Pestel and the Decembrist Movement

Abstract

Pestel’s concern for his country’s social and political development was shared by many of his generation whose outlook had been moulded by much the same formative experiences. It is therefore understandable that he should have sought some way of canvassing the views and influencing the minds of others. The most convenient way of so doing was through the officers’ dining clubs. These had developed during and immediately after the Wars of Liberation in imitation of those which existed in the messes of allied forces’ regiments. Such dining clubs formed, in Russian regiments, the embryo of the earliest Decembrist secret societies: the Society of True and Loyal Sons of the Fatherland or the Union of Salvation, and the Union of Welfare. The very names of these organisations attest also to the Masonic influence behind their formation, especially with regard to their organisational secrecy and conspiratorial ethos.