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Remembering the Decembrists

The Imperial Life Guards Regiment during the uprising of December 14th 1825 Senate Square. (19th Century).

Vasily Timm (1820 -1895).The Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

‘The historical value of revolutions depends upon three conditions:  upon what they destroy, upon what they create and upon the legend that they leave behind…The Decembrists have not destroyed anything or created anything. The value of their accomplishment consists entirely in their legend, but that is sufficient.’  (Aldanov, Memories of the Decembrists.1926.)

Today, the 14th December (if we reckon by the Julian Calendar*), is the two hundredth anniversary of the Decembrist Uprising in Saint Petersburg, a revolt by a group of young officers against serfdom and autocracy in Russia.

The events of 14th December 2025 have a special place in my heart, since they form the background to my first novel, Small Acts of Kindness.

            The revolution was short lived and unsuccessful. The young men involved were unclear about their aims, and were obliged to prepare in a hurry.  The Emperor Nicholas the First had little trouble in putting down the revolt. He then hanged five of the ringleaders for their trouble, and over one hundred others were sent off to specially created camps in Siberia.

In the past in Russia the December revolutionaries were lauded as heroes.  In Tsarist times they were regarded, by liberals at least, as early standard bearers in a righteous cause.  It is thought that Tolstoy had the revolt in mind when he started War and Peace, but in the end the book covered different ground. In the Soviet era, as witnessed by the quotation from Aldanov above, despite the fact that the main actors were essentially toffs, they were embraced as worthy forerunners of the later revolutions of 1905 and 1919.

I am not sure how the anniversary will be portrayed in today’s Russia, but the prospects are not good.

The most recent retelling of the story, as far as I am aware, was a film ‘The Union of Salvation’,  that was released in Russia in 2019.  Unsurprisingly perhaps given today’s situation, the film, in part produced by state owned Channel One, takes a less than positive view of the Decembrist rebels.   Meduza’s film critic, Anton Dolin, reviewing the film in December of that year, describes it as  ‘an epic chronicle of a well-deserved failure. Its characters are naïve drinkers and neurotics, ready to drown Russia in blood for a good cause’.  The motivation behind the rebellion is never discussed in the film and the Emperor Nicholas in contrast to the revolutionaries, is shown as  a laudable figure who, handsome and paternal, saves his country from anarchy.  Once the revolutionaries meet their just deserts, we are led to believe that the man known variously as the ‘Gendarme of Europe’ and Nicholas the Stick, reigned for the next thirty years like a benign pussy cat.  In short,  the story as presented can be seen as more reflective of the values of the Government of today’s Russia than those of the young heroes of the post Napoleonic era.  In Dolin’s words the story has become  ‘an endorsement of the policy of state terror in relation to dissenters’.

*Add 12 days to find the date for events in the 19th century, under the Grigorian Calendar that we use now.

Napoleon in Moscow

Napoleon Bonaparte receiving the keys of Vienna at the Schloss  Schonbrunn , 13th November 1805. (1808)

Anne-Louise Girodet de Roussey-Trioson (1767-1824)

When Napoleon defeated his enemies in battle he expected the vanquished to concede and hand the keys of their capital cities to him.  This occurred in Vienna (twice), Berlin and Madrid in the early years of the 19th Century.  The picture above shows the scene in Vienna in 1805, but pictures can be found showing similar ceremonies elsewhere.

When he arrived at the walls of Moscow in September 1812, after the inconclusive battle of Borodino, Napoleon expected the same treatment. The French Emperor waited for twenty four hours in the hills to the west of the city, while some of his generals were sent to find suitably important people formally to cede the city to him.

He waited in vain.  Much to his irritation and the embarrassment of his suite, no one came, apart from a few French emigres and one or two people of little significance.  This was the first indication that the occupation of Moscow was going to be very different from his Austrian, Prussian and Spanish experiences.

Losing patience, Napoleon finally entered Moscow. As the French troops marched through the streets, they realized that the city was almost entirely deserted.  The Russian army had, as agreed, passed straight through the city and anyone who was anyone, including the Governor of the City, Rostopchin, had gone, taking government employees, fire fighting equipment and the police force with them.

