The Semyonovsky Regiment Revolts

17 October 1820

In the early nineteenth century, the Semyonovsky Regiment was one of the most prestigious units in the Russian imperial military. Growing out of the “toy army” that Peter I created as a boy, the regiment took its name from the village of Semyonovskoye, outside Moscow, where it was then barracked. It later became an illustrious Lifeguards regiment in which an officer could make a brilliant career and achieve high social status.

It also became a regiment where, after the war with Napoleon, enlightened, forward-thinking officers predominated. They began establishing societies (not yet secret societies, which would come later) that strove to transform Russia. One of the first such societies was the Union of Salvation. Its members believed that Russia, which still had serfdom and unrestrained autocracy, had to be saved. A few years later, another organization emerged, the Union of Welfare. Its symbol was the bee: as the bee collects pollen grain-by-grain and ultimately produces sweet honey, so too the Union’s members strove to gradually help their motherland find the correct path. Of course, they dreamed of a constitution and freedom, but, in keeping with the “theory of small deeds,” they engaged in charitable work and settled for achievable goals.

The Union of Welfare’s members raised money to help famine victims in drought-stricken provinces, or bought the freedom of talented serfs so they could get an education. They used their position in society to influence public opinion. The Lifeguards officer Ivan Pushchin even gave up his military career to become a judge and bring honesty and justice to the courts – a voluntary relinquishing of status that was incomprehensible to many of his peers.

The Union of Salvation did everything it could to improve the lives of soldiers. The Lancasterian System, which was extremely popular in those days, made it possible to quickly teach a large number of people to read and write. The basic idea was that one teacher would teach a few strong students who would then instruct their peers under the teacher’s supervision. This method seemed to be perfectly designed for the illiterate Russian Army, and Lancasterian classrooms began cropping up in imperial regiments. Names you didn’t often hear in autocratic Russia – Washington, Lafayette, Mirabeau – were slipped into the primers used in these classrooms. These unfamiliar names would prompt questions from the soldiers, who would then get little history lessons from the officers.

But what really mattered here was the humane attitude officers showed toward the soldiers, quite a rarity in imperial Russia. The soldiers were gaining knowledge and being treated with respect. The Semyonovsky officers agreed among themselves that they would not resort to physical abuse, which was normally quite widespread in “disciplining” soldiers.

And then it turned out that one man can easily destroy something that has developed over years. A new colonel was put in charge of the Semyonovsky Regiment. Yakov Potyomkin, who was much beloved by both the soldiers and officers, was replaced by the petty tyrant Fyodor Shvarts. Shvarts saw the officers’ liberal undertakings as a bunch of nonsense.

The soldiers’ lives were transformed overnight. They were marched around endlessly, demeaned, and abused. When Shvarts raised his hand to strike a soldier, the officers informed him that, in their regiment, soldiers were not beaten. Then, as legend has it, he ordered the guilty soldiers to stab one another with forks and spit in each other’s faces. Even if this story is spurious, it says something about the mood in the regiment.

Rumors started to spread that all was not well in the Semyonovsky Regiment. When Grand Duke Konstantin, Tsar Alexander I’s brother, came to review the troops one day, he rode up to the Semyonovsky Regiment and asked them whether or not they had any complaints. He was greeted with silence. He asked again, but stopped short of coaxing an answer. How differently things might have turned out if only one of the soldiers had had the courage to speak up!

Then, on October 17, 1820, the soldiers of one company refused to leave the parade ground or perform their sentry duties. They demanded that their company commander come to them and hear their grievances against the regimental commander. There were soldiers running around the barracks looking for Shvarts. By some accounts, the colonel had hidden in a pile of manure, but that was probably a malicious rumor. In any event, they did not find Shvarts and he was never harmed. Soldiers from other regiments surrounded the mutineers and took them away to be locked up in the Peter and Paul Fortress. At that point, other Semyonovsky companies started demanding either that the arrestees be released or that the entire regiment be arrested. The authorities chose the latter option.

An investigation was launched. At the time, Tsar Alexander, who always called the men of the Semyonovsky Regiment his favorites, was attending the Congress of Troppau in Austrian Silesia. The Congress had been convened to discuss revolutionary unrest elsewhere in Europe. The courier sent to gallop to him with the news was delayed along the way, so the tsar only learned what was happening in St. Petersburg from Austria’s then foreign minister, Klemens von Metternich, a circumstance Alexander found embarrassing and insulting. Because of this, when the courier finally did arrive, he was given a cool reception.

The highly placed aide-de-camp who had been sent to the tsar, Pyotr Chaadayev, went on to become an outstanding philosopher and a renowned figure in Russian history. Like many of the officers of the mutinying regiment, he was a member of the Union of Welfare. Historians have long wondered what was going through his head as he galloped across Central Europe. Was Chaadayev perhaps counting on having a heart-to-heart talk with the tsar? Was he hoping to explain to him why the soldiers were rebelling, describe the situation in the regiment or the army in general, gain Alexander’s trust and become his advisor, nudge the tsar toward reform? That is certainly not what happened. And, soon after the tsar’s hostile reception, Chaadayev resigned from military service.

The Semyonovsky men were tried, and the entire regiment was disbanded and reassembled with a new set of soldiers and officers. The mutineers were scattered throughout the army to units across the vast Russian Empire. Colonel Shvarts was sentenced to death, but was  then, of course, pardoned and sent off into retirement. And although no officers had taken part in the mutiny, they were nevertheless demoted from the guards into the regular army and sent off to serve in the provinces. The problem had been “handled,” or so it seemed.

But for the members of the Union of Welfare, who had been modeling their efforts on the methodical bee, this was only the beginning. What happened with the Semyonovsky Regiment convinced many of them that their slow, gradualist actions were too easily countered by a single die-hard reactionary, policeman, or despotic landowner. They saw how young officers were rebelling in Spain and Italy, with apparent success. The desire to take decisive action, to do something different, grew increasingly intense.

Soon after the Semyonovsky mutiny, the Union of Welfare was dissolved and new societies were organized in its place – now truly secret and revolutionary organizations. It was their members who went out onto St. Petersburg’s Senate Square in December 1825, and it was they who raised a revolt by the Chernigov Regiment in Ukraine. The Decembrist and Chernigov revolts failed. Some of its organizers went to the gallows, others to Siberia.

Who knows? If Fyodor Shvarts had not been put in charge of the Semyonovsky Regiment, perhaps the members of the Union of Welfare would have continued their gradualist efforts. Then again, there probably would have been another Shvarts. In the nineteenth-century Russian military, there were plenty to go around.