Decembrist Uprising [Movement] of 1825

Historical Context Essay

Patrick O’Meara (University of Durham)
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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,

2186 words

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 19 March 2024.]

1671 Decembrist Uprising [Movement] of 1825 2 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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