               The Emperor of France set himself up in the Kremlin, and quickly appointed his own officials to govern the city. His suite was said to have found the ancient fortress surprisingly shabby, not at all the luxurious palace that they had expected. They possibly didn’t realise that the place had hardly been used since the time of Peter the Great, one hundred years earlier. 

            Napoleon, unable to believe that Alexander the First had given up the city without a fight, waited in vain for his offer of negotiations.  Soon he decided that he must take the initiative himself and write to the Russian Emperor.   By this time a devastating fire had broken out in the city, destroying much of it, and in the resulting chaos it was difficult to find any Russian of standing prepared to take his message.  Eventually State Councillor Tutolmin, the superintendent of the Moscow Foundling Home containing 600 children under eleven years old,  agreed to send Rykhin, one of his employees with a letter to Alexander and also to the Emperor’s mother, Maria Feodorovna, who was the patron of the orphanage.

            The unfortunate young man’s journey to Saint Petersburg was not without incident, at one stage he was almost murdered by suspicious peasants,  but he did finally manage to deliver his message.  This was one of at least two dispatches that Napoleon sent to Alexander, but no answer was received. Alexander realised that winter was coming on and that all he needed to do to rid the city of the French invader was to wait.   In the end Napoleon spent a little over five weeks among the ruins of burnt-out Moscow before embarking on his disastrous retreat back to Europe. It turned out to be the beginning of the end.

            This incident features in my current work in progress, In the Shadow of the Flames (working title), which is set in 1812, and centres around the Moscow Foundling Home.  There are articles about this extraordinary institution on this blog in June 2021 and July 2024.

Mrs Adams in Winter

Sometimes you come across a book that would have been really useful when working on a project years ago!

My talk ‘Russian Roads’ was developed in the early 2000’s.  It is a rather eclectic mix that examines travelling in Russia through the ages.  It also illustrates the work of the Peredvizhniki, the group of Russian artists who in the 19th Century broke away from the constraints of the conservative Imperial Academy of Arts. They not only often painted landscapes but also took their pictures on travelling exhibitions around the country. The talk concludes with a discussion of the idea of travelling forward (вперед!) embraced by communist propagandists in the 20th Century.

Mrs Adams in Winter, a Journey in the last days of Napoleon by Michael O’Brien tells the story of a journey undertaken by Catherine Adams, the wife of John Quincy Adams who subsequently became the sixth President of the United States.   In the early months of 1815, Mrs Adams, with her seven year old son, travelled from Saint Petersburg  to Paris to be reunited with her husband.  Quincy Adams had been the American plenipotentiary to the Court of Alexander 1st for several years. He left his wife behind in Russia for almost a year when he was obliged to travel to Ghent to join the commission negotiating the treaty that concluded the 1812 war between the United States and Britain.  Catherine kept a diary of the journey, which forms the basis of the book.

While details of the journey itself are fascinating, containing many facts about travel at the time, of some of which I was unaware,  the book is supplemented by all sorts of information about  history and personalities that are equally interesting. 

In my book, Fortune’s Price, which is set a little later in 1830, one of my characters undertakes a journey from St Petersburg to Warsaw, which covers some of the same route.  I was pleased to read that the same hair-raising river bridges, snow, mud, bears and wolves were encountered by Mrs Quincy Adams as she traversed the forests of Estland and Livonia!

The Streltsy

Tom Holland and Dominic Sandford, on their excellent podcast ‘The rest is history’, recently featured a series on the subject of Peter the Great and the Great Northern War.

 I have not yet had time to listen to the whole narrative, but I much enjoyed the first episode which told the story of Peter’s early years and the upheavals of his childhood.

The picture above shows some members of the Streltsy, a corps of soldiers formed in the 16th Century by Ivan lV (a.k.a. Ivan the Terrible), as his personal bodyguard. Their name derives from the Russian verb ‘strelat’,  which means ‘to shoot’. As can be seen; not only were they very brightly dressed, they were also armed to the teeth with a variety of weaponry. A potent force in battle at times of war the Streltsy were generally faithful and effective servants of the Tsar. However, in times of relative peace they had a tendency to get bored and become involved in trouble.

