An Age of Reform 359
was taken up vigorously by the liberal emigre Aleksandr Herzen, and copies ot
Kolokol ('The Bell') reached St. Petersburg and other cities where military col-
leges were located.^39 Disciplinary rules in these establishments had been
somewhat relaxed in 1855 and the cadets allowed to take an interest in the pro-
gress of the war; they could also mix more freely with university students. It
was not long before they set up informal discussion groups at which the talk
turned to political and social questions. Young activists established mutual
support funds (kassy), libiaries, and eventually even clandestine presses on
which agitational material could be printed. This 'technological advance'
distinguished the dissidents of this generation from their forerunners in
1816-25. They were more impetuous and sometimes displayed a streak of bit-
terness, even though the underlying mood was still one of idealism. As before,
it was bl!t a short step from the salon to the conspiratorial 'society', with all its
paraphernalia of pseudonyms and secret meeting-places. The administration
was better placed than before to meet the challenge, since it was prepared to
co-opt young radicals, on fairly generous terms, as well as to repress them.
In St. Petersburg the new spirit first made itself felt at the General Staff
Academy, where entry requirements were liberalized during and after the war.
One of those admitted in 1857 was Zygmunt Sierakowski, a 31-year-old Pole
from Volhynia who, as a university student under Nicholas I, had been
arrested for trying to leave the country without permission and sent to serve as
a private in the Orenburg corps, on the empire's south-eastern border. Here he
had risen to commissioned rank and now, on entering the academy, was pro-
moted to captain. He soon became the focus of a group of like-minded men
who met daily either in the apartment of his friend, Lieutenant Jaroslaw
Dabrowski, , or in some other convenient location. As many as two hundredindividuals associated with this circle have now been identified, (^40) of whom
some 50 to 70 may be regarded as core members. It was an informal associa-
tion with little organizational structure: 95 per cent were servicemen, four-
fifths of them subalterns and only 2 per cent majors or above; most were in
their mid-twenties. One-third (34 per cent) were Orthodox by religious affilia-
tion; 22 per cent hailed from the empire's 'internal provinces' but 53 per cent
D'yakov and I. S. Miller, and we now know much more about the individuals and organizations
involved. However, care is needed in handling the official interpretation of the movement, which
stresses either (Great) Russian paramountcy or, slightly less debatable, the sense of incernationai
brotherhood among revolutionaries from all ethnic groups within the empire.
39 Herzen's first appeal to Russian troops in Poland was written in March 1854, but it was not
until 1861-2 that issues of Kolokol and leaflets published by the Free Russian Press in London
began to circulate at all widely in the army: V erzh bitsky and Frumenkov, 'Rasprostraneniye
"Kolokola'"; D'yakov, 'Gertsen, Ogarev i Komitet russkikh ofitserov v Pol' she', RSR iii. (1963),
3-30. For a breakdown of this material: Radchenko, Kolokol ... sistemat. rospis', items nos.
882-959, 1979-2035.
40 Leykina-Svirskaya and Shidlovskaya, 'Pol'skaya revol. organizatsiya', pp. 19-21; D'yakov,
'Peterburgskiye ofitserskiye organizatsii', pp. 273, 337; for a list see G. V. Bogdanov and V.A.
D'yakov in Vosstaniye 1863 g. i russko-po/'skiye svyazi 60-kh gg., Moscow, 1960, pp. 489-637.
Cf. also Smirnov, 'Sierakowski'.