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 Historical Models of Terror in Decembrist Literature Ludmilla A. Trigos Every attempt to solve the social question with political means leads into terror. —hannah arendt On December 14, 1825, a small group of noblemen and elite officers led their troops into Senate Square in St.Petersburg in an attempt to overthrow the autocracy and abolish serfdom.1 Taking advantage of the confusion resulting during the interregnum after the death of Alexander I, who left no offspring to inherit the throne, the rebels played on the troops’ sympathy for Tsarevich Constantine, Alexander’s younger brother and the assumed heir, and demanded his purportedly rightful ascension, in opposition to the claim of Nicholas,third brother in line to the throne.They rallied the troops behind the slogan “Constantine and a Constitution,” though they had bigger plans for a change in power.Later known as the Decembrists,this group consisted of a Northern Society, with its members located in St. Petersburg , and a Southern Society, based in regiments in Tulchin, Poltava, and Chernigov, Ukraine. The northern group for the most part advocated for a constitutional monarchy and gradual political reform, while the southern group demanded more rapid and radical change and wanted to establish a republican form of government. The revolt in Petersburg was quashed in relatively short order after the new tsar, Nicholas, commanded his troops to fire on their rebel comrades. Ten days later the southern group learned of the uprising in the north; after their leaders were arrested, they gathered forces to free them, and then rebelled against the authorities. By January 3, 1826, this revolt too had been subdued, as it had little support among locals or the military. The perpetrators were sent to the Peter-Paul Fortress and  ludmilla a. trigos joined their Northern Society colleagues,who were already incarcerated and undergoing questioning by the tsar to determine the extent of the sedition and treason against the state. After a lengthy investigative process lasting into May 1826, the participants were assigned different levels of guilt, with 121 sentenced to penal servitude or exile,or both.The lower-ranking rebels had to run the gauntlet and, if they survived, were demoted and sent to serve in the war in the Caucasus.The five considered most guilty because of their leadership and espousal of regicide—Kondraty Ryleev (1795–1826), Colonel Pavel Pestel (1799–1826), Lieutenant Colonel Sergei MuravievApostol (1795–1826), Lieutenant Mikhail Bestuzhev-Riumin (1801–26), and Petr Kakhovsky (1799–1826)—were sentenced to death by hanging and executed on July 13, 1826.2 The Decembrists’ conspiracy arose out of a combination of traditions: the native Russian tradition of palace coups supported by military force and the classical tradition of Greco-Roman tyrants dethroned according to the doctrine of melior pars, founded on the principle that small elite groups (such as noblemen at the court, highly placed military officers, or senators) “would recognize an obligation to act on behalf of the community as a whole”and would oppose, depose, or assassinate a ruler if necessary.3 As the Decembrist Mikhail Lunin (1787–1845) pointed out during his testimony to the Investigating Commission,“the idea of regicide is not new in Russia; there are some quite recent examples of it.”4 Lunin obviously recalled the eighteenth-century palace coups led by guards’ officers to secure the crown for a different ruler, but he was actually hinting at more recent examples: the overthrow and murder of Paul I in 1801, in which two members of the Investigating Commission had participated and which put Alexander I on the throne, and the coup d’état and subsequent regicide of Peter III, Alexander I’s grandfather, which brought his grandmother, Catherine the Great, to the throne in 1762. In both cases the change in power was justi- fied as the replacement of a tyrannical, unfit tsar by a more appropriate and better-equipped ruler, as Cynthia Whittaker has amply demonstrated. Whittaker suggests that in the post-Petrine era, the legitimacy of each successor to the throne became a hotly contested issue, and points out that between 1725 and 1801 four coups d’état took place, two of which involved assassination. In each case the deed was justified as the replacement of an unfit ruler.Although a coup was considered acceptable under certain conditions , palace revolutions were not free-for-alls but instead had specific rules that needed to be followed. When those rules were abrogated...

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