The Streltsy loomed large in Peter’s life. He became Tsar of Russia in 1782 when only 10 years old, reigning as joint ruler with his elder brother Ivan, who was disabled.  His mother was appointed regent, but this situation was soon challenged by Peter’s sister, Sophia, who seized the throne with the Streltsy’s help. The bloodshed witnessed by young Peter was horrible and Peter developed an aversion to the gloomy labyrinth of the Kremlin palace, where the atrocities took place, and to Moscow as a whole.

The tables were turned when Peter, aged 17, deposed his sister, in part with the assistance of the ever restive Streltsy, and in part by deploying his own ‘play’ regiments that Sophia had carelessly allowed him to equip and drill outside Moscow.

It is believed that Peter’s violent and unsettled childhood was a contributory factor to his decision to move his capital from Moscow to fortifications on the Baltic Sea, built on land taken from the Swedes which he named Saint Petersburg.

The illustration above is one of the illustrations from my talk, ‘The Bronze Horseman’, which tells the story of Saint Petersburg through references to the giant statue of Peter the Great that still graces Senate Square today, and also Alexnder Pushkin’s poem of the same name.

Diplomatic Immunity

Right: Charles Whitworth, 1st Baron Whitworth (1675-1725)  Guillaume Birochon

Left:  Andrey Artemovich Matveev (1666-1728) Artist unknown

My Royal Connections talk is now complete and I recently delivered it for the first time at Brantham Historical Society.  I think that it went well, although it was challenging to fit almost a thousand years of history into an hour.

While researching the topic I discovered that in the early years of the eighteenth century Peter the Great established the first Russian permanent embassies in every European capitals.  Prior to that time envoys were sent on diplomatic missions on an ad hoc basis as circumstances demanded.

Our first ambassador to the Russian Court was Charles Whitworth, later Baron Whitworth (1675-1725), a career diplomat who had served in Berlin and Vienna prior to his appointment to Russia between 1705 and 1712. In addition to trying to improve the regulation of the tobacco monopoly held by the English Russian company,  it fell to Whitworth to smooth over the relationship between the two countries following the scandal surrounding his ambassadorial counterpart in England,  Andrey Artemonovich Matveev.

Matveev was the son of a Moscow family with close familial ties to Peter, who as a youth had spent time at the Matveev family home during the irregular reign of his sister, Sophia.   Matveev was dispatched  on assignments to the Dutch Republic and Austria before settling in London in 1705.  He was clearly a copious spender since, just prior to leaving the city in 1708, he was abused physically by bailiffs and incarcerated in the ‘sponging house’ (debtors’ prison ) for non-payment of his debts.

Andrey Artemonovich was finally bailed out but, despite apologies from Queen Anne and the Government, his detention and treatment scandalized other foreign ambassadors in London who complained vociferously.  The result was the passing of the Diplomatic Immunities Act of 1708, the first instrument of its kind.  The Act was repealed in 1964 and superceded by the international Vienna Convention, which is the reason that diplomats in London flout the congestion charge and  don’t pay their parking fines!

A modest proposal

Ivan the Terrible showing his treasure to the English Ambassador. (Alexander Litovchenko 1875) The Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg.

Did Ivan the Terrible propose to Elizabeth the First of England?

I have been researching my Royal Connections talk that I will be giving to several historical societies later this year.

Relations between the Russian and English royal families go back further than you might think. The later Tudors, starting with Mary and Philip, were in regular contact with Russia. Their correspondence related to the privileges enjoyed by the English Muscovy Company, founded in 1555, which enjoyed special trading rights with Russia for 100 years.

In 1556 the first Russian envoys reached the English court and after that time what were called ‘embassies’ travelled with some regularity between the two countries, although no permanent physical building was established in England at that early date.

Relationships between the two countries became very cordial under Elizabeth (1533- 1603) (reigned 1558 – 1603).  The Queen’s advisors wrote a letter on 1st May 1570 offering asylum to Ivan lV (better known as Ivan the Terrible) in the case of his needing to flee Russia as a result of the ongoing Livonian War.  The letter was signed by Bacon, Leycester and Cecil.

