The Decembrist revolt is justly regarded as the beginning of the nineteenth century revolutionary movement in Russia. Decembrism as a movement was a significant symptom of the social and political situation in Russian in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. At the same time, it contained within it the seeds of different political  and ideological trends that would develop more fully in the future: from conservative and liberal to ultra-revolutionary. The ideological freedom and diversity of Decembrism were the secret of its perennial appeal. The Decembrists were revered as martyrs, and the ideals and example of these aristocratic revolutionaries continued to inspire later generations of reformers, radicals and revolutionaries alike.

Alexander I’s reign of the first quarter of the nineteenth century contained within it different alternatives for Russia’s future. Presided over by a half-hearted ruler, the government vacillated between reform and stagnation and finally opted for the latter. The reawakened public movement contained both a moderate trend in favor of the transformation of tsarist autocracy into a constitutional monarchy, and a revolutionary strand advocating a violent overthrow of the existing order and its replacement by a new one. In the life of the Russian society of that era all of those trends were closely connected, as were the individuals who represented them. The advocates of change in government circles, like Michael Speransky, and in secret societies, like Paul Pestel, belonged to the same ruling class of the nobility and shared the same ideology based on the ideas of the Enlightenment. The impossibility to voice their ideas openly in public and thus form a broad reformist coalition led to a split between enlightened government officials, who elaborated their plans in the secrecy of government privy committees, and the progressively-minded members of the gentry who saw their only chance of effecting political change in the clandestine activities of underground movements.   

The crushing of the Decembrists was a national tragedy that had removed from active public life a whole generation of the country’s most talented, educated and honest people. Russia’s evolution along the Western European path of a constitutional, law-governed state was considerably delayed. The gulf between the government and society began to widen, turning more and more into an irreconcilable ideological confrontation and leading to the growing alienation of the ‘thinking minority’ from the state.

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