OOC: Oops. This is what happens when you stop writing something for a few days; you end up failing to return to it for months. Also, hopefully this isn't too rambling and incoherent. I ended up touching on a lot of different events in passing while focusing on what may seem to be minute details. Those are important details for later though, promise.
IC:
Pestel P.I. said:
Every Union of several people for the achievement of any kind of goal is called a society. The cause for such a union or its purpose can be the Satisfaction of common needs, which, stemming as they do from common and identical traits of human nature, are the same for all Men. Therefore all the members of any society can be unanimously agreed as to its goal. But when they turn towards Action or the means by which their goal must be achieved, there must arise between them strong Disputes and endless Disagreements, because the choice of means depends not so much on the common traits of human nature as on the idiosyncratic character and personal qualities of every specific man.
By the spring of 1827 it was no longer possible for anyone to deny that something has gone horribly wrong in Russia. In fact, in oh so many ways, it soon turned out to be the worst case scenario for almost everyone involved.
It was the worst-case scenario for the House of Romanov, as the last Tsar was removed from power and imprisoned together with most of the still-living members of his family. To be sure, the new dictator (sorry, Provisional Supreme Ruler) had guaranteed their safety, but firstly, such promises did not seem all that trustworthy when coming from a man who they by now knew used to plot to kill them all, and secondly, the Romanovs, while not treated too harshly, were also kept under exceptionally strict surveillance. All plans of escape entertained during the year failed to get off the ground. Grand Duke Michael was missing, as was Arakcheyev; later both would turn up in Berlin, at Frederick William III’s court, but by then their chances of forming an effective anti-Republican lobby were greatly diminished by the events.
For it was indeed also the worst-case scenario for the great powers of Europe. The Concert of Europe and the Holy Alliance had hinged on Alexander’s support; perhaps Constantine could have tried to play the same role, but not from Shlisselburg! Even as high society recoiled in shock and horror at the spectre of Jacobinism somehow snatching Russia, their greatest if sometimes unpredictable supporter, away from the side of legitimate monarchies, Metternich might have been just as, if not more, appalled by the diplomatic implications; the Holy Alliance has been overturned and the Concert of Europe was already in shambles. The one advantage he could see was that Canning’s plans in the Greek issue were disrupted also; the meddlesome British statesman, soon called upon to replace ailing Lord Liverpool as Prime Minister, found his planned coalition of anti-Turkish diplomatic pressure falling apart. Russia was right out – the British weren’t fully sure who was in charge right now, and whether they’d still be there in a few months, but if it was who they thought it was, then their willingness to buck the Holy Alliance did not yet extend to eagerly allying with Jacobin wannabes in charge of a European Great Power. But without Russia, they could not get France. And without France, the Ottomans and their Egyptian allies were not too concerned about a British intervention, so they kept trying to root out the Greek resistance all the same (hence it was also possibly a worst-case scenario for the Greeks). As for Metternich, he desperately scrambled to find some way to maintain unity among his continental allies and figure out what if anything could be done about Russia. In this he was both hampered and assisted by the infectious example that the events in Greece and now Russia continued to provide elsewhere in Europe. But we’ll get back to him later.
The ragtag remains of the Northern Secret Society were also in despair over what happened. It was, for many of them, a fulfillment of their worst nightmare: Pestel, whom they long feared as a Napoleonic type, had managed to rise to unchallenged and absolute power in Russia, on the bayonets of a large and loyal army. Meanwhile, the Northerners themselves were disunited and in general disarray. Ryleev, their most charismatic and capable leader, was dead. Their support base in St. Petersburg had shown what it was capable of – and was now quite spent, at least for the moment. Pestel, in a way that would have been seen as hypocritical were it not always an explicit part of his program, had forbidden the operation of “societies”, secret or otherwise, though what this meant in practice was somewhat unclear. He did not, after all, touch the Freemasons – but he did put many former Northerners under close surveillance. Trubetskoy was alive and trying to struggle along, but it was clear that he had bet on the wrong horse. He’d come to realise a bit later that things weren’t quite so hopelessly grim for the liberalist cause, but for now, he entertained plans of fleeing to Britain. The other survivors, such as Batenkov and Turgenev, were no less dispirited than he, though they continued to defer to his leadership. Burtsev, the former Northern envoy in Pestel’s camp, appeared to have lost all interest in moderation, though in any case that ship has sailed. Speransky made no effort to come out of retirement, and Pestel was perfectly content to leave him there; the remains of liberal bureaucracy was seemingly put before the hard choice of supporting the new government or fleeing abroad, though the initial fears of revolutionary terror were slow to become reality.
