Ingrid Kleespies is Associate Professor of Russian Studies in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Florida. Her interests include early nineteenth-century Russian literature and culture, history of emotions, and Romanticism. She is the author of A Nation Astray: Nomadism and National Identity in Russian Literature; The Necessary Man: Petr Chaadaev and the Invention of Russian Literature (forthcoming); and the co-editor (with Lyudmila Parts) of Goncharov in the Twenty-First Century.
This post introduces a series of forthcoming posts dedicated to new research on the Decembrists and their legacy that appeared in a recent special issue of Canadian-American Slavic Studies 59.4 (2025) edited by Alexander Martin and Emily Wang: The Decembrist Bicentennial: New Perspectives on Russia in the 1820s. Work by Yasyn Abdullaev, Mikhail Belousov, Anna Nath, Stanislav Tarasov, and Ingrid Kleespies examines Decembrist emotional culture; the complications, legal and otherwise, of the interregnum that galvanized the Decembrists’ decision to act in December 1825; and the formation of the Third Department in response to the uprising.
Two hundred years ago this month, perhaps the greatest near-event in Russian history took place on 26 December 1825 (14 December o.s.) on Senate Square in Saint Petersburg. A hundred or so young liberal officers, along with three thousand troops, mustered to protest Nicholas I’s swearing-in, which they viewed as illegal, and to demand political reform.
The rebels, who would come to be known as the Decembrists, were brutally defeated by troops loyal to the new tsar, and their hopes for limiting, if not abolishing, Russian autocracy were dashed. The political reverberations of this failed revolution have echoed in Russian history ever since, from the harsh nature of Nicholas I’s reign through the Russian Revolution and the collapse of the USSR.
While the Decembrist uprising occupies an important place in the Russian imagination—indeed, its looming presence lies at the heart of Tolstoy’s War and Peace—it is striking that the bicentennial will be all but invisible in Russia. There will be no public discussions, no official marking of the day, and certainly no Soviet-style commemorative mythologizing. There will be no what-if speculations on how Russia’s path might have been different had the Decembrists succeeded in at least some of their aims. Instead, the Decembrist memory has been re-suppressed in recent years. As in the nineteenth century, it is officially off-limits, except as the target of criticism for its violence and essential “foreignness.” It is hard to overlook the fact that perhaps what matters most about the Decembrist bicentennial is its absence.
This past May, in a speech at the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum, Russia’s justice minister, Konstantin Chuychenko, described the Decembrists as “agents of foreign influence,” suggesting that the liberal officers and writers who attempted to enact a version of liberal reform on 14 December were operatives in the service of foreign powers bent on destabilizing or destroying Imperial Russia. As literary scholar Lindsay Ceballos has described, this identification is widespread. For example, at the state-sponsored mega-exhibition “Russia—My History,” now permanently housed at the former park of Soviet achievements, VDNKh, the uprising is labeled the “Decembrist Conspiracy” and the Decembrists themselves are termed “foreign agents” who were both “disseminators and victims of ‘Masonic lies.’”
In his speech, Chuychenko further asserted that the project of strengthening the Russian state is more important than the task of protecting individual rights or upholding the rule of law—a claim that must surely have set the Decembrists spinning in their graves. For while the Decembrists ranged from advocates of constitutional monarchy to those calling to establish a republic, they were united by a shared desire to limit autocratic power and to enshrine protections for rights and the rule of law. In essence, Chuychenko and others in recent years have defined the Decembrists’ basic liberal goals as “not Russian” and thus inimical to national values and even to the nation itself.
While the participants in the uprising were not in the pay of foreign powers, they were directly inspired by events of the previous fifty years in the West, starting with the American and French Revolutions and culminating in the many officer-led revolts and outbreaks of political unrest in favor of constitutional reform that spanned the globe from places like Spain and Greece to Haiti in the 1810s and 1820s. They could hardly be faulted for imagining that this early wave of democratization was headed for Russia’s borders, too.
The current silence around the Decembrist bicentennial marks a significant shift from the last one hundred years. As literary scholar Liudmila Trigos has described, the heroic, if underground, narrative of the Decembrist uprising as a valiant struggle against autocracy was coopted early on by the Bolsheviks, who turned the event into the “official legitimating myth of the Soviet state.” The uprising’s status as a Soviet origin story and memory site par excellence was cemented in the large-scale 1925 celebration of the centennial, when Senate Square was renamed Decembrists’ Square.
After 1991, the Decembrist memory was reconfigured into another kind of origin story, this time as the precursor of liberal democracy. This trend proved short-lived (although traces of it remain on the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library website). Already in December 2015, local commemoration of the 190th anniversary was not accompanied by any centralized official remembrance. Instead, authorities unveiled a statue of General Mikhail Miloradovich in Saint Petersburg. Miloradovich, famed for his heroic role in 1812, was shot and killed by Northern Society member Petr Kakhovskii on December 14, 1825 as he attempted to negotiate with the rebels on Nicholas’ behalf. The message was clear: it is not rebels who are remembered but those who attempt to pacify them in the name of autocracy.
This official message has only hardened in recent years. In his speech this summer, Chuychenko asserted that the Decembrists’ punishments in 1826 were too lenient, the result of a weak “liberal” monarchy. Such rhetoric fits with a common theme in Russian state-sponsored discourse today, which holds that a “fifth column” is working from within to destroy Russia, and that such conspirators should be dealt with summarily in order to prevent future social “disorder.” In this framing, the war in Ukraine is understood not as the outcome of Russian imperial aggression, but as the result of authorities’ failure to destroy the Euromaidan Revolution in 2013-14, the “disorder” of which allowed for Ukraine to be taken over by a “neo-Nazi dictatorship.” Further, Russian media has blamed the Decembrist Southern Society for Euromaidan.
Why do the Decembrists matter? As literary scholar Emily Wang and political scientist Susanna Rabow-Edling have both described, the Decembrists should be understood as “civic nationalists.” That is, they fervently supported a nation that they defined primarily in terms of citizenship and shared civic values, rather than primarily in terms of culture or bloodline. The Decembrists were interested in glorifying the ideal of the citizen, an equal member of a republic, defined legally by a constitution—all elements found in the U.S. and French revolutionary models.
Tellingly, as soon as the uprising was crushed, Nicholas did what he could to ensure that such an episode would never be repeated. Measures included the establishment of the infamous Third Department (secret police). As political scientist Susanna Rabow-Edling puts it: “[The Tsar] was furious that the Decembrists had broken their bonds of loyalty and chosen to serve the nation instead of the tsar.”
When we look beyond the events of 14 December, we see that the Decembrists didn’t only dream of political reform, but of becoming the kind of citizens they idealized—of making such a status possible. Some of them attempted to do so on an epic, if disastrous, scale on Senate Square. But they also attempted a “revolutionary” restructuring of autocratic reality in the years leading up to 1825 on the most local of levels, through what we might call today micropolitics. They used speech, behavior, dress, and, importantly, emotion to model and enact citizenhood.
The Decembrists are a fascinating example of how the self can be used as a salient canvas on which to express meaningful political protest and challenge. This model acquires renewed relevance today when speech, rights, and the rule of law are endangered.
