The Icon and the Axe

The gradual triumph of Karamzin's conservatism at court forced proponents of reform in the second half of Alexander's reign to assume more extreme positions than those taken by Speransky. The exposure of the officer class to the West after the pursuit of Napoleon gave them new ideas. Alexander kept alive the old hope of "reform from above" by vaguely promising to make the constitution granted Poland a pattern for his entire empire and by appointing a commission under Novosiltsov to draft a federal constitution for Russia.

The political reformers that history has come to call the Decembrists can be thought of as returning war veterans, hoping to make Russia worthy of the high calling it had assumed through victory over Napoleon. They were unified mainly by certain things they opposed: the military colonies of Arakcheev, the irrational cruelties of petty officialdom, and the succession of Nicholas I to the throne. They were, in part, simply bored with Russia, determined to "awake it from its slumber," to prove themselves the heroes at home that they had been abroad. They spoke of themselves initially as "Russian knights" and "free gardeners" and considered vaguely everything

from building a web of canals between Russia's great rivers to annexing Serbia, Hungary, and even Norway.133 The Decembrist movement had its origins in the formation by guards officers early in 1817 of a "Union of Salvation or of Sincere and Loyal Sons of the Fatherland," and patriotic journals, such as Son of the Fatherland, were important media for the publication of their initial proposals for political reform.136

A romantic interest in the history and destiny of their own country was as important to these new radicals as it was to the new conservatives like Karamzin. "History leads us," wrote the Decembrist Lunin, "into the realm of high politics."137 He called himself "the False Dmitry," whose Westernizing policies he glorified in defiance of Karamzin, and he started the general Decembrist chorus in praise of the traditions of Novgorod.138

The parliament (sejm) of early Poland and Lithuania was glorified along with the assembly (yeche) of Novgorod. The aristocratic reformers had many links with Poland and Lithuania.139 Some of the more radical officers sublimated nationality altogether in such new brotherhoods as the Society of the United Slavs. Poland was a model for the hoped-for transformation of the entire empire, because it had been allowed to keep its sejm by Alexander I, who had appeared before it.140 From Lithuania came one of the first and most far-reaching plans for an ail-Russian constitution, Timothy Bok's Note to Be Presented and Read to an Assembly of the Lithuanian Nobility. Bok was arrested shortly after sending it to Alexander I in 1818, but his work helped put in circulation the romantic idea that genuine popular rule had existed throughout Eastern Europe prior to the German Drang nach Osten of late medieval times. The spontaneous and communal qualities of the Baltic peoples and their deep opposition to Germanic autocracy was a theme in the writings of the gifted Esthonian poet-Decembrist Wilhelm Kiichelbecker, which was echoed by the Decembrist poet Bestuzhev-Marlinsky and by the great Polish writer and friend of the Decembrists Adam Mickiewicz.141 There was also a tendency to glorify the Cossacks for their methods of "gathering the 'eldest ones' from all tribes for the promulgation of laws in accordance with the spirit of the people."142

Aside from their general bias in favor of increased constitutional liberties and some form of representative government, the Decembrist reformers were most concerned with turning the Russian empire into a federation. The^ United_States was generally the model, Nikita Murav'ev actually proposing that Russia be divided into thirteen original states with the Moscow and Don district serving as an oversized version of the District of Columbia.143 The change of the "Union of Salvation" into the "Union of Commonweal" in 1818 involved the adoption of a new decentralized organizational system among the reformers. The Moscow congress of the

various regional councils of the Union early in 1821 was the first nationwide, secret political meeting in Russian history, and it called itself a "constituent duma."

But in the early 1820's Alexander began to take alarm. The model for the "Union of Commonweal" had been the radical German "Union of Virtue." In the face of unrest among these German students and a confused mutiny in 1820 within his own favored Semenovsky regiment, Alexander took drastic measures to cut Russia off from the Western Enlightenment: he purged professors and burned books, expelled the Jesuit order, and finally, in the summer of 1822, abolished all Masonic and secret societies.