The Decembrist revolt of 1825 was crushed within a day
On this day · 26 December 1825
About 3,000 soldiers defied Tsar Nicholas I in St Petersburg's Senate Square, faced three times as many loyal troops, and were scattered by cannon at dusk.
The Decembrist revolt broke out in St Petersburg’s Senate Square on December 26, 1825 by the modern calendar (December 14 by the Julian calendar Russia then used), when about 3,000 soldiers led by some 30 officers refused to swear allegiance to the new tsar, Nicholas I. Artillery broke it before nightfall.
The opening came from a muddled succession. When Alexander I died in late 1825, the army swore loyalty to his brother Constantine, who had secretly renounced the throne in 1822 and stayed in Warsaw. Nicholas set a fresh oath for December 14, and members of the secret Northern Society, who wanted a constitution and an end to serfdom, urged regiments to refuse it.
The rebels faced about 9,000 loyal troops, three times their number. Their chosen leader, Prince Sergei Trubetskoy, lost his nerve and never took command. When the capital’s governor-general, Mikhail Miloradovich, tried to talk the soldiers back to barracks, the conspirator Kakhovsky shot him, fatally. At dusk Nicholas ordered three guns to open fire; men who fled onto the frozen Neva were shelled there, and some of the dead went through the broken ice.
Russia’s calendar ran 12 days behind Western Europe’s, so every date in the story has two versions, which is why accounts disagree:
| Event | Julian (Russian) | Gregorian |
|---|---|---|
| Senate Square uprising | Dec 14, 1825 | Dec 26, 1825 |
| Pestel arrested in the south | Dec 13, 1825 | Dec 25, 1825 |
| Chernigov regiment mutiny begins | Dec 29, 1825 | Jan 10, 1826 |
| Southern mutiny defeated | Jan 3, 1826 | Jan 15, 1826 |
| Five leaders hanged | July 13, 1826 | July 25, 1826 |
The investigation indicted 579 men and sentenced 121. The five condemned to death, Pestel, Ryleyev, Muravyov-Apostol, Bestuzhev-Ryumin and Kakhovsky, had first been sentenced to be drawn and quartered. More than a hundred others went to Siberia, several followed by their wives, and the last surviving Decembrist died in 1892. It took eighty years, and another revolution, before a tsar conceded anything like their demands, in the October Manifesto of 1905.
Sources & references
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