The last vestiges of Alexander’s liberalism had dissipated, and his ‘mysticism’ had grown decidedly reactionary. ‘To maintain peace, to combat the revolutionaries and attack them everywhere, that is my ambition, and the only glory to which I aspire,’ he declared to La Ferronnays in July 1824, and he had already achieved a great deal in the way of crushing the spirit of those whom he had encouraged to dream and to place such high hopes in him.1
Among his first acts on ascending the throne in 1801 had been to abolish the Secret Expedition, a sinister body which dealt with political subversion; to free some seven hundred political prisoners, most of whom had no idea why they had been locked up; and to forbid the use of torture in interrogation. ‘In a well-ordered state all crimes should be embraced, tried and punished by ordinary law,’ he explained in a manifesto issued on 2 April that year. Things did not work out that way. The Secret Expedition’s functions were seamlessly taken over by the office of the governor of St Petersburg. In 1805, before setting off to war, Alexander was obliged to set up a body to deal with state security, and in 1807 a Committee of Public Safety (Komitet Obshchei Bezopasnosti). In 1810 he established a ministry of police, modelled on Napoleon’s, under General Balashov, who adopted the worst aspects of the model. Alexander’s friend the statesman Viktor Pavlovich Kochubey complained that St Petersburg had become ‘infested with spies of every kind: there are foreign spies and Russian spies, salaried spies and voluntary spies; police officers have begun to adopt disguises; they even say that the minister himself has begun to disguise himself’. According to him, ‘they did everything to provoke crime and suspicion … resorting to tricks of every sort’ to entrap people. Alexander criticised Balashov’s methods, arguing that surveillance was pointless and that all denunciations should be ignored. Yet he created a new Secret Chancellery run by Yakov Ivanovich Sanglen (a French émigré formerly named Saint-Glin) – whom he instructed to spy on Balashov. The governor of St Petersburg had his own independent secret police force, but it was not his spies who were feared most.2
While the tsar was occupied abroad with waging war and peacemaking, the man left in control back home was General Aleksey Andreevich Arakcheev, a brutal martinet commonly referred to as ‘the vampire’, whom Alexander had appointed to head the council of ministers. Although he scrupulously refrained from doing anything but carry out his master’s commands, Arakcheev quickly extended his power into all areas of government. His presence was felt, and feared, everywhere. When he returned to Russia, Alexander left the running of the country to the general while he concentrated on his programme of reform.3
When this foundered, he turned his attention to what he saw as the more serious task of facing up to the forces of evil attacking his country. In 1817 he amalgamated the ministries of education and of religious affairs, and appointed Aleksandr Nikolaevich Galitzine minister. An old friend of the tsar, Galitzine had enjoyed a dissolute youth, but after being nominated procurator of the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church he began reading the Bible, and gradually found his way to God. He had helped Alexander to spiritually weather the trials of 1812, and fed his ardour to save the world. One of the founders of the Russian Bible Society, he encouraged all faiths based on the Book: like Alexander, he was more of a reborn Christian than a conventional Orthodox believer; he nevertheless came to reject the Enlightenment, which he equated with immorality.
