with whom we shall have occasion to deal at some length is Nikolai Turgenev.[1]
It is hardly possible to overestimate the political importance of decabrism. The movement was widespread. After December 14 (old style), 1825, more than a thousand arrests were made, and one hundred and twenty sentences were passed by the supreme criminal court. Among notable writers of the twenties, Rylěev, Bestužev (Marlinskii), Küchelberg. and Prince Odoevskii were decabrists, and Griboedov was closely related to the movement. Puškin, too, for a time displayed decabrist leanings. Spiritually and morally the decabrists constituted an elite in Russian society of that day. This is proved by the literature now becoming known, describing the sorrows, the studies, and the labours of the Siberian exiles. There were brave women among them, who shared their fate.
Almost all the political tendencies of subsequent years, alike theoretical and practical, are foreshadowed among the decabrists. Even the most revolutionary of those conceptions, and above all those of Herzen, may be directly deduced from decabrist political ideals.
Although in later days some of the decabrists (a few of whom lived on into the reform epoch of Alexander II) expressed extremely conservative views, we have to take into account the effects of banishment. From the decabrist memoirs, those of Jakuškin, for example, we learn what a martyrdom the banished men had to endure.
§ 17.
THE leaders of the revolt of December 14th were punished by the new tsar with extreme rigour. Of the one hundred and twenty-one accused, five were to be quartered, among them Pastel and the poet Rylěev, thirty-one guillotined, and the remainder exiled to Siberia, the officers being degraded. The tsar, however, exercised his clemency—and the five principal offenders were merely hanged.
Hardly had the revolution been suppressed in the capital and subsequently in the army, when further revolutionary
- ↑ Sergii Murav'ev-Apostol wrote an Orthodox Catechism. His brother, Nikita Murav'ev, outlined a Freeman's Catechism. Several of the decabrists wrote memoirs, and some compiled historical and other studies. Their correspondence is of considerable interest.