The sad truth was that Pestel and his followers were not too happy about their situation either. Initial elation did not last too long, for they had come to realise that seizing a few key cities and arresting the ruling dynasty was not enough to transform Russia into an ideal republic overnight, while being quite enough to put them and their plans in the open and make them a good target for any opposition that might emerge. There was a lot of work ahead – that much Pestel was quite prepared for – and they were not going to be able to do it without a fight, if not always from the corners the revolutionaries had expected. Very soon, it became apparent that the Russian Empire was in flames. Continuing the metaphor, there were three main areas of conflagration. The first two were immediately visible and relatively easy to contain. As has already been mentioned, Congress Poland had for all intents and purposes seceded from the Empire back in 1826. With Constantine’s abdication, the Sejm felt there was no longer any need for political vacillation, proclaiming a republic on the 1st of March of 1827 (New Style, as Catholic Poles no longer had need for the Old). This March Republic, as it would go down in history, was headed largely by members of Poland’s aristocratic political elite, the two most prominent figures in it being Michał Gedeon Radziwiłł, appointed as the commander in chief, and Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, who emerged as the uprising’s political leader. Their surnames were already damning from a radical perspective, marking them as members of Poland’s most powerful houses – but to make matters worse, Adam Czartoryski used to be Emperor Alexander I’s foreign minister and a grand old statesman of the Empire. It seemed as though he had come out of retirement specifically to block the radicals’ effort to turn Poland into Pestel’s ally. Indeed, later in March, members of the Patriotic Society were put under arrest on charges of conspiracy. Pestel, who was willing to grant Poland independence, but wished to see it as a country bound to the new Russian Republic by a strong political and military alliance, was none too happy about those developments – or the tentative efforts of some Polish, Lithuanian and Russian nobles in the old Grand Duchy of Lithuania to strike a deal with Warsaw.
A different source of aggravation was in the Caucasus. The paltry forces Yermolov had left behind when taking his main army to Russia were obviously unable to continue his offensive against the restive highlanders. However, they were not even able to hold the defenses for that long. The revolution in Russia had coincided with a powerful murid-inspired uprising throughout Chechnya, Dagestan and Kabarda, Ghazi Mullah, a charismatic Sufi Imam, soon emerging as the preeminent religious leader of the
gazawat. The local rulers who had previously been loyal to the Tsar found that there was no Tsar left to be loyal to – and began to come around to the idea of making common cause with the murids instead, though this was far from unanimous. The fiercely independent Circassians intensified their raids against the Cossack Black Sea Host and its nearby settlements. Soon, all of Yermolov’s previous work since 1816 was in jeopardy. To make matters worse, the Ottomans lended some measure of support to the Circassians, while Abbas Mirza, a Qajar
shahzada (crown prince) already rather loosely called by some the Napoleon of Persia, launched an invasion of the southeastern Transcaucasian regions, seeking to reclaim what the Qajars had lost by the Treaty of Gulistan and facing very little serious opposition. The local khans, abandoned by St. Petersburg and intimidated by Ghazi Mullah, were only too happy to swear allegiance to Persia instead.
