The Emperor appointed his adviser Mikhail Speransky to draw up plans for a constitution that was largely based on the Code Napoleon. Had Speransky got his way, Russia would have moved toward becoming a constitutional monarchy governed by a law-based bureaucratic state. But Alexander hesitated to implement his minister's proposals and, once Russia went to war with France, they were condemned by the conservative nobility, which mistrusted them because they were 'French'. Speransky fell from power - to be replaced by General Arakcheev, the Minister of War, as the outstanding influence on Alexander's reign in its second half, from 1812 to 1825. The harsh regime of Arakcheev's military settlements, where serf soldiers were dragooned into farming and other labour duties for the state, enraged the men of 1812, whose liberal sympathies had been born of respect for the soldiers in the ranks. When the Emperor, against their opposition, persevered with the military camps and put down the peasants' resistance with a brutal massacre, the Decembrists were enraged. 'The forcible imposition of the so-called military colonies was received with amazement and hostility', recalled Baron Vladimir Steigel. 'Does history show anything similar to this sudden seizure of entire villages, this taking over of the houses of peaceful cultivators, this expropriation of everything which they and their forefathers earned and their involuntary transformation into soldiers?'40 These officers had marched to Paris in the hope that Russia would become a modern European state. They had dreamed of a constitution where every Russian peasant would enjoy the rights of a citizen. But they came back disappointed men - to a Russia where the peasant was still treated as a slave. As
Volkonsky wrote, to return to Russia after Paris and London 'felt like going back to a prehistoric past'.41
The prince fell into the circle of Mikhail Orlov, an old school friend and fellow officer from 1812, who was well connected to the main Decembrist leaders in the south. At this stage the Decembrist movement was a small and secret circle of conspirators. It began in 1816, when six young Guards officers formed what they initially called the Union of Salvation, a clandestine organization committed to the establishment of a constitutional monarchy and a national parliament. From the start the officers were divided over how to bring this end about: some wanted to wait for the Tsar to die, whereupon they would refuse to swear their oath of allegiance to the next Tsar unless he put his name to their reforms (they would not break the oath they had already sworn to the present Tsar); but Alexander was not even forty years of age and some hotheads like Mikhail Lunin favoured the idea of regicide. In 1818 the society broke up - its more moderate members immediately regrouping as the Union of Welfare, with a rather vague programme of educational and philanthropic activities but no clear plan of action for revolt, although Count Orlov, a leading member of the Union, organized a brave petition to the Tsar calling for the abolition of serfdom. Pushkin, who had friends in the Decembrist camp, characterized their conspiracy as no more than a game in these immortal (but, in Tsarist times, unpublishable) lines intended for his novel
'Twas all mere idle chatter
'Twixt Chateau-Lafite and Veuve Cliquot.
Friendly disputes, epigrams
Penetrating none too deep.
This science of sedition
Was just the fruit of boredom, of idleness,
The pranks of grown-up naughty boys.42
Without a plan for insurrection, the Union concentrated on developing its loose network of cells in Petersburg and Moscow, Kiev, Kishinev and other provincial garrison towns like Tulchin, the headquarters of the Second Army, where Volkonsky was an active member. Volkonsky
had entered Orlov's conspiracy through the Masonic Lodge in Kiev -a common means of entry into the Decembrist movement - where he also met the young Decembrist leader, Colonel Pavel Ivanovich Pestel.
