Perhaps only one other young woman in the empire could think of her life as equally charmed: Maria Raevskaia. Maria’s great-grandfather was Mikhail Lomonosov, Enlightenment Russia’s greatest scientist and poet. Her father, Nikolay Raevsky, was surely the most admired man in Russia, most brilliant of the commanders who resisted Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812. At Borodino, in the bloodiest part of the fighting, Raevsky had led the assault on Napoleon’s elite grenadiers, seized their regimental flag, and saved the Russian army’s flank. (During the assault, a bullet passed through the breeches of his eleven-year-old son, also Nikolay.) Later, Raevsky was by the side of Czar Alexander when “the liberator of Europe” rode into Paris in 1814.
It could never be said of Katyusha, but Maria was stunning. She had raven hair and eyes like phosphorescence. When she was a girl, Raevsky said his daughter “moves like a thoroughbred colt.” No one watching Maria emerge from her childhood chrysalis was more beguiled than Alexander Pushkin. He had spent a summer falling in love with her, a state he never wholly exited.
The young poet, curly-haired and dark-skinned, great-grandson of an Eritrean slave yet himself a noble, was already loved for his notoriety, a national treasure. His Ode to Liberty (“I will sing of liberty, and scourge the evil that sits on thrones”) had exasperated the czar. Pushkin, people said, was to be banished to Siberia. But Alexander I thought of himself as an enlightened man, generous too. He sent Pushkin to cool off in relative ease in Ekaterinoslav, in the heart of Russia’s southern colonies. There, Pushkin contracted fever just as General Raevsky’s family and entourage were passing through on their way to take the waters at mineral springs in the Caucasus. The younger Nikolay, now an officer in his early twenties, had been a boyhood friend of Pushkin’s. When he heard that the poet was in town, he rushed off in search of him. He found the poet delirious, and pulled the general’s physician out of bed to treat him. “We came to a sordid little thatched hut,” the doctor wrote later. “I found in it a young man sitting on a wooden bunk. He was deathly pale, thin, and unshaven. Sheets of paper lay on the table and everywhere around him . . .”
The general was persuaded not to leave the poet behind. Very soon after setting off, Pushkin threw off his fever. Electric and alive, he sang throughout the day. He declaimed a fresh poem each time the suite stopped, and he tumbled in the grass with Nikolay. Maria could not keep her huge eyes off him. Later, Pushkin’s eyes lingered longer. When the Raevsky carriages reached the Black Sea, Maria ran into the surf and chased the retreating waves, shrieking with joy each time the waves returned. Two years later, in Eugene Onegin, Pushkin wrote:
How I envied the waves—
Those rushing tides in tumult tumbling
To fall about your feet like slaves!
I longed to join the waves in pressing
Upon those feet these lips . . . caressing.
To Pushkin, Maria’s massed curls shone brighter than sunlight and were darker than the night. With olive skin she was, he said, “la fille du Ganges.” Back in the capital, this carefree young woman of exceptional grace enthralled St. Petersburg society. While the powerful gathered at the Laval palace, the capital’s artistic, literary, and intellectual life revolved around the salon of Maria’s parents. A frequent visitor was a spirited prince, Sergey Volkonsky. Nearly two decades older than Maria, Volkonsky had been an aide-de-camp to Czar Alexander, dining with the emperor each day. Prince Sergey was now a major general in the Guards, a much-decorated hero, having fought more than fifty battles in the wars against Napoleon. The emperor had given him a golden saber, “for valor” inscribed along its blade.
The Volkonsky line descended from a saintly prince, Mikhail Chernigovsky, who helped liberate Moscow from the Mongol hordes and was given estates on the Volkona River south of Moscow in return. By the 1800s the family had become if not the richest of Russia’s ancient noble families, then certainly the best connected. Sergey’s mother, Princess Alexandra, lived in rooms in the Winter Palace or at Tsarskoe Selo, the czars’ summer retreat south of St. Petersburg. She was Mistress of the Robes to the dowager empress, the highest lady in the land after the royal family. (At Tsarskoe Selo, the schoolboy Pushkin had caused a scandal by jumping on this cold, severe woman, mistaking her for her young French companion.) When Maria accepted Prince Sergey’s offer of marriage, a life of ease and happiness seemed to beckon, as for Katyusha Laval. Yet her husband, like Katyusha’s, had kept from his princess an unspeakable secret, the ruin of them all.
