It seems, however, that Volkonsky was afraid of exposing the great poet to the risks involved - so he did not carry out this promise to Pestel. In any case, as Volkonsky no doubt knew, Pushkin was so famous for his indiscretion, and so well connected at court, that he would have been a liability.49 Rumours of an uprising were already circulating around St Petersburg, so, in all likelihood, the Emperor Alexander knew about the Decembrists' plans. Volkonsky certainly thought so. During an inspection of his regiment, the Emperor gently warned him: 'Pay more attention to your troops and a little less to my government, which, I am sorry to say, my dear prince, is none of your business.'50
The insurrection had been scheduled for the late summer of 1826. But these plans were hastily brought forward by the Emperor's sudden death and the succession crisis caused by the refusal of the Grand Duke Constantine to accept the throne in December 1825. Pestel resolved to seize the moment for revolt, and with Volkonsky he travelled up from Kiev to St Petersburg for noisy arguments with the Northern society about the means and timing of the uprising. The problem was how to muster the support of the ordinary troops, who showed no inclination towards either regicide or armed revolt. The conspirators had only the vaguest notion of how to go about this task. They thought of the uprising as a military putsch, carried out by order from above; as its commanding officers, they based their strategy on the idea that they could somehow call upon their old alliance with the soldiers. They rejected the initiatives of some fifty junior officers, sons of humble clerks and small landowners, whose organization, the United Slavs, had called upon the senior leaders to agitate for an uprising among the soldiers and the peasantry. 'Our soldiers are good and simple', explained one of the Decembrist leaders. 'They don't think much and should serve merely as instruments in attaining our goals.'51 Volkonsky shared this attitude. 'I am convinced that I will carry my brigade', he
wrote to a friend on the eve of the revolt, 'for the simple reason that I have my soldiers' trust and love. Once the uprising commences they will follow my command.'52
In the end, the Decembrist leaders carried with them only some 3,000 troops in Petersburg - far less than the hoped-for 20,000 men, but still enough perhaps to bring about a change of government if well organized and resolute. But that they were not. On 14 December, in garrisons throughout the capital, soldiers were assembled for the ceremony of swearing an oath of allegiance to the new Tsar, Nicholas I. The 3,000 mutineers refused to swear their oath and, with flags unfurled and drums beating, marched to Senate Square, where they thronged in front of the
Within hours the ringleaders of the insurrection had all been arrested and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress (the police had known who they were all along). The conspirators might still have had some chance of success in the south, where it was possible to combine with the Poles in a march on Kiev, and where the main revolutionary forces (something in the region of 60,000 troops) were massed in garrisons. But the officers who had previously declared their support for an uprising were now so shocked by the events in Petersburg that they dared not act. Volkonsky found only one officer who was prepared to join him in the call for a revolt, and in the end, the few hundred troops who marched on Kiev on 3 January were easily dispersed by the government's artillery.53 Volkonsky was arrested two days later, while
on his way to Petersburg to see Maria one last time. The police had an arrest warrant signed in person by the Tsar.