In 1819 Alexander instructed Mikhail Nikolaevich Magnitsky to cleanse the University of Kazan, reportedly a hotbed of atheism and immorality. After a cursory inspection, Magnitsky sacked more than half of the teaching staff. The library was purged of nefarious literature, beginning with Machiavelli and taking in all the philosophers of the Enlightenment and many contemporary German writers. Geology, deemed to be incompatible with the Bible, was removed from the curriculum, the teaching of mathematics and philosophy was curtailed, and priests were brought in to provide religious instruction. By way of justification, Magnitsky pointed out that the sole purpose of education was ‘the formation of true sons of the Orthodox Church, true subjects of the tsar, and good and useful citizens of the fatherland’, and to counteract ‘the evil spirit of the times’.4
The universities of Kharkov, Dorpat, Vilna and Moscow were subjected to similar purges. The University of St Petersburg was vigorously defended by its founder, Sergei Semionovich Uvarov, who battled the concept that everything Western was tainted, and maintained that there could not be ‘education without danger, that is, fire which does not burn’. He was forced to resign. His replacement, D.P. Runich, a close friend of Magnitsky, labelled all those who did not agree with him ‘reptiles of revolution’, and promptly sacked four professors. This provoked an exodus of students; within a few months the university only had forty left.5
In the first years of Alexander’s rule press laws had either been abolished or fell into desuetude, and the number of periodicals grew, leading to a lively literary scene; but this changed in 1817. Admiral Aleksandr Semionovich Shishkov, president of the Russian Academy, set the tone, arguing that the eighteenth century had bred a ‘spirit of godlessness and depravity’ that had brought in its wake ‘destruction and murder’, which had drowned religion and civilisation in ‘torrents of blood’. It was the French language that had spread the evil ‘from country to country, from house to house, from school to school, from paper to paper, from theatre to theatre’ like some corrupting plague.6
While such views might appear to go against the grain of everything he believed in, Alexander did not react against them. He was growing increasingly taciturn. The death of his sister Catherine in January 1819 deeply affected him, and he felt isolated as he struggled with his contradictory impulses, both spiritual and political. His search for inner peace seemed less and less compatible with his role as absolute monarch, and he expressed the desire to abdicate more than once. At the same time he saw the act of abdication as one of cowardice and failure in his duty to God, who had placed him on the throne. He was also developing alarming levels of paranoia. Whenever a name was mentioned, he would consult a little black book Metternich had given him listing all recorded political suspects. The paranoia was also personal. ‘Not only did he fear for his security, but, if he heard someone laugh in the street or caught one of his courtiers smiling, he was convinced he was being laughed at,’ his former mistress Maria Antonovna Naryshkina confided to the comtesse de Boigne. His worsening deafness meant that he thought people were mocking him in his presence, as well as making fun of him behind his back.7
In June 1822 he met the ‘holy man’ Photius, who lived only on bread and water, wore a hair shirt and an iron penitent’s belt. The tsar quickly fell under his spell. Photius was determined to expel all ‘heretics’ from Russia, among whom he included members of the Bible Society. On 30 April 1824 he revealed to Alexander ‘the plan of the revolution’ and the ‘secrets of the iniquitous aim towards which the secret society is working in Russia and everywhere else’, and persuaded him to ban the Bible Society and dismiss Galitzine.8
On 1 August 1822, before leaving for Verona, Alexander had ordered the dissolution of all associations, including Masonic lodges. The measure was deeply unpopular. There was only one French-style café in St Petersburg, and that was closely watched by the police. There were no salons where free and easy social intercourse or intellectual discussion could take place. Masonic lodges and other societies provided a welcome social diversion. Idealistic young officers congregated in associations such as the Union of Welfare, dedicated, like the Tugendbund, to rebuilding the moral fabric of society. There were also literary societies such as the Free Society of Lovers of Russian Literature, the Green Lamp, and Arzamas, of which Pushkin was a leading light, whose members were concerned not only with literature, but also with its function – which many of them saw in political terms. They celebrated Karl Sand’s assassination of Kotzebue as an act of heroism, idolised Bolívar and hailed Riego and Quiroga’s pronunciamiento. They wrote and recited poems and essays criticising the state of affairs and calling for change. Pushkin’s ‘Ode to Freedom’ suggested a constitutional monarchy, while in ‘The Village’ he expressed the hope that the oppression of the people would cease and liberty would reign in Russia.
