Stanislav Tarasov is currently a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress.
This post is part of a series 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. The introduction to this series of blog posts, by Ingrid Kleespies, may be found here. The previous posts in the series are here and here.
Emotions set politics into motion. Reason and ideas create political programs, but on their own cannot motivate someone to come to the Red Square and disappear for years in Siberian prisons. And how can one person’s political enthusiasm “insult the feelings” of an opponent to the point of incurring persecution, as happened often in the Russian nineteenth century? What feelings are involved in political protest, anyway? And what do they mean if the action fails to bring about the desired changes?
The case of 1825 is telling: for a protest rooted in such strong emotions, the Decembrist Uprising has left a surprisingly muted legacy. The Decembrists are fading even from the Russian-speaking world’s memory, having never really impressed the West. This lack of cultural staying power proceeds in large part from their failure to bring about a revolution. Beyond this obvious cause, their “guilt” is that they were not radical enough, either in their ideas or actions. But what is “radical”? Can emotional expression be as radical as political action?
The Decembrists were radical enough for their time. They left an enduring impact on the cultural worldview of Russian Imperial elites, contributing to the Soviet myth and the Ukrainian national story. To this day, these unsuccessful rebels are often regarded as overly emotional and hopelessly romantic. And so they were. But to be fair, such was the “spirit of the times” in the 1800s-1820s. The Decembrists’, their Romantic “enthusiasm” produced the first modern revolutionary attempt in Russian history. It appears that enthusiasm has a history as well.
How does a prototypical Russian imperial subject of the time—call him Sergei—become politically enthusiastic? The first step in his awakening may be a rising awareness of just how trapped he is. In other words, Sergei (perhaps Muravev-Apostol (1795-1826), who led the uprising in Ukraine in 1825) might initially experience melancholy and political apathy because he lives in an autocratic regime. He might start to reflect on these dark thoughts and feelings, and discover that even he is not really free, while serfs are even worse off. He might become enthusiastic about changing his situation and join others in political action.
This emotional genesis of protest is not some modern construct. In early-modern Russo-European culture, melancholy and enthusiasm were thought to be dangerous mental states that could lead to political radicalism. In Western Europe, meanwhile, Catholics and Protestants alike considered anyone who claimed personal visions and divine inspiration to be a melancholic madman and an enthusiastic fanatic. Later, the processes of medicalization and Enlightenment redefined melancholy and enthusiasm as diseases and emotional maladies. Above all, these emotional experiences came to signify a rebellion against authority, tradition, and political order.
In the absence of European-style religious strife, Russian authorities saw melancholy and enthusiasm merely as sickly and dangerous. Catherine the Great was great, indeed, in foreseeing the potential for political dissent among critical “melancholics,” as she called them, including writers like Alexander Radishchev (1749-1802) and Nikolay Novikov (1744-1818). The French Revolution only amplified her suspicions. After all, the European thinkers Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant blamed the French Revolution specifically on the proliferation of political enthusiasm, which exposed the uncontrolled power of mass exaltation.
The Revolution and the ensuing Napoleonic Wars also awoke romantic individuals, as well as romantic nations. This was the Age of Sensibility, with Sentimentalism and Romanticism placing human emotionality at the forefront of art, contemplation, and lived experience. Romanticism combined melancholy and enthusiasm into the creative genius of the heroic rebel. Two French Romantic writers, Madame de Stael (who coined “Romanticism”) and Benjamin Constant (who coined “liberalism”), outlined how civic melancholy led to reformist enthusiasm in the emerging liberal doctrine of political dissent.
Their avid readers, the Decembrist generation of the early 1800s, became bored and restless after Napoleon was defeated in 1815 due to socio-political stagnation in Russia’s affairs. Political enthusiasm for liberal reforms, arising from civic melancholy, inspired some members of the educated elites to self-organize and eventually rebel. The poet Lord Byron, the archetypal bored enthusiast, and the Southern European officer-led uprisings in the 1820s paved the way for Russian “superfluous” men, the Onegins and Chatskys.
That is how Romantic enthusiasm became political. Yet it also emerged as a self-conscious revolutionary ideal and a social script requiring performance. It was not political ideas (which were quite diverse), but revolutionary enthusiasm that became the glue of Decembrist “emotional communities,” spurring adherents to the shared emotionality of political aspirations and a readiness for patriotic self-sacrifice. The performance of revolutionary enthusiasm became not only a binding emotional norm, but also a cause for disputes in the Southern secret associations in Ukraine.
Even at their trial, the rebels blamed mutinous passions and described themselves as being possessed by unruly political sentiments and unhealthy exaltation. In this framing, the eventual revolts could be explained as a kind of madness. Tellingly, since 1825, what stands out in public memory is the Decembrists’ romantic enthusiasm. And as late historian Jan Plamper reminded us with his description of the Russian Revolutions as a “sensory experience,” lived experience matters.
It may be tempting to regard melancholy and enthusiasm first and foremost as emotional experiences with few political implications. Yet for the Decembrist generation of the 1820s, they were cultural concepts to live by. The emotional expression of political grievances in an autocratic empire was in itself a “radical” action in 1825. The situation in the modern Russian Empire is not so different.