There is no document in the archives relating to the rumoured, and often still asserted, offer of marriage from Ivan to Elizabeth. This was not altogether surprising.  It is said that the highly sensitive matter could not be trusted to paper and that the message from the hopeful bridegroom was conveyed orally through the English envoy, Anthony Jenkinson. 

            A letter in October 1570 refers to ‘secret business of great value’ that was entrusted by Ivan to Jenkinson.  Ivan would have been 40 years old at the time. He had been a widower twice, and rumours suggested that he had poisoned two of his previous wives. In the light of this, having already dodged much more attractive suitors, it is not surprising that Elizabeth refused.

Ivan, possibly upset by the brush-off, is known to have written a fairly abusive letter back to Elizabeth, saying that she was not really in control of England, but simply a ‘common girl.’

Communication ceased for some years, but then, still seeking a wife, Ivan turned his attention to Elizabeth’s lady in waiting, Lady Ann Hastings. Ivan dispatched a Russian boyar, Grigory Pisemkoy, to England to make a formal request. He was accompanied back to Russia by an English envoy, Sir James Bowes, who ‘threw every obstacle in the way of the match’ much to Ivan’s irritation.

Ivan died the following year with the matter unresolved. A period of relative inactivity between the two courts then followed as Russia fell into the chaotic period known as the Time of Troubles.

Fortune’s Price is published!

Fortune’s Price, the sequel to my first novel Small Acts of Kindness, was published last week.

The book’s action commences in the summer of 1830, a time when Russia experienced an uprising in the Kingdom of Poland and the arrival from the east of a cholera epidemic. The main characters, many of whom the reader will know from the previous book, are fated to interact with these major historic events while confronting their own personal issues.

The Polish revolt was stimulated by the July Days, an uprising in France which toppled the Bourbon monarchy. This event ignited a series of popular revolts across Europe, disturbing the settlement achieved at the Congress of Vienna in 1814.  In Poland, Russia’s failure to allow the Poles to exercise previously agreed liberties had upset liberals for some time, and at the end of November 1830 a group of young soldiers rose up against the Tsar of Russia, who was also the King of Poland.  War was swiftly declared and, after a chaotic and irresolute campaign, the insurrection was finally put down in the early autumn of 1831.

Not much attention  was initially paid in Russia to the spread of cholera, until it started to threaten the towns on the Volga, and ultimately Moscow and beyond.  Very little was understood about the causes of the disease and how it spread, which led to panic and rioting among the people and heavy-handed responses from the authorities.  The government struggled with what measures should be taken and society was swamped by conspiracy theories leading to civil unrest.

When researching these events I dug into the historical sources available, using both personal memoirs of eyewitnesses and also more general histories. The latter included an exhaustive (and exhausting) diplomatic history of post-congress Poland which, for the benefit of the reader, I hope I have managed to condense into a few hundred words. More lively were the relevant parts of  General Orlov’s 1880 history of The Saint Petersburg Grenadiers, later renamed for the King of Prussia, a regiment that fought with distinction in the Polish war.

The family drama that is central to Fortune’s Price is of course fictional, but the issues of legitimacy, heredity, nobility and religion on which it touches were matters of great importance in early 19th Century Russia.  The difference in life expectations experienced by people of different status and rank was very stark. Only legitimate members of the nobility were allowed to own land and serfs; they were exempt from taxation and the officer ranks of the army and civil service were in general exclusively open to them.   Contentious matters were decided by the courts, but the Emperor, as supreme autocrat, had the power to overrule their decisions and often did so, although as time went on they became increasingly reluctant to exercise this prerogative.

Although I have tried hard to ensure the book’s historical accuracy, like its predecessor Fortune’s Price, it is above all intended to entertain.  I hope to transport the readers to a different time and place and to keep them turning the pages until the end.  I also hope that they will learn something new, since the book depicts events in Poland and Russia that are not particularly well known in the UK and also have some resonance today.

