The Decembrist movement and uprising together constitute a landmark in Russia’s political history as the first attempt to effect a fundamental change in the Empire’s system of government through a constitutional project backed by armed force. Its name derives from the month in which the military uprising the movement instigated occurred in St Petersburg on 14th December 1825. The Decembrists were young noblemen, many of them officers of the Guards Regiments, whose leaders aimed to replace the autocratic Romanov regime with a Western-style law-based constitutional political and social system by means of a
coup d’état.
Ideological FormationThe Decembrists’ ideology was shaped by the writings of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, in particular of the French philosophes,
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Citation: O’Meara, Patrick. "Decembrist Uprising [Movement] of 1825". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 June 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1671, accessed 22 November 2024.]
