Pavel Viktorovich Ilyin,
Candidate of Historical Sciences, St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The St. Petersburg Conspiracy of the Decembrists in 1825: Unstudied and Unclarified Episodes and Personalities
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2025-6-1
Despite all the in-depth research available on the secret society of the Decembrists on the eve of the uprising on Senate Square, the activities of the Decembrist conspiracy at the culmination of the movement at the appear insufficiently illuminated in many respects. The historian is forced to view the events and episodes of 1825 primarily through the prism of the investigative materials, also drawing on official documentation and testimonies of contemporaries. The complex of investigative testimony contains numerous denials and omissions that distort the true picture of the development of the Decembrist conspiracy and the real participation of many individuals in it. In the face of official investigation and trial, the accused often concealed the true nature of the relationships between those implicated in the conspiracy with its “center”. The reasons for this situation are obvious: it was based on a natural desire to avoid impending punishment − the activities of the conspirators on December 14, 1825, had ended in failure, and as a result, affiliation with the conspiracy was prosecuted, constituting a “corpus delicti”. Therefore, the actual network of conspiratorial relationships is only fragmentarily reflected in the investigative materials. The later memoirs of the participants in the conspiracy also do not always provide complete information, including omissions and distortions. The reasons are rooted in ethical concerns: many individuals who escaped punishment went on to careers in the service, and participation in the December 14 conspiracy remained a discreditable factor for government officials for many years. As a result, the state of the source base is such that historians have incomplete information about those involved in the conspiracy. This article, for the first time in Decembrist studies, presents an attempt to consolidate the data, with the goal of covering as fully as possible those participants in the Decembrist conspiracy who were concealed from the investigation or who have remained obscure in historiography, to the extent that the documentary base allows. The focus of this study is on secret cells within the Guards units, both those identified during the investigation and those not previously identified, as well as the actions of the conspirators and the episodes of the events of December 14, 1825 caused by them (in the Finland and Izmailovsky regiments, the horse and foot artillery, the Horse Pioneer Division, and attempts to influence the Preobrazhensky regiment and the suburban Guards battalions). The author has collected information on little-studied and unknown conspirators − both reliably identified and suspected. The work is based on documentary evidence, but the author is critical of information that requires further verification. The results of this study contribute to the study of the activities of the Decembrist society before the December 14th uprising.
Publishing: 28/12/2025
The article has been received by the editor on 07/11/2025
How to cite: Ilyin P.V. The St. Petersburg Conspiracy of the Decembrists in 1825: Unstudied and Unclarified Episodes and Personalities // Historical Courier, 2025, No. 6 (44), pp. 9−34. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2025/ISTKURIER-2025-6-01.pdf]
Links: Issue 6 2025
Keywords: Decembrist conspiracy of 1825; uprising on Senate Square; new data; unknown Decembrists