel Burtsov and Pestel over the republican system’.60 It was the issue of what kind of state the successful coup should inaugurate – a republic or


a constitutional monarchy – that was the root cause of the disagreement between the two men and its consequences were very serious. Following the January meeting in St Petersburg, Pestel’s own views on the matter were taking written shape in the earliest drafts of what from 1824 he would call Russian Justice.61 The resultant split in the Tulchin section did not escape the attention of the emissary of the Union’s executive board, I.D. Yakushkin, sent there to discuss the section’s representation at the impending Moscow congress. In his memoirs, Yakushkin vividly describes the state of the Tulchin section at the time of his visit: In Tulchin the members of the secret society, having no worries about being under any special observation, met with one another freely and practically every day. In this way they kept each others’ spirits up. In any case, Pestel alone was enough to serve as a constant source of enthusiasm for all the Tulchin members, among whom at this time there were something like two parties: the moderates under the influence of Burtsov and, as it was said, the extremists under Pestel’s leadership.62 As one commentator has expressed it: ‘There is no doubt that the discord between Pestel and Burtsov ran very deep and threatened organisational havoc within the southern section of the Union of Welfare.’63 In fact, ‘organisational havoc’ was already present in Tulchin. Moreover, the collision between the opposing viewpoints these two men represented in one section of the Union of Welfare was symptomatic of the tension it was to create among Decembrists and their organisations subsequently. This applied equally in St Petersburg and in the south right up to the uprising on Senate Square on 14 December 1825. The main reason for convening the Moscow congress of the Union of Welfare was not, however, the deep division apparent in its Tulchin section. There was more generally an increasing divergence between moderate and radical opinion within the secret society as a whole. Concern was mounting at the evident lack of progress being made in the furtherance of the aims of the Green Book. In the increasingly reactionary climate of Arakcheevshchina it was becoming impossible to meet the goal of ‘creating public opinion’ by means of propaganda. The Green Book’s statutes were too broad and undefined to amount to a realisable political programme. There were also difficulties in recruiting members of the right calibre in sufficient numbers to the various regional sections of the Union (in Moscow, St Petersburg, Tulchin and Kishinev). For all these reasons certain members of the secret society, notably Mikhail Fonvizin


and Ivan Yakushkin, felt that the time had come for a major review of the Union’s activity and future agenda. To this end, all founder members of the Union’s executive board were called to a special meeting in Moscow. In addition every section was requested to send its own nominated representative. In view of the discord between Pestel and Burtsov, the matter of representation caused particular difficulties in Tulchin. Burtsov and those who shared his moderate outlook were anxious not to be represented by their forceful republican opponent. As Yakushkin was given quite clearly to understand: ‘Burtsov assured me that if Pestel were to go to Moscow, he would spoil the whole thing with his acerbic opinions and his stubbornness.’64 In the event the matter was resolved with almost opportune ease: Burtsov and another Tulchin member, Nikolai Komarov, both had leave at the right time and, what was equally important, both had other plausible reasons for journeying to Moscow, such as visiting their families there. The membership’s deliberations are succinctly summarised in the eyewitness account of Yakushkin: Pestel very much wanted to go to the congress in Moscow. But many persuaded him that as there would already be two deputies at this congress his presence there was not essential. And if he were to request leave to go to Moscow where, as everybody knew, he had no relations and no particular business, he might arouse the suspicions of the Tulchin authorities, or even the suspicion of the Moscow police.65 The Tulchin section then was represented at the Moscow congress by Burtsov as founder member and by Komarov as elected delegate.66 This decision was a major blow to Pestel’s ambitions to determine the future course of action of the Tulchin section. He must have known that in being deprived the opportunity to press his own viewpoint at the important Moscow congress, he was almost certainly surrendering the organisation to the moderate line represented by Burtsov and Komarov. He had effectively allowed himself to be out-manoeuvred by his opponents by being denied direct access to the Moscow congress which, as the supreme policy-making body, would profoundly affect the future course of the secret society. His frustration over this must have been compounded by the fact that the majority of the Tulchin membership supported this arrangement, to the detriment of his own leadership status. The work of the congress was led by Nikolai Turgenev and Mikhail Fonvizin and extended over three weeks. Its participants learned that


the authorities knew from informers of the society’s existence. Lengthy and heated discussions resulted in the decision to declare the Union of Welfare defunct and to wind up its affairs. This unexpected course of action was recognised as the best way of ridding the organisation of passive, unreliable or unwanted members such, indeed, as the absent Pestel. Further, it would leave the founder members of the executive board the option of continuing their primarily philanthropic activity with renewed vigour in a more covert, strictly conspiratorial and more clearly focused fashion. Such was the hope expressed, for example, by Ivan Yakushkin, whose recollections of the event refer generally to ‘unreliable’ members without, however, naming Pestel specifically.67 Basargin’s account of this démarche, based on what Burtsov told him, certainly points the finger at Pestel. The participants at the Moscow meeting ‘noted that Pestel had considerable weight and influence in the south and that some of his ideas, which they did not agree with, were accepted in the Southern section. Their wounded vanity and fear that the society might be discovered by the government … led them to close the society temporarily’. Pestel’s influence was thus one of the main reasons for the decision of the Moscow congress and ‘if they were successful in reducing Pestel’s influence’ the Union of Welfare would resume its activity.68 And so, as one student of the 1821 Moscow congress summed matters up with a note of incredulity: ‘the unpalatable decision of the congress was directed not only against the hesitant and unreliable, but against Pestel, the resolute organiser of the coup, unique in his profound strength of will and the soundness of his knowledge and judgments’.69 News of this development, communicated to Pestel by Komarov and Burtsov on their return to Tulchin in March, came to him as an unexpected and devastating blow, as described by Komarov: ‘One would have to know Pestel and his fierce ambition for the success of the society to see his distress at this sudden news, which destroyed all his efforts and the labours of many years.’ Pestel protested to Komarov that the Moscow congress ‘had no right to destroy what they had not been alone in creating’.70 Evidently the congress had decided that he was not to be made aware of the feint that this move actually represented, because he was one of the Union’s members whose removal was intended by means of its decision. Yakushkin explained that a new organisation was to be set up instead. It was to comprise four main sections, one to be centred on St Petersburg under Nikolai Turgenev, one in Moscow under Ivan Fonvizin, another in Smolensk province under Ivan Yakushkin himself, while the fourth ‘Burtsov undertook to reorganise in Tulchin.’ Such ‘reorganisation’,


therefore, clearly envisaged the elimination of the radical, republican influence of Pavel Pestel. Burtsov’s declared intention to this effect at the congress met with no objection. The plan was, according to Yakushkin, for Burtsov to inform the entire Tulchin section of the cessation of the Union of Welfare. Immediately afterwards all members, ‘apart from Pestel’s adherents’, were to be apprised of the existence of the new rules, with a view to ‘uniting them all under his (Burtsov’s) leadership’.71 As Nechkina rightly observes, far from carrying out his intention to destroy the secret organisation, he was in fact bent on creating a new one.72 The conclusion must therefore be that Pestel at this stage did not have any reliable support within the doomed organisation. Nevertheless, it was Burtsov who was the loser, as subsequent events and Yakushkin’s account make clear: Burtsov, on his return to Tulchin, announced at a general meeting that the secret society no longer existed. All members present attacked him and those members who had attended the Moscow congress, quite rightly pointing out that eight people had no right whatsoever to destroy the whole secret society. They promised each other there and then not to cease their activities. Burtsov was left completely isolated; he did not even show anyone the new statutes and from that moment broke off all contact with members of the society.73 According to Pestel, many in the Tulchin section shared his outrage at the news from Moscow: ‘The displeasure of all the members of our executive board with what had taken place in Moscow is evident from the fact that the majority was inclined to reject the declared liquidation of the Union.’74 This claim finds support in Basargin’s memoirs: ‘It was quite natural that when Burtsov, having convened all the members of the Tulchin section, told them what had been done in Moscow, we were insulted by this action which provoked general dissatisfaction. Everyone except Komarov (a man of dubious qualities) decided to remain.’75 And so the long-standing dispute between Burtsov and Pestel had come to a head. It would be resolved by the former’s departure from Tulchin and the secret society there, and the emergence under the aegis of Pestel and Aleksei Yushnevskii of a reconstituted Tulchin-based organisation: the Southern Society. Obviously, Pestel was to become a leading figure in the new organisation. However, for all his impact on the Decembrist movement to this point and in spite of his considerable personal influence over many of his confederates, it remains a remarkable


fact and a significant pointer to subsequent developments, that two major events – the signal decisions to reform the Union of Salvation in 1817 and to ‘liquidate’ the Union of Welfare in 1821 – took place without Pestel’s participation, much less his assent. The explanation for this lies simply in his political ineptitude. Although his persuasive powers and the clarity of his vision were formidable, he was transparently manipulative, and he antagonised too many people by shows of impatience when they failed to grasp the extraordinarily radical ideas he put to them, so failing to establish his own personal power base. The parallels with L.D. Trotskii in the political history of the 1920s are striking.

6 Ideologist of the Decembrist Movement: Russian Justice

Although Pestel never completed it, Russian Justice (Russkaya pravda) was the most outstandingly original and radical of the Decembrists’ various projects and manifestos. Only the Northern Society’s rather modest proposal for a constitutional monarchy and a federated Russian state, drafted by Nikita Muraviev, came anywhere close to matching the importance and stature of Pestel’s manifesto. This chapter explores the genesis, composition and main ideas of Pestel’s work. It also considers aspects of his idiosyncratic Russian usage of language and the extent to which Russian Justice was known generally among the members of the secret societies. The Decembrists’ reaction to Pestel’s radical agenda will be further considered in subsequent chapters. Russian Justice ranks alongside its namesake, Russkaya pravda of Yaroslav the Wise (1019–54) and the Ulozhenie (1649) of Aleksei Mikhailovich as one of the three historic Russian law codes. Of the three, Pestel’s is the least complete and has survived in only fragmentary draft form. By the autumn of 1825, of the 10 projected chapters Pestel had virtually completed only the Introduction, Chapters 1 and 2 and part of Chapter 3. These deal with the territorial extent of the Russian republic, its constituent nationalities, the class composition of its population and the administrative structure of post-revolutionary Russia. He had written drafts of chapters 4 and 5 ‘pertaining to the political and social condition of the people’.1 The last five chapters exist only in outline. It may well be that some of the most important sections of Russian Justice were destroyed by Pestel himself on the eve of his arrest, as he claimed to the Investigating Committee, or by his friends in the Southern Society subsequent to it.2 Following his arrest on 13 December 1825 and the literal unearthing of his project some months later by the Investigating Committee acting on 72

Ideologist of the Decembrist Movement 73

information received, Russian Justice disappeared into secret state archives for 80 years. As Mikhail Lunin wrote in his Commentary on the work of the Investigating Committee which, with Nikita Muraviev, he completed in Siberia in November 1839, in their anxiety to conceal Pestel’s work from the people the authorities consigned it to the oblivion of the archives.3 It was not until 1883 that Tsar Alexander III gave the military historian and academician N.F. Dubrovin permission to make a copy of it. Twenty years later, in 1903, V.I. Semevskii obtained permission to read through Russian Justice but even so was only allowed to take notes, not to make a copy of it. When Dubrovin died in 1904 his papers passed to the Academy of Sciences, where P.E. Shchegolev used them as the basis of the first published edition in 1906. Shchegolev was still, however, denied access to the original manuscript. As a consequence this version proved so unreliable that Semevskii urged future scholars to bypass it and go straight to the original.4 Shchegolev’s edition was preceded by N.P. Pavlov-Silvanskii’s 16-page entry on Pestel in the ‘Russian Biographical Dictionary’ (Russkii Biograficheskii Slovar’) of 1902. This important landmark in Decembrist historiography contains the first published summary of the main ideas of Russian Justice. The most important of the early Soviet generation of Russian historians to produce valuable studies of Pestel and Russian Justice were N.M. Druzhinin, B.E. Syroechkovskii, S.N. Chernov and A.A. Pokrovskii. The last three in particular did pioneering work on the two editions of Russian Justice. The complete and first scholarly edition of Russian Justice was at last published in 1958 as Volume 7 of the series ‘The Decembrist Uprising. Documents’ (Vosstanie dekabristov. Dokumenty).

Genesis and composition Pestel worked on versions of Russian Justice for over seven years, from 1817 to the winter of 1824–25. Some key ideas, such as the ending of serfdom and autocracy, were present from the outset. But, crucially, the type of state governance he proposed changed from a constitutional monarchy to a republic as his own political ideas developed. All this time, however, he was also writing extensively on contemporary military matters which actually preoccupied him almost as much. Indeed, Russian Justice was not the only project Pestel worked on. He made the major contribution to the statutes of the Union of Salvation adopted in 1817, calling for a constitutional monarchy and the abolition of serfdom, but unfortunately no copy of them has survived. His early interest in political institutions is further reflected in two memoranda, ‘A note


on state government’ (Zapiska o gosudarstvennom pravlenii) and ‘The state department of justice’ (Gosudarstvenyi prikaz pravosudiya) (1819–20) in which he outlined two projected civil and criminal legislatures. Still in his pre-republican phase, he developed proposals in the former for a constitutional monarchy and elaborated in detail the structure of central organs of government, its legislative processes, the departments (prikazy), the security of the state (which for Pestel was always a major concern), military reform and foreign affairs. This document also outlined revolutionary plans which pointed to the abolition of the autocratic, serf-based structure of government in Russia and its replacement by a more liberal system. It is not, however, generally considered to be an early version of Russian Justice.5 In addition he wrote a ‘Social–political treatise’ (1820) in French, a historical narrative of the development of classes (sosloviya) in the middle ages. He attached considerable importance to this work, which may have been a draft of the constitutional project he was then working on.6 It is essentially an account of the growing conflict between classes or social estates, the place of the aristocracy (aristokratsiya) and the role of the monarchy in this conflict. While at this stage of Pestel’s thinking the monarchy still figured in Russia’s future social and political profile, the privileged aristocracy emphatically did not. Abandoning the moderate tone of the ‘Note on State Government’, Pestel inveighed in the ‘treatise’ against the traditional feudal social structures which ensured a position for the minority land-owning class above the peasant majority. Another of Pestel’s treatises, ‘Practical principles of political economy’, which he wrote in French (Principes pratiques de l’économie politique), and which was found among his papers during the search of his apartment in Tulchin following his arrest, was once thought to be his original work. However, B.E. Syroechkovskii showed that it was in fact Pestel’s characteristically careful summary of Prof K.F. German’s lectures which he had heard as a student at the Corps of Pages in the academic year 1809–10. An indirect role in Pestel’s summary was also played by German’s contemporary, Mikhail Andreevich Balugyanskii, who was Professor of Political Economy at St Petersburg Pedagogical Institute.7 Professor German himself cited Balugyanskii’s work in his own lectures, thus transmitting his ideas to Pestel who dutifully noted them down. The text of the treatise was first published in 1925 when the work was attributed without qualification to Pestel.8 Another commentator, E.M. Kosachevskaya, has pointed out further textual similarities between Balugyanskii’s publications on political economy (e.g. in ‘The statistical journal’, Staticheskii zhurnal) and Pestel’s ‘Social-political treatise’ (1820) and Russian Justice.


Both texts refer, for example, to the division of farmers’ income into rent, tax and profit, and to the government’s responsibility to protect the individual and his property.9 Pestel’s reputation as a political thinker pre-eminently rests, however, on Russian Justice. Scholars have identified two versions of this text, the first dating from 1822–23 and the second from 1824 to early 1825. Both editions are incomplete. In his deposition of 13 January 1826 Pestel gave a detailed description of the project’s structure and summarised the contents of the ten chapters.10 While the fate of the five last chapters, which included the sections on state governance, remains unclear, the first five of these existed in draft form and were headed respectively: On the territorial extent of the state; On the peoples inhabiting Russia; On the estates which are found in Russia; On the people in the political sense; On the people in the civil sense.11 Strictly speaking, Russian Justice is not just a constitutional project but a series of propositions designed to direct a future provisional revolutionary government in its formulation of a new constitution and in the implementation of the Decembrists’ Russian revolution. The scope envisaged by Pestel for Russian Justice is apparent from the full title he gave to his project: ‘Russian Justice or the Governing State Charter of the great Russian people, serving as an ordinance for the completion of the state structure of Russia and containing a true instruction both for the people and for the Provisional Supreme Directorate.’ Pestel referred to it himself variously as his ‘plan for the constitution’ or ‘instruction’ (nakaz) thus evoking the famous precedent of Catherine the Great’s nakaz to the Legislative Assembly of 1767. The role and status of Russian Justice as the rulebook of the Provisional Supreme Directorate in effecting a new order in post-revolutionary Russia greatly preoccupied Pestel. This accounts for his detailed explanation of them in a significant portion of the introductory chapter.12 He gave his project the title Russian Justice in 1824 after the Kievan legislative document initiated in the eleventh century by Yaroslav the Wise, the first attempt in Russian history to draw up a regulating code of law. In choosing the title of an early medieval legal document associated with the illustrious history of Old Rus (Russia), Pestel was deliberately reviving an ancient Russian tradition associated with the rule of law. Pestel first outlined the main ideas of Russian Justice at the first Kiev congress of Southern Society leaders in 1822. Sergei Muraviev-Apostol’s detailed account of the meeting describes how Pestel laid particular emphasis on the need for an agreed constitution which the future revolutionary provisional government would be obliged to implement.


He then outlined the main ideas of his proposal, including its project for agrarian reform. Pestel did not immediately have his own way. While the Southern Society’s leadership did not reject Pestel’s radical package, they did not accept it on the spot either. Instead, taken aback by his political audacity, they agreed to postpone a decision about Russian Justice until they met in Kiev again in 12 months time.13 They clearly needed a whole year to think through the enormous implications for Russia of the proposed new deal: a republican system, the temporary dictatorship of a provisional government and the fate of the overthrown imperial house, the abolition of the existing class structure and the redistribution of land. Thus it was not until their Kiev congress a year later that Pestel’s proposals were formally, if not unanimously, adopted as the Southern Society’s programme. As Muraviev-Apostol testified: ‘Pestel again explained Russian Justice which was accepted by all the members with some objections.’ However, elsewhere in his testimony he stated without any reservations that ‘Russian Justice and the means of implementing it in Russia were accepted unanimously by all members’.14 If Muraviev-Apostol’s somewhat contradictory testimony reflects at the very least some unease on the part of some members at the radicalism of Russian Justice, such unease amounted to downright opposition in the Northern Society. When in 1824 Pestel explained his ideas to the Northern Society’s members in St Petersburg, his bid to have the bullet points of his as yet uncompleted Russian Justice accepted as the manifesto of the Decembrist movement as a whole ended in failure.15 But its rejection prompted Pestel to revise Russian Justice during the rest of 1824 and to produce what amounted to a second version in anticipation of the agreed joint meeting of the Northern and Southern Societies scheduled for 1826. We shall be returning to this theme in the next chapter. The influence on Pestel’s political thought of Jeremy Bentham, SaintSimon, Destutt de Tracy and other European thinkers has already been discussed. He was further impressed by the brutal pragmatism of the Jacobins in the French Revolution, especially Robespierre.16 Pestel’s vigorous criticism of all privilege whether conferred by wealth or birth, his condemnation of the social disparity generated by modern economics, and his overt anticlericalism are all reminiscent of the eighteenth century tradition of Sismondi, whose Nouveaux principes de l’économie politique (1819) Pestel read early in 1820. While there is no evidence that Pestel read Saint-Simon, it is clear that the Decembrists were made familiar with the French rationalist’s ideas by M.S. Lunin who had spent some time with him in Paris during 1816.17 Bentham’s pamphlets on morality


and jurisprudence, and on pain and pleasure, would have been available to Pestel in the French translations of Etienne Dumont of Geneva, published between 1802 and 1825. Pestel himself emphasised that he was especially influenced by the Commentary written by Destutt de Tracy on Montesquieu’s ‘On the spirit of the laws’. De Tracy’s Commentary was first published in Philadelphia in 1811 in an English translation by Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States. It was used as a student text in the College of William and Mary, Virginia, and far from being a pamphlet was in fact a very substantial book running to 430 pages. Scholars have speculated that Jefferson may have been its co-author as well as the translator, given the echoes of Jeffersonian democracy in de Tracy’s book: ‘In many places the resemblance is such that Jefferson could have written entire pages of the Commentary without changing a single word’. In particular, Jefferson objected to Montesquieu’s insistence on the superiority of constitutional monarchies over all other governments.18 Destutt de Tracy argued in his Commentary that ‘every system, where the state is headed by just one person, particularly where the office is hereditary, will inevitably end in despotism’. The author of Eléments d’Idéologie (1801–05), de Tracy was the chief exponent of the views of the Idéologues. This was a group of thinkers, at one stage including Condillac and Condorcet, whose doctrine on the perfectibility of the human race gave rise to the notion that civil liberty and individual happiness must be founded pre-eminently on political liberty.19 In the editor’s forward to the French edition, published in Liège in 1817, J.F. Desoer wrote ‘we believe we have rendered a signal service to liberals in every country’. Indeed, de Tracy’s work became the bible of underground republican and revolutionary groups throughout Europe, and further editions were published in 1819 and 1822. The book was essentially a comprehensive criticism of Montesquieu’s liberalism from a far more radical position, and was also aimed against the leading liberal politician, Benjamin Constant, and his followers. The Commentary comprises a wide-ranging critical discussion of such issues as the nature of liberty, types of constitution, political institutions, representative assemblies and the role of women in them, international trade and the place of religion in society. De Tracy was frequently at odds with Montesquieu’s position and observed, for example, ‘I regret that I find myself so frequently opposed to a man for whom I have so much respect’. But he emphatically agreed with the encyclopedist’s ‘belle sentence’, which he read as a crucial endorsement of the republican concept: ‘The spirit of a monarchy is war and aggrandisement; the spirit of a republic is peace and moderation.’20


Pestel first read the Commentary (in the edition of July 1819) when he was in St Petersburg in the winter of 1819–20, just at the crucial juncture when he was receptive to its republican thrust. His committed republican stance at the meeting of the Union of Welfare’s executive board in January 1820, as discussed earlier, seems to indicate that he had already fallen under de Tracy’s spell. Syroechkovskii characterises the Russian officer’s encounter with the French thinker as no less than the ‘turning point in Pestel’s conversion to republicanism’.21 The exact process by which Pestel became a republican is difficult to reconstruct precisely. The dating of his various sketches and fragments, which later came together in Russian Justice, is often uncertain and conjectural. But, as he made abundantly clear in his testimony to the Investigating Committee, once he had reached a republican position he became irrevocably committed to it: ‘I became a republican at heart and could see no greater welfare and no higher blessing for Russia than a republican system of government.’22 The Decembrist Alexander Poggio testified that he had listened to Pestel elaborating on his republicanism and the influence of de Tracy in a conversation they had in 1824. Pestel argued that the Russian monarchy contradicted the principle of representation and the hereditary system made the prospect of any coherent government impossible since it depended on the false assumption that firstborn sons would somehow possess the qualities needed to govern the country competently. A republic based on popular representation was Pestel’s proposed solution and he had been led to it by reading de Tracy which ‘he had very ably transformed into a mathematically constructed system’.23 Pestel was greatly impressed by de Tracy’s fierce critique of the political systems enshrined both in constitutional monarchies and in the presidential system and federal structure of the United States. Interestingly, Pestel never once praised the British consitutional monarchy and parliamentary system so much admired by such liberals of the day as Benjamin Constant. His republicanism also made him share de Tracy’s critique of Montesquieu, another liberal icon. De Tracy’s work was known to some of the other Decembrists too, for whom, according to M.F. Orlov, leader of the Kishinev branch, it represented ‘the apogee of wisdom’.24 According to the testimony of Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin, following the Northern Society’s rejection of Russian Justice, Pestel had thought about inviting Destutt de Tracy, along with Benjamin Constant, Jeremy Bentham and the French historian and statesman François Guizot, to approve a new constitution for Russia. It was to be framed by a ten-man committee nominated by Nikita Muraviev, Nikolai Turgenev and Bestuzhev-Ryumin himself.25 As the Italian historian Franco Venturi


rightly concluded: ‘Only a revolutionary government would have been able to realise the liberation of the serfs and the transformation of the whole Russian economy, the most crucial and innovative point in the plan exposed in Russkaya pravda. In the end, Destutt de Tracy’s pupil was convinced that only the sword could cut the Gordian knot of Russia’s problems.’26 While it is important to identify the main influences on Pestel’s thought, it is equally important to affirm, as Soviet historians frequently did with palpable indignation, that he was not exclusively dependent on his reading of Western political thinkers.27 In responding to the specifically Russian needs and challenges of his day, Pestel also developed a number of remarkably original ideas of his own to which we now turn.

Pestel’s agenda In Russian Justice Pestel set out his vision for Russia’s future development which was dominated by two main goals: the overthrow of autocracy and its replacement by a Russian republic, and the abolition of serfdom. The introductory chapter, entitled ‘Basic Concepts’ (Osnovnye ponyatiya), lays particular emphasis on the importance of observing the first two commandments of Christ – ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God’ and ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’ – in matters of framing laws and establishing citizens’ rights and responsibilities.28 This is among the many references in the work to Christian teaching and values. According to Pestel’s agenda autocracy was to make way for the supreme power of the people on the grounds that ‘the Russian people are not the property of any one individual or family. On the contrary, the government is the property of the people and it is established for the good of the people. The people do not exist for the good of the government’.29 Chapter 3 of Russian Justice explains that the social structure of the ancien régime with its pervasive class distinctions was to be swept away. In its place there would be just one ‘civil’ estate (grazhdanskoe soslovie) of Russian citizens uniformly equal before the law and, by extension, before the courts where cases were to be tried exclusively by jury. All Russian males would be enfranchised from the age of 20 without any property or educational qualifications. Freedom of worship, speech and occupation would be guaranteed and serfdom, ‘the vile privilege of owning other people’, abolished entirely. Russian Justice urged the abolition of serfdom with particular vehemence, stressing that the institution violated all known laws of humanity, morality and religion. Rarely does Pestel’s heartfelt indignation emerge so clearly as in his condemnation


of serfdom: ‘It is a shameful business, contrary to humanity, to natural law, to the holy Christian faith and to the precious will of the almighty Creator, who ordained in holy scripture that all people are equal before him.’ This passage is certainly worthy of Alexander Radishchev’s repentant nobleman. However, while it is generally assumed that the Decembrists were familiar with Radishchev’s writings, there is no conclusive evidence that Pestel had ever read his Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow (1791), a work which, with its searing indictment of serfdom’s inhumanity, burns with much the same indignation.30 Similarly, those who dared oppose emancipation were ‘monsters’ to be subjected to the severest punishment as ‘enemies of the Fatherland’.31 All the same, Pestel acknowledged initially that emancipation could not be achieved overnight and in early drafts adumbrated a gradual transition process extending for up to 15 years. In the second edition, however, the serfs were to be emancipated with immediate effect.32 They were to be granted a landholding of around 10 desyatiny (10.9 hectares) which would be obtained by halving the landowners’ own holdings. Pestel reconciled the apparently contradictory views of property he expressed in Russian Justice by combining two stated principles: ‘land is the property of the entire human race’ with ‘toil and labour are the sources of property’, meaning that those who tilled the soil earned the right to own it. His solution was to divide the land in every district (volost’) into two holdings: public and private. Publicly held land, derived from the confiscated half of what had been the landlords’ property was set aside for ‘essential production’ and could not be sold or mortgaged. From it over a 15-year period every citizen would be granted a plot at the rate of one allotment per household (tyaglo) or family of five. They could then farm it for a year before returning it to the community or else retain it for their further use. The owners of very large estates, that is to say, those over 10,000 desyatiny (10,900 hectares), would receive no recompense for the confiscation of half their landholdings while those whose estates were less than this figure would be redressed by cash payments or land allotments in other locations. Land which continued to be held privately was expected to produce an ‘abundance’ and could be bought and sold freely. To facilitate such transactions, as well as the financing of the land reform he proposed, Pestel envisaged the rapid growth of a regional banking infrastructure. Accordingly, he confidently expected Russia would become a nation of landowners, a country where ‘there will not be one citizen who would not be the owner of land’ and where poverty would consequently be eliminated altogether.33


The process of transition from the old regime to the new order was outlined in the unfinished Chapter 6. The transition was to be bridged by a provisional government with dictatorial powers which would, however, in due course make way for a unicameral legislative body, the National Assembly (narodnoe veche). Executive power was to be vested in the State Duma (derzhavnaya duma) while supreme judicial authority would be assumed by the Supreme Council (verkhovnyi sobor). This body was to comprise 120 members, called boyars, elected for life. The voice of the people at the local level was to be expressed through the annually convened regional people’s assemblies (zemskoe narodnoe sobranie). These assemblies were to directly elect deputies to the next provincial tier of representative political institutions. The age of majority was fixed at 15, and on attaining it girls as well as boys would be required to take the oath of loyalty to the state. This was a major innovation as in tsarist Russia women had been excluded from political life to the point where they were not even called upon to take the loyal oath. The right to vote, however, even in Pestel’s new republic was to remain a male preserve, and Russian Justice makes no further proposals in relation to political equality for women. The testimony of Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin gives the fullest summary of the missing chapters of Russian Justice. It describes Pestel’s evidently advanced plans for the organisation of the executive and legislative powers and the establishment of a special executive organ, the Revolutionary Senate. The role of this new body was of crucial importance since it was to assume responsibility for monitoring and ensuring full adherence to the precepts of Russian Justice. In addition it was to supervise the activity of the revolutionary procurators-general, all amendments to existing legislature and legal proceedings, and the work of both the legislative assembly and the assembly of deputies. Finally, it was to approve the structure and organisation of revolutionary ministries, the rights and duties of each minister, the electoral system and regional administrative institutions. The broad terms of reference of the Revolutionary Senate as an omnipotent and omniscient institution of scrutiny make it reminiscent of the Jacobin Committee of Public Safety of 1793 which Pestel may indeed have taken as his model. The French body was, as Pestel must have known, largely responsible for the Terror. Although some of Bestuzhev-Ryumin’s account finds corroboration in the testimony of others, most of what he told the Investigating Committee about the missing sections of Russian Justice appears only in his account.34 The capital of the Russian Republic was to be relocated eastwards to the ancient city of Nizhnii Novgorod and renamed Vladimir ‘in memory


of the Great Man who introduced the law of Christianity into Russia’. Pestel lists five reasons for his choice. Among them was the fact that the city was advantageously placed in the system of waterways formed by the Volga and Oka rivers, it was the location of an important annual trade fair and, moreover, it had proud historical associations with Minin and Pozharskii, the liberators of Russia from the Poles in 1613.35 He consciously associated the resurgence of old Russian national traditions of republican rule with a return to the roots of state justice and its merging with the national culture of Russia, for so long dominated by Muscovite autocracy. To support the provisional government Pestel envisaged a hugely expanded police force totalling around 113 000 men.36 This figure dwarfs the 4000 men in Nicholas I’s Third Department in 1835. And just as Alexander I decreed the closure of secret societies and Masonic lodges in 1822, so Pestel at around the same time called for their suppression in Russian Justice.37 The dictatorial power of the revolutionary provisional government would brook no Decembrist-style opposition! Pestel’s proposals for the future of the peoples of the Russian Empire and the definition of the Russian republic’s borders were set out in Chapter 1 of Russian Justice, ‘On the territorial extent of the state’ and further elaborated in Chapter 2, ‘On the peoples inhabiting Russia’.38 They amount to what was in effect the first serious consideration and proposed solution of the nationalities problem in modern Russian history. Here Pestel undoubtedly exhibited unmistakable signs of Great Russian chauvinism, although Soviet historians typically preferred to see Pestel’s approach to the matter, in which Russia’s own interests were paramount, as that of a Russian patriot upholding the integrity of the land under tsarist rule, rather than that of a nationalist lording Russian superiority over other races under the yolk of the tsar.39 Still, while it is true that he did not acknowledge the right of national minorities to secede he did recognise their equality before the law along with the Russian people as citizens of a single unitary, but not federal, republic. In Pestel’s view, the ‘right to nationhood’ (pravo narodnosti) was only meaningful where a people was capable of preserving its independence or where there was already historical evidence of prolonged and full independence.40 He tended towards a centralised state on the basis that small, weak peoples or those which, in Pestel’s not strictly historical view, lacked adequate experience of national independence, would be better off merging with their larger neighbour and taking on its national identity and language. This category included Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Bessarabia, Crimea, Georgia and, a fortiori, Ukraine which


Pestel regarded as part of the unified Russian people. For Finland, a Grand Duchy and referred to as a ‘state’ by M.M. Speranskii, this designation represented a considerable deterioration in its national status, but Pestel wanted to see Finland Russified as it had been in the eighteenth century. Poland, however, Pestel considered viable enough a nation to proceed to a ‘new life’ of independence, but only on certain conditions. These included a binding treaty with Russia by which Poland’s army would join Russia’s in time of war, and the adoption of identical social and political institutions as Russia’s including the abolition of the Polish aristocracy.41 The apparent contradiction in Pestel’s attitude towards Poland (qualified independence) and Finland (wholesale Russification) is consistent with his rejection of federalism. His insistence on the need for a strongly centralised Russian state and his opposition to the federalism of Nikita Muraviev’s constitutional project, Pestel in part took from Destutt de Tracy who urged that a state’s strength ultimately depends on its integral character. Any division into constituent parts, de Tracy argued, renders the state vulnerable no matter how strongly united such parts may be. Pestel’s overarching concern was that the new government should make one Russian people out of all those which inhabited the territory of the republic throughout which ‘the Russian language alone should hold sway’. The very names of the all other tribes and peoples should be obliterated and united under ‘the one common Russian designation’.42 This presumably would have included the Chechens, the Ingush, the Ossetians and other troublesome ethnic minorities. Semevskii rightly dismissed Pestel’s plans for wholesale Russification of the new republic as ‘utterly unrealisable dreams’, but nevertheless saw in Pestel’s unflinching directness of purpose on the national question a good illustration of the ‘decisive character of our Jacobin’.43 This seems a fairer comment than that of another early student of the Decembrists who considered that Pestel ‘did not understand the national question in Russia’ and so failed in Russian Justice to propose any viable solutions to it.44 In general, then, the Russian republic was to bear a remarkable geographical resemblance to the existing Russian Empire, retaining territory on the Black Sea littoral and in the Far East. In addition, the people of the Balkans were to be encouraged to unite with the new republic. However, Pestel was undecided as how best to settle Russia’s Jewish question and he devoted a large section of Chapter 2 to a consideration of it.45 He was unhappy with their rejection of Christianity and hostility to Christians, their failure to assimilate with the indigenous population and their exemption from certain laws, such as the recruit levy.


He maintained that Jews actually enjoyed more rights than Christians although he conceded they were denied the right to live where they pleased in Russia. As V.I. Semevskii noted, Pestel was in general ill disposed towards the Jewish community and this is reflected in the way he wrote about it. He was not, however, the only Decembrist to display an anti-Semitic streak.46 Ultimately, as he indicates in section 14 of Chapter 2, Pestel favoured resettling the Jews in their own state in Asia Minor, thereby prefiguring both Constantine Pobedonostsev’s aggressively anti-Semitic policy of Russification under Alexander III and Stalin’s botched establishment of the autonomous Jewish region of Birobidzhan in inhospitable eastern Siberia. Among the first tasks to be undertaken by the new revolutionary government was the immediate dismantling of the military colonies which had been set up during Alexander I’s reign. They had been devised to solve the economic problem of maintaining a huge standing army by transforming villages into barracks where troops were garrisoned and provisioned by the local serfs. In some of the most animated pages of Russian Justice Pestel subjected them and those responsible for them to sustained and excoriating criticism. He concludes by castigating the system as ‘the cruellest injustice’ devised by a spiteful and evil regime, and one which had failed to meet any of its purported military and agrarian objectives.47 Their removal was envisaged as part of a wider military reform which included a maximum 10-year term of service and the abolition of corporal punishment. Taken as whole and in certain important respects, Russian Justice held out better and broader prospects for Russia’s transition to a democratic and constitutional state than the officially commissioned and discarded projects of Mikhail Speranskii or Nikolai Novosiltsev. And even though, to the certain and considerable relief of most of his contemporaries, it never came close to implementation it retains its historical significance as the first republican constitutional project in Russian history.

Pestel’s Russian style In their report to Vitgenshtein following Pestel’s arrest, Generals Chernyshev and Kiselev rightly noted Pestel’s use of old Russian forms and slavonicisms in his memoranda on military matters.48 Similarly, Russian Justice is written in a deliberately archaic style which does not yield easily to casual reading. Even to his contemporaries it must have seemed oddly dated.49 Perhaps Pestel used such language in order to lend greater gravitas and significance to his writing, or it may simply


have been the only style of formal writing he could manage in a language with which he was not fully at home. Indeed, he was justifiably unhappy with his Russian narrative style and asked Yushnevskii to check it for errors on the grounds that his command of Russian was superior to his own.50 Pestel’s declamatory style, which contrasts markedly with the restrained register of Nikita Muraviev’s constitutional project, has clear echoes of Radishchev’s Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow.51 Pestel spoke German in his family circle and, in common with all educated Russian noblemen of his generation, he was also fluent in French. Russian was actually an unusual and awkward medium in which to draft an abstract political work, but he may have deliberately chosen it as the vehicle for his manifesto of the future Russian republic with a much wider readership in prospect and as an affirmation of Russian national culture. It is interesting to compare Pestel’s style in Russian Justice with the language he used with greater spontaneity in his written replies to the Investigating Committee. What is immediately striking is the lack of any stylistic homogeneity in his statements but instead a repeated and rapid switching between formal and colloquial usage of the kind generally held to be quite typical of bilinguals. An analysis, for example, of his autobiographical account to the Investigating Committee clearly illustrates this tendency. His frequent, even startling use of colloquial formulations contrasts markedly with the formal style of the written questions drawn up by the Investigating Committee. For example, he describes himself as having been ‘cruelly’ (zhestoko) wounded at Borodino where standard usage would have required ‘severely’ (tyazhelo). In his description of the after-effects of this wound he unexpectedly uses a diminutive form for the pieces of bone which continued to be come out of the wound throughout 1813: ‘iz koei chrez ves’ 1813 god kostochki vykhodili’.52 The bilingual’s lack of command and confidence is evident, too, in his syntax and punctuation, marked by a strange and random usage of commas and dashes. His liberal but inconsistent capitalisation probably derives from the influence of German, which may also account for grammatical mistakes and some uncertain prepositional usage. The number of corrections he made suggests that even though he read through his drafts very carefully he was not able to get his Russian right without help. His style becomes more ‘Germanic’ when he writes more abstractly. The very detailed answers he provided betray no sign of linguistic inhibition or fatigue. He appears to have enjoyed writing and explaining himself, as if he were drafting memoirs for posterity. In his prison cell, Pestel fully exploited the opportunity to create his own legacy, apparently


untroubled by remorse or by the trauma of separation from loved ones which so tormented many of the other Decembrists, especially those who, unlike Pestel, were married with young children.

Assessments of Russian Justice How widely known was Russian Justice among its author’s contemporaries? Opinions vary on this matter. According to Andrei Rozen’s memoirs only a few people knew the work from start to finish apparently on account of Pestel’s secretiveness. Every door of his apartment had a bell fixed to it so that he always had time to hide his papers away from unexpected guests. Pestel’s secretiveness meant that only a few people had any clear idea what he had written, making reconstruction of the many missing or incomplete parts very difficult. Both Mikhail BestuzhevRyumin and Maiboroda, Pestel’s betrayer, clearly had a firsthand knowledge of Russian Justice since they were able to summarise its main points with remarkable accuracy for the Investigating Committee.53 Pestel definitely showed the whole work to one of his closest collaborators, Aleksei Yushnevskii, (if only to ask him to correct his Russian!) described by Rozen as ‘a man of great intelligence and scrupulous morals’. In his memoirs, Nikolai Lorer also recalls that Yushnevskii, ‘a most virtuous republican’ and Quartermaster-General of the Second Army helped Pestel considerably with his advice in drafting Russian Justice.54 Pestel in his testimony emphatically implicated Yushnevskii along with Avramov, Ivashev, Aleksandr and Nikolai Kryukov, Basargin, Baryatinskii and Volf as those ‘who shared with me both my goal and the means of achieving it and unanimously without demur, equivocation or contradiction accepted and endorsed both the one and the other’.55 In addition, N.S. Bobrishchev-Pushkin admitted that Pestel had read to him an extract from Russian Justice to which he had responded by supplying an appropriate Biblical reference.56 Pestel also recounted parts of his work to many members of the secret society and to some who were not, including P.D. Kiselev, in the expectation of comments and suggestions.57 Further testimony from the memoirs of another of Pestel’s closest collaborators, S.G. Volkonskii, suggests that the author of Russian Justice did show his work to others.58 Baryatinskii and Sergei Muraviev-Apostol were certainly familiar with Pestel’s work because they made French translations of it.59 A.V. Poggio, writing in 1866, recalled that Pestel frequently aired his views about emancipating the serfs with land, the peasant commune and so on. However, he was much more careful about giving a wider audience to the republican ideas contained in Russian Justice because he feared that the majority would reject them point-blank.60 Nevertheless,


many members of the Northern Society got to know Russian Justice when Pestel visited St Petersburg in 1824. Among them was Evgenii Obolenskii who recalled: ‘Colonel Pestel’s visit was decisive. In particular, he carefully explained to each of us his constitution.’ And Obolenskii admitted to the Investigating Committee that he was impressed by what he heard: ‘When he explained it to me, the novelty of its ideas, their coherence and in particular its main principles led me to give it my approval.’61 Similarly, Mikhail Lunin wrote in his depositions that although he could not recall precisely which extracts Pestel had read to him from Russian Justice he clearly remembered approving of what he heard because of its ‘merit, value, the pertinence of goal and the profundity of thought’.62 On the other hand, Nikita Muraviev claimed to have burned his copy of Russian Justice shortly after receiving it because ‘it was not consistent with our own goal’.63 Volkonskii wrote of Pestel’s ‘enormous labour’, and the ‘clarity and enlightened views’ which permeated Russian Justice.64 Mikhail Bakunin, however, characterised Pestel as a man inextricably linked to his age and class who, in seeking to replace autocracy with a republican dictatorship, saw himself as its dictator.65 Alexander Herzen also thought it was ‘very likely that in the event of success’ Pestel, despite his prematurely ‘socialist’ credentials, would indeed have become a dictator.66 Such assessments touch on the paradox which lies at the very heart of Pestel’s Russian Justice. Despite its reforming thrust, its proposed dismantling of the autocratic tsarist system along with its social and political institutions, and despite its vision of a republic of equal citizens in a classless society, Russian Justice’s new Russia was nevertheless to be governed indefinitely by the equally authoritarian dictatorship of a provisional revolutionary government. One can understand why the designated Decembrist ‘dictator’ Sergei Trubetskoi, who in the event failed to keep his appointment with the uprising he was supposed to command on 14 December, reproved Pestel for wanting to replace a legitimate autocratic government with revolutionary despotism.67 Pestel shared with eighteenth-century Russian rulers and French revolutionaries alike, with both Catherine the Great and Robespierre, an absolute horror of uncontrollable, elemental popular upheaval, and so he advocated the potentially harsh control measures which had been adopted by them both too. Yet the paradox central to Russian Justice is further compounded by Pestel’s eloquent championing of the rule of law. In particular, he attached considerable importance to the freedom of the individual, describing it as ‘the primary and pre-eminent right of every citizen and the most sacred obligation of every government’. Due legal process alone, Pestel insisted, could lead to the forfeiting of


individual liberty.68 As Andrei Rozen fairly remarked in his memoirs: ‘Those who wish to make a true assessment of Pestel must first have a knowledge of his Russian Justice’.69 Even so, however, such knowledge is not necessarily sufficient to resolve fully the contradictions encountered on the road to ‘a true assessment’ of its author, Pavel Ivanovich Pestel.

7 In the Southern Society

The generally accepted view of this stage of the Decembrist movement’s development may best be summarised as follows. Subsequent to the unexpected decision taken in Moscow in 1821 to scrap the Union of Welfare, partly in an attempt to deprive Pestel of his political power-base in Tulchin, there emerged like a brace of phoenix rising from the ashes, the Northern Society in St Petersburg and the Southern Society in Tulchin, the latter with branches in Vasilkov and Kamenka. The remarkably smooth transition, according to this view, was brought about by the unwavering leadership and steely determination respectively of Nikita Muraviev and Pavel Pestel. However, this chapter draws very different conclusions from the evidence available, with regard at least to the Southern Society. The sources adduced point rather to its slow and difficult emergence and subsequent desultory activity, limited membership and above all to the highly questionable quality of Pestel’s leadership and his machinations to sustain it particularly during 1824 and 1825. In addition, the actual extent of the Southern Society’s readiness to embrace Pestel’s republicanism and to draw lessons from European events, such as the revolts in Greece and Spain, especially with regard to the fate of the Romanov house, still need to be discussed.

