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Russian Conspirators In SiberiaEditions
ReviewThe following is taken from my introduction: On 14th December, 1825, the first day of Nicholas I’s reign, 3,000 men gathered in St Petersburg’s Senate Square intending to force the new Tsar into accepting some kind of constitution. They were not sure what the constitution should consist of, nor even what they should do next, but the circumstances had seemed ripe. But their leader, Prince Trubetskoy, had not shown up; things had not gone well for them. Still, they refused to disperse. The Governor General of St Petersburg, Miloradovich, was shot and killed when he tried to approach, likewise Commander Stürler. The Metropolitan Serafim went out in episcopal robes to try spiritual influence, but the situation was ugly and the Father of the Church was advised to go away and pray. By 3.00pm, as the light began to fail, Nicholas ordered grapeshot to be fired and the ringleaders to be rounded up. ‘Violà un joli commencement de règne,’ he remarked as the bloodbath began… The new Tsar stayed up all night to interrogate those who were brought in and it was soon evident that the plot was the work of people whom he knew and trusted. Here was the abject Prince Trubetskoy, whose nerve had failed him; Nikita Muraviev, who at seventeen had been among the victorious troops entering Paris; Prince Obolensky; the talented Ryleev; a young Estonian officer called Baron Rozen from whom he had expected so much… While the affair was investigated, most of the prisoners were kept in solitary confinement in the St Peter & Paul Fortress, in near darkness. Nicholas himself took a close interest in every aspect. He examined individual confessions and annotated them with instructions on how to proceed, suggesting lines of questioning and alterations to the conditions of their imprisonment. Then in July, 1826, Pestel, Ryleev, Kakhovsky, Sergei Muraviev-Apostol and Bestuzhev-Ryumin were sentenced to be hanged (at a time when there was officially no death penalty in Russia). A further 121 men were sentenced to varying terms of hard labour in Siberia, followed by exile, in many cases for life. They travelled post – to remove them as fast as possible – in chains… Rozen’s first child, Yevgeniy, was born while he was still in the St Peter & Paul Fortress. He saw him once, in July1826, and told his wife not to follow him until the child could walk. Leaving Yevgeniy with her sister in Moscow, Anna rejoined her husband in Siberia in August, 1830, as they were making their way from Chita to Petrovsky Zavod, their new prison. Konrad was born in 1831 (named after Ryleev), and in July the following year, Rozen’s term of hard labour ended… In August, 1839, after a fourteen year odyssey, [Rozen] returned with his family to Estonia… The memoirs stop there, but Rozen lived for 44 more years… By the1860s he began to think that someone should bear witness to what had happened for posterity. Since no one remained who was likely to do it as well as himself, he came to regard it as his duty to write a sustained, balanced account. He wrote in German and it was from that edition that his memoirs were translated into English in 1874… The Decembrists belong to a distinguished line of people who rejected tyranny at the cost of their own freedom, for moral rather than overtly political reasons. The pseudo-legal aspects of their trial and the absence of religious elements make them seem modern, but it is also the record of their experiences which puts them in the same tradition as later enemies of tyranny like Ginzburg, Solzhenitsyn and Havel. Since Rozen’s is the primary voice of the Decembrists, and every generation needs to be freshly inspired by tyranny’s opponents, it is a fine thing to see his memoirs in print for the first time since 1874. The full text of this introduction can be e-mailed on application - review by John de Falbe |
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