Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

The investigation lasted over a year, and in January 1827, a military court decreed that ‘Lutsky be relieved of his Junior Officer rank and under the terms of military rule 137 he be hung.’ Three months later the death sentence was commuted to permanent exile ‘with hard labour’, and he was sent off to Siberia. He didn’t go with the other Decembrists, but was sent on ‘the bar’ with the ordinary criminals. They spent the whole journey in foot shackles, and by day were handcuffed and attached to an iron rail known as ‘the bar’. They walked between twenty to twenty-five versts [49] An obsolete Russian unit of measurement, equivalent to a little over a kilometre. each day, through heat and frost, and when they came to villages they sang the mournful ‘Lord have mercy’ in order to beg alms from the peasants. On the way, Lutsky frequently fell ill; he ended up spending two months in the infirmary in Kazan, and five months in Perm.

Lutsky was relieved of hard labour down a silver mine only after twenty years, during which time he had married the daughter of the mine’s barber, Martha Portnova, and had four children. An amnesty was declared in August 1856, but this news didn’t reached Lutsky until 1857, which is why he has gone down in history as ‘the forgotten Decembrist’. He settled in the town of Nerchinsk, in the Trans-Baikal Region, where he taught at the Nerchinsk Parish school. The last record of ‘the nobleman teacher Alexander Nikolaevich Lutsky’, found in the archive in Chita, is dated 8 December 1870.

Further details about his life are sporadic. It’s known that Lutsky liked to go hunting and would head off alone into the taiga with his rifle and his dog; he could be gone for several days. Despite his advanced years, he enjoyed excellent health and was remarkably strong; it seems that the hard labour had toughened him up and given him a rare will to live. It is generally thought that he disappeared in the taiga during a fierce snowstorm on 22 February 1882, aged seventy-eight, having lived through the reigns of three emperors; but in fact, having lost his dog, he took refuge from the storm in the empty shelter of a Buryat shaman. There he found dried biscuits, yak’s fat and herbal tea, and, having brewed this and drunk it he fell into a wonderful sleep – for 133 years.

When he awoke in the autumn of 2015, he emerged from the taiga and wandered in amazement along the streets of Nerchinsk, craning his neck to look up at the tall buildings and dodging the cars. His natural intelligence and his experience as a prisoner helped him to adapt to his new surroundings; and the collection of squirrel skins which he brought out of the taiga helped him to avoid being sent to a psychiatric hospital and even enabled him to obtain a new passport ‘to replace the lost one’. In the police station they just laughed, having concluded that they were dealing with just another ‘pest’, an unlucky prospector who had found his way out of the taiga just before the winter set in. At the start of December, Lutsky made his way to Shilkia, and from there to Chita, where he boarded the train from Khabarovsk and arrived in Moscow on the morning of 12 December – Constitution Day and on the eve of the one hundred and ninetieth anniversary of the Decembrist Uprising, which his old new Motherland had almost forgotten about…

The Decembrists occupy a special place in our national pantheon, but opinions about them are split in two. Some see them as irreproachable heroes, the seventeen-year-old generals who went through the Napoleonic campaign and the allurement of Paris, and who created the first and only ‘revolution of dignity’ in Russia. Others, though, consider them to have been inept conspirators, whose plan for an uprising failed miserably: Pyotr Kakhovsky failed to shoot the Tsar; the ‘dictator’, Prince Sergei Trubetskoi, went and hid at his relatives’ place; Captain Alexander Yakubovich didn’t lead the Guards to attack the Winter Palace; Colonel Alexander Bulatov was unable to seize the Peter and Paul Fortress; and four thousand soldiers and rebellious officers were left standing in the cold all day not knowing what to do, just five hundred paces from the Winter Palace, until, as the sun was going down, they were fired upon with buckshot. From one side it is seen as an attempt to plant the first green shoots of the French Enlightenment in their native soil; from the other, it is perceived as the complete collapse of their ideas, leading to all hope of change in Russia being frozen for the next thirty years until the Crimean War finally bankrupted the system of serfdom. On the one hand, they were canonized by the Soviet system, caressed by the propaganda and official histories: streets and steamboats were named after them, local historians and schoolchildren trod in their footsteps and more than twenty thousand academic works were written about them. On the other hand, the authorities today clearly don’t love them: they see the Decembrists as rioters and Voltaireans, as freemasons (literally: a recent film, The Order of the Russian Knights , accuses the Rosicrucian Order of organizing the uprising) and even as agents of influence from the West – another recent film, The Mirage of Enchanting Happiness , tells how British intelligence used the Decembrists as a way of getting their hands on the gold in the Urals.

And if Yemelyan Pugachev [50] In 1773–4, the Cossack, Yemelyan Pugachev, led a peasant revolt to try to seize the throne from the Empress Catherine II. is a metaphor for the senseless Russian riot, [51] This is an oft-cited quote from Alexander Pushkin’s History of the Pugachev Rebellion , ‘God save us from seeing a Russian riot, senseless and merciless’. then the Decembrists are a metaphor for the doomed Russian uprising. Alexander Herzen created the sacrificial myth about the Decembrists, which was taken up by tens of thousands of people, from members of ‘the People’s Will’ [52] ‘The People’s Will’ (Russ: Narodnaya Volya ) was a nineteenth-century revolutionary political organization that used terrorism in an attempt to promote reforms in the country. It is best known for killing Tsar Alexander II in 1881. to the Bolsheviks, who created, in the words of the modern historian Sergei Erlikh, ‘a sacrificial class’ of the Russian intelligentsia. This myth encouraged the ‘sixties generations’ of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the writer Natan Eidelman, with his books about the Decembrists, and the poet Alexander Galich, with his Petersburg Romances : ‘Dare you go out to the Square / At the appointed hour?’ [53] Link . The Decembrists’ myth has even encouraged the opposition today: at his trial, Mikhail Khodorkovsky called his wife, Inna, ‘a Decembrist’ (referring to the historical fact that almost all the Decembrists’ wives voluntarily followed their husbands to Siberian exile), and in his first message from prison in Chita, in the Trans-Baikal region, he wrote that he was ‘in the land of the Decembrists’. The protests in Moscow in December 2011 and the entire ‘White Protest Movement’ that winter also followed the Decembrist myth, both with its pride and its elite character, and the fact that it was doomed to failure: it was unable to excite the crowd and persuade them to march from Bolotnaya Square to Revolution Square by the Kremlin. That was exactly the ‘Decembrists’ syndrome’: individual dignity yet collective defeat. On the evening of 30 December 2014, when there was a ‘people’s assembly’ on Manezh Square in Moscow (discussing the sentence passed on the Navalny brothers, which had been fabricated by the state), a few thousand people stood in the frost along the pavements on nearby Tverskaya Street and Okhotny Ryad, unsure about chanting slogans, or going onto the Square or stopping the traffic – just like the Decembrists, two hundred years ago.