• • •
A dozen years earlier in St. Petersburg, in August 1812, as Russia’s attempts to block Napoleon reached their crisis, Czar Alexander received a report of the war from his young aide-de-camp. He inquired about the troops’ morale. Every man down to the merest foot soldier, Sergey Volkonsky replied, would lay down his life for the country. The emperor then asked about the common folk. “You should be proud of them, for every single peasant is a patriot.” What, then, of the aristocracy? Volkonsky fell silent, and then: “Your Majesty, I am ashamed to belong to that class. There have been only words.”
As Orlando Figes puts it, in the campaign of 1812 many aristocrat officers lost their pride in their class but found their true countrymen in the ranks of the Russian army. The aristocracy, they had been taught to believe, were the “true sons of the fatherland.” Yet since the time of Peter the Great, noble families turned to France for their culture and tastes. French was the language spoken at court and at home; what little Russian aristocratic women knew was learned from their wet nurses. Any war, but particularly one with France, carried a deep ambivalence for this cosseted elite. As Napoleon’s armies drew close, noblemen and their families fled to their country estates.
Noblemen had been brought up to think of the hereditary serfs who tended the estates as little more than insensible beasts. Exceptions were made. Immured in the countryside, aristocrat children loved the warm, informal embrace of the pantry. Here was a contrast to the stiff formalities of the drawing room, and often the only place to make friends. The adored wet nurse, the nanny, the maid: these women made up a privileged serf caste in a world where the children of noble families were starved by mothers too bound up in society or too busy producing yet more children to offer much in the way of maternal love. Alexander Herzen, in his great memoir, wrote of “a feudal bond of affection” between aristocratic families and their household serfs.
But for the first time, the war threw aristocrat officers back on ordinary men. Officers were billeted in peasant villages, sharing their food with serf soldiers. Peasants intimate with every forest path and fold of the land sometimes saved the lives of officers from the hunting enemy. Intimacy bred respect toward the common soldier, then warmth. “We rejected the harsh discipline of the old system,” Volkonsky wrote at the end of his life, “and tried through friendship with our men to win their love and trust.” Officers with similar sensibilities set up field schools to teach troops to read. Others drew up army “constitutions’ to improve the soldiers’ lot. In “Notes on the Life of the Cossacks in Our Battalions,” based on a close study of Cossacks’ life and social organization, Volkonsky proposed communal grain, public schools, and state loans. In such documents was the germ of what later in the century would be a great flourishing of ethnography among the liberal intelligentsia—not least in Siberia.
When the war was over, this new breed of officer went back to their estates fired by a desire to recast the feudal contract with their serfs, paying for serfs’ education and the upkeep of dead soldiers’ children. Yet the commitment went deeper than that. Having seen the serf soldiers’ bravery on the battlefield, and watched groups of peasant partisans harrying the Grande Armée on its catastrophic retreat through the snow, officers like Volkonsky had discovered in the peasants the true “sons of the fatherland.” They had, indeed, discovered Russia’s future citizenry. “They may only be serfs,” Volkonsky wrote to his brother from among the corpses on the fie
ld at Borodino, “but these men have fought like citizens for their motherland.” In the face of suffocating autocracy, the “simple men,” endowed with robust and uncorrupted virtues, offered to Russia the promise of national liberation and spiritual renewal. That these men were hereditary slaves was “our national disgrace.”
