190 years ago, on July 25, 1826, the execution of five leaders of the Decembrist uprising took place. In total, about 600 people were involved in the case of the Decembrists. The investigation was conducted with the direct and direct participation of Nicholas I. The result of the work of the court was a list of 121 "state criminals", divided into 11 categories, according to the degree of offense. Out of the ranks were placed P. I. Pestel, K. F. Ryleev, S. I.
Among the thirty-one state criminals of the first category, condemned to death by beheading, included members of secret societies who gave their personal consent to regicide. The rest were sentenced to various terms of hard labor. Later, for the "first-class" members, the death penalty was replaced by eternal hard labor, and for the five leaders of the uprising, quartering was replaced by the death penalty by hanging. The execution of five Decembrists - Pestel, Ryleev, Muravyov-Apostol, Bestuzhev-Ryumin and Kakhovsky - took place on the night of 13 (25) July 1826. The Chief of Police read the maxim of the Supreme Court, which ended with the words: "… hang for such atrocities!"
Based on the uprising of the so-called. "Decembrists" created a myth about "noble knights", "the best people of Russia" who wanted to save their homeland from the "tyrant and despot" Nicholas and bring "freedom" to the serfs. Nicholas I himself, together with his father Emperor Paul I, became one of the most maligned Russian tsars ("Black myths" about the Russian emperor Nicholas I, the myth of "backward Russia" of Nicholas I). The basis of this myth was created by the Russophobe A. Herzen, who threw mud at Russia and Nicholas from abroad: with fists, half the city in uniforms, half the city making a frustration and the whole city hastily taking off its hat, and thinking that all this is devoid of any originality and serves as the fingers, tails, nails and claws of one person who combines all types of power: landowner, pope, executioner, his own mother and the sergeant, - may dizzy, become scary, may come a desire to take off his hat and bow while his head is intact, and twice as much, may want to sit down again on the steamer and sail somewhere."
but the truth is that Nikolai Pavlovich at the beginning of his reign was able to suppress the hotbed of turmoil, which could cover the entire Russian civilization and cause a civil war and the collapse of the Russian Empire. After all, the "Decembrists", hiding behind slogans that were completely humane and understandable to most (like most revolutionaries, democrats-perestroika), objectively worked for the West. In fact, these were the forerunners of the "Februaryists" of 1917, who destroyed the autocracy and the Russian Empire. They planned the complete physical destruction of the Romanov dynasty, members of their families and up to distant relatives. And their plans in the field of state, national and economic construction were guaranteed to lead to great confusion and the collapse of the Russian state.
It is clear that some of the noble youth simply did not know what they were doing. Young people dreamed of eliminating "injustice and oppression", destroying many class borders, so that Russia would prosper. Aleksandrovskaya Russia gave many examples of injustice: the dominance of foreigners at the top echelons of the empire; extortion; examples of inhuman treatment of soldiers and sailors in the army and navy; the vileness of serfdom, etc. The problem was that the nobles who opposed the "regime" took the "great truths" of freedom, equality and brotherhood as models. That is, measures supposedly necessary for the good of Russia were associated in their minds only with European republican institutions and social forms, which in theory they mechanically transferred to Russian soil.
This process is similar to the modern “color revolutions” or the “Arab spring”, when the West, the United States, NATO and the European Union are trying to establish “democracy” (using various methods - from propaganda in the media and political and diplomatic pressure to direct organization of revolutionary movements and military attacks) in various countries of the former USSR or in the Near and Middle East. And "democracy", for example, in the countries of the East, such as Iraq, Libya and Syria, led to a brutal civil war, a complete split of society along religious, national, tribal, etc. signs, wild massacre and genocide. Western institutions and social forms cannot be simply copied and transferred to the territory of other civilizations and cultures that are fundamentally different from the West. The "virus" of Westernization ultimately leads to destruction. This is beneficial for the masters of the West: it is easier to “digest” destroyed states, cultures and peoples and make them a part of the global “New Babylon”.
