However, even while it suggested ways to stabilise society and strengthen the state, the Napoleonic experience had also disrupted traditional social patterns and created expectations that would prove troublesome to the regime in the future. There are indications that Russian peasants understood their 'liberation' from Napoleon to mean freedom from serfdom as well, and like Spain, though to a far lesser degree, Russia had peasant guerrillas who might become a threat to the regime once the French were gone. A more fateful parallel with Spain was the creation of secret societies of disillusioned officers who were committed to radical political change and would attempt to overthrow the autocracy in December 1825.[159] Nikitenko met some of them when he was still a serf in Ostrogozhsk:
[participants in world events, these officers were not figures engaged in fruitless debates, but men who . . . had acquired a special strength of character and determination in their views and aspirations. They stood in sharp contrast to the progressive people in our provincial community, who, for lack of real, sobering activity, inhabited a fantasy world and wasted their strength in petty, fruitless protest. The contact the officers had had with Western European civilization, their personal acquaintance with a more successful social system . . ., and, finally, the struggle for the grand principles of freedom and the Fatherland all left their mark of deep humanity on them. ... In me they saw a victim of the order of things that they hated.[160]
Like the proponents of militarism and the Holy Alliance - who were, after all, their friends and relatives - the Decembrists saw an opportunity to resolve the problems outlined at the opening of this chapter. They proposed to place progressive military men, whose moral authority rested on a patriotism tested in battle, at the head of a cohesive and mighty Russian nation-state. By liberalising the social and political order to a degree that even Alexander I and Speranskii had never seriously contemplated, they meant to confront tyranny and social injustice. In adopting for themselves the persona of austere, dignified, outspoken, emphatically moral men of action committed to the public good, they offered their own answer to the crisis of spiritual meaning and of the norms of individual conduct that beset the nobility.[161] By creating 'secret societies' as a framework for political action, they acknowledged the same absence of a viable civil society that prompted Alexander I and Nicholas I to foster religious associations, bureaucracy and militarism. And in seeking to gain power through a pronunciamiento, they joined nationalistic officers from San Martin to Nasser in following in the footsteps of General Bonaparte's Bru- maire coup, but they also helped to bring the violent, conspiratorial culture of eighteenth-century Russian politics into the ideologically polarised world of the nineteenth.
159
Isabel de Madariaga discusses this issue in 'Spain and the Decembrists',
161
See the (by now classic) 'Dekabrist v povsednevnoi zhizni', in Lotman,