Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Would Pushkin have agreed with Tolstoy’s passionate idea? He never did forgive Alexander I for his persecution. But Tolstoy’s assumptions about Alexander might easily have struck a chord with the poet Zhukovsky. The early-nineteenth-century mystic and the early-twentieth-century Christian anarchist would probably have had much food for spirited conversation.

CHAPTER 6

Nicholas I and Pushkin

Emperor Nicholas I called December 14, 1825, the “fateful day.” It became one of the most famous dates in Russian history: three thousand rebels—soldiers and sailors, led by several dozen officers, who came to be known as the Decembrists—came out onto Senate Square in St. Petersburg, to keep Nicholas, the younger brother of Alexander I, who had died less than a month previously, from becoming the new monarch of Russia.

The Decembrist uprising was like a sudden lightning bolt, and could have destroyed the empire. Part of the blame for this catastrophe was Alexander’s: he ignored reports of growing conspiracies, and his instructions on succession were exceptionally befuddled. (Many thought that the next tsar would be his brother Konstantin, next in age. Only a select few knew Alexander intended to make Nicholas his heir.)

The Decembrists took advantage of the confusion. They told the rebel soldiers that they would swear allegiance to Konstantin, while their real goal was the introduction of a constitution and the repeal of serfdom. The soldiers on Senate Square shouted, “Constitution, hurrah!,” believing it to be the name of Konstantin’s wife.

Most of the Decembrists were noble and courageous men, but they acted foolishly. The rebels who assembled around the Bronze Horseman, the monument to Peter the Great, had no idea what to do, their leaders vacillated, and their plans changed. Nicholas, displaying determination and firmness, surrounded the mutineers with troops loyal to him.

At first Nicholas had hoped to avoid bloodshed. But the rebels responded with bullets when ordered to give up, fatally wounding Count Miloradovich. It grew dark. As Nicholas I later recalled, “I had to put an end to this, otherwise the rebellion could spread to the rabble.” A loyal general said, “Sire, il n’y a pas un moment à perdre; l’on n’y peut rien maintenant; il faut de la mitraille!” (“Sire, there’s not a moment to lose; we have to shoot!”) Nicholas hesitated: “Vous voulez que je verse le sang de mes sujets le premier jour de mon règne?” “Pour sauver votre Empire.” (“You want me to spill the blood of my subjects on the first day of my reign?” “To save your Empire.”) The emperor gave the order to the artillery: “Fire!”¹

“Long live freedom!” was the mutineers’ response to the first round. But they fled after the second and subsequent rounds. It was over in fifteen minutes. The number of losses is still in dispute: officially, there were fewer than one hundred; unofficially, more than a thousand. In any case, Nicholas won the battle, as his personal fate and the future of the Romanov dynasty had hung by a thread that day.

That evening the leading Decembrists were arrested and brought to the Winter Palace, hands tied behind their backs. The new tsar’s quarters resembled a military camp. In full uniform with scarf and saber, Nicholas sat in on the interrogations until dawn, using his formidable range of acting skills: tall and impressive, with a profile from an antique cameo, he stared with his piercing gray eyes at the rebels and was alternately stern, gentle, angry, kind. Some Decembrists behaved cockily, even insolently; others fell to the tsar’s feet and tearfully begged forgiveness.

Hiding his fear and shock, Nicholas tried to find out the roots and causes of this attempted revolution. In his memoirs he wrote, “[T]he statements by the prisoners were so varied, expansive and complex, that it required especial firmness of mind to keep from getting lost in that chaos.”²

Despite the confused accounts, an important detail immediately caught the new emperor’s attention: during the interrogations, the Decembrists kept quoting Pushkin’s freedom-loving poetry to explain their ideology. This made Pushkin a marked man.

By that time, Pushkin had spent sixteen months in exile in the village of Mikhailovskoe, Pskov Province, in his family estate. He had been sent there, to be supervised by the local authorities, on Alexander’s personal orders. In 1824, the emperor struck Pushkin from government service. The poet had desired that himself, but life in the sticks of the countryside did not suit him at all. Still, Alexander, angered by Pushkin’s defiant behavior, kept the poet in Mikhailovskoe.