But it was another set of experiences in Europe following Napoleon’s defeat that made these young officers take the next step, an extreme one. In Europe they had moved in heady reformist circles. Czar Alexander himself had helped establish constitutional monarchies in France, Poland, and Finland. But he had not taken a more liberal direction at home. Volkonsky had gone to London and watched, amazed, as the House of Commons debated the madness of King George. He had wanted to go on to the United States, “a country that had captured the imagination of all Russian youth because of its independence and democracy.” What they encountered in Europe held up to them Russia’s backwardness: absolutist czars, a rigid hierarchy of class and service to the state, and serfdom.
Once there had been hope. In 1801 the young, uncrowned Alexander stood before the throne of an empire that, officially, was a grand, harmonious edifice but that, upon closer inspection, was “chaotic and disorganized, a picture with prolix and careless touches, intended for a distant observer.” The heir had been tempted to renounce his claim to the throne and retire to the banks of the Rhine and there contemplate nature. He overcame the temptation largely because he resolved to bequeath to his people a liberal constitution. Serfdom preoccupied him from the start. With his intimates, he had talked about curbing the powers of landlords over their peasants. Years later, Alexander I could still claim to Madame de Staël in her Paris salon that, with God’s will, an end to serfdom would come during his reign. Yet from the start, too, the State Council resisted. Memories of the French Revolution were still fresh. Noblemen saw emancipation as part of some Russian Jacquerie out to overturn the old order. Others argued, meretriciously, that the current system actually protected the poorer peasants from exploitation by the richer ones. And so Czar Alexander’s only victory was to have removed from the pages of the St. Petersburg News announcements for the sale of serfs, a ban that was quickly circumvented through the use of euphemisms.
• • •
And so, though Europe had much changed these aristocrat officers, the veterans came home to a Russia that had changed scarcely at all. The returnees knew how to scandalize. Volkonsky grew a beard. He swapped his Order of St. Anne for a simple medallion of St. Nicholas, and went about in a peasant’s kaftan. With the weariness of war veterans—or perhaps the swagger—the men boycotted the frivolities of the St. Petersburg social round, or they marked their protest by wearing their swords at balls, indicating a refusal to dance. “We had taken part in the greatest events of history,” one wrote, “and it was unbearable to return to the vacuous existence of St. Petersburg, to listen to the idle chatter of old men about the so-called virtues of the past.” Pushkin, who had a great many friends among these men, put it this way:
The fashionable circle is no longer in fashion.
You know, my dear, we’re all free men now.
We keep away from society; don’t mingle with the ladies.
We’ve left them at the mercy of the old men,
The dear old boys of the eighteenth century.
This alienated group, “the children of 1812,” sought their own solace. The brotherhood caroused and whored, played cards and wrote poems. Above all, the brothers began to plot. They plotted first to rewrite the country’s laws in a language “that every citizen can understand.” Then they wondered about overthrowing the man who stood unchallenged above all law, a man who had once seemed to be progressive but who now embodied reaction. They attempted, for the first time in Russia’s history, to overturn autocracy.
The conspirators called themselves the Union of Salvation, founded by a group of young Guards officers committed to the idea of a constitutional monarchy and national parliament. From the beginning there was disagreement about how to bring about these goals. Some said they should wait for the czar to die, and then refuse to swear their oath of allegiance to his successor; others talked of regicide. Pushkin, in Eugene Onegin, made fun of these amateur conspirators, his friends:
’Twas all mere idle chatter
’Twixt Château-Lafite and Veuve Clicquot
Friendly disputes, epigrams
Penetrating none too deep.
This science of sedition
Was just the fruit of boredom, of idleness,
The pranks of grown-up naughty boys.
Cells spread through St. Petersburg, Moscow, and the provincial garrison towns. In Kiev, Volkonsky entered the conspiracy via the freemasonry and met Colonel Pavel Ivanovich Pestel, who, as a full-blown republican, was among the most radical of the young officers. Pestel was emerging as the chief orchestrator of an uprising. By this time, the Union of Salvation had become the Southern Society. In 1825 Pestel had a wild scheme to arrest the czar during an inspection of southern troops in Kiev and then to march on St. Petersburg. Volkonsky was put in charge of forging links with the more moderate Northern Society, based in St. Petersburg. There, the poet Kondraty Feodorovich Ryleev supplied “Russian lunches” of rye bread and cabbage soup over which members drew up demands for a constitutional monarchy.
