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When the War of 1812 began, the patriotic feeling reached its pitch. It was to be a Scythian war—a war of retreat. Time and space were to be the chief allies of Russia, whose military forces were between one-half and one-third the size of Napoleon’s. Indeed, the deeper Napoleon penetrated into Russia’s vast expanses the more equal the chances became. Alexander named Mikhail Kutuzov commander in chief (in the place of Mikhail Bogdanovich, Prince Barclay de Tolly) and Fyodor Vasilyevich, Count Rostopchin, governor of Moscow, the capture of which was the final aim of Napoleon’s strategy.

After the bloody but undecided battle at Borodino, Moscow was abandoned by its residents. For five weeks of his stay in the city Napoleon waited in vain for a peace proposal. Moscow was burned by the inhabitants and by the marauders of the Grand Armée. That army was in the process of dissolution, and winter was approaching. Then followed Napoleon’s famous retreat, during which the Grand Armée was nearly annihilated. Russia became a party to the Quadruple Alliance against France, and the wars of liberation of 1813 and 1814 brought Alexander and his army to Paris.

All these events produced an enormous impression on the sensitive temperament of Alexander. “The fire of Moscow lit up my soul,” he said later to the German pastor Rulemann Friedrich Eylert, and “I then got to know God and became another man.” Alexander now found in the Bible the proofs of his mission and proposed to his allies to establish a Holy Alliance, a monarch’s league based on the precepts of the Scriptures. At the Congress of Vienna (1815) Alexander figured as a saviour of Europe, and he continued to play a leading part at Aix-la-Chapelle (1818), Troppau (1820), Laibach (1821), and Verona (1822).

The revolutionary movement

Quite different were the impressions brought back to Russia by the younger generation of officers who took part in the Napoleonic Wars. While abroad, many of them had read political newspapers and were present at the debates of representative assemblies. They learned to quote the books of Jean-Louis de Lolme, Count A. Destutt de Tracy, Benjamin Constant, Gaetano Filangieri, and Baron Louis Bignon. After their return to Russia they were shocked by the contrast of arbitrary rule, the abuses of bureaucracy, the venality and secrecy of the courts, the sufferings of the serfs, and the indifference to popular education. The secret Union of Salvation (later called the Society of True and Loyal Sons of the Motherland) was established in 1816 but was soon closed. The Union of Welfare, founded in 1818, was disbanded in 1821, but its Southern Board in Ukraine, led by Pavel Ivanovich Pestel, ignored the dissolution order and continued to function as the Southern Society. After the breakup of the Union of Welfare, the Northern Society was organized in St. Petersburg by Nikita Muravyov and Nikolay Turgenev. Later, Pestel drafted a republican and strongly centralized constitution, while Muravyov composed a monarchical and federal constitution on the basis of those of Spain (1812) and the United States.

Pestel’s tactics were revolutionary, whereas the St. Petersburg group intended to help the government openly in questions of education, philanthropy, economics, and improvement of justice, thus preparing Russia for a constitutional regime. They expected Alexander to sympathize with them, because in 1815 he had given a constitution to Poland and at the opening of the sejm mentioned that he was preparing one for Russia. He also acknowledged the old institutions of Finland. However, Alexander soon ceased to distinguish between “the holy principles of liberal institutions” and “destructive teaching which threatens a calamitous attack on the social order.” He entirely agreed with Klemens, Fürst von Metternich (in 1820) that the liberal principles themselves were destructive.

A period of reaction thus began in Russia. The transition to it was marked by an attempt to impart to Russia Alexander’s religious enlightenment. The Ministry of Public Education was united, for that purpose, with a new Ministry of Spiritual Affairs, in which all religions including the Russian Orthodox were treated equally (1817). Prince Aleksandr Golitsyn, the procurator of the Holy Governing Synod and the president of the Russian branch of the Bible Society, was made the chief of the united ministries. The consequence was that between 1819 and 1821 the young universities recently opened were entirely destroyed—especially by the curators of Kazan and St. Petersburg circuits, Mikhail Magnitsky and Dmitry Runich. They removed the best professors and prohibited textbooks on natural law, morals, and logic, on the ground that the teaching must be based exclusively on Holy Scripture. For Russian church dignitaries even Golitsyn’s mystical Pietism was heresy: he was forced to leave his office, after he had been anathematized by the archimandrite Photius, a fanatic protected by Alexander’s favourite Aleksey Andreyevich, Graf Arakcheyev. During the last part of the reign, Arakcheyev, a brutal man, enjoyed the power of prime minister.

Under these conditions secret societies changed their character. The measures of Alexander convinced them that monarchs’ promises were not to be relied upon. They were also impressed by pronunciamentos (military coups) in Spain and Naples (1820). Turgenev recorded in his diary in 1820: “We formerly asked, every time we met the readers of newspapers in the club, whether there was a new constitution. Now we ask whether there is a new revolution.” One may judge of the impression produced on the officers of the guard when they learned that they had to stifle the Neapolitan uprising, by orders of the Congress of Laibach.

The constitutionalists were losing ground; radical elements among them (like the poet Kondraty Fyodorovich Ryleyev) began to prevail. Proposals of regicide were heard from Pyotr Kakhovsky and Aleksandr Yakubovich but were rejected or indefinitely postponed. In any case, revolutionary tactics were considered inevitable, but no definite scheme was in preparation. Suggestions were made for forcing the emperor, at some favourable opportunity, to nominate a liberal ministry under Speransky and Nikolay Mordvinov, who would convoke a Great Council (later, Russian revolutionaries called it a Constituent Assembly) which should decide on the form of the government.

A favourable occasion presented itself quite unexpectedly. Alexander died in Taganrog on December 1 (November 19, Old Style), 1825. The order of succession happened to be undecided. Constantine, the elder of Alexander’s surviving brothers, had renounced the throne in 1822, but Nicholas, the younger, apparently unaware of this, swore allegiance to his brother. Constantine would not accept the throne. Nicholas threatened to leave Russia. The correspondence between Warsaw (where Constantine was the virtual ruler of the Congress Kingdom of Poland) and St. Petersburg was thus protracted for about two weeks. The Decembrists, as they were called later, decided finally to raise the guard regiments for Constantine against Nicholas and to force Nicholas—in case he survived that day—to appoint a liberal ministry which would do the rest. The rising was a failure. The Decembrist movement was defeated because its leaders did not dare to turn to the masses, and as conspirators they lacked resolution. The uprising would serve as an ominous prognostication of the coming democratic revolutionary movement.