The Praetorian Option 261the 579 men officially listed (in 1827) as having been involved in the affair^53
78.8 per cent were serving officers. The term military intelligentsia is certainly
appropriate in their regard, for 'of the 166 Decembrists for whom we have the
necessary information, 147 (88.5 per cent) had some sort of formal institu-
tional education'.^54 Nearly one third had seen action. Age data are available
for 254 officers sent for trial; they indicate that 70.2 per cent were 30 years old
or less. The breakdown by rank is as follows:rank 'involved' sentenced
-------·-------------
generals 17 7
staff officers 115 52
junior officers 315 192
total armed forces• 447 251- includes navy and retired.
Sources: Prokof"yev, Bor'ba, pp. 99-100; Lincoln, 'Reconsideration', p. 368.
The importance of the colonels relative to their total number is striking: 68
were 'involved', of whom 26 were sentenced. There was also a relatively high
proportion of staff officers (in the normal sense of this term); actual or former
guards officers accounted for 46.5 per cent of the members of the Southern
and 69 per cent of those of the Northern Society.^55 The differential reflects the
fact that these privileged units were stationed mainly in St. Petersburg (and
Warsaw) rather than on the empire's south-western perimeter.
One task that awaiK historians is to reconstruct the Russian army's 'order of
battle' in the early 1820s and to identify all the leading personnel and the
location of each unit. Only once this is done can firm conclusions be drawn as
to the extent to which the armed forces had been affected by dissent and con-
spiratorial activity. Despite the large claims sometimes made, it would seem
that its scale was modest-and anyway below the 'threshold' necessary for a
successful Praetorian-type revolution.
One major problem confronting conspirators in the Russian army of the 1820s
was that of communication. Several hundred miles separated their two main
centres, St. Petersburg and Tut' chin. This made it impossible to create an
effective nation-wide organization and impeded settlement of the personal and
political differences bound to arise in any clandestine body. 'Technical'
military considerations also crucially affected the fate of the various secret
53 'Prikosnovennye k delu': the term is vague and the data need verification. This includes nine
men not listed in the A/favit dekabristov, on which these computations are based, but not another
20 who were indicted later: Beskrovnyy, Potentsial, pp. 225-6. The A/favit was published in
VD viii.
S4 Lincoln, 'Re-examination', p. 359.
is Ibid., pp. 362-3.