Thus, the "Decembrists" sought to "transplant France to Russia." How later, Russian Westernizers of the early 20th century will dream of remaking Russia into a republican France or a constitutional English monarchy, which will lead to the geopolitical catastrophe of 1917. The abstraction and frivolity of such a transfer lies in the fact that it is carried out without understanding the historical past and national traditions, spiritual values that have been formed for centuries, the psychological and everyday life of Russian civilization. The noble youth of Russia, brought up on the ideals of Western culture, was infinitely far from the people. As historical experience shows - in the Russian Empire, Soviet Russia and the Russian Federation, all such borrowings from the West in the sphere of the socio-political structure, the spiritual and intellectual sphere, even the most useful ones, are eventually distorted on Russian soil, leading to degradation and destruction.
The "Decembrists", like the later Russian Westernizers, did not understand this. They thought that if we transplant the advanced experience of the Western powers in Russia, give the people “freedom”, then the country will take off and prosper. As a result, the sincere hopes of the Decembrists for a forced change in the existing system, for a legal order, as a panacea for all ills, led to confusion and destruction of the Russian Empire. It turned out that the "Decembrists" objectively, by default, worked in the interests of the masters of the West. In addition, some of them were Masons, that is, according to the hierarchy, they were subordinate to the “elder brothers” from the West. And Freemasonry is one of the tools of the masters of the West to build a New World Order, a global slave-owning, caste civilization ("New Babylon"). As a result, the “Decembrists” objectively became traitors to Russian civilization and Russian statehood, realizing the plans of the masters of the West to destroy the Russian superethnos and civilization. As well as the later "Februaryists" of the 1917 model, who, explicitly or by default, implemented the plan of the masters of Great Britain, France and the United States to eliminate the main competitor on the planet - the Russian Empire.
In the program documents of the Decembrists, you can find a variety of attitudes and wishes. There was no unity in their ranks, their secret societies were more like discussion clubs of sophisticated intellectuals who heatedly discussed pressing political issues. In this respect, they are also similar to Westernizers-liberals of the late XIX - early XX centuries. both the Februaryists of 1917 and the modern Russian liberals, who cannot find a common point of view on almost any important issue. However, they are ready to endlessly “rebuild” and “reform”, in fact, destroy the country, and the people will have to bear the burden of their managerial decisions.
Some Decembrists proposed to create a republic, others - to establish a constitutional monarchy with the possibility of introducing a republic. According to N. Muravyov's plan, it was proposed to de facto divide Russia into 13 powers and 2 regions, creating a federation of them. At the same time, the powers received the right of secession (self-determination). The manifesto of Prince Sergei Trubetskoy (Prince Trubetskoy was elected dictator before the uprising) proposed eliminating the "former government" and replaced it with a temporary one until the elections to the Constituent Assembly. That is, the Decembrists planned to create a Provisional Government even before the "Februaryists".
The head of the Southern Society of Decembrists, Colonel and Freemason Pavel Pestel, wrote one of the program documents - "Russian Truth". Pestel planned to abolish serfdom, transferring half of the arable land to the peasants, the other half was supposed to be left in the ownership of the landowners, which was supposed to contribute to the bourgeois development of the country. The landlords had to lease the land to farmers - "capitalists of the agricultural class", which was supposed to lead to the organization of large commodity farms in the country with the wide involvement of hired labor. "Russkaya Pravda" abolished not only estates, but also national borders - all the tribes and nationalities living in Russia planned to unite into a single Russian people. Thus, Pestel planned, following the example of America, to create a kind of "melting pot" in Russia. To speed up this process, a de facto national segregation was proposed, with the division of the Russian population into groups.
Muravyov was a supporter of the preservation of land holdings of landowners. The liberated peasants received only 2 tithes of land, that is, only a personal plot. This site, with the then low level of agricultural technologies, could not feed a large peasant family. The peasants were forced to bow to the landowners, the landowners, who had all the land, meadows and forests, turned into dependent laborers, as in Latin America.