However, a bigger and much more dangerous explosion was building up in the heartland of Russia itself. The region at risk stretched from Novgorod guberniya and Little Russia to Western Siberia, but the biggest threat was poised by the area around the Volga and the Urals, a traditional breeding ground of massive peasant rebellions that had been used by Stenka Razin in the 17th century and Yemelyan Pugachev in the 18th. Chronic peasant uprisings had been an immutable fact of Russian history for centuries now, even when they did not erupt into such large-scale, long-lasting, organised warfare. The immense hardships of peasant lives; the unpredictable climate that constantly kept them on the brink of starvation; more recently, the changes in the overall Russian economy that alternatingly encouraged or forced their noble masters to squeeze more and more out of their human chattel; the spread of cholera, and the panic it brought with it; the proliferation of unorthodox religious sects, such as the Molokans and the Dukhobors, with prominent eschatological and anti-government components – all those factors and more played into a constant state of simmering social tensions that sometimes erupted into rebellion. 1825 and 1826 already saw some large-scale disturbances throughout the Empire, ones that it was suddenly unable to suppress anywhere near as vigorously as it would have liked, despite the efforts of local authorities which were for the most part uninvolved in the high-level power struggles. This gave the peasants undue encouragement, something that a few of the revolutionaries had remarked on with alarm. But much worse was to come.
From Alexander I’s death onwards, wild rumours spread among the peasants, even wilder than the ones that spread among the nobility and the bureaucrats. The aforementioned sects had a part to play in this. The late Emperor was, on the whole, remarkably liberal when it came to religion, granting a great deal of official toleration both to Old Believers and to the newer sects of Molokans and Dukhobors, despite their opposition to both formal church hierarchy and to many fixtures of state power. Alexander was highly regarded by them as a result. His death seemed to confirm the old Good Tsar, Evil Boyars stereotype – the Good Tsar cared for his subjects and wished to make their life easier, but the Evil Boyars, Germans and Latins so prominent among them, would not let that happen and murdered him upon learning that he planned to carry out extensive reforms, abolish serfdom and military service, and give all lands to the peasants. The Will of Alexander I rapidly became a subject of folk mythology – and within a year, several different copies had appeared among the literate few, who shared their contents with their brethren. The government, normally quick to crack down on any such “wills”, was by this point completely paralyzed, while some of the revolutionaries, not sure of their success, were reportedly willing to utilise this as a desperate fallback plan. Pestel, then working to hijack the revolution and take over the Empire, would never have stood for it, but his agents had their hands full dealing with monarchist counter-plots.
The revolution itself, of course, led to even more rumours. At first, few peasants were particularly enthused by a Lutheran German arresting the Tsar and openly taking over the country, and indeed, the early reception had caused quite a few liberal-minded noble observers to recoil at the ingratitude shown by the masses. It was thought that Tsar Constantine was planning to carry out his brother’s Will, and the revolution was an evil plot to stop just that. The disbandment of the military settlements and the early few manifests of the Provisional Supreme Government promising the abolition of serfdom and redistribution of the land had made the situation somewhat more nuanced, however. It would appear that the peasantry did not overall trust those manifests, or otherwise did not pay very careful attention to them. What Pestel promised was full abolition and the roughly-equal division of lands in every region of Russia into commons held by the peasant community as a whole and the private lands that would remain under their previous owners but could be sold freely or rented out to the peasants. Some of the peasants had apparently decided that in reality it meant that the new government was going to give them all the land anyway; others, that it was a clever trick to
take away all their lands under the excuse of “freeing” them. In either case, however, many of them did not wait for the government to sort out the situation, instead taking justice into their own hands – attacking the nobles, seizing or burning down their property and killing their servants and officials. This was made easier by the fact that many of the noble landowners who were not already absentee landlords living in cities had made haste to flee there in advance, fearful for their fate as the countryside descended into anarchy.