There was nothing revolutionary about such bodies. When a young man by the name of Nikolai Turgenev joined the Union of Welfare, he was surprised to discover that all the members did was sit around bemoaning the state of Russia and formulating pious wishes for the future. When he freed two of his house-serfs and suggested others do likewise, he met with stunned silence. ‘Among the many contradictions one finds here in the character of men and the state of affairs, one must include the so-called liberal ideas widespread among young men who serve with zeal a purely despotic government,’ noted a French diplomat; ‘armed with his knout, subject to an absolute Monarch, surrounded by his own slaves, a young Russian officer will lecture you on the rights of peoples and on liberty as though he were a citizen of the United States’.9
These societies provided comfort to a generation by fostering a sense of togetherness in an alienating world which appeared to have no place for them and their talents. There were many such, who fell into the category of the Lichnii chelovek, the superfluous man. In his poem Eugene Onegin, Pushkin describes how such young men would come together to discuss great things between the Veuve Cliquot and the Château Lafitte. Although the discussions led to nothing, they allowed the young men to indulge their enthusiasms in harmless ways.
While most of the societies obediently dissolved, others went underground, and their members discovered the thrill of conspiracy. The Union of Welfare grew more political, and divided into a Northern Society based in St Petersburg and a Southern in the military bases in Ukraine. The first was led by the twenty-four-year-old Guards captain Nikita Mikhailovich Muravev, who had joined up to fight the French at the age of seventeen and distinguished himself in battle. While he did draw up a list of the society’s aims, embracing a constitutional monarchy and the emancipation of the serfs, he was typical of his generation in that he occasionally drifted to the left or the right of this position. Other members of the society fluctuated even more in their views, while many did not have any fixed ones at all. One, Aleksandr Ivanovich Yakubovich, bragged that he would kill the tsar, but was described by one of his own colleagues as ‘a storm in a glass of water’.10
The Southern Society was more radical. Its leader, Pavel Ivanovich Pestel, was the son of the governor of Siberia. He had studied in St Petersburg and in Germany, been wounded at Borodino in 1812 and was, in 1821, a full colonel at the age of twenty-seven. He was a republican, but how many of his members shared his views is uncertain, as is how many of them there actually were: he confided to Nikolai Turgenev that there were only five or six he could rely on. The Northern and Southern Societies held talks aimed at achieving consensus, but never managed to agree a common programme, let alone a course of action.11
Being mostly military men, they saw Riego and Quiroga’s pronunciamiento as the obvious model. ‘Our revolution,’ one of them explained, ‘will be similar to the Spanish revolution of 1820; it will not cost a single drop of blood, for it will be executed by the army alone, without the assistance of the people.’ The fact that the Spanish revolution had caused a great deal of bloodshed before being crushed does not seem to have been addressed. Nor do any of the plotters appear to have had any idea of what would follow their pronunciamiento. Pestel told one friend that after carrying out the coup he would retire, like Washington (to a monastery rather than Mount Vernon). He did not explain who would govern the country or how. The Northern Society actually designated a ‘dictator’, in the shape of Prince Sergei Petrovich Trubetskoy, a conservative who feared revolution and seems to have hoped the whole thing could be arranged amicably through some kind of deal with the tsar. Although they were plotting revolution, few of them were, in any real sense of the word, revolutionaries. Their impulse was idealistic, histrionic and thoroughly immature: they were, in effect, playing at revolution.12
The Russian imperial family had, over the past three generations, built up a cult of the military, partly as a means of control, partly as a form of self-validation. The tsar and his siblings had been playing at soldiers from the cradle. They never appeared out of military uniform. They relished parades, balletic rituals of domination which had no military value – quite the contrary, as their frequency irritated the troops and removed any hint of the sense of special occasion that a rare opportunity to parade before the sovereign might have held.
