LESS WORDS, MOAR PHONE NUMBERS.
Looking forward to the explosion.
OOC: My painstaking research that took me most of the last two days has revealed that they did not have phones in early-to-mid 19th century Russia. This is disappointing, but explains a
lot. By way of apology I typed up this:
IC:
Muraviev M.N. or maybe Ryleev K.F. said:
My God, what a country. They cannot even hang us right.
Constantine’s coronation in Moscow went through flawlessly, and he was acclaimed with equal eagerness by the staid, respectable local aristocracy and the high-minded intellectuals. Karamzin, the old patriarch of sentimental poetry and Russia’s first true great conservative historian who might have rallied those minds against Constantine’s patronage of ill-considered and poorly planned liberal reforms, had passed away not long ago. Pushkin was the new rising star of the literary world, and he sincerely praised Constantine as did many others; they saw him as a romantic hero, “not unlike Henry V”. Constantine reveled in the praise, but still found the time for state affairs, both in the run-up to and in the immediate aftermath of the coronation. In May, he found the time to meet the Duke of Wellington, who traveled to discuss the Greek situation. Once upon a time, Catherine the Great had entertained the notion of restoring the Byzantine Empire, and groomed one of her grandsons for the task, naming him Constantine and assigning a Greek nanny to take care of him and teach him the language of his future subjects; nothing had come of that, but that grandson still felt some sympathy for the Hellenes and their plight, as did many Russian liberals. He was therefore only too happy to join in the British plan to press the Ottomans into ceasing their campaign and granting Greece full autonomy within the Turkish Empire. No doubt he also fancied being known as the Tsar who had brought freedom, first to the Poles, then to the Russians, and now to the Greeks, the very inventors of liberty.
Speaking of bringing freedom to the Russians, Constantine was still a bit too cautious to consider the projects for abolition of serfdom that were starting to reach his attention, but he was willing to form a committee to consider land reform. He showed rather more enthusiasm for the constitutional project. Finally remembering his promise, he finalised the restoration of Speransky to power by appointing him the Minister of Justice. This did not deter the aging minister from paying full attention to the constitution committee; he seemed to have felt that this was his last chance to make good on all the hopes that were associated with him, and so he threw himself headfirst into the work. Seeing the need to preserve a strong and centralised empire, Speransky overrode Muraviev on the issue of regional autonomy for the Dominions. Still, he directed the committee to get to work on defining their actual borders and the proper election process. It might take some time to actually implement it and elect the first Russian People’s Assembly (
Narodnoye veche), but Speransky had developed plenty of patience while out of favour. He made sure also to secure a freedom of religion and an equality before the law clause in the constitution, though how it would apply in the heavily stratified Russian society was left as an exercise for the reader.
On the surface, therefore, all seemed well in early June. There were, admittedly, grumblings and what now appeared to be chronic turbulence in St. Petersburg, in Warsaw and the big cities of the south, and Constantine was in no hurry to return to his capital, rejoicing in the quiet, comparatively steady social life of Moscow, under the auspices of general-governor Dmitriy Vladimirovich Golitsyn. Speransky and the rest of the government had returned to St. Petersburg. Miloradovich had followed soon after – much to Speransky’s relief. He left behind some allies with the new Emperor’s retinue, though, Hans Karl von Diebitsch foremost among them. Under Alexander, whom he had accompanied to the Congress of Laibach and to his last retreat to Taganrog, von Diebitsch had been conducting investigations into the secret societies. He never did manage to crack down on them due to the chaos of the Interregnum, but he did gather a large amount of information on Speransky’s closest associates and their regicidal, truly revolutionary plans. And now the process of slowly feeding Constantine with this information began.
It wasn’t so straightforward (if slow) as Miloradovich might have hoped. Diebitsch had overplayed his hand a little by making it seem as though Ryleev and Pestel were the ones in close contact with Speransky and Kiselyov, rather than Trubetskoy. Constantine was quietly incredulous at first. Still, his paranoia began to take over, bolstered by the apparent resentment of many Muscovite nobles – not at Constantine or his bold plans, God forbid, but at the return of Speransky and at his plans that ran counter to tradition and privilege. They remembered tearfully how that horrible priest had forced some of the first families of Russia to part with their children under Alexander, sending them to study at the cruel, cold Lyceum. They spoke of the bureaucracy and red tape that had flourished in his care, and hinted that it would tie his own hands as well. Constantine looked over the project of the constitution and found that his powers, while considerable, were strictly in the bounds of Law; that was very good and liberal, but still somewhat disturbing. At the same time, Diebitsch had procured for him information directly linking Speransky to the uprising and the regicide of December 14th. By August, when Constantine had finally returned to St. Petersburg, Speransky could see the first alarming signs of the Tsar’s growing lukewarmness towards him and his projects. The plan to abolish the military settlements, having been proffered to the Tsar on his return, was accepted in principle, but returned to Kiselyov over matters of phrasing and other such details.
