The Lessons of the Decembrist Revolt Aren’t What Russia’s Opposition Want to Hear |
Dec. 26 marks 200 years since the Decembrist uprising in St. Petersburg. Liberal army officers, inspired by Western ideals after defeating Napoleon, tried to prevent Tsar Nicholas I from taking the throne. They demanded a constitution and the abolition of serfdom. “Law and liberty,” they cried.
In liberal historical memory, the Decembrists are often held up as proof that another Russia is possible. When the moment of Vladimir Putin’s succession comes, liberals posit, the regime will be at its most vulnerable to change.
But if that future Russia does come to pass, it will not look the way either today’s liberals or the Decembrists imagined.
Some remember the Decembrists as honorable and self-sacrificing; others as traitors. Many historians see them as naive dreamers who delayed reform and made the system they despised even more draconian. That they also inspired Lenin and Trotsky, not to mention later Soviet dissidents, only adds to the paradoxes.
The reality is that the Decembrists were a fragmented group of liberal-minded nobles operating in different parts of the empire. They had competing priorities, little in common with the broader population and only a half-formed plan to seize power from the ancien régime. They were happiest reciting poetry and performing rituals in Masonic lodges.
Then, in 1825, they attempted to take advantage of an unclear royal succession — and failed.
Nonetheless, “a beginning was made,” argued a recent piece in The Economist. At best, the........