The Presidential Library tells about the fate of the wives of the Decembrists

11 women went to hard labor and settlement in Siberia, following their husbands who took part in the 1825 uprising on Senate Square in St. Petersburg. The “voluntary exiles” were young, belonged to the most worthy families in Russia and firmly believed in the oath of fidelity given to the spouse during the wedding sacrament. 

“Whatever your fate, I share it...” – this is what twenty-year-old Maria Volkonskaya wrote to her husband, the father of her two-month-old Nikolenka. And the clouds over Prince Sergei Grigorievich Volkonsky thickened, heavy, gloomy and did not promise any light in the rest of his life for the general, the hero of the war with Napoleon. After the events on Senate Square in St. Petersburg on December 14, 1825, he was sentenced to hard labor with subsequent settlement in Siberia. When Maria’s father, the brave and famous cavalry general Nikolai Nikolaevich Raevsky, learned that his daughter was going to go to Siberia to join her convicted husband, his despair knew no bounds. He dissuaded, forbade, exhorted, begged, except that he did not dare to curse his daughter. It was all in vain.

Maria turned to the sovereign, asking permission to follow her husband. Nicholas I responded to the request in writing. This answer from the emperor is given in the Notes of Princess M. N. Volkonskaya (1913), available on the Presidential Library's portal.

This is what awaited outside Irkutsk. According to the instructions given in the same publication, the wives of convicts, “following their husbands and continuing their marital relationship with them, will naturally become involved in their fate and lose their previous title, that is, they will already be recognized as nothing other than the wives of exiled convicts, and the children, who will take root in Siberia, will become state-owned peasants”. Maria Nikolaevna did not want to think about this: her heart was heavy. The worst thing is the separation from her son, whom she is forced to leave with relatives: he already knew how to babble, laugh out loud, remember for a long time and quickly forget...

On the eve of Maria Nikolaevna’s departure to Siberia, relatives and friends gathered at the Moscow house of her daughter-in-law Zinaida Volkonskaya. They invited all the Italian singers who were in the city...

Twenty days later, the horses drove Maria Volkonskaya's carriage to Irkutsk. Here free life was already ending. Maria Nikolaevna did not yet know that quite recently her friend in misfortune, Princess Ekaterina Trubetskaya, had left the apartment she occupied in Irkutsk... And upon returning from the Irkutsk governor, Volkonskaya met Alexandra Muravyova - she was also going to her husband.

In Siberia, young aristocratic women not only saw, but experienced prison life. In the capital, in excellent French, they discussed the unbearable chains of secular conventions. But the young wives of the convicts learned only now how real fatigue weighs on them.

At the beginning of 1829, terrible news came to the Volkonskys: their three-year-old son, Nikolino, as he was called at home, died. At first, meetings with husbands were allowed twice a week, for an hour, usually in the presence of a guard. But one could watch as much as one wanted how their husbands, once brilliant officers, honored generals, were taken to work, and then returned to the dungeon.

In Siberia, Princess Volkonskaya had a son and daughter. Many years later, the poet Nikolai Nekrasov listened to Mikhail Volkonsky read his mother’s notes to him for three evenings in a row. The poet could not hold back his tears, “he cried like a child” and had to interrupt reading several times. The son of the Volkonskys himself spoke about this in the preface to the Notes of Princess M. N. Volkonskaya, published in 1904.

The Presidential Library's collections contain unique documents - 69 letters personally written by Maria Nikolaevna Volkonskaya to her mother-in-law - Princess Alexandra Nikolaevna, daughter of Field Marshal Repnin. In these messages, she reports on the health of her husband and son Mikhail, talks about the living conditions of the Decembrists and their wives at the Petrovsky plant, asks to send necessary things, medicines, books and newspapers.

The author of these memoirs, published on the Presidential Library's portal, Baron Andrei Rosen, a former lieutenant of the Life Guards of the Finnish Regiment, also had his wife come to see him. Anna Vasilievna, nee Malinovskaya, is the sister of Pushkin’s beloved lyceum friend Ivan Malinovsky. Anna Vasilievna left her firstborn in the care of relatives. In Siberia she gave birth to a son and daughter. The boy was named Kondratiy - in honor of the ideological leader of the rebels, the poet Ryleev.

...25-year-old Frenchwoman Pauline Gebl hardly knew that two days before the uprising, her lover Ivan Annenkov, lieutenant of the Life Guards Cavalry Regiment, received instructions from Prince Evgeniy Obolensky, one of the leaders of the December uprising. All she knew for sure was that Ivan was the most handsome man in St. Petersburg, and it was no coincidence that his portrait was painted by Orest Kiprensky... A few months later, the verdict of the handsome cavalry guard became known, and Polina not only obtained an audience with the emperor, but also begged His Majesty to allow her to travel "to the criminal". In Chita, Polina Gebl officially became Annenkova Praskovya Egorovna.

Another Frenchwoman who received a Russian name in Chita was Camille Le Dantu, married to Camilla Petrovna Ivasheva, the wife of the former captain of the cavalry regiment Vasily Petrovich. They said that he wrote very good poems, but, unfortunately, they did not reach us. It is not difficult to guess who was the muse of the amateur poet in Siberia.

Elizaveta Petrovna Naryshkina knew from childhood that her father was an extraordinary person: not just anyone, but the famous Zhukovsky himself wrote poems about the hero general and the threat of Napoleonic troops.

...Natalya Dmitrievna Fonvizina lived in the same section at the settlement with Naryshkina, Trubetskoy and Anna Rosen. The youngest of all those who came to join their husbands in Siberia, she was also the most devout - in her early youth she was going to enter a monastery. Then she married a respectable forty-year-old general and gave birth to two children. Natalya Dmitrievna spent a quarter of a century in exile with her husband, and when they were released, a year later she was widowed. Her second husband was also a recent exile, Ivan Ivanovich Pushchin.

Alexandra Potapova, the daughter of the provincial secretary, met her future husband, a retired colonel and World War II veteran Vasily Lvovich Davydov, in 1819. However, Davydov’s mother was against her son’s choice, and the wedding took place only after her death, in 1825. And soon Vasily Davydov was sentenced to lifelong hard labor. At that time they already had six children. Leaving the kids with relatives, Alexandra Ivanovna followed her husband. In exile, the Davydovs gave birth to seven more “angels”...

Maria Kazimirovna Yushnevskaya, the wife of one of the organizers and leaders of the Southern Society of Decembrists, was one of the oldest “wives of exiled convicts” - by the time she arrived in Siberia, she was about forty years old. After the verdict on the Decembrists was announced, Maria Kazimirovna immediately began to seek permission to follow her husband, Alexei Petrovich, to Siberia, but received permission only at the beginning of 1829. Maria Kazimirovna had practically no money: to get to Siberia, she had to sell everything she could. The mother of the Decembrists Muravyovs, Ekaterina Fedorovna, provided her with great help. Maria Kazimirovna spent almost 10 years with her husband in the Petrovsky Plant; later they lived near Irkutsk and were engaged in teaching - they took pupils into the house, mainly from merchant children.

The Presidential Library's portal features the collection of documents Decembrists in the History of Russia, where the section “Portraits of Decembrists” presents images of Sergei Volkonsky, Alexander Odoevsky, Ivan Pushchin, Sergei Trubetskoy and others.

The poet and publicist Pyotr Vyazemsky wrote to the poet Vasily Zhukovsky almost: “Thanks to the women - they will give several wonderful pages of our history...”