The Russian empire had, over the past half-century, expanded more rapidly and further than any other on the globe, yet as it did so it had developed an almost pathological fear of invasion. That it had in 1812 managed to repel the most formidable force ever assembled in Europe, led by one of the greatest generals in history, all without making much of a military effort, had done nothing to allay this fear, and Alexander would not stand down the huge army he had built up for the conquest of France. Its maintenance involved crippling expense, eating up half of the national budget (without including the navy), and kept hundreds of thousands of able-bodied men away from the plough and the factory, where they could be contributing to the economy. The officers should have been in politics, the arts, journalism, the law or other liberal professions. With no war to distract them or to offer a chance to shine, they were bored and frustrated, and offended by the brutal routines of military service. To make matters worse, they were so poorly paid that many subalterns, not being able to afford new ones, did not go out for fear of wearing out their uniforms, and wrapped themselves in blankets when in their quarters. Foreign diplomats regularly reported the disaffection, and in August 1822 the French acting minister in St Petersburg, Boislecomte, noted that everyone was commenting on the unrest in the army and the mood of discontent among the younger sections of the nobility. One general told him that the only thing preventing a revolution was the lack of a leader.13
The ‘mutiny’ of the Semeonovsky Guards came as a shock, yet instead of enquiring into its causes, Alexander laid it at the door of the comité directeur. He had the entire unit disciplined and the men dispersed among line regiments all around the country – a curious way of dealing with ‘contagion’. He ordered the setting up of a spy network of soldiers and officers of each rank in every unit, who were paid to inform on their comrades. What he did not do was address any of the underlying problems.14
Only weeks after meting out these punishments, the tsar was handed by General Vassilchikov a list of officers who were planning to stage some kind of mutiny. After looking through it Alexander fell into a reverie. ‘My dear Vassilchikov!’ he said after a while. ‘You who have been in my service since the beginning of my reign, you know that I have myself shared and encouraged these illusions and these errors.’ After a pause, he added: ‘It is not for me to inflict punishment.’ Not long after, Alexander received a report from Colonel Benckendorff, chief of staff to the Guard Corps, which listed various nests of disaffection. Some of the stated objectives of the conspirators were alarming, but there was no danger to the state: they might be able to find some kindred spirits among foreign-educated individuals in Moscow and St Petersburg, but nowhere further afield. ‘It can confidently be said that in the interior of Russia nobody has even thought about a constitution,’ it pointed out, adding that the nobility had no wish to lose their privileges and the people were used to doing what they were told. Alexander did not react. ‘I know that I am surrounded by assassins who have evil designs on my person,’ he said to one general, but did nothing about it. He was showing less and less interest in what was happening around him, and had taken to travelling around Russia with no apparent purpose beyond that of getting away from the constraints of court life.15
In July 1824 Alexander was handed a report from an officer of English origin, Captain John Sherwood, stationed in Ukraine, which contained chapter and verse on the Southern Society. The tsar muttered something about the will of God, and left it at that. In 1825 General Diebitsch warned him of trouble brewing, and in October of that year Benckendorff produced another report, drawing attention to a near collapse of discipline in the officer corps; inactivity and scant prospect of promotion had, he explained, bred a profound sense of grievance among them. It was only on receipt of a further report that the tsar at last ordered an investigation.16
He then set off on another journey, leaving the governance of his empire in the hands of Arakcheev. While the tsar was away, Arakcheev’s mistress was brutally murdered by the serfs on his estate of Gruzino, whereupon, mad with grief and rage, he dropped everything and left for the country, where he indulged both emotions to the full. He ignored urgent letters from Sherwood warning that the conspirators in the Second Army stationed in Ukraine were preparing to rise.17
On 19 November, after a brief illness following a chill, Alexander died at Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov. The news reached St Petersburg on 27 November, and the army and civil service duly began swearing allegiance to the new tsar, Alexander’s younger brother Constantine. As it happened, Constantine was not in fact the heir to the throne. Back in 1819, Alexander had decided to pass him over, partly on account of his volatile and tempestuous temperament, partly because he was divorcing the German princess to whom he was married in order to wed a Polish lady whose rank was not commensurate with the exigencies of the Russian imperial family’s code. Constantine had renounced his right of succession in favour of the next brother, Nicholas. But Alexander did not tell anyone about this except his mother, and consigned the relevant documents to the safekeeping of a Church dignitary, who was given no inkling of their significance.