Formation: from the Union of Welfare to the Southern Society After Burtsov had returned to Tulchin from Moscow in March 1821 he did not proceed in accordance with the mandate of the congress to ‘reorganise’ the Tulchin section under his leadership. In his testimony he commented laconically: ‘Having announced the closure of the 89


Union, I withdrew.’1 It seems that he was quite unprepared for the vehement protests of Pestel and A.P. Yushnevskii. The latter was Quartermaster-General of the Second Army and, at 40 years of age, more than 10 years the senior of most of the others. Pestel bluntly told Burtsov that the Moscow congress had acted ultra vires in liquidating the Union of Welfare, and defiantly announced his intention to establish a new society. It is interesting to note that Yushnevskii ascribed the society’s closure to ‘searches and the suspicions of the government’.2 The hostility Burtsov encountered from Pestel he attributed to his ‘wounded pride’, noting that Pestel’s dislike of him became so intense that he started to put it about that Burtsov was an agent of the secret police. In contrast, Burtsov claimed, many members were grateful to him for his part in bringing about the closure of the Union of Welfare, Dr Volf being among those to thank him for his ‘decisiveness’.3 But in the face of overwhelming and withering hostility, Burtsov decided to wash his hands of the whole enterprise. According to S.G. Volkonskii, the harbingers of doom, Burtsov and Komarov, were the only two to leave the organisation at this point.4 It has been suggested that they were both made aware that their names had featured in the Gribovskii report (discussed above in Chapter 2, ‘At Second Army HQ’) and had been persuaded to sever their ties with the organisation before they were any further compromised.5 Apart from his difficulties with Pestel, Burtsov also had his military career to think about. A captain in the Moscow Regiment and adjutant to General Kiselev at Second Army HQ, Burtsov was at this point awaiting his first regimental command. In fact, he had to wait even longer than Pestel: although he achieved the rank of colonel in July 1822, he did not receive command of the Ukrainian Infantry until March 1824. Interestingly, the fact that he withdrew from the Decembrist conspiracy in 1821 meant that, like Komarov, he was treated with relative leniency by the Investigating Committee and Tsar Nicholas I. He was permitted to resume military service in July 1826 and, with the rank of majorgeneral, was killed in action against the Turks three years later. The fullest account of the meeting the Tulchin members held on receipt of the news from Moscow of the Union of Welfare’s closure is contained in the testimony of A.P. Baryatinskii. According to him, Pestel initiated the discussion of the section’s future by asking whether he was alone in believing that those who had assembled in Moscow had no mandate to close down the Union of Welfare. There was ‘unanimous’ agreement that its activity should be continued, whereupon ‘in a detailed explanation’ Pestel pointed out that the society had collapsed

In the Southern Society 91

due to lack of agreement about aims and means. ‘Consequently, what he now gave his own agreement to and urged that everyone else present should’, was his proposal that the sine qua non for the introduction of a new system of government was the death of the Alexander I. Pavel Avramov objected that what he wanted was a constitutional monarchy (konstitutsiya) and that no other system of government would satisfy him. Pestel and Yushnevskii reasoned that their aim was indeed a constitution but that it would be impossible to obtain and keep one during the reign of the present tsar because he was so firmly ensconced on the throne. Avramov conceded this point, ‘after which we criminally settled the question by agreeing to (the tsar’s) death’.6 It is of considerable interest to note from this account that the usage of the word ‘constitution’ in the context attributed by Baryatinskii to Avramov and Pestel did not have a generic significance but was synonymous specifically with ‘constitutional monarchy’. In his account of the same meeting, Yushnevskii wrote that the first question arising from the conspirators’ consideration of the reformed organisation’s purpose was whether the republican goal of the Union of Welfare should be discarded or maintained. Its continuation was ‘unanimously endorsed’, with Yushnevskii himself speaking out in its favour.7 Both the precise nature of these aims and the date of their inception are corroborated by the testimony of the Russified Corfiote and member of the Greek secret political society Philiki Etaireia (Society of Friends), Spiridon Bulgari. He defined them as the extermination of the entire imperial family ‘in one day’ (!), the establishment of a republic and assistance for the Greeks.8 The stirring news of Ypsilanti’s rising of February (1821) was still very fresh in the minds of the Tulchin members as they met to consider the society’s future. Pestel’s clear analysis of the causes for the failure of the old organisation, and his perception of the immediate need for absolute agreement on the question of objectives and the means of achieving them, are indications of his leading role in the recovery of the Tulchin section and the eventual formation of the Southern Society. It was just at this critical moment for the future of the secret society in the south that Pestel was sent to Bessarabia to carry out the important official mission of monitoring the position of the Moldavian Christians under Turkish rule. His close observation of the role of Ypsilanti and the Society in Friends in the Greeks’ struggle for independence reinforced his conviction that he had to do everything possible to prevent the collapse of the Tulchin organisation following the decision of the Moscow congress. He was certain, too, of support for this intention in


St Petersburg from certain members of the secret society there, who were equally committed to continuing the work of the Union of Welfare through the formation of the Northern Society. In particular, at this time he enjoyed good contact with Nikita Muraviev and hoped to liaise directly with him on the need to maintain the existence of the organisation north and south. Pestel told the Investigating Committee that the Tulchin members rejected the decision to close the Union of Welfare and entrusted to him, Yushnevskii and Nikita Muraviev, none of whom had been at the Moscow meeting, the task of ensuring its continuation. The choice of Muraviev is significant in that it reflects the Tulchin leadership’s desire to maintain close links with the secret society in St Petersburg. Pestel’s testimony shows that, initially at least, such links were maintained: ‘Soon afterwards we heard from Nikita Muraviev that many members in St Petersburg had taken exactly the same action as had the Tulchin directorate. Thus began the Northern and Southern districts (okrugi) of the same Union of Welfare, continued and, moreover, reformed.’9 In the south, Pestel and Yushnevskii were to have ‘full authority over the members’.10 Right from the Southern Society’s inception, Pestel considered it and its members to be identified precisely with the aims and interests of its counterpart, the Northern Society in distant St Petersburg. In fact, from his point of view the only difference between the former Union of Welfare and the newly formed Southern Society ‘consisted in a few changes to the Union’s inner structure and in the fact that the Southern section ceased from this time to consider itself independent from St Petersburg’.11 It was Pestel’s conviction as to the inherent unity of purpose which he felt bound the two sections together which caused his intense dismay when it became evident that they were drifting apart, and which was to make him so determined to unite the secret society in 1824. The irony is that it was precisely to achieve a united organisation that the disunited Union of Welfare had been wound up in the first place as Yakushkin, for example, makes abundantly clear.12 The formation of the new Southern Society did not occur immediately after the disbanding of the Union of Welfare, whatever Pestel’s declared intentions may have been. The main reason for this was the dispersal of the secret society’s most active members to various postings away from Tulchin during the course of 1821. Pestel was involved in his three official trips to Moldavia at this time, Burtsov ‘withdrew’ to the Crimea and played no further part in the Decembrist movement, while V.P. Ivashev, who for a while had shared Pestel’s quarters, left for the Caucasus. Like Burtsov, Ivashev had misgivings about Pestel’s authority and influence in the secret society and effectively quit the organisation at this point, but he


was to suffer a harsh fate all the same: he was sentenced to fifteen years in Siberia and died there in 1840. A.A. Kryukov (known as Kryukov I to distinguish him from his brother, N.A. Kryukov, or Kryukov II, also a member of the secret society), and P.V. Avramov were also assigned to new postings. This left in Tulchin as members who were close to Pestel only A.P. Baryatinskii (‘a man of no significance’, in Burtsov’s scathing estimation), and the above-mentioned N.A. Kryukov. Rather fancifully, Burtsov regarded this wholesale desertion of Tulchin as a calculated defection from Pestel’s powerful orbit on the part of members who ‘expressed their satisfaction at the break with their previous connections’. Serving officers, however, as Burtsov well knew, had little choice about where in Russia’s vast empire their regiment might be posted. In his determination to lend authenticity to his picture of a friendless Pestel, Burtsov included in his list A.P. Yushnevskii, the other member of the Southern Society’s directorate and in fact one of Pestel’s staunchest supporters, on the grounds that he had frequently heard him make ‘unfavourable remarks about Pestel’s character’.13 But in a letter of confession to Nicholas I after his arrest, Yushnevskii gave quite a different picture both of Pestel’s role at this juncture and of his own attitude to him: On the liquidation of the society, the Tulchin section was on the point of breaking up and that would have been the end of that. But in fact the only two to withdraw were Komarov and Burtsov, in whom Pestel had always seen a strong opponent of his political views. There remained myself, Colonel Avramov, the two brothers Kryukov, Bassargin (sic), Ivashev and Volf. Pestel … with his characteristic skill persuaded us not to disperse but, on the contrary, to unite more strongly than ever, arousing in each of us a sense of pride, of devotion to the general good, and of love for the fatherland.14 It is evident that Pestel’s powers of persuasion were, as N.V. Basargin confirmed, an important factor in the formation of the Southern Society since they enabled him to ‘sway everyone with the power of his reasoning’.15 Taking his cue from Pestel’s forceful speech, Yushnevskii argued that this unexpected turn of events in fact provided them with an excellent opportunity to rid their own organisation of the faint-hearted and irresolute by stressing the dangers of involvement in the conspiracy. Far from putting anybody off, Yushnevskii’s arguments (according to Pestel) served to strengthen still further the resolve of the remaining Tulchin membership to continue the work of the Union of Welfare under the new banner of the Southern Society.16


Burtsov’s explanation for the slump in conspiratorial activity in Tulchin following his return from Moscow was no doubt highly partisan, but a slump, nevertheless, there most certainly was. Baryatinskii remarked that in 1822 the society did not greatly increase, and that during 1823 and 1824 it was still ‘fairly inert’.17 Pestel himself wrote in his testimony that ‘right from 1821 the Tulchin section became inactive’.18 Commenting on this claim, Pavlov-Silvanskii has observed that it would be truer to say that it did not exist at all. He bases this on the fact that not a single recorded meeting took place and that in five years only about a dozen members were recruited there, not one of whom could be described as an ardent supporter of Pestel. Worse still, the only recruit Pestel made was A.I. Maiboroda, the junior officer who was to betray Pestel to the military authorities in Tulchin in 1825. Apart from Yushnevskii and, from 1824, N.I. Lorer, the only two who were close to Pestel were V.L. Davydov and S.G. Volkonskii, but their section in Kamenka was virtually non-existent, except for the activity from 1823 of A.V. Poggio.19 Pavlov-Silvanskii appears here to overstate the organisational weakness of the Southern Society. But in their own accounts too, certain Decembrists were quite as dismissive as the historian of the idea of a formal organisation in the sense attributed to the Tulchin society by the Investigating Committee. Basargin insisted that friendly and informal conversation was vested with a formality altogether inappropriate to it, that is, elevated to the unwarranted status of a ‘meeting’, by the Investigating Committee. The result of this was that those interrogated themselves came to accept this view. In turn, it may be noted, it was unquestioningly accepted as such by many Soviet historians. Basargin cited specifically ‘our gathering (sobranie) at Pestel’s in 1821’ which ‘the Committee has seen fit to turn into a formal meeting (zasedanie)’, whereas in fact ‘we talked all kinds of rubbish among ourselves, not infrequently in friendly banter over a glass of champagne’. This interpretation of the nature of their activity led Basargin to conclude: ‘I am now convinced that Pestel himself was more guilty in words than in intent.’20 In fact, the transition from the Tulchin section of the Union of Welfare to the Southern Society was neither swift nor smooth. From the strictly organisational point of view there was little immediate alteration, apart from those important membership changes already indicated. Academician Nechkina, however, preferred to see the matter differently in line with Soviet historiography’s emphasis on the unbroken continuity of the society’s subversive activity. Accordingly, she asserted that ‘one cannot speak of any kind of a lull or of an alleged


break marking the beginning of the society’s life. The Southern Society arose and immediately began to act.’ But even she significantly qualified this view by rightly acknowledging that the entire period from the spring of 1821 to the beginning of 1823 was a ‘period of formation’ for the secret society, both north and south.21 Indeed, it was not until January 1822, according to Sergei Muraviev-Apostol, when he met with Pestel, Yushnevskii, Davydov and Volkonskii in Kiev, that significant structural reform was proposed and implemented. In other words, fully twelve months after the decision had been taken in Moscow: ‘They told me that they did not wish to recognise the destruction of the Union of Welfare and that they had decided to act as a separate society.’ As a result of this declaration, Muraviev-Apostol joined them and they elected Pestel and Yushnevskii as directors of the ‘new society’.22 This meeting turned out to be the first in a series of annual gatherings of leading members of the Southern Society held in Kiev. They were timed to coincide with the New Year (Epiphany) trade fair, which had been a feature of Kiev’s commercial life since 1797, in order to minimise the risk of attracting the attention of government agents. At the January 1822 meeting, Pestel outlined the main points of the programme then taking shape in his Russian Justice. As already noted, this was his blueprint for Russia’s future to be implemented by means of a coup d’état and a provisional government established by the society’s directors. It was decided that members would have a year to consider this proposal and to come up with ways of how it might be implemented.23 Volkonskii testified that, as far as he knew, until 1822 the secret society had continued to operate on the basis of the Union of Welfare’s statutes.24 Similarly, when he joined the Southern Society in Kishinev in l822, Davydov was given to believe that the organisation there still adhered to the Union of Welfare’s Green Book.25 Baryatinskii recalled that they decided, pending the drafting of their constitutional project, and given that they were still a long way from taking any direct action, to express their unanimous agreement (‘which would be made known to all new members as they joined the society’) on one major issue of principle. Pestel had already raised it at the first meeting of the Southern Society in Tulchin: that in the event of his refusal to accept some form of constitutional proposal, the tsar should be deposed.26 Under the watchful leadership and steady encouragement of Pestel and Yushnevskii, the members of the newly reformed Southern Society edged gingerly, yet ever closer, to full acceptance of the startling notion of putting an end to the two centuries-old Romanov dynasty. In its stead they would establish a Russian republic which would be the


envy of the American Republicans, affronted as they were by the moral intransigence of the Confederate slave-owners in the Southern states, and an inspiration to liberal Europeans everywhere. Pestel certainly was reluctant to discard the organisation at Tulchin either in fact or in name. He evidently considered the future ‘welfare’ of Russia would be best served by an eponymous organisation, and so continued to refer to the secret society after 1821 as the Union of Welfare. For example, referring to the Northern and Southern societies in the months immediately preceding the 1825 uprising, he wrote of ‘the members of the current Union of Welfare’. Similarly, citing the activity of the Southern Society during 1824, Pestel used the revealing expression ‘the southern district (okrug) of the Union of Welfare’.27 Nechkina is right to claim that ‘for Pestel the secret society from 1818 to the end of its existence was named the Union of Welfare, and the name was taken by him and his comrades to correspond to the revolutionary essence of their organisation’.28

Organisation and structures The structure of the Southern Society gradually took shape during 1822. Thus by the following year it comprised three sections: the original one in Tulchin, another in Vasilkov about 20 km from Kiev led by Sergei Muraviev-Apostol and Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin – considered by Pestel to be the most active – and the third in Kamenka, some 200 km southeast of Kiev in the Dniepr valley, which was headed by Davydov, Volkonskii and Poggio. In his testimony, Pestel gave a detailed description of the secret society’s structure that lays particular emphasis on its conspiratorial nature and owes much to Masonic practices: Members fell into one of three categories: brother, fellow and chief. Brothers were those members who did not have the right to recruit other members. Fellows had this right. Chiefs joined the Directorate to decide important issues. Friends were those who had not been recruited to the Union but who were under active consideration. The aim and plan were revealed fully to fellows and chiefs. Each member was obliged to conceal from those he recruited the names of the other members known to him. Pestel concluded this account by pointing out that although formally these were the rules by which the organisation was supposed to be regulated, in practice not one of them was ever properly observed.29 Experience in the Union of Welfare had shown, however, as the Moscow


congress of 1821 recognised, the need for a more tightly knit, disciplined and secretive organisation. In general, all communication was verbal rather than written in order to minimise the risk of official interception. This is one reason why there is relatively little written documentation concerning the formation of the Southern Society, apart from that contained in written depositions to the Investigating Committee.30 One such is that of M. Muraviev-Apostol, which gives a detailed description of the organisational structure of the Southern Society as provided for by the meeting in Kiev of January 1822 which, in his phrase, ‘reformed the Southern Society’: Appointed to its Directorate, consisting of two people, were Pestel and Yushnevskii. Beneath the Directorate was the council of Fellows. These were former members of the Society of the Green Book [i.e. the Union of Welfare]. And below them were the brothers – newly recruited members.31 There was one important element of Pestel’s perception of the organisation of the Southern Society that does not emerge from his description: the role (much less the identity) of its leader. But this information did emerge from the testimony of other members. Avramov, for example, stated that Pestel ‘had pre-eminence over all Tulchin members and, one might say, alone took the initiative’. A.V. Yentaltsev noted from what others said that Pestel’s influence was dominant and reckoned that ‘he must have run the Southern Society’.32 It was Pestel’s unblinking view of himself as the guiding light of the society, both through the force of his personality and the authority he claimed for his Russian Justice, coupled with his insistence on the need for firm leadership, that simultaneously aroused mixed feelings towards him of respect, suspicion and fear. We have seen in the case of Burtsov and other Tulchin members of the Union of Welfare, that Pestel’s radical policies and leadership style caused them to quit rather than join the emergent Southern Society. It was Pestel’s very self-confidence, bordering on arrogance, that ultimately proved to be the rock on which his hopes of uniting the Northern and Southern societies (under his undisputed leadership) would founder. According to Nikita Muraviev’s biographer, Pestel was deeply convinced that ‘the revolutionary society should function according to the principles of internal dictatorship in order to secure unconditional unanimity for the initiatives which were being undertaken’.33 It was precisely in line with these principles, too, that Pestel envisaged governing Russia after the revolution.


Having survived the crisis of the Union of Welfare’s closure and the repercussions of this move in the Tulchin section, the southern Decembrists continued their conspiratorial activity in the Second Army albeit tentatively and sporadically. Burtsov’s allegation of a ‘slump’ from the time of the Moscow congress’s decision has already been referred to, as has Pestel’s claim in his testimony to his interrogators, of ‘inactivity’ in the Tulchin section from l82l. Moreover, the discernible decrease in Pestel’s activity in l825 is largely to be explained by his ‘awareness of the society’s weakness’, which ‘paralysed his energy’.34 Nevertheless, by this time Pestel had expended considerable energy in winning others round to his views on regicide and republicanism. The Southern Society did not start to function anything like fully until l823, when at the Kiev meeting in January of that year its members were given the incentive of Russian Justice as a focal point for future political action. From this point an armed insurrection was accepted as the immediate political objective of the conspiracy.35 The frustration of some members with what they perceived as the lack of organisational cohesion in the Southern Society, in spite of Pestel’s best efforts to engender it, is reflected in Volkonskii’s report of Sergei MuravievApostol’s intervention at this meeting. The latter proposed that they should ‘abandon the slow pace which had become the accepted norm and get things moving, by violent means if necessary’. The proposal was accepted, but no definite timetable for action was laid down. Pestel, though, had been making considerable efforts during l822 to drum up more active support throughout the secret society for the realisation of its goals by improved organisation. Volkonskii described how at the end of l822 he had been requested ‘in the name of the section’ (i.e. by Pestel) to go first to Moscow ‘to make representations about the establishment of the proposed society’ and from there to proceed to St Petersburg. Here he was to propose to Nikita Muraviev that they should begin negotiations which should lead to the union of the Northern and Southern societies.36 This was in fact the first in a protracted series of meetings between representatives of the two societies, to be considered next. Apart from the issue of a united organisation, there were additional aspects of secret society activity for which Pestel was largely responsible. Baryatinskii describes how in l825 Pestel initiated important personnel changes. He proposed to Yushnevskii that S. Muraviev-Apostol should be appointed the third director of the Southern Society and Baryatinskii chairman of the Tulchin section. Yushnevskii agreed, but concerned about Muraviev’s ‘lust for power’, made it a condition that Davydov should be appointed as well. Yushnevskii told the Investigating


Committee that Pestel’s real reason for having Sergei Muraviev-Apostol made a director of the Southern Society was that he ‘feared Muraviev’s strength’. Pestel’s testimony refers to their concern that otherwise Muraviev-Apostol ‘might leave our society’.37 Baryatinskii’s appointment was intended to raise the morale of the Tulchin members, encourage them to discuss more frequently society matters and prepare them for what lay ahead. Morale at Tulchin was certainly a problem at this time. One member, an officer of the Imperial Suite, N.S. Bobrishchev-Pushkin, wrote of Pestel’s efforts to ‘inject some life into the Tulchin membership, which he had long suspected to be lacking, especially in Yushnevskii’. The latter, according to the same source, was nervous about Pestel’s groundless confidence in their readiness for immediate action, while Volf protested that Pestel would be the ruin of them all.38 It was difficult enough for Pestel to go to Tulchin himself to raise members’ spirits since he did not actually live there but 60 km to the north-east in the village of Lintsy, where the Vyatka Regiment had been quartered from 1822. He could thus ill-afford to take the risk of frequent and unauthorised visits. The fact that Pestel was indeed somewhat out of touch with everyday society matters in Tulchin is suggested by his remark to the Investigating Committee concerning the recruitment in l823 of Tulchin member I.B. Avramov. He pointed out that since ‘at that time I no longer lived in Tulchin, I had no detailed information of who was recruited or by whom’.39 As it was, the Southern Society was in constant danger of exposure as a result of infiltration by government agents. The first rumours that the society had been betrayed began to circulate in the summer of l825. By August, Pestel had heard from Davydov about A.K. Boshnyak’s act of betrayal, though it would be some months before his reports would be acted on. Pestel was under no illusion about the gravity of their situation: ‘After the contact with Boshnyak, we were in continual danger.’40 Indeed, worse was to come. Meanwhile, Baryatinskii’s main task was to set up a line of communication between Tulchin and Lintsy, where Pestel’s regimental quarters were situated.41 This link proved vital when news of the emperor’s fatal illness was passed to Pestel by Baryatinskii from Tulchin through N.F. Zaikin who acted as go-between.42 Other aspects of Pestel’s activity in the Southern Society, such as contacts with other secret organisations, will be considered later under separate headings. A longer-standing threat to the continued existence of the secret society was the imperial decree of August l822 ordering the closure of Masonic lodges and all other organisations which were presumed to exist beyond the baleful gaze of the authorities. But it had no lasting


impact on the Tulchin Decembrists beyond deterring the less resolute of the membership, who now saw more clearly that they were beginning to tread a path which was too hazardous for comfort. The decree was certainly known and talked about. Interestingly, Ivan Borisovich Pestel, perhaps sensing that his son might be in need of it, sent him a copy of the ‘decree to the Minister of Internal Affairs relating to Masonic lodges and other secret societies’, stressing that he was in support of it: ‘I never was a mason … and always considered these lodges to be so much knavish nonsense.’43 The fact that a year earlier Pestel had been busy observing, on the government’s behalf, the functioning of Ypsilanti’s secret society and had become increasingly convinced of the need to regroup the Tulchin section of the Union of Welfare, makes Ivan Borisovich’s paternal solicitude appear all the more redundant.

Recruitment In his testimony, Yushnevskii declared that the ‘entire activity’ of the newly formed Southern Society ‘consisted in increasing the number of its members’. If so, to judge by Baryatinskii’s estimate, the results were rather disappointing. He claimed that over a period of four years (from 1822) not more than ten members were recruited from the Second Army.44 Recruitment was carried out cautiously, with the new member supposedly kept ignorant of the identity of all the rest and even of the precise aims of the society: ‘To be accepted into the society did not mean to become immediately acquainted with its objectives’, Yushnevskii asserted.45 That this was the case may be seen from Pavel Bobrishchev-Pushkin’s account of his own recruitment to the Southern Society. Initially sceptical of the expansive talk of the ‘Tulchin politicians’, Bobrishchev-Pushkin soon found himself becoming increasingly interested in their ideas about righting Russia’s wrongs and willing to accord them ‘trust and respect’. He was also impressed at hearing Pestel and Yushnevskii described as the ‘most intelligent and best educated people around’. On a visit to Tulchin in 1822 the 19-year-old was told by Baryatinskii that Russia’s ‘ills could be cured’ and was invited to join the secret society. He replied that he would not join without knowing its aims. Baryatinskii then told him that the aim would be revealed to him after he had joined, adding what strictly speaking he should not have: ‘but to show you how sound it is, I can tell you that your brother belongs to it, along with Pestel and Yushnevskii’. This was apparently good enough for Bobrishchev-Pushkin who ‘without hesitation swore to him that he would become a member’.46


According to the account of another Decembrist, Pavel Leman, who did not become involved in the society until August 1825, such caution was even reinforced by colourful threats: he described how Pestel had told him that it was ‘desirable for the current order of things to be changed’. When Leman asked him how he thought this might be done, Pestel replied: ‘Swear to me that you will tell no-one and I will tell you.’ He then informed Leman of the existence of the secret society whose members did not know the ‘elders’ but only those who had recruited them, adding that ‘poison or the dagger will always find the traitor’.47 This menacing hint, subsequently denied by Pestel, is reminiscent of forms of Masonic oaths sworn by ‘poison and dagger’. In the manuscript of this testimony the phrase is underlined in pencil, quite possibly by Tsar Nicholas himself. In his testimony on this point, Baryatinskii denied that any particular form of initiation was in general use in the Southern Society. However, he did recall hearing from Pestel ‘quite recently’ that in the Vasilkov section Muraviev-Apostol and Bestuzhev-Ryumin ‘were recruiting in a special way, apparently by exacting an oath’.48 A detailed description of the manner of his recruitment to the Southern Society’s group in St Petersburg in 1824 is contained in the testimony of I.Yu. Polivanov. He recalled how, seated one evening round a table with Pestel and four other officers, Pestel first secured their agreement to become members of the society, ‘without explaining as yet that its goal was a state republican system’. He then admonished them as follows: ‘Do not imagine that this will be easy. You must be prepared to sacrifice your blood and accept whatever the society commands you to do.’ Once they had declared their ‘resolute agreement’ to join the society, Pestel explained his ideas for the redistribution of the land. He then gave them to understand that the emperor and the court would have no part to play, which prompted one of those present to ask whether he envisaged a monarchy at all. Pestel replied: ‘This will all go’ (Il n’y aura [plus] de tout cela). He added that while it was no concern of theirs, he would find certain people ‘to carry this out’ but did not elaborate further. After this, Polivanov concluded his account of his recruitment, they ‘drank, as far as I can recall, to the success of our enterprise and to the health of the members’.49 The caution with which members recruited others is clear from the fact that not all those who were felt to be sympathetic to the cause were drawn into the conspiracy. For example, Pestel refuted Volkonskii’s claim that Major-General Mikhail von Mengden had been recruited in 1822: ‘I told Prince Volkonskii that from my conversations with General von Mengden I considered him suitable for membership of the society


and that his outlook could be taken for that of a member; but I cannot say definitely that he ever became one.’50 Lorer recounted how Pestel turned down an offer from Count I.O. Vitt, who had been his prospective father-in-law when, in the summer of 1821, marriage to Isabella Vitt had seemed a possibility. Vitt proposed joining the society with the pledge of 50,000 troops from the military colonies to assist with the realisation of its aims. This handsome-looking proposition was transmitted by Davydov to Pestel who, after consulting Yushnevskii and Baryatinskii, decided it should be rejected since they had their doubts about its authenticity.51 By contrast, in St Petersburg the Northern Society was rather less careful about whom it welcomed to its ranks. This was especially true from 1823, thanks to the incautious and somewhat impetuous enthusiasm of the poet, Kondratii Ryleev, whose direct participation in the secret society dates from this time. Even so, given the low level of recruitment to the Southern Society, it is remarkable that its leadership missed the opportunity to involve the two generals mentioned earlier. It may well have been that Pestel above all feared that they might use their senior rank to frustrate his own plans for overall control of the organisation.

Aims of the Southern Society In Pestel’s view, the aims to which the Southern Society was committed were those set out in his instruction to the provisional revolutionary government, Russian Justice. The overriding objectives were to be implemented following the revolution by forceful imposition through the agency of a provisional dictatorship which was to rule for anything up to 10 years. These objectives were the overthrow of tsarist autocracy, its replacement by a Russian republic and the immediate emancipation of the serfs with the redistribution of the land. If, as Yushnevskii claimed, members only gradually learned of the society’s real objectives, then it follows that many were persuaded to run the considerable risk of becoming involved in it with only the vaguest idea of what the conspiracy was all about. Leman’s testimony confirms this. Pestel told him that the aim of the society was to ‘reform the government’ and ‘to change the entire order of things in Russia’, without apparently offering him any more specific explanation as to how these objectives were to be met.52 The account given by V.L. Davydov about his awareness of the society’s goals is also revealing. He explained to the Investigating Committee that on joining the Union of Welfare he had had no clear idea of its aims or of its resources, but assumed that it


shared his own desire for a representational system of government as the most likely basis for Russia’s future well-being. However, when he later heard specific references to the republican system he did not like to object for fear of being thought ‘weak and characterless’. In mitigation, Davydov protested that ‘at the time none of them had thought that the matter was as serious as it must now seem’. Moreover, given the meagre resources at their disposal and the lack of agreement among the members, he had hoped that ‘it would all end in wordy and empty conversation’. Davydov’s testimony is important because it gives an entirely plausible picture of the way in which many young conspirators were persuaded to lend support to radical notions which they never actually imagined could or would be realised.53 Yushnevskii’s own initial statement on this matter was itself very general: ‘The intention of the society was to establish a constitution in the state’, he admitted to his interrogators. His next, more specific statement defined this as a ‘constitutional monarchy’.54 However, several months after his interrogation had begun, and with the looming prospect of being brought face to face with Pestel on the question of the Southern Society’s aims, Yushnevskii admitted that the principal objectives of the secret organisation in Tulchin from 1821 had indeed been the establishment of a republican government and the overthrow of the throne. Pestel had in any case admitted as much, stressing that the aims of the Southern Society were no more and no less than a continuation of those he claimed had been adopted by the Union of Welfare in 1820: With the directorate’s decision to continue the Union, both the republican system and the revolutionary means of action were confirmed. Thus it was not a new aim which was introduced, but a continuation of the old one which had already been adopted.55 This was retrospective wishful thinking on Pestel’s part. As already described, the Union of Welfare had ultimately rejected Pestel’s revolutionary republicanism and, indeed, had disbanded itself rather than accept it. In his earlier statements, then, Yushnevskii had merely been avoiding the awkward admission that what Pestel had aimed for was a Russian republic. This radical objective had obvious implications for the future role and fate of the imperial family, and it was these that the Investigating Committee was concerned above all to clarify. As on so many other matters, the testimony of the Decembrists as to what Pestel’s view about the future role of the Romanovs had actually been


was inconsistent and contradictory. For example, N.N. Depreradovich testified that when he joined the conspiracy just weeks after his twentyfirst birthday in December 1823, as a member of the Southern Society’s group in St Petersburg, he had asked Pestel specifically about the imperial family. In a guarded and evasive reply, worthy of his irresolute sympathisers in the Northern Society, Pestel told him that ‘circumstances would show what it would be necessary to do’.56 However, the testimony of M.P. Bestuzhev-Ryumin was more specific and, for Pestel, considerably more compromising. Describing a meeting held in Vasilii Davydov’s apartment in Kiev in 1823 attended by Pestel, Yushnevskii, Volkonskii, Sergei Muraviev-Apostol, Davydov and the newly recruited Bestuzhev-Ryumin himself, the latter recalled that Pestel asked for and obtained ‘unanimous’ agreement for the establishment of a Russian republic. However, when he asked Bestuzhev and Muraviev whether they agreed with the Society’s insistence on the need to liquidate the entire imperial family, they replied they did not. ‘Whereupon there arose heated and prolonged discussions. Muraviev stuck by his opinion, but I had the misfortune to be convinced by Pestel’s arguments’, Bestuzhev confessed.57 In his own version of these discussions, Muraviev maintained that in view of the controversy sparked off by Pestel’s proposal about the imperial family, it was decided to postpone the issue on which he claimed debate was not renewed. Despite this assertion, the question was in fact the main talking point at a meeting held in Kamenka in November 1823. Referring to the disappointing failure of Riego’s revolt in Spain, which was known to the Decembrists primarily through French newspaper reports, Pestel argued that the fatal weakness of the Spaniards’ rebellion was the trust placed in Ferdinand VII to honour his constitutional undertakings. The king’s breach of faith provided Pestel with a convenient argument with which to persuade his confederates against making the same mistake. The logic of the situation they were contemplating required the total elimination of the imperial family and it was imperative, in his view, that the secret society north and south should be united on this vital point. Only in this way, Pestel insisted, could they hope ‘not to follow the unhappy example of Spain and guard against the possibility of failure’. The force of this argument, he claimed, persuaded Sergei Muraviev-Apostol and Bestuzhev-Ryumin to change their minds and to declare their acceptance of the decision taken at the Kiev meeting in January.58 As the latter laconically expressed it in his depositions: ‘Pestel compelled the majority to accept the eradication of the imperial family.’59


It was this conclusion, according to M.V. Nechkina, that was for the Decembrists the main lesson of the Spaniards’ defeat.60 In a major article on the Southern Society, I.V. Porokh disputed Nechkina’s account (written over 20 years earlier) of what she characterised as a ‘crisis’ in the society. Porokh maintains that Pestel’s argument in favour of exterminating the imperial family hinged not so much on the lessons of the failure of the Spanish revolution as on the recent, abortive ‘Bobruisk plan’ of S. Muraviev-Apostol and Bestuzhev-Ryumin. Its intention had been to arrest Alexander I at a troop review at Bobruisk in the summer of 1823, thereby providing the Southern and Northern societies the signal for revolutionary action. However, the proposal did not win the support of the Southern Society’s directorate. Pestel told Bestuzhev-Ryumin that the arrest of the tsar would have precipitated a civil war and their own ineluctable doom; in his view, nothing less than the annihilation of the imperial family would do, and nothing would happen until this was carried out.61 But still, important lessons were indeed to be drawn from the failure of the Spanish revolution. This emerges in S. Muraviev-Apostol’s reference in his testimony to the Southern Society’s Kamenka meeting of 24 November 1823. Significant here is his estimation of the main lesson for the conspirators of the Spanish debacle: ‘Spain certainly was discussed, but not in support of the need to exterminate the entire imperial family, but as proof of the necessity for constitutional order in Russia by means of a provisional government.’62 Muraviev did not say as much, but since a provisional government could only conceivably have been set up over Tsar Alexander’s dead body, the distinction seems a very fine one. Its subtlety was naturally not appreciated by the Investigating Committee. Meanwhile, the testimony of N.I. Lorer, who did not become a member of the Southern Society until l824, reflects both a shift in emphasis of the Tulchin section’s main strategy and Lorer’s own view of the most significant of its objectives: ‘to emancipate the peasants and to make them free and to propose new civic rights. That is the basis on which the society functioned.’63 Consideration of the type of administration which was to implement these momentous reforms was either secondary to Lorer’s concerns or else, and this seems more likely, by l824 was simply taken for granted by him and the other members of the Southern Society. As he wrote in his depositions, on his transfer to the Second Army, he ‘found the Southern Society fully republican in spirit’, and committed to the liquidation of the entire imperial family. Another member, V.N. Likharev, similarly remarked that ‘the majority of the membership of the Southern


Society was aware that its aim was the establishment of a republican system of government by means of a revolution with the abolition of the throne’.64 This, certainly, was the aim attributed to Pestel in the Investigating Committee’s own directory of the Decembrists: ‘He proposed the establishment of a republic by means of a revolution; argued the necessity of doing away with the Sovereign Emperor and the entire Most August Family, considered the means of fulfilling this and coldbloodedly counted on his fingers the actual number of victims.’65

Pestel’s influence The accepted view of Pestel, among most of his contemporaries (friendly and hostile), as well as liberal nineteenth-century Russian and, subsequently, Marxist Soviet historians (more friendly than hostile), is that his influence over the Southern Society was pre-eminent and, as author of Russian Justice, decisive. He is known variously as the ‘leader’ of the entire Decembrist movement, the ‘mainspring’ of such revolutionary activity as there was up to December l825, and its ‘chief ideologist’.66 Such, certainly, was the view of the Investigating Committee as expressed by its secretary, A.D. Borovkov: ‘Not only did he despotically rule the Southern Society, but he also had a decisive influence on the affairs of the Northern … In a word he was the head of the society and the pre-eminent instigator of all its doings.’67 However, Pestel’s contemporaries did not unanimously see him in this light; nor have all historians subscribed to this view of him. Allegations of Pestel’s domineering behaviour and selfseeking designs on the secret organisation and its membership are not uncommon in the testimony and memoir literature of the Decembrists. Such allegations were, of course, out of keeping with subsequent Soviet views of Pestel as the movement’s undisputed and progressive leader and were therefore generally ignored or dismissed by Soviet historians. Yet, however unpalatable to some, they do exist and must therefore be properly considered in order to arrive at as full a picture as possible of the most controversial of the Decembrists. The pre-Soviet historian Pavlov-Silvanskii harboured considerable reservations about Pestel’s following in the Southern Society, ascribing the origin of widespread belief in his powerful influence to the Northern Society’s (deliberately?) exaggerated fear of him and his designs on their own organisation. Silvanskii argued that there were few grounds for supposing that the Tulchin members from l82l were harmoniously united under his leadership, submitting unquestioningly to his orders. In fact, Pestel’s personality was an obstacle to full unanimity that, insofar as it


existed at all, was more apparent than real, being achieved only by the blandishment and bullying that was so characteristic of him. Hence, while his influence was considerable, his actual power was strangely limited. In support of this argument, so provocative as to border on heresy, Silvanskii cited the inimical view of Basargin: ‘Very often, in even the most insignificant conversations, it seemed to us that Pestel’s views were quite wrong. But rather than arguing with him, we would just leave him to stick to his opinions, and continue our conversation among ourselves without him.’ Whilst conceding the force of Pestel’s influence on them, Basargin told the Investigating Committee that they considered ‘Pestel thought too freely’.68 While it is true that Basargin’s testimony concerning Pestel’s influence on the secret society is particularly revealing, it is equally true that it is in places intensely subjective and self-interested. In common with certain other Decembrists, Basargin sought through his testimony to distance himself from potentially so compromising an associate. All the same, his insistence that Pestel’s radicalism was exceptional is confirmed by the evidence adduced in the foregoing pages. So, equally, is his claim that Pestel’s extremism was not generally shared by other members whose sole fault, as Basargin put it, was to have listened to him without having found the courage to quit the society altogether. Even so, Basargin could not deny Pestel’s initial dynamism: ‘He was the mainspring of the society’s activity, so that when he was absent from headquarters (i.e. of the Second Army at Tulchin), it virtually ceased.’ Yushnevskii, Volkonskii and Baryatinskii were all identified by Basargin as mere acolytes of Pestel, ‘who alone was the foundation on whom the whole edifice was constructed’.69 Basargin’s views of Pestel are worth quoting in extenso since they bring out his strengths as well as his weaknesses: Gifted with a remarkable mind, powers of speech, and especially the ability to express his thoughts clearly and logically, he exercised considerable influence over his army comrades and all those with whom he was in close contact … But for all his intelligence, Pestel also had his faults. One of them was his desire to subordinate the convictions of others to his own ideas. Moreover, he would often get carried away and in serious political conversations push his conclusions to extremes. I cannot refrain from mentioning at this point that he did not have the capacity to arouse the complete trust of others. These faults apart, I do not know what else Pestel might possibly have been reproached for … His behaviour was straight, honest, and completely disinterested. As a member of the society, as a political


activist who for the first time contemplated a social revolution in Russia not for the benefit of an individual but for the national good, he was, in my opinion, utterly irreproachable.70 In a review of the memoirs of A.M. Muraviev which were published in 1854, E.I. Yakushkin, son of the Decembrist, commented: ‘It is remarkable that without exception every Decembrist I have spoken to about Pestel has expressed one and the same opinion about the superb quality of his mind and the firmness of his convictions.’71 Such generally positive appraisals tend to detract from the image of a dictatorial, manipulative martinet, blinded by his own self-seeking ambition to the needs and views of his comrades, which is created elsewhere in the literature. N.S. Bobrishchev-Pushkin, for example, while in no doubt about Pestel’s influence, was at best grudging in his acknowledgement of it: ‘I noticed that he had a direct and involuntary influence on many through his intellectual abilities, which I cannot deny him, though I have no confidence in him.’72 Basargin and Bobrishchev-Pushkin were by no means alone in expressing mixed views about Pestel. As Evgenii Obolenskii’s recollections suggest, his persuasiveness was at once engaging and unsettling: Pavel Ivanovich was a man of unusual intelligence, possessed of a lucid approach to the most abstract matters and rare eloquence which produced a powerful impression on those to whom he confided his innermost thoughts. It was indeed difficult to resist the considerable strength of character of so remarkable a personality as Pavel Ivanovich. But for all his intellectual attributes and the persuasiveness of his rhetoric, each of us felt that once we had accepted his proposals, we would all have to renounce our own convictions and, having submitted to him, follow the path he indicated.73 Among those Obolenskii introduced to Pestel was N.I. Lorer, whom Nechkina calls Pestel’s ‘loyal shadow’.74 Lorer formed a very high opinion of Pestel’s intellectual qualities, describing him as ‘one of the most remarkable people of his time’.75 His memoirs contain some of the best characterisation of Pestel available, including this telling description of him: ‘Pestel was on the short side, brown-haired, with dark, flashing but pleasant eyes. He put me very much in mind of Napoleon.’76 The poet Kondratii Ryleev was also struck by Pestel’s similarity to Napoleon, albeit unfavourably.77 The Orthodox priest who visited the condemned Decembrists in the Peter-Paul Fortress, Father P. Myslovskii, also stresses


his similarity to Napoleon: Quick, decisive, highly eloquent, a gifted mathematician, and a superb military tactician; his wileliness, his physical bearing and stature, even his face were all very similar to Napoleon’s … He dreamed, as it were, that he could easily make himself the same in Russia as Napoleon had been in France.78 Blaming his involvement in the conspiracy entirely on Pestel’s harmful influence, P.V. Avramov, a junior officer serving at Second Army HQ, described him bitterly as ‘the most evil person I have ever met in my life’.79 V.P. Ivashev, too, uneasy about Pestel’s intentions as a director of the newly constituted Southern Society, remarked to Basargin that Pestel ‘has achieved his desired objective and will now do whatever he likes with the members’. It will be recalled that, like Basargin, Ivashev did not wait to see his prediction fulfilled, but left the society at that point. There is even a reference in the testimony of Bobrishchev-Pushkin to rumours circulating Tulchin to the effect that Pestel ‘wanted to make himself emperor’.80 If so, this only serves to confirm the view of a number of Decembrists, especially in the Northern Society, that Pestel fancied himself as the Napoleon of the Russian revolution. In his memoirs, Sergei Volkonskii, described how in 1824 Pestel had claimed to him that he knew he was viewed in some quarters as ‘an ambitious man who aims to fish in troubled waters’ (un ambitieux qui a l⬘intention de pêcher dans l’eau troublé). But Volkonskii strenuously refuted the suggestion that Pestel, driven merely by self-interest, had intended to seize power himself following a successful coup d⬘état. This view, he maintained, was ‘an insult to the memory of one who sacrificed his own life for the cause of us all’.81 From Yushnevskii we obtain rather the view of Pestel as the undisputed leader of the Southern Society that became the norm for Soviet historiography. Describing himself as a member of the ‘Pestel section at Lintsy’, Yushnevskii explained to the Investigating Committee that: ‘Pestel was, of course, informed about everything and nothing was done without his agreement.’ This deference to Pestel was acknowledged despite Yushnevskii’s claim that they were together the ‘first’ leaders of the society.82 Davydov, too, admitted that although they all talked a lot during discussions of society matters, when it came to taking a decision, nobody attempted to challenge Pestel’s opinion. Davydov provided the specific example of his own participation in a meeting at Volkonskii’s, attended by Pestel, Yushnevskii and S. Muraviev-Apostol. Pestel summarised his ideas about the way in which deputies might be elected to the proposed assembly, the distribution of land to the communes, the


structure of such communes and about the Directorate. Davydov attempted to speak against each of these points but conceded that: ‘I was craven enough to suppress my own views in favour of Pestel’s opinion, as I did, to my misfortune, in much more important conversations.’83 But Davydov was not the unwilling accomplice of Pestel he claimed to be. Likharev heard him constantly invoking Pestel’s name ‘with respect and high praise for his unusual intelligence, his patriotism and his excellent knowledge of the local position of Russia’. In his testimony, too, Volf attributes to Pestel’s dominant influence ‘the most unhappy resolution’ to establish a Russian republic and abolish the ruling house.84 Baryatinskii wrote in his depositions that while all members were broadly in agreement with the society’s aim ‘to establish a constitutional system of government in Russia by means of a revolution’, it was Pestel’s place, as ‘chairman’, to propose this as the organisation’s policy. And the reason he was chairman, Baryatinskii’s testimony continued, was because ‘he was without doubt more respected than anyone else on account of his intelligence and knowledge of politics’. His regard for Pestel extended to his declining to refute the compromising testimony he (Pestel) had made against him. Thus, when asked by the Investigating Committee whether he had in fact conveyed to the Northern Society the intention of the Southern Society to establish a republic and to liquidate the entire imperial family, Baryatinskii replied with almost reckless candour: ‘I admit that if he entrusted me with (this) task, I would have carried it out unquestioningly and to the letter.’85 In his memoirs, written only months before his death in 1852, Northern Society member Alexander Muraviev, Nikita Muraviev’s younger brother, identified Pestel and Sergei MuravievApostol as ‘the core around which the entire Southern Society revolt revolved. They attracted numerous followers and acted energetically. Most members blindly believed in them. Pestel was Adjutant to General Count Vitgenshtein, commander of the Second Army, who also came under his influence, the influence of a very unusual man.’86 Pestel’s hold over many members of the Southern Society cannot be ascribed to any innate ability to inspire their loyalty, much less to arouse their affection. M.A. Fonvizin noted that ‘he did not have the gift – so essential in the leader of a political party – of arousing loyalty. There was something steely about him which alienated the sympathies of those whom he led.’87 Bestuzhev-Ryumin commented to his interrogators on Pestel’s personality in similar vein, Pestel was respected in the society for his unusual abilities, but he was not liked due to his lack of sensitivity. His extraordinary suspiciousness


put people off for it was impossible to hope that any relationship with him would last long. Everything filled him with doubt, as a result of which he made many mistakes. He had little understanding of people. Trying to make him out, I became convinced of the truth in the idea that there are some things which only the heart can perceive and which will remain an eternal enigma to even the most incisive mind.88 Pestel’s hold over his fellows derived rather from his energetic if erratic exercise of the authority that had been vested in him on his election, with Yushnevskii, as director of the organisation. He drew also on his experience of military command; temperamentally, too, he was well suited to it. An example of his resourceful leadership emerges from Davydov’s testimony. When the latter informed him that Pavel Leman had been recruited to the society, Pestel immediately instructed Davydov to ask him to prepare a paper on the military colonies. He knew that Leman served in that area and was therefore well placed to inform the society as to the colonies’ revolutionary potential.89 It was typical of Pestel’s alertness that he did not fail to make the connection and realise the usefulness of this new recruit. Nevertheless, it was precisely Pestel’s reputation for firm leadership which made him an object of suspicion, especially in St Petersburg among more cautious members of the Northern Society. This reputation gave rise to charges that Pestel, prompted by ‘self-seeking ambition’, made dangerous and repeated demands for ‘blind obedience’ from Southern Society members which, it was feared, would be extended to the north as well. Further evidence of the Tulchin society’s dependence on Pestel is contained in the testimony of P.S. Bobrishchev-Pushkin who declared himself ‘in all conscience bound to say that the soul (of the secret society) was Pestel alone’. He noticed that when Pestel visited Tulchin, ‘it was as though he woke everybody up, prompting them into some sort of activity’. On his departure, the members would relapse ‘into their former indifference’. It was only the fear of appearing ‘cowardly or egotistical’ that prevented most members from leaving the society, in Bobrishchev-Pushkin’s view.90 During the investigation, Pestel professed embarrassment at the constant references made by his fellow prisoners to his dominant influence in the Southern Society which the Investigating Committee brought to his attention. In order to parry these allegations, he stressed that a plan to stage an uprising during the troop review scheduled for 1826 had been made not by him, but by the group at Vasilkov. He claimed that the plan had merely been conveyed to him by


Bestuzhev-Ryumin as a fait accompli which showed that his ‘influence was not as strong and unlimited as members have testified’. Furthermore, he argued, the Vasilkov plan might have been very different if he really had ‘possessed that cruel inclination and that desperate resolve for bloodshed which many members ascribe to me in their depositions’.91 However, elsewhere he conceded that his role in reforming the Tulchin section was absolutely crucial and that without it the Southern Society might never have existed. He would always reproach himself for using his influence to induce his comrades to tread the ‘unhappy path of the secret society’.92 V.N. Likharev, a member of the Southern Society, was beset by similar doubts which he confided to S. Volkonskii, telling him that Pestel’s behaviour had struck him as ‘secretive and peculiar’, and that new domestic responsibilities made him reluctant to get involved in ‘fantasies that could prove very dangerous’. Volkonskii confided that he, too, was going to ‘change his conduct’ since being told by General Kiselev that he was foolish to be mixed up in such a dangerous business.93 Even though officially he affected to have no direct knowledge of the secret society in the Second Army, Kiselev well knew the personality of his young colonel, and was in a better position than most to judge the potentially extremely compromising influence which Pestel exerted over his fellow officers in the conspiracy. The picture that emerges from the foregoing account, then, is one of a secret society and a leadership in disarray. The Southern Society was from the very moment of its emergence early in 1821 from the defunct Union of Welfare beset by a number of problems. First, there were the purely organisational difficulties of achieving proper co-ordination between the branches at Tulchin, Kamenka, and Vasilkov, and then between Tulchin (Second Army HQ) and Lintsy (where Pestel was based). These difficulties were aggravated by the periodic absence of key members on military duties: with Pestel, for example, being sent on three missions to Moldavia in the first half of 1821. Then there was a lack of clarity about the role of the directorate consisting of Pestel and Yushnevskii. Pestel seems to have assumed overall though not unchallenged command, while Yushnevskii was increasingly eclipsed by Sergei Muraviev-Apostol in Vasilkov and Alexander Baryatinskii in Tulchin. Most importantly, there were policy differences surrounding Pestel’s controversial proposals for a Russian republic, the recourse to regicide and government by means of a provisional dictatorship. Such differences led to internal dissension for which there was no effective remedy beyond the informal forum provided by the January meetings in Kiev.


