The Decembrists are slaughtered
Nicholas I orders his artillery to open fire on a crowd of rebels
In St Petersburg, the morning of
|&ecember &ecember in the 1ld|Style calendar dawned darM and cold
Sunrise did not come until nine o’clock, and the mood was heavy with tension.
For weeks Russia had been locked in a constitutional crisis. On 1 December, Tsar Alexander I had died without an heir. The throne should have passed to his brother Constantine, viceroy of Poland, but he had renounced his right to the crown in 1820 when he married a woman with no royal blood. Constantine insisted, therefore, that his younger brother, Nicholas, should become tsar. Unfortunately, taking the throne and originally swore an oath to Constantine as the new tsar.
As if all that were not convoluted enough, a
Iroup of aristocratic liberals and oʛcers had
united to form the Northern Society. Passionately dedicated to the idea of reform, they were deeply opposed to the accession of the conservative Nicholas. But by the evening of 25 December, Constantine had again rejected the crown, and Nicholas was poised to take power.
The next morning dawned with St Petersburg in chaos. While Nicholas and his supporters were scrambling to secure the generals’ loyalty, some 3,000 soldiers assembled in the capital’s Senate Square, chanting support for Constantine and demanding a constitution. Word soon spread, and a vast civilian crowd began to assemble, apparently sympathetic to the rebels. Visibly pale with nerves, Nicholas sent the capital’s military governor to calm the soldiers, but a rebel shot him. The tsar then ordered a cavalry charge, but the horses slipped on the frozen cobbles.
In the end, Nicholas lost patience and
ordered his artillery to fire on the crowd, and
scores of people were killed. Nicholas’s throne was safe. But in the Russian liberal imagination, the martyrdom of the Decembrists was remembered as the most heinous crime of the age.
Dominic Sandbrook ’s latest book is Who Dares Wins: Britain, 1979–1982 (Allen Lane, 2019)