Still, Constantine didn’t act. Not by himself. It seemed he wasn’t fully convinced that Speransky’s trucking with revolutionaries was real – or perhaps, much like in Poland, he found it excusable. Those regicidal radicals did worry him, however. After finally granting Arakcheyev a proper private audience, he asked him to head over to Kiev and investigate the Southern Secret Society. Diebitsch was charged with looking into matters in St. Petersburg. Miloradovich fumed; apparently the Tsar still did not trust him. But this would have to do. The audacious murder of General-Lieutenant Alexander von Benckendroff while leaving a prestigious restaurant on August 29th gave him the excuse he needed. The Emperor and Kiselyov himself (who, having only arrived in the capital after the 14th, perhaps did not see the events in the city as a grand revolutionary drama between liberals and conservatives so much as merely a situation where disruptions of public order and military discipline had gotten ridiculously out of hand) publicly called upon Miloradovich to restore order, and to carry out a sweeping expansion and reform of the local police force. This turned out to be mostly a matter of turning the spy network established by Miloradovich into a proper police force. Martial law was introduced in the city, and no one dared protest it – again, even the more moderate revolutionaries increasingly saw the situation as justifying a thorough crackdown if only so that they could get back to work. Dozens of investigations were reopened, Miloradovich’s spies searched people’s houses and company offices, and the first few arrests were made. Ryleev and Gorbachevsky went into hiding; many of their allies did likewise, but some of the junior members of the conspiracy were taken in, especially as evidence had linked them both to Schilling’s disappearance and to Benckendorff’s assassination. Trubetskoy, Muraviev and their associates were left untouched. The Northern Secret Society was sundered, as one part of it now met at Speransky’s office in the Shuvalov Palace, and the other was either in the Peter and Paul Fortress or hiding in the docks.
On September 11th, the soldiers of the Moscow Guard Regiment had had enough of Miloradovich’s White Terror – and that of their own commanders, encouraged by the general-governor’s sudden vigour. Ordered to cooperate with the police, they refused to hand over the revolutionary pamphlets spread by Gorbachevsky, and instead attacked the gendarmes who tried to drag away the poet Kuchelbekker, who was spotted trying to hide among them. They chased away the police and arrested some of the resisting officers. Their commander, Baron Fredericks, barely escaped to call for help. This was provided with surprising speed, as Miloradovich led his loyal guards (particularly, the Mounted Leib Guard), gendarmes and regular army troops to crush the rebellion before it could spread to any other units. The officers were freed, the apparent instigators of the uprising were put under arrest and then hanged, and the rest of the troops were moved to new barracks further from the city, though officially the unit was not disbanded. A precedent was made for rapidly and ruthlessly crushing any dissent, which was repeated during a subsequent popular disturbance at the markets. Miloradovich was in control, and the rebels were seething as victory appeared to slip from their grasp.
Miloradovich’s heavy-handed punishments and censorship policies, as well as intensifying waves of arrests, were nothing out of the ordinary for the Russian Empire – under Alexander. But the thaw of the first few months of Constantine’s reign was apparently enough to make people forget. Outrage grew in the saloons and at the court; even Grand Duke Michael privately admitted that the Serb was outstepping his boundaries, though that might have been because he barely saw fit to consult with the Tsar. In truth this was an elaborate bait – and Speransky fell for it, hook, line and sinker. The Minister of Justice told the Tsar that while maintaining order was good and fine, “it would be a blow to those whose tied their hopes with Your reign” to let Miloradovich continue arresting and perhaps even executing the flower of Russian aristocratic youth. He urged mercy. Constantine, normally well-disposed to be merciful, was in a bad and troubled mood; those disturbances suddenly reminded him vividly of last year and of his old fears. He shouted at Speransky, declaring that if he showed those people mercy he’d be dead in a month, the House of Romanov in two months after that, and the whole Russian Empire won’t make it to next year! Part-cowed, and part-aware of Constantine’s volatile moods, Speransky saw fit to retreat for now, brooding. Indeed, a few days later Constantine was willing to talk to him again and promised to rein Miloradovich in. But rumours about a rift between the liberal ministers and the Tsar already spread. When Miloradovich met with Constantine on September 25th, the Emperor had failed to rein him in, and found himself agreeing, to his horror, that the martial law must be stepped up. Speransky had betrayed his trust by cavorting with murderers and revolutionaries, and even now he was trying to use his influence to cover for them. By October 7th, with news reaching the capital about uprisings in Poland, Little Russia, the Urals and Caucasus, Constantine was ready to approve the next step: Miloradovich was empowered to start arresting everyone connected to the revolutionaries, effectively permitting him to stage a military coup against the “corrupted” liberal government. Which he did, with gusto.