But even this proved ultimately unavailing: what was to be the last such meeting, in January 1825, exposed the tensions which continued to beset the Southern Society. As one participant, A. Poggio, testified: ‘The consensus, the unity that had existed before, was missing.’94 Finally, Pestel’s leadership aroused both admiration and hostility, giving rise to conflicting assessments among his contemporaries. His powerful personality must be seen ultimately as a liability rather than an asset to the Decembrist movement, since he failed in his aim to unite the Southern Society under his command around his unfinished republican manifesto, Russian Justice. In 1824 for much the same reasons he would fail equally to unite the Southern and Northern societies. This aspect of his role in the Decembrist movement is explored in the next chapter.

8 Pestel and the Northern Society

The liabilities of disunity Following the closure of the Union of Welfare in 1821 there emerged, as already discussed, the Northern and Southern Societies. The names of these groups, which were coined by the Decembrists themselves, refer to their location in St Petersburg and Tulchin respectively. Pestel always regarded two separate societies as a nuisance dictated by geography to be mitigated as speedily as possible by organisational initiatives and the bilateral adoption of a concerted political programme and a united plan of action. He remarked to the Investigating Committee that he regarded the two societies essentially as one ‘because they both represent the continuation of the Union of Welfare’. He claimed to have found support for this view during his stay in St Petersburg in 1824, members of the Northern Society generally considering ‘our two regional bases (okrugy) as sections of one and the same society’.1 He told BestuzhevRyumin that he always had been convinced that ‘without the Northern base’ it would be impossible to take direct action.2 Nevertheless, Pestel’s own testimony reveals that the two societies were – and remained – completely separate and that, in spite of his best efforts, there was no unanimity of aim, operation or structure.3 Pestel assumed that St Petersburg would naturally be the cradle of the revolution. Had Pestel not been posted to Tulchin but stationed in St Petersburg, there is every reason to suppose that he would have attempted by the force of his personality to impose his leadership on the Northern Society. And, furthermore, given the predisposition to his republican ideals of such influential and active members of the Northern Society as E.P. Obolenskii and K.F. Ryleev, there is good reason to suppose that he might have succeeded. But as things were, from 1821 114

Pestel and the Northern Society 115

Pestel was obliged to rely on keeping open the lines of communication between Tulchin and St Petersburg from afar by means of direct personal contact. This was ensured by a number of Southern Society emissaries who travelled northwards on a variety of pretexts, and included V.L. Davydov, S.G. Volkonskii and A.P. Baryatinskii. In addition, M.I. Muraviev-Apostol lived in the capital from June 1823 to August 1824, to all intents and purposes as the Southern Society’s ‘man on the ground’ there.4 Even so, there were numerous practical obstacles to maintaining regular contact with the north. In the main, such contact depended on chance visits of Tulchin members – usually on official business – to St Petersburg. In 1821, however, Pestel, had underestimated the possibility of Nikita Muraviev and Sergei Trubetskoi leading the Northern Society towards a programme significantly different from the one he was himself developing. Pestel’s error stemmed from the fact that he had not allowed for a substantial shift in Nikita Muraviev’s outlook with whom he had, after all, been politically so attuned in the days of the Union of Salvation and the Union of Welfare. Now he found himself powerless to check the ‘Muraviev line’ through the Southern Society’s representatives in spite of his best efforts. At the Southern Society’s Kiev meeting in January 1823, Sergei Muraviev-Apostol proposed the need to place the activity of the secret society on a firmer footing. In particular there was recognition of the need to establish closer links with the Northern Society. Pestel therefore proposed that the main discussion points for both societies should be drawn up and considered both in St Petersburg and Tulchin, and that the work of both societies be geared towards a common agenda.5 By the autumn of 1823, Pestel’s concern over the widening gulf between the Northern and Southern Societies prompted his decision to go to St Petersburg in person. His mission was to convince Muraviev and his confederates of the absolute necessity of achieving an organisation united in its programme and in the strategy needed to ensure its successful implementation. For Pestel this meant persuading the Northern Society to accept both his overall command of the movement and his draft manifesto, Russian Justice, as its programme. Specific objections among the Tulchin membership to the alternative constitutional project proposed by Muraviev and transmitted to Tulchin in the first weeks of 1823, concerned its ‘federative system and the frightful Aristocracy of Wealth which it envisaged in the broadest terms’.6 These and other criticisms were set out in a long letter, containing an outline of Russian Justice, which Pestel had sent with Vasilii Davydov to Muraviev in February.


Pestel prepared to travel to St Petersburg with a good idea of the difficulties he could expect to encounter on arrival. He had a foretaste of them from the reports he had received from Tulchin colleagues who had already visited the northern capital. Alexander Baryatinskii, making the earliest contact with the Northern Society on the Southern Society’s behalf early in January 1823, had taken Nikita Muraviev a letter from Pestel. It contained a report on the Southern Society’s adoption of a republican platform, on its decision to exterminate the imperial family, on the state of the society’s morale and the number of troops at its disposal. It requested Muraviev to supply information about the work of the Northern Society, about any increase in its membership and the strength of the troops that could be counted on for revolutionary action.7 Baryatinskii was instructed to reproach the Northern Society for its inactivity and to convey a clearer idea of the state and work of the Southern Society. Furthermore, he was to tell the members that a definite decision had been taken to take action before the year was out: they were therefore required to give a decisive indication of their readiness to join forces with the Southern Society. This was in fact merely a feint to goad the Northern Society into action, since the Southern Society had actually decided no such thing. Baryatinskii claimed that the ruse worked since Nikita Muraviev pleaded with him to stay the Southern Society’s hand. Fearful of his own inevitable arrest by General I.V. Gladkov, St Petersburg’s Chief of Police, Nikita Muraviev told Baryatinskii of the difficulties he was having in attracting officers to the secret organisation: ‘Guards officers think only about enjoying themselves at balls and are not at all inclined to become members of the society.’8 Baryatinskii returned from St Petersburg highly dissatisfied with Muraviev but enthusiastic about the energetic commitment of E.P. Obolenskii.9 When Davydov went to St Petersburg in February 1823, he found Nikita Muraviev still complaining, as he had a few weeks earlier to Baryatinskii, about the problems of recruiting new members. He asked Davydov to assure the Southern Society that he was doing all he could to remedy the situation but that very few were prepared to become involved. On listening to Muraviev’s recital of his constitutional project, Davydov ‘realised that its aim was not in accord with Pestel’s’.10 Volkonskii also visited the Northern Society early in 1823, and he formed the impression that Nikita Muraviev was against the union of the two societies. This was largely because he was opposed to so many of Pestel’s views, and feared police surveillance in St Petersburg which made active propaganda of the society’s views impossible. This led Muraviev to resort to ‘cautious means’ in pursuit of the secret society’s aims about which


Northern Society member Mikhail Mitkov complained to Volkonskii.11 Volkonskii and Davydov together went to see Muraviev and discussed with him, as they had been instructed, the agreement of both societies to act as one, in pursuit of a common agenda, with both sides making concessions where necessary. They outlined Pestel’s scheme for allocating to the peasants a half, ‘or at least a significant proportion’, of the landowners’ land, his electoral system to the houses of representatives, and the division of Russia into regions. This discussion lasted less than threequarters of an hour and ended inconclusively.12 M. Muraviev-Apostol informed Volkonskii of the ‘disagreement and inactivity’ he had found in St Petersburg. As a result of the Southern Society’s growing concern about Nikita Muraviev, Volkonskii was instructed instead to contact Sergei Trubetskoi and Evgenii Obolenskii. From the latter, more promisingly, he heard that the society was beginning to be more active thanks to such new blood as Mikhail Naryshkin and Kondratii Ryleev, and that in certain regiments junior officers were becoming increasingly outraged by the excessive harshness of the discipline they were expected to impose.13 On his return to Tulchin, Volkonskii added his voice to the growing chorus of those who sought to persuade Pestel to go to St Petersburg himself in pursuit of the union of the two societies on a common radical platform ‘considered essential by the majority of Southern Society members’. It was felt that Pestel alone might realise these objectives in view of his earlier contacts with Nikita Muraviev in the Union of Welfare. Those Southern Society representatives who had already had personal dealings with Muraviev were dismayed by his mistrustful and non-committal attitude towards them. Pestel therefore decided at the end of 1823 that he would go to St Petersburg and accordingly applied for leave as soon as the emperor’s inspection of the Second Army was finished. He requested Volkonskii to meet him in St Petersburg at the end of December in order to be present at his meetings with members of the Northern Society.14 Sergei Muraviev-Apostol’s testimony gives details of Pestel’s agenda. On his departure for St Petersburg Pestel told him that he intended to do everything he could to unite the two societies with mutual recognition of each other’s directorate. He was apprehensive about the Northern Society’s reception of Russian Justice in view of the less radical goals of Nikita Muraviev’s constitutional project. He knew that he had little room for manoeuvre because he was not prepared to concede any of the principles of Russian Justice which, in any case, he assumed had been broadly accepted by the Southern Society as its manifesto. Nevertheless, he was determined to succeed.15


Pestel did not arrive in St Petersburg unannounced. Members of the Northern Society had learned with some trepidation of Pestel’s imminent visit from the letter brought by Baryatinskii on a further visit to St Petersburg in June and deemed it prudent to prepare themselves for it. Their sense of foreboding was increased by the tone of the letter in which Pestel reproached Muraviev for his inactivity and bluntly remarked that it ‘would be better to split properly than to do nothing while still running such dangerous risks’.16 The northerners had an exaggerated idea of the Southern Society’s strength and feared Pestel’s energy and influence. According to Sergei Trubetskoi, a special delegation was elected to meet and talk with Pestel, consisting of Nikita Muraviev, Evgenii Obolenskii and himself. In this way, the Northern Society hoped both to elucidate Pestel’s current thinking and the state of the Southern Society while at the same time presenting him with the impression of a well-organised society in St Petersburg.17

In St Petersburg Pestel’s impatience, self-confidence and dynamism contrasted strongly with the diffidence, moderation and caution that he encountered among many leading members of the Northern Society in St Petersburg in March 1824. Frequent references in Soviet writing to the ‘unshakeable unity’ of the Decembrist movement did not in fact correspond with reality.18 S.S. Landa, one of the least conventional of Soviet writers on the Decembrists, lamented the tendency to naive acceptance of this demonstrably absurd proposition19 Certainly, the many accounts of Pestel’s stay in St Petersburg combine to convey a clear impression of the ambivalent feelings he aroused there. Pestel arrived in St Petersburg early in March 1824 and stayed for two months with his brother, Vladimir, Quartermaster of the Horse-Guard Regiment. Primed for confrontation, he immediately visited Sergei Trubetskoi for talks and complained to him about the Northern Society and in particular about Nikita Muraviev’s failure to respond to his letters.20 Obolenskii, who was the Northerner closest to Pestel and acted as his intermediary with the society’s leaders, was among those who attended a meeting soon after Pestel’s arrival at which Nikolai Turgenev, Trubetskoi and Nikita Muraviev were also present. Here, according to Trubetskoi, Pestel read from his Russian Justice without attempting to defend it but appeared to compromise, by ostensibly accepting that in Russia constitutional government could only be provided by a monarchical system.21 But the atmosphere of their discussions was


considerably less cordial than Trubetskoi inferred. He and Muraviev vehemently objected to Pestel’s proposals for a provisional government pending the implementation of a fully centralised republican administration as laid down in Russian Justice. Pestel maintained his self-control until, exasperated by their criticisms he slammed the table with his fist and leapt to his feet.22 Some maintained that Pestel shouted at this point: ‘You’ll have a republic and like it’, but though this may well have been what he was thinking, he denied saying anything at all. Poggio, however fancifully, claimed that ‘after this all the Northerners agreed with this criminal objective’.23 P.N. Svistunov described in his testimony another meeting which took place at F.F. Vadkovskii’s instigation in his apartment, attended by Muraviev-Apostol, I.Yu. Polivanov, N.N. Depreradovich, I.A. Annenkov and S.I Krivtsov, all members from 1823 of what was effectively the Southern Society’s ‘cell’ in St Petersburg. Here Pestel stressed the need for change in Russia’s political system and advocated the establishment of a republic along American lines. Although he made no direct reference to the imperial family’s fate, ‘his republican intentions’, as Svistunov put it, ‘implied large-scale crimes’. Nor did Pestel say how these changes would be brought about, beyond asserting that it was ‘easy enough to overthrow any government’. The real problem was to establish a new one and this was what they would have to work on.24 Pestel’s impatience with the Northerners’ slowness to find a solution to the problem in contrast to the activity of the Southern Society was expressed to Obolenskii and recorded by N.I. Lorer: ‘Nothing is being done here in St Petersburg; people are just sitting around with their arms folded. Things are going better with us in the south. (Chez nous au midi les affaires vont mieux).’ Lorer also recalled a conversation with Pestel in which he argued that if America could become a republic, so could Russia: ‘In what way is America any better than us? … It was a British colony for years … and it was only when it became aware of its own strength and Washington appeared that it decided to secede.’25 In spite of such strictures, Pestel denied ever trying to secure the Northern Society’s ‘blind obedience to one Director, but proposed the formation of one common directorate’.26 But the exchange of views, or rather, the clashes between Muraviev and Pestel were ultimately unproductive. The gulf that separated them on the fundamental question of Russia’s future governance and Russian Justice as the putative new republic’s constitution, was simply too wide to be bridged. There was also the matter of personal pride. According to Baryatinskii, from what Pestel told him of his heated exchange with


Nikita Muraviev over the relative merits of their two projects, it sounded ‘more like a clash of authorial vanity than a meeting of a secret organisation’.27 But it was much more serious than this. Nikita Muraviev’s own account of their discussions reveal the extent of his antipathy for Pestel, his policies and his leadership style: I put to Pestel an alternative scenario, explaining the impossibility of integrating two societies separated by such a great distance and such divergent opinions. In the Northern Society we each had our own view, whereas in the Southern, as far as I could tell from those members who visited us, there was no view which contradicted Pestel’s. Therefore, any majority vote would always be a reflection of his will alone. Furthermore, I declared that I would never agree to submit blindly to a majority vote that produced a decision that went against my conscience, and reserved the right to leave the society at any point. Muraviev claimed that this threat worked and that Pestel agreed to leave the two societies as they were until 1826 when there would be a meeting of delegates to review the terms on which union of the two societies might be achieved.28 At the meeting in Vadkovskii’s apartment, Nikolai Turgenev disputed Pestel’s radical (‘republican’) proposals for land re-partition and agrarian reform as laid down in Russian Justice. It was this part of Pestel’s plan that was least acceptable to him. Turgenev was to recall, in relation specifically to Pestel, how difficult it was to decide how best to demolish the theories of others when they were so manifestly absurd.29 Turgenev’s counterproposal, that the land would gradually and imperceptibly re-distribute itself without the need for any such administrative disruption, was an argument which strongly influenced all those who heard it.30 Pestel, however, attached the greatest significance to this plank in his political platform. He insisted that if the proclamation of a Russian republic was going to mean more than a mere change in name, then first and foremost the question of land-ownership would have to be addressed. According to accounts of this meeting which subsequently reached Alexander Herzen, Pestel declared: ‘It is imperative that land be given to the peasants – only then will the aim of the revolution be achieved.’31 Pestel also met Kondratii Ryleev and in the course of a lengthy exchange of views found some rare common ground on the issues of a republic and regicide. This was vitiated, however, by Ryleev’s doubts about Pestel’s motives, ambition and personality. A particularly revealing passage of Ryleev’s account


of their meeting has Pestel defending his enthusiastic reference to Napoleon’s pragmatism with the words: ‘I merely wished to say that ambitious designs are not to be feared and that if one of us does take advantage of the coup then he should make himself a second Napoleon. At least then we shall not all be losers!’32 As Nikita Muraviev’s biographer put it: ‘Apart from political arguments, personal tensions came into play. Pestel was reproached for his hypocrisy and power seeking, while his revolutionary aspirations were denigrated by comparing them with the ambitious schemes of Napoleon.’33 However, while conceding that there were stumbling blocks between North and South, Pestel was to insist in his testimony that there had been complete agreement on one matter. This was that the revolution could not start until the death of Alexander I and that, in the meantime, the secret organisation should gather momentum and, if necessary, ‘hasten’ the tsar’s demise.34 Part of the difficulty in reaching agreement, as he retrospectively concluded from their differences, was that the Northerners were so undecided among themselves at this time as to their precise goals, particularly as concerned the question of the new constitution and the redistribution of land.35 Lorer, too, was to remark that the Northerners ‘really did not seem to know themselves which system of government they wanted’.36 After Pestel left St Petersburg, Obolenskii sent him a letter with Volkonskii in which he expressed his ‘sincere desire’ to see the two societies united and told him of the raised morale in the Northern Society in the wake of his visit.37

Pestel after St Petersburg Despite Obolenskii’s encouraging letter, Pestel returned to Tulchin depressed by the evidence he had found in St Petersburg of scant support for a secret society united around his proposals in Russian Justice. In spite of opinions he had heard there, he remained convinced that concerted action alone stood any realistic chance of success. There were fluctuations in his mood; indeed, both Lorer and Volkonskii somehow received the impression that Pestel’s efforts in St Petersburg had been successful.38 Similarly, Nikolai Basargin noted in his memoirs that he had been in St Petersburg at the time of Pestel’s visit: ‘I learned afterwards that the purpose of his trip had been to persuade the St Petersburg society to act in accord with the Southern, in which he was successful. But he said nothing about this to me himself; I found all this out in Siberia.’39 And even though Pestel complained to Yushnevskii about the Northern Society’s weakness, its inactivity and its worrying diversity of


outlook, he was still confident of being able to win the majority in St Petersburg to the republican cause.40 He was certainly under no illusion, though, that he would ever be able to agree with Nikita Muraviev’s programme, recognising his former Union of Welfare colleague, as he told Lorer, as ‘a clever man with very odd views’.41 From this point there was no further contact between Pestel and Muraviev. The latter testified that when Prince Volkonskii visited St Petersburg subsequently he brought with him no specific word from Pestel beyond greetings to members of the directorate and ‘praise for the harmony of the two societies’. No further meeting with the Northern Society took place, and there is nothing to suggest that one was definitely planned beyond the general idea of a review session sometime in 1826.42 Nikolai Lorer has left an interesting account of a conversation he had about Pestel with Matvei Muraviev-Apostol. At the end of October 1824, as he was about to go on leave, Lorer was requested by Pestel to check with Muraviev for any news about the Northern Society in St Petersburg, from where he had recently returned. Lorer did so, and found Muraviev ill-disposed both to the conspiracy in general and to Pestel in particular. He claimed that in St Petersburg the society was ‘quiet’ since on the whole everyone was ‘very satisfied’ with the government. He warned Lorer against Pestel, ‘a most dangerous and self-regarding man, who is deceiving us all for his own selfish reasons’, and possessed of so huge an ego that he saw himself as Russia’s George Washington. In addition, Muraviev found Pestel ‘cunning, secretive and extraordinarily egocentric’. Lorer was astonished by this outburst, not least for its revelation of such profound differences among the society’s members. Pestel himself was no less surprised on hearing Lorer’s account of his meeting with Muraviev-Apostol, particularly as the latter was considered one of the Southern Society’s most active members and had been the first to try to persuade the Northern Society to accept Russian Justice. There was a curious sequel to this episode. A short time later, Bestuzhev-Ryumin brought Pestel a letter from Muraviev-Apostol retracting everything he had said about him to Lorer and pledging his continued support for the work of the society.43 Muraviev-Apostol had evidently heard very negative assessments of Pestel from the St Petersburg membership which succeeded in turning him, albeit temporarily, against the Southern Society’s director. The swings in Muraviev’s attitude to Pestel bring to mind the generally well-disposed General Kiselev’s exasperated description of Pestel’s character as ‘black as mud’. Meanwhile, the Northern Society’s leadership, disconcerted by Pestel’s visit, placed some hope in Sergei Trubetskoi’s posting to Ukraine in


November 1824. As a staff-officer attached to the Fourth Army Corps stationed in Kiev, he hoped to closely monitor Pestel at Second Army Headquarters in Tulchin. Trubetskoi recalled in his memoirs that after the St Petersburg talks ‘trust in Pestel was severely shaken and the St Petersburg members saw the need to follow with a vigilant eye the activities of Pestel and the Southern Society whose members were completely subordinate to him’. Sergei Muraviev-Apostol was told of the disagreements that had arisen between the two societies during Pestel’s visit and was asked to keep him under surveillance.44 The monitoring of Pestel was unrelenting. In the autumn of 1825, only weeks before the death of Alexander I, Trubetskoi, still stationed in Kiev, requested a member of the secret society, Mikhail Naryshkin, to enquire about Pestel’s standing in the Southern Society. This was because he had learned that ‘several of its members did not fully trust him’. Naryshkin was on his way to his Crimean estates and had been asked by Moscow members of the Northern Society to call on Trubetskoi to ascertain the state of the Southern Society. In turn, Trubetskoi made his request of Naryshkin, knowing that he was intending to visit Pestel’s former Tulchin confederate, I.G. Burtsov. Naryshkin then learnt from Burtsov, even though he had broken with the society four years earlier, that ‘Colonel Pestel had great influence in the Southern Society and was its most important member.’45 To convey to the Investigating Committee the extent of the distrust felt by the Northern Society, Trubetskoi cited Ryleev’s view of him as a ‘cunning seeker of power, a Bonaparte rather than a Washington’.46 Given the gulf which by 1824 had opened up between members of the Northern Society, to a greater or lesser extent adherents of constitutional monarchy, and the republican Pavel Pestel, whom they personally mistrusted, it is difficult indeed to see what agreed way forward they might have found in the round of negotiations scheduled for 1826.

9 The Polish Connection

Among the most interesting, yet more obscure aspects of the Southern Society’s history must count the nature and extent of its contacts with the Polish Patriotic Society. The full story of these contacts, which lies beyond the scope of this study, has still to be told; but their very existence suggests that the Decembrists did not regard their political aspirations as exclusive to Russia.1 It is true that foreigners had been specifically excluded from membership of the earliest Decembrist secret societies, but this was not held to prevent the Southern Society from actively seeking international links in the common pursuit of political and social reform that transcended national boundaries. In any case, at this time, Russians and Poles were subjects of the one emperor. Under the terms of the Treaty of Vienna (1815) Alexander I had assumed the crown of a new and independent ‘Congress Kingdom of Poland.’ While he remained the absolute autocratic ruler of Russia, he was Poland’s constitutional monarch. The kingdom had its own government and judiciary, its own elected Assembly or Sejm, and a separate civil service and army. ‘On paper at least’, in the view of Norman Davies, ‘it was one of the most progressive constitutions of Central Europe’.2 Alexander’s representative, resident viceroy in Warsaw and married to a Polish princess, was his younger brother, Constantine. The theme of the Southern Society’s Polish connection is especially interesting for the light it throws on Pestel’s political goals, in particular the furtherance of his ambition to rid Russia of the Romanovs. It also reveals his attitude towards other secret political organisations within the Russian Empire, and the character of his own Russian nationalism, providing a foretaste of ‘Great Russian’ chauvinism in its revolutionary guise. How did Pestel view the future of Poland following the success of the Decembrists’ revolution? As already noted earlier, Pestel argued in 124

The Polish Connection 125

Russian Justice the case for Poland’s full independence on the grounds that the country had ‘for many centuries enjoyed complete political independence and represented a large independent state’. He had in mind the fact that the Congress Kingdom, which at 127 000 square km in area with a population of 2.5 million, was only a fraction of the much grander and entirely independent pre-partition Polish Commonwealth which the Poles aspired to recreate. Poland therefore, ‘out of pure justice’ belonged to the category of nations as defined in Russian Justice which were capable of exercising ‘the right of nationhood’. This was in contradistinction to those peoples such as Finns, Estonians, Byelorussians and Ukrainians, which Pestel considered too weak ever to stand alone and had therefore to abandon any idea of becoming separate nations. In Pestel’s scheme of things, however, Polish independence was to be by no means unconditional. The political structures and institutions of the newly independent Poland were to be modelled in every respect on the forms he laid down for the new Russian republic in Chapter 6 of Russian Justice. Those appointed to government office and the civil service were to be selected according to the procedures stipulated for Russia in Chapters 4 and 9 of Russian Justice. Just as in Russia, so in Poland all class distinctions, including the aristocracy, were to be abolished in line with Chapter 4 of Pestel’s manifesto. The question of the Russian–Polish border was similarly to be defined in a way which would be consistent with Russia’s security interests. The same was to apply to Poland’s foreign policy, which would be entirely subordinate to Russia’s own requirements, including the use of Polish troops. Echoing the Polish policy of Catherine the Great, Pestel confirmed that Russia, in return, would ‘take Poland under its protection, guarantee the integrity of her borders, and indeed her very existence’.3 And so it served Pestel’s interests to establish contact with Poland’s would-be future leadership at an early stage of their respective struggles against tsarist autocracy.

First contacts with the Polish Patriotic Society In Poland, meanwhile, from 1817 a number of associations had been formed, many of them centred on universities, all motivated by a fierce determination to rid the country of Russian tyranny and to win for their Polish motherland the sovereign independence appropriate to her reawakened sense of national identity. One of the most significant secret societies was that formed in May 1819 by Major Walerian Lukasinski ´ which, like its Decembrist counterparts in St Petersburg, was based mainly on the army and adopted a Masonic guise as ‘The Society of National Freemasonry’.


One source puts the membership of this group at 33.4 Early in 1820 the Union of Free Poles was formed with a membership of more than 40. This was the embryo of the ‘Patriotic Society’ which from May 1821 rapidly spread cells throughout Poland, pledged to reunite all the Polish lands, to uphold the constitution and to promote the cause of Polish independence. This is not to suggest that Poland at this time was on the verge of a revolutionary situation, or anything approaching it. After all, the Polish Patriotic Society’s membership was probably no more than 150. All the same, the authorities, directed by Grand Duke Constantine, responded to these and other indications of youthful radicalism with a series of repressive measures. These included the decree of September 1821 banning all secret societies throughout the Congress Kingdom, in anticipation of a similar ukaz the following year in St Petersburg. In 1822, Lukasinski, ´ an officer of Constantine’s favourite Fourth Infantry Regiment, was betrayed and arrested. He subsequently languished in prison where he died in 1869. His place in the Society was taken by Lieutenant-Colonel Seweryn Krzyzanowski, a member since June 1821, and it was he who was put in touch in 1823 with representatives of the Decembrists’ Southern Society, S.I. Muraviev-Apostol and M.P. Bestuzhev-Ryumin.5 Krzyzanowski was to testify that the idea of establishing contact with Russian secret societies had originated in 1820. In spite of what ultimately would prove to be the inconclusive and, from the Decembrists’ point of view, disappointing outcome of Pestel’s dealings with the Patriotic Society, Nicholas I directed the Investigating Committee to elucidate the Poles’ contacts with the secret societies in Russia. Mention by individual Decembrists of contacts with members of a Polish secret organisation aroused the predictably xenophobic suspicions of the Investigating Committee. In addition, it increased its keen interest in unearthing underground political activity in a notoriously volatile part of the Russian Empire. The Committee was therefore particularly anxious to establish the actual extent of such activity. It is interesting to note that in January 1822 the Decembrist Mikhail Lunin, a member of the Northern Society, was posted to Warsaw as an aide-de-camp to Grand Duke Constantine. Although he was not directly involved in the development of contacts with the Polish secret society, it was in Warsaw that he was arrested in April 1826 and where he underwent a preliminary interrogation by the Investigating Committee established in the Polish capital before being sent to St Petersburg. Lunin’s treatment was a fair reflection of the remarkably slow official reaction in Warsaw to the uprising on 14 December 1825 in St Petersburg. In spite of secret police reports Grand Duke Constantine had received about the


activity of the Polish Patriotic Society, he had given no orders for them to be followed up. This curious negligence was paralleled by Alexander I’s failure to respond to similar reports he had received in St Petersburg well before his death in November 1825 about the Russian secret societies. After the events of 14 December Constantine wrote complacently to his brother, the new Tsar, Nicholas I: ‘Here in Warsaw all is calm and [we are] surprised and outraged by the St Petersburg events.’6 However, a letter from Constantine to Nicholas of 22 January 1826 revealed a quite different tone: ‘Do not lose track of Prince Anton Jablonowski about whom General (sic) Pestel speaks. If he has not already returned to Volhynia province then he should be in Kiev. He is a very slippery customer (eto – tonkaya shtuka) and it would be no bad thing in many ways to have him brought to St Petersburg.’7 Before the month was out Jablonowski was arrested and held in the Peter-Paul Fortress; two weeks later he was sent to Warsaw for interrogation. On the basis of his testimony some 200 arrests were made. For this compliance his 20-year sentence was reduced; he served it in Saratov until 1834 when he was allowed to return to his estate in Ukraine where he died in 1855. The Investigating Committee in Warsaw was convened only on 7 February 1826 and completed its much lighter work-load six months later than its St Petersburg counterpart, on 22 December 1826, when it indicted a mere 16 Russians and nine Poles. Not surprisingly, they were almost all acquitted by the tacitly sympathetic Sejm court. Orders were given to release immediately even those who had been convicted and given three-year prison terms out of consideration for the time they had already served. Subsequently, in 1828, the ringleaders of the Patriotic Society were charged with treason by a tribunal of the Sejm. The chief defendant, Seweryn Krzyzanowski, was handed down a mere three-year sentence. Such leniency was regarded in the Russian capital as sheer impudence. It was in stark contrast to the much heavier sentences imposed on the Decembrists two years earlier and the Sejm tribunal was overruled from St Petersburg by a furious Nicholas. The State Council in St Petersburg revised the Warsaw verdicts and sentences: 12 were released, nine imprisoned from two to eight months, two reduced to the ranks and four exiled to Siberia for 10 to 20 years.8 Seweryn Krzyzanowski died in Tobolsk in 1839. It was not Lunin’s Warsaw testimony that provided the information sought by the Investigating Committee about the Decembrists’ Polish connections. Rather, the depositions that most fully exposed the Polish society were those of the Southern Society’s four authorised representatives: Bestuzhev-Ryumin, Sergei Muraviev-Apostol, Volkonskii and


Pestel himself.9 Muraviev-Apostol warned his interrogators that his account of the Polish organisation would be ‘unsatisfactory for want of information’ because, in spite of their close contacts, the Poles were always cautious about what they disclosed. Krzyzanowski had told him that he had no authority to give him the requested details about the Poles’ organisation, but that he should nevertheless trust him.10 Yushnevskii’s depositions state that Sergei Muraviev-Apostol, and especially Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin, rather than Pestel, conducted the main liaison work with the Poles. Bestuzhev-Ryumin was the first to establish contact with the Poles (through Seweryn Krzyzanowski), as he informed the Southern Decembrists who met during the 1824 Kiev trade fair which was regularly visited by Poles. The trade fair was held every year during the last two weeks of January and from 1822 it provided members of the Southern Society a cover for what was, in effect, their annual conference. Bestuzhev-Ryumin apparently remained the Poles’ preferred gobetween. In 1823 he informed Pestel of his proposal to the Poles concerning the restoration of the Western provinces that Russia had annexed whereupon Pestel instructed him and Sergei Muraviev-Apostol to open negotiations with them on behalf of the Southern Society.11 According to Sergei Volkonskii, Bestuzhev-Ryumin’s contacts with the Poles started as early as 1822 and he had earned the approval of the Southern Society’s Directorate, communicated to him by Yushnevskii, for the success of their discussions in 1823 and 1824.12 Until Bestuzhev-Ryumin had initiated these promising contacts, the Southern Society had in fact been rather ill disposed towards the Poles and therefore, according to Volkonskii, there was not exactly unanimous enthusiasm for these overtures. Nevertheless, fairly frequent meetings took place of which Pestel received news in detailed reports from Bestuzhev-Ryumin.13 There were negotiations under a number of other headings, best described as confidence-building measures. For example, a Polish complaint about difficulties experienced in bringing litigation before Russian courts expressed at their meeting in Kiev in January 1824 revealed the Russians’ readiness to appear helpful. The Poles remarked that when pursuing legal actions through the St Petersburg courts their ignorance of local procedure created considerable difficulty and delay. They requested practical assistance from the Russian society ‘as evidence of its benevolent disposition towards the Polish society’ and asked that an individual be appointed specifically to guide their members through the chaotic maze of Russian litigation. In return, the Poles promised to reciprocate with similar help for any Russian member who might have litigation in the


Congress Kingdom of Poland. Pestel, who was himself in St Petersburg at that time, asked S.G. Krasnokutskii, a member both of the Senate and of the Southern Society, to fill this role. M. Muraviev-Apostol commented in his testimony that ‘the Southern Society was very pleased with Krasnokutskii’s agreement to assist the Poles, because this gave the Polish society, as my brother Sergei and Bestuzhev told me, a clearer idea of the Russian society’.14 However, such readiness to assist the Poles does not seem to have been sustained in subsequent dealings with them.

Formal negotiations and Pestel’s role The first formal negotiations between the Poles and the Russians, which took place in Kiev in January 1824, seemed to go well. Indeed, one Soviet commentator described them as the ‘major event in the work of the Southern Society’s leaders at the trade-fair conference of 1824’.15 Although he had instigated them, Pestel himself was not a party to these negotiations since in January 1824 he was preparing to visit St Petersburg and making contact with members of the Northern Society. He heard an account of the January talks from Sergei MuravievApostol and Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin only on his return in July 1824 to his regiment from St Petersburg. Bestuzhev-Ryumin’s testimony shows, despite bilateral confidence-building efforts, the extent of Pestel’s mistrust of Polish intentions. Bestuzhev recalled that: On his return from St Petersburg, Pestel visited us in Belaya Tserkov and expressed his doubts about the Poles’ readiness ‘to use all means’ to prevent the tsarevich [Constantine] from returning to Russia. He suspected that the Poles would take advantage of our weakness during the coup to put Constantine on the throne by force of arms so that out of gratitude he would restore their independence to them. On the basis of this opinion, Pestel ordered me in the name of the directorate to demand of the Polish society the immediate liquidation of the tsarevich.16 Evidently, Pestel’s main interest in securing the compliance of the Polish conspiracy was to implement his intention to assassinate all the most prominent members of the ruling Romanov house. Grand Duke Constantine as Governor-General of Warsaw and viceroy of the Congress Kingdom, obviously figured high on Pestel’s list of potential victims. Pestel instructed Bestuzhev-Ryumin when he met Anastasii Stepanovich Grodetskii (Anastazy Grodecki) in late November 1824 to


register a complaint about the Poles’ ‘obvious divergence from us and reluctance to pass on to us any information of importance’.17 Since there were various aspects of the Polish society’s activity that Pestel was anxious to clarify he decided to conduct the second round of negotiations himself, together with Sergei Volkonskii, in Kiev in January 1825. As Volkonskii testified: ‘In December 1824, I called on Pestel at Lintsy to be told that a member of the Warsaw Society was to visit Kiev, and that we would be conducting talks with him.’18 During the 1825 Kiev trade fair, in the absence of Muraviev-Apostol and Bestuzhev-Ryumin, Pestel had talks with Polish representatives, among them Prince Antoni Jablonowski, Anastazy Grodecki and Józef Rulikowski, at Sergei Volkonskii’s apartment. Rulikowski put it to Pestel that if the Russians were serious about their desire to liaise with them, a high-ranking member in both St Petersburg and Warsaw should be designated to take on this task, since the Poles they would be dealing with were of very high standing. Pestel told Yushnevskii that he gave no definite undertaking in response to this request. This was, as he claimed, because he was embarrassed at the possibility of having to reveal to the Poles the relative paucity of the Russian membership as well as the modesty of their social and political rank. In the event, Pestel’s reluctance to meet the Poles’ request proved a stumbling block to the development of a plan of joint action with them. Yushnevskii learned from Pestel that the aim of the Polish Society was the restoration of Poland to its previous form, that is, as the country had been before the first partition in 1772 when Russia, Prussia and Austria had seized huge areas of its territory. It was only on this condition that the Poles would go along with the aims of the Russians’ Southern Society. This position was a reiteration of what Bestuzhev-Ryumin had been told at his first meeting with the Poles: that in return for a guarantee that all territories seized by Russia would be restored to Poland, the Polish secret society would render every assistance to the Southern Society in pursuit of its goals. More generally, the Poles urged that the Southern Society should do what it could to help eradicate the two nations’ traditional mutual hostility. The Poles told Pestel of foreign interest in the aspirations of their secret society. They claimed that Lord Stratford Canning, the British foreign minister, had promised on behalf of his government to assist as and when necessary.19 Sergei Muraviev-Apostol was also told that Canning had contacted members of the secret society while he was in Warsaw, while Matvei Muraviev-Apostol testified that he had heard that Canning had made contact with a General Kniaziewicz in Dresden and offered financial assistance.20 This seems to have been a combination of


boastfulness and wishful thinking, since there is nothing to corroborate claims of Canning’s involvement. Even more fanciful was Jablonowski’s claim to Pestel and Volkonskii in 1825 that his organisation was in contact with Prussian, Hungarian and Italian sympathisers. Such claims, the Russians reasonably enough dismissed as ‘empty boasting’.21 Their scepticism, however, did not prevent Pestel from passing on this information to other members as though it were a matter of fact.22 The Investigating Committee was inclined to the view that the Poles had invented the Canning connection, even though it would have been perfectly consistent with British policy to have the Russian Empire’s grip on Poland weakened. The Committee had at its disposal a report from Grand Duke Constantine describing the suggestion of the British minister’s involvement with the Polish society as ‘a lie’. Canning had, after all, been closely watched: ‘Every action, every step taken by Stratford Canning during his short stay in Warsaw was known to the Grand Duke.’23 Prince Jablonowski himself denied at his interrogation any contact with other foreign groups apart from the Southern Society. Even so, he had declined what he described as Pestel’s offer to unite their organisations since he feared that the idea of an independent Poland was bound to be unpopular in Russia. This was in spite of Pestel’s highly questionable assurances that the Russian people once free themselves, would not want to have subject peoples of their own.24 Volkonskii’s testimony provides further details of Pestel’s role in the Southern Society’s Polish contacts. Volkonskii described his own assignment from 1824 as a member of the ‘Pestel section at Lintsy’ specifically to monitor Polish contacts.25 His information was that the headquarters of the Polish society were in Dresden, with a branch in Warsaw. His main contact was Prince Jablonowski, who was among those members of the Polish Patriotic Society who visited the Kiev trade fair. Prince Jablonowski told him, as he had told Pestel, that their goal was an independent Poland with the restoration of the provinces annexed by Russia during the three partitions of 1772, 1793 and 1795. The Poles were confident of the support of the Ukrainian nobility, of Prussian collaboration and British financial assistance. Volkonskii was requested to name some ‘significant individual’ in the Russian society with whom the leader of the Polish society might establish contact. But, like Pestel, he managed to stall on this embarrassing demand. There was, in fact, no member of the Decembrist conspiracy of the status which the Poles seemed to expect, such as court grandee or government minister.26 It was as a leading participant in the talks with Polish leaders in Kiev in January 1825 that Volkonskii gave the Investigating Committee the


fullest picture of Pestel’s role in what took place. The chief negotiators were Pestel and Prince Jablonowski. The latter opened by informing the Russians that he was the authorised representative of the Warsaw Directorate while his compatriot, Grodecki, who had been involved in earlier rounds of talks with Bestuzhev-Ryumin, was the representative of the provincial societies. Pestel was clearly taken aback by the formality and apparent organisational sophistication of the Poles which seemed to contrast so markedly with the disintegrating organisation of the Southern Society at this stage. This is why he responded with the claim, as spurious as it was spontaneous, that he was the appointed representative of the St Petersburg Directorate while Volkonskii was to represent the Southern Society in all future dealings with the Polish society.27 For the moment, Prince Jablonowski let this declaration pass. But he returned to it at the conclusion of their talks by stressing that the Warsaw Directorate wanted to establish precisely who in St Petersburg’s ruling circles might be relied on to promote the political agenda of the conspiracy. He insisted that Pestel identify such an individual by name. Quite obviously, the Poles had been given an exaggerated idea of the extent to which the Decembrists had succeeded in penetrating the upper echelons of the ruling elite in St Petersburg. But Pestel, far from correcting this mistaken impression, did everything he could to foster it. He fobbed Prince Jablonowski off with the excuse that in order to meet this request he would first have to clear it with the St Petersburg Directorate. Clearly playing for time, he gravely undertook to report back on the matter at their next meeting. But this was not due for another twelve months, being fixed to coincide with the 1826 Kiev trade fair.28 In his account of the conversation between Pestel and Prince Jablonowski, Volkonskii wrote that they had agreed that once the revolution was underway the Polish society, in furtherance of Pestel’s goal, would arrange for the detention of all members of the imperial family then in Poland. Jablonowski further undertook to frustrate any attempt which might be made to free them. Specifically, the Poles promised to do whatever was necessary to prevent Grand Duke Constantine from reaching Russia.29 Obviously, Pestel wanted to keep the initiative in his own hands and so required Prince Jablonowski to guarantee that they would await the Russians’ signal to take action and not do so independently. Prince Jablonowski agreed to this condition but requested a month’s notice of any request for active collaboration in order to have time to co-ordinate all their available resources. Pestel replied with all the arrogance of a Great Russian chauvinist that while the St Petersburg Directorate wished the Polish society every success, it demanded its


unfailing co-operation. He reminded Jablonowski that it was not for Russia to seek support in Poland, but for Poles to look to the Russians for assistance. Pestel’s condescension towards the Poles emerges with great clarity from his testimony: ‘All our dealings with them proceeded from the basis that we had absolutely no need of them but that they needed us, that we could manage without them, but that they could not succeed without us.’30 Prince Jablonowski’s response to Pestel was dignified and measured: he was certain that concerted action in Poland and Russia would achieve success. Previously the Polish Patriotic Society had been contemplating action only in the context of another general European upheaval (presumably Jablonowski had in mind the recent uprisings in Spain, Greece and Naples). But now that they had the support of the Russian secret societies this could only bring nearer the long-awaited hour of Poland’s renaissance. Pestel claimed to the Investigating Committee that the Poles had been on the point of following the example of the uprising in Naples by striking their own blow for Polish independence, but, conscious of their weakness, had desisted.31 A further major source of tension between the negotiators was Prince Jabl onowski’s marked lack of enthusiasm for a Polish republic as projected in Russian Justice, his own preference being for a constitutional monarchy.32 Senator Soltyk, a leading figure in the Polish organisation, testified that the Poles were against regicide, priding themselves on their loyalty to their rulers: ‘History offers no example of a Pole raising his hand against his king.’33 Pestel thus encountered the same resistance to the concept of a republic established over the dead bodies of the country’s imperial rulers as he had in St Petersburg the previous spring. Their talks concluded with what Volkonsii described as a ‘mostly invented’ account by Pestel of the extensive network of the Russian secret societies among the troops and in the capital and of their contacts with French liberals. Apparently signalling his belief in a developing international subversive movement, he asked Prince Jablonowski to put the Decembrists in touch with the Poles’ German and British contacts and in general to keep them informed of any dealings they might have with foreign organisations.34 Prince Jablonowski was not willing to close the meeting without having some assurance from the Russians about the future independent status of Poland and the restoration of its former territories. Pestel took it upon himself ‘in the name of all the societies’ to promise Poland’s independence and to restore Russia’s Polish provinces ‘as far as was just and practicable’.35 Pestel’s guarded phrase was glossed by Davydov for


the Investigating Committee: ‘Pestel told me that it had been decided to avoid any talk [with the Poles] about borders, but merely to allow the hope that some concession might be made which was not detrimental to Russia.’36 In other words, Pestel was manipulating, not assisting, the Polish Patriotic Society. The Southern Society’s position on this important question received amplification in the report of the Investigating Committee to the emperor. The provinces which it was intended to restore to Poland were those which had not yet become fully assimilated into Russia (‘qui ne sont pas encore Russificiées’). These included the Bialystok region, Grodno province and parts of Wilno (Vilna), Minsk and Podolia, the border to be defined in the light of Russia’s defence needs. The report noted that Pestel had testified that he had made no definite agreement to return these territories to Poland, arguing that there had been widespread misunderstanding over the term ‘agreement’ (uslovie). Nevertheless, the map of Russia he had drawn and appended to his Russian Justice shows the Russian–Polish border redrawn in the way indicated earlier. It shows that Wilno, Minsk and Lvov would be Polish, while Vitebsk, Zhitomir and Kamenets would be in Russia.37 Futhermore, Nikita Muraviev testified that when a number of Northern Society members strongly objected to Pestel’s proposals on this question, he and Davydov had replied: ‘There’s nothing to be done. We have given our word and it is the will of the Southern Society.’38 Nikita Muraviev was indeed very negative about the Southern Society’s contacts and agreements with the Poles: These contacts greatly upset members of the Northern Society since they were against conceding Russia’s gains and property. They were also against dealing with foreigners, even though they were under the same administration as we were. Moreover, it was felt that this was a concession made to a foreign power and one that most likely would subsequently be hostile to Russia.39 Kondratii Ryleev was similarly against what was understood in the Northern Society to be the deal Pestel had done with the Polish Patriotic Society, on the grounds that he had had no authority to make it. It was Ryleev’s consistent view that all such matters should be for a specially convened Grand Council to decide after the overthrow of the ancien régime. Ryleev attached the utmost significance to ethnological definitions of national territory. He wrote in his depositions on this point: ‘Poland’s borders really begin where the Ukrainian and Russian (or, in Polish, kholopskoe) languages end; but where the majority of the population speak these


languages and confess the Graeco-Russian or Uniate religion, there is Rus, our ancient heritage.’40 The situation was, in fact, rather more complicated than this since, in general, the Ukrainian and Russian ethnic elements on the territories in question were peasants, which is the meaning of the Polish adjective used by Ryleev, while the gentry was Polish. Prince Jablonowski testified that Pestel had suggested a compromise which met general approval: that the population of the disputed areas should decide by plebiscite whether they wished to remain part of Russia or be returned to Poland.41 It would be interesting to discover the source of what seems to be a very modern political solution: the implementation of a referendum. Furthermore, Grodecki remarked that the Russians had ‘promised to assist in the return of territory seized by Austria and Prussia.’42 Interestingly, Pestel’s attitude towards Ukrainian independence was quite different. He knew from Jablonowski and Grodecki of a Ukrainian secret society led by V.L. Lukashevich. This aimed at separation from Russian or, at least, Polish suzerainty. Pestel, however, told his Polish contacts that the Ukrainians would never succeed in realising their goals since: ‘Little Russia had been part of Russia for centuries.’43 Vasilii Lukashevich was a member of the Union of Welfare, but the Investigating Committee was satisfied that, apart from the Borisov brothers’ Poltava-based Society of United Slavs, no other Ukrainian secret society had ever actually existed.44 Finally, arrangements were made at the Kiev meeting in January 1825 for routine contact between the Russians and the Poles on the understanding that all their dealings were to be conducted in the strictest secrecy and knowledge of them restricted to the Directorates. The Directorates’ liaison officers were to be Volkonskii and Grodecki, while routine organisational matters were to be dealt with by Shveikovskii through Moczynski and Grodecki.45 In his testimony, Pestel gave a highly partial summary of his discussion with Jablonowski as follows: Our entire conversation lasted not more than an hour, and it was the only one we had. Its themes were: (1) Polish independence. The talk was vague, and not a word was mentioned about the Lithuanian provinces, Bialystok, Volhynia or Podolia. (2) Concerted action in the event of a foreign war. (3) A uniform system of government. (4) That they should deal with the tsarevich in exactly the same manner as we would treat the other grand dukes. (5) They were to inform us of all their contacts with other secret societies in Europe and with England and were to give no undertakings to anybody else without our prior agreement.46


