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The Decembrist revolt or the Decembrist uprising (Russian: Восстание декабристов) took place in Imperial Russia on December 14 (December 26 New Style), 1825. Russian army officers led about 3,000 soldiers in a protest against Nicholas I's assumption of the throne after his elder brother Constantine removed himself from the line of succession. Because these events occurred in December, the rebels were called the Decembrists (Dekabristy, Russian: Декабристы). This uprising took place in the Senate Square in St. Petersburg. In 1925, to mark the centenary of the event, it was renamed as Decembrist Square (Ploshchad' Dekabristov, Russian: Площадь Декабристов). The revolt was personally suppressed by Nicholas I of Russia.

Contents 1 The Union of Salvation 2 At the Senate Square 3 Assessment 4 References 5 Further reading 6 External links

In 1816 several officers of the Semyenov Guard founded a society known as the Union of Salvation, or of the Faithful and True Sons of the Fatherland. The society acquired a more revolutionary caste after it was joined by the idealistic Pavel Pestel. After a mutiny in the Semyenov regiment in 1820 the society decided to suspend activity in 1821. Two groups, however, continued to function secretly: a Southern Society in which Pestel was the outstanding figure and a Northern Society led by Guard officers Nikita Muraviev, Prince S. P. Trubetskoy and Prince Eugene Obolensky. The political aims of the more moderate Northern Society were a constitutional monarchy and limited franchise. The Southern Society, under Pestel's influence, was more radical and wanted to establish a republic and redistribute land.

When Tsar Alexander I died on December 1, 1825, the royal guards swore allegiance to the presumed heir, Alexander's brother Constantine. When Constantine made his renunciation public, and Nicholas stepped forward to assume the throne, the Northern Society acted. With the capital in temporary confusion, and one oath to Constantine having already been sworn, the society scrambled in secret meetings to convince regimental leaders not to swear allegiance to Nicholas. These efforts would culminate in the events of December 14. The leaders of the society (many of whom belonged to the high aristocracy) elected Prince Sergei Trubetskoy as interim dictator.

On the morning of December 14, 1825, a group of officers commanding about 3,000 men assembled in Senate Square, where they refused to swear allegiance to the new tsar, Nicholas I, proclaiming instead their loyalty to the idea of a Russian constitution. They expected to be joined by the rest of the troops stationed in St. Petersburg, but they were disappointed. Nicholas spent the day gathering a military force, and then attacked with artillery. With the firing of the artillery came the end of the revolt in the north.

The revolt suffered because those in charge communicated poorly with the soldiers involved in the uprising. Soldiers in St. Petersburg were made to chant "Constantine and Constitution," but when questioned, many of them reportedly professed to believe that "Constitution" was Constantine's wife. This may just be a rumor, however, because in a letter from Peter Kakhovsky to General Levashev, Kakhovsky says, "The story told to Your Excellency that, in the uprising of December 14 the rebels were shouting 'Long live the Constitution!' and that the people were asking 'What is Constitution, the wife of His Highness the Grand Duke?' is not true. It is an amusing invention."

When Prince Trubetskoy failed to turn up at the square, Nicholas sent Count Mikhail Miloradovich, a military hero who was greatly respected by ordinary soldiers, to pacify the rebels. While delivering a speech, Miloradovich was shot dead by an officer called Peter Kakhovsky.

While the Northern Society scrambled in the days leading up to December 14, the Southern Society (based out of Tulchin) took a serious blow. On December 13, acting on reports of treason, the police arrested Pavel Pestel. It took two weeks for the Southern Society to learn of the events in the capital. Meanwhile, other members of the leadership were arrested. The Southern Society, and a nationalistic group called the United Slavs discussed revolt. When learning of the location of some of the arrested men, the United Slavs freed them by force. One of the freed men, Sergey Muravyov-Apostol, assumed leadership of the revolt. After converting the soldiers of Vasilkov to the cause, Muraviev-Apostol easily captured the city. The rebelling army was soon confronted by superior forces armed with artillery loaded with grapeshot, and with orders to destroy the rebels.

On January 3, the rebels met defeat and the surviving leaders were sent to St. Petersburg to stand trial with the northern leaders. The Decembrists were interrogated, tried, and convicted. Kakhovsky was executed by hanging together with four other leading Decembrists: Pavel Pestel; the poet Kondraty Ryleyev; Sergey Muravyov-Apostol; and Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin. Other Decembrists were exiled to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the Far East.

When the five Decembrists were hanged something unusual happened. The ropes that were being used to hang them split before any of them actually died.^[1] This caused a sigh of relief in the crowd because, according to a centuries-old tradition, any condemned prisoner who survived a botched execution would be set free. Rather than free these prisoners, Nicholas ordered new ropes and the prisoners were hanged again. This was the last public execution in Russian imperial history.

Suspicion also fell on several eminent persons who were on friendly terms with the Decembrist leaders and could have been aware of their clandestine organizations, notably Aleksandr Pushkin, Alexander Griboedov, and Aleksey Ermolov. Wives of many Decembrists followed their husbands into exile. The expression Decembrist wife is a Russian symbol of the devotion of a wife to her husband.

With the failure of the Decembrists, Russia's monarchial absolutism would continue for almost a century, although serfdom would be officially abolished in 1861. Though defeated, the Decembrists did effect some change on the regime. Their dissatisfaction forced Nicholas to turn his attention inward to address the issues of the empire. In 1826, a rehabilitated Speransky began the task of codifying Russian law, a task that continued throughout Nicholas’s reign. Anecdotally, after being defeated in the Crimean War, Nicholas is said to have lamented that his corrupt staff treated him worse than the Decembrists ever had.

Although the revolt was a proscribed topic during Nicholas' reign, Alexander Herzen placed the profiles of executed Decembrists on the cover of his radical periodical Polar Star. Aleksandr Pushkin addressed poems to his Decembrist friends, Nikolai Nekrasov wrote a long poem about the Decembrist wives, and Leo Tolstoy started writing a novel on that liberal movement, which would later evolve into War and Peace.

To some extent, the Decembrists were in the tradition of a long line of palace revolutionaries who wanted to place their candidate on the throne, but because the Decembrists also wanted to implement a liberal political program, their revolt has been considered the beginning of a revolutionary movement. The uprising was the first open breach between the government and liberal elements, and it would subsequently widen.

• Figes, Orlando (2002) Natasha's Dance: a Cultural History of Russia. London. ISBN 0-7139-9517-3
• Rabow-Edling, Susanna (May 2007). "The Decembrists and the Concept of a Civic Nation". Nationalities Papers 35 (2): 369-391. 

• Decembrist exile in Irkutsk
• Decembrist exile in Siberia
• Online Museum of the Decembrist movement
• Freemasonic background of the movement
• Source for Letter from Peter Kakhovsky to General Levashev