When Constantine, who was in Warsaw, heard that he was being hailed as the new emperor, he wrote to Nicholas informing him that in fact he, not Constantine, was the new tsar. Nicholas did not at first believe him. After a multiple exchange of letters and much soul-searching, Nicholas accepted the succession, and the date of 14 December was set for the army and civil service to swear a new oath of allegiance to him. For reasons it is hard to understand, Constantine was popular with the army, and was believed to have liberal instincts. The Northern Society decided to take advantage of the confusion attendant on swearing the new oath to make its move. Neither aims nor consequences were uppermost in their minds, only the desire to act. At their last meeting, on the evening of 13 December, the leadership were in a state of Romantic delirium, making heady speeches and declaring their readiness to die. But no plan was made beyond that of making a pronunciamiento in favour of Constantine and constitutional government. Neither had it occurred to them to prepare their men to participate in a revolution: they would merely order them out, as their rank entitled them to do.18
Early on the morning of 14 December, the brothers Mikhail and Alexander Bestuzhev led a battalion of their regiment, the Moskovsky, out of its barracks in St Petersburg, having told the men that the rightful Emperor Constantine was in chains and they must help deliver him. They marched off to Senate Square, where they drew the battalion up in parade order. They were soon joined by units of the Marine Guards and the Grenadiers. As they waited, watched by a gathering crowd of bemused onlookers, various other plotters turned up, delivered themselves of florid declarations, and wandered off. Colonel Bulatov, aide to the Northern Society’s ‘dictator’, Prince Trubetskoy, also put in an appearance, but then went off to swear allegiance to the new tsar. Of the dictator himself there was no sign. After driving around the city trying to explain to various authorities that he had never meant any disloyalty, Trubetskoy sought asylum in the house of the Austrian ambassador, Lebzeltern, who happened to be his brother-in-law.
The 3,000 troops drawn up on Senate Square were getting colder and increasingly bewildered. They obediently huzza’d when their officers shouted various slogans which they did not understand: not having the faintest idea what a constitution might be, they took ‘Constantine and the Constitution’ (Konstantin i Konstitutsia in Russian) to refer to Constantine and his wife.
Meanwhile, Nicholas had gathered other units, but before confronting the mutineers he sent General Miloradovich to parley with them. He was shot by one of the rebels as he rode up. Nicholas then sent another officer, then the Metropolitan Serafim, and finally his own younger brother, Grand Duke Michael, who was also shot at. He then ordered a unit of cavalry to disperse the mutineers, but the icy cobbles proved their undoing, and their charge turned into a chaotic withdrawal which caused much mirth among the by now sizeable crowd of onlookers. These were passive, although by early afternoon more and more shouts of support for the mutineers could be heard, mingled with calls for Nicholas to abdicate and the hurling of a few stones.
After sending one more emissary offering clemency, Nicholas brought his artillery into play and ordered them to open up with canister shot. The mutineers made no attempt to charge the guns or defend themselves. They began to fall back, but their ranks were broken by the civilians fleeing in panic, precipitating a general rout, peppered by the artillery, which changed to ball shot to break the ice on the river Neva when some of the fugitives tried to make their escape across that. Exact numbers of those shot and drowned have never been established.
Nine days passed before news of the Northern Society’s plans reached their comrades in Ukraine. Pestel had been arrested, so leadership was taken over by Sergei Ivanovich Muravev-Apostol. He did not manage to muster his troops until 30 December, when he marched out of barracks at the head of some eight hundred men of the Chernigov Regiment. He had read out a declaration in which he explained that their ills stemmed from the fact that the tsar was not fulfilling the will of God. After a certain amount of marching about in an attempt to galvanise other units, he came up against loyal troops, and was defeated.