It must be noted that Pestel did much more than publish manifests in the first half of 1827, while this build-up continued. He was spending much of his efforts on the herculean task of organising a new government. It highlighted yet again one of his main differences from Robespierre – Pestel was almost frighteningly unsentimental and pragmatic. Even as he organised his secret police (the Office of Public Discipline, which was to become more commonly known at home and abroad as the
Prikaz), he did not start a reign of terror or mass reprisals – whether against the servants of the previous regime or his political opponents in the revolution, the exceptions in both cases being those who acted against the public order
after the revolution, starting with those involved in the disturbances in St. Petersburg. While many of the most odious military and civil officials did have to be removed from office, in truth it was not as much of an issue as one might expect since many of those officials had already disappeared, in many cases turning up abroad (thus, Arakcheyev and Michael were joined in St. Petersburg by Nesselrode). In fact, he did the opposite of what some had expected of him by enlisting the support of some of those loyalist officials and commanders who did
not abandon their posts. The assistance of Kiselyov, a
bona fide minister in the government, may have had something to do with this, as did the fact that there was
no alternative Tsarist government in existence for them to join if they wished to continue serving the Empire. The first big victory for Pestel was winning over Kankrin, the Minister of Finances. In retrospect, this was not so surprising – despite his reputation as a conservative, Kankrin was, in his own way, a resolute reformer and an enemy of government corruption and the intrigues and waste of the court. He realised that the Romanovs were, at least for the moment, out of the game, but Russian statehood continued existing – and thus seized upon the chance to implement his own economical agenda. Together with Kiselyov, Witt and Pestel himself, Kankrin joined the Provisional Supreme Government’s Executive State Duma in mid-February, after Constantine’s abdication that might have seemed to cut off the path for reconciliation for more staunch monarchists. It was soon dubbed the quintumvirate, because they were then joined by Trubetskoy.
The one-time Dictator of the Revolution joining Pestel’s government was a product of a great deal of calculation on the part of both men. Pestel’s preference for practical talents over rhetorical prowess or ideology, as well as his desire to consolidate control, would have seemed to argue against it. However, he evidently did not wish to rupture the ties with the remains of the Northern Secret Society – or indeed, those parts of the liberal bureaucracy that had allied with it. He may have had no need for Speransky, but there were plenty of lower-ranking, promising officials whose cooperation was essential. Of course, though not everyone realised this at the time, it was also a matter of keeping Trubetskoy within easy reach and making it harder for him to plot a return to the political scene as an opponent later. Lastly, Kiselyov and Kankrin were the Tsar’s ministers and Witt was a military bureaucrat and a government spy; it stands to reason that Pestel would wish to balance them somewhat with another revolutionary conspirator, Trubetskoy having more administrative pull and independent political experience than his own lieutenants, who in any case were needed elsewhere. Trubetskoy, for his part, was not at all pleased with Pestel or his actions. Truth be told, he was actually somewhat put off by his decision to make Constantine abdicate – despite previous failures, Trubetskoy had thought that there was still a chance of making the Emperor carry out the necessary reforms, at bayonet-point if need be, without actually getting rid of him and the legitimacy he would have provided among the people. In some ways Trubetskoy was more insightful than Pestel in predicting a large-scale peasant uprising regardless of what generous agrarian program the government would propose, though he may have overestimated the connection between the uprising and the abolition of the monarchy. And of course there were quite a few disagreements between Trubetskoy and Pestel as to what the aforementioned necessary reforms would consist of. But this was precisely why Trubetskoy wished to join the new government. From it, and with the support of his previous co-conspirators, he could hope to exercise some influence over the government and perhaps guide it along a gentler, more cautious path of reform and pacification. His hopes, inasmuch as he had them, were to be disappointed – as the Supreme Ruler, Pestel had only a limited interest in sharing actual power with his fellow Duma members – but his presence alone allowed the liberalist faction to hold its head a little higher and regain some measure of influence over the newly born Republic.
It's impossible to say for sure, since the earliest stages of its history are not that well-traced, but personally I suspect that Venice's political evolution started with more or less a blank slate, the community having to adapt pragmatically, rather than working off some carry-over of lingering traditions of Roman republicanism.
