by Stefano Caprio

The Decembrist revolt on December 14, 1825 saw army officers and intellectuals in favor of liberal reforms attempt to seize power after the sudden death of Tsar Alexander I, only to be crushed by the repression of Nicholas I. An icon of the recurring alternation between “system” and “revolt,” regime and anarchy, in the parable of Russian history.

These days, two very significant dates follow one another in Russia: December 12 marked Constitution Day, commemorating the fundamental law approved by Boris Yeltsin in 1993, a couple of months after the shelling of the Supreme Soviet building where parliamentarians had barricaded themselves to contest the new pro-Western power that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It was the formal act that marked the end of the communist regime, with the transition to a market economy and the elimination of planning and control institutions. Only the outlines of that text remain, as it was overturned in 2020 by changes sought by Vladimir Putin to consecrate the new orthodox sovereignist regime of the “vertical of power.”

December 14 also marks the 200th anniversary of the Decembrist revolt (in Russian, December is dekabr), when in 1825 the Decembrists attempted to seize power after the sudden death of Tsar Alexander I, who, despite his glorious victory over Napoleon, had not decided to introduce the liberal reforms so desired by army officers and Russian intellectuals.

The revolt was suppressed by the new Tsar Nicholas I, Alexander's brother, who was devoted solely to order and repression in Russia and every other country, earning him the title of “gendarme of Europe.”

The two dates are intertwined in a reinterpretation of Russia's recent and ancient history, always poised between the long winters of dictatorial ‘stagnation’ and the spring explosions of new popular upheavals, without ever finding a balance between its different souls.

At the conference on the two centuries since the uprising, which opened in Moscow at the Academy of Sciences, one of the most authoritative historians, Yuri Pivovarov, proposed as a key to interpretation the pendulum between samoderzhavie (“autocracy”) and samovlastie (“self-power”), two almost identical terms indicating the contrast between ‘system’ and “revolt,” between regime and anarchy.

Russia has historically been prone to excessive contradictions, and since the time of the Decembrists, this has been articulated in a series of opposing and successive images: from Alexander I's “Holy Alliance” in 1815 (the first “European Union”) to Nicholas I's Crimean War in 1853, with Russia opposing the whole of Europe, and then the great reforms of Alexander II with the liberation from serfdom in 1861.

This turning point would later be rewarded with 80 attempts to assassinate the tsar, culminating in his death in 1881 at the hands of revolutionaries, a prelude to the Bolsheviks' rise to power after the revolutions of 1905 and February 1917, before the great October Revolution.

Even the seventy years of totalitarian communism were certainly not peaceful and uniform; after the civil war of 1918-1920, there was a long internal struggle within the party, won by Stalin in 1930 after eliminating all his opponents and establishing a regime of terror, which was then denounced during Khrushchev's ‘thaw’ in 1957 and replaced by Brezhnev in 1964 with the restoration of neo-Stalinist control.

Gorbachev then attempted the ‘gentle revolution’ of perestroika in 1986, only to succumb to the KGB coup attempt in 1991, thwarted by Yeltsin, who climbed onto a tank and was hailed by the people, who gathered the next day to remove the monument in Lubyanka Square, the headquarters of the KGB, which represented its founder Feliks Dzerzhinsky.

It is therefore not surprising that even Yeltsin's own ‘democratic’ regime, inaugurated by cannon fire in 1993, then turned into a series of wars and uprisings in Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Transnistria, eventually converging into Vladimir Putin's current dictatorship, built on the repression of popular demonstrations organized by Alexei Navalny and culminating in war against Georgia, Ukraine, Europe, the West, and the universal Antichrist.

From Yeltsin's samovlastie, which gave everyone the chance to take “all the power they could swallow,” we have returned to Putin's samoderžavie, a system of power that leaves no freedom or hope for change until the next turn of Russia's crazy compass.

