A Revolt of Secret Societies or a Revolution by the Autocracy?

This article challenges the traditional divide between “revolt” and “revolution” in interpreting the Decembrist uprising of December 14, 1825, in St. Petersburg. Often seen as either a failed military mutiny or Russia’s first bourgeois revolution, the event is reexamined here through the lens of dynastic law and political legitimacy. Drawing on new archival sources and a fresh reading of state documents, the study argues that Nicholas I ’s rise to power marked not just the suppression of a rebellion but a legal and political transformation that signaled the end of dynastic arbitrariness and the start of regulated succession under the 1797 Law on Succession. In this perspective, the interregnum crisis, marked by the Decembrist uprising, emerges as a pivotal moment in the institutionalization of autocratic legitimacy in the Russian Empire.