New Personalities of Participants of the Russian Secret Societies of the 1810s–1820s: Touches to the Traditional Picture of the Decembrist Movement

Abstract

This article presents the results of the study of the composition of secret societies and the military conspiracy of the Decembrists conducted by the author over 20 years. One of the main tasks of this work was to identify the unknown Decembrists who remained unnoticed during the government investigation and, for the most part, in historiography. The article considers members of secret societies and participants of the military uprisings of 1825–1826, little-known in literature and never previously identified. The relevance and academic significance of the reconstruction based on the extant source data consists in the development of existing ideas about the Decembrist movement. The author clarifies insufficiently studied specific episodes of the history of secret societies, adjusting the biographies of identified participants, including those known in a general historical context. The article examines the personalities of the newly identified members of secret societies (K. M. Poltoratsky, S. S. Lanskoy, I. M. Lyubovsky, P. A. Nabokov, F. S. Panyutin). The affiliation of the personalities considered to conspiratorial unions is associated with issues little-studied in the history of Decembrism: the involvement of persons endowed with high official status and public authority in the movement, the spread of the Decembrist society among provincial officials, the involvement in the movement of regimental commanders, who the initiators of the “southern uprising” (Chernigov regiment) relied on in their plans. Other cases discussed in the article explore the participation in Decembrist unions of representatives of the capital’s merchants, and naval officers, unnoticed by the investigation of the participants in the St Petersburg conspiracy of 1825. Special attention is paid to the evidence base; the author evaluates the reliability of documentary indications, verifies them against other evidence, and reveals the channels for obtaining information to the authors of the evidence, which makes it possible to conclude that the affiliation of identified persons with the Decembrist societies is substantiated by documents.