It has already been noted that Pestel had discussed the future of the territories mentioned, and reached an understanding with the Polish Patriotic Society that was deprecated by the Northern Society. As to the concept of joint action in the event of a foreign war, this finds no corroboration in others’ testimony; nor was there any agreement over the issue of an identical government. Indeed, since Pestel had failed to win general support within the Southern and Northern Societies for his proposal for a revolutionary dictatorship for up to 10 years, it seems highly unlikely that he obtained the Poles’ agreement to it. On the contrary, Grodecki’s testimony reveals the considerable tension between Pestel and the Poles on this matter. He wrote: ‘We can only agree to have close contacts with them when they decide in principle to recognise the independence of all of Poland, not to interfere in our internal affairs and when, finally, they reveal all their intentions to us.’ The Poles were unwilling to accept Pestel’s demand that they should establish the same system of government in Poland as he intended for Russia. While conceding that the United States could be an appropriate model for Russia, the Poles preferred a constitutional monarchy for Poland. But Pestel warned them that unless they accepted all his proposals, after the revolution Poland would become part of the Russian state and would not obtain its independence. All in all, it comes as no great surprise that Krzyzanowski reported hearing that ‘Jablonowski had left this conversation displeased’.47 Davydov names in addition as a member of the Polish society one Dr Plessel. The significance of this is that Plessel actually lived and worked in Lintsy as a general practitioner where the Vyatka regimental HQ were located and where Pestel had his own quarters. Equally interesting is the fact that Pestel claimed to have shunned the regular contact Plessel requested with him on the grounds that neither of them was empowered to conduct negotiations on behalf of their respective organisations! This is highly improbable: Pestel was evidently reluctant to reveal the true extent of the Southern Society’s involvement with its Polish contacts.48 It is likely that there was more to Pestel’s association with Plessel than the former was prepared to admit: the latter poisoned himself after his arrest while being taken to Kiev rather than face interrogation. Certainly, the Investigating Committee, according to its secretary Borovkov, was satisfied that Pestel used Plessel as a conduit to the Polish secret society. 49

Last attempts to reach agreement A further attempt at Russian–Polish contact took place in May 1825 when, according to Lorer’s testimony, Pestel went to Berdichev to see


a member of the Polish secret society. The mission was doomed to fail because the Pole did not appear.50 A few months later Volkonskii travelled to Berdichev on Pestel’s instructions in order to meet a Polish general. Again, the unidentified general failed to keep the appointment. The Poles’ erratic attendance at meetings arranged with their Russian counterparts was the source of considerable friction. Thus, for example, Likharev recalled Pestel’s irritation when Jablonowski failed to keep an appointment with him in Kiev because he had been delayed by a duel – ‘an incident which caused quite a rumpus in Kiev’.51 Volkonskii instead met Count Piotr Moszynski who reported that a group of officers in the Lithuanian Corps had formed a secret society.52 In his testimony Davydov confirms the spread of the Polish society in the Lithuanian Corps, having heard as much from Pestel.53 Moszynski himself went to Lutsk in Western Ukraine in 1825 to conduct propaganda among the Corps, and the subject was discussed at a meeting with Southern Society representatives held at his house in Zhitomir in August 1825. This was indeed an important development, since the Decembrists had been concerned about the willingness of the Lithuanian Corps, whose colonel-inchief was Grand Duke Constantine, to participate in the Polish Society’s uprising in response to a successful Russian coup. In fact, one outcome of the January talks had been an agreement to nominate two delegates, one Polish and one Russian, to set about establishing secret societies respectively among Polish and Russian troops in the Corps.54 In his memoirs, Nikolai Lorer relates that Pestel referred, in November 1825, to his ‘recent’ visits to Berdichev and Zhitomir ‘for discussions with Polish members, but he found nothing there to his comfort. They had no interest whatever in helping us and wanted to elect their own king in the event of our insurrection’.55 The good intentions of the Kiev talks of January 1825 did not lead to full development of accord between Polish and Russian secret societies. Thus when, on Tsar Alexander’s death in November 1825, the moment unexpectedly arrived at which it had been agreed that the Northern and Southern societies should rise up, the Poles were all but forgotten in the ensuing chaos. This is hardly surprising, given the lack of co-ordination among the Russians themselves. In any case, the Patriotic Society remained completely supine while their would-be Decembrist partners were suppressed, no doubt because, as R.F. Leslie suggests, the Polish conspiracy existed only on paper.56 It was clearly even less primed for effective action during the ensuing interregnum than the Northern and Southern societies proved to be. Volkonskii admitted to having harboured suspicions about the Poles’ true intentions during the interregnum, and had advised Pestel and Davydov that the Patriotic Society


should be closely monitored.57 This suspiciousness was mutual and derived, ultimately, from the differing objectives of the two societies. As we have seen, the main aim of the Patriotic Society was the resurrection of the Polish state within its historic boundaries. Polish aspirations of liberty were underpinned by notions of national identity and resurgence, or with what Jablonowski described in his testimony as ‘national inspiration’.58 The Southern Society was less concerned with Polish aspirations than with the assistance the Polish secret society might provide in the furtherance of its own Russocentric agenda. As the Investigating Committee’s report to the emperor remarked, these contacts with the Polish society did not have any further apparent consequence. This circumstance was attributed directly to Pestel’s inability to furnish the Poles with the requested names of the highly placed Russian contacts: ‘Pestel was compelled to answer vaguely, because he could name noone.’ The report conceded that although from this point the Poles, having guessed the reason for the vagueness of Pestel’s reply, began to lose confidence in him and their other Southern Society contacts, provision had been made for the resumption of official negotiations in Kiev in January 1826.59 Pestel ultimately fared no better with the Poles in 1825 than he had with the leadership of the Northern Society in 1824. This did not, however, prevent Alexander Herzen from referring frequently in his writings and speeches to the heroic role Pestel had played as ‘defender of Polish liberty’. Herzen evidently chose to ignore Pestel’s undisguised disdain for the Poles of the sort which, in a later age, was to vitiate Soviet–Polish relations. Nor did Herzen acknowledge that Pestel’s interest in securing the collaboration of the Polish Patriotic Society was in fact a reflection both of his driving leadership ambition and his belief in Russian imperialism. Just as Pestel had to go along with the postponement of any further negotiations with the Poles, he had similarly to accept further postponement of any consideration of uniting the Southern and Northern Societies under one leadership (preferably his own) until 1826. But whatever the outcome destined to emerge from renewed negotiations that year between Pestel and St Petersburg or Pestel and the Poles, it was utterly confounded by the unexpected death in November 1825 of Alexander I, Emperor of Russia and King of Poland. This event, as it turned out, was to have disastrous personal consequences for every active member of the secret societies, both Russian and Polish.

Part III From Aspiration to Retribution


10 The Planned Coup d’état and Provisional Government

At their 1823 congress the leadership of the Southern Society had envisaged the use of force in pursuit of their political objectives. Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin, for example, noted in his testimony that ‘the intention of the Society was the introduction into the state of a representative government. The means of attaining this was through the spread of branches of the Society and the use of armed force.’ This was an intention from which, as he stated elsewhere, ‘we never veered’.1 This chapter explores the Southern Society’s plans for seizing power, and Pestel’s contribution to them. The conspirators’ intentions to do so by violent means brought into sharp focus the intended fate of Alexander I and the imperial family, the issue which above all others most preoccupied Nicholas I and the Investigating Committee. Of interest as well is Pestel’s equally controversial proposal for the ensuing dictatorship of a provisional government and the role in it which he saw for himself. The chapter concludes with an assessment of Pestel’s loss of morale in the wake of his failure to unite the Northern and Southern societies under his leadership. As enumerated by the Investigating Committee, there were three major charges laid against Pestel. These all related to his intention that, after the coup, he would: compel the Synod and Senate to: declare a provisional government consisting of members of the society and invested with unlimited power; have a universal oath sworn to it; promulgate two manifestos respectively from the Synod and the Senate that the provisional government would undertake the gradual introduction of a constitution whose main principles should derive from the manifestos (Russian Justice). All the positions in the provisional government were to be taken by members of the society.2 141


The fate of the imperial family When the leading figures of all sections of the Southern Society met in January 1823, the question of the imperial family’s future arose in the course of their discussions of Russian Justice. This is how A.D. Borovkov summarised for the Investigating Committee the testimony of a number of Decembrists in relation to this meeting: At the 1823 Kiev trade fair Pestel proposed the introduction into Russia of a republican system of government by means of a revolution, which all approved. Pestel immediately spoke of the need to kill all blessed members of the most august Imperial Family. No one contradicted him apart from [Sergei] Muraviev [-Apostol]. Davydov maintains that there never was a precise position on this evil deed … However, in a confrontation Davydov agreed with the testimony of Staff Captain Poggio who maintained that when he recruited him, Davydov revealed to him that the aim of the society was to kill the late emperor and having assassinated the whole Imperial Family to introduce a republican system of government.3 Pestel’s proposed recourse to regicide was the most striking feature of the Southern Society’s evolving plans from this point, marking a path very different from that which the Northern Society was following. Regicide was not unknown to Russia: Peter III and the former Ivan VI had been despatched in the eighteenth century and the present tsar’s father, Paul, had been struck down at the start of the nineteenth century. What made Pestel’s proposal so shocking to his peers and judges was the cold, premeditated murder of the entire imperial house, only the second dynasty in the history of Russia. The scale of the intended carnage was without precedent and would be finally inflicted on Alexander I’s descendants in an act of unparallelled barbarity by the Bolsheviks in July 1918. Aleksei Yushnevskii’s testimony confirms that at this meeting ‘Russian Justice was accepted and it was agreed to implement it by means of a provisional government to be entrusted to the directors of the society. Here Pestel first proposed the annihilation of the Emperor and the whole Imperial Family.’4 There was neither immediate nor unanimous support for Pestel’s proposal that the Romanov house should be exterminated. Bestuzhev-Ryumin, for example, considered that the assassination of the tsar alone should be sufficient, while Sergei Muraviev initially opposed the idea of regicide altogether. But at a meeting held at Davydov’s house in Kamenka later that year (November 1823), they

The Planned Coup d’état 143

both accepted Pestel’s view, broadly shared at this stage by Aleksei Yushnevskii, Vasilii Davydov and Sergei Volkonskii, that the entire imperial house should be exterminated in line with the decision taken at the 1823 Kiev trade fair to make Russia a republic.5 However, during the investigation, Muraviev emphatically dissociated himself from this intention and insisted that ‘every member I spoke to about it openly can confirm that I always considered this idea absolute madness’.6 The full horror of what was envisaged is succinctly captured in the list of indictments against Pestel drawn up by Borovkov: ‘He cold-bloodedly counted on his fingers the actual number of victims in the Imperial Family.’ This he did, according to the Committee’s account, in response to Poggio’s suggestion that they kill the whole imperial house: ‘Let’s count them on our fingers. I’ll organise twelve assassins. Baryatinskii has already recruited some.’ When he got to the female members of the Imperial Family Pestel paused and said: ‘You know, Poggio, this is terrible!’ but nevertheless concluded his frightful calculation at 13, adding: ‘If you kill the other ranks too, there’ll be no end to it. All the Grand Duchesses have children. It will be enough to deprive them of the right to reign, and anyway who would want a throne so covered in blood?’ But Pestel himself, as his confederateaccuser testifies, wanted for himself at least the tsar’s power. ‘Who’, he asked Poggio, ‘will head the Provisional government?’ ‘Who other than he who initiated and undoubtedly will complete the great cause of the revolution? Who apart from you?’ ‘It is difficult for me, having a non-Russian name.’7 The Investigating Committee, then, was left in no doubt as to Pestel’s intentions for the imperial family and the plan of action for the future government of Russia, since the testimony of many Decembrists broadly concurs on these issues. It is interesting, for example, to note the detailed account contained in the statement of Pavel BobrishchevPushkin as summarised for the Investigating Committee by Borovkov: In 1824 Colonel Pestel who was in Tulchin informed him that in St Petersburg there was a plan to assassinate the late emperor and, having seized all the other members of the Imperial Family, to proceed immediately to the Senate and the State Council and compel its members to publish a decree announcing that as the Imperial Family no longer existed (without explaining why) supreme power was now vested in the Senate and State Council, but that they were transferring


this burden to three supreme directors elected for this purpose who, in accordance with ordinance of Russian Justice, would issue a decree: a provisional government to last for 10 years with the task of establishing an electoral system of rule.8 In the same year, 1824, Bestuzhev sent a letter to Warsaw calling on members of the Polish society, with whom as noted in the previous chapter he had recently established contact, to arrange the assassination of Grand Duke Constantine.9 Alexander Herzen claimed that Pestel made the same demand of Krzyzanowski who at first flatly rejected it but then ‘blindly and meekly’ undertook to do so.10 Pestel himself was further, and hopelessly, compromised by the testimony of the turncoat Maiboroda who alleged in a letter of 10 January 1826 to General Chernyshev of the Investigating Committee, that Pestel had declared the annihilation of the entire imperial family to be the sine qua non of their coup’s success.11 Under interrogation and confronted by the incriminating testimony of three co-conspirators, Bestuzhev-Ryumin eventually admitted what it was quite pointless to continue denying: that at Pestel’s instigation the Southern Society’s aim had indeed been to assassinate the emperor and all members of the imperial family.12 Much of the Decembrists’ testimony pointed to just this conclusion. For example, Andrei Yentaltsev stated: ‘Pestel … expressed extreme dissatisfaction with members of the Imperial Family and did not conceal his decision to take their lives, maintaining that this was essential for the revolution.’13 A few days after receiving Maiboroda’s letter, on 13 January, Chernyshev drew up and presented Pestel with a list of 55 questions for elucidation. Question three sought details of the proposed coup and it elicited from Pestel by far the longest of the 55 answers he wrote.14 While not denying that the conspirators had all agreed on the possible need to ‘hasten’ the emperor’s death, since the revolution could not begin as long as he was alive, Pestel insisted that it was one thing to theorise about regicide but quite another to carry it out. As far as he knew, there was not a single member of the ‘current Union of Welfare’ morally capable of perpetrating such an ‘evil deed’ and that therefore, no matter how well the Society flourished, there was to be no revolution until the natural death of the emperor.15 It was a defensive argument absolutely typical of Pestel, but ultimately it would afford him no defence at all.

The ‘cohorte perdue’ Central to the Southern Society’s plans for the coup (or ‘revolution’ as Pestel calls it in his testimony) was, to all appearances, an intriguingly


modern terrorist tactic. This was the deployment of a commando-style detachment of assassins known as the ‘cohorte perdue’ or ‘suicide squad’. Considerable controversy surrounds the provenance and responsibility for this idea and its proposed implementation. In the course of the investigation, it was alleged that Pestel had proposed the formation of a dedicated detachment of assassins. Pestel disputed this, admitting that he had been aware of the idea since Mikhail Lunin, as he confirmed himself, had first suggested it back in 1816 or 1817. In his statement of 30 May 1826 Pestel asserted that ‘in 1817 Lunin had said that if at the start of the society’s overt activities they decided to kill the emperor then it could perhaps be done by sending a number of masked men along the road to Tsarskoe Selo’. According to Matvei Muraviev’s testimony, Pestel wanted to recruit from disaffected young men a so-called cohorte perdue and to entrust command of it to Lunin, to destroy everyone or, in his phrase ‘to make a clean sweep’ (pour faire main basse sur tous). This Pestel denied.16 He further denied suggestions in the depositions of A.V. Poggio, the Muraviev-Apostols and Bestuzhev-Ryumin, that he had undertaken to co-ordinate the assassination attempt. Instead, as he reminded his interrogators, his main energies had always been focused on his ‘Constitution’ rather than the ‘implementation of the Revolution’, although he conceded that he did sometimes think about this too. Furthermore, he referred Chernyshev and his colleagues for corroboration of this point to the answer he had given on 1 April to question 30 where he describes the Belotserkov plan.17 His helpful suggestion to Chernyshev raises an interesting question about the Investigating Committee’s procedures. It is evident from the memoirs of some Decembrists (Lorer, Gangeblov, Rozen) that they were given a fixed amount of time to write their answers to the lists of questions brought to them in their cells, and were issued with pens, ink and paper accordingly. Moreover, any notes or drafts made had to be surrendered to the duty officer along with the completed questionnaires.18 Therefore, either Pestel had no difficulty in remembering what he had written nine days earlier thanks to his unusual powers of recall and the intensity of his situation or else he somehow managed to keep quite full and accurate notes of his answers in his cell. If so, they do not appear to figure among his archival papers. At all events, his prompt to the Investigating Committee suggests quite remarkable sang froid. The extent of Pestel’s knowledge, much less his approval of the proposal to form an assassination squad is uncertain. His own statements on this sensitive issue were not surprisingly contradictory and ambivalent. For example, the Investigating Committee’s record for 11 April 1826


shows that while he ‘emphatically denies any intention to form a so-called cohorte perdue’ he did concede the ‘usefulness’ of implementing the society’s ‘criminal intention’ to assassinate members of the imperial family by means of ‘a special conspiracy of people not belonging to the society’.19 In a confrontation with Alexander Poggio on 13 April Pestel further conceded some of Poggio’s account of the proposed cohorte perdue but denied that he had ever mentioned the identities of a gang of 12 assassins.20 The Investigating Committee decided to pursue this matter further and found Pestel further incriminated by the testimony of Nikita Muraviev. The latter had protested that resorting to regicide would undermine the conspirators’ authority since those ‘with blood on their hands would be disgraced in public opinion and prevented from wielding the power they had seized’. Pestel, Muraviev’s account continues, had retorted that those selected for this mission would be from outside the society, and once they had carried out their objective, they in turn would be sacrificed and the imperial family thus avenged. Although Pestel denied that it had been his intention to dispose of the hired assassins, he did admit that they should be recruited from outside the society.21 In Borovkov’s view, ‘had Pestel achieved his aim in all probability he would have unhesitatingly sacrificed those of his confederates who might have overshadowed him’.22 The testimony on this point of Fedor Vadkovskii of 3 April 1826 is confused and contradictory. Although he strenuously denied all knowledge of the idea, his concluding phrase, ‘gang of murderers’, suggests otherwise: It was an unfortunate weakness of Pestel to boast even about things which never actually happened. If he really did intend to form une garde perdue then Yushnevskii as chairman, Volf, Ivashev and I would have known about it. But I can honestly say that I definitely do not remember him ever speaking of this intention … I confirm that I never proposed to anyone that they should join such a group. Through one of the officers of the suite sent by me to Pestel I told him that all the officers of the suite ardently supported the aims of the society, but that did not mean that they could be turned into a gang of murderers.23 The idea of a hired and disposable gang of assassins is so ingeniously cynical and utterly callous, a scheme worthy indeed of the Stalin era, that it could not have been the fabrication of certain Decembrists in their testimony. As Borovkov commented, not even Machiavelli himself could have come with such a diabolically cunning plan!24


So where did Pestel get it from? He attributed the suggestion to Mikhail Lunin. There is a statement about a similar act of terrorism in the Investigating Committee’s minute of its meeting of 21 April. Here Pestel revealed that a proposal for seizing the tsar ‘by members of the secret society dressed in soldiers’ uniforms and positioned among His Majesty’s guard’ was made by Colonel I.S. Povalo-Shveikovskii, a member of the Southern Society.25 This may not, however, have been quite the same as the cohorte perdue idea. Nevertheless, the Investigating Committee clearly took the view that Pestel was directly implicated because it identified this episode as contributing significantly to his overall guilt: ‘He approved and prepared to participate in the conspiracy to assassinate the Emperor at the military base at Belaya Tserkov (1824).’26

The Bobruisk and Belotserkov plans The first attempt to implement the ‘cohorte perdue’ proposal was as part of the so-called ‘Bobruisk’ plan of Sergei Muraviev-Apostol and Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin. Their idea was to seize the tsar at the review of the Ninth Infantry Division in the Belorussian town of Bobruisk, thereby signalling the start of the revolution in Russia.27 In the event, the leaders of the Vasilkov section did not receive the assent of the Southern Society’s directorate in time for them to execute their plan, and the tsar’s scheduled visit to Bobruisk passed off without incident.28 Pestel, according to Bestuzhev-Ryumin’s testimony, was hugely relieved to learn that no attempt had been made to arrest the tsar since he felt this would have precipitated ‘either a civil war or our own inevitable ruin’. He gave instructions that no one was to make any such move during the emperor’s lifetime.29 Alexander Herzen, however, was to claim that the seizure of the emperor and the occupation of the Bobruisk fortress was precisely what Pestel wanted since this would have given the rebels the means to initiate a country-wide coup by linking up with their confederates in Warsaw and St Petersburg.30 Pestel, however, in his own testimony remarked that, given the forces at the Southern Society’s disposal, the ‘Bobruisk’ plan had not the slightest chance of success and that there was therefore never any intention of going ahead with it.31 Nevertheless, the tsar’s impending visit to review the Third Infantry Corps at Belaya Tserkov in the summer of 1824 provided Muraviev-Apostol and Bestuzhev-Ryumin with an opportunity to revisit their Bobruisk plan. They planned to infiltrate Alexander’s guard with their own men who were to murder him as he slept.32


Bestuzhev-Ryumin’s testimony revealed that he together with: Pestel, Sergei Muraviev, the two Poggios, Davydov and Shveikovskii drew up a criminal plan to assassinate the emperor. They mistakenly supposed that the emperor was due that year (1824) to inspect the troops of the 3rd Corps at the village of Belaya Tserkov. The conspirators therefore decided that on the first night of the emperor’s visit several officers deemed ready to commit such a crime (some of them retired) in soldiers’ uniforms at the changing of the guard would break into the pavilion in the Alexandria park, penetrate the emperor’s apartment and kill him. Whereupon Sergei MuravievApostol, Shveikovskii and Tizengauzen should incite an uprising in the camp, and then head for Moscow and Kiev. Muraviev intended going from Kiev to St Petersburg to incite the Northern Society and, with Bestuzhev, they would declare themselves in command of the Chernigov regiment. The Investigating Committee identified one possible member of the assassins’ squad as a retired guards officer, Zhukov, who on interrogation protested that he would fall on his own sword rather than kill the emperor.33 This time, however, Alexander unwittingly frustrated his would-be assassins by cancelling his visit to the review. Pestel passed through Belaya Tserkov himself on his return from St Petersburg in July and learned of the aborted plot from BestuzhevRyumin and Muraviev-Apostol. They discussed a third possible opportunity of executing their plan should the emperor attend the review of the Third Infantry Corps in the summer of 1825. Such discussions reflected the impatience of the Vasilkov section to initiate direct action, as well as Pestel’s frustration with the Northern Society which he had only recently visited. They were resumed at the Southern Society’s meeting in Kiev in January 1825 which was attended by Pestel and 10 other members. In the end, however, the conspirators decided that it would be wiser to postpone recourse to such spectacular direct action until 1826 when the question of uniting the Northern and Southern societies was due to be reconsidered.

Pestel’s role In any case, precise tactical planning was made virtually impossible by strained relations not only between Northern and Southern societies, but also within the Southern Society itself. Sergei Trubetskoi’s year-long


posting to the Fourth Corps headquarters in Kiev at the end of 1824 meant for him relocating from St Petersburg and the Northern Society to the south where, as he admitted, ‘one of my responsibilities was to keep an eye on Pestel because he had become totally isolated’.34 His testimony reveals the tension between the Vasilkov and Tulchin sections of the Southern Society: Shortly after my arrival in Kiev I met Sergei Muraviev-Apostol who assured me that he had made no concessions to Pestel and that he and other members from their division of the society had declared themselves against Pestel whom they hated. Pestel, however, had confidence in Bestuzhev, through whom they were watching Pestel. Great care was needed in any dealings with him because he was a very suspicious figure.35 Pestel plays down his own role in the formulation of the Vasilkov section’s plan for 1826 which was conveyed to him by Bestuzhev-Ryumin: ‘This plan was devised by them and passed on to me, and not drawn up at any preliminary meeting with me.’ Considering that this was the same plan which Pestel among others had rejected at the trade fair meeting in Kiev in January 1825, ‘this circumstance may also serve as proof that my influence was not as strong and unlimited as is claimed by members’. And he added by way of mitigation his own benign character reference: ‘Perhaps I may be permitted to observe that if I really did possess that cruel streak and desperate determination for bloodshed ascribed to me by many members in their testimony, then the plan of the Vasilkov section would have acquired a quite different character.’36 Pestel insisted in his testimony that in point of fact no revolutionary activity was envisaged until after the natural death of Alexander I which, in the event, occurred sooner than anyone had expected. Pestel had reasonably assumed that the tsar would live longer than 47 years, and that his strategy would give the organisation time to meet two vital conditions: firm commitment to an agreed form of rule in Russia in order to avoid the emergence of ‘parties and various machinations’, and a significant increase in membership in order to prepare public opinion for revolution. In Pestel’s view, the secret society was far from meeting these objectives at the time of the tsar’s death in November 1825. In any case, he was against initiating the revolution in such peripheral outposts as Bobruisk or Belaya Tserkov. The only realistic location in his view was St Petersburg, where the guards’ regiments and the fleet were based.37


However, Pestel’s focus on St Petersburg as the cradle of the revolution was not without ambiguity. Bestuzhev-Ryumin’s elaboration of the Southern Society’s planned coup d’état has Pestel at the head of the insurgent Second Army seizing Kiev, with Bestuzhev himself in command of the Third Infantry Corps establishing his base in Moscow. Pestel was to initiate these proceedings by issuing revolutionary proclamations to the troops and to the Russian people. Pestel’s own very full testimony on this point, in response to one of 47 questions presented to him on 1 April, outlines the same course of action. He emphasised the key role in initiating the revolution to be played by members of the Vasilkov branch working with the Third Corps which was to be joined by all other troops of the First Army committed to the revolution. However, he stressed that there was no possibility of any revolution occurring unless the Northern Society proved strong enough to seize control in St Petersburg and establish a provisional government there.38 The question specifically seeks confirmation of the plan of action drawn up by Pestel and Muraviev for May 1826, referred to also in the testimony of Bestuzhev and Baryatinskii. Pestel confirmed that what was meant was the same Belotserkov plan which he had already explained in reply to the questions of 13 January.39 He is here referring to testimony he had produced 10 weeks earlier on 13 January. It is doubtful that he could have recalled it from memory so precisely and he may therefore have been reminded of it by the Investigating Committee. However, against the claim that there would be no revolution before the death of Alexander I, is a letter Pestel himself wrote to BestuzhevRyumin in August 1825 summoning him to Lintsy without delay. On his arrival, Pestel apparently told him to prepare the Third Corps for decisive action at the general inspection due in 1826.40 There is an impressive array of testimony which suggests that right up to the time of his arrest Pestel was thinking in terms of direct action by mid-1826. Among the most explicit is the statement of Sergei Volkonskii to the effect that Pestel told him in early December that they must be ready by 1 May 1826.41 This ‘firm intention of the Southern [Society] to begin the rebellion in 1826’ Pestel had also made known to the Northern Society via Sergei Trubetskoi in October 1825.42 Given that this was at least a month before the unexpected death of the tsar, Pestel’s own claim that no action was contemplated during Alexander’s lifetime was clearly disingenuous. Volkonskii’s testimony elsewhere suggests that Pestel had decided on a definite date, regardless of any regime change: ‘At my last meeting with Col. Pestel in Uman in December 1825, when we both knew of the death of the Emperor, he told me that we should be prepared for the possibility of taking action by next May.’43


As Pestel himself explained to the Investigating Committee, however, the emperor’s unexpected death and rumours that the government had reliable reports of the secret societies’ existence caused the Southern Society to give urgent reconsideration to the timing of direct action in 1826.44 The Southern Society was relying on elements of the Third Infantry Corps of the First Army and the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Divisions of the Second Army where there were officers who were leading members of the conspiracy.

The planned coup During the course of the investigation, as the Committee gathered more and more statements, many of them contradictory, fuller details of the planned coup emerged. Thus, for example, V.L. Davydov’s testimony highlighted major disagreements as to how the coup would start, emphasising the ‘negligible’ forces at the society’s disposal and playing down Pestel’s role: ‘Pestel was never inclined, at least not in my presence, to take action, and probably for this reason the others did not count on him much.’45 In a confrontation with Yushnevskii held on 22 April, Pestel insisted that the two main proposals for achieving the goal of a Russian republic were centred not on Tulchin and the Southern Society but on St Petersburg. The first of these was that the revolution should be initiated by the Northern Society fully supported by its southern counterpart. The other was that the initiative would be taken by army units stationed in St Petersburg and supported by the Northern Society. In either case, the Tulchin group approved decisive revolutionary action ending autocracy and if necessary ‘the removal (izvedenie) of those persons who represented an insuperable obstacle’.46 Despite Pestel’s focus on the north, he had, as we noted earlier, from 1824 clearly envisaged seizing command of the Second Army at its Tulchin HQ by uniting the regiments of the Nineteenth Division with his own Vyatka Regiment. In this connection, N.S. Bobrishchev-Pushkin testified that Pestel had said that once revolutionary activity was underway ‘it would be the job of all in Tulchin to ensure that the commanderin-chief and the chief of staff did not escape, and for any oversight in this respect we would answer with our heads’.47 From the end of 1824 Pestel’s planning also involved the military colonies. Appointing Davydov leader of the Kamenka directorate, Pestel instructed him to give them proper consideration in his planning, though this does not appear to have produced results. The Decembrists were convinced that the conditions endured in the military colonies made them fertile


breeding grounds for recruits to their cause. V.N. Likharev, for example, admitted to having composed a memorandum on the military colonies which Davydov passed to Pestel. In it, he referred to ‘the monstrous regulation of the military colonies devised by Count Arakcheev’ whom he called ‘the secret enemy of the Emperor and our Fatherland’. He vividly described the oppression and poverty of the military colonists, the negligence of those in charge of them and asserted that ‘the majority of military colonists, given the unhappy condition in which they found themselves, could easily be provoked to extremes’.48 This point was not lost on Pestel who included the military colonies in his coup plans and robustly stipulated their closure in Russian Justice. The final variant of Pestel’s planned coup envisaged action starting on 26 January with his own Vyatka Regiment. At that time the regiment was rostered for guard duty and they were to take advantage of this in order to seize the Headquarters of the Second Army and incite the Eighteenth Infantry Division. Simultaneously, Sergei Volkonskii was to rouse the Nineteenth Infantry Division and the Twenty-Seventh Mounted Artillery Company. Davydov was to provoke rebellion in the military colonies while the Vasilkov branch was to incite the Third Infantry Corps. Pestel informed N.A. Kryukov of these quite detailed plans in November and through him the staff officers of the Second Army who were members of the Tulchin branch.49 Kryukov testified that Pestel let it be known in Tulchin ‘that insurgent activity would begin with the actions at the Vyatka Regiment’s HQ on 1 January 1826’.50 At the end of November, Kryukov took a letter to this effect from Pestel to Sergei Muraviev in Vasilkov. He returned with a message of acknowledgement from Sergei and Matvei Muraviev-Apostol and Bestuzhev-Ryumin, together with Gorbachevskii’s report about the mood of the troops in the Eighth Artillery Brigade. The revolution, in the south at least, was accordingly set for New Year’s Day, 1826. In weighing up the case against Pestel, based on Maiboroda’s report and the testimony produced during the investigation, the Committee noted that he contrasted his own lack of support for the proposals of the Vasilkov members for the proposed coup with Sergei Muraviev-Apostol’s impatience and enthusiasm. Others testified, however, that at the very least Pestel stood ready to back any initiative taken by MuravievApostol, and that this remained his position after the death of the emperor which ‘changed neither the disposition of the conspirators nor their main intentions’. Much of the testimony relating to plans made during 1825 for the coup, especially in the wake of the tsar’s death, points to the rising profile of Sergei Muraviev-Apostol. Active in the


Decembrist movement from the outset, he had been a founder member of the Union of Salvation, then of the Union of Welfare and from 1822 headed the Vasilkov branch of the Southern Society. He had been a captain in the Semenovskii Regiment when, in October 1820, it was detained in the Peter-Paul Fortress and disbanded following its mutinous protest against its commander, Colonel Shvarts. Along with Bestuzhev-Ryumin, he established the first contacts with the Polish society; he was a major figure in the Bobruisk and Belotserkov plots to assassinate the emperor and, in the summer of 1825, in the union of the Society of United Slavs (SUS) with the Southern Society.51 Always a major figure in the Southern Society, indeed from November 1825 its third director, he increasingly dominated the conspiracy as Pestel began to recognise the futility of working with a divided movement following his return from St Petersburg. Thus, at their meeting in Kiev in January 1825 it was Sergei Muraviev-Apostol who took the initiative in proposing insurgent action with which Pestel appeared to agree against the objections of Shveikovskii and Davydov. The latter, however, maintained that Pestel in fact shared their misgivings about MuravievApostol’s eagerness to take direct action at that time.52 Muraviev-Apostol was as committed to regicide as Pestel himself and, indeed, was hanged alongside him largely for that reason. In fact, Volkonskii testified that it was Muraviev, not Pestel, who was the first to propose assassinating the tsar along with the rest of the imperial family at a meeting which took place in Kamenka with Pestel, BestuzhevRyumin, Davydov and Volkonskii himself at the end of 1823.53 Pestel, however, concluded his own lengthy response to the Investigating Committee’s question about the proposed revolution by insisting that nothing had been set in stone: typically a proposal would be considered then modified or totally recast. This was particularly true with regard to regicide, he said, about which ‘the Society to the very end never formulated a precise, detailed, positive, full and rigorous proposal’.54 There is an almost audible sigh of exasperation and regret in Pestel’s statement which may well have been recognised by members of the Investigating Committee. Similarly, following the death of Alexander I, it was Muraviev, not Pestel, who was thought most likely to take advantage of the dynastic crisis. Davydov testified that he met Pestel at Volkonskii’s and urged him to ‘send for Matvei Muraviev to restrain his brother Sergei from any untimely initiation of insurgent activity as they were all afraid of his decisiveness’. Pestel promised to do so but declared that he would nevertheless follow Sergei Muraviev in the event of an uprising.55


Davydov’s testimony starkly contrasts Pestel’s pessimism with the resolve of Muraviev, leader of the active Vasilkov section: The central directorate was always against proposals to take action. Even when I saw Pestel for the last time (in December) he was more than ever convinced of the impossibility of taking action. He repeated what he had often said to me recently: that no such opportunity would ever arise and that it would be better to dissolve the society. Only one directorate was active – Muraviev-Apostol had several times proposed taking action but had met with no agreement.56 In the light of such evidence, Nechkina concluded that during 1825 the leadership of the Southern Society was actually passing from Pestel to the ‘energetic’ Sergei Muraviev-Apostol.57 Before examining this issue further, we must first consider Pestel’s plans for the provisional government which was to assume power following the successful Decembrist revolution.

The provisional revolutionary government The idea of a revolutionary provisional government first arose in 1820. To give it authority and standing, the Decembrists hoped to prevail on prominent public figures, known for their relatively liberal outlook, to join it. These included M.M. Speranskii, N.S. Mordvinov, A.P. Ermolov and P.D. Kiselev. Indeed, some Decembrists seemed to think that Kiselev, chief-of-staff of the Second Army, was actually a member of the secret society, though all such suggestions were ignored by the Investigating Committee and, curiously, Pestel was not at any stage even asked about them. This is in spite of the fact that, as we saw in an earlier chapter, Kiselev was a great admirer of Pestel and was warned by his St Petersburg friend, General Zakrevskii, of the tsar’s unfavourable view of the ambitious young officer. On the basis of his friendship with Kiselev, Pestel certainly hoped that the general, along with other highly placed officials would join the revolution. I.V. Poggio testified that Kiselev was seen as a future Governor-General of Moscow following the success of their enterprise. His association with members of the Southern Society, such as Avramov, Basargin and Burtsov, was thought to be close enough to arouse the authorities’ suspicions. This was the reason, according to Prince Peter Dolgorukov, why in the final variant of the Southern Society’s plan of action for 1 January 1826, Kiselev was to be arrested in order to deflect any such suspicions.58


General A.P. Ermolov, the ‘pro-consul of the Caucasus’, who was one of the most educated and in many ways outstanding figures of his generation, with a reputation for rugged independence of mind, was personally acquainted with many Decembrists. They could not fail to see him as an important candidate for high office in ‘post-revolutionary’ Russia. He is famously supposed to have remarked to M.A. Fonvizin, his former adjutant and a member of the Union of Welfare, on learning from the tsar in 1821 of the existence of the secret society: ‘I do not wish to know anything about what it is you are getting up to, but I can tell you that he [Alexander I] fears you as much as I would have him fear me!’ As Nechkina commented, such words of warning sounded almost like encouragement. They undoubtedly gave many Decembrists cause to hope that Ermolov would support them when the time came. Ryleev, for example, declared simply: ‘Ermolov is ours.’59 But others were more critical of him and his potential use to their cause. For example, Nikolai Zaikin quoted Pestel as saying that ‘Ermolov had his own society and wanted to be tsar’. Zaikin added that Pestel was always complaining about Ermolov, and while he could not account for this, Zaikin was himself convinced that Ermolov ‘wanted to be tsar’. Furthermore, Pestel referred to Ermolov in a letter to Kiselev as a ‘two-faced, arrogant satrap’. The reason for his hostility he gave in a letter to Lorer: ‘This man is dangerous to our society because he does nothing for the good of the fatherland but will act only for his own interests and pride.’60 Ironically, although he seemed unaware of it, Pestel himself gave rise to such negative assessments. It could well be that his acerbic judgement of Ermolov was more than a little coloured by the ill-suppressed professional jealousy of a young man overwhelmed by similar ambitions. At any rate, Pestel was in good company as his view of Ermolov was shared by both Alexander I who maintained that Ermolov’s heart was as black as his boots, and Nicholas I who declared him the least trustworthy of men. A well-connected acquaintance Pestel had in mind for the future provisional government was a former Union of Welfare member in Tulchin, S.G. Krasnokutskii. From 1822 he was a procurator (ober-prokuror) of the senate, and became closely acquainted with M.M. Speranskii. While Pestel was in St Petersburg he met Krasnokutskii and discussed with him his plans for a Russian republic and the way in which the new regime would be proclaimed by the senate. Following his arrest and during the investigation, Krasnokutskii confirmed as much in a confrontation with Pestel on 2 May 1826. This suggests that Pestel had hoped to enlist Krasnokutskii’s support in view of his standing as a senator.61


In his assessment of the Decembrists’ conspiracy, published in London in 1858, Alexander Herzen commended Pestel’s proposal for a provisional dictatorship to rule for a decade or longer, describing it as ‘absolutely right’. Herzen brushed aside the question of Pestel’s personal ambition as irrelevant and stressed instead the point that ‘Pestel understood revolution quite differently from his St Petersburg friends’.62 Pestel was quite clear, too, about the need for the provisional government to be in place for not less than a decade. This was the reply he gave to Poggio’s suggestion that it need last no longer than two years, and pointed out that ‘initial measures’, including the agrarian reforms alone, according to the scheme adumbrated in Russian Justice, would take years to implement. The fuller version of Pestel’s response to Poggio given by the Investigating Committee includes the remarkable statement: ‘To stop people complaining we will occupy their minds with a foreign war … And once I have finished the great achievement I will incarcerate myself in the Kiev Lavra, take my monastic vows and then embrace the faith.’63 There is an echo here of Tsarevich Alexander’s comment to his friend, the Polish aristocrat Adam Czartoryski, about his wish to retire to the banks of the Rhine having, as a reforming tsar, left Russia a changed and happier country. For its part, the Northern Society envisaged a three-month transitional term for the government during which elections to the Constituent Assembly would be held. This in turn would publish a constitution and determine the form Russia’s future government should take. In his testimony, Sergei Volkonskii, a member of the Southern Society who had good contacts with the St Petersburg group, combined the notion of a provisional government with that of a constituent assembly: ‘The revolution … was to start in the capital with the establishment of a provisional government and the publication of the (emperor’s) abdication, and the convening of representatives to determine the type of rule.’64 On this same issue, S.P. Trubetskoi testified that Pestel, at his meeting in St Petersburg with him and Nikita Muraviev, had insisted that Russia’s future government would be a republican one. Pestel stipulated further that ‘the transition from the current system to a republic required a gradual approach headed by a temporary government consisting of five directors invested with full supreme powers for an indefinite period which could last many years’.65 In a detailed statement to the Investigating Committee, Nikita Muraviev recounted that he had told Pestel that he was in favour of moulding public opinion by widely circulating anonymously his own constitutional project.


To this Pestel objected that our constitutional ideas should remain the secret of the society’s leadership and should not be announced in order to avoid discussion. The first task should be to assassinate members of the Imperial Family, and then to compel the Holy Synod and Senate to declare the society’s leadership to be the Provisional Government with unlimited powers. The Provisional Government, having received the loyal oath from the Synod, Senate and all Russia and, having distributed ministries, armies, corps and other authorities among members of the society, would gradually over several years bring in the new order. In the meantime the society would continue to exist and go on recruiting members. No one who was not a member of the society would be invested with any civil or military power.66 What Pestel thus outlined here to Muraviev was essentially the first formulation in Russian history of the notion of a monopolistic political party with an elite nomenklatura of qualified office holders. The Decembrists’ plans for the future shape of Russia’s governance clearly intrigued members of the Investigating Committee. In his memoirs S.P. Trubetskoi related in detail a ‘confrontation’ he was called to with Ryleev during the course of the investigation at which, to his considerable amazement, Prince Golitsyn discussed openly with them the various proposals that he, Pestel and Ryleev had made about the composition of the provisional government, mentioning the names of Speranskii, Mordvinov and Ermolov. He (Golitsyn) talked about the membership of Pestel’s directorate and joked that Pestel, on finding that my way of thinking did not match his would not want to have me in his directorate and would instead appoint me Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Sergei Shipov Minister of the Armed Forces. After questioning us about these matters, he gave his opinion as to what he considered would have been the best directorate, the various measures needed to establish a constitution, and developed his ideas about these matters. In a word he left me speechless with amazement. I have long wondered about the, to me, inexplicable conduct of Prince Golitsyn and tried to explain it to myself.67 Unfortunately, Trubetskoi did not record the composition of Golitsyn’s preferred directorate.


