A striking paradox of Peter the Great’s rule is that, despite his many achievements in building a strong Russian state, he failed to establish a reliable mechanism for the transfer of supreme executive power and helped create the conditions for a century of palace coups. In the century after Peter’s death in 1725, army officers were involved constantly in questions of sovereign power, although they never seized power for themselves. The one episode that could have ended with an officer on the throne was the failed Decembrist uprising.
The Era of Palace Coups
Peter himself had come to power with the assistance of
military officers. Peter was ten years old when his father, Tsar Feodor, died
in 1682. Feodor’s sister Sophie, with the aid of Muscovite strel’tsy
(musketeers), seized power and declared herself regent. In 1689 Peter organized
her overthrow with the help of his so-called play regiments, which later were
transformed into elite Guards regiments. An attempted revolt by the strel’tsy
in 1698 was crushed and Peter had their units disbanded; many of them were
executed. Peter then ruled without challenge until his death in 1725.
In a momentous change before his death, Peter sought to make
succession dependent on the wishes of the sitting tsar. Previously the oldest
son generally had succeeded, but there was no set mechanism in the absence of
an heir. Peter himself was unable to appoint his own successor, however,
because he died suddenly in 1725. There were four pretenders to the throne in
1725: Peter’s grandson, his two daughters, and his widow (Peter’s only son,
Alexis, had previously been charged with treason and tortured to death). All of
the successions in the next century were marked by instability and officer involvement,
and there were at least eight coups or attempted coups during this period. The
Guards regiments established by Peter played a key role in these events. The
most tumultuous period was 1725-1762, during which seven different monarchs
occupied the throne. Only with the accession to power of Catherine the Great in
1762 did Russia once again have a stable leadership.
The details of these succession struggles are less important
for our purposes than some general points about the role of officers in these
conflicts. First, these palace coups involved only a small fraction of the
officer corps, elite Guards officers. These officers were members of the
Imperial court, and they generally acted at the behest of and on behalf of more
powerful members of the court. Second, these elite officers generally acted out
of personal motives and grievances, not corporate ones. To the extent that
corporate interests were involved, they were those of the Guards, and not the
officer corps as a whole. It was only in the late eighteenth century that
Guards officers began to see themselves as distinctly military, rather than as
members of the broader elite. Third, the Guards officers did not try to seize
power for themselves. They remained loyal to the principle of autocracy.
Finally, efforts to prevent coups through the use of material incentives, political
spies, changing commanders, or creating counterbalancing units were only
marginally successful.
The last successful military coup in Russia took place in
1801. Tsar Paul I, who had succeeded his mother Catherine the Great to the
throne in 1796, was assassinated by a group comprised largely of Guards
officers. Paul had alienated the military because of a purge of more than
twenty percent of the officer corps, his favoritism toward elite units that he
had established, and his adoption of Prussian drill and tactics. Fifty officers
were involved in the coup, which made it larger than the palace coups of the
eighteenth century. The coup had some support in broader society, particularly
among the nobility, who were unhappy with Paul’s efforts to restrict their
privileges. Thus, unlike the previous interventions, which were strictly
matters of the Imperial court, the intervention of 1801 had broader military
and societal support. It also is important to note that Paul I had changed the
law on succession, instituting the principle of primogeniture (succession of
the oldest son) in 1797. The coup of 1801 was a partial challenge to this
effort to establish a stable succession mechanism, although Paul’s eldest son
Alexander took his throne. The coup was not a challenge to the principle of
autocracy itself.
Decembrist Revolt, a painting by Vasily Timm
The Decembrist Uprising
The Russian armed forces thus had a strong tradition of
involvement in sovereign power issues in the eighteenth century. At the
beginning of the nineteenth century it seemed quite possible that this pattern
would continue and that a military organizational culture of praetorianism would
develop.
Alexander I ruled Russia (1801-1825) during one of the most
momentous events in modern European and Russian history, the Napoleonic Wars.
The French Revolution represented a threat to dynastic rule throughout Europe,
and Revolutionary France quickly became involved in wars with a coalition of
European powers. From 1792 to 1815 much of Europe was at war, and these wars
had profound effects on political, social, and military development in Europe.
Russia played a considerable role in the defeat of Napoleon, and Russia’s
victory in the War of 1812 (the Fatherland War, in Russian parlance)
established Russia as perhaps the dominant power in continental Europe.
The force of French revolutionary ideas and arms led many
European states to adopt liberalizing and modernizing reforms. Alexander I,
however, who had pursued limited political reform before the Napoleonic Wars,
now resisted any suggestion that further reform was necessary for Russia. The
autocratic and patrimonial state of traditional Russia and its corollary institutions,
particularly serfdom, were seen by the tsar as vindicated because of the
Russian victory over Napoleon.
Russian educated society expected that reforms similar to
those taking place in western and central Europe also might be enacted at home.
Discontent grew when Alexander embraced a reactionary vision for Russia,
particularly because before the war the tsar had been perceived by many as
relatively liberal and a reformer. Many officers shared these hopes for reform,
and they were disappointed by the conservative policies of the tsar after 1815.