The news that reached St. Petersburg from the outskirts of the Empire was conflicting and confused. The events in the Urals had nothing to do with what was happening in Europe; it was just another chronic rebellion of peasants drafted to work on factories against particularly harsh overseers. Caucasus, likewise, was experiencing a tribal uprising inspired by Sufi mystics called the murids, who called for the religious revival of Islam among the mountaineers and their liberation from non-Muslim oppression. It was only relevant inasmuch as it harried Yermolov and frustrated Constantine’s foreign policy due to the likely, but unproved, link between the rebels and the Ottoman Empire. Poland was something else; having become convinced that Constantine, who was never much liked, had finally made up his mind to bring back Alexandrian repression, the Polish nobility and the army that Constantine himself helped found had decided to preempt him by starting a rebellion. The Patriotic Society, spurred on by Pestel and led by left-liberal intellectuals such as Walerian Łukasiński (earlier released from his arrest as part of Constantine’s thaw) and Antoni Jabłonowski, ended up playing a negligible part in it; the main force came from the disgruntled army officers and the Sejm itself. Warsaw was captured, the surprised Russian garrison was placed under arrest, and the Sejm proceeded to bicker in good Polish szlachta style. What happened in Little Russia was more alarming if less personally embarrassing.
Alarmed by the crackdown in St. Petersburg and by Arakcheyev’s investigations in Kiev, Pestel and his comrades – Ivan Grigoryevich Burtsev (a colonel and originally an “envoy” of the Northern Secret Society), Vasiliy Lvovich Davydov (another colonel) and Sergey Grigoryevich Volkonsky (a major-general) had decided that the time to act was now. They already had several regiments all to themselves. Their allies were ready to turn soldiers in other regiments over to their cause, hopefully dragging their commanders along with them. Pestel had found bigger, if more dubious allies. Peter Wittgenstein, the supreme commander of the southern Second Army, was close to retirement, but willing to turn a blind eye to his old protégé Pestel’s plots; between Speransky and Miloradovich, he was increasingly open to the idea of a military revolution. Ivan Osipovich Witt, the commander of the southern military settlements and former client of Arakcheyev, was worried for his career regardless of what happens, and on increasingly unfriendly terms with his old chief. The levels of disgruntlement and uncertainty being what they were, by late September Pestel was perfectly ready to cross the Rubicon. The plan went off almost without a hitch, despite the doubts that some felt regarding Pestel’s allies; the rebellions, secretly assisted by Witt, started at the military settlements, carried over to the undecided regiments, and then took over the entire Second Army as Pestel occupied Tulchin and Kiev. A few more officers had to be killed than he had hoped, and Arakcheyev, frustratingly, avoided capture and escaped to Odessa. But now the Second Army controlled half of Ukraine and the Directory was set up in Kiev, made up of Pestel, Yushnevsky, Burtsev, Muraviev-Apostol and Volkonsky. Both Wittgenstein and Witt found their way there. Military settlements were disbanded, demeaning corporal punishments were abolished, taxes were cut and the most odious (or loyal) imperial officials were arrested. The Second Army moved to secure Chernigov and Kursk, all while defeating or even subverting to their side what little resistance government forces could muster. But this rebellion seemed oddly lackluster; the Directory spoke a lot about protecting the Empire from its enemies, but said nothing about a republic; and Pestel did not seem to make any plans to march on Moscow, preferring to establish full control of his immediate surroundings and quietly cull resistance in his own ranks, sending those he found less loyal – not to their deaths, but to backwater areas where they could do him no real harm. He was waiting on news from the capital.