Unexpectedly, plans for insurrection were thrown into turmoil in November 1825 by the sudden news of the childless czar’s death, at forty-eight. The presumed heir was the Grand Duke Constantine, the oldest of Alexander’s younger brothers, to whom the elite Guard, including its martinet commander, Nicholas, next in line to the throne, swore allegiance. Yet some time before, in an agreement known to Alexander and very few others, Constantine had renounced his claim to the throne, preferring life in Poland. Now, Constantine openly declared loyalty to Nicholas. For three weeks correspondence on the matter flew between St. Petersburg and Warsaw. The London Times professed itself amazed at the “strange predicament of having two self-denying Emperors.” The public resented the confusion. When, ran the sarcastic question, will the sheep be sold? On December 13, they learned. Nicholas proclaimed his accession to the throne, backdating it to Alexander’s death. The following day the army was once again to swear its oath of allegiance, this time to him. He felt some urgency, for he had got wind that conspirators had seized on the confusion and had decided to act.
Though the conspirators could hardly be in favor of either candidate, to them Nicholas was by far the more unpleasant. Constantine was a mediocre, meddling sort, but he was thought somehow to have liberal leanings. Nicholas was much worse. His political mind was dark and narrow. In military matters he was a disciplinarian of nearly sadistic proportions, limited only by a lack of imagination. The prospect of Nicholas as czar was abhorrent not just to the conspirators but to wide swaths of the political establishment and army. The conspirators intended to win popular support with the bald claim that Nicholas had usurped the throne from Constantine.
Believing their actions would change the course of the nation, the insurrectionists needed a “dictator” to assume full power and guide the country toward a constitutional monarchy. They chose Prince Sergey Trubetskoy. The rebels dismissed suggestions by junior officers that the soldiers and peasants for whom the revolution was being staged should be called upon to rise up too. All the soldiers needed to do was to follow the orders of their officers. “I am convinced that I will carry my brigade,” Volkonsky wrote, “for the simple reason that I have my soldiers’ trust and love.” Ryleev proposed to put on a peasant’s garb, with knapsack and rifle, to emphasize the bond between serf and soldier. A colleague, Nicholas Bestuzhev, dissuaded him from such romanticism. The Russian soldier, he said, did not understand “these delicacies of patriotism.”
At dawn on December 14 the garrisons of the capital mustered their soldiers to swear the oath of allegiance to Nicholas I. Something less than three thousand mutineers ref
used—the Decembrists had hoped for seven times that number. They marched on Senate Square, calling for “Constantine and a Constitution.” Many in the ranks thought “Constitution” must be Constantine’s wife. The mutineers stood, frozen, in Senate Square. First the Preobrazhenskii Guards, the tallest men in the empire, surrounded them, then the Life Guard Grenadiers, the Horse Guards, the Chevalier Guards, and the Guards Chasseurs. Nicholas himself commanded his troops. The rebel leaders, so apparently resolute during years of scheming, now lost their revolutionary ardor. Alexander Yakubovich had once called for mob rule and the assassination of Nicholas. He marched on the square with his hat on the tip of his raised sword, shouting “Hurrah for Constantine.” Moments later he complained of a severe headache. He strode up to Nicholas and declared that his presence on the square was “the result of exclusive zeal and sincere attachment to the young emperor.” He went back to the rebel troops and told them to stand fast, for Nicholas was scared of them. He then went home, loaded his pistol and, as Bestuzhev told it later, contemplated “how to betray more heroically.”
As for the “dictator,” Trubetskoy, the brave young soldier of 1812, had become a weak-kneed general. Though meant to command the rebel troops, he was nowhere to be seen. He had, indeed, been wandering about the city before shutting himself up in an office, “despondent and in fear.” Later, he snuck out and crossed Senate Square, his face muffled. That night Nesselrode, the foreign minister, found him hiding in the Austrian embassy, where his brother-in-law was ambassador.
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