The rebels’ action had been a gesture rather than an attempt to seize power, and did not constitute an attack on the monarchy itself, but while the episode smacked of farce rather than revolutionary terror, it placed Nicholas in an unenviable position, personally as well as politically. The shy twenty-nine-year-old had never been prepared to rule, and it cannot have been easy to suddenly find himself thrust forward into a role he did not particularly relish, and then to face the enmity of his subjects. Having to fight for his throne at the outset was less than dignified, and presented the new tsar to his people in aggressive guise: normally successions were accompanied by amnesties. This was reflected in the way Nicholas and his diplomats represented the revolt to the outside world, which swung between outrage at the enormity of the event and a calm assertion that it had been a minor incident of no significance. It was all, in the final analysis, horribly embarrassing.19
Nicholas was not only ill-prepared, but was also poorly endowed to deal with the challenge fate had dealt him. A tall, good-looking man with a commanding presence, he was not devoid of charm, and captivated many by his manner. According to one of his pages, he was ‘a bizarre mixture of defects and qualities, of pettiness and grandeur: both brutal and chivalrous, courageous to the point of temerity and suspicious to the point of cowardice; equitable and tyrannical, generous and cruel, fond both of ostentation and simplicity’. Much of this was probably the consequence of a less than happy childhood.20
He had been his father’s favourite, and losing him before his fifth birthday had come as a shock. From then on he was at the mercy of General Lamsdorff, who was in charge of his upbringing and that of his younger brother Michael. ‘General Lamsdorff knew how to implant in us one emotion – fear,’ Nicholas later wrote. The boy found comfort in the person of his English nanny, Jane Lyon, and he cried bitter tears when she left. He reacted against this harsh upbringing with defensive stubbornness which frequently turned to aggression, and his tutors noted that there was ‘too much violence’ in his behaviour, his games were noisy and disorderly, and that he always ended up hurting himself or others.21
Nicholas and his younger brother were given a broad, if superficial, education and the rudiments of religious instruction, but the main thrust of his upbringing was military, and he grew up to the sound of orders, bugles and cannon shot, which implanted in him a respect for hierarchy, and a strong sense of honour and duty. In the structures and routines of the military life he saw the surest code of conduct as well as a comforting refuge from the uncertainties and disorderliness of life.22
He regarded uniforms as a way of reminding people that they were not private individuals who could do as they pleased, but members of a structure which demanded service. A uniform immediately identified a person and his place within that state structure. That is why he introduced them into the civil service and even the universities, and why he imposed military structures on areas of the administration such as land surveying, forestry, mining, engineering and transport. The regimentation did not stop at uniforms: officers were obliged to wear a moustache, which had to be black whatever the colour of the man’s hair, while civil servants had to be clean-shaven. Nicholas would issue dozens of decrees concerning the numbers of buttons on uniforms and the cut of jackets, trousers and breeches.23
In 1817 he had married Princess Charlotte of Prussia, the daughter of Frederick William III. The two loved each other dearly, and their home was a model of conjugal affection and propriety. On 12 December 1825, after reading the letter from his brother Constantine which finally convinced him that he had to accept the succession, Nicholas went to his wife and knelt before her, his empress, while she embraced her dear ‘Nicks’, as she called him.24
He admired Ivan the Terrible and particularly Peter the Great, who had drawn up the table of ranks which defined the hierarchy; he viewed the country as a pyramid with himself at the apex, performing his duty to God, with every person beneath him fulfilling theirs to those above them in the hierarchy, each bound by his obligations to his superiors and receiving those of their inferiors. Since he dismissed any alternative view of things and regarded unfamiliar ideas as ‘abstractions’, he saw no useful purpose in discussion.
