An interesting facