Russia’s December Revolution, 1825
Though the Decembrist rising against the Tsar was quickly put down, writes Michael Whittock, the officers and land-owners who led it created an heroic revolutionary tradition that influenced Russians of every class.
The death of Tsar Alexander I in November 1825, at the early age of 48, took by surprise the conspirators who, for nearly ten years, had been plotting his overthrow and the replacement of the Russian autocracy, based on serfdom, by some form of representative government. Most of these men, as young officers, had served in the war of 1812 and the foreign campaigns that culminated in the fall of Paris; they were all members of the dominant class in Russia, the land-owning and serf-holding dvoryanstvo.
They returned home strongly affected by western European political theories and institutions — constitutional monarchy, republicanism, parliamentary government and the like — and their impressions and experiences quickened the seed already sown among enlightened dvoryane by the Russian humanists of the eighteenth century — Fonvizin, Novikov, Pnin, Radishchev and others who had publicized the evils of the serf system—and also by the patriotic upsurge of 1812.
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