Decembrist Revolt 1825: Grapeshot on the Neva and Exiles Who Built Siberia

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On December 26, 1825, by the modern calendar, about 3,000 soldiers in St. Petersburg's Senate Square refused to swear allegiance to Tsar Nicholas I while 9,000 loyal troops faced them. Their officers were nobles radicalized by the Napoleonic Wars, who came home appalled by serfdom and wore cavalry swords to court balls rather than dance. Pavel Pestel's Southern Society wanted a republic and land for freed serfs, the Northern Society a British-style constitutional monarchy, and the United Slavs a pan-Slavic federation. All opposed American slavery. When Alexander I died, Constantine's secret renunciation sat in sealed envelopes, troops swore to him, and Nicholas called a new oath, which the rebels framed as usurpation.

Their chosen leader, Prince Sergei Trubetskoy, never appeared, and Prince Obolensky took over on the spot. Pyotr Kakhovsky shot the envoy Mikhail Miloradovich, cavalry slipped on icy cobbles, and Nicholas ordered grapeshot, then fire on the Neva ice as rebels fled. Pestel had been arrested the day before, and Sergei Muravyov-Apostol's five-day rising in Ukraine was crushed. Five leaders were hanged, common soldiers ran gauntlets of thousands of lashes, and the nobles went into Siberian exile at Chita and Petrovsky Zavod. Wives such as Maria Volkonskaya gave up their status to follow, petitioned until hard labor was canceled, and the exiles opened schools and pharmacies. Alexander II granted amnesty in 1856.

• Police cleaned blood from the streets and pulled bodies from the river overnight to hide the toll.
• Mikhail Speransky's codification after the revolt produced nearly 36,000 enactments.
• Indigenous Tungus, Yakut and Buryat communities welcomed the exiles as martyrs.
• The exiles grew tobacco and buckwheat in hothouses and opened schools for women.
• Leo Tolstoy first conceived War and Peace as a novel about the Decembrists' origins.