Primarily to be read for pleasure, Fortune’s Price does have an underlying message, and the clue is in the title. Having worked in the City of London for many years, I know that wealth and status seldom come without strings attached, and the question therefore arises as to how far people will compromise to attain their desires.  It seems in fact that generally there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Fortune’s Price is available now from the publisher, The Book Guild, and from all good bookshops.  An electronic version is available on Amazon. 

The soviet dacha

Soviet-era dacha in Resheti, near Ekaterinburg

I have just dusted down a talk that I gave some years ago about Russian dachas. I have been asked to give it again in early December. The lecture traces the history of this aspect of Russian life from its start in the 18h Century to the recent past.

In his excellent book, Summerfolk, a History of the Dacha (2003. Ithaca and London), Stephen Lovell describes the Russian dacha as ‘not a place but a way of life’, representing as it does a place of recreation where Russians have, since the mid eighteenth century, escaping the busy pressures of the cities.

In the immediate post-revolutionary period, Dacha ownership came under serious threat.  The notion of holiday homes for the better off was condemned by the intellectual avante guard, for whom ‘the dacha was synonymous with the social and cultural arrière’ (Lovell p. 134).  Indeed, in those early years many dachas were confiscated not only for ideological reasons but to alleviate the chronic housing shortage that existed at the time.

Despite everything, however, the private dacha survived, and in the 1920s came to be tolerated.  Some town dwellers moved to their dachas permanently and others were able to retain them by appealing to friends in high places. In addition, the peasants resumed the pre-revolutionary practice of renting out their homes during the summer period to those escaping the cities.

At the end of the twenties the campaign against so called ‘former people’ resulted in the confiscation of some dachas, but this period of repression did not last long.  The original notion of a dacha as something ‘given’ by the state revived, and workers were encouraged to aspire to own a dacha as a reward for their hard work.  Co-operatives were set up, and books of architectural plans featuring proletarian dacha were published.  Self-build schemes were encouraged, and it was mandated that new dachas should be simple in appearance and not resemble town houses, or pre-revolutionary bourgeoise structures.

The concept of official dacha settlements came into being: holiday homes, approved by the authorities, aimed at accommodating specific  groups of privileged people, such as artists, factory workers and party members. One of the earliest of these was the Polotsov Mansion, an early 20th century building that was converted to a house of rest for workers and opened by Vladimir Lenin in the 1920s.  The poet Boris Pasternak had a dacha at the famous artists’ colony of Peredelniko outside Moscow.  He spent a good deal of time here, seeking to escape the terrible living accommodation available in the city rather than to avoid official attention as is sometimes thought.  In fact, the eyes of the government were firmly focused on the colony, and indeed  both Boris Pilnyak and Itsak Babel were arrested there during the Terror. Chukovsky, the children’s author, described it as ‘Entrapping writers within a cocoon of comfort, surrounding them with a network of spies’ (quoted in The Zhivago Affair. Peter Finn and Petra Couvé, 2014 London, p. 4.).

When it came to holiday homes for the highest echelons of the Party different rules applied.  Lenin enjoyed the luxurious surroundings of a former noble estate near Domodedovo, where he kept his Silver Ghost Rolls Royce. Stalin had several dachas in the Moscow region.  Other party members  enjoyed similar privileges, while they remained in favour. Their story is a long one, and  must therefore form the subject of another post.

Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna and music in 19th Century Russia

Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna (1850) Christina Robertson (1796–1854

Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna (1850)
Christina Robertson (1796–1854)

As I prepare for the publication and launch of my second novel, Fortune’s Price, I have taken some time out to read a book I came across recently about the life of the Grand Duchess, Elena Pavlovna (1807 – 1873)(pictured above). Born Princess Charlotte of Württemberg, she was the wife of Mikhail Pavlovich, the youngest brother of Alexander 1 and Nicholas 1.  While reading the book, I  discovered that the grand duchess played a significant part in the development of musical education in Russia.

Despite the fact that we now regard Russian music as among the greatest in the cannon, the development of a musical tradition and the establishment of music academies came comparatively late.

There was not a great deal of music played in a secular context until the time of Peter the Great, who died in 1725, and his particular interest lay in promoting improvements in military music.  To this end he imported composers from Germany to teach young soldiers who were obliged to perform every day on the tower of the newly built Admiralty.

