drink. Constantine, the elder of Alexander’s siblings, had already run off to Poland, where he had fallen in love with a Catholic pianist (after Constantine first heard the ten-year-old prodigy play, his wife often invited Chopin to their Polish residence, convinced his music calmed Constantine’s difficult nerves). Alexander’s youngest brother, Nicholas, was also slow to act and take up the vacant throne; he needed to be cautious lest any advances he made be considered a coup. For the Decembrist revolutionaries, this messy two-week interregnum therefore presented the perfect opportunity to advance their plans for revolt.
But while the Decembrists’ motives were impassioned, their regiments were not. When the men began to assemble in Senate Square, there was a smaller force of rebel soldiers than the Decembrists had hoped. In addition, one of the main leaders deserted. Despite these setbacks, the Decembrists refused to disperse, so Nicholas ordered a cavalry squad to break up the rabble. Only with the whine of cannon fire did the men eventually retreat to a frozen River Neva, where Nicholas’s soldiers blitzed the ice with artillery. By nightfall, the revolt was quashed. The perpetrators were rounded up. On the same day as the Decembrist Revolt, also referred to as the First Russian Revolution, Nicholas I declared himself Tsar.
Close to six hundred suspects were put on trial. Five men were hanged, including the poet and publisher Kondraty Ryleev, who was executed holding a book by Byron in his hand. When the rope snapped on the first attempt, one of the prisoners reportedly quipped: ‘What a wretched country! They don’t even know how to hang properly.’ Another of the condemned men remarked on the privilege of dying not once but twice for his country. Whether any of these remarks are true is beside the point: the myth of the Decembrists’ martyrdom took root when Tsar Nicholas I ordered the execution to continue, and the gallows were strung with new rope.
With the hangings complete, a core of more than a hundred men were identified as coup leaders and sent to Siberia for hard labour, some for life.* They were stripped of their wealth and privileges. As they were members of some of the grandest, most decorated families in Russia, this was the high-society scandal of the time. It was talked about all over Europe, with the vengeance in Nicholas’s response also changing Russians’ perception of banishment forever. Prior to 1825, very little compassion had existed for the men, women and children sent to Siberia. After 1825, political exiles were regarded with far greater sympathy. As for the eleven women who elected to follow their Decembrist husbands and lovers into exile, they were revered as living saints. Under the rules of banishment, the women had to leave their children behind in European Russia. Any offspring conceived in exile would be forbidden from inheriting their family’s titles or estates.
The five Decembrists hanging from the gallows, sketched in Pushkin’s notepad. Pushkin was closely linked to the revolt, having gone to school with some leading Decembrists. His 1817 poem ‘Ode to Liberty’ was also cited by some conspirators as an influence. As a result, Pushkin was brought before the Tsar and restrictions placed on his freedom of movement and expression.
One of the most high-profile Decembrists banished for life was Prince Sergei Volkonsky – a childhood playmate of the Tsar’s, whose mother was a principal lady-in-waiting to the Dowager Empress. Sergei’s wife, Maria, came from an equally elite family. Her father, General Raevsky, was one of the heroes of Napoleon’s defeat in 1812. With her knowledge of literature, music and foreign languages, Maria was a descendant of Catherine’s ‘Enlightened’ Russia. She was also a well-known beauty, her abundant black curls and olive skin earning her the nickname la fille du Ganges.*
Maria decided to abandon her enchanted circle – as well as her infant son, who would die aged two – and follow her husband into exile. It became one of the most talked about tragedies of a feverishly romantic century. ‘All her life was this one unconscious weaving of invisible roses in the lives of those with whom she came in contact’ is how Tolstoy described the heroine, modelled on Maria, in his unfinished mid-nineteenth-century novel The Decembrists. Maria’s actions inspired paintings, music and Pushkin’s poetry, as well as a love of the piano on the other side of the Urals, when she took a clavichord some four thousand miles from Moscow to join her husband deep in the Siberian taiga.
The instrument, kept close at hand throughout Maria’s exile, was a gift from her sister-in-law Zinaida Volkonsky – a keen patron of the virtuosos, who hosted one of the most well-regarded cultural salons of the period. When Zinaida threw a leaving party in Moscow on the eve of Maria’s Siberian journey, Maria sat close to Zinaida’s piano, and Pushkin close to Maria. She wanted her friends to sing so that she wouldn’t forget their voices in exile. Shortly afterwards, she set off for Siberia with the clavichord Zinaida had strapped to her sledge. It was a remarkable journey, the instrument travelling all the way from Moscow to the eastern side of Lake Baikal. What the local Buryats would have made of this Russian princess as they watched her passage across the lake is hard to picture. The Buryats thought the Milky Way was ‘a stitched seam’, and the stars the holes in the sky. When meteors flashed, Siberia’s indigenous tribes described it as the gods peeling back ‘the sky-cover to see what is happening on Earth’. The sight of Maria bundled up in her ermine furs must have appeared out of this world to them, like a visitation from another planet.
Maria spent her first few months in exile in the town of Nerchinsk, near the Mongolian border, living in a small Cossack hut. She was allowed to visit Sergei’s cell twice a week. At first the men were forbidden to receive packages from relatives in European Russia, so the women began to sneak money into Siberia through secret channels in order to buy the prisoners extra privileges. When a French-born couturier arrived in Nerchinsk in pursuit of her Decembrist lover, she turned up with hundreds of roubles stitched into her clothes. She also smuggled in Italian sheet music for Maria. The women were pushy, persistent and resourceful. As for the Decembrists’ prison commander, he soon got the measure of their capabilities, remarking ‘he would rather deal with a hundred political exiles than a dozen of their wives’.
The men were moved a year later to a prison at Chita, also east of Lake Baikal. Later, the Decembrists were transferred to a new jail at Petrovsky Zavod, in a nearby valley, where the wives were allowed to share their husband’s room. Maria’s clavichord moved into the windowless prison, which was far gloomier than the one at Chita. As the years went by, children were conceived. Maria learned to speak Russian, as opposed to the French of her aristocratic childhood. She gave birth to a little girl, who died after only two days. Her next two children, a son and a daughter, survived.*
While family provided comfort to a few of the Decembrists, it was through culture – for many, music in particular – that they were able to maintain some kind of connection to the lives they had left behind, helped along by relatives sending books, paints and large sums of money from home. ‘What remarkable fighters they were, what personalities, what people!’ wrote the nineteenth-century Russian journalist Alexander Herzen of the gentlemen revolutionaries. The Decembrists represented everything brave and humane that was missing from Tsar Nicholas I’s lightless reign. ‘I have been told, – I don’t know whether it is true, – that wherever they worked in the mines in Siberia, or whatever it is called, the convicts who were with them, improved in their presence,’ wrote Tolstoy.
The Decembrists teamed up to create a small academy in exile. They set up carpentry, blacksmith and bookbinding workshops, and ran lectures on subjects from seamanship to anatomy, physics to fiscal theory. They established a library, which they filled with thousands of books sent by their relatives (according to one account, a collection that numbered nearly half a million). Another building was turned into a music room for piano, flute and strings. Locals came to study, and to attend the Decembrists’ concerts and musical soirées. The prisoners dreamed up imaginary lands, inventing sea stories about the distant oceans, and found comfort in the smallest delights of nature. The Borisov brothers, for instance, went on to build a huge Siberian insect collection. Meanwhile, the school the Decembrists created during their prison years benefitted