So, the question that scholars are analyzing these days about the Decembrists comes up again and again: are these just reactions to dissatisfaction with Russia's role in history, or are they the realization of ideologies capable of forming new state systems, destined to change the face of the whole world?

This is the question today: is Putinism destined to peter out and disappear, or will it come to dominate the rest of the world, starting with the America of his friend Trump? The Decembrists were exalted by the Soviets as the beginning of the great revolutionary epic, only to be forgotten with the establishment of the Putin regime, which cannot tolerate any semblance of popular revolt.

Yet the young Alexander Pushkin, the bard of the rediscovery of the Russian soul after a century of Westernism and today as celebrated by Russians as he is hated by Ukrainians for having stolen their first truly great Ukrainian poet and writer, Nikolai Gogol, by making him fall in love with Great Russia, also referred to the Decembrists.

In the course on ‘The Foundations and Principles of Russian Statehood’, which is now compulsory in all schools of all levels in Russia, just as lessons on Marxism and dialectical materialism were in Soviet times, the 1825 uprising is completely obscured, rewriting history through the lens of Nicholas I's censorship, the Okhrana, the mother of the special services, up to the KGB and the current FSB, Putin's school of power and even that of Patriarch Kirill of Moscow.

The nobles and officers who gathered in Senate Square in St. Petersburg on December 14, 1825, intended to eliminate the autocracy by preventing Nicholas I from ascending to the throne, a coup d'état that had been in preparation for years and was accelerated by the unexpected death of Alexander I in the southern city of Taganrog, where he had gone to seek treatment for his wife.

The death of the victorious tsar is one of the great mysteries of Russian history, as he was still relatively young at 48 and no proper autopsy was performed. The subsequent legend sees the tsar transformed into the starets Fedor Kuzmič, an itinerant preacher in Siberia, and no subsequent regime has ever wanted to verify who the remains buried in the tomb of St. Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg really belong to, along with the other tsars of the modern era, where the last tsar, Nicholas II, and his family are also laid to rest, with equally dubious remains recovered from mass graves in the Urals.

The uncertainty surrounding the fate of the tsars and their memory reflects the need to continually rewrite Russian history, which is now one of the main motivations behind Tsar Putin's sovereignist and imperial ideology. “Crimea is ours,” “Donbass has always been Russian,” the desire to claim the Baltic, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and perhaps other regions of the world from Africa to South America, characterize a frantic search for an identity that is not truly linked to the earth, but to the higher spheres of the ideological sky. This was also the inner contradiction of Alexander I, who, entering Paris triumphantly in 1814, thought he could reunite all peoples and even churches, uniting Russian Orthodox Christians with Austrian Catholics and Prussian Protestants in the “Holy” Alliance.

Putin's war in Ukraine explicitly refers to Stalin's victory over the Nazis, but no less significant is the memory of the period following the Napoleonic Wars, when the ideological premise was precisely the contrast between absolute power and liberal revolution, between samoderžavie and samovlastie. The Decembrists were partly descended from a secret society formed in Moscow in 1818, the Sojuz Blagodenstvija, ‘the Union of Prosperity’, which intended to form a liberal-oriented popular movement to build a society without any form of dictatorship or slavery, a romantic dream that often recurs in history, almost always giving way to new forms of autocracy. The ideals of liberal society presupposed a rapprochement between intellectuals and the people, as had happened during the war against Napoleon, with the meeting between officers and the humblest soldiers.

It was the great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev who described this encounter in Memoirs of a Hunter, where the noble narrator encounters a series of low-level figures during a hunt, such as the peasants Khor and Kalinič, who live in the woods and express feelings of authentic human dignity. Turgenev coined a term to describe these encounters that is once again widely used today, populizm from the Russified Latin (the writer later included other terms in his novels that have become universal, such as anarkhizm and nigilizm), prophesying the great ambiguity of the times in which we live in the third millennium, between the sovereignist illusions of the new emperors and the populist confusion of artificial ideologies, awaiting a new world and new revolutions.