Regular concerts started under the Empress Anna (1693 -1640). She invited the Neapolitan composer Francesco Araja to Russia in 1735, where he lived for twenty-five years and presented the first opera with a Russian libretto in 1736.  His career in Russia continued under the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna. We know that Elizabeth was fond not just of music, but also of the young choristers who sang in the imperial chapel.  Indeed it was among their number that she found her life-long companion, Alexey Razumovsky, whom she may or may not have married, and who enjoyed the nickname of ‘The Night Emperor’.

Catherine the Second, despite confessing to having no musical taste herself, not only organised public concert series, but also composed several operas of her own that were staged in the Hermitage Theatre.  In her reign some Russian composers began to appear, but probably the most important was the Polish composer, Josef Koslowsky, who lived much of his life in St Petersburg and who in 1791 wrote the music for the unofficial Russian national anthem ‘Let the thunder of victory rumble!’ with a text by Derzhavin.

In the early years of the 19th century Russian society saw a proliferation of music and opera both by Russian and non-Russian composers such as Haydn, Mozart and Rossini.  The 1830’s witnessed  the emergence of Mikhail Glinka (1804 -1857) (pictured below in 1856) His ‘A life for the Tsar’ (1836) is generally regarded as the first ‘proper’ Russian opera. 

Musical life in St Petersburg was however heavily circumscribed by a proliferation of rules that guaranteed the imperial theatres a virtual monopoly over performances.  Academies for music and singing were established during Nicholas’s reign, but they proved short lived, possibly due to a lack of opportunities beyond the imperial theatres for graduates.

It was not until the 1860’s that musical education was firmly established in St Petersburg. The Grand Duchess, Elena Pavlovna had always been a musical enthusiast. In her later years she became a patron of the great musician, Anton Rubenstein, and it was finally through their influence that a Russian academy of music opened its doors to students in November 1861.

Mikhail Gllnka in 1856. Lithograph. Artist unknown.

The Great Flood of 1824

In this very strange year for weather unseasonable floods have been reported in some parts of the world. I was reminded of this recently when giving my talk ‘The Bronze Horseman, A tale of Peterburg’ to a group of hospitable WI Members in Long Melford.

The talk focusses on Peter the Great and the founding of St Petersburg, and in it I look at Peter’s legacy through the prism of two works of art:  Falconet’s great equestrian statue of Peter that stands in Senate Square, and Pushkin’s poem The Bronze Horseman.  In both the Great Flood that occurred in 1824 and the statue of the horseman take pride of place.

The historian, James Cracraft, wrote in his book on Petrine Architecture about the founding of the city that

‘a less auspicious setting in which to found a city is difficult to imagine.’  The site of St. Petersburg violates virtually every principle of good town planning.  Its climate is damp, it is frozen up for roughly 150 days a year, its soil is poor, it is miles from trade routes, being the most northerly in the world, roughly on a level with Hudson Bay.  Most important for our purposes is the city’s propensity to flood.  In 1986 the city had already flooded 269 times since its foundation.  The floods were generally storm surges, where an unfortunate combination of wind and tide led to the inundation.’

I have always been fascinated by the picture by Fyodor Alexeyev (1754-1824) of the Great flood of 1824, shown above.  This was the artist’s last picture and he is depicting a very recent event.  The scene is Theatre Square.  The flood itself is of course dramatic, but perhaps even more interesting are the scenes of Petersburg life that can be seen struggling through, and sometimes under, the water.  A grandee is making his way home in his carriage, a droshky is almost submerged under the waves.  To the right of the picture an officer of the horse-guards tries to rescue a capsized boat.

Another contemporary, the playwright Alexander Griboyedov, wrote in his memoirs:

’The embankments of the various canals had disappeared and all the canals had united into one. Hundred-year-old trees in the Summer Garden were ripped from the ground and lying in rows, roots upward.’

When the waters finally receded 569 people were dead, and thousands more had been injured.  More than 300 buildings had been washed away. Today of course the city is protected by flood defences completed in 2011, which successfully averted what would have been the 309th flood!