Thus, the Decembrists did not have a single, clear program, which could lead, in the event of their victory, to an internal conflict. The victory of the Decembrists was guaranteed to lead to the collapse of statehood, the army, the economy, chaos and conflict of estates, different peoples. For example, the mechanism of the great land redistribution was not described in detail, which led to a conflict between the multimillion-dollar mass of peasants and the then landowners-landowners. In the conditions of a radical breakdown of the state structure, the transfer of the capital (it was planned to move it to Nizhny Novgorod), it was obvious that such a "restructuring" led to a civil war and a new turmoil. In the sphere of state building, the plans of the Decembrists are very clearly correlated with the plans of the separatists of the early 20th century or 1990-2000. As well as the plans of Western politicians and ideologists who dream of dividing Great Russia into a number of weak and "independent" states. That is, the possible actions of the "Decembrists" objectively led to unrest and civil war, to the collapse of the powerful Russian Empire. The Decembrists were the forerunners of the "Februaryists" who were able to destroy the Russian statehood in 1917.
Therefore, they throw mud at Nikolai Pavlovich in every possible way and cannot forgive the suppression of the "Decembrist" revolt. After all, he was able to stop the first major attempt at "perestroika" in Russia, which led to unrest and civil confrontation, to the delight of our Western "partners".
At the same time, Nikolai is accused of an inhuman attitude towards the Decembrists. However, the ruler of the Russian Empire Nicholas, who was recorded in history as "Palkin", showed amazing mercy and philanthropy towards the rebels. In any European country, for such a rebellion, many hundreds or thousands of people would be executed in the most cruel way, so that others would be discouraged. And the military for the mutiny was subject to the death penalty. They would have opened the entire underground, many would have lost their posts. In Russia, everything was different: out of about 600 people arrested in the case of the Decembrists, almost 300 were acquitted. Sturler and Governor Miloradovich - Kakhovsky. 88 people were exiled to hard labor, 18 to a settlement, 15 were demoted to soldiers. Corporal punishment was applied to the insurgent soldiers and sent to the Caucasus. The "dictator" of the rebels, Prince Trubetskoy, did not appear at the Senate Square at all, he chickened out, sat at the Austrian ambassador, where he was tied up. At first he denied everything, then he confessed and asked for forgiveness from the sovereign. And Nicholas I forgave him!
The "Decembrists" were punished not at the request of the "tyrant" Nicholas, but for their participation in an armed rebellion. For such a crime, they have always been executed in all countries, and turning a participant in an armed uprising into an act of personal reprisal is despicable and stupid. Nikolai has already reduced the number of those executed to a minimum. Nicholas I was a strict ruler who demanded that everyone honestly fulfill their duty, but he was neither a cruel man, much less a tyrant. So, when, during the mutiny, the question arose about the need to open fire on the rebels, Nikolai could not dare to give the order to shoot, since this event was exceptional for Russia at that time. Adjutant General Vasilchikov then told him: “You can't waste a minute; now nothing can be done; you must shoot with buckshot. " "I had a presentiment of this need," Nikolai writes in his memoirs, "but, I confess, when the time came, I could not decide on such a measure, and horror seized me." "Do you want me to shed the blood of my subjects on the first day of my reign?" - I answered. To save your empire, he told me. These words brought me to my senses: having come to my senses, I saw that either I should take it upon myself to shed the blood of some and save almost everything, or, having spared myself, resolutely sacrifice the state. " And the young sovereign decided to sacrifice his peace of mind, but to save Russia from the horrors of revolutionary turmoil. That is, on that day, Nicholas showed the essence of the Decembrist uprising: "the blood of some" and the salvation of the building of the empire and thousands and thousands of lives, or the death of the state and bloody turmoil.
“Through the clouds that darkened the sky for a moment,” said Emperor Nicholas I to the French envoy, Count Laferon, on December 20, 1825, “I had the consolation of receiving a thousand expressions of high devotion and recognizing the love for the fatherland, avenging the shame and shame that a handful of villains tried to roar on Russian people. That is why the recollection of this despicable conspiracy not only does not inspire me with the slightest mistrust, but also strengthens my credulity and lack of fear. Straightforwardness and trust are more likely to disarm hatred than mistrust and suspicion, which are part of weakness … " “I will show mercy,” Nikolai said further, “a lot of mercy, some will say too much; but the leaders and instigators of the conspiracy will be dealt with without pity and without mercy. The law will pronounce punishment on them, and it is not for them that I will use my right of pardon. I will be adamant: I must give this lesson to Russia and Europe. "
