The Icon and the Axe

Secret societies nevertheless continued to exist and to discuss the political questions that Alexander had himself once raised. Still faithful to the concept of reform from above, these groups focused their hopes for a constitutional monarchy on the heir apparent to the throne, the Grand Duke Constantine. A former Mason and long-time resident of Poland, Constantine was thought to be sympathetic with constitutional forms of rule; but when it became apparent after Alexander's death late in 1825 that Constantine's Prussian-trained brother Nicholas was to be the successor, the St. Petersburg reformers staged a large, confused demonstration on December 14 in the Senate Square, which was followed a few days later by an equally foredoomed if somewhat more protracted rising in the Kiev district.

Although the Decembrist movement is often regarded as the starting point of the Russian revolutionary tradition, it is perhaps more properly considered the end of aristocratic reformism: the last episode in the sixty-year period of political discussions that had begun when Catherine first convened her legislative assembly. The majority of Decembrists sought no more than to realize the original aspirations of Catherine and Alexander, to prod their nation into political and moral greatness commensurate with the military greatness assured by Suvorov and Kutuzov.

Most of these loosely affiliated reformers sought only some kind of constitutional monarchy with a federated distribution of power without any major changes in the economic or social order. One of the Decembrist leaders, however, did advocate a more radical course of action for Russia in the 1820's. In so doing, Paul Pestel, leader of the southern wing of the movement, identified himself less with the romantic age in which he lived than with the age of blood and iron which was to follow. He is the most original and prophetic of the Decembrists; a kind of lonely, halfway house between the Russia of Peter and Catherine and that of Lenin and Stalin.

Pestel gave more consideration to the problem of power than any of his reform-minded associates. He believed that a homogeneous, highly centralized state was necessary in the modern world. Nationalities that will

not assimilate (the Jews and Poles) are to be excluded from it; and all other nationalities are to be completely absorbed and Russified. He looked for guidance not to the romantic past traditions of Novgorod and the Cossacks, still less to what he considered the "opiate" of an English- or French-style constitution. Rather he looked to Russia's first national law code, the Kievan Russkaia Pravda, which he made the title of his own major political treatise. Only uniform, rational laws could bring order out of chaos in Russia; and under current Russian conditions, this required radical social and political change: agrarian redistribution and the transfer of sovereign power to a unicameral republican legislature.

All of this was to be brought about by force if necessary and would require a kind of Jacobin network of organized plotters as well as an interim military dictatorship between the seizure of power and the full realization of "Russian justice."144 Pestel devoted great attention to matters of military reform and reorganization and made the most serious effort of any Decembrist to utilize the forms of Masonry for the purposes of revolutionary organization.145 He recognized the value of maintaining the Orthodox Church as an official unifying force in Russia, although he himself was a freethinker, with a partly Protestant background.

His extremism and preoccupation with power link Pestel with Lenin more than with his fellow Decembrists. His vague belief in the peasant commune as a model for social reorganization and his willingness to consider assassination as a weapon of political struggle form a link with the future populists and Social Revolutionaries. His program for resettling the Jews in Israel (though partly anticipated by Potemkin) represents a curious anticipation of Zionism by an unsympathetic outsider.