Officers’ self-confidence was high after their victories on the battlefield,
and liberal elements in society looked to the army as a potential agent of
change. Many officers felt the same way.
The origins of the Decembrist movement can be traced to the
growth of a Russian “military intelligentsia” around the turn of the
century. The term military intelligentsia refers to officers who, by virtue of
their education, acquired a greater understanding of broader cultural, social,
and political is- sues and, equally important, a willingness to question
received ideas and to seek out new knowledge. These officers were not political
radicals and they maintained the service mentality of the Russian aristocracy.
At the same time, they found fault with conditions both in the army and in the
larger society. A small but important element within the military
intelligentsia had been to Western Europe during the Napoleonic Wars, and they
shared their experiences and impressions with other officers. These officers
objected to the arbitrariness of authority relations in the military and in
Russia and sought greater security for the individual. The military
intelligentsia, although committed to state service, also began to transfer
their loyalty from the tsar to a broader notion of service to the people, the
nation, or the state.
In the years after 1815 the military intelligentsia began to
organize itself in secret societies. These societies adopted such names as the
Union of Salvation (the Society of True and Loyal Sons of the Fatherland), the
Union of (Public) Welfare, and, a personal favorite, the Society of Military
Men Who Love Science and Literature. The most prominent of these were the Northern
Society, based in St. Petersburg, and the Southern Society, based in Tul’chin
(in present-day Ukraine); these two societies came into being in 1821, after a
split in the Union of Welfare. The Southern Society was dominated by Colonel P.
I. Pestel’, who possessed an authoritarian temperament and radical republican
views. The leaders of the Northern Society, such as Captain N. M. Murav’ev,
were more attracted to constitutional monarchy. Although members of the secret
societies and the military intelligentsia were committed to reform, individual
officers differed substantially in terms of their views of the appropriate
goals. Views diverged even more substantially on the question of means, with
some supporting assassination of the tsar and a military dictatorship while
others seemed uncommitted to any form of action other than discussion.
The event that gave the Decembrists their name was a failed
military intervention launched in December 1825 after the death of Tsar
Alexander I. Alexander died unexpectedly on November 19, 1825. He had no son,
so according to normal succession procedures the oldest of his three brothers,
Konstantin, should have taken the throne. Konstantin, however, had renounced
his claim to the throne at Alexander’s request in 1822 because of Konstantin’s
marriage to a lower-born Catholic Polish countess. According to a secret
manifesto signed by Alexander in 1823, and agreed to by Konstantin, their
brother Nicholas should have been the next tsar. Because this agreement had not
been publicized, and contradicted the legal succession chain established by
Paul I, considerable confusion accompanied Alexander’s death and the throne
remained unoccupied for over three weeks while Konstantin and Nicholas
vacillated. The army originally swore loyalty to Konstantin, before the secret
manifesto became known, and Konstantin and Nicholas each renounced the throne
in favor of the other.
Members of the Northern Society, based in Petersburg, saw
the confused interregnum as an opportunity for action. A hasty scheme was
hatched for armed opposition to the plans for the army to swear loyalty to
Nicholas, scheduled for December 14. The intent was to bring troops to Senate
Square in St. Petersburg on the fourteenth and declare the establishment of a
dictatorship under Prince Sergey Trubetskoy, a Colonel. Trubetskoy got cold feet,
however, and literally ran away and hid in the Austrian Embassy. A day-long
standoff between the Decembrists and troops loyal to Nicholas ended in a rout
of the Decembrists. An attempted uprising in the south also failed.
Several general points are in order about what, in
hindsight, was a key turning point in Russian civil-military relations. First,
the rise of the military intelligentsia should be separated somewhat from the
failed Decembrist intervention. Many participants in the December events were
not members of secret societies, and many members of secret societies did not
participate in the Decembrist uprising. They were two related but distinct
phenomena, although the failure of December 1825 had considerable impact on the
military intelligentsia movement. Second, it seems likely that the Decembrist
uprising would not have taken place if the succession had happened quickly and
smoothly. At the time of Alexander’s death there was no plan for a coup that
could be taken off the shelf and implemented; the Decembrist uprising was an
improvised response to an opportunity created by the power vacuum at the top.
The act of swearing loyalty to Konstantin several weeks before officers were
asked to swear loyalty to Nicholas, in particular, may have encouraged many of
the Decembrists to come out against Nicholas. Third, another counterfactual
worth considering is whether the secret military societies would have gone on
to develop a more coherent plan for military intervention if no leadership
crisis had arisen in 1825, and they could have gone on scheming. This
counterfactual is more difficult to resolve. The secret military societies had
been detected by government informers be- fore December 1825, with those in the
south particularly compromised. On the other hand, previous reports about the
societies had been largely ignored. It is certainly possible that, in the
absence of the failed Decembrist uprising, secret military societies would have
continued their activities and presented a potential threat to the state.
