The Praetorian Option 263derived strong republican convictions. Other dissident officers were impressed
by his erudition and earnestness, but were also somewhat afrnici of his
headstrong dictatorial temperament. One major who served under him was
reminded of Napoleon, and even the poet Kondratiy Ryleyev, who shared
Pester 's republican views, considered him 'not a Washington but a
Bonaparte'.^61 There was a streak of ruthlessness behind his idealism, and he
was contemptuous of those associates whom he deemed faint-hearted or dilet-
tantish. From a twentieth-century perspective Pester appears irresistibly as
a prototype of Lenin; indeed, it has become commonplace to describe
Russkaya pravda, the programmatic document which he compiled, as the first
manifesto of 'Russian jacobinism'.^62
Pester was largely responsible for the streamlining of the first secret
societies: revolutionary centralism was to be the order of the day. 'The main
thing', he said in evidence later, 'was that there should be no divisions or intri-
gues, for they could ruin everything.'^63 His posting to Second Army head-
quarters at Tur chin inadvertently removed him from the centre of affairs. He
promptly set up an organization there which had several subordinate cells, and
this bore the imprint of his own strong personality. The 'southerners'
endeavoured to impose a republican programme on their comrades in the
north, and in November 1819 Pestel · returned to the capital for six months. He
was successful in his aim, but it was a paper victory. The 'northerners', unhappy
at the prospect of violence, began to favour a schism which, when it finally
came about, after a conference in Moscow in January 1821, took a form of
which Pester and the radicals disapproved.
These differences prevented the dissidents from reacting to a major provo-
cation by the authorities, the dissolution of the Semenovsky guards regiment
after the alleged 'mutiny' in its ranks (October 1820: see below, p. 298). The
setback led to a loss of morale among the conspirators in the capital. In 1821-2
the Guards Corps was sent to the Virna region for 15 months. The move was
made in part for domestic security reasons: to remove potential trouble-makers
from St. Petersburg. It was not until the autumn of 1822, when the corps had
returned, that Captain Nikita Murav'yev and several former associates in
the defunct Union of (Public) Welfare agreed to set up a new cadre group,
which came to be known as the 'Northern Society'.^64 It turned out to be a
quiescent body, whose members devoted themselves mainly to theoretical
discussions. Murav'yev was the principal architect of a constitutional charter
designed to counter Pester 's extreme republicanism. He hoped that some
future tsar, if not Alexander I himself, might be persuaded to endorse it. One
possible scenario which he and his comrades envisaged was that the dissidents
might force a new ruler's hand by refusing en masse to take the oath of allegi-
ance unless he did so. This tactic has been criticized as politically naive. It can
61 Lorer, Zapiski, p. 70; Basargin, Zapiski, pp. xxxvii-xxxviii, 15-16; 'Doneseniye', p. 293.
62 Text in VD vii. I 13-209; Eng. tr. (abbreviated) in Raeff, Decembrist Movement, pp. 124-56.
6J VD iv. 87. 64 VD i. 320.