The drama of St. Petersburg finally came to a head after October 14th. At the last moment, Constantine felt pangs of guilt, or perhaps simply of fear towards Miloradovich. In any case, he once again proved himself to be the court party’s worst enemy by first trying to warn Speransky and the others, and then arranging to flee the capital, heading for Moscow. It was too late for Speransky; Miloradovich’s loyal troops openly occupied the capital and the Winter Palace itself, arresting the Minister of Justice and many of his allies. He did not even struggle, perhaps still waiting on Constantine to call the general-governor off. Muraviev was arrested also. Trubetskoy, Turgeniev and Kiselyov were among those who managed to flee with or after Constantine. Miloradovich was powerless to chase them, but instead focused on hunting down others who tried to hide out in the city. Only a few members of the Palace party made it to a bittersweet reunion with the Squarers. Hugging their leader, Gavriil Stepanovich Batenkov, Kondraty Ryleev declared that the time to act had come. They were now the only force in the city that could oppose Miloradovich’s Napoleonic ambitions that threatened to drag Russia deeper into tyranny even as it sought to reach for freedom. All disagreements among the men of good intent now had to be forgotten. With or without the Tsar, with or without Speransky or Muraviev’s constitution, they had to make a stand.
Miloradovich was fully expecting them to, of course. While his agents had failed to arrest Ryleev, they did nab some lesser conspirators – most notably, Yakubovich, who managed to kill two men and maim another before being arrested (the poor fools did not count on his extremely sane habit of sleeping with a sword). He also sent loyal troops to disarm the suspect Guard regiments. What he did not account for was that Ryleev had gotten much better at planning revolutions since December 14th. The plan of action developed by the underground leadership of the Barracks party was two-pronged. Miloradovich anticipated the first prong well enough when he attacked the Guards. The disarmament started out well enough, but he had underestimated the extent to which the rebels had prepared for this event; before long, the guards in several regiments have managed to organise armed resistance. Even the disarmed units turned out to have acquired hidden caches, courtesy of sympathisers in the government and higher ranks (a belated proof of Miloradovich’s thesis that radicals had their claws in Speransky’s clique). There were three hotbeds of the Guards rebellion – rather like in December, but bigger and more consolidated. Miloradovich managed to crush the southeastern rebels in a pitched battle on Semenovskaya Square, scattering the disloyal parts of the Jaeger and Semenovsky regiments of the Leib Guard. Some of them managed to retreat in relative order to join up with the Naval Guards in the southwest, which held out for longer, trying to hold the narrow streets. In the end, however, that ragged stand turned into a massacre; Miloradovich brought up the artillery and broke the rebel ranks, then chased them into the cold, still waters of the Neva. But this vital delay won time for the rising of the grenadiers, the Finnish Regiment and – the second prong.
Developments on the northern side of St. Petersburg were uneven. The rebels tried and failed to seize the outer defenses of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Ryleev had hoped to make it a Russian taking of the Bastille, but reluctantly conceded that their imprisoned comrades would have to wait a little longer. Vasilyevsky Island, the western part of St. Petersburg connected to the rest of the city by bridges over the Neva, had become the main battlefield. The remaining rebel forces clashed with Miloradovich’s troops on Admiralty Square. The fight was bloody, vicious and indecisive – the rebels
almost prevailed over the loyal Guards before Miloradovich brought over the regular troops from other parts of the city. Yet he was delayed by a near-mutiny among his artillery and also by the harrying of the city mob – particularly dockers and sailors from the island. They could do nothing more than delay his movements, though, as most of them did not dare to actually assault the government forces.
Until the darkness came, that is. By night-time, the Admiralty Square was still contested, neither side willing to give up its apparent advantage. But under a dark sky, the advantages of artillery and rifles became less apparent, while the civilians grew more bold. Gorbachevsky’s bid to rouse the poorest and most rebellious parts of the city population had paid off. Stevedores struck the general-governor’s flanks. Soon, he had to retreat. The situation might have still been salvaged, but for the rebellion on St. Isaac’s Square. The builders in the “village” around the St. Isaac’s Cathedral (built under Peter the Great, razed and built again under Catherine the Great and her unfortunate son, and then torn down again and put under construction by Alexander in 1802) did not require much radical agitation. Their work was hard, their living standards were increasingly atrocious, they had no love for Miloradovich – and they inexplicably loved Constantine, who they heard was either chased out or locked away by the general-governor. They set upon the retreating forces, setting up traps, throwing large stones and wielding hammers, pickaxes and laths as weapons in melee. The retreat, then, turned into a rout.
