This is not a monograph but a documentary collection, and the distinction matters, because it is the source of the book's real value and of the frame that value has to be read against. Vladimir Fyodorov, D.Sc. (History), has gathered the testimony, letters, memoirs, statutes and trial papers of the Decembrists — the noble officers who on 14 December 1825 marched insurgent Guards regiments onto Senate Square in St Petersburg against the autocracy, and who paid for it with the scaffold and the Siberian mines. Around the documents he has written a preface, a long "Historical Background" essay, and the connective headnotes that open each section and each figure. The volume appeared from Progress Publishers in Moscow in 1988, in "The Library of Russian and Soviet Literary Journalism," translated by Cynthia Carlile. Its title comes from the second of its three parts, and behind that from Herzen; its epigraph is Tolstoy's — "The Decembrists are always interesting and stir the most serious thoughts and feelings."
What the reader is holding, then, is roughly nine parts primary source to one part editorial voice. That proportion is the book's strength. It is also why the introduction that follows spends most of its length crediting Fyodorov and only its last third quarrelling with him — the quarrel is with the ramp he lays under the documents, not with the documents, and not with the scholarship that assembled them.
Establish the date first, because Progress spines mislead and this one carries a charge. The documents are of the 1810s to the 1880s; the compiler's own prose fixes his moment precisely. "Even today," Fyodorov writes in the Historical Background, "when the first socialist state has celebrated its seventieth anniversary, Lenin's assessment of the Decembrist movement retains its validity." The seventieth anniversary of October is 1987. This is a text written at the very height of glasnost, in the year the Soviet Union began, publicly and painfully, to reopen its own past — and published in 1988, when that reopening was in full flood.
That dating is worth holding onto, because the book does nothing with it. Search the text for glasnost, perestroika, Gorbachev, restructuring: nothing. (The "Gorbachev" the concordance returns is Ivan Gorbachevsky, a Decembrist of the Society of Associated Slavs.) A book about noble rebels who rose against despotism, censorship, the secret police and Siberian exile, appearing in the one year the Soviet century was being forced to look at its own version of all four, refers to its own moment not once. It keeps strictly to 1825 and to Lenin. Whether that silence is discretion, conviction or reflex, it is the first thing to notice, and we will come back to it, because the documents Fyodorov chose are a good deal less silent than he is.
Take the scholarship on its own terms first, because it earns that. This is a real historian doing real work. Each document arrives with a biographical headnote — dates, rank, society, sentence, fate — and a source note; many are drawn straight from the archives, cited by fund and file number in the Central State Archives. The selection is intelligent and it is moving, and for a reader without Russian it is very nearly the only door of its kind into 1825 in English.
Consider what is actually in these pages. Pestel's testimony to the Committee of Enquiry, in which the leader of the Southern Society traces his own road to revolution — "The slavery of the peasants had always affected me deeply" — and diagnoses his age with a clarity that needs no gloss: "every age has its distinctive feature. The present age is marked by revolutionary ideas... The spirit of change is, so to speak, causing minds everywhere to simmer." Pyotr Kakhovsky's letters to Nicholas I from the Peter and Paul Fortress, written by a man who knew he would hang, and who used the little time he had to lecture the Tsar on political theory: "Where, show me the country, reveal the history — where and when were nations happy under absolute rule, without the law, without rights, without property?" Alexander Bestuzhev's astonishing catalogue of a whole society's discontent — soldiers, officers, sailors, scholars, "young people complained that they were prevented from learning... Every element was in ferment." The Green Book of the Union of Welfare; Pestel's Russkaya Pravda; the extracts from Nikita Muravyov's draft constitution. These are the founding programmatic texts of the Russian revolutionary tradition, and Fyodorov puts them in front of the reader in sequence, with enough scaffolding to follow the argument.
Then the insurrection, and then the part that no reader forgets: the reprisal. Fyodorov reproduces the machinery of the state's revenge in its own words — the decree to the Supreme Criminal Court, the protocol, Nicholas's instructions on the "ceremonial execution" — and then the report of the Governor-General of St Petersburg to the Tsar, dated 13 July 1826, on the hanging of the five. It is one of the coldest documents in the Russian nineteenth century: "Due to the inexperience of our executioners and their inability to construct a scaffold, at the first attempt three, namely: Ryleyev, Kakhovsky and Muravyov, fell to the ground, but were quickly hanged a second time, and met their merited end. The which I humbly report to Your Majesty." To have set that beside the survivors' own accounts of the same morning — Yevgenii Obolensky watching "all five, surrounded by grenadiers with fixed bayonets" — is editorial judgement of a high order.