The December mutiny had been so far from everything Nicholas regarded as proper that he was baffled as well as shocked by it. Returning home to his anxious wife after putting it down, he wasted no time setting up an interrogation room in the Hermitage Palace, to which he had the first prisoners conducted that very evening. They were brought in one after the other, with their hands bound behind their backs, and Nicholas questioned them himself. The following day he set up an Investigating Committee, but insisted on personally interrogating the principal mutineers. He treated them like wayward children, sometimes talking to them more in sorrow than in anger, like a disappointed father, trying to engage their sympathy, professing a desire to help them. At other times he would shout at them, stamp his feet and threaten harsh punishment, while they were forced to stare into a bank of candles. He would modify his approach with the same person on different days, and at the end of every session, when the prisoners were escorted back to their cells in the Peter and Paul fortress, he specified whether they were to be chained, manacled or left unfettered, granting and withdrawing minor privileges. But, try as he might, he still found the whole thing utterly incomprehensible.25
Following the investigation, five were hanged, a further 121 received various custodial sentences or were banished to Siberia, and three hundred others were disciplined, reduced in rank and transferred to other regiments, where they were kept under surveillance. A number who had been abroad at the time and did not return to face interrogation were condemned to death in absentia. The sentences were light by comparison with those handed out in England and France, where people were hanged, guillotined or transported on the flimsiest of evidence. But these ‘Decembrists’, as the participants of the revolt were known, quickly came to be seen as martyrs. The death penalty had not been applied in Russia for decades, and the rank of the condemned, all of whom were nobles, some from very aristocratic families, made punishments such as a lifetime in a peasant hovel in Siberia or service in the ranks of a line regiment in the Caucasus seem excessively harsh. Wives of common criminals exiled to Siberia were allowed to join their husbands and return home with them at the end of their sentence, but Nicholas decreed that the wives of the rebels would be stripped of their noble status, would forfeit the right to dispose of their property and could never return, even after the end of the sentence or the death of their husband, and any children they might bear were to be registered as state serfs.26
There was also much unfavourable comment on the manner in which the investigation had been carried out. In its report, the committee represented the Union of Welfare as a well-organised body with organs of government ready to take over the country, even though most of its members knew this to be untrue. One of them, Aleksandr Dmitrievich Borovkov, a minor literary figure who had been employed as a police informer for the past fifteen years, admitted that they had built up a dangerous conspiracy from the spoutings of nonentities. How could anyone, he pointed out, take seriously a man like Zavalishyn, a boastful fantasist who had, during a visit to England in 1822, declared that he was going to fight for the revolution in Spain, but failed to make a move, then gone to California, which, having been enchanted by the climate, he decided to conquer for Russia, and thence to Mexico, where he meant to play a glorious role, before returning to Russia and sounding off at meetings of the Northern Society. Maksim Yakovlevich von Vock, one of the most senior police officials in Russia, summed up the revolt as a desperate outburst against an intolerable state of affairs, a cry for help. While the enterprise had been criminal and reprehensible, he pointed out that ‘everything had been done to provoke the discontent and nothing to smother it at birth’.27
Nicholas did not see it that way. ‘Louis XVI failed in his duty and was punished for it,’ he had written in a history essay as a child. ‘A monarch has no right to pardon the enemies of the State.’ Baffled and insulted by the whole episode, he took refuge in the conspiracy theory. In this he was not alone. Several members of the Investigating Committee assured the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna that in order to join the Southern Society a man had to swear his readiness to murder his father, his mother, his brother and his sister if ordered to by his superiors in the society. They had been deluged by denunciations and accusations against various generals and officials, against foreigners, Freemasons and secret societies of one kind or another. Wild allegations were made, the Illuminati resurfaced, and bizarre theories were constructed. The kind of nonsense being peddled is well illustrated by an entry in the diary of Philipp von Neumann, secretary to the Austrian embassy in London: ‘the scheme of the conspirators was to assassinate the whole of the Imperial family at the grave of the Emperor Alexander on the day of his burial at St Petersburg …’28
For Nicholas, a grand conspiracy by foreign ‘canaille’ was the only explanation. He commissioned the Prussian minister of justice Karl Albert von Kamptz to write an article in the Allgemeine Litteratur-Zeitung to the effect that the rebellion had been the work of a Europe-wide network of secret societies. In April 1826 he gave orders that everyone who had ever belonged to any association, secret or not, must be identified and obliged to make a full confession. He was haunted by the idea that the conspiracy might still be in existence, that some of the conspirators had got away and were rebuilding their forces, and even that those exiled to Siberia might be concerting with the numerous Polish prisoners and exiles there.29