The fighting dragged on into October 15th. Much to Ryleev’s frustration, the rebel rally, while enough to foil Miloradovich’s plan, fell just short of taking the Winter Palace. The tired Guards and disorganised workers and sailors could not push further when encountering stiff and still fairly organised resistance – organised by Grand Duke Michael, who some said was now being groomed for the throne, Miloradovich and the court party having become utterly disappointed with Constantine. It and the Peter and Paul Fortress, as well as the loyalist barracks on Semenovskaya Square, became the main pillars of anti-revolutionary resistance. Skirmishing, raids and sallies continued through the day as both sides tried to rally their remaining followers. The nail was placed in Miloradovich’s coffin when the Guards stationed on Semenovskaya Square joined the rebellion after a too-enthusiastic attempt to use them to plug holes in the Winter Palace’s defenses. Soon, the southern part of the city fell into rebel hands, cutting off the most likely route of escape. By evening, they had rallied enough, while Miloradovich’s supporters started to desert him en masse. And the night of October 16th saw the final, triumphant assault.
The imperial family was placed under arrest yet again – on a more permanent basis this time, as there were no forces left in the city that would dislodge the rebels from the Winter Palace. The revolutionaries were disappointed to discover that Constantine was indeed no longer there and so could not be forced to abdicate. Nevertheless, they lost no time in calling for a Constituent Assembly and proclaiming, perhaps a little hastily, the Russian Republic. The prisoners were freed, including Speransky. While Ryleev treated him with utmost courtesy and respect, and hailed him as the “father of Russian democracy”, it was clear to both of them that Speransky’s days in power were now well and truly over. It was different from his previous disfavour because it was increasingly clear to him that soon there really might not be a Tsar for him to return to. All of his political experience hinged on trying to guide a monarch towards the light and using his absolute authority to bring about good ends (he was a little dubious on whether the same could be done with an ignorant and unruly mob). But Speransky did not struggle against it in any case, having been both unnerved by the harrowing events of the previous days, and disillusioned by Constantine’s cowardice in a critical moment. He went back to his house, after having passed on the proverbial torch to Muraviev.
As for Miloradovich himself, the newly-rechristened Republican Guards found him hiding at the house of a certain ballerina that he greatly favoured. He did not resist and did not lose his composure until the end. According to a legend that spread after the event, the inexperienced revolutionaries have botched his hanging on the first try, giving him one last chance to gloat. “You can’t even hang me properly!” he laughed quite madly. “How do you hope to run an Empire?!” But on the second try, they succeeded.
The Russian Republic was off to a rocky start from day one, exacerbated by the fact that, as we have seen, many of those who brought it to power still felt a great deal of loyalty to the Tsar. Confusion and anarchy reigned both among the revolutionaries and in the city itself, where the city mobs and many of the lower-ranking Guards alike have taken to looting and drunken disorder. In this chaos it was not hard for the remains of Miloradovich’s forces – actually not that few, as it turned out – to slip away to Tsarskoye Selo, commanded by Diebitsch. Having united with more monarchist forces there, this army set out towards Moscow, because Miloradovich was not the only general in Russia who thought that he could rule over the Tsar’s shoulder. The High Duma of the Northern Secret Society, reconvened in the Admiralty Building (the Winter Palace was actually damaged in the fighting), tried desperately to control the situation, now positioning itself as a sort of provisional government of the Republic until the Assembly could be convened. The only man who could realistically control the situation now was Ryleev, and he did his best to calm the city down after three days of looting, even nipping in the bud a fire that seemed poised to destroy St. Petersburg. But it was clear that this work was taking a lot out of him. Moreover, he had been injured during the fighting, and started coughing blood in the middle of an impassioned speech against those who would bring division into the camp of the righteous. The city-sized Russian Republic barely held its own, and was clearly not prepared to expand outwards: they had to hope that other cities and armies will declare for them.
. Those names indicated the forces that they were courting, not their actual locations: for the first few weeks, at least, the Northern Secret Society continued to meet as one. But soon, the conflict over methods (“Shall we hope that liberal officials and frightened courtiers will accept our Constitution, or should we raise the troops to give them a second shove?”
