Decembrist Revolt
About three thousand soldiers stood in a square in St Petersburg on 14 December 1825 refusing to swear allegiance to a new tsar, and were dispersed by artillery before dark. The conspirators were officers, many of them from the best families in Russia, who had marched to Paris in 1814 and come home to serfdom and an autocracy that had abandoned the reforms it once discussed. They had been organising in secret societies for years, disagreeing about whether they wanted a constitutional monarchy, a republic, or a federal state, and about whether to kill the tsar. The opportunity was an accident. Alexander I died childless in the south in November, his brother Constantine had secretly renounced the succession, and for three weeks each brother insisted the other was tsar while the country swore oaths to both in turn. The conspirators used the confusion, telling their soldiers that Nicholas was usurping Constantine's throne and that the word constitution was Constantine's wife. Then almost nothing happened. The officer chosen as dictator for the day never appeared, the units stood in the freezing square for hours without orders, the governor of the city was shot when he rode over to negotiate, and Nicholas eventually brought up guns and fired canister into them at close range. Five leaders were hanged, three of the ropes breaking first, and over a hundred were sent to Siberia, where a number of their wives followed them. Nicholas read the interrogation files carefully and spent thirty years making sure it could not happen again.
- Year: 1825 CE
- Category: Political
