260 Gentlemen to Officers
sorry to see him go (as were his men, especially once he had been replaced by
the notorious Shvarts: see below, p. 298), for he had looke<fbenignly on their
social gatherings and had sometimes even attended them. General_ Yermolov,
as commander of the Caucasian Corps, was powerful enough to tolerate
political activity by liberal-minded officers, some of whom had ~sent to
this distant frontier area as a punishment. When passing through Mos'(OW in
September 1821, he warned his former adjutant, Fon-Vizin, that the tsar 'knew
of his' conspiratorial activities.^48 His attitude was ambivalent; as was that of
several other generals, notably those stationed in the provinces. The principal
activists were colonels and others of medium rank. Many had served on such
generals' staffs during the recent campaigns. Some owed their appointments to
their protection; a few were connected to them by family ties. Thus V. P.
lvashev, a prominent 'southerner', was the son of a former aide-de-camp to
Suvorov who had been involved in Paul I's assassination, and N. N. Dcprera-
dovich was the nephew of another of these military conspirators.49 These links
suggest a certain 'dissident tradition' fo which age, rank, and kinship were all
important factors. Five generals, notably M. F. Orlov, joined the Union of
(Public) Welfare, but the senior men generally kept out of anything subversive
and were useful to the societies mainly through the influence they wielded in
high places as tacit opponents of Arakcheyev and the extreme militarists.
There were also many family links among the activists. The Murav'yev clan
has already been mentioned. It was distantly connected to the Murav'yev-
Apostols, who provided two leaders of the 'southerrters' in 1825, as well as to
N. P. Panin, who had been so prominent in the 1801 coup.so Two sons of
General N. N. Rayevsky, a hero of 1812, were associated with the clandestine
circles, and his two daughters married other activists, M. F. Orlov and S. G.
Volkonsky (both of them generals). There were several pairs of brothers and
one group of four siblings, the Bestuzhevs.^51
A full-scale prosopographical study of the movement has yet to be under-
taken, but preliminary studies, Western and Soviet, reveal a good deal about
the participants' background. W. B. Lincoln's analysis of the 28~ men who
were sentenced by the Supreme Criminal Court shows that 85.7 per cent of
those for whom data are available had fathers in state service (38 per cent of
whom had been in the army) and that 87 per cent had served in the army
themselves; 73 per cent were still in military uniform in December 1825.^52 Of
(^48) Yakushkin, Zapiski, p. 65; Fon-Vizin in VD iii. 74; Nechkina, Dviihen/yf, i. 353, ii. 110-12,
148.
49 Kenney, 'Politics or Assassination', p. 133 (P. N. lvashev); Nechkina, Dv~niye, ii. 219-20,
333, 348; Prokof'yev, Bor'ba, pp. 106-7. 10 [Bartenev(?)), 'Panhl', p. 432 n.
11 Lotman, 'Dekabrist', p. 66; Orlov, Kapi111lyatsiya Pariiha, p. 274 (for Rayevskys);
Kleinschmidt, Geschichte, pp. 323-34, 346-5 I (for Murav'yevs, Bestuzbevs); Pedorov, Sold.
dvizheniye, p. 86 (for Vadkovskys).
s2 Lincoln, 'Re-examination', esp. pp. 359, 366-8 (tables); cf. Prokofyev, Bor'ba, pp. 98-101.
A more recent Soviet study is Lur'ye, 'Evolyutsiya' (unpublished: seep. II of his dissertation
abstract).