Pestel’s ‘crisis’ The consequences of his failure to unite the Decembrist movement, north and south, under his leadership and his republican programme clearly began to tell on Pestel during 1825. In a letter dating from the end of September 1825 his father appealed to him, clearly referring to the well-known mood of unrest in some military circles, to use his influence to protect his brother Alexander ‘from this infection, now fairly widespread as a consequence of moral dissolution’. He implored his son to ‘distance himself from these evil and malicious people’.68 It could be that Ivan Borisovich’s request was not entirely ineffective and may help to explain a curious passage in Baryatinskii’s testimony which portrays Pestel in an unusually despondent frame of mind at this time. Pestel, he claimed, had told him frequently of his intention ‘quietly to leave the society which was a childish nonsense that could well be our ruin, adding that the others could do what they liked’.69 In her article on the ‘crisis’ of the Southern Society, Nechkina remarked on Baryatinskii’s statement: ‘To what depths of despair Pestel must have sunk to describe as “childish nonsense” the cause of the secret organisation for which he had fought with such desperate tenacity for nearly nine years. It shows that the crisis of his convictions had reached an extremely acute stage.’ A further indication of Pestel’s inner turmoil, cited by Nechkina, was his renewed interest during 1825 in religious matters, which so delighted his parents.70 Perhaps it was Pestel’s alleged intention to quit the society that lay behind his nomination of Baryatinskii in November 1825 as leader of the Tulchin section in his place. Ivashev, too, recalled that Pestel had told him at the beginning of 1825 of his desire to leave the society.71 In effect, Pestel did so, becoming less and less active himself while Sergei Muraviev-Apostol increasingly assumed the role of the Southern Society’s leader.72 Similarly, a pre-revolutionary historian took the view that the Southern Society, almost on the point of collapse, at this juncture effectively had two leaders: Pestel and Sergei Muraviev-Apostol.73 This is how Pestel himself described his contribution to the life of the Southern Society during what would be this final, difficult year: During the whole of 1825 my outlook began to weaken, and I started to see things somewhat differently, but it was already too late to go safely back. Russian Justice was now much harder to write than was previously the case. I was often asked to hurry it along, and I tried to do so, but work went badly and I wrote nothing during the entire


year, merely revising what I had already written. I began strongly to fear internecine strife and internal dissent and this greatly cooled my enthusiasm for our objective.74 A dramatic passage in Lorer’s reminiscences describes how Pestel, by November 1825 so convinced of the hopelessness of their situation, depressed by his sense of authority slipping away from him and of imminent betrayal, had reached a turning point. Pestel had decided to seek an audience with Alexander I. He proposed ‘to bow his culpable head before the sovereign and persuade him of the absolute necessity of destroying the society by bestowing on Russia all those laws and rights for which we have been striving’.75 Similarly, Pestel confided to Aleksei Yushnevskii his grave doubts about the prospects of their success. Yushnevskii testified that although Pavel Ivanovich was very worried about the paucity of the society’s numbers, their lack of resources and of high-profile members, he did not want to discourage any of the others by openly admitting these concerns.76 For Pestel, the union of the Northern and Southern societies was absolutely crucial to their success and, by extension, for the future wellbeing of Russia. He felt the failure of the 1824 talks more keenly than any other Decembrist. This was because he had the clearest ideas about how Russia should be reformed, together with the fewest reservations about the cost of doing so, up to and including the physical annihilation of the ruling Romanov house. His despair at the state of the conspiracy during 1825 is therefore understandable. His worst fears about the penetration of the secret society by government agents were realised with the acts of betrayal by Maiboroda and Shervud. The chaotic response of the Decembrist leaders to the agreed signal for taking action – the death of Alexander I in November 1825 – resulted from their earlier failure to recognise the strategic wisdom of Pestel’s position. A revealing letter from Fedor Vadkovskii to Pestel written from Kursk just before his arrest there on 11 December was considered ‘worth noting’ by the Investigating Committee. Referring to the tsar’s death, Vadkovskii complained to Pestel: Here is an opportunity of which the society could have taken advantage had it been ready, but we’ve missed it and we’ll have to wait and see what the new government does. If it acts ineptly then by increasing the number of those disaffected this will increase our strength too. But if, on the other hand, the general welfare improves along with greater freedom, we will have to redouble our efforts to overthrow the government.77


The conspirators’ precarious position had been worsened by their rejection back in March 1824 of Pestel’s call for unity on terms that they could not accept or would not negotiate. When they eventually took place, the uprisings, north and south, were in fact acts of desperation in which signs of the conspiracy’s prolonged demoralisation and lack of preparation were all too apparent. Pestel had no hand or part in them, since he had already been arrested on 13 December in Tulchin on the word of a traitor, actually on the eve of the insurrection in St Petersburg. The discrepancy between the revolution Pestel proposed and what in fact transpired was enormous. The Decembrists’ finest hour came not in their quixotic and brief armed resistance to the eventual accession of Nicholas I, but during their ‘day in court’, their prolonged, six-month incarceration in the Peter-Paul fortress for the purposes of the investigation process. Although many of those arrested broke down, or abjectly confessed, or incriminated others, some showed a fortitude and firmness beyond their years. Characteristically, as we shall show, Pavel Pestel did both.

11 Arrest, Investigation and Sentence

After ten years of planning, plotting and writing, the Decembrist conspiracy’s denouement came suddenly and swiftly. This is explained by three main factors: first, the reports of Shervud and Maiboroda exposing the Southern Society in particular, second, the totally unexpected death of the 47-year-old Tsar Alexander on 19 November 1825 which precipitated an equally unexpected succession crisis and, third, the uprising in St Petersburg on 14 December 1825, the day which was supposed to bring an end to Russia’s interregnum with the public inauguration of Nicholas I. Following the events of 14 December the authorities had little difficulty in identifying and rounding up those who had been involved. Some indeed gave themselves up. The conspiracy unravelled at such a speed that within hours the first prisoners found themselves in the Winter Palace, subjected to a preliminary interrogation, in many cases by Nicholas I himself, and to the humiliating procedures of arrest and detention. However, the net had been closing in on the Southern Society well before the end of 1825. This chapter traces the events which led to Pestel’s arrest, analyses both his investigation at the hands of the Investigating Committee and his behaviour during this six-month process and concludes with an account of his execution.

Pestel’s arrest In the summer of 1825 Alexander I received a report from a junior officer of the Third Ukrainian Ulan Regiment, I.V. Shervud, about a broad antigovernment conspiracy in the south.1 On 17 July Shervud was brought before the emperor in St Petersburg. Alexander asked how widespread the conspiracy was. Shervud told him that he thought it was ‘quite strong’, especially in the Second Army, according to information he had obtained 161


from one of its members, F.F. Vadkovskii. Still doubtful, Alexander asked Shervud for irrefutable proof of his claims. The informant was given a year’s leave and 1000 roubles to provide it: he selected Vadkovskii as his first target. The two men met in Kursk on 19 September, Shervud posing as a full-time member of the Southern Society and duly passing back to Count Arakcheev confirmation of Vadkovskii’s optimistic estimation of the state of the conspiracy, including its plans for the annihilation of the entire imperial family. Arakcheev in turn passed Shervud’s report on to Alexander, who was at this stage in Taganrog, on the Black Sea coast. By now convinced of the truth of Shervud’s claims, Alexander brushed aside the assurances of I.I. Dibich, Chief of General Staff, that it was ‘all a lot of nonsense’. What had finally persuaded him was a further report he had received in Taganrog from the chief of the military colonies in the south, Gen. I.O. Vitt, whose agent, A.K. Boshnyak, had succeeded in infiltrating the secret society in the Second Army. Vitt sent his report to Alexander in August and on 19 October the general, summoned to Taganrog, told the emperor that the conspiracy in the Eighteenth Infantry Division was particularly strong and that the commander of the Vyatka Infantry Regiment, Pavel Pestel, was its ringleader. On 10 November, Alexander at last made his move. He ordered Dibich to despatch Col. S.S. Nikolaev to Kharkov, ostensibly to purchase horses, but actually in order to arrest F.F. Vadkovskii and his co-conspirators. Dibich gave Nikolaev a letter for Shervud asking him to identify other members of the conspiracy. Accordingly, Shervud persuaded Vadkovskii to write a detailed letter to Pestel in which he referred to the society’s plans and named many of its members, and handed it to Shervud to deliver. The latter promptly passed it to Nikolaev who returned with it to Taganrog for further instructions. In the meantime, however, after a three-week illness Tsar Alexander I, not yet 48 years old, died on 19 November. The incriminating evidence procured by Shervud from Vadkovskii was added to by another report which reached Taganrog less than two weeks after the tsar’s death, on 1 December. This was from a close colleague of Pestel’s, a fellow member of the Southern Society and fellow officer of the Vyatka Regiment, Capt. A.I. Maiboroda, to whom Pestel himself had given command of the First Grenadier Company. At first, Pestel had found Maiboroda to be ‘fully deserving of our trust’, as he told S.G. Volkonskii, and so in August 1824 recruited him to the Southern Society. But the two men clashed over allegations that Maiboroda had embezzled funds allocated to the regimental payroll. To get back at Pestel, Maiboroda resolved to betray the secret society. Pestel by now no longer trusted him and had him closely

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watched. However, on one occasion when Pestel had to be absent from Tulchin for a day or two, Maiboroda took the opportunity on the night of 24 November to travel to Zhitomir to General L.O. Rot, commander of the Third Corps. He handed Rot a letter for the tsar, telling him that only its prompt delivery could save the state and the emperor from great danger. General Rot immediately forwarded the letter, which reached Dibich in Taganrog on 1 December, and Maiboroda returned unnoticed to base.2 In his own account, Maiboroda describes how Pestel had asked him to begin preparing the regiment for revolutionary action and to give him daily progress reports. Instead, he started avoiding Pestel by feigning illness and remaining at his quarters. Pestel became exasperated by him, accused him of malingering, and never again discussed secret society matters with him.3 Maiboroda’s letter listed the names of no less than 46 Decembrists, mostly active members of the Southern Society. In all three of the reports referred to here, Pestel was named as the leader of the conspiracy in the South, thus finally sealing his fate. On 5 December, General Dibich sent A.I. Chernyshev to Tulchin with an order for Pestel’s arrest which was duly implemented on 13 December. Vadkovskii meanwhile was arrested in Kursk on 11 December. B. Syroechkovskii, citing the memoirs of Nicholas I, shows that Dibich sent Count Chernyshev to Tulchin to inform General Vitgenshtein about the revelations of Shervud and Maiboroda in relation to the Second Army and to arrest Prince Volkonskii and Colonel Pestel.4 Chernyshev reached Tulchin on 11 December and reported to the chiefof-staff of the Second Army, P.D. Kiselev. Pestel’s commanding officer, Vitgenshtein, who had left Tulchin the previous day for his estates at Kamenka, was urgently recalled. Having returned and read Dibich’s report, he decided that Kiselev and Chernyshev should proceed to Lintsy where they would have Pestel’s quarters watched and, with Maiboroda’s help, searched. Vitgenshtein summoned all the divisional, brigade and regimental commanders from Pestel’s division to Tulchin HQ ‘for instructions’. In this way, Pestel suspected nothing, since the summons was a general one. But once in Tulchin he was immediately placed under close arrest by General Baikov, while Chernyshev hastened to the Vyatka Regiment’s HQ to seize as many of Pestel’s incriminating papers as he could lay his hands on. Pestel was interrogated for almost two weeks in Tulchin before being transferred to St Petersburg on 26 December. Maiboroda had stated in his letter that Pestel kept his secret papers in two green briefcases. These were found but they were covered in a thick layer of dust, obviously long unused and, when opened, proved to be


empty. Those papers they did find were largely to do with regimental matters, proposals for improving supplies and funds for the regiment, copy books and notes on the political economy of France and his Masonic insignia. Then, following Maiboroda’s instructions, all the other cupboards, lockers and drawers were thoroughly searched, as were the attic, the regimental box-room where Pestel’s trunks and packing cases were stored and even the bath-house, the cellars and outhouses. But this exhaustive search, carried out on 14 December, unearthed nothing suspicious.5 Nikolai Lorer recalled that Pestel’s house was searched for three days, and his garden dug up for incriminating papers, many of which Lorer had spend a whole night burning.6 All cupboards, lockers and drawers were sealed. Pestel’s rooms were locked and the keys handed to his successor as commander of the Vyatka Regiment, Colonel Tolpygo.7 Pestel’s orderly, S.F. Savenko, was also arrested on 13 December because Maiboroda had written that he must ‘know a lot of details’. Chernyshev and Kiselev questioned him about the whereabouts of secret documents but Savenko denied all knowledge of them. He did, however, reveal the names of members of Pestel’s circle and details of his master’s comings and goings. Interestingly, he also described Pestel’s reaction to news of the tsar’s death: ‘Towards evening he felt unwell and called on the services of Dr. Plessel. The news upset all Pestel’s plans and shattered him too’.8 Following Pestel’s arrest, the Vyatka Regiment was inspected and to the relief of Vitgenshtein, Kiselev and Chernyshev, neither the officers nor the men showed any signs of discontent or regret at the sudden departure of their regimental commander. Pestel’s arrest had been carried out with considerable circumspection since it was thought quite likely that the regiment might rise in protest to save its colonel.9 Poggio did, in fact, according to the testimony of Southern Society member, Andrei Yentaltsev, send a letter to Sergei Volkonskii urging him to incite the Nineteenth Infantry Division, which he commanded, to liberate Pestel, but Volkonskii rejected the suggestion. Interestingly, the tsar refused the Investigating Committee’s request to put Poggio in chains in order to extract more precise information about his intentions.10 Andrei Rozen wrote in his memoirs that Pestel guessed why he was being summoned to Tulchin but did not think of offering any resistance beyond charging his colleagues to hide Russian Justice. He made for Tulchin where he was met at the entrance to the base by the police officers waiting for him.11 He also decided against evading arrest by taking the poison which, as he admitted to the Investigating Committee, he always carried with him, even on being transferred to St Petersburg


following his arrest. It was found on Pestel when he was searched after reaching the Peter-Paul Fortress on 3 January. The fortress commandant Sukin immediately reported the matter to the Investigating Committee. However, Pestel was not asked to account for it until 1 April when he explained that he only ever intended taking it if he were gravely wounded or subjected to unbearable torture. Since neither of these contingencies arose, we may infer that Pestel was driven above all by his desire to explain for the benefit of posterity what his purpose had been. To be sure, his testimony and other writings, notably Russian Justice, provide facts and insights about the Decembrist movement which there would not otherwise have been.12 As Yurii Lotman puts it in his discussion of the Decembrists’ behaviour during interrogation: ‘It was not everyone who could, like Pestel, take posterity as his sole interlocutor, engage it in a dialogue without paying any attention to the Investigating Committee as it listened in on this conversation, thereby mercilessly ruining himself and his friends.’13 On 16 December the three senior officers returned to Tulchin from Lintsy. Aleksei Yushnevskii, who had also been arrested on 13 December, was questioned but admitted nothing. A search of his quarters and those of the Kryukov brothers and Baryatinskii produced no compromising evidence. So for the time being the arrest of Pestel and, for the sake of appearances, Maiboroda, remained their main concern. Other officers attached to the Second Army were called in for questioning. Even though at this stage he had no incriminating evidence apart from Maiboroda’s denunciation, Chernyshev was predisposed against Pestel whom he described as ‘a demagogue combining all the characteristics of the Robespierres and Marats of this world’. Chernyshev’s mission must have been worrying too for Vitgenshtein and Kiselev who were themselves now vulnerable to charges of a lack of vigilance or, in the case of Kiselev, even of connivance at the secret society’s existence. It even emerged during the interrogation of one confused prisoner, V.S. Tolstoy, that Vitgenshtein was rumoured to be the leader of a secret society which intended to overthrow the Romanovs and which had links with similar organisations in Poland and France!14 Vitgenshtein was thought by Chernyshev to be unhappy with the turn of events because of his friendly relations with Yushnevskii. Yet Maiboroda’s own position was now difficult because so far his revelations had found no proof. For example, when Burtsov and Avramov were questioned on 19 December they pleaded ignorance of the charges made by Maiboroda. Pestel followed suit when he was questioned on 22 December. His written answers to the 39 questions put to him amounted to an impressively sustained act of denial.15


Four days later, on 26 December, Chernyshev with his prisoners left Tulchin for St Petersburg in a subdued frame of mind. His two-week mission to Tulchin and his preliminary investigation of Maiboroda’s claims had yielded only modest results and no material evidence. Of the nine Southern Society members questioned, eight rejected Maiboroda’s allegations and only one of them, M.P. Staroselskii, confirmed their truth without, however, adding anything new to them. As Chernyshev said himself in a letter to Kiselev of 5 January, ‘what we knew in Tulchin was only a microscopic part of their terrible projects’, compared with what by early January had been revealed by those arrested in St Petersburg following the events of 14 December. Nor had Chernyshev proved able to defuse the Vasilkov branch of the secret society and so avert the insurrection of the Chernigov regiment towards the end of December.16 Meanwhile, in St Petersburg the dual dramas of the interregnum and the uprising of Monday 14 December were played out. This is how A.I. Kolechitskaya, a friend of the Pestel family, recorded these events in a diary entry of 19 December: From letters it has become known that Constantine has refused the crown! That means one dependable man less, because he was so good to my husband who even received a letter from him! On the 14th of this month some guards regiments refused to swear allegiance to Nicholas. A crowd gathered on Senate Square, demanding Constantine and a constitution. Miloradovich was killed; they unleashed the artillery. Those they arrested are now in the fortress, and there are searches going on everywhere. I fear for many people! My poor country! What is to befall you!17 Such was the wave of arrests that the Peter-Paul Fortress was unable to accommodate all those brought in, despite the hasty construction of 140 temporary cells. The tsar’s order that all be placed in solitary confinement aggravated the problem. On 7 January the Investigating Committee made arrangements for 700 men from the lower ranks to be transferred to the fortresses at Keksholm and Vyborg. This still left, according to one estimate, 316 prisoners though by 1 June this number had been reduced to 178.18 On 17 December the Investigating Committee into the Decembrist affair held the first of 146 meetings in the house of the commandant of the Peter-Paul Fortress. It was effectively a military tribunal consisting of four senior generals-adjutant (V.V. Levashov, who was the tsar’s righthand man, A.I. Chernyshev, A.N. Potapov and A.K. Benkendorf), the


military governor-general of St Petersburg, P.V. Golenishchev-Kutuzov and one civilian, A.N. Golitsyn, who as procurator of the Holy Synod and Minister of Education and Spiritual Affairs had exerted an enormous influence on Alexander I. The appointment of a member of the imperial family, the tsar’s younger brother, Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, was of dubious legality and at any rate represented a clear conflict of interests. The committee was chaired by the war minister, A.I. Tatishchev. It was in session for exactly 6 months until 17 June, though its regular meetings ceased from 19 May after which it met on only a further 6 occasions. Until 6 February, however, the committee met every evening from 6 or 6.30 until around midnight or even later, and it interrogated a total of 276 men. It was administered with remarkable efficiency by A.I. Chernyshev, A.D. Borovkov and General-Adjutant V.F. Adlerberg, Pestel’s former classmate at the Corps of Pages, and every decision it took was meticulously recorded in an exemplary set of minutes, which were preserved in archives and eventually published in 1986.19 On 23 December Nicholas wrote to Constantine in Warsaw that ‘those arrested in the Second Army are the most important ringleaders … It is especially important to me to have Pestel and Sergei Volkonskii’. The importance and timeliness of Pestel’s arrest became even clearer to Nicholas as the investigation neared its completion. He wrote to his mother on 24 June: ‘(Chernyshev) was sent from Taganrog to Tulchin to arrest Pestel, which he did with considerable despatch. If this had not been done in time, then events could have taken an even worse turn than they did here [in St Petersburg] and in Vasilkov.’20 Extracts from the diary kept by the Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna during the investigation reflect the real fear felt among members of the imperial family about how close they may have come to death at the hands of the conspirators. Referring on 12 March 1826 to ‘Pestel’s party’ she writes: ‘My God, what people! Only the death of our angel averted the downfall of our family and the state; otherwise blood would have flowed in streams!’21 Meanwhile, on 27 December the Investigating Committee heard a report from the Commander-in-Chief of the Second Army, Count Vitgenshtein. This set out the information passed to him by Generals Chernyshev and Kiselev relating to the arrest of Pestel, the seizure of his papers and also included the list of other officers involved in the conspiracy that Maiboroda had supplied.22 The commanding officers of the Second Army were deeply embarrassed by the arrests and sought to exculpate themselves. On 26 December, Vitgenshtein wrote to the tsar assuring him of the Second Army’s unswerving loyalty and stressing that


‘this gang of criminals did not have and never could have had any influence over troops so accustomed to strict discipline’.23 In a letter to Dibich on 27 December Kiselev wrote from Tulchin expressing his indignation and shock as the interrogations yielded more information: The admissions made to us by Major Lorer have thrown considerable light on the Pestel affair … That scoundrel has deceived us most unworthily and he is not alone. But I hope that the enlightened and stern justice of our August Sovereign will eradicate the evil which for 10 years has been making the most dreadful progress. Kiselev claimed to have had his first vague suspicions about Pestel after the tsar’s military review in 1823. These were strengthened on his return to Tulchin from abroad, ‘but all his [Pestel’s] plotting was conducted with such skill that my incompetent police were unable to unearth anything positive’. His letter details the measures he was taking to seize incriminating papers and the people implicated in them.24 Similarly, Kiselev wrote to Vitgenshtein with a detailed disclaimer of any knowledge of the existence of a secret society among his officers. He had attempted back in 1821 to establish a secret police force throughout the army but, although Alexander I had agreed to appoint a director, he made no funds available. Kiselev made another attempt in 1823 with a similar lack of success. Then, finally, during 1825 suspicion fell on Pestel largely because of his association with V.L. Davydov, a retired army officer and landowner who possessed nearly 3000 serfs. Davydov was, together with S.G. Volkonskii, the leader of the Kamenka branch of the Southern Society. Well known for his ‘corrupt views’, his house was full of people hostile to the government. However, in spite of increased surveillance on Pestel and Davydov, nothing unusual was observed. It was only in December when Kiselev got Maiboroda’s letter that he realised what Pestel had been up to and so was convinced of its veracity.25 Kiselev went on to write an abjectly loyal letter to the tsar dated 16 January 1826, in which he denounced ‘the vile conspirators’. Beginning ‘Sire, I fall at your feet’ (‘Sire, je tombe à Vos pieds …’), it strikes the same tone of self-abasement which is frequently to be found in letters written to the tsar by the repentant Decembrists themselves.26 According to Nicholas’s own account, the arrested Pestel was put in chains because of the particular gravity of the accusations he faced, and was transferred in secret to the Hermitage library. There he underwent a confrontation with the tsar on whom he evidently made a very negative impression. In his recollections of this encounter, Nicholas described


Pestel as an ‘evil-doer in the fullest sense of the word, showing not the slightest trace of remorse, with a bestial expression who has the most brazen audacity to deny everything. I suggest that such a monster is rarely to be found.’ He was transferred to the Peter-Paul Fortress on 3 January with the instruction that a cell should be found for him in the Alekseevskii ravelin (rampart), ‘relocating for this purpose Kakhovskii or one of the less important [prisoners]’. Initially held in cell 5 in the Nikolaevskii curtain (wall) he was duly transferred later the same day to cell 13 in the Alekseevskii ravelin.27

The ‘arrest’ of Russian Justice The authorities were first made aware of the existence of Russian Justice by Maiboroda’s report, written on 25 November 1825. Pestel, however, at first denied ever having written such a project.28 An obituary of Prince Sergei Volkonskii (who died in 1865) written by P.V. Dolgorukii contains an account of a meeting Volkonskii had in Tulchin with Pestel, who was by then under arrest and in the custody of General Ivan Ivanovich Baikov. Volkonskii found them taking tea together. Taking advantage of a few minutes while Baikov received a courier from Taganrog, Pestel told Volkonskii that he would give nothing away no matter how cruelly he was tortured. ‘The only thing that could ruin us is my Russian Justice. Yushnevskii knows where it is: save it, for God’s sake.’ Volkonskii relates in his memoirs that ‘unfortunately’ instead of destroying Russian Justice they buried it in a village garden, and when it was recovered it became the main incriminating evidence against Pestel and all the members of the secret societies.29 Nikolai Lorer’s memoirs claim that the news of Alexander’s death and the consequent likelihood of the exposure of their conspiracy were enough to determine them to bury Russian Justice in a sealed box in the cemetery at Tulchin. Nikolai Kryukov and Aleksei Cherkasov were instructed to do this at the earliest opportunity.30 When asked about the fate of Russian Justice by the Investigating Committee on 13 January 1826, Pestel claimed that he had burned most of his ‘political papers’ but had handed to Nikolai Kryukov ‘the proposal I had begun for the formation of the State’, requesting him to hide it somewhere in Tulchin or to burn it ‘if things became dangerous’. He further told the Investigating Committee that he presumed these papers had been destroyed.31 The testimony of several members of the Southern Society shows that it was generally recognised that Pestel’s papers were potentially very compromising and should therefore be destroyed. Bobrishchev-Pushkin, however, did not want to burn them,


and neither did Nikolai Zaikin. Pavel Avramov was also against the idea despite being told by Aleksei Yushnevskii and Ferdinand Volf to ensure that Bobrishchev-Pushkin should do so without delay. The latter was also nervous about drawing attention to himself by burning so many papers.32 In the event, Russian Justice was interred by the two Bobrishchev– Pushkin brothers near the village of Kirsanovka in the second half of December 1825. During interrogation Nikolai Zaikin, a lieutenant in the Second Army’s quartermaster’s section, admitted that he knew where Pestel’s manuscript was located and drew a detailed sketch-map to show precisely where. Encouraged by this development, the Investigating Committee proposed on 28 January to send Zaikin in chains to Ukraine to retrieve the buried document, and received the tsar’s approval for this on 30 January.33 But when in early February 1826 Zaikin was taken from the Peter-Paul Fortress to Tulchin in spite of three attempts at excavation he failed to identify its precise location. However, his obliging 17 year-old brother, Fedor Zaikin, proved able to do so. He had been shown the spot by Nikolai Bobrishchev-Pushkin who was worried that he might not survive his imminent arrest to retrieve the papers himself.34 The younger Zaikin was promptly arrested for his pains.35 The search party returned with its treasure trove to St Petersburg on 12 February. At its meeting on the following day, the Investigating Committee ordered Pestel’s papers to be forwarded, still sealed, direct to Nicholas. They were immediately returned from the Winter Palace to the Peter-Paul Fortress on 14 February and were added to Pestel’s growing file.36 In his memoirs, A.P. Belyaev recalls that Nikolai Zaikin, tormented by the weakness he had shown in betraying Pestel to the Investigating Committee, tried to commit suicide by beating his head against the wall of his cell. The younger Zaikin was eventually freed by order of the Investigating Committee at its very last meeting on 17 June, since his membership of the conspiracy had not been established and he was deemed to have been punished enough for failing to alert the authorities about the buried papers.37 Nikolai Lorer later suggested that Pestel, in spite of his original intention, decided in the Peter-Paul Fortress to admit to the existence and whereabouts of Russian Justice. This was because, knowing very well that he was doomed, he was afraid that his many years’ work on the project would disappear without trace. ‘With this admission Pestel signed his own death warrant, without betraying his convictions even unto death’, as Lorer put it.38 Nicholas read Pestel’s project and expressed his view of Russian Justice in a letter to Constantine of 14 June: ‘Pestel’s Russian Justice is sheer


buffoonery (‘est une véritable bouffonnade’), were the matter not so serious. I had expected to find in him more common sense and intelligence but he expressed himself like a madman and revealed some kind of chaos of shrill, poorly conceived and half-baked ideas. One can merely shrug one’s shoulders’. He ordered it to be sealed and not shown even to the Investigating Committee. Only in 1883 was the historian N.F. Dubrovin given permission by Tsar Alexander III to have access to it. The notes he made were published by P.E. Shchegolev in 1906.39

Under investigation Pavel Pestel was unquestionably the Investigating Committee’s star witness. From the 38 questions put to him in Tulchin by Kiselev and Chernyshev on 22 December, he could see that the basic facts of the society and its conspiracy were already known. In St Petersburg over the next few days many more names and details were revealed, in particular by S.P Trubetskoi, E.P Obolenskii and I.G. Burtsov. At his first interrogation, Trubetskoi divulged much incriminating information about Pestel which confirmed Maiboroda’s denunciation and left him hopelessly compromised. But up to this point Pestel had clung to the slim hope that it was his word against Maiboroda’s. However, following his transfer to the Peter-Paul Fortress he realised the futility of continued denial and started to co-operate fully with the Investigating Committee, embarking on nothing less than a wholesale confession. Trubetskoi, meanwhile, was rewarded for his complete and compliant candour with permission to correspond with his wife.40 His testimony would also explain why, to his own surprise, he was not subsequently questioned about Pestel or other members of the Southern Society. But then he was not at that stage aware of the reports of Maiboroda, Shervud and Vitt.41 Pestel was from a very early stage of the investigation not only among the most seriously compromised but also along with M.P. BestuzhevRyumin, S.I. Muraviev-Apostol, K.F. Ryleev and E.P. Obolenskii, the most frequently interrogated prisoners.42 Of these, however, it was Pestel who was handed the most written questions to respond to (195), a quarter of which required him to confirm the membership of individuals to the secret society. He was also among those most often called on to stand over their evidence in face-to-face ‘confrontations’ (ochnye stavki) with other prisoners. Andrei Rozen recalled that Pestel was so tormented by the demands made on him by the Investigating Committee that his patience snapped on one occasion when he was appearing before it. Reproaching his interrogators for their inept line of questioning he asked


for a blank sheet of paper and drew up a list of questions more effectively designed to elicit the information they required. Rozen’s claim cannot be corroborated and even if the scene he describes never actually took place, there is more than a whiff of the authentic arrogance of Pestel about it.43 His comprehensive testimony provided his interrogators, as it provides historians to this day, with the fullest account of the Decembrist movement’s development. His name figures most frequently in the testimony of others, particularly members of the Southern Society, as the man who had exerted the greatest influence over them. A glance at the schedule of his dealings with the Investigating Committee as indicated by the documents in his own file alone will give an idea of the pattern of Pestel’s interrogation. Following his initial confession, which was reviewed by the Investigating Committee on 4 January, his first major interrogation took the form of 55 questions drawn up on behalf of the Investigating Committee by General Chernyshev, dated 13 January. This testimony was considered by the Investigating Committee at its meeting of 19 January which noted that Pestel had elaborated in great detail on what he had said at his first interrogation. Surprisingly, the Committee did not return to Pestel’s extensive answers until 1 April when he was required to respond to a further 47 supplementary questions. Pestel’s lengthy, considered replies to these took him six days to write. Just two days later, the indefatigable Chernyshev returned with further questions seeking clarification of Pestel’s testimony. The main interrogation of Pestel concluded on 9 April but it was followed by a series of supplementary questions and confrontations over the following two weeks. A closer examination of the records of the Investigating Committee reveals a much fuller picture of its dealings with Pestel and facilitates a precise reconstruction of the schedule of Pestel’s interrogation.44 Within 10 days of his imprisonment in the Peter-Paul Fortress Pestel started to display remorse and contrition. On 12 January he wrote from his cell to General V.V. Levashov: All contacts and plans linking me with the secret society are finished forever … If I die God alone will know that perhaps I was not the person I was thought to be. [But if spared] my existence will be the gift of His (Nicholas I’s) magnanimity and should therefore consist only of loyalty, enthusiasm and total and exclusive devotion to the person and family of His Majesty. This is a mathematical truth.45 In his letter of 31 January to General Chernyshev, Pestel struck the same note of atonement, expressing the hope that the tsar was entirely satisfied


with the completely candid and detailed answers he had provided in response to the Investigating Committee’s questions. To do so, he declared, had been the only way open to him to demonstrate the profound regret he felt for having been a member of the secret society. His self-abasement is completed by his admission that his sole comfort was that he had at least not taken part in the uprisings. His greatest torment was the thought of the pain his actions had caused his parents in their old age. It was this that drove him to the outer limits of despair. In his letter, Pestel begs the tsar to spare them by sparing him and swears that if he does, the tsar will never regret it, since ‘every moment of my life will be devoted with gratitude and boundless devotion to his illustrious person and the august family’. Pestel pleads with Chernyshev to intercede with the tsar on his behalf and to give him some feedback which might alleviate the ‘agonising uncertainty which, I swear to you, is a thousand times worse than death’.46 These letters show how shattered Pestel was by his arrest and imprisonment. It is a measure of his desperation and selfdelusion that he actually contemplated the possibility of mercy being shown him by Nicholas, even though he had confessed to planning to assassinate him along with the rest of the Romanovs! S.Ya. Shtraikh, the first scholar to publish these two humiliating letters in 1922, commented that they made painful reading, written as they were by the ‘celebrated leader of the Decembrists and one of the cleverest people of the Pushkin era’ to the ‘utterly unscrupulous and despicable’ Chernyshev. Shtraikh observed that Pestel’s collapse can be explained by the sudden and complete reversal of his fortunes and the total failure of his long-held ambitions.47 Subsequent Soviet writing on the Decembrists tended to avoid reference to the letters since they are so obviously at odds with the stereotypical image of the fearless freedom fighters so carefully cultivated there. This orthodoxy led to such nonsensical formulations as: ‘Pestel conducted himself during the investigation with complete consistency, skilfully and coolly refusing to confess, and maintained throughout the investigation and before the court total selfcontrol and dignity.’48 Such a complete travesty of the truth was all part of the Soviet promotion of the Decembrist cult. In fact, Pestel’s behaviour would seem to lend weight to the view that the crisis he underwent from 1824 after his unsuccessful mission to St Petersburg, as discussed earlier, continued unalleviated and brought him to the brink of collapse in the final months of his life. Nicholas was in no way inclined to show Pestel the leniency he craved. On 4 January 1826 he wrote to Constantine: ‘The testimony which Pestel has just given is so significant that I consider it my duty to inform you of it without delay. From it you will see clearly that the matter is becoming


ever more serious because of its ramifications abroad and especially because everything that happened here is evidently solely the consequence or the fruits of foreign influences.’ On 10 February Nicholas wrote incredulously to Constantine about Pestel’s plans: ‘To judge from their plans, it seems these madmen really did intend to take charge of matters. Thus, Sergei Muraviev was to take command of the Guards here [in St Petersburg]; (Bestuzhev-)Ryumin of the Third Corps, and Pestel of the Second Army! It is, of course, hard to make sense of such absurdity.’49 The Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna noted in her diary on 16 March: ‘Nicholas told me that when interrogated yesterday Vadkovskii stated that if the man who had recruited him to this society had ordered him to kill his father, mother, brother and sister he would have done so; it was Pestel who recruited him. It just makes one shudder!’50 Meanwhile, Pavel Pestel ended what would be his last major interrogation on 9 April with an embarrassingly emphatic and fulsome assurance to the Investigating Committee that his aim was to be as comprehensive and honest in his answers as possible. Any perceived deficiencies arose not from a lack of candour but purely from lapses in recall.51 The extent to which Pestel’s despair led him to incriminate others has been the source of conflicting views. Andrei Rozen, writing in an article published in 1884, the year of his death, stressed that in his eight years of exile in Chita and Petrovsk he never heard a single word spoken against Pestel. He met almost all those who had had a ‘confrontation’ with Pestel during the investigation and no one accused him of betrayal.52 Against this, however, the biographers of Mikhail Lunin have argued that Pestel’s testimony was the main cause of his arrest and exile, though Lunin never subsequently held this against him.53 And a contemporary British chronicler recorded that while Pestel initially behaved with courage during the investigation, he ‘became a denunciator and told all that had passed between him and his associates, though sworn to secrecy by the laws of the society to which they belonged’.54 Behind Pestel’s capitulation there lies a more complex process which has more to do with the Decembrists’ ambivalence towards the authority of hallowed political traditions and structures in Russia. In this respect 14 December 1825 marks a turning point since it exposed a clash of interests between government and society, or an elite section of it, which split Russia into two mutually hostile camps, marking the first step in the ‘parting of ways’ which was a feature of Nicholas’s reign. The Decembrists were not opposed to the government’s authority as such, but they believed it could be reformed. Their projects did not reveal any fundamental hostility to the power of the Russian state or personal hatred of it.


This is what explains their behaviour and Pestel’s, in particular, during the investigation. Psychologically, Pestel identified himself with the authority of the government which, in a significant way and with filial respect, he had both personified and upheld as an army officer. Most likely, the Decembrists regarded the entire conspiracy as a family affair between themselves and the authorities: hence, perhaps, their anxiety to explain to the tsar, as head of the family, what it had all been about – a mood which Nicholas naturally sought to encourage.55 In a wide-ranging discussion of behavioural norms and stereotypes of the Decembrists’ generation, in which the sense of duty towards one’s seniors, the obligations of oath and the honour of a nobleman all figured prominently, Yurii Lotman has observed: ‘The Decembrists’ sincerity during the investigation, which to this day astonishes researchers, flowed logically from the aristocratic revolutionaries’ conviction that there were not and could not be different kinds of honesty … [They] were not psychologically prepared to behave in conditions of legitimized unscrupulousness.’56 In a letter to his parents of 1 May Pestel wrote of his renewed faith in Christ which was sustaining him. Pavel told his parents that: ‘My real story can be summed up in just a few words: I have passionately loved my country and ardently desired its happiness.’ He assured them that if he were sentenced to die he would accept death gladly as he was tired of life. Pestel also penned a moving and affectionate note to his sister, Sophie (‘You can be sure, my dearest, that no sister could ever have been loved more tenderly than you have by me’). Ivan Borisovich wrote to his wife and daughter from St Petersburg also on 1 May to tell them that Pavel was in good health, was conducting himself nobly and was repentant. At his own request he had taken communion on the Saturday of Easter week. Pastor Reinbot spent an hour and a half with him and was able to assure Ivan Borisovich that his son ‘was completely reconciled with God and with our Saviour … All the unfortunates in the Fortress are being excellently looked after and lack nothing that might alleviate their position.’57 It was doubtless the references made by Pestel to his renewed faith that made Soviet historians play down the relevance of his correspondence from the fortress. Pestel’s letters were not to be considered a source for the reconstruction of his philosophical outlook while his mention of religion was merely to provide some comfort for his parents.58 On 3 June Ivan Borisovich visited his son in the Peter-Paul Fortress. They met in the presence of the commandant. Ivan Borisovich described how as they knelt and prayed and he blessed his son, the commandant himself was moved to tears. Ivan Borisovich also provides an account of


a meeting his son had in prison with Pastor Reinbot. A tearful Pavel Ivanovich told Reinbot that the worst thing he had to endure was the thought that he had made his parents suffer terribly. In his cell he had both a German and a Russian bible.59 Reinbot is elsewhere quoted as saying that whereas he was himself shaken on hearing of the death sentences, Pestel remained calm and, resigned to his fate, said: ‘I didn’t catch what it is they want to do with us. But whatever it is, let it be soon.’60 While reconstructing the conversation between Pastor Reinbot and Pestel, Ivan Borisovich emphasises Pavel’s concern for his family. Reinbot told Pestel that his mother had written him a farewell letter which his father had decided would be too upsetting for him to read.61 According to the account given him by Reinbot as related in his memoirs, Nikolai Grech recalled that the pastor had found Pestel in reasonable spirits though worried and anxious. The condemned man talked about his trial, tried to justify himself and complained about the injustice of the court and its sentence. In the end, he took the proferred sacrament and blessing and asked the pastor to convey a final apology to his parents. Grech, no friend of the Decembrists, could not resist a final twist of the knife: ‘In general, he seemed to Reinbot to be a dissembling Jesuit, even at this auspicious moment’.62 The account heard by the Orthodox priest and prison chaplain, P.N. Myslovskii, led him to record in his diary that Reinbot left this meeting in tears, upset by Pestel’s ‘hard-hearted’ defiance as he argued about religion and politics to the end.63 According to Reinbot, Pestel had the best accommodation of the 14 prisoners he visited to give communion and hear confession. Judging by the inventory made of Pestel’s belongings after his execution, he certainly managed to find room in it for a lot of personal property. It included two suitcases, a wooden trunk and a carpet bag. One case contained two uniforms, 11 handkerchiefs (silken and linen) and 10 towels. In the other were found ‘a silver spring for cleaning the tongue’ (sic), a tobacco jar with a portrait of Count Vitgenshtein on it, shaving gear and a pair of steel-framed glasses. He had his decorations and service medals with him, a gold crucifix and 179 roubles 65 kopecks. He had far more personal effects than any of the other four executed Decembrists, whose belongings are listed in the same inventory.64 Surprisingly, these items were never claimed by Pestel’s family but were removed to Tulchin to be sold there at auction at the end of 1827. The proceeds raised, together with those which derived from the sale of his valuable library, were set against Pestel’s debts.65


Pestel’s execution In reaching its verdicts, the Supreme Criminal Court declared that it had sought to vindicate the trust placed in it by the tsar. In examining ‘with indefatigable attention the entire make-up of this highly complex affair’ it had sought without fear or favour to arrive at an outcome in accordance with the law and the evidence before it. In its report it identified the three main types of crime which the Decembrists had envisaged, namely regicide, revolt and military mutiny. The Court decided by majority vote to present to Nicholas for his consideration 11 degrees or categories of culpability and a corresponding range of executions and punishments. In support of their proposals, members of the Court, including M.M. Speranskii, cited the precedent of article 19 of the 1716 military statute and the appropriate article of the 1720 naval statute, while ignoring the various intervening ukazy (decrees) of Elizabeth, Catherine and Paul on the abolition of capital punishment.66 The sole exception was Senator N.S. Mordvinov who cited ukazy of Elizabeth dating from 1753 and 1754, Catherine II’s Nakaz (‘Instruction’), and Paul I’s ukaz of 1799 to argue against the use of the death penalty.67 The court recommended that one egregious group of five convicts who ‘by the particular character and gravity of their crimes could not be categorised’ should be executed by quartering. Pestel headed this list, followed by Ryleev, Muraviev-Apostol, Bestuzhev-Ryumin and Kakhovskii. They were named, therefore, not in alphabetical order but according to the gravity of their crimes. Pestel’s ‘main types of crime’ specify that: ‘He planned to assassinate the tsar, devised means for doing so, selected and designated individuals to carry this out; he planned the extermination of the Imperial Family and in cold blood enumerated all those of its members condemned to die, and incited others to this.’ The report goes on to list 11 categories, with those in the first category condemned to be executed by beheading. It proposed that ‘all criminals belonging to the second category are to be sentenced to what our laws call political death, that is: they place their heads on the execution block and are then exiled to forced labour for life’. There was, however, no mention of death by hanging, the method of execution designated by Nicholas in preference to the barbarous and long-abandoned sentence of quartering.68 The Supreme Criminal Court chose this extraordinary method of execution, knowing that it would give Nicholas, who had no intention of sanctioning it, an opportunity to appear merciful by commuting it. As anticipated, the tsar wanted no more bloodshed as Dibich made clear to the


Court’s chairman, Prince P.V. Lopukhin, in a letter of 10 July from Tsarskoe Selo. In it, Dibich conveyed the tsar’s express wish that the condemned men were not to be quartered, shot or beheaded, or otherwise undergo ‘any execution entailing the shedding of blood’.69 This effectively left the Court with the only remaining option: death by hanging, the sentence it duly imposed. In his correspondence Nicholas appeared anxious to distance himself from the death sentences. For example, on 12 July he wrote to his brother, Michael: ‘To-morrow morning at 4 o’clock the sentence is to be carried out. Five men have been sentenced to death not by me, but by the will of the Supreme Court to whom I entrusted their fate.’70 That there may have been some concern in government circles as to the legal basis of the capital sentences is reflected in various grandees’ defence of the Supreme Criminal Court’s decision to impose them. For example, a letter of 16 July from Nesselrode to M.S. Vorontsov states: ‘Far from having abolished the death penalty for crimes of state and high treason, our laws in their uniform rigour apply this punishment both to the intention and to the deed.’ Nesselrode was not alone in his horror at the crimes of which the ringleaders of this ‘frightful conspiracy’ were found guilty: regicide, the extermination of the imperial family, the subversion of the government and the break up of the Russian empire. He considered that they were rightly ‘abandoned to the just severity of the laws’.71 Nicholas I’s own anxiety about the executions is further reflected in the attention he gave to the arrangements for their proper conduct. He wrote to Dibich on 11 July suggesting that they be carried out at 4 a.m. ‘such that from 3 a.m. there can be a celebration of the holy eucharist and they may be given communion’. A copy of the tsar’s notes on the precise ‘order of ceremony’ was found among the papers of L.N. Tolstoy whose interest in the Decembrists inspired the draft chapters of what became War and Peace. It stipulated the order in which the condemned men – accompanied by a priest with a cross and each escorted by two guards – were to be led to the scaffold, the precise position of designated troops and even the timing of drum rolls.72 Nicholas ordered the Supreme Criminal Court to convene in the Senate building at 10 a.m. on 12 July, the eve of the executions, for the formal signing of the sentences he had finally approved. The members of the Court were then to proceed to the PeterPaul Fortress to pronounce the sentences to the assembled prisoners.73 Andrei Rozen, whose memoirs contain one of the fullest accounts of the Decembrists’ executions, describes how his group of five prisoners in the fifth category heard their sentences. Entering the room they were faced by


the whole Supreme Criminal Court seated at tables ranged round the three walls, with its chairman, Prince P.V. Lopukhin, at the centre. To his right were members of the State Council, and to his left representatives of the Synod, the metropolitans Serafim and Evgenii, and Archbishop Avraam. There was a second row consisting of senators and behind them a further 15 officers and civil officials especially designated by the tsar. Among the generals, Rozen noticed a tearful General K.I. Bistrom who a few minutes earlier had seen sentence passed on his favourite adjutant, E.P. Obolenskii. The sentence was read out in a ‘loud and distinct’ voice by the Chief Secretary of the Senate, I.F. Zhuravlev, after which the prisoners were led back to their cells. This process was repeated for the remaining 10 categories and for the five placed ‘beyond category’ and condemned to death. According to Rozen, the procedure took several hours to complete and was conducted in total silence.74 Pestel and his four comrades heard the original sentence pronounced first, that is execution by quartering, followed by the tsar’s ‘merciful’ commutation of this ‘agonising execution’ to death by hanging.75 They were then taken to cells in the Kronverk curtain, much nearer to the specially erected scaffold than the Alexeevskii ravelin which was at the far west end of the Peter-Paul Fortress, to spend their last hours waiting for their execution. Pastor Reinbot gave Pestel his last communion and offered to accompany him to the gallows. But Pestel thanked him and remarked that one priest (Myslovskii) would be sufficient for this purpose. In the early hours of Tuesday 13 July, the priest Myslovskii accompanied the five to the scaffold from the fortress cathedral church where, in the words of Andrei Rozen, ‘wearing shrouds and shackles they heard their funeral service while still alive’. Pestel remained throughout remarkably calm and composed, even as he was placed in front of the noose. In his diary Myslovskii recorded Pestel’s last words which included a complaint that they deserved a better death – by firing squad. The same comment is recorded also by the Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna in her diary entry for Saturday 17 July, which reads: ‘Chernyshev told me in detail about this terrible day. The five sentenced to hanging behaved with great composure … Pestel apparently complained when told how he was to die: he had expected to be shot.’76 Pestel told Myslovskii that now more than ever he wanted to be a believer, that he had been deluded but now asked for his sins to be forgiven and for a blessing ‘on his long and terrible road’.77 The commandant of the Kronverk of the Peter-Paul Fortress, General Berkopf, recorded that Pestel was in such a weak condition that he could not step over the threshold of the prison unaided.78


In an impressive show of autocratic strength, as many as 2000 soldiers drawn from all the guards regiments stationed in St Petersburg were deployed in and around the Peter-Paul Fortress on the morning of the executions. The scaffold itself was surrounded by men of the Pavlovsk Lifeguard Regiment. A small crowd gathered and grew in number as the executions proceeded, but the police kept it well back. In spite of Nicholas’s instruction that the hangings should take place at 4 a.m., matters were delayed. The condemned men had to wait and watch for more than an hour while the construction of the scaffold was completed. When it was at last ready, they embraced each other for the last time before they were hooded and led in chains, their hands bound behind their backs, to the nooses in the order they had been sentenced: Pestel first, followed by Ryleev, Muraviev-Apostol, Bestuzhev-Ryumin and Kakhovskii. The execution was so terribly botched that it gave rise to numerous conflicting versions of what actually happened. All accounts agree that three of the five condemned men were not hanged at the first attempt because the inexperienced hangman had failed to realise that the quality of the rope rendered it unfit for the task required of it. However, they differ as to the identity of the unfortunate three who slipped from their nooses and plunged from the scaffold to the ground below, and with regard to the comments (mostly remarkably witty one-liners) the prisoners allegedly uttered. It is certainly Ryleev who is credited with most of the many aphoristic statements recorded in the literature.79 The fact that they were wearing hoods presumably made correct identification much more difficult. The military governor-general of St Petersburg in charge of the executions that morning, P.V. Golenishchev-Kutuzov, reported to Nicholas that Ryleev, Kakhovskii and Muraviev-Apostol had to be hanged a second time. The undoubted ghastliness of the proceedings provided compelling grist to the mill of Decembrist myth and legend. A French account has the ‘intrepid Pestel’s’ rueful (and miraculously posthumous) comment: ‘What a sad country this is where they do not even know how to hang a man!’80 General Chernyshev, on whom Pestel had quixotically counted to intercede on his behalf with the tsar, unhesitatingly ordered them to be hanged again, although many witnesses protested that their survival was a divine indication that they should be spared. The agony of the three survivors was prolonged as the necessary adjustments were made to the gallows. It was nearly 6 a.m. by the time all five had finally been hanged. Their bodies were later cut down and taken under cover of darkness the following night to Golodai Island and secretly buried there. In his report to the tsar, the unperturbed P.V. Golenishchev-Kutuzov wrote


smoothly: ‘The execution was carried out with due calm and order both on the part of the paraded troops and of the few spectators present.’81 That same day, 13 July, a relieved Nicholas issued a manifesto which declared: ‘And so the affair, which we have always considered to be a matter for the whole of Russia, is concluded. The criminals have been duly executed. The fatherland is cleansed of the consequences of an infection concealed within it for so many years’. In the manifesto, Nicholas also reveals his own view of the Decembrists and their conspiracy: Their goal was alien to the Russian character and to Russian morals. Devised by a handful of monsters, it infected their immediate circle, with corrupted hearts and impudent aspirations. But even after a decade of malevolent effort it did not and could not spread any further. Russia’s heart was and always will remain inaccessible to it. Ever conscious of his prisoners’ extensive family and society networks, and of the resentment his retribution may have generated among them, Nicholas ended his manifesto with an assurance to the relatives of the condemned that they were not to be stigmatised: ‘Let no one dare by imputation reproach any of their kin. This is forbidden by civil and above all by Christian law.’82 A letter written six months before the executions by Pestel’s younger brother, Vladimir, to his parents on 16 January shows that the tsar apparently practised what he now preached. Vladimir relates a conversation he had with Nicholas following an inspection the previous day: ‘If one son has disappointed his father, another will in all respects be a comfort to him. Tell him this, calm him, and be calm yourself’. ‘To my last breath this will be my foremost task.’ ‘Pestel, I am very pleased with you. I hope that you will continue to serve me henceforth just as you have done hitherto’. ‘I will always be Your Imperial Majesty’s most humble servant’. ‘And as far as your brother is concerned, be calm and reassure your father’. I wish you could have seen the emperor’s face as he spoke to me. It bore an expression of concern and clarity, enveloping every feature of his face, which gave me a thousand times more comfort and hope than the kind words he addressed to me.83 Vladimir wrote to his parents about a further honour: ‘On 2 January, the emperor, who had observed my zeal and actions on 14 December, signed an ukaz appointing me a Knight of the Order of St. Anna, 2nd class.’


On the day after the execution of Colonel Pavel Pestel, the emperor had Colonel Vladimir Pestel promoted to adjutant.84 In a further act of solicitude towards Pestel’s younger brothers, Nicholas ordered Alexander’s transfer to the Cavalry Guards regiment to serve alongside Vladimir, and also awarded him an annual maintenance grant of 3000 roubles. Years later Pestel’s father was granted 5000 roubles in February 1831 while his sister Sophie received four payments amounting to 2250 roubles between 1845 and 1859, the last two of them at the instigation of Tsar Alexander II.85 The verdicts of the Supreme Criminal Court and the implementation of the sentences are detailed with considerable variation in numerous Decembrist memoirs. Although 12 July 1826 was the day on which the prisoners would at last learn their fate, according to one account the prevailing mood was one of unbridled joy and elation as friends were reunited on being assembled to hear the verdict of the Supreme Criminal Court. In Basargin’s words: ‘Everyone was thrilled to be meeting if only for a minute after six months’ solitary confinement.’ When he was awakened early that morning by the duty officer bearing his officer’s uniform, Belyaev was still expecting the firing squad. Instead, he was ordered to dress to attend the court for sentencing. Again, there soon followed ‘embraces, conversations, explanations’. But the mood changed once the full significance of their sentences registered. And morale plummeted when news of the executions set for the following day spread round the fortress. After the sentences and the executions in the days leading up to the emperor’s departure to Moscow for his coronation in August, there had been some expectation of an amnesty or, at the very least, a reduction in their sentences. As Basargin put it, to believe this was to misread the tsar’s character. Nicholas had already decided that they were to be excluded from society and separated from their loved ones forever pour encourager les autres.86 Sergei Trubetskoi describes how word of the executions spread among the disbelieving prisoners and relates the account given to him by the priest Myslovskii who was stunned by what he had witnessed. The day before the hangings Myslovskii had told Yakushkin not to believe any rumours about impending executions, despite the fact that some prisoners reported seeing from their cells that a scaffold was being erected outside the walls of the fortress. Nevertheless, the priest seems to have convinced many others of this too so their shock was all the greater when it became clear later the following day that five of their number had in fact been hanged. Like Trubetskoi, Yakushkin did not believe it until he heard from Myslovskii his account of that morning’s events.


Myslovskii seems to have had a compulsive need to talk: Basargin reproduces in his memoirs a very detailed description based entirely on the account given to him by the distraught priest at 5 o’clock on the afternoon after the executions had taken place. The following day, 14 July, seven months to the day after the uprising, a service of purification was held on Senate Square, which was sprinkled with holy water.87 Nikolai Lorer, writing in 1862, was still seething with indignation at the decision of the Horse-Guard Regiment to go ahead that same evening with the ball on Elagin Island in honour of their commanderin-chief, the Empress Aleksandra Fedorovna. ‘They forgot that only the day before many of their comrades had been sentenced to death and many were still languishing in their cells. Eternal shame on the officers of the Horse-Guard Regiment!’ Against this, however, Alexander Muraviev correctly states that the regiment’s colonel, Count A.N. Zubov, categorically refused to attend the executions with the blunt objection: ‘They are my comrades and I will not go’. Presumably, it would have been much harder for Zubov to boycott the regimental ball. Two days later, on 15 July, Myslovskii held a requiem in the Kazan cathedral for the five dead Decembrists. The sister of Muraviev-Apostol, Ekaterina Bibikova, was praying in the cavernous cathedral when, to her astonishment, she heard Myslovskii, arrayed in black vestments, intone the names of her brother Sergei, and those of Pavel (Pestel), Mikhail (Bestuzhev-Ryumin) and Kondratii (Ryleev). By accident or design, the fifth victim’s name, Peter Kakhovskii, is omitted from Yakushkin’s list.88 At any rate, the state had not at this early stage muzzled the church, though all public reference to the executed and convicted Decembrists would soon be totally banned. It is interesting to see the large number of rewards and awards Nicholas made to those who had shown him loyalty during the Decembrists’ uprising and retribution. The informer Boshnyak was paid 5000 roubles per annum from 21 December 1826 while he served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Shervud received the addition to his surname of the epithet ‘loyal’ (Shervud-Vernyi) and was granted 15 000 roubles on 3 February 1828 to pay off his debts and a further 2000 roubles in September 1830. Maiboroda was permitted to pursue his military career and given command of the Apsheronskii Regiment, until his suicide early in 1844, following which his widow received two modest payments of 515 roubles in October 1847 and 257.5 roubles in February 1857. In accordance with an ukaz of 26 February 1826, a total of 22 065 troops were each awarded one rouble as a token of Nicholas’s gratitude for the loyalty they had shown on 14 December and thereafter, including 2493 who turned


out for the funeral of the assassinated Governor-General Miloradovich. On 14 July 1826, the day after the executions, Nicholas had the Guards parade on Senate Square, the scene of the uprising on 14 December. The 11 446 men who turned out each received one rouble.89 Pestel’s will was found among his Tulchin papers and a report of it dated 11 April 1826 was sent to Dibich. Headed ‘I leave as a token of remembrance and friendship’ it disposed of his property (including six horses, two carriages (drozhki and troika) and two saddles) among his fellow officers including, pathetically, Maiboroda.90 Pestel’s promising career and his brief, eventful life had been brutally cut short three weeks after his 33rd birthday. The legacy of this most controversial and remarkable Decembrist is the subject of the final chapter.

12 Pestel and the Roots of Russian Republicanism

Pestel has been described by a recent commentator as ‘the most impressive Russian revolutionary before Lenin’.1 The central issues of Pestel’s revolutionary credentials, his influence, his personal ambition and his legacy have all been discussed in earlier chapters but we return to them here in order to summarise our conclusions. These also include final consideration both of Pestel’s regicidal intentions and Nicholas I as Pestel’s executioner, and of the Decembrist ideologue’s historical significance.

Pestel as revolutionary Semen Yushnevskii, younger brother of one of the directors of the Southern Society, became a member of the secret society in Tulchin in 1823, when he was 22. He blamed his involvement in it on the influence of people like Pestel. He told the Investigating Committee that he had never had a liberal outlook of his own but had the misfortune to serve alongside those who were themselves ‘infected’ and whose ‘bad example’ often compelled him to discuss matters of which he ‘had no understanding and would otherwise never have thought about’.2 His was a fairly typical experience of those young officers who were drawn into the conspiracy through force of circumstances. The Investigating Committee accepted that Pestel’s influence and his persuasive readings from Russian Justice had proved decisive and hard to resist. In a damning reference to Pestel, Sergei Trubetskoi told the Committee: ‘I will just say that he horrified me’, and that Nikita Muraviev had warned him that the Southern Society’s leader was ‘dangerous and ambitious’. Similarly, Kondratii Ryleev’s considered opinion was that Pestel posed a dangerous threat to Russia.3 185


Such negative views were shared by commentators both at the time and later in the nineteenth century. For example, in her memoirs the daughter of the artist F.P. Tolstoy recalled ‘with great interest’ her father’s view of the Decembrists. He held them all in high regard with the exception of Pestel whose extremist influence, in Tolstoy’s view, had caused the ruin of so many able, energetic and honest citizens at incalculable cost to Russia.4 The novelist Fyodor Dostoevskii, who had little sympathy for the Decembrists, also singled out Pestel for obloquy, ascribing to him a penchant for dictatorship, political adventurism and even cruelty.5 A contemporary British view was equally harsh. Robert Lee, who was retained as Count M.S. Vorontsov’s personal physician from 1824 to 1826, was acquainted with several members of the Southern Society. Of Pestel he wrote in his diary: ‘He is a man remarkably vain and easily flattered. He imagines himself another Buonaparte. The public welfare he had certainly not in view.’6 In his autobiography the secretary of the Investigating Committee, A.D. Borovkov, described Pestel with a rich mixture of conflicting epithets as: ‘intelligent, cunning, enlightened, cruel, persistent and resourceful’.7 Dmitrii Kropotov, in one of the earliest assessments of the Decembrists, first published in the reign of Alexander II, reserved particularly harsh judgement for Pestel. He dismissed him as a man totally devoid of morals who, because he was ‘German by descent, a foreigner by upbringing, and a Protestant by religion’ remained totally ignorant of Russia. On this point, however, Svistunov insisted that Pestel, despite his German origins, was completely Russian at heart. Kropotov further castigated Pestel for the planned ‘cohorte perdue’ or suicide squad and claimed that his ‘hypocrisy and treachery’ were particularly apparent during the investigation. Kropotov quoted and endorsed Nicholas I’s alleged remark that in Pestel he saw all the vices of a conspirator and in Ryleev all the virtues.8 The views of other Decembrists, while certainly varied and even ambivalent, were generally more nuanced than those quoted earlier and have frequently been referred to in the foregoing pages. Ivan Yakushkin, for example, wrote that Pestel was not simply to be ranked alongside the rest of the conspirators since he was a man of outstanding brilliance. Evgenii Obolenskii was impressed by Pestel’s lucid presentation of the most abstract issues which, combined with his oratorical skills, made him very influential and persuasive. Yet Obolenskii, a member of the Northern Society, told the Investigating Committee that Pestel’s efforts to achieve unity within the Decembrist movement were doomed because ‘none of us personally trusted Colonel Pestel, whom we considered

The Roots of Russian Republicanism 187

a dangerous individual’.9 Nikolai Lorer, one of Pestel’s closest collaborators, described him unequivocally as one of the most remarkable men of his age whose eloquent oratory nevertheless contained signs of ‘immeasurable ambition and self-regard’. Pestel admitted to Lorer that other members of the secret society frequently challenged him about this. His usual reply was that the more ambition he applied to their cause the better their chances of success. By way of emphasising his personal disinterestedness in the outcome he would promise them that ‘when the Russian people, having accepted Russian Justice, are happy’ he would retire to a monastery in Kiev and live out his time there as a monk.10 In his memoirs Sergei Volkonskii, also very close to Pestel, recalled with admiration his friend’s ‘great gifts’, among them his firmness of character and ardent patriotism. He rejected the ‘offensive’ and persistent view that Pestel, motivated by personal ambition, had intended to seize power.11 Another former Southern Society member, Peter Svistunov, agreed. Whilst conceding that Pestel was reproached more than any other Decembrist with displays of personal ambition, Svistunov naively insisted that all those involved stood to lose the considerable social advantages they enjoyed and could not, therefore, be suspected of selfserving motives.12 His view, however, is based on the assumption that a victorious outcome to their enterprise was never a realistic expectation. How the Decembrists in general, and Pestel in particular, would have conducted themselves in the event of success is quite another matter. Given the complexity of Pestel’s character and the controversial leadership role he played in the Decembrist movement, it is easy to understand the range of conflicting assessments of him. It is, however, far harder to determine which of them is the truest. An emphatically positive view of Pestel was taken by the father of Russian Populism, Alexander Herzen. He hugely admired the Decembrists and especially Pestel. When, in the summer of 1826 as a 13-year old in Moscow, he heard the news of the executions, he vowed to avenge them. In due course he became the main architect of the potent Decembrist legend. A good example of the mythmaking Herzen indulged in is his account of an episode which supposedly occurred during Pestel’s investigation: Once, at a confrontation between Volkonskii and Pestel, Pavel Vasilievich Golenishchev-Kutuzov, who as a young man had been among the assassins of Paul, said to them, ‘I am surprised, gentlemen, that you could have been set on a such a terrible course as regicide.’ Pestel replied: ‘But I am surprised at your surprise. Of all people, Your


Excellency, you should know better than we do that this was not the first instance!’ Kutuzov turned not white but green while Pestel, turning to the other members of the commission, said with a smile: ‘It has been known here in Russia for orders of St. Andrew to be awarded for this!’13 It is a piquant description of Pestel at his most sardonic but, unfortunately, it finds no corroboration in the sources and is almost certainly Herzen’s invention. Typically, Herzen wrote in 1855 to the French historian, Jules Michelet, informing him that he was about to publish a new journal called The Polar Star and that he hoped to have the first number issued on ‘the day of Pestel’s execution’.14 Interestingly, it was another hanged Decembrist, Kondratii Ryleev, who with Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinskii had published the hugely successful literary almanac, The Polar Star, in the 1820s which was the prototype for Herzen’s own journal, but it was clearly Pestel who was uppermost in Herzen’s mind. For Herzen, Pestel was neither a dreamer nor a utopian but a man in close touch with reality and with ‘the spirit of his nation’ who realised that to leave the land in the hands of the nobility would be to perpetuate an oligarchic elite. Pestel was a prophet and the first to think of involving the people in revolution, while the Decembrist movement as a whole was ‘a vastly important school for the modern generation’.15 For Herzen, the most important lesson to be drawn from Pestel’s legacy was that ‘the wall which split Russia in two could only be breached by means of an economic revolution’.16 The historian R.V. Ivanov-Razumnik saw the utilitarian rationalism behind Pestel’s agrarian reform with its combination of private ownership and the communal principle as prefiguring N.G. Chernyshevskii’s notion, developed in the 1860s, of state property alongside communal ownership. Ivanov-Razumnik contended that Pestel’s agrarian project as outlined in Russian Justice had been some 50 years ahead of its time when Pestel wrote it and still made remarkable reading early in the twentieth century. In it ‘we see the first birth-pangs of socialism which from the second half of the nineteenth century became the predominant viewpoint of the Russian intelligentsia’ and Pestel himself was ‘the first representative of emergent Russian socialist thought’.17 Jules Michelet set out in a letter to Alexander Herzen his view of Pestel’s significance, in which he credited the Decembrist for his instinctive realisation that Russia’s revolution would follow a course distinct from that of Western Europe. According to Michelet, Pestel recognised the crucial role to be played in Russia by deep-seated rural tradition, identifying as he did the village


commune (obshchina) as the embryo of the future Russian republic. For Pestel the republican model was far more natural for Russia than ‘Tatar tsarism or German Kaisertum’.18

Settling of accounts Theorising about the republican model was, however, a very different matter from implementing it. Pestel was found culpable by the Investigating Committee and convicted by the Supreme Criminal Court of intent to assassinate the entire imperial family as the first step towards the establishment of a Russian republic. The evidence against him on this charge was overwhelming. Although, when arrested in Tulchin, he at first denied everything and told Sergei Volkonskii that no matter how horribly he were tortured he would continue to do so, after just a few days in the Peter-Paul Fortress, confronted by the mounting incriminating testimony of others, he admitted his guilt in a series of full and detailed written confessions. Indeed, the depth of his remorse and his abject plea for forgiveness coupled with his pledge of loyalty to the new tsar and full co-operation with the Investigating Committee raise the question of the genuineness of his intention to commit so heinous and inherently blasphemous a crime as regicide. His doubts about ever realising the goals he had set the Southern Society had, after all, surfaced long before his arrest and are consistent with his ‘crisis’ following his unsuccessful mission to St Petersburg in 1824 and the reawakening of his Lutheran faith during 1825. The balance of probability must be that Pestel was guilty more of rhetorical bravado than actual intent. A similar question arises in relation to Nicholas I’s real intentions towards the arrested Decembrists and whether he really wanted to execute the ringleaders as the culminating point of the investigative process. Contrary to what may be commonly supposed, capital punishment was surprisingly rare in pre-Revolutionary Russia. The last time it had been applied before 1826 was in the case of Vasilii Mirovich who was executed in 1764 for his part in the attempt to liberate Ivan VI from his lifelong incarceration in the Shlüsselberg Fortress. It would not be used again until 1866 when Dmitrii Karakozov was hanged for his attempt on the life of Alexander II. Nicholas’s claim that he agonised about the executions may well have had some basis in fact and would explain the distance he sought to put between himself and the sentence of the court as well as his desire to avoid bloodshed at all costs. His wife, Empress Aleksandra Fedorovna, recorded in a diary entry on the eve of


the ‘terrible executions’ her husband’s despondent mood: ‘If only people knew how Nicholas has been wavering.’19 Nicholas no doubt sought to have it both ways: he wanted to make an example of the Decembrist ringleaders without, however, having to accept the awful responsibility for their execution. As to the Investigating Committee, Nikolai Lorer complained in his memoirs that it was biased from start to finish. He remained convinced that if there had been a proper defence of the accused, half of them would have been acquitted. Like Lorer, Alexander Muraviev expressed an unequivocally jaundiced view of the ‘secret committee’, calling it an ‘inquisitorial tribunal, without respect or humane consideration, without the slightest trace of justice or impartiality and completely ignorant of the law’. He singled out for special condemnation the behaviour of Chernyshev and Levashov for whom ‘all means were justified’ and who routinely tricked their prisoners into betraying one another.20 A uniformly negative view of the Investigating Committee is to be found also in the historiography of the Decembrist movement, most notably among Soviet historians. An assessment of such views, let alone an evaluation of the Investigating Committee’s conduct, is clearly beyond the scope of the present study. Nevertheless, it seems worth pointing out that of the 1400 officers, men and civilians originally arrested in connection with the investigation only 121 were finally convicted and sentenced, and of these just five were executed. This outcome compares rather well with a more recent instance in Soviet Russian history in 1936 and 1937, the cruellest years of Stalin’s purges, when the ruthless application of ‘socialist legality’ saw mass executions following far more peremptory investigations and show trials. Another major difference between 1826 and 1936 is that, far from victimising the relatives of ‘enemies of the people’ as Stalin did, Nicholas I insisted by decree that the Decembrists’ relatives should suffer no discrimination and even went out of his way to show special consideration to many of them, including Pestel’s sister and brothers. The Investigating Committee’s findings in respect of the Decembrist conspiracy suggest that that body did not, as is generally accepted, work hand in glove with the Supreme Criminal Court but in fact retained a degree of autonomy. For even though the rule of law did not obtain in Russia in any meaningful sense, as the Decembrists themselves had frequently observed, the fact remains that the Investigating Committee took six whole months to complete its work. This included 146 lengthy and meticulously documented meetings as well as 175 appended reports. In addition, the Committee’s work generated over a million


sheets of paper in the course of its investigation which were carefully collated and archived. All this suggests that it took its work seriously and did not rush to summary justice. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that both the Investigating Committee and the Supreme Criminal Court were ultimately answerable to Nicholas. They were, therefore, entirely subservient to his own vested interests in elucidating fully the Decembrist affair and duly punishing its ringleaders. Nicholas always insisted that he had simply allowed the law to take its course, particularly in the matter of the death sentences imposed. In fact, however, in all matters relating to the Decembrist prisoners, no matter how trivial, the tsar’s permission or approval was routinely sought. This indeed would remain the position with regard to his amis du quatorze right up until his death in 1855.21

Conclusion A summary of Pavel Pestel’s curriculum vitae is remarkable for the number of contradictions it contains. Though he graduated top of his class, the controversy his placement caused came to the attention of Count A.A. Arakcheev and Tsar Alexander himself. From school reports they learned that the officer cadet had audaciously questioned the significance of the tsar’s anointing at his coronation and had openly expressed his hostility to serfdom as the basis of Russia’s social and economic order. This was hardly an auspicious start to Pestel’s career. Nevertheless, once commissioned, Pestel went on to distinguish himself during the Napoleonic War, most notably at the Battle of Borodino in 1812, receiving from Field Marshal Kutuzov’s own hand a coveted sword of honour. General Pavel Kiselev, future Minister of State Domains in Nicholas I’s government, was highly impressed by Pestel’s dependability and resourcefulness as a junior officer in the Second Army. Yet his promotion to colonel was delayed by over two years (first sought in spring 1819 it at last came through in autumn 1821) for reasons which were never made explicit and despite the patronage and support of Generals Vitgenshtein, Rudzevich and Kiselev himself. Alexander I was in turn impressed by Pestel’s report in 1821 from Bessarabia on the status of the Orthodox population, imagining its author, until his identity was revealed to him, to be a ‘talented diplomat’ rather than an army officer. The tsar was similarly impressed just two years later during an inspection in September 1823 by Pestel’s transformation of the Vyatka Infantry into something more resembling a Guards regiment, for which he


rewarded the young colonel with 3250 hectares of land. The continuing success of his military career seemed assured and, in spite of some early difficulties, Pestel stood to make up for his father’s disappointments and setbacks in government service. Both parents warned him from 1822 (the year Alexander I ordered the closure of Masonic lodges and all similarly covert organisations) against rumoured plotters in the Second Army, trying in their letters to their eldest son to keep him to the straight and narrow path of their shared Lutheran faith. Little did they know that by this time he had already been involved in secret society activity for five years, thus recklessly jeopardising any prospect of a brilliant career. In fact, irreparable damage had already been done as early as May 1821 when Gribovskii’s report to the authorities identified Pestel as one of 13 members of the Union of Welfare. It was passed to Alexander I himself, thereby fulfilling the prophecy of the veteran conspirator Count Pahlen to Pestel in Mitava three years earlier, warning him of the inevitability of betrayal. From the time of the St Petersburg meeting of the Union of Welfare in January 1820 Pestel had become a committed republican. Over the next four years he would strive to unite the Decembrist movement as a whole under the banner of republicanism as set out in his manifesto, Russian Justice. But his crushing failure to win round the Northern Society during his mission to St Petersburg in 1824 either to his manifesto, or even to his proposed common directorate for the two societies, precipitated his crisis the following year. He had proposed back in January 1823 at the Southern Society’s Kiev conference the need for an agreed common agenda with the St Petersburg members. He was so completely convinced of the absolute correctness of his own programme and of his ability to ‘sell’ it to the Northern Society that he had simply not prepared himself psychologically for the possibility of defeat. During 1825, therefore, as Pestel’s erstwhile drive seemed to desert him, initiative and leadership increasingly passed to Sergei Muraviev-Apostol. Similarly, Pestel’s main role in the Southern Society’s negotiations with the Polish Patriotic Society was not played until January 1825, following the important work already done in 1823 and 1824 by Sergei Muraviev-Apostol and Mikhail Bestuzev-Ryumin. Yet even here, Pestel contrived to antagonise his Polish contacts by showing much greater interest in their potential role as proxy assassins of Grand Duke Constantine, viceroy of the Congress Kingdom and Governor-General of Warsaw, than in assisting the Poles in pursuit of their cherished objective: the restoration to Poland of territory seized from it during the three partitions under Catherine the Great. Finally, it was Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin, with the assistance of Sergei


Muraviev-Apostol, rather than Pestel who was mainly responsible for securing the affiliation of the Society of United Slavs to the Southern Society in August 1825. Pestel’s main problem was that he had not realised just how controversial his idea for a Russian republic was. While there was general acceptance among the Decembrists for the abolition of serfdom, there was much less sympathy for Pestel’s agrarian revolution, which many found difficult to understand. Moreover, the nettle which Pestel grasped – the ending of all class-based privilege and distinction – was too painful for most to handle. Worse still, the suggestion of regicide at a time when terrorist acts of political assassination were unknown in Russia, was beyond the comprehension of most of Pestel’s confederates. Russia was by tradition wedded to Orthodoxy and to rule by God’s anointed tsar. For most Decembrists, the transformation of the tsar from an absolute autocrat to a constitutional monarch was the limit of their goals and expectations. ‘Those who think otherwise do not know Russia’, as Sergei Trubetskoi expressed it.22 The issues of regicide and republicanism, which caused a split in the Tulchin organisation between Pestel and Burtsov, effectively precipitated the decision taken in Moscow in May 1821 to ‘liquidate’ the Union of Welfare altogether. It was a decision that Pestel had no hand or part in and from which he dissociated himself. Yet these issues would remain unresolved and were to be the main stumbling block in 1824 when Pestel encountered stiff opposition to them from the Northern Society in St Petersburg. His cause was not helped by the perceived Napoleonic scale of his personal ambitions. His proposals controversially included government by a provisional revolutionary dictatorship for as long as 10 years, as provided for in his ‘instruction’ to Russia’s new rulers, Russian Justice, which paradoxically was a blueprint for a republic of equal citizens in a classless society. Alexander Poggio was right to suggest in a letter he wrote to Sergei Volkonskii’s son in February 1866 that if Pestel was reticent about giving a wider audience to the republican ideas central to Russian Justice it was because he feared that a majority would reject them point-blank.23 It was Poggio, too, who 40 years earlier had told the Investigating Committee that, at the last of the Kiev conferences of the Southern Society in January 1825, the organisation’s previous consensus and unity had evaporated as tension and disagreement rose around the challenging radicalism of Pestel’s proposals.24 Significantly, it was mainly for his proposals that Pestel was executed. The other four were hanged for their deeds: Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin and Sergei Muraviev-Apostol for leading the rising of the Chernigov


Regiment at Vasilkov, Kondratii Ryleev for organising the uprising in St Petersburg and Peter Kakhovskii for assassinating the GovernorGeneral of St Petersburg, Count Miloradovich, during the uprising of 14 December. The proposals for which Pestel was executed were to be taken up by succeeding generations of revolutionaries. They included regicide as the prerequisite for establishing a Russian republic within newly defined boundaries, the abolition of class-based privilege and distinction, revolutionary agrarian reform and the dictatorship of a provisional government of a self-selected elite while the stipulations of Russian Justice were implemented across the former Russian Empire. These were all prototypes of ideas which found their way into the manifestos of Russian revolutionary groups in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to contend that they are all recognisably precursors and subsequently characteristic features of Bolshevik theory and practice, stripped of its Marxist ideology, for the revolutionary transformation of Russia’s political, social and economic order after October 1917. They include the assassination of the Romanovs, the abolition of class distinction, a territorial redefinition of the boundaries of the former Russian Empire and the collectivisation of agriculture, all to be achieved under the regime of the dictatorship of the nomenklatura on behalf of the proletariat. As a British historian of Russia has put it: ‘Thus a century before the October Revolution Pestel thought up the one-party state as the means of achieving happiness in Russia’.25 In addition, the crucial role played by the secret police throughout the years of Soviet power was also prefigured in Pestel’s idea for an enforcement agency whose proposed manpower far exceeded that of Nicholas I’s own much-reviled Third Department and Corps of Gendarmes. Alexander Herzen famously went so far as to dub Pestel ‘a socialist before socialism’, a description more notable for its euphony than its accuracy, largely because of the radicalism of the agrarian reform set out in Russian Justice and because of his revolutionary aspirations.26 Herzen was particularly impressed by Pestel’s foresighted view of land distribution and credited him with expressing the view that the Decembrists’ revolution would not succeed until the land-owning gentry’s property rights were fundamentally changed to the advantage of the land-hungry peasant.27 In the first published analysis of Russian Justice, V.I. Semevskii expressed a view of its historical significance which was close to Herzen’s: ‘Pestel’s plans for agrarian transformation, despite his acceptance of private property, must be considered the birth pangs of socialism in Russia’.28 Such claims depend ultimately on one’s definition of socialism.


What may be conceded, however, is that Pestel’s ‘premature socialism’ was decidedly agrarian in character and represented a robust attempt to apply socio-economic theory to Russian reality. In fact, his agrarian proposals amounted to a potential revolution in that they posited a fundamental shift in rural relationships, anticipating but actually far exceeding the outcome of the 1861 Emancipation Act. His proposed reallocation of land is a case in point. By 1861 the peasants owned onethird of all arable land but under the terms of the emancipation act the landowners acquired one-fifth of the peasants’ allotments. Pestel, however, had proposed transferring to the peasants one half of all arable land. It may be fairly argued, therefore, that Pestel’s agrarian proposals were more far-reaching than the 1861 Act since they were based on the principle of common ownership of the land, half of it being assigned to the peasant communes. The Emancipation Act, in contrast, was based on the landlords’ ownership of the land, with the peasants buying back their allotments from them. Alexander Poggio rightly claimed that the main feature of Pestel’s originality lay in his programme for the peasants: ‘Many were our plans and ideas about the emancipation of the serfs … But the idea of freeing the peasants with land was Pestel’s alone.’ Poggio insisted that despite the official silence around Pestel after his execution, he should be given due credit for proposing the agrarian reform, the idea which was central to the 1861 Emancipation Act. ‘Emancipation with land is the way things should rightly be … But to deprive Pestel of the praise which is due to him alone is a perfidious distortion of historical truth’.29 Ultimately, it is this achievement which makes Pestel, despite all his flaws and contradictions, the most significant, controversial and interesting Decembrist, and numbers him among the major political figures of nineteenth-century Russia.

Notes 1

The Roots of Decembrism

1. N.P Pavlov-Sil’vanskii, ‘Pestel’, Pavel Ivanovich’, Russkii Biograficheskii Slovar’ (St Petersburg, 1902), pp. 599–615; G.A Nevelev, ‘N.P. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii – istorik dekabristov,’ Osvoboditel’noe dvizhenie v Rossii, i (1971) pp. 53–69, see p. 55. 2. P.E. Shchegolev, ‘Pamyati N.P. Pavlova-Sil’vanskogo’, Minuvshie gody, 10 (1908), pp. 309–19, see p. 315. 3. Shchegolev (1908), pp. 318–19. 4. Compare, for example, M.V. Nechkina, ‘Krizis yuzhnogo obshchestva dekabristov’, Istorik marksist, 7 (1935), 30–47 and the same author’s Dvizhenie dekabristov (Moscow, 1955), 2 vols. 5. S.S. Landa, Dukh revolyustionnogo preobrazovaniya. Iz istorii formirovaniya ideologii i politicheskoi organizatsii dekabristov 1816–25 (Moscow, 1975). V.V. Pugachev, ‘O spetsifike dekabristskoi revolyutsionnosti: (nekotorye spornye voprosy)’, Osvoboditel’noe dvizhenie v Rossii, 1 (1971), pp. 5–29; 2 (1971), pp. 11–32. 6. L.A. Medvedskaya, Pavel Ivanovich Pestel’ (Moscow, 1967). N.M. Lebedev, Pestel’ – ideolog i rukovoditel’ dekabristov (Moscow, 1972). A recent addition to the literature on Pestel is O.I. Kiyanskaya, Pavel Pestel’: ofitser, razvedchik, zagovorshchik (Moscow, 2002). 7. S.V. Mironenko, Dekabristy. Biograficheskii spravochnik (Moscow, 1988).

2

Education and Upbringing

1. S.D.Tol’, Masonskoe delo. Istoricheskii ocherk o zagovore dekabristov (St Petersburg, 1914), pp. 51–4. 2. L. Maikov, Russkii Biograficheskii Slovar’ (St Petersburg, 1902), pp. 593–9. See p. 593. 3. I.E. Andreevski (ed.), Entsiklopedicheskii Slovar’ Brokgaus-Efron, (St Petersburg, 1898), vol. 45, p. 429. 4. S.I. Pestel’, ‘Bumagi Ivana Borisovicha Pestelya’, Russkii arkhiv, iv (1875), pp. 369–423, see p. 392. 5. Pestel’ (1875), Brokgaus-Efron, vol. 45, p. 429. 6. Brokgaus-Efron, (St Petersburg, 1898), vol. 45, p. 429. See also A.V. Remnev, ‘Prokonsul Sibiri Ivan Borisovich Pestel”, Voprosy istorii, 2 (1997), pp. 142–9. 7. P.A. Vyazemskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (St Petersburg, 1883), vol. 8, pp. 391–2. The fathers of Vyazemskii and Pavel Pestel were good friends; and the sons ‘probably played together as children’ (p. 392). 8. A.O. Kruglyi, ‘P.I. Pestel’ po pis’mam ego roditelei’, Krasnyi arkhiv iii/16 (1926), pp. 165–88, see p. 169. Letter of 27 March 1804. These letters, among the few sources we have for Pestel’s early years, were mostly written, it should be noted, in French or German, but not in Russian. 196

Notes 197 9. N.I. Grech, Zapiski o moei zhizni (Moscow-Leningrad, 1930), pp. 435–6. Grech was a leading apologist for the ideological conservatism of Nicholas I’s ‘Official Nationality’. 10. GARF, f. 48, op.1, d.173ob. See also S.N. Chernov, ‘Imushchestvennoe polozhenie dekabristov’, Krasnyi arkhiv, 15 (1926), pp. 164–213, see p. 189. 11. Pestel’ (1875), pp. 415–18. Cf. the annual salary at that time of the historiographer, N.M. Karamzin, who with the rank of major-general received 2000 roubles. S.A. Ekshtut, V poiske istoricheskoi al’ternativy. Aleksandr I. Ego spodvizhniki. Dekabristy (Moscow, 1994), p. 75. 12. Lebedev (1972), p. 59. See also Patrick O’Meara, ‘The Decembrist Pavel Ivanovich Pestel: some questions of upbringing’, Irish Slavonic Studies, 9 (1988), pp. 6–20, on which sections of this chapter are based. 13. N.P. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii, Dekabrist Pestel’ pred Verkhovnym Ugolovnym Sudom (Rostov-on-Don, 1907), p. 6. 14. A.I. Kolechitskaya, ‘Moi zapiski ot 1820–go goda’, Litsa. Biograficheskii al’manakh, 6 (1995), 277–341. See p. 316. 15. Grech (1930), p. 437. 16. Grech (1930), p. 438. Seidel subsequently entered Russian service with the name Andrei Egorovich. (Vd viii, 375). 17. B.E. Syroechkovskii, ‘P.I. Pestel’ i K.F. German (k voprosu o rannykh politicheskikh vozzreniyakh Pestelya)’, Uchenye zapiski MGU kafedry istorii SSSR, vyp.167 (1954), pp. 151–78, see pp. 160–1. 18. Kruglyi, (1926), p. 169. Letter of 27 March 1804; GARF f. 48, op. 1, ed.khr.477 ch. 1, 1.38, letter dated 3/15 July (or June) 1807. 19. GARF f. 48, op. 1, d. 478, letters 3 and 8. There also survive from this period 14 letters from Seidel (in German) written between 1809 and 1811. ‘Generally speaking, the content of all these letters is less important than might have been expected, given the mutual relationship between Pestel and Seidel’ (Comment of archivist, f. 48, op. 1, p. 508). In addition there are various other letters in French and German ‘of no historical interest’. Otherwise we have 10 letters from Pestel’s grandfather, Boris Vladimirovich, written from Moscow between 1805 and 1811 which are of ‘an intimate family nature and marked by a deeply religious character’ (p. 509). 20. GARF f. 48, op. 1, d. 478, 1.81ob. Letter dated 9 December 1809. Jackson is identified as Pestel’s English governor in N.A. Sokolova, ‘Voennye stranitsy biografii P.I. Pestelya (materialy semeinoi perepiski)’, P.V. Il’in (ed.) 14 dekabrya 1825 goda. Istochniki. Issledovaniya. Istoriografiya. Bibliografiya (St Petersburg-Kishinev, 2000), no. 2, pp. 78–125, see p. 121. 21. Grech (1930), pp. 437–8. 22. G.A. Pobedimova, ‘Iz materialov o dekabristakh v arkhivakh fondov LOII SSSR AN SSSR’, Vspomogatel’nye istoricheskie distsipliny (Moscow, 1976), pp. 306–12, see p. 307, ‘Zemleopisanie Rossiiskogo gosudarstva’. This was in fact the title of a school text book written by E.F. Zyablovskii and published in 1787. Syroechkovskii considers that Pestel’s work was an abridged version of it, produced under the supervision of K.F. German, who was employed to prepare Pavel for his return to the Corps of Pages, where he would be his most influential teacher. See Syroechkovskii (1954), p. 163. 23. Yu.M. Lotman, Pushkin. Biografiya pisatelya. Stat’i i zametki, 1960–1990. ‘Evgenii Onegin’, Kommentarii (St Petersburg, 1995), pp. 498–9.

198 Notes 24. A.S. Gangeblov, ‘Pazheskii korpus v 1813–1821’, in A.D. Margolis, Peterburg dekabristov (St Petersburg, 2000), p. 38. 25. Syroechkovskii (1954), p. 161, n. 2; H. Mohrmann, Studien uber Russischdeutsche Begegnungen in der Wirtschaftswissenschaft (1750–1825) (Berlin, 1959), pp. 88–9. 26. John Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar (Oxford, 1985), p. 244. 27. Vd iv, 86. 28. Syroechkovskii (1954), pp. 165–6. 29. Quoted in V.I. Semevskii, Politicheskie i obshchestvennye idei dekabristov (Moscow, 1909), pp. 225–35. 30. A. Semenova, ‘Dekabrist P.I. Pestel’ i ego sem’ya,’ Moskva 11 (1975), pp. 194–200. See p. 195. 31. Semevskii (1909), p. 225. N.I. Lorer was transferred to Pestel’s Vyatka regiment with the rank of major in March 1824. He served eight years of a 12-year sentence of hard labour in Siberia followed by four years of exile. His military service resumed in 1837 as a private soldier in the Caucasian Corps. He was permitted to visit and reside in Moscow and St Petersburg from 1851. Amnestied in 1856, Lorer died in Poltava in May 1873. 32. P.A. Zaionchkovskii, ‘K voprosu o biblioteke P.I. Pestelya,’ Istorik-marksist, 4 (1941), pp. 86–9, see p. 86. 33. Semevskii (1909), p. 224. 34. G.A. Miloradovich, Materialy dlya istorii Pazheskogo ego imp. Vel. Korpusa 1711–1875 (Kiev, 1876), p. 43. 35. Pestel’ (1875), p. 417. 36. Grech (1930), p. 438. 37. See Kruglyi (1926), p. 171. 38. Grech (1930), p. 439. On Friedrich Klinger, see Patrick O’Meara, K.F. Ryleev. A Political Biography of the Decembrist Poet (Princeton, 1984), pp. 28–9. 39. Lebedev (1972), pp. 67–8. 40. D.M. Levshin, Pazheskii E.I.V. Korpus za sto let 1802–1902 (St Petersburg, 1902), i, pp. 303–5. Pestel’s examination results reveal both the impressive range of subjects and the high marks he achieved in them. He attained 1303 marks out of a total possible 1360, including full marks for trigonometry, Russian and diplomacy and politics. (Levshin (1902), ii, pp. 56–7). V.F. Adlerberg (who obtained 1273 ex 1360) was to have his revenge. His name replaced Pestel’s on the Corps’ role of honour following the Decembrist affair. He was among Nicholas’ retinue on Senate Square on 14 December 1825 and was a member of the Investigating Committee’s administrative team. He went on to enjoy an illustrious court career and died in 1884, at the ripe old age of 92. (O.R. von Freiman, Pazhi za 183 goda (1711–1894), Biografii byvshikh pazhei s portretami (Fridrikshamn, 1894), see pp. 165–6.)

3

Military Service

1. Letter (otnoshenie) No. 692 from the Corps of Pages to the regimental commander of 16 December 1811. (L. Plesterer, Istoriya 62-go pekhotnogo Suzdal’skogo polka, 6 vols. (Belostok, 1903), vol. 4: Istoriya Suzdal’skogo

Notes 199

2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

(1819–1831) i Vyatskogo (1825–1833) pekhotnykh polkov, appendix II, p. 3); Levshin (1902), ii, 56–7. Kruglyi (1926), p. 171, letter of 19 April 1812. Kruglyi (1926), p. 173, letter of 5 November 1812. A. V. Semenova, ‘Iz istorii bor’by III otdeleniya s otgoloskami dvizheniya dekabristov,’ Problemy istorii obshchestvennoi mysli i istoriografii: k 75-letiyu akademika M.V. Nechkiny (Moscow, 1976), pp. 61–5, see p. 64. GARF, f.48, op.1, ed.khr.477, ch. 1, 1.8, letter No. 5 (in French); 1.18ob, letter No. 8 (7 July 1813), also in French. Fourteen letters received by Pestel from his parents, written between 12 April 1812 and 21 March 1814, are published in N.A. Sokolova, ‘Voennye stranitsy biografii P.I. Pestelya (materialy semeinoi perepiski)’ P.V. Il’in (ed.), 14 dekabrya 1825 goda. Istochniki. Issledovaniya. Istoriografiya. Bibliografiya (St Petersburg-Kishinev, 2000), no. 2, pp. 78–151. Quoted in N. Eidelman, Conspiracy against the Tsar (Moscow, 1985), p. 35. Vd iii, 44. Yakushkin was one of the founders of the Union of Salvation, a member of the Union of Welfare, and participated in preparations for the uprising in Moscow planned for December 1825. After serving ten years in penal servitude he remained in Siberia and set up two schools in Yalutorovsk for local boys and girls. Following the amnesty of August 1856 he returned to Moscow where he died a year later, having written one of the most valuable Decembrist memoirs. (S. Ya. Shtraikh (ed.), Zapiski, stat’i, pis’ma dekabrista I.D. Yakushkina (Moscow, 1951).) A.V. Ionov, ‘Otkliki russkoi obshchestvennosti na zagranichnye pokhody russkoi armii v 1813–14 gg.’, Problemy istorii SSSR 13 (Moscow, 1983), pp. 157–73, see p. 170. Vd iv, 92. Of Vitgenshtein, Nikolai Basargin, a member of the Southern Society and, from January 1825, Senior Adjutant of the General Staff, Second Army HQ, Tulchin, wrote: ‘Count Vitgenshtein, a hero of 1812, was an extraordinarily good, outstanding man. He enjoyed an enormous military reputation throughout Russia and Europe. This reputation was, perhaps, somewhat exaggerated. Nevertheless, I often heard Pestel, who fought alongside him in the 1812 campaign, say that he was a man of unerring tactical ability and exemplary courage’. (I.V. Porokh, V.A. Fedorov (eds), ‘Vospominaniya N.V. Basargina’, Memuary dekabristov. Yuzhnoe obshchestvo (Moscow, 1982), p. 16). L.Ya. Pavlova, Dekabristy – uchastniki voin 1805–1814gg. (Moscow, 1979), pp. 73–4, 78–9; Mironenko (1988), p. 141. Vd viii, 375. P.N. Svistunov, ‘Neskol’ko zamechanii po povodu noveishikh knig i statei o sobytii 14 dekabrya i o dekabristakh,’ Russkii arkhiv (1870), cols 1633–68. See col. 1644. Grech (1930), pp. 439–40. N.I. Lorer, Zapiski dekabrista (Irkutsk, 1984), p. 69. N.Ya. Eidel’man, ‘Iz predystorii dekabrizma’, Problemy istorii russkogo obshchestvennogo dvizheniya i istoricheskoi nauki (Moscow 1981), pp. 23–9, see p. 24. Quoted in Eidel’man (1981), pp. 26–7. Kruglyi, (1926), pp. 174–6. Basargin describes Kiselev as ‘a quite remarkable personality … extraordinarily intelligent, adroit and energetic’ with ‘a talent for providing leadership and inspiring the loyalty of those he commanded.’

200 Notes

18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

(Porokh (1982), p. 17). Kiselev went on to achieve ministerial rank under Nicholas I and to serve as ambassador in Paris. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1902), p. 600. A.P. Zablotskii-Desyatovskii, Graf P.D. Kiselev i ego vremya (St Petersburg, 1882), pp. i, 99. N.F. Dubrovin, ‘Bumagi Grafa Arseniya Andreevicha Zakrevskogo’, Sbornik Imperatorskogo Russkogo Istoricheskogo Obshchestva, 78 (St Petersburg, 1891), vol. 2, see p. 17, letter dated 13 July 1819. S.Ya. Shtraikh, ‘Dekabrist P.I. Pestel’. Novye materialy’, Byloe xx (1922), 106–15. See p. 111, letter of 8 May 1819. A.L. Narochnitskii (ed.), ‘Zapiska podpolkovnika P.I. Pestelya nachal’niku shtaba vtoroi armii P.D. Kiselevu’, Vneshnyaya politika Rossii XIX i nachala XX veka, series 2, vol. 4(12), (Moscow, 1984), p. 119. A.S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad, 1949), vol. 12, p. 303. Ekshtut, (1994), pp. 74–7. Pestel’s attitude to the closure of the Union of Welfare and his role in the formation of two new secret organisations, the Northern and Southern societies, will be discussed in the next chapter. Nevertheless, a Soviet historian asserted that for some (unspecified) members of the secret society: ‘Gribovskii’s report had the most tangible consequences – exclusion from the service, repression and intensified shadowing’. M.V. Nechkina, Dvizhenie dekabristov (Moscow, 1955), i, 352. Semevskii (1909), p. 251. I.S. Dostyan, ‘O rukopisi v krasnom pereplete i ego avtore’, Voprosy istorii 12 (1975), pp. 110–25, see p. 112, n. 12. On this see also Theophilus C. Prousis, Russian Society and the Greek Revolution (DeKalb, 1994), p. 49. Semevskii (1909), pp. 252–3. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii, ‘Iz zapisok Pestelya o grecheskom vosstanii 1821 g.’ (1907), p. 172. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1907), p. 172. This was a reference to Russia’s own development as a sovereign nation state. It was a result first of Dimitrii Donskoi’s famous victory at Kulikovo (1380) over the Mongols, who had imposed their ‘Tatar yoke’ on the Russian lands from 1240, and second of Ivan III’s decision in 1480 to cease paying tribute to the Mongol khan at Sarai, thus effectively ending 240 years of suzerainty. Zablotskii-Desyatovskii (1882), i. 139. Zablotskii-Desyatovskii (1882), i. 140. Lorer (1984), p. 72. In fact, Pestel had not yet achieved the rank attributed to him in Lorer’s account. Moreover, as mentioned earlier, Alexander must have known about Pestel from Gribovskii’s report of the previous May. Dubrovin (1891), vol. 2, p. 195, letter of 2 June 1819. Dubrovin (1891), vol. 2, p. 200, letter of 1 August 1819. Dubrovin (1891), vol. 2, p. 25, letter of 14–16 August 1819. F.I. Pokrovskii, P.G. Vasenko (eds), ‘Pis’ma Pestelya k P.D. Kiselevu (1821–23gg.),’ Pamyati dekabristov (Leningrad, 1926), iii, 151. Letter of 23 October 1819. Dubrovin (1891), vol. 2, p. 53, letter of 27–9 November 1819. Dubrovin (1891), vol. 2, p. 213, letter of 15 December 1819.

Notes 201 41. Dubrovin (1891), vol. 2, p. 232, letter of 28 September 1820. See also Zablotskii-Desyatovskii (1882), i, 91. 42. Zablotskii-Desyatovskii (1882), i, 94. 43. Ekshtut (1994), pp. 100–1. 44. Dubrovin (1891), vol. 2, pp. 59–60, Kiselev to Zakrevskii, 17 February 1821; p. 70, Kiselev to Zakrevskii, 18 June 1821; p. 246, Zakrevskii to Kiselev, 29–30 June 1821. On Kiselev and the Decembrists see also A.V. Semenova, Vremennoe revolyutsionnoe pravitel’stvo v planakh dekabristov (Moscow, 1982), ch. 4; E.A. Prokof’ev, Voennye vzglyady dekabristov (Moscow, 1953), pp. 54ff. 45. Semenova (1982), p. 154. Letter of 16 July 1821. 46. F.I. Pokrovskii (1926), p. 158, letter of 19 July 1821. 47. Zablotskii-Desyatovskii (1882), i, 90. 48. Zablotskii-Desyatovskii (1882), i, 92. 49. Shtraikh (1922), p. 112, letter of 16 June 1821. 50. Zablotskii-Desyatovskii (1882), i, 157. 51. Zablotskii-Desyatovskii (1882), i, 156. F.P. Shakhovskoi, a member of the Union of Welfare, was duly retired with the rank of major on 3 February 1822. 52. N.V. Basargin, Vospominaniya, rasskazy, stat’i (Irkutsk, 1988), pp. 54, 59. 53. Shtraikh (ed.), (1951), p. 36; Nechkina (1955), i, 321. 54. Zablotskii-Desyatovskii (1882), i, 89. 55. A.V. Semenova, ‘Yuzhnye dekabristy i P.D. Kiselev’, Istoricheskie zapiski, 96 (1975), pp. 128–51. See pp. 142, 128, 131, 144. 56. Semenova (1982), p. 173. 57. F.I. Pokrovskii (1926), p. 154. 58. Vd viii, 375; Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1907), p. 7. 59. Shtraikh (1922), p. 112, letter of 29 December 1821. 60. F.I. Pokrovskii (1926), p. 159, letter of 19 July 1821. 61. F.I. Pokrovskii (1926), p. 160, letter of late November/early December. 62. GARF f.48, d.473. 63. M.S. Lunin, Sochineniya, pis’ma, dokumenty, I.A. Zhelvakova, N.Ya. Eidel’man (eds) (Irkutsk, 1988), pp. 173, 467–8. The extract is quoted from Lunin’s essay ‘The social movement in Russian in the current reign’ (Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii v nyneshnee tsarstvovanie), written in 1840 and first published in 1926 in Dekabrist M.S. Lunin, S.Ya. Shtraikh (ed.). Perhaps the most stoical of the Decembrists, Lunin was a member from 1816 of the Union of Salvation, then of the Union of Welfare and the Northern Society. From January 1822 he served in Warsaw with the Grodno Hussars attached to the staff of Grand Duke Constantine. Largely as a result of his declared sympathy for the aims expressed in Pestel’s Russian Justice, he served 10 years’ penal servitude in Siberia. In 1841 he ran foul of the authorities in Irkutsk for his essays on the Decembrist secret societies. Nicholas I ordered him to be kept in ‘severe incarceration’. Lunin died in prison in Nerchinsk, Siberia, in December 1845. 64. F.I. Pokrovskii (1926), p. 189, letter of 15 November 1822. 65. F.I. Pokrovskii (1926), p. 181. 66. F.I. Pokrovskii (1926), pp. 174–5. 67. F.I. Pokrovskii (1926), pp. 197–9, letter of 16 May 1823. 68. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1902), p. 600.

202 Notes 69. A. Savchenko, ‘Potomok dekabrista’, Neva, xi (1988), pp. 182–3. According to this source, Ivan Borisovich’s letter of refusal is dated 22 October 1815. Savchenko notes that the grandson of Ivanov, M.V. Ivanov, was the Red Navy’s first admiral; he died in 1942. 70. Kruglyi (1926), p. 180. 71. Lorer (1984), pp. 70–1. 72. Kruglyi (1926), p. 180; GARF f. 48, op. 1, d. 477/2, 1.275. 73. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1907), p. 5. 74. Plesterer (1903), vol. 4, pp. 174–5, 183, 187; F.I. Pokrovskii (1926), pp. 179–80. 75. V. Gantsova-Bernikova, ‘Otgoloski dekabr’skogo vosstaniya 1825 goda’, Krasnyi arkhiv, 16 (1926), 189–204, see p. 193. 76. B.E. Syroechkovskii (ed.), Zapiski i pis’ma dekabrista I.I. Gorbachevskogo (Moscow, 1925), p. 33. Gorbachevskii was a member from 1823 of the Society of United Slavs. After serving 13 years’ penal servitude in Chita, he was exiled to Petrovskii zavod where he died in January 1869. 77. D.A. Kropotov, Zhizn’ grafa M.N. Murav’eva (St Petersburg, 1874), p. 195. 78. A.E. Rozen, ‘Mikhail Nikolaevich Murav’ev i ego uchastie v tainom obshchestve 1816–1821’, Russkaya starina i (1884), pp. 61–70, see p. 67. 79. V.S. Pecherin, Zamogil’nye zapiski (Kalinin, 1932), p. 23. Pecherin (1807–77) was living in St Petersburg in 1825 but was not a Decembrist. Briefly Professor of Latin at Moscow University, he left Russia in 1836, converted to Catholicism and became a Redemptorist priest. From 1854 until his death he lived and worked in Ireland where he became the first chaplain of the Mater hospital in Dublin. 80. M.K. Sokolovskii, ‘Dekabristy. Bumagi o nikh’, Russkii arkhiv 6 (1905), pp. 303–23, see pp. 309–10, ‘Pamyat’ o Pestele v Vyatskom polku. Donesenie sekretarya Zaslavskogo Nizhnego Zemskogo Suda Yaretskogo, 22 noyabrya 1826 g.’. 81. Lorer (1984), p. 72. 82. Grech (1930), p. 439. 83. Gantsova-Bernikova (1926), p. 192. Agent’s report of 16 February 1827. These regular reports on attitudes within the tainted Vyatka Regiment ceased only in 1829. 84. Vd iv, pp. 50–1. 85. Plesterer (1903), vol. 4, p. 183. 86. Plesterer (1903), vol. 4, pp. 195–6. 87. Semenova (1975), p. 200; O.I. Kiyanskaya, ‘Dokumenty o finansovoi deyatel’nosti P.I. Pestelya v Vyatskom pekhotnom polku’, 14 dekabrya 1825 goda. Istochniki, issledovaniya, istoriografiya, bibliografiya (St PetersburgKishinev, 2001), no. 4, 198–228, see p. 213. 88. Kiyanskaya (2001), pp. 205–10.

4

The Political and Social Environment

1. Perhaps it is worth recalling that, in Russian history at least, the Ulyanov brothers (the executed rebel Alexander and the future Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin) present just the same conundrum given their similarly conventional ‘middle-class’ family background.

Notes 203 2. Kruglyi, (1926), p. 168, letter of 30 July 1812. 3. GARF f. 48, op.1, ed.khr. 477, ch. 2, l.64, letter of 5 August 1818 (in French), and l.81, letter of 10 January 1819. 4. Pestel’ (1875), pp. 415–16. 5. I.Ya. Shchipanova, S.Ya. Shtraikh (eds), Izbrannye sotsial’no-politicheskie i filosofskie proizvedeniya dekabristov (Moscow, 1951), ii.498. The letter dates from 1822. 6. GARF f. 48, op.1, d.476, ch. 2, 1.26. Letter of 31 March 1825. See also Kruglyi (1926), p. 187. 7. S.M. Volkonskii, writing in 1922, observed about his grandfather, S.G. Volkonskii, a leading figure of the Southern Society’s Kamenka branch: ‘We should add at this point that, as we have seen, the Decembrists were profoundly religious.’ S.M. Volkonskii, Vospominaniya: o dekabristakh. Razgovory (Moscow, 1994), p. 103. 8. For example, a letter of 5 June 1823 contains in Ivan Borisovich’s hand an extract from St. Luke’s gospel, ch. 8, vv.11–15. (GARF f. 48, op. 1, d. 476, ch. 1, ll.8, 8ob). 9. Kruglyi (1926), p. 175. Letter of 16 May 1818. 10. Shchipanova (1951), ii.499. 11. Vd iv, 89; Kruglyi (1926), p. 183. 12. Kruglyi (1926), p. 183. Letter of 16 August 1825. The reference is to Heinrich Bernhardt Johann Dreseke (1774–1849). Letter of 19 August 1825. It is worth mentioning in this context that Pestel’s archive contains several files of notes on religious themes, extracts from the Gospels, prayers and so on, written in his cramped and not readily decipherable German handwriting. (GARF f. 48, op. 1, dd. 495–505.) 13. Kruglyi (1926) pp. 183–6. Letters of 8 September and 7 October 1825. 14. GARF f. 48, op. 2, d. 473, ll.14-14ob. 15. Vd iv, 46. They are now among Pestel’s archive in GARF. See also N.M. Druzhinin, ‘Masonskie znaki Pestelya’, Muzei revolyutsii SSSR, ii, (Moscow, 1929), pp. 12–49, and his ‘K istorii ideinikh iskanii P.I. Pestelya,’ S.S. Dmitriev (ed.), Izbrannye trudy. Revolyutsionnoe dvizhenie v Rossii v XIX v (Moscow, 1985), pp. 307–29. 16. V.I. Semevskii, ‘Dekabristy-masony’, Minuvshie gody (St Petersburg, 1908), v, 379–433, see p. 379. The figures he gives are 23 out of 121. For further discussion of freemasonry and the Decembrist movement see O’Meara (1984), pp. 70–4. A useful addition to the literature on this subject is Lauren G. Leighton, The Esoteric Tradition in Russian Romantic Literature. Decembrism and Freemasonry (Pennsylvania, 1994), see especially pp. 25–33. 17. T. Sokolovskaya, Russkoe masonstvo i ego znachenie v istorii obshchestvennogo dvizheniya (St Petersburg, 1908) pp. 171–3. The Russian term is ‘shotlandskii master’; Tol’ (1914), p. 63. 18. Vd iv, 45. 19. Grech (1930), p. 440. Grech provides this memorable description of Pestel at one such meeting: ‘He was on the short side and had an intelligent, pleasant and serious face. Particularly distinctive were his high forehead and prominent front teeth.’ 20. Nechkina (1955), i.152–3. See Chapter 2. 21. Vd iv, 100.

204 Notes 22. For a discussion of this question, see I.F Iovva, ‘Otdel’nye aspekty deyatel’nosti yuzhnykh dekabristov’, Istoricheskii akt 1812 goda i ego znachenie v sud’bakh moldavskogo naroda (Kishenev, 1982), pp. 114–39. 23. Quoted in T.C. Prousis, Russian Society and the Greek Revolution (DeKalb, 1994), p. 137. See also Leighton (1994), p. 181. 24. Vd iv, 94, 105. The French translation is Pestel’s own: he was clearly anxious that his interrogators, most of whom were as much at home with French as they were with Russian, understood exactly what he meant. On the European context of the Decembrist movement, see O.V. Orlik, Dekabristy i evropeiskoe revolyutsionnoe dvizhenie (Moscow, 1975); M.V. Nechkina, ‘Dekabristy vo vsemirnoi istorii’, Voprosy istorii, 12 (1975), pp. 3–18. 25. M.A. Fonvizin, ‘Obozrenie proyavleniya politicheskoi zhizni v Rossii’, Obshchestvennye dvizheniya v Rossii v pervoi polovine XIX v (St Petersburg, 1905), vol. 1, p. 185. 26. Vd iv, 90. 27. Vd iv, 91. 28. F. Venturi, ‘Destutt de Tracy and the liberal revolutions,’ Studies in Free Russia, Translated by F.S. Walsby and M. O’Dell, (Chicago, 1982), pp. 59–93, see pp. 61, 66. 29. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1907), p. 174. 30. Vd iv, 89–91. See also C. Lübke, Novgorod in der russischen Literatur (bis zu den Dekabristen) (Berlin, 1984). 31. Vd iv, 90. 32. I.V. Maiorov, ‘Krest’yanskie vospominaniya o P.I. i B.I. Pestele’, Byloe 5 (1906), pp. 266–7, see p. 266. 33. Kruglyi (1926), pp. 183–6. See letter of 20 November 1824, p. 170. Syroechkovskii (1954), p. 160. 34. On this, see O’Meara (1984), p. 43, n. 69. 35. Vd iv, 90.

5

Pestel and the Decembrist Movement

1. Nechkina (1955), i, 154; Mironenko (1988), p. 129. 2. Vd iv, 91, 101. See Medvedskaya (1967), p. 31. 3. Vd i, 305–6. Pestel’s description of it is as follows: ‘The distinctive feature of Novikov’s constitution was its republicanism, and in it Supreme Power was vested in a special estate (soslovie) whose chairman had two votes while the other members had only one. Other matters were arranged in accordance with almost all other republican constitutions. It had a lot in common with the American version.’ (Vd iv, 113). 4. Vd iv, 100. 5. GARF f. 48, op. 1, d. 82, l.60. 6. Vd iv, 82. 7. Vd iv, 113. 8. Nechkina (1955), i, 155; see, for example, Trubetskoi’s testimony, Vd i, 24. 9. Vd iv, 101. 10. Vd iv, 179. 11. Nechkina (1955), i, 170–1.

Notes 205 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Shtraikh (ed.) (1951), p. 23. Porokh and Fedorov (eds) (1982), p. 17. Vd i, 9, 29; Nechkina (1955), i, 169. Mironenko (1988), p. 141. GARF f. 48, d.231, ll.1-1ob. Quoted in A.G.Mazour, The First Russian Revolution, 1825. The Decembrist Movement. Its Origins, Development and Significance (Stanford, 1962), p. 70. Porokh and Fedorov (1982), p. 20. Semevskii (1909), p. 225. Pierre Laromiguière (1756–1837), Professor of Philosophy and Librarian at the Sorbonne from 1811, was the author of Les principes de l’intelligence, ou sur les causes et sur les origines des idées (1815–18). Presumably, it was this work with which Pestel was familiar. Porokh and Fedorov (1982), pp. 15–16. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1907), pp. 145–6. Landa (1975), p. 99. GARF f. 48, op.1, d.230, l.2ob. Testimony of Ilya Dolgorukov. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1902), p. 605. M.V. Dovnar-Zapol’skii, Tainoe obshchestvo dekabristov (Moscow, 1906), p. 57. Vd i, 299, 307; Nechkina (1955) i, 216. Landa (1975), pp. 93, 95. Repnin-Volkonskii was Governor-General of Ukraine from 1816 to 1834. From his office in Poltava he sought to ameliorate the serfs’ condition by, for example, co-ordinating famine relief. But he merely antagonised the Ukrainian landowners, ever suspicious of his intentions. GARF, f. 48, op. 1, d. 87, l.14ob. Vd iv, 101. GARF, f. 48, op. 1, d. 96, l.7; Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1907), p. 140. Vd iv,108. Dovnar-Zapol’skii (1906), pp. 60–1. Vd xii, 121–2. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1907), p. 142. Vd iv, 108. Vd xii, 298. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1907), pp. 140–1. Vd xii, 122. My italics. Nechkina (1955), i, 228–9. Vd iii, 68 (Fonvizin). Quoted in Medvedskaya (1967), p. 39. Most commentators give March as the month in which this meeting took place. But Landa argues convincingly that it was in fact held in January. See Landa (1975), pp. 130–1. GARF f. 48, op. 1, d. 82, ll.15ob-16. Vd iv, 101–2; Semevskii (1909), p. 445; Nechkina (1955) i, 286. Vd iv, 91. Nechkina (1955), i, 288. I.V. Vasil’ev, ‘Iz istorii organizatsionnoi deyatel’nosti tul’chinskoi upravy’, Osvoboditel’noe dvizhenie v Rossii (1971), no. i, pp. 30–52. See p. 39. Or again, Syroechkovskii asserted that the ‘March (sic) resolution of 1820 of the main governing nucleus occupies an exceptional place in the history of the Russian republican movement’ (Syroechkovskii (1969), p. 215).

206 Notes 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

Landa (1975), p. 125. Vd iv, 102. Landa (1975), p. 125. GARF, f. 48, op. 1, d. 82, 11.56–60. Vd xviii, 188, 194. Vd xiv, 436. Quoted in Landa (1975), p. 138. N.P. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii, Ocherki po russkoi istorii XVIII–XIX vekov (St Petersburg, 1910), p. 218. G.A. Nevelev, ‘N.P. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii – istorik dekabristov,’ Osvoboditel’noe dvizhenie v Rossii, i (1971), pp. 53–69, p. 62. Vd iv, 155; Vd i, 317–18. Vd iv, 177. Nechkina (1955), i, 219. Nechkina (1955), i, 281. Nikita Muraviev testified that he made a copy of Pestel’s constitution, translated into French, in August 1820 when he passed through Tulchin on his way to Odessa (Vd i, 299). Shtraikh (1951), p. 36. Vasil’ev (1971), p. 41. Shtraikh (1951), p. 37. Shtraikh (1951), pp. 46–7. Vd iv, 108. Komarov, a lieutenant-colonel attached to the Quartermaster’s section, Second Army HQ , Tulchin, was not among those subsequently arrested. He was transferred at his own request to the civil service in 1826, resumed his military career in 1830, and retired early in 1840. He committed suicide in May 1853. Shtraikh (1951), p. 44. Porokh and Fedorov (1982), p. 22. S.N. Chernov, ‘K istorii politicheskikh stolknovenii na Moskovskom s’’ezde 1821 g.’, U istokov russkogo osvoboditel’nogo dvizheniya, B.E. Syroechkovskii, I.V. Porokh (eds) (Saratov, 1960), pp. 46–95, see p. 91. Medvedskaya (1967), p. 57. GARF f. 48, op. 1, d. 95 (Burtsov), l.15. Shtraikh (1951), p. 45. Nechkina (1955), i, 331. Shtraikh (1951), p. 46. Vd iv,108. Porokh and Fedorov (1982), p. 22.

6

Ideologist of the Decembrist Movement: Russian Justice

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69.

1. Vd vii, 120. 2. Vd iv, 86–7. 3. M.S. Lunin, ‘Razbor doneseniya, predstavlennogo rossiiskomu imperatoru tainoi komissiei v 1826 godu’, (1988), pp. 67–77, see p. 73. 4. V.I. Semevskii, ‘Retsenziya na izdanie Shchegolevym “Russkoi pravde” Pestelya’, Byloe, 5 (1906), pp. 278–83, see p. 279; A.A. Pokrovskii, ‘ “Russkaya pravda” P.I. Pestelya i metody ee izdaniya’, Trudy istoricheski-arkhivnogo instituta, vol. 4 (1948), 265–79, see p. 268.

Notes 207 5. M.V. Nechkina ‘ “Russkaya pravda” i dvizhenie dekabristov’, Vd vii, 9–75, see p. 23. For a detailed analysis of this work and its place in the development of Pestel’s political orientation, see Syroechkovskii, ‘Perekhod Pestelya’ (1969). 6. Pugachev, 2 (1971), p. 25. 7. B.E. Syroechkovskii, ‘Byl li Pestel’ avtorom raboty “Prakticheskie nachala politicheskoi ekonomii” ’, Iz istorii dvizheniya dekabristov (Moscow, 1969), pp. 58–126; Nechkina (1955), i, 149–50. 8. S.S. Mil’man, ‘ “Prakticheskie nachala politicheskoi ekonomii” P.I. Pestelya’, Kransnyi arkhiv, 1925 vol. 6 (13), pp. 174–249, 280–4. One of the most curious passages in the text contains a brief assessment of the state of education in the British Isles. These are comments recorded by Pestel but presumably attributable either to German or to Balugyanskii: ‘England has the most outstanding authors in all disciplines but especially in the political sciences. The institutions of learning are very badly organised, particularly the ancient universities of Oxford and Canterbury (sic!). In Ireland the national education is badly organised. The best institution of learning is to be found in Edinburgh where all branches of science are taught’ (see p. 243). 9. E.M. Kosachevskaya, Mikhail Andreevich Balug’yanskii i Peterburgskii universitet pervoi chetverti XIX veka (Leningrad, 1971), pp. 181–3. 10. Vd iv, 114–15. 11. Vd vii, 120. 12. Vd vii, 118–20. 13. Vd iv, 158. 14. Vd iv, 275, 349. 15. Nechkina, Vd vii, 9. 16. On this, see N.S. Rusanova, ‘Vliyaniya evropeiskogo sotsializma na dekabristov i molodogo Gertsena’, Minuvshie gody 12 (1908), pp. 170–90. 17. S.B. Okun’, Dekabrist M.S. Lunin (Leningrad, 1962), pp. 31–4. 18. G. Chinard, ‘Jefferson et les idéologues’, The Johns Hopkins Studies in Romance Literatures and Languages, quoted in E. Dvoichenko-Markov, ‘Jefferson and the Russian Decembrists’, American Slavic and East European Review, vol. ix, no. 3 (1950), pp. 162–8, see p. 164, n. 9. 19. Venturi (1982), p.78; Syroechkovskii, ‘Perekhod Pestelya’ (1969), p. 189. 20. See Commentaire s´ ur l’esprit des lois de Montesquieu (Liège, 1817), pp. 87, 136. 21. Syroechkovskii, ‘Perekhod Pestelya’ (1969), p. 191; Landa (1975), p. 195. Landa (p. 147) refutes Syroechkovskii’s suggestion that Pestel had read it in early 1820 and argues that he did not do so until June 1821. However, given Pestel’s republican stance at the meeting of the Union of Welfare’s executive board it seems hard to resist Syroechkovskii’s dating. 22. Vd iv, 91. 23. Testimony of A.V. Poggio, Vd ix, 75, quoted in Venturi (1982), p. 83. 24. Semevskii (1909), p. 546. 25. Vd ix, 77; Landa (1975), pp. 194–5. 26. Venturi (1982), p. 86. 27. To give just one of numerous examples, see F. Morozov, ‘Ekonomicheskie voprosy v “Russkoi pravde” P.I. Pestelya’, Voprosy ekonomiki, 11 (1950), pp. 24–40. Here the author, conforming to the party line of the post-war Zhdanovshchina years, accuses V.I. Semevskii of ‘having suffered from the disease of kowtowing to Western social thought’ in his survey of Western

208 Notes

28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52.

influences on Pestel. He also castigates M.N. Pokrovskii for his ‘silly little cosmopolitan idea’ that Pestel was influenced by Sismondi (see pp. 33, 34). Vd vii, 115. Pestel summarises here Mat. 12, 30–1. Vd vii, 69. See, for example, Nechkina (1955) i, 115. The collected works of Radishchev (published 1807–11) are among the Russian books found in the library of Nikita Muraviev. See Druzhinin (1985), p. 252. Vd vii, 174, 157. For a detailed discussion of the differences in Pestel’s proposals in relation to the peasant question in the two versions of Russian Justice, see S.M. Faiershtein, ‘Dva varianta resheniya agrarnogo voprosa v “Russkoi Pravde” ’, N.M. Druzhinin and B.E. Syroechkovskii (eds), Ocherki iz istorii dvizheniya dekabristov (Moscow, 1954), pp. 15–61. Vd vii, 47, 199, 187. Vd ix, 58–60; M.K. Azadovskii, ‘Zateryannye i utrachennye proizvedeniya dekabristov’, A.M. Egolin et al. (eds), Literaturnoe nasledstvo (Moscow, 1954), p. 639. Vd vii, 129. Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev, the ‘baptiser of Russia’, embraced the Byzantine Orthodox rite in 1088 on behalf of his people. Vd vii, 341, 69–73. One commentator has even suggested that Count Benkendorf actually got the idea of establishing a dedicated corps of gendarmes from reading these pages of Russian Justice, citing as evidence the speed with which the Third Department was set up under Nicholas I. See M. Ol’minskii, Gosudarstvo, byurokratiya i absolyutizm v istorii Rossii (MoscowLeningrad, 1925), p. 184. Vd vii, 204. Vd vii, 122–6, 136–50. See, for example, N. Deev, ‘Politicheskaya ideologiya dekabristov: kritika sovremennykh burzhuaznykh interpretatsii’, Pravovedenie, 6 (1975), pp. 104–11, see p. 110. Vd vii, 121–2. Vd vii, 122–4. Vd vii, 149–50. Semevskii (1909), p. 523. M.V. Dovnar-Zapol’skii, Idealy dekabristov (Moscow, 1907), p.389. Vd vii, 146–8. Semevskii (1909), p. 521. Vd vii, 163. Vd iv, 44. For example, he uses archaic forms like prinyaty byt’ imeyut, sluzhit’ imeet osnovaniem, iz sego yavstvuet, and words like daby, poeliku, koii, paki, yako, nizhe. Vd vii, 417; Vd x, 62. V.S. Parsamov, ‘P.I. Pestel’ kak “arkhaist” ’, V.V. Mavrodin (ed.), Problemy istorii kul’tury, literatury, sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoi mysli (Saratov, 1984), pp. 126–46. See also his ‘K genezisu kul’turno-yazykovoi positsii P.I. Pestelya’, V.V. Pugachev (ed.), “Tamizdat” ot osuzhdeniya – k dialogu (Saratov, 1990), pp. 113–20. Vd iv, 92.

Notes 209 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

69.

Vd iv, 11; Vd ix, 58–60. Lorer (1984), p. 71. Vd iv, 178. Vd xii, 387. A.E. Rozen in S.S. Volk (ed.), ‘Zapiski dekabrista’, Vernye syny otechestva. Vospominaniya uchastnikov dekabristskogo dvizheniya v Peterburge (Leningrad, 1982), p. 320. S.G. Volkonskii, Zapiski (Irkutsk, 1991), p. 375. Vd vii, 29; Vd iv, 163. Podzhio (1989), p. 309. Vd i, 264. Vd iii, 120. M.V. Dovnar-Zapol’skii, Memuary dekabristov (Kiev, 1906), p. 55. Volkonskii (1991), p. 375. M. Bakunin, Izbrannye proizvedeniya (Moscow, 1920), vol. 3, p. 90. Gertsen (1956), vol. 7, p. 200. Herzen’s view of Pestel is further considered in Chapter 12. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1902), p. 603. Vd vii, 199–200. For a discussion of Pestel’s proposals on law reform, see E.V. Vilenskii, ‘P.I. Pestel’ o prave’, Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo, 12 (1975), pp. 94–7. Rozen (1982), p. 321.

7

In the Southern Society

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1907), p. 141. Vd x, 48. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1907), p. 141. Vd x, 115. S.G. Volkonskii already had a very distinguished military record with the rank of major-general by the time he became a member of the Union of Welfare in 1819. He was an active freemason and a member of four lodges between 1814 and 1820. He had estates in Nizhegorod and Yaroslavl provinces and in the Crimea, and owned 1600 serfs. From 1823 he led, together with V.L. Davydov, the Kamenka section of the Southern Society, and shared Pestel’s republican outlook. He served 10 years of a 20-year sentence of hard labour in Siberia, where he was joined by his wife Mariya Nikolaevna Raevskaya in November 1826, followed by exile in Irkutsk. He was amnestied in August 1856 by Alexander II and returned to Moscow. He died in Chernigov province in November 1865, only days before his 77th birthday. See, S.G. Volkonskii, Zapiski, N.Ya. Eidel’man, (ed.), (Irkutsk, 1991). A.V. Poggio, a fellow member of the Kamenka section and a life-long friend, visited Volkonskii’s family at their Chernigov estate after his return to Russia from Florence in 1873. He died there in June that year, aged 75, and was buried next to his old comrade. Nechkina (1955), i, 351. Vd x, 279. Vd x, 85–6, 91. GARF, f. 48, op. 1, d. 156, l.10.

210 Notes 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Vd iv, 108–9. Vd x, 91. Vd iv, 110. Shtraikh (ed.), (1951), p. 44. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1907), p. 141. Vd x, 48. Quoted in Medvedskaya (1967), p. 65. Vd x, 89. Vd x, 256. Vd iv, 110. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1902), p. 610. Maiboroda, a captain under Pestel’s command, betrayed the Southern Society to the authorities in a report dated 25 November 1825. This was followed by a detailed statement in which he named as many as 46 associates of Pestel. Rewarded with a transfer to the prestigious Grenadier Guards, Maiboroda went on to enjoy an ostensibly successful military career, but he was an unpopular figure, loathed by his officers. He committed suicide by falling on his sword in the first weeks of 1844. P.E. Shchegolev (ed.), Zapiski N.V. Basargina (Petrograd, 1917), pp. 62–3. Nechkina (1955), i, 337, 343. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1907), pp. 145–6; Vd iv, 349. Sergei Muraviev-Apostol was a founder-member of the Union of Salvation and of the Union of Welfare. He was, with Pestel and Yushnevskii, a member of the Southern Society’s directorate and, with Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin, leader of the Vasilkov section. They were also largely responsible for persuading a Ukraine-based group known as the Society of United Slavs to join forces with the Southern Society in August 1825. Muraviev-Apostol led the rising of the Chernigov regiment from 29 December 1825 to 3 January 1826. For their revolutionary republicanism and, above all, for their readiness to assassinate the Tsar in its cause, Sergei Muraviev-Apostol and Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin were among the five Decembrists executed in July 1826. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1907), p. 146. Vd x, 116. Vd x, 225. Vd x, 270. Vd iv, 91. Nechkina (1955), i, 187. Vd iv, 109, 111. Medvedskaya (1967), p. 65. Quoted in Nechkina (1955), i, 356. Matvei Muraviev-Apostol, older brother of Sergei, was one of the founders of the Union of Salvation, a member of the Union of Welfare and of the Southern Society, and participated in the rising of the Chernigov regiment. In spite of his brother’s terrible fate, his 20-year sentence of hard labour in Siberia was first reduced to 15 years and then, probably due to his complete co-operation with the investigation process, commuted entirely to be replaced by the much milder penalty of administrative exile. Eventually, in 1836, he was even allowed to purchase his own house in Western Siberia. After the amnesty of 1856, he returned to European Russia and died in Moscow in February 1886, two months before his 93rd birthday. He was buried in the Novodevichii monastery.

Notes 211 32. Vd xii, 195, 236. Lieutenant-Colonel Andrei Yentaltsev, who commanded the 27th Horse Artillery Company, was a member of the Union of Welfare and then of the Southern Society. He was sentenced to two years’ hard labour in Siberia, reduced to one year. 33. N.M Druzhinin, Dekabrist Nikita Murav’ev (Moscow, 1933), p. 89. 34. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1902), pp. 609, 6l2. 35. See Nevelev (1971), pp. 62–3. 36. Vd x, 116, 120. 37. Vd iv, 99. 38. Vd xii, 354, 360. 39. Vd xiii, 24. 40. Vd iv, 170; Nechkina (1935), p. 45. Aleksandr Boshnyak served from 1820 as a clerk in the office of the Count I.O. Vitt, commander of the Southern military colonies, in Kherson province. In this capacity, Boshnyak got to know the Decembrists V.N. Likharev and V.L. Davydov, both members of the Southern Society. Boshnyak passed two reports about the secret organisation’s plans to General I.O. Vitt. They may have prompted Vitt’s attempt to penetrate the society by proposing to join it in order to provide a link with the military colonies, as recounted later in this chapter. 41. Vd x, 286–7, 295. 42. Vd xii, 425. Second-Lieutenant Nikolai Zaikin, of the Quartermaster Section at Second Army HQ, became a member of the Southern Society in 1824. He was involved in the efforts made to conceal Pestel’s incriminating papers by burying them (on this see further in Chapter 11). He was sentenced to 20 years’ Siberian exile and died in Irkutsk province in 1833. 43. Kruglyi (1926), p. l87, letter written between August and October l822. 44. Vd x, 268. 45. Vd x, 49. 46. Vd xii, 399. Nikolai Sergeevich Bobrishchev-Pushkin, a lieutenant in the Quartermaster’s section at Second Army HQ, became a member of the Union of Welfare in 1820 or 1821, and had then joined the Southern Society. With Zaikin they were both involved in burying Pestel’s papers and then revealing them to the Investigating Committee. He was sentenced to 20 years’ hard labour in Siberia where, in 1827, doctors declared him insane. His younger brother, Pavel, joined the Southern Society in 1822. He served six years’ hard labour followed by exile in Krasnoyarsk. In 1839 the brothers were re-united in Tobolsk where Nikolai was hospitalised. Pavel died in Moscow in February 1865, Nikolai at his sister’s estate in Tula province in May 1871. 47. GARF f. 48, d.89, l.23ob. Colonel Pavel Leman of the Perm Infantry became a member of the Southern Society in 1825. After seven months in the PeterPaul Fortress during the investigation process in 1826, he was allowed to resume his military career, but in 1844 was court-martialled and discharged for his cruel treatment of lower ranks. 48. Vd x, 284. 49. Vd xiii, 56. The implicitly incriminating words attributed by Polivanov to Pestel are written in the margin of the MS folio and underlined in pencil. They would have formed part of the regicide case against the Southern Society leader. Shortly after receiving a relatively light one-year sentence, Polivanov collapsed and died in the Peter-Paul Fortress aged 26.

212 Notes 50. Vd x, 137. The Investigating Committee accepted Pestel’s denial of von Mengden’s membership and no case was brought against him. 51. Vd xii, 37. 52. GARF f. 48, d. 89, ll.1, 23ob. 53. Vd x, 219. 54. Vd x, 47, 57. 55. Vd iv, 156. 56. Vd xviii, 280. Depreradovich deserted the conspiracy on 14 December 1825. As a result of his belated loyalty he did not have to stand trial. He retired from military service in 1846 and died in Stuttgart in 1884 aged 82. On the Southern Society group in St Petersburg, See S.N. Korzhov, ‘Severnyi filial yuzhnogo obshchestva dekabristov,’ P.V. Il’in (ed.), 14 dekabrya 1825 goda. Istochniki. Issledovaniya. Istoriografiya. Bibliografiya (St Petersburg-Kishinev, 2000), No. 4, pp. 91–151. 57. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1907), p. 149. 58. Vd iv, 179 (Pestel), 342 (Muraviev-Apostol). 59. Vd ix, 46. 60. Nechkina (1935), pp. 31–2. 61. I.V. Porokh, ‘O tak nazyvaemom “krizise” yuzhnogo obshchestva dekabristov,’ Uchenye zapiski saratovskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, vypusk istoricheskii, 47 (1956), pp. 111–47, see pp. 120–1. Vd ix, 109–10. There are obvious and tragic parallels in Pestel’s callous line of reasoning with the fate suffered in 1918 by Tsar Nicholas II and his family, whose physical extermination Lenin authorised for the Bolsheviks’ ultimate victory over the forces of counter-revolution in the civil war. 62. Vd iv, 350. 63. Vd xii, 33. 64. Vd xii, 46, 100. 65. Vd viii (Alfavit dekabristov), 147. 66. See, for example, Alfavit dekabristov, Vd viii, 148. 67. Vd iv, p. 221. 68. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1902), p. 609; Vd xii, 307. 69. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1907), pp. 143–4; Vd xii, 298. 70. Quoted in S. Ekshtut, ‘Pereklichka sudeb – Aleksandr I i Pavel Pestel’’, Rodina 10 (1989), pp. 77–81, see p. 79. 71. V.A. Fedorov (ed.), ‘Zapiski A.M. Murav’eva’ (“Mon Journal”)’, Memuary dekabristov. Severnoe obshchestvo (Moscow, 1981), pp. 123–46, see p. 146. 72. Vd xii, 366. 73. Fedorov (ed.), ‘Vospominaniya E.P. Obolenskogo’ (1981), p. 82. 74. Lorer (1984), p. 14 75. Lorer (1984), p. 67. 76. Lorer (1984), p. 63. It is an arresting coincidence that in Pushkin’s Queen of Spades (1833), Tomskii describes Hermann in almost identical terms as combining ‘the profile of Napoleon’ with ‘the soul of Mephistopheles’. Was Pushkin himself perhaps struck by this similarity with Napoleon when he met Pestel in Kishinev in 1821? It is an intriguing possibility. Hermann and Pestel, after all, share other characteristics, including their German background, their relentless sense of logic, their systematic thoroughness in all that they undertake and, above all, their driving, fatal ambition. See also

Notes 213

94.

M.S. Al’tman, ‘Dekabristy – prototipy literaturnykh geroev’, Osvoboditel’noe dvizhenie v Rossii 2 (1971), pp. 56–62, see p. 60. O’Meara (1984), pp. 149–50. M.N. Myslovskii, ‘Iz zapisnoi knizhki protoieriya’, Russkii arkhiv ix (1905), pp. 132–3. Vd xii, 197. Vd xii, 300, 357. Cf. the comment of his brother, P.S. Bobrishchev-Pushkin: ‘We discussed whether Pestel was not thinking of making himself supreme ruler’ (Vd xii, 401). S.G. Volkonskii, Zapiski (St Petersburg, 1902), p. 417. Vd x, 57, 76, 104. Vd x, 232–3. Vd xii, 89 (Likharev), 123 (Vol’f). Vd x, 268, 284. Baryatinskii’s support for Pestel’s views in this regard is reflected in the harshness of his sentence: 20 years’ penal servitude in Siberia. In 1835 his sentence was reduced to 13 years and he died in 1844 in Tobolsk. During November 1825, following the death of Alexander I and in the weeks leading up to the Decembrist uprisings, Baryatinskii was made leader of the Tulchin section and played a key co-ordinating role between Tulchin and Pestel’s quarters at Lintsy. Fedorov, ‘Zapiski Murav’eva’ (1981), pp. 127–8. M.A. Fonvizin, ‘Obozrenie proyavlenii politicheskoi zhizni v Rossii’, Obshchestvennye dvizheniya v pervuyu polovinu XIX veka, i, Dekabristy, V.I. Semevskii et al. (eds) (St Petersburg, 1905), pp. 99–202, see p. 189. Vd ix, 68. Vd x, 213. Vd xii, 404. Vd iv, 169. Vd iv, 156. Vd xii, 98. Vladimir Likharev, a second-lieutenant attached to the Quartermaster’s Section, was a Southern Society member. He served two years in Siberia followed by exile in Tobolsk. In 1837 he was permitted to enlist in the Caucasian Corps and was killed in a skirmish with mountain tribesmen in 1840. Vd ix, 78.

8

Pestel and the Northern Society

77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

Vd iv, 115. Vd iv, 169. Pavov-Sil’vanskii (1902), p. 613. On this question, see O’Meara (1984), pp. 146ff and the same author’s article, ‘Towards a united Decembrist movement: a reassessment of Pestel’s role’, Irish Slavonic Studies 3 (1982), pp. 59–72. Vd x, 155 (Volkonskii). Vd iv, 114 (Pestel’s testimony). Azadovskii (1954), pp. 651–2. Vd x, 284–5.

214 Notes 9. Vd x, 119, 228, 269. As a member of the Union of Welfare from 1817 and subsequently a director of the Northern Society, Obolenskii was a highly influential member of the conspiracy on the eve of the uprising in St Petersburg. His 20-year sentence was eventually reduced to 13 years. He remained in Siberian exile until his death in Kaluga in 1865. 10. Vd x, 227. 11. Vd x, 120. 12. Vd x, 228. 13. Vd x, 120–1. 14. Vd x, 165. 15. Vd iv, 353. 16. Pavov-Sil’vanskii (1902), p. 607. 17. Vd xv, 285. 18. A typical ritual denial of any conflict between the two societies may be found in N. Deev, ‘Politicheskaya ideologiya dekabristov: kritika sovremennykh burzhuaznykh interpretatsii,’ Pravovedenie 6 (1975), pp. 104–11, see p. 107. 19. Landa (1975), p. 14. 20. Pavov-Sil’vanskii (1902), p. 607. 21. Vd xv, 285. 22. Vd iv, 163. 23. Vd iv, 210. 24. Vd xiv, 344–5. 25. Lorer (1984), pp. 64, 69. 26. Vd iv, 161. Pestel’s emphasis. 27. Vd x, 269. 28. V.A. Fedorov (ed.), ‘ “Istoricheskoe obozrenie khoda obshchestva” N.M. Murav’eva’, Memuary dekabristov. Severnoe obshchestvo (Moscow, 1981), pp. 309–14, see pp. 312–13. 29. R.V. Ivanov-Razumnik, Istoriya russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli (St Petersburg, 1911), vol. 1, p. 124. 30. Vd xv, 289–91. 31. Ivanov-Razumnik (1911), vol. 1, p. 118. 32. Vd i, 178–9. A fuller account of this meeting may be found in O’Meara (1984), pp. 146–54. 33. Druzhinin (1985), p. 113. 34. Vd iv, 103. 35. Vd iv, 163. 36. Vd xii, 32. 37. Vd iv, 206; Vd i, 257; Azadovskii (1954), p. 653. 38. ‘Colonel Pestel did indeed take his Russian Justice with him to St Petersburg and said that, after a long discussion with N. Muraviev he persuaded the members there to his point of view’ (Lorer, Vd xii, 47). ‘In 1824 Pestel went to St Petersburg and managed to unite the Northern Society with the Southern. Although this was not apparent to all members it most certainly was to the leaders who resolved to take concerted action’ (Volkonskii’s italics, Vd iv, 205). 39. Porokh and Fedorov (eds) (1982), p. 32. 40. Vd x, 77. In relation to Nikita Muraviev, Poggio testified: ‘On [my] return from St Petersburg in 1824 to Kiev [I] reported to Yushnevskii about the inactivity and weakness of the St Petersburg directorate … and proposed the exclusion of

Notes 215

43. 44. 45. 46.

Nikita Muraviev from the directorate which was approved. The meeting was with him (Yushnevksii) and Sergei Muraviev and it was agreed to contact Pestel without whom nothing in the society was decided’ (Vd x, 88). Vd xii, 32. Fedorov, (1981), p. 313; cf. Baryatinskii: ‘After this, as far as I know, there was no further contact between them, and I have absolutely no idea whether from that time there was any further negotiation or correspondence between the Northern and Southern societies’ (Vd x, 269). Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1907), p. 156. Porokh and V.A. Fedorov (eds) (1982), p. 34. Vd xiv, 406–7, 413 (Testimony of Naryshkin). Vd xvii, 35.

9

The Polish Connection

41. 42.

1. The fullest accounts are: Frank W. Thackeray, Antecedents of Revolution: Alexander I and the Polish Kingdom, 1815–1825 (Boulder, 1980); W.L. Blackwell, Alexander I and Poland: the foundation of his Polish policy and its repercussions in Russia, 1801–25, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Princeton University, 1959, see pp. 181–208, and his ‘Russian Decembrist views of Poland’, Polish Review, 3, no. 4 (1958), pp. 30–54; L. Baumgarten, Dekabrysci a Polska (Warsaw, 1952); I. Bekker, ‘Dekabristy i pol’skii vopros’, Voprosy istorii 3 (1948), pp. 65–74; N. Korobka, ‘Pol’skie obshchestva 20kh godov i dekabristy’, O minuvshem (1909) pp. 189–233; L.A. Medvedskaya, ‘Yuzhnoe obshchestvo dekabristov i pol’skoe patrioticheskoe obshchestvo’, Ocherki iz istorii dvizheniya dekabristov (Moscow, 1954), pp. 276–320; P.N. Ol’shanskii, Dekabristy i pol’skoe natsional’no-osvoboditel’noe dvizhenie (Moscow, 1959). 2. Norman Davies, God’s Playground: a History of Poland (Oxford, 1981), p. 309. 3. Vd vii, 121–3. 4. V.A. Pushkina, ‘Skhema (i kommentarii k nei) razvitiya dekabristskikh i svyazannykh s nimi organizatsii,’ Obshchestvennaya mysl’ v Rossii XIX veka, V.S Dyakin, B.F. Yegorov (eds) (Leningrad, 1986), pp. 242–4. 5. A fuller account of the history of the Polish secret societies of this period, on which this summary is largely based, may be found in R.F. Leslie, Polish Politics and the Revolution of 1830 (London, 1956), pp. 105–14. See also Szymon Askenazy, Rosya-Polska, 1815–1830 (Lwow, 1907) and his Lukasinski, 2 vols (Warsaw, 1908). 6. N.K. Shil’der, ‘Imperator Nikolai I i Pol’sha’, Russkaya starina (1906), p. 277. 7. Syroechkovskii (1926), p. 183. 8. Bekker (1948), p. 72. 9. Korobka (1909), p. 226. 10. Vd iv, 281. 11. Vd iv, 204. 12. Vd x, 87, 92. 13. Vd x, 131–2. 14. Vd xii, 71–2. 15. Porokh (1956), p. 124.

216 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

Notes Vd ix, 111. Vd ix, 87. Vd x, 128. Vd x, 47, 49–50, 59, 60, 76, 77–8, 92. GARF f. 48, d. 316, l.72, 72ob. This was most probably General Karol Kniaziewicz, an aide-de-camp of Grand Duke Constantine. GARF, f. 1, op.1, d.9707, l.5; Vd x (Davydov), 205. See, for example, Avramov’s testimony, Vd xii, 196. Vd xvii, 66. GARF, f. 48, d. 320, l.11, 11ob., 12ob., 13. Vd x, 104. Vd x, 105. Vd x, 128. Vd x, 130. Vd x, 129; Vd xvii, 37. Vd iv, 119. GARF, op.1, ed. khr. 25, l.53. Ol’shanskii (1959), p. 120. Bekker (1948), p. 68. Vd x, 129, 177. Vd x, 130. Vd x, 204. See the map, Vd vii, opposite p. 130. Vd xvii, 36–7, Vd iv, 164–5. Quoted in Bekker, (1948), p. 70; Vd i, 300. Quoted in Bekker (1948), p. 70; Vd i, 180. Quoted in Bekker (1948), p. 70. Ol’shanskii (1959), pp. 118–19. Vd iv, 83, 117; GARF f. 48, op. 1, d. 70 (Lukashevich), l.32. After a brief detention, Lukashevich was permitted, in September 1826, to reside in the Ukrainian village of his choice (Borispol) under the supervision of the local authorities. He died there in October 1866. (Mironenko (1988), pp. 105, 279). Vd x, 130. Vd iv, 85. Medvedskaya (1954), pp. 305–6. Vd x, 206. Medvedskaya (1954), p. 307; Mironenko (1988), p. 300. Vd xii, 45. Vd xii, 90–1. Vd x, 178. Vd x, 204. Medvedskaya (1954), p. 305. Lorer (1984), p. 174. Leslie (1956), p. 114. Vd x, 144. Cited in Bekker (1948), p. 68. Vd xvii, 37, 66.

Notes 217

10 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

The Planned Coup d’état and Provisional Government Vd ix, 38, 57. Vd iv, 224. Vd x, 243. Vd x, 91–2. Vd xvii, 36; Vd x, 87. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1907), p. 147. Vd xvii, 40–1; Vd iv, 399; Vd ix, 60, 167. Vd xii, 408. Vd iv, 204 (testimony of Sergei Murav’ev-Apostol); E.L. Rudnitskaya, A.G. Tartakovskii (eds), 14 dekabrya 1825 i ego istolkovateli (Gertsen i Ogarev protiv barona Korfa) (Moscow, 1994), p. 87 (‘Donesenie sledstvennoi komissii 30 maya 1826’). A.I. Gertsen, ‘Rossiya i Pol’sha’, Sobrannye sochineniya v 30 tomakh, V.P. Volgin (ed.), (Moscow ,1956), vol. 14, p. 30. GARF f. 40, op. 1, d. 104 (N.N. Depreradovich), l.1ob.20; Vd iv. 225. Vd ix, 166. Vd xii, 243. Vd iv, 93–100 (Chernyshev’s questions); Vd iv, 100–21 (Pestel’s replies). Vd iv, 103. Vd xvii, 27. Vd iv, 180. The capitalisation is typically Pestel’s. N.I. Lorer, ‘Zapiski moego vremeni’, in A.D. Margolis, Peterburg dekabristov (St Petersburg, 2000), p. 234; A.S. Gangeblov, ‘Vospominaniya dekabrista’, Margolis (2000), p. 267; A.E. Rozen, ‘Zapiski dekabrista’, Margolis (2000), p. 241. GARF f. 48, op. 1, ed. khr. 25, l. 297ob. GARF, f. 48 op. 1, ed. khr. 25, l. 314ob-315. Vd i, 325–6. S.V. Mironenko (ed.), ‘Dekabristy glazami ikh sledovatelya’, Fakel’. Istorikorevolyutsionyi al’manakh (Moscow, 1990), pp. 58–72, see p. 62. Vd x, 280. Mironenko (1990), p. 62. Vd xvi, 175. Vd iv, 225. Vd iv, 399; Vd ix, 60, 167. Porokh (1956), p. 120. Vd ix, 109–10. A. Gertsen, ‘Russkii zagovor 1825’, Volgin (1956), vol. 13, p. 136. Vd iv, 104. Vd ix, 90. Vd xvii, 38. Vd i, 10. Vd i, 44. Vd iv, 169. Vd iv, 102–3. Vd ix, 67; Vd iv, 12, 169.

218 Notes 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71.

Vd iv, 150 (Bestuzhev, Baryatinskii), 169 (Pestel). Vd ix, 112–13. Porokh, (1956), p. 140. Vd iv, 220. From the summary of A.D. Borovkov, secretary to the Investigating Committee. Vd x, 122. Vd iv, 191. Vd x, 200, 205. Vd x, 85. Vd x, 149; Vd xii, 372. Vd x, 245; Vd xii, 95. Vasil’ev (1971), p. 50. Vd xi, 375–6. The SUS had been formed by Peter Borisov in the spring of 1818 in the Poltava region of Ukraine at around the same time as the Union of Welfare. However, the two groups remained unaware of each other’s existence. The aim of the SUS was to emancipate all the Slavonic peoples (of Russia, Poland, Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary with Transylvania, Serbia, Moladavia, Wallachia, Dalmatia and Croatia) and to unite them in one democratic federal republic. The main role in arranging the United Slavs’ affiliation with the Southern Society was played by Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin. Many of those who volunteered for the ‘suicide squad’ were members of the SUS. Vd x, 230, 245. Vd x, 156, 164. Vd iv, 105. Vd x, 246. Vd x, 188. Nechkina (1935), p. 40. Semenova (1982), pp. 168, 170–1. Semenova (1982), pp. 118–20. Quoted in Ekshtut (1994), p. 44. N.S. Zakharov, ‘Peterburgskoe soveshchanie dekabristov v 1824g’, Ocherki iz istorii dvizheniya dekabristov, N.M. Druzhinin, B.E. Syroechkovskii (eds) (Moscow, 1954), pp. 101–2. Gertsen, ‘Russkii zagovor 1825’, Volgin (1956), vol. 13, p. 133. Vd iv, 212; Vd xvii, 41. Vd x, 155. Vd i, 15. Trubetskoi here dismisses Pestel’s vision as rubbish (vzdor) and told his Northern Society colleagues that Pestel was ‘raving’ (bredit). Vd i, 324. Muraviev went on in this statement to describe Pestel’s entire plan as ‘unrealisable and impossible as it was barbaric and immoral’. Fedorov (ed.), ‘Zapiski S.P. Trubetskogo’ (1981), p. 61. Shipov, although a member of the first secret societies, played no further part in the Decembrist movement after the demise of the Union of Welfare, but went on to enjoy a distinguished military career. Kruglyi (1926), pp. 187–8, letter of 30 September 1825. Vd x, 260. Nechkina (1935), p. 39. Vd xii, 265.

Notes 219 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

11

Nechkina (1935), pp. 38, 40. Dovnar-Zapol’skii (Moscow, 1906), pp. 106–7, 314. Vd iv, 92. Lorer (1984), p. 77. Vd x, 75. Vd xvii, 45.

Arrest, Investigation and Sentence

1. This summary of events is drawn from S.V. Mironenko, ‘14 dekabrya 1825 goda. Vosstaniya moglo ne byt’, Otechestvennaya istoriya, 3 (2002) pp. 57–66, which is itself a reworking of his Stranitsy tainoi istorii samoderzhaviya. Politicheskaya istoriya Rossii pervoi poloviny XIX stoletiya (Moscow, 1990), ch. 2. 2. Quoted in Syroechkovskii (1926), p. 238; S.G.Volkonskii, Zapiski, (St Petersburg, 1902), pp. 428–9. See also V.A. Fedorov, ‘Svoei sud’boi gordimsya my …’. Sledstvie i sud nad dekabristami (Moscow, 1988), pp. 42–3. 3. I. Trotskii, ‘Likvidatsiya tul’chinskoi upravy yuzhnogo obshchestva’, Byloe, 5 (1925), pp. 44–74, see pp. 53–5. 4. Syroechkovskii, ‘Zapiski Nikolaya I’, Mezhdutsarstvie (1926), pp. 19, 33. 5. Trotskii (1925), pp. 56–9. 6. Lorer (1984), p. 77. 7. S.N. Chernov, ‘Poiski “Russkoi pravdy” P.I. Pestelya’, U istokov russkogo osvoboditel’nogo dvizheniya (Saratov, 1960), pp. 347–89, see pp. 371–2. 8. M.A. Rakhmatullin, ‘Ryadom s dekabristami’, Istoriya SSSR 1 (1979), pp. 173–92, see pp. 174–6. On 17 February, after two months’ detention Savenko was unchained and released from the Peter-Paul Fortress where he was ‘needlessly occupying a cell’, as he was no longer required by the Investigating Committee. His new employer was to be informed that he had not been involved in the conspiracy but arrested only as a suspect (Vd xvi, 102, 105). 9. Trotskii (1925), p. 59. 10. Vd xvi, 105–6, n. 251. From the minutes of the Investigating Committee’s meeting of 17 February 1826. 11. Rozen (1982), p. 284. 12. A.I Mikhailovskii-Danilevskii, ‘Vstuplenie na prestol Imperatora Nikolaya I’, Russkaya starina, xi (1890), pp. 489–523, see pp. 491–2; Vd iv 173–4, Vd xvi 233; Ekshtut (1994), pp. 65–6. 13. Yu.M. Lotman, ‘Dekabrist v povsednevnoi zhizni’, Besedy o russkoi kul’ture. Byt i traditsii russkogo dvoryanstva (xviii – nachalo xix veka) (St Petersburg, 1994), pp. 331–84, see p. 355. 14. Vd xvi, 138. From the minute of the meeting of 22 March. 15. See Vd iv, 45–59. 16. Trotskii, (1925), pp. 60–3, 69–72; Fedorov (1988), p. 89. 17. Kolechitskaya (1995), p. 315. Count M.A. Miloradovich was governorgeneral of St Petersburg. 18. Vd xvi, 236; Fedorov (1988), pp. 75–6. 19. Vd xvi, Zhurnaly i dokladnye zapiski sledstvennogo komiteta (Moscow, 1986); Fedorov (1988), pp. 95–6, 99–100; O.V. Edel’man, ‘Dekabristy na

220 Notes

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45. 46.

doprosakh: opyt kolichestvennoi kharakteristiki, 14 dekabrya 1825 goda, vyp.4 (St Petersburg-Kishinev, 2001), pp. 333–62, see p. 337. Syroechkovskii, ‘Zapiski Nikolaya I’, Mezhdutsarstvie (1926), pp. 168, 206. Syroechkovskii, ‘Iz dnevnikov Marii Fedorovny,’ Mezhdutsarstvie (1926), pp. 100–2. ‘Angel’ was the imperial family’s name for Alexander I. Vd xvi, 38. From the minutes of meeting XI. Zablotskii-Desyatovskii (1882), vol. 4, p. 36. Zablotskii-Desyatovskii (1882), vol. 4, pp. 34–5. Zablotskii-Desyatovskii (1882), vol. 4, pp. 37–8. Zablotskii-Desyatovskii (1882), vol. 4, p. 37. See, for example, Pestel’s own abject supplication to Nicholas in his letter to General Chernyshev, which is discussed later in this chapter. Vd viii, 375; S.A. Artem’ev, ‘Sledstvie i sud nad dekabristami’, Voprosy istorii, 2 (1970), pp. 115–28, see p. 117; Syroechkovskii, ‘Zapiski Nikolaya I’, Mezhdutsarstvie (1926), pp. 19, 33. Vd iv, 8 (Maiboroda), 47 (Pestel). Testimony of Volkonskii, Vd iv, 205; Gertsen, Volgin (ed.), (1956), vol. 19 (1960), p. 18; Volkonskii (1991), pp. 385–6. Lorer (1984), pp. 76, 98. Vd iv, 113. Chernov (1960b), pp. 371–2. Vd xvi, 74, 79, 252. Vd iv, 131. Margolis (2000), p. 426. Cf. Vd iv, 127–8; see also Chernov (1960b), pp. 360–2. The detailed, even graphic, report by Sleptsov on the unearthing of Pestel’s papers is in Vd iv, 127–8. Vd xvi, 98, 100. A.P. Belyaev, ‘Vospominaniya dekabrista o perezhitom i perechuvstvovannom’, quoted in Margolis (2000), p. 249; Vd xvi, 220. N.A. Arzumanova, I dum vysokoe stremlen’e (Moscow, 1980), p. 140. V.A. Fedorov, Dekabristy i ikh vremya, (Moscow, 1992), p. 106;. Syroechkovskii, ‘Zapiski Nikolaya I’, Mezhdutsarstvie (1926), p. 196. See on this earlier, Chapter 5. Vd xvi, 38. Decision of 27 December. V.A. Fedorov (ed.), ‘Zapiski S.P. Trubetskogo’, Memuary dekabristov, Severnoe obshchestvo (Moscow, 1981), pp. 25–75, see p. 50. Edel’man (2001), see pp. 337, 349. The figures given for written responses to questions are Pestel (195), M. Bestuzhev-Ryumin (193), S. Muraviev-Apostol (161), Ryleev (147), Obolenskii and Trubetskoi (114). Rozen (1982), p. 302. In addition to the main interrogations indicated above, the Investigating Committee considered further testimony obtained from Pestel at six meetings in January (7, 10, 13, 16, 17, 23), nine in February (3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15, 20, 24), just one in March (24), a further 11 in April (6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, 21, 22, 23, 27) and at one final meeting in May (8). The records for April and May include the transcripts of 21 confrontations, 11 of which were held on one day (April 22). Vd xvi, passim. Shtraikh (1922), p. 106. Vd iv, 126.

Notes 221 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

Shtraikh (1922), pp. 108–9. Artem’ev (1970), p. 124. Syroechkovskii, ‘Zapiski Nikolaya I’, Mezhdutsarstvie (1926), pp. 174–5, 189. Syroechkovskii, ‘Iz dnevnikov Marii Fedorovny,’ Mezhdutsarstvie (1926), pp. 100–2. Vd iv, 181. Rozen (1884), p. 68. S.Ya. Gessen, M.S. Kogan, Dekabrist Lunin i ego vremya (Leningrad, 1926), p. 160. R. Lee, The Last Days of Alexander and the First Days of Nicholas (Emperors of Russia) (London, 1854), p. 167. On this, see the interesting essay in M.O. Gershenzon, Obrazy proshlogo (Moscow, 1912), pp. 294–300. Lotman (1994), pp. 341, 343, 355. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1907), p. 166; Pestel’ (1875), pp. 422–3. P.F. Nikandrov, Mirovozzrenie P.I. Pestelya (Leningrad, 1955), p. 59. Pestel’ (1875), pp. 419–21. After this, their last meeting, Ivan Borisovich returned to his Smolensk estates and became even more of a recluse than he had been hitherto. He died aged 78 in 1843, Pestel’s mother having died in 1836. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1907), p. 168. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1907), p. 165. Grech (1930), p. 441. M.N. Myslovskii, ‘Iz zapisnoi knizhki protoieriya’, Shchukinskii sbornik (Moscow, 1905), p. 39. GARF, f. 48, op.1, delo 293 (31 July 1826), ll. 322–3. Semenova, Moskva, 11(1975), p. 200; O.I. Kiyanskaya, ‘Dokumenty o finansovoi deyatel’nosti P.I. Pestelya v Vyatskom pekhotnom polku’, 14 dekabrya 1825 goda. Istochniki, issledovaniya, istoriografiya, bibliografiya (St Petersburg-Kishinev, 2001), no. 4, pp. 198–228, see p. 226. GARF f. 48, op.1, d.457. Nechkina (1955), vol. 2, p. 404. Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov Rossisskoi Imperii (PSZRI) vol. 1, 12 December 1825–27, no.1–799, (St Petersburg, 1830), pp. 755–6, 759, 760, 761–9, 772. Quoted in Nechkina (1955), vol. 2, pp. 408–9. Syroechkovskii, ‘Zapiski Nikolaya I’, Mezhdutsarstvie (1926), p. 212. GARF, f. 1261, op.1, ed. khr. 2347, ll.5–50b. Vd xvii, 278, 280. Fedorov (1988), p. 259. A.E. Rozen, Zapiski dekabrista (Quoted in Margolis (2000), pp. 319–20, 443 nn. 1, 2). Vd xvii, 279. Fedorov (1988), p. 266; Rozen (1982), pp. 320–1; Syroechkovskii, ‘Iz dnevnikov Marii Fedorovny,’ Mezhdutsarstvie (1926), pp. 100–2. Myslovskii (1905), p. 39. Artem’ev (1970), p. 121. See O’Meara (1984), pp. 305–6; Fedorov (1988), pp. 267–8; G.A. Nevelev, ‘Istina sil’nee tsarya … ’ (A.S. Pushkin v rabote nad istoriei dekabristov) (Moscow, 1985), p. 95.

222 Notes 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88.

89. 90.

12

F. Lacroix, Les Mystères de la Russie (Paris, 1845), p. 101. Vd xvii, 252. PSZRI vol. 1, 12 December 1825–27, no. 1–799 (St Petersburg, 1830), p. 774. A.V. Semenova, ‘Nikolai I i P.I. Pestel’ (Pis’mo V.I. Pestelya o razgovore s Nikolaem I)’, Istoricheskie zapiski 96 (1975), pp. 370–7, see p. 375. Semenova, Istoricheskie zapiski 96 (1975), p. 376. F.I Pokrovskii, ‘Raskhody gosudarstvennogo kaznacheistva na “dekabristov” ’, Byloe 5/33 (1925), pp. 79–108, see p. 106. A.P. Belyaev, 12 Vospominanii (Margolis (2000), p. 249; N.V. Basargin, Zapiski (Margolis (2000), pp. 309, 311, 341). S.P. Trubetskoi, Zapiski (Margolis (2000), p. 304); I.D. Yakushkin, Zapiski, (Margolis (2000), pp. 306–7); N.V. Basargin, Zapiski (Margolis (2000), pp. 309–12). N.I. Lorer, Zapiski moego vremeni, (Margolis (2000), pp. 315–16); A.M. Murav’ev, Prigovor (Margolis (2000), p. 317); I.D. Yakushkin, Zapiski (Margolis (2000), p. 308). E.I. Bibikova was the wife of Illarion Mikhailovich Bibikov (1793–1861), colonel of the Hussars and Director of the Office of the Chief of General Staff. F.I. Pokrovskii (1925), pp. 82–3, 91, 95. GARF, f. 48, op. 1, delo 293 (31 July 1826), ll.325–326.

Pestel and the Roots of Russian Republicanism

1. J. Gooding, Rulers and Subjects: Government and People in Russia (London, 1996), p. 39. 2. GARF, f. 48, op. 1, d.69, l.3ob. 3. Vd xix, 372; S.P. Trubetskoi, Materialy o zhizni i revolyutsionnoi deyatel’nosti (Irkutsk, 1983), p. 90; Vd i, 174 (testimony of Ryleev). 4. E.F. Yunge, Vospominaniya (1843–60) (Moscow, 1914), vol. 10, p. 116. F.P. Tolstoy (1783–1873) was a member of the Union of Salvation and the Union of Welfare but was acquitted of complicity in the Decembrist conspiracy. He became vice-president of the Academy of Arts. 5. N.A. Rabkina, Otchizny vnemlem prizyvan’e (Moscow, 1976), p. 239. 6. R. Lee, The Last Days of Alexander and the First Days of Nicholas (Emperors of Russia) (London, 1854), pp. 100–1. See also M.P. Alekseev, ‘Angliiskie memuary o dekabristakh’, Issledovaniya po otechestvennomu istochnikovedeniyu (Moscow-Leningrad, 1964), pp. 243–53, see p. 244. 7. A.D. Borovkov, ‘Avtobiograficheskie zapiski’, Russkaya starina, xi (1891), pp. 331–62, see p. 337. 8. Kropotov (1874), pp. 193–4, 197; Svistunov (1870), col. 1639. 9. Quoted in P.F. Nikandrov, Revolyutsionnaya ideologiya dekabristov (Leningrad, 1976), pp. 83, 85. 10. Lorer (1984), p. 70. 11. S.G. Volkonskii, Zapiski (St Petersburg, 1902), pp. 408, 417. 12. Svistunov (1870), col. 1643. 13. Gertsen, Volgin (ed.), vol. 19 (1960), p. 19. 14. Gertsen, letter of 31 March 1855, Volgin (ed.), vol. 25 (1961), p. 252. 15. Gertsen, ‘O razvitii revolyutsionnykh idei v Rossii’, Volgin (ed.), vol. 7 (1956), p. 200.

Notes 223 16. Gertsen, ‘Russkii zagovor 1825’, Volgin (ed.), vol. 13 (1958), p. 145. 17. R.V. Ivanov-Razumnik, Istoriya russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli (St Petersburg, 1911), vol. 1, pp. 122–6. 18. Letter of 1 July 1855 from Paris. Gertsen, Volgin (ed.), vol. 12 (1957), p. 290. 19. Diary entry of 12 July 1826. ‘Iz dnevnikov Aleksandry Fedorovny’, Syroechkovskii (ed.) (1926), pp. 92–3. 20. N.I. Lorer, Zapiski moego vremeni (Margolis (2000), pp. 284–5); A.M. Murav’ev, Sledstvennyi komitet (Margolis, (2000), p. 292). 21. On this see also Patrick O’Meara ‘Vreden sever: the Decembrists’ Memories of the Peter-Paul Fortress’, St Petersburg 1703–1825, Anthony Cross, ed (Basingstoke, 2003) pp. 165–89; see pp. 183–4. The French expression meaning ‘friends of the 14th’ was Nicholas I’s own collective name for the Decembrists. 22. Vd i, 87. 23. Podzhio (1989), p. 309. 24. Vd ix, 78. 25. Gooding (1996), p. 40. 26. Gertsen, ‘O razvitii revolyutsionnykh idei v Rossii’, Volgin (ed.) (1956), vol. 7, p. 200. 27. Gertsen, Volgin (ed.) (1956), vol. 12, p. 262. 28. Semevskii (1909), p. 629. 29. A.V. Podzhio, Zapiski, pis’ma (Irkutsk, 1989), p. 101.

Bibliography There is a vast literature on the Decembrist movement, much of it directly relating to Pavel Pestel. I have listed here the main sources which are cited in the body of the work and upon which it is based.

Manuscript sources Moscow. State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), f. 48, op. 1, ed. khr. 25, 70, 82, 87, 89, 96, 104, 156, 230, 231, 293, 316, 320, 457, 473, 476, 477, 478, 495–505, 2347, 9707.

Printed sources Dubrovin, N.F., ‘Bumagi Grafa Arseniya Andreevicha Zakrevskogo’, Sbornik Imperatorskogo Russkogo Istoricheskogo Obshchestva, 78 (St Petersburg, 1891), vol. 2. Kiyanskaya, O.I., ‘Dokumenty o finansovoi deyatel’nosti P.I. Pestelya v Vyatskom pekhotnom polku’, 14 dekabrya 1825 goda. Istochniki, issledovaniya, istoriografiya, bibliografiya (St Petersburg-Kishinev, 2001), no. 4, pp. 198–228. Kruglyi, A.O., ‘P.I. Pestel’ po pis’mam ego roditelei’, Krasnyi arkhiv iii/16 (1926), pp. 165–88. Mil’man, S.S., ‘ “Prakticheskie nachala politicheskoi ekonomii” P.I. Pestelya’, Kransnyi arkhiv, 1925, vol. 6 (13), pp. 174–249, 280–4. Narochnitskii, A.L. (ed.), ‘Zapiska podpolkovnika P.I. Pestelya nachal’niku shtaba vtoroi armii P.D. Kiselevu’, Vneshnyaya politika Rossii XIX i nachala XX veka, series 2 (Moscow, 1984), vol. 4 (12). Pavlov-Sil’vanskii, N.P., Dekabrist Pestel⬘ pred Verkhovnym Ugolovnym Sudom (Rostov-on-Don, 1907). Pestel⬘, S.I., ‘Bumagi Ivana Borisovicha Pestelya’ Russkii arkhiv, iv (1875), pp. 369–423. Plesterer, L., Istoriya 62-go pekhotnogo Suzdal’skogo polka, 6 vols (Belostok, 1903), vol. 4: Istoriya Suzdal’skogo (1819–1831) i Vyatskogo (1825–1833) pekhotnykh polkov. Pokrovskii, F.I. and Vasenko P.G. (eds), ‘Pis’ma Pestelya k P.D. Kiselevu (1821–23gg.)’, Pamyati dekabristov (Leningrad ,1926), vol. iii, pp. 150–201. Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov Rossisskoi Imperii (St Petersburg, 1830). Shchipanova, I.Ya. and Shtraikh S.Ya. (eds), Izbrannye sotsial’no-politicheskie i filosofskie proizvedeniya dekabristov (Moscow, 1951), 3 vols. Shtraikh, S.Ya., ‘Dekabrist P.I. Pestel’. Novye materialy’, Byloe xx (1922), pp. 106–15. Sokolovskii, M.K., ‘Dekabristy. Bumagi o nikh’, Russkii arkhiv 6 (1905), pp. 303–23. Syroechkovskii, B.E., Mezhdutsarstvie 1825 goda i vosstanie dekabristov v perepiske i memuarakh chlenov tsar’skoi sem’i (Moscow-Leningrad, 1926). 224

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Index

Adlerberg, V.F. 15, 37, 167, 198 Aleksei Mikhailovich, Tsar 72 Alexander I, Tsar 3, 9, 21, 23, 28, 39, 41, 43, 47, 52, 54, 82, 84, 124, 127, 155, 156, 162, 167, 192, 220 illness and death of 5, 99, 123, 137, 138, 144, 149, 153, 161, 169, 213 plans to arrest and assassinate 91, 105, 121, 147–8 and Pestel 15, 17, 24, 25, 27, 34, 154, 159, 191, 200 Alexander II, Tsar 6, 182, 186, 189, 209 Alexander III, Tsar 73, 84, 171 Annenkov, I.A. 119 Arakcheev, A.A. 15, 53, 152, 162, 191 Arakcheevshchina 39, 67 Avramov, I.B. 99, 154 Avramov, P.V. 28, 58, 86, 91, 93, 97, 109, 165, 170 Baikov, I.I. 35, 163, 169 Bakunin, M.A. 87 Balugyanskii, M.A. 95, 207 Baryatinskii, A.P. 28, 66, 90, 91, 94, 95, 100, 101, 110, 115, 150, 165 and Pestel 86, 93, 98, 99, 102, 107, 112, 116, 118, 119, 158, 213, 215 Basargin, N.V. 21, 28, 54, 56, 66, 69, 70, 86, 93, 94, 107, 109, 121, 154, 182, 183, 199 Beccaria, Cesare 15 Belyaev, A.P. 170, 182 Benkendorf, Count A.K. 23, 27, 42, 166, 208 Bentham, Jeremy 14, 76 Berkopf, V.I. 179 Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, A.A. 188 Bestuzhev-Ryumin, M.P. 6, 153, 171, 174, 177, 180, 183, 218, 220 in Vasilkov 96, 101, 193, 210 and Bobruisk plan 105, 147–8

and Pestel 78, 81, 86, 110, 112, 114, 122, 142, 149, 150, 152 and Polish Patriotic Society 126, 127–9, 130, 132, 144, 192 Bibikov, I.M. 222 Bibikova, E.I. 183, 222 Bistrom, K.I. 179 Blücher, Gen. Gebhard von 19 Bobrishchev-Pushkin, N.S. 86, 99, 108, 151, 170, 211 Bobrishchev-Pushkin, P.S. 100, 111, 143, 170, 211, 213 Borisov, P.I. 218 Borodino, Battle of 18, 85, 191 Borovkov, A.D. 106, 136, 142, 143, 146, 167, 186 Boshnyak, A.K. 99, 162, 183, 211 Brigen, A.F. fon-der 9, 13, 64 Bulgari, S.N. 91 Burtsov, I.G. 28, 58, 59, 66, 68, 69, 70, 89, 90, 92, 93, 97, 98, 123, 154, 165, 171, 193 Canning, Lord Stratford 130, 131 Catherine II, the Great, Empress 9, 75, 87, 125, 177, 192 Chaadaev, P.Ya. 42 Cherkasov, A.I. 28, 169 Chernigov Regiment 148 rising of 6, 166, 193–4, 210 Chernov, S.N. 7, 73 Chernyshev, A.I. 84, 144, 145, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 171, 172, 173, 179, 180, 190, 220 Chernyshevskii, N.G. 188 Condillac, Etienne de 14, 77 Condorcet, A.-N. de 77 Constant, Benjamin 65, 77, 78 Constantine, (Konstantin Pavlovich), Grand Duke 5, 124, 126, 127, 129, 131, 132, 137, 144, 166, 167, 170, 173, 192, 201, 216

229

230 Index Corps of Pages 9, 12, 13–16, 18, 25, 37, 39, 43, 197, 198 Czartoryski, Adam 156 Davydov, V.L. 66, 94, 95, 98, 99, 102, 103, 104, 109, 111, 115, 133, 137, 143, 148, 153, 211 in Kamenka 96, 142, 151, 154, 168, 209 Depreradovich, N.N. 104, 119, 212 Dibich, I.I. 35, 162, 163, 168, 178, 184 Diderot, Denis 14 Dimitrii Donskoi of Moscow, Grand Prince 200 Dolgorukov, I.A. 52, 53, 61 Dolgorukov, P.V. 154 Dostoevskii, F.M. 186 Dreseke, H.B.J. 40, 203 Druzhinin, N.M. 7, 73 Dubrovin, N.F. 73, 171 Dumont, Etienne 77 Eidelman, Natan 20 Elizabeth, Empress 3, 177 Ermolov, A.P. 29, 154, 155, 157 Ferdinand VII, King of Spain 25, 45, 104 Filangieri, Gaetano 14, 56 Finland 47, 82–3 Focht, I.F. 9 Fonvizin, I.A. 9, 87 Fonvizin, M.A. 9, 13, 44, 60, 66, 67, 68, 110, 155 Francis I, Emperor of Austria 24 Freemasonry, see also Pestel and freemasonry 42, 51, 96, 99, 101 French Revolution 45, 55, 76 Gangeblov, A.S. 13, 145, German, K.F. 13, 43, 74, 197, 207 Gladkov, I.V. 116 Glazenap, G.I. 10 Glinka, F.N. 42, 52, 61, 63, 64 Golenishchev-Kutuzov, P.V. 167, 180, 187 Golitsyn, A.N. 157, 167 Gorbachevskii, I.I. 20, 33, 152, 202

Grech, N.I. 10, 11, 12, 15, 19, 34, 42, 176, 203 Greece 46, 89, 91, 133 Griboedov, A.S. 15, 42 Gribovskii, M.K. 23, 25, 27, 90, 192, 200 Grodetskii (Grodecki), A.S. 129, 132, 135 Guizot, François 78 Helvétius, Claude-Adrien 14 Herzen, A.I. 87, 120, 138, 144, 147, 156, 187–8, 194 Holbach, Paul Thiry, Baron d’, 14 Holy Alliance 45, 53 Horse-Guard (Kavalergardskii) Regiment 19, 26, 118, 183 Investigating Committee and Pestel 99, 114, 131–2, 133–4, 136, 145, 151–4, 156, 161–76, 189, 193, 220 and fate of imperial family 103, 106, 110, 141, 142–4 Ivan III, the Great 200 Ivanov, M.V. 202 Ivanov-Razumnik, R.V. 188 Ivashev, V.P. 58, 86, 92, 93, 109, 146, 158 Jablonowski, Antoni 127, 130–3, 135, 136, 138 Jefferson, Thomas 46, 77 Kakhovskii, P.G. 177, 180, 183, 194 Kalm, F.G. 58 Karamzin, N.M. 197 Khotyaintsov, I.N. 58 Kiselev, Gen. P.D. 57, 58, 90,112, 154, 163, 165, 199, 201 and Pestel 20–8, 30–1, 33, 46, 84, 86, 122, 155, 164, 167–8, 171, 191 Kladishchev, P.A. 35 Klinger, F.M. von 15, 25, 198 Kniaziewicz, K. 130, 216 Kolechitskaya, A.I. 11, 166 Komarov, N.K. 58, 59, 68, 69, 70, 90, 93, 206 Kosachevskaya, E.M. 74

Index 231 Krasnokutskii, S.G. 58, 129, 155 Krivtsov, S.I. 119 Kropotov, D.A. 33, 34, 186 Krüdener, Baroness Julie de 39 Kryukov, A.A. 13, 28, 86, 93, 165 Kryukov, N.A. 66, 86, 93, 152, 165, 169 . Krzyzanowski, S. 126, 127, 136, 144 Kutuzov, M.I. 18, 191 Landa, S.S. 8, 62, 64, 118, 205, 207 Laromiguière, P. 56, 205 Lee, R. 186 Leman, P.M. 101, 111, 211 Lenin, V.I. 185, 202, 212 Leslie, R.F. 137 Levashov, V.V. 166, 172, 190 Likharev, V.N. 105, 110, 112, 137, 211, 213 Locke, John 14 Lopukhin, P.P. 52 Lopukhin, P.V. 178, 179 Lorer, N.I. 14, 20, 32, 34, 86, 94, 102, 105, 108, 119, 121, 122, 136, 137, 145, 155, 159, 164, 168, 169, 170, 183, 187, 190, 198 Lotman, Yu.M. 165, 175 Lukashevich, V.L. 135, 216 Lukasin´ski, W. 125, 126 Lunin, M.S. 30, 52, 53, 61, 64, 73, 76, 87, 126, 127, 145, 147, 174, 201 Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de 14 Machiavelli, Niccolo 15, 31, 56, 146 Maiboroda, A.I. 35, 86, 94, 144, 152, 159, 161, 162–5, 167, 168–9, 171, 210 Maiorov, I.V. 47 Maria Fedorovna, Dowager Empress 15, 174, 179 Marmontel, Jean-François 14 Mengden, M. von 101, 212 Metternich, Clemens von 24 Michael (Mikhail Pavlovich), Grand Duke 167, 178 Michelet, J. 188, military colonies 32, 47, 84, 102, 111, 151–2, 162, 211 Miloradovich, M.A. 166, 184, 194, 219 Mironenko, S.V. 8

Mitkov, M.F. 117 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de 14, 56, 77 Mordvinov, N.S. 29, 154, 157, 177 Moszynski, P. 137 Muraviev, A.M. 108, 110, 183, 190 Muraviev, A.N. 4, 52 Muraviev, N.M. 4, 42, 52, 54, 56, 57, 61, 63, 65, 66, 78, 83, 85, 87, 89, 97, 98, 110, 197, 206, 208 and Pestel 92, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119–20, 122, 134, 143, 156, 185, 214, 218 Muraviev-Apostol, M.I. 18, 52, 61, 97, 115, 117, 119, 122, 128, 130, 145, 152, 153, 210 Muraviev-Apostol, S.I. 6, 75, 52, 61, 64, 65, 86, 95, 98, 104, 109, 110, 115, 117, 123, 141, 142, 145, 148, 152–4, 171, 174, 177, 180, 183, 193, 210, 220 and Polish Patriotic Society 126–30 in Vasilkov 96, 101, 112, 149 Myslovskii, P.N. 108, 176, 179, 182, 183 Napoleon I, Emperor, see also Pestel and 12, 18, 19, 44, 45, 54, 56 Naryshkin, M.M. 117, 123 Nechkina, M.V. 7, 62, 70, 94, 105, 108, 154, 155, 158 Nepenin, A.G. 58 Nesselrode, K.V. 25, 178 Nicholas I, Tsar 5, 11, 29, 34, 42, 82, 160, 161, 166, 174, 177, 191, 194, 197 and Decembrists 90, 93, 127, 175, 178, 180, 184, 189–90, 201, 223 and Investigating Committee 126, 127, 134, 138, 141, 164 and Pestel 31, 32, 167, 170–1, 172, 173, 181, 182, 185, 186, 208 Nicholas II, Tsar 212 Nikitenko, A.V. 47 Nikolaev, S.S. 162 Northern Society 4, 7, 72, 92, 102, 110, 186 and Pestel 76, 78, 86–7, 111, 114–23, 129, 134, 136, 138, 150, 192, 193

232 Index Novikov, M.N. 42, 52, 57, 204 Novikov, N.I. 52 Novosiltsev, N.N. 52, 84 Obolenskii, E.P. 87, 108, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 171, 179, 186, 214, 220 Orlov, M.F. 42, 55, 78 Pahlen, P. von 20, 192 Paul I, Tsar 9, 20, 142, 177 Pavlov-Silvanskii, N.P. 7, 65, 73, 94, 106–7 Pecherin, V.S. 33, 202 Pestel, A.I. 38, 158, 182 Pestel, B.I. 38 Pestel, B.V. 9, 197 Pestel, E.I. (née Krok) 7, 11, 20, 32, 38–9, 43, 47, 173, 175, 181, 192, 221 Pestel, I.B. 9–12, 13, 15, 18, 20, 25, 32, 40, 100, 158, 175, 192, 202, 203 Pestel, P.I. see also Investigating Committee and Russkaya pravda, see Russian Justice family 7, 9–13, 37–40 education and upbringing 13–16, 198 military service 5, 17–36, 38, 41, 48, 99, 136, 151, 162, 164, 191–2, 202 early writings 13, 40–1, 60, 64, 73–4 personal life 32 religion 39–41 freemasonry 41–2, 53 republicanism 45, 46, 52, 61–6, 78, 86, 91, 95, 103, 104, 193 and serfdom 46–7, 53, 57, 58, 79–80, 105, 120, 194–5 physical appearance 108, 203 and Napoleon 109, 121, 123, 186, 193, 212–13 and regicide 65, 95, 104, 105, 106, 119, 142–4, 211 opinions of 19, 21–2, 23, 25, 26, 34, 54–5, 61, 68, 87, 106–11, 122–3, 185–7 Pestel, S.I. 11, 37, 38, 175, 182 Pestel, V.I. 12, 13, 38, 54–5, 118, 181–2

Peter I, the Great 9, 41 Plessel, Dr. 136, 164 Pobedonostsev, Constantine 84 Poggio, A.V. 78, 86, 94, 96, 113, 119, 142, 143, 145, 146, 148, 156, 164, 193, 195, 209, 214 Poggio, I.V. 148, 154 Pokrovskii, A.A. 7, 73 Poland Constitution (1815) 47, 124 in Russian Justice 83, 124–5 Polish Patriotic Society 5, 124–38, 144, 192 and see Volkonskii, S.G. Polivanov, I. Yu. 101, 119, 211 Porokh, I.V. 105 Potapov, A.N. 166 Potocki family 21 Povalo-Shveikovskii, I.S. 147, 148 Pugachev, V.V. 8 Pushchin, P.S. 42 Pushkin, A.S. 23, 42, 212–13 Quiroga, A. 45 Radishchev, A.I. 80, 85, 208 Raevskaya, M.N. 209 Raevskii, V.F. 43 Reinbot, F. G. von 175, 176, 179 Repnin-Volkonskii, N.G. 52, 57, 205 Riego, Rafael del 45, 104 Robespierre, F. de 55, 76, 87, 165 Rostopchin, F.V. 10 Rot, L.O. 163 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 14 Rozen, A.E. 9, 33, 86, 88, 164, 171, 178, 179 Rudzevich, A.Ya. 22, 27, 28, 34, 191 Rulikowski, J. 130 Russian Justice (Russkaya pravda) 4, 7, 15, 29, 40, 43, 46, 60, 65, 67, 72–88, 95, 97, 102, 106, 113, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 125, 133, 142, 144, 152, 158, 169–71, 185, 187, 188, 192, 193, 194, 201 Ryleev, K.F. 5, 39, 47, 102, 108, 114, 117, 120–1, 123, 134, 155, 157, 171, 177, 180, 183, 185, 188, 194, 220

Index 233 Saint-Martine, Louis Claude de 41 Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri 14 Savenko, S.F. 164, 219 Say, Jean-Baptiste 15, 56 Seidel, A.E. 12, 197 Semenov, S.M. 61, 64 Semenova, A.V. 8 Semevskii, V.I. 14, 24, 41, 73, 83, 84, 194, 207 Shakhovskoi, F.P. 28, 52, 53, 201 Shchegolev, P.E. 73, 171 Sheremetev, D.N. 47 Shervud, I.V. 159, 161, 162, 171, 183 Shipov, I.P. 52, 55, 61 Shipov, S.P. 157, 218 Shtraikh, S.Ya. 173 Sibirskii, A.V. 31 Sismondi, Léonard Simonde de 15, 76, 208 Sleptsov, N.S. 220 Smith, Adam 14, 56 Society of United Slavs 135, 193, 202, 210, 218 Southern Society 4, 5, 28, 89, 96, 99, 149, 158 Tulchin branch 23, 70, 99, 105, 106, 111, 112 Kishinev branch 42, 203 Kamenka branch 94, 96, 168, 209 Vasilkov branch 5, 147, 148, 150, 154, 166 St Petersburg group 4, 19, 104, 119, 212 directorate 95, 97, 98, 105, 111, 112, 210, 213 Kiev congresses 75, 95, 97, 98, 104, 112, 115, 128, 130, 131, 135, 138, 148, 149, 192 Speranskii, M.M. 10, 11, 29, 48, 53, 83, 84, 154, 155, 157, 177 Stael, Anne-Louise-Germaine, Mme de 15 Stalin, J.V. 84, 146, 190 Staroselskii, M.P. 166 Sukin, A.Ya. 165, 175 Supreme Criminal Court 6, 177, 178, 182, 189, 190 Svistunov, P.N. 19, 119, 186, 187 Swedenborg, Emanual 41

Syroechkovskii, B.E. 197, 207

7, 73, 74, 163,

Tatishchev, A.I. 167 Third Department 34, 42, 82, 194, 208 Tizengauzen, V.K. 9, 29, 148 Tolpygo, E.I. 34, 164 Tolstoy, F.P. 61, 186, 222 Tolstoy, L.N. 178 Tracy, Destutt de 14, 45–6, 76, 77, 78, 79, 83 Trotskii, L.D. 71 Trubetskoi, S.P. 4, 6, 35, 42, 52, 53, 55, 87, 115, 117, 118, 119, 122, 123, 148, 150, 156, 157, 171, 182, 185, 193, 220 Turgenev, N.I. 47, 61, 65, 68, 69, 78, 118, 120 Ulyanov, A.I. 202 Union of Salvation 4, 42, 51–6, 68, 73, 115, 153, 210 Union of Welfare 4, 27, 29, 41, 51, 90, 96, 114, 115, 117, 135, 153, 155, 192, 193, 200, 210, 218 Moscow branch 53, 69 Kishinev branch 42, 55 Tulchin branch 23, 56–60, 89–94 Moscow congress 66–71, 103 recruitment to 58–9, 102–3 and Green Book 56, 57, 58, 59, 95, 97 United States 23, 45–6, 54, 64, 78, 119 Vadkovskii, F.F. 119, 120, 146, 159, 162, 163, 174 Vasiliev, I.V. 62 Vasilkov, see Southern Society uprising 17, 20, 43, 167 Venturi, F. 78 Vitgenshtein, P.K. 163, 164, 165, 167, 168, 176, 191 Vitt, I.I. 32, 102 Vitt, I.O. 32, 102, 162, 171, 211 Vladimir, Grand Prince 81–2, 208 Volf, F.B. 9, 58, 59, 60, 86, 90, 93, 110, 146, 170 Volkonskii, P.M. 25, 27

234 Index Volkonskii, S.G. 35, 66, 90, 95, 96, 98, 104, 115, 116–17, 121, 122, 153, 156, 163, 164, 167, 168, 169, 193, 203, 209 and Pestel 86, 87, 94, 101, 107, 109, 112, 143, 150, 152, 162, 187, 189 and Polish Patriotic Society 127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 137 Voltaire, F. Arouet de 14 Vorontsov, M.S. 178, 186 Vyatka Infantry Regiment, see Pestel, military service Washington, George

119, 122, 123

Yakushkin, E.I. 108 Yakushkin, I.D. 19, 28, 47, 53, 54, 67, 68, 69, 92, 182, 183, 186, 199

Yaroslav, the Wise 72, 75 Yentaltsev, A.V. 97, 144, 164, 211 Ypsilanti, Alexander 24, 42, 91, 100 Yushnevskii, A.P. 58, 59, 67, 90, 92, 142, 165, 170, 214–15, 217 and Pestel 32, 70, 85, 86, 91, 102, 107, 109, 111, 121, 130, 143, 151, 159, 169 and the Southern Society 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 100, 103, 104, 112, 128, 146, 210 Yushnevskii, S.P. 185 Zaikin, F.F. 170 Zaikin, N.F. 99, 155, 170, 211 Zaoinchkovskii, P.A. 14 Zakrevskii, A.A. 21, 25, 26, 27, 154 Zhuravlev, I.F. 179 Zubov, A.N. 183 Zyablovskii, E.F. 197

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