sung. The Northern Society's political demands were more moderate than those of Pestel's group - a constitutional monarchy with a parliament and civil liberties. Volkonsky shuttled between Petersburg and Kiev, mustering support for Pestel's planned revolt. 'I have never been so happy as I was at that time', he later wrote. 'I took pride in the knowledge that I was doing something for the people - I was liberating them from tyranny.'46 Although he was in love with, and then married to, Maria Raevsky, he saw very little of his beautiful young bride.
Maria was the daughter of General Raevsky, a famous hero of 1812 who had even been praised by Napoleon. Born in 1805, Maria met Volkonsky when she was seventeen; she had extraordinary grace and beauty for her years. Pushkin called her the 'daughter of the Ganges' on account of her dark hair and colouring. The poet was a friend of the Raevskys and had travelled with the general and his family to the Crimea and the Caucasus. As one might expect, Pushkin fell in love with Maria. He often fell in love with beautiful young girls - but this time it was serious, judging by the frequency with which Maria appeared in his poetry. At least two of Pushkin's heroines - Princess Maria in The Fountain of Bakhchisarai (1822) and the young Circassian girl in The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1820-21) - had been inspired by her. It is perhaps significant that both are tales of unrequited love. The memory of Maria playing in the waves in the Crimea inspired him to write in Eugene Onegin:
How I envied the waves -
Those rushing tides in tumult tumbling
To fall about her feet like slaves!
I longed to join the waves in pressing
Upon those feet these lips… caressing.47
Volkonsky was given the task of recruiting Pushkin to the conspiracy. Pushkin belonged to the broad cultural circles of the Decembrists and had many friends in the conspiracy (he later claimed that, had it not been for a hare that crossed his path and made him superstitious about travelling, he might well have gone to Petersburg to join his friends on Senate Square). As it was, he had been banished to his estate at Mikhailovskoe, near Pskov, because his poetry had inspired them:
There will rise, believe me, comrade A star of captivating bliss, when Russia wakes up from her sleep And when our names will both be written On the ruins of despotism.48
It seems, however, that Volkonsky was afraid of exposing the great poet to the risks involved - so he did not carry out this promise to Pestel. In any case, as Volkonsky no doubt knew, Pushkin was so famous for his indiscretion, and so well connected at court, that he would have been a liability.49 Rumours of an uprising were already circulating around St Petersburg, so, in all likelihood, the Emperor Alexander knew about the Decembrists' plans. Volkonsky certainly thought so. During an inspection of his regiment, the Emperor gently warned him: 'Pay more attention to your troops and a little less to my government, which, I am sorry to say, my dear prince, is none of your business.'50
The insurrection had been scheduled for the late summer of 1826. But these plans were hastily brought forward by the Emperor's sudden death and the succession crisis caused by the refusal of the Grand Duke Constantine to accept the throne in December 1825. Pestel resolved to seize the moment for revolt, and with Volkonsky he travelled up from Kiev to St Petersburg for noisy arguments with the Northern society about the means and timing of the uprising. The problem was how to muster the support of the ordinary troops, who showed no inclination towards either regicide or armed revolt. The conspirators had only the vaguest notion of how to go about this task. They thought of the uprising as a military putsch, carried out by order from above; as its commanding officers, they based their strategy on the idea that they could somehow call upon their old alliance with the soldiers. They rejected the initiatives of some fifty junior officers, sons of humble clerks and small landowners, whose organization, the United Slavs, had called upon the senior leaders to agitate for an uprising among the soldiers and the peasantry. 'Our soldiers are good and simple', explained one of the Decembrist leaders. 'They don't think much and should serve merely as instruments in attaining our goals.'51 Volkonsky shared this attitude. 'I am convinced that I will carry my brigade', he
wrote to a friend on the eve of the revolt, 'for the simple reason that I have my soldiers' trust and love. Once the uprising commences they will follow my command.'52
In the end, the Decembrist leaders carried with them only some 3,000 troops in Petersburg - far less than the hoped-for 20,000 men, but still enough perhaps to bring about a change of government if well organized and resolute. But that they were not. On 14 December, in garrisons throughout the capital, soldiers were assembled for the ceremony of swearing an oath of allegiance to the new Tsar, Nicholas I. The 3,000 mutineers refused to swear their oath and, with flags unfurled and drums beating, marched to Senate Square, where they thronged in front of the Bronze Horseman and called for 'Constantine and a Constitution'. Two days earlier, Nicholas had decided to take the crown when Constantine had made it clear that he would not. Constantine had a large following among the soldiers, and when the Decembrist leaders heard the news, they sent out leaflets misinforming them that Nicholas had usurped the throne, and calling on them to 'fight for their liberty and human dignity'. Most of the soldiers who appeared on Senate Square had no idea what a 'constitution' was (some thought it was the wife of Constantine). They displayed no inclination to capture the Senate or the Winter Palace, as envisaged in the hasty plans of the conspirators. For five hours the soldiers stood in freezing temperatures, until Nicholas, assuming the command of his loyal troops, ordered them to commence firing against the mutineers. Sixty soldiers were shot down; the rest ran away.
Within hours the ringleaders of the insurrection had all been arrested and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress (the police had known who they were all along). The conspirators might still have had some chance of success in the south, where it was possible to combine with the Poles in a march on Kiev, and where the main revolutionary forces (something in the region of 60,000 troops) were massed in garrisons. But the officers who had previously declared their support for an uprising were now so shocked by the events in Petersburg that they dared not act. Volkonsky found only one officer who was prepared to join him in the call for a revolt, and in the end, the few hundred troops who marched on Kiev on 3 January were easily dispersed by the government's artillery.53 Volkonsky was arrested two days later, while
on his way to Petersburg to see Maria one last time. The police had an arrest warrant signed in person by the Tsar.
Five hundred Decembrists were arrested and interrogated, but most of them were released in the next few weeks, once they had provided evidence for the prosecution of the main leaders. At their trial, the first show trial in Russian history, 121 conspirators were found guilty of treason, stripped of their noble titles and sent as convict labourers to Siberia. Pestel and Ryleev were hanged with three others in a grotesque scene in the courtyard of the Fortress, even though officially the death penalty had been abolished in Russia. When the five were strung up on the gallows and the floor traps were released, three of the condemned proved too heavy for their ropes and, still alive, fell down into the ditch. 'What a wretched country!' cried out one of them. 'They don't even know how to hang properly.'54