And then Siberia, which is where the collection becomes something more than a political anthology. Fyodorov gives space to the wives who followed their husbands to the mines — Maria Volkonskaya's notes, Pauline Annenkova's reminiscences — and to the strange, luminous afterlife of the exiles: Nikolai Bestuzhev teaching local children to read; Bobrishchev-Pushkin, the Decembrist who became a homoeopath and drove his little hunch-backed pony from one end of cholera-struck Tobolsk to the other, treating the poor without pay. Tolstoy's verdict on the returned exiles closes the theme — that after thirty years it was "clear that happiness is not in Siberia nor in St Petersburg but in the human spirit." A reader told that Progress printed only apparatus would not expect this book, and would be wrong. It is a work of recovery, and much of what it recovers is unbearable and beautiful at once. That much should be said plainly and first.
Now the frame. A documentary collection is shaped twice — once by what is chosen, once by how it is introduced — and Fyodorov's introductions run the documents along a single track whose terminus is fixed before the first of them is read.
The track is Lenin's. The Historical Background opens not with a Decembrist but with a citation: "Russia witnessed the first revolutionary movement against tsarism in 1825" (Lenin, "Lecture on the 1905 Revolution"), and Fyodorov adds, "I would like, as a historian, to begin my account of the first Russian revolutionaries with this assessment by Lenin." He then lays out the famous schema in full — three generations of the Russian revolution, the aristocratic (1825–1861), the bourgeois-democratic (1861–1895), the proletarian (from 1895), with the Decembrists and Herzen as "the most outstanding figures of the aristocratic period." And he draws from it the conclusion the whole book exists to earn: "the October Revolution is quite rightly seen as having its starting point on that day of 14 December" 1825. October was "the natural culmination of the Russian revolutionary-liberation movement, its final fruit, its consummation." Herzen's regard for the Decembrists, Fyodorov writes elsewhere, showed "the natural inevitability of the next stage in the liberation movement."
The collection is built to that shape. It opens with Mikhail Lunin's "A Look at the Secret Society in Russia," whose keynote — "Its Cause Is the Cause of the Whole of Russia" — announces the theme of continuity, and it closes, after the documents of struggle, trial and exile, on Lenin's 1912 essay "In Memory of Herzen," printed nearly whole. The book's last words are Lenin's: "The Decembrists awakened Herzen. Herzen began the work of revolutionary agitation," the work "taken up, extended, strengthened, and tempered by the revolutionary raznochintsi... The storm is the movement of the masses themselves," first in 1905 and then in 1917. The reader is walked from Senate Square to the Winter Palace along a graded ramp, and every document is a step on it.
Here honesty requires a hard turn, because the easy criticism is the wrong one. It would be simple to convict Fyodorov of manufacturing a Bolshevik pedigree for men who were constitutional monarchists and republicans of 1825, and to leave it there. But the tradition from which this introduction is written built the same genealogy, and did so with pride.
In December 1925, speaking to the Second Congress of the Society of Political Prisoners and Deportees on the twentieth anniversary of the first revolution, Trotsky drew the identical line of descent: "Without Radishchev there would not have been Pestel. Without Pestel, no Zhelyabov. Without Zhelyabov we would not have had Alexander Ul'yanov. And without Alexander there would not have been Vladimir" — and concluded, "In Leninism live the Decembrists, the teachers of the 1860s, the Populists and the People's Will." ("Twenty Years After 1905," delivered 26 December 1925.) Honouring the Decembrists as ancestors of October is not a Stalinist falsification; it is common ground across the whole movement that came out of 1917, this series included. Whatever is wrong with Fyodorov's book, it is not that he claims Pestel and Ryleyev for the revolutionary tradition. They belong to it.
The difference is in the kind of genealogy, and it turns out to be everything. It shows in two places.
First, in what is said of 14 December itself. For Fyodorov the rising is a revolution and a smooth first step: he endorses the Decembrist Batenkov's court declaration that it was "not a mutiny, but the first experiment in political revolution in Russia," and calls the day "the first-ever armed uprising in Russia against absolutism." In the same 1925 speech, Trotsky reads the same event as tragedy: "Both had essential elements of revolution, but were still not revolution. That class that would have been able to take power was incapable of leading the peasant movements. The insurrection of the Decembrists had insufficient social support." The point that Lenin himself concedes in the passage Fyodorov quotes — that these were revolutionaries "very far removed from the people" — is for Trotsky not a footnote to a triumph but the analytic centre: 1825 as an argument about social forces, a rising by officers over the heads of a peasantry they could not reach, defeated in six hours because it had no ground under it. That is why Trotsky insists the story is one of "single-combat" and "a necessary preparatory school," a chain of heroic insufficiencies, each redeemed only by the next. Fyodorov's ramp climbs; Trotsky's is a record of defeats that had to be paid for before anything could be won.
Second, and more important, in where the genealogy ends. Fyodorov's is closed and completed. Its terminus is not an argument but a monument — "the first socialist state has celebrated its seventieth anniversary" — and the whole preceding history is graded by its arrival there. A genealogy that ends at a finished triumph spares itself the one question its own logic ought to force: what became of the thing at the top of the ramp? Trotsky's genealogy could not be closed, because for him the proletarian revolution was not a consummation to be commemorated but a conquest still to be defended — and, by the time he wrote The Revolution Betrayed in 1936, a conquest already half lost to a bureaucratic caste that had raised over the workers' state a new apparatus of privilege, censorship and police. The difference between the two genealogies is the difference between a heritage honoured as an open argument and a heritage laid to rest at the foot of a statue.
Which brings us back to the date, and to the sharpest thing in the book — sharper than anything Fyodorov intends. Test the collection by the question this series puts to every volume: can the category it celebrates be turned on the speaker's own side? The book celebrates men who resisted an autocratic police state — its censorship, its espionage, its unaccountable treasury, its scaffolds and its Siberia. It seals that resistance safely at 1917, its enemy a dead Tsar, its victory complete. It never once lets the category swing round toward the state publishing it. And yet the documents Fyodorov reprints keep swinging it round on their own.
Read Lunin's essay "The Social Movement in Russia in the Present Reign," written in 1840 from Siberian exile and placed near the end of the book. It is an indictment of Nicholas I's regime, and in 1988 it is an indictment with a double edge Fyodorov leaves entirely unremarked. On the state's finances: "We pay, but we do not know where our money goes... today we pay so much, and tomorrow we may be obliged to pay twice this amount." On the press: a government "surrounding the freedom of the press with new restrictions." On the fate of critics: a power that "extinguished with the hand of the executioner the minds which illumined and guided the development of the social movement." And, most startlingly, on the character of the regime — Lunin's exiles imagining the reproach they would fling at the rulers: "We preached the cult of law, you preach the cult of the personality... and have plunged it into the abyss of laxity, the vices of espionage and the darkness of ignorance."
The cult of the personality. That phrase — in the English of this Progress edition, and, a Soviet reader would have known, in the Russian below it — was the official euphemism under which the Soviet state had, since 1956, acknowledged and quarantined the crimes of Stalin. Here it stands in a Decembrist's 1840 arraignment of a tsar, reprinted in Moscow in 1987–88 with no gloss, no footnote, no evident awareness that the reader's ear would catch it. Whether Fyodorov placed it consciously or the resonance ambushed him, the effect is the same and it is the book's real electricity: the machinery the collection teaches its reader to despise in Nicholas I — the secret police, the exile, the strangled press, the cult of a single person, the "hand of the executioner" — describes, sentence for sentence, the century that lay between the Decembrists and the book's own publication. The genealogy the book draws so carefully, from Senate Square to the seventieth anniversary, has a stretch it will not walk: the stretch in which the heirs of the men who fought the police state built one of their own. The silence noted at the outset is not neutral. It is the seam where the frame and the documents come apart.
The revolutionary-Marxist tradition answered this way of reading the Russian past as it was being written, and answered it without giving up the ancestors. The relevant texts are near to hand. Trotsky's "Twenty Years After 1905" (1925) honours the Decembrists as forebears while refusing to call their defeat a victory. "Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution" (Summer 1939) reopens the whole Populist–Marxist quarrel that Fyodorov's ramp flattens, as a three-cornered argument — Plekhanov's, Lenin's, Trotsky's — in which the peasant question decided everything and no party simply won; his brief "A Note on Plekhanov" (24 April 1922) is the companion portrait of the tradition's first Marxist. And The Revolution Betrayed (1936) is the book Fyodorov's frame is built to avoid: it reads the Soviet outcome by the standard of what the revolution had promised — precisely the standard a genealogy ending at a monument declines to apply. Read against chapters 5 and 6 of that book, "The Soviet Thermidor" and "The Growth of Inequality," Lunin's indictment of Nicholas stops being a period piece.
The reader should also set this volume beside its own twin in this series: Andrei Anikin's Russian Thinkers (Progress, 1988), a history of Russian socio-economic thought running the same road — Radishchev, the Decembrist economists, Herzen, Chernyshevsky, the Populists — to the same terminus in "the Young Lenin," and open to the same reflexive objection in a scholarly key. The two books are the same operation performed on the same heritage, one in documents and one in narrative, in the same year. Read together they show the method whole.
None of this is a reason to do without Fyodorov. It is the reason the book is worth republishing. He has recovered a heritage and read much of it with real feeling; the documents he assembled are the founding papers of the Russian revolutionary tradition, and the human record he preserves — the wives on the road to Chita, the botched scaffold, the homoeopath on his pony — is history of the first order and will outlast any frame. Read the collection for Pestel and Kakhovsky and Lunin and the women who followed them east; read Herzen's line that closes the second part — "raised up on the scaffold, these people awoke the soul of a new generation." And then read past the ramp Fyodorov lays beneath them, and ask the question his own last document, Lunin's, cannot help but pose: whether the heirs of the men of 14 December kept faith, in the end, with the "cult of law" they died for, or whether they too came to be arraigned before "the court of our contemporaries and descendants." The Decembrists asked that question of their century. The honest way to honour them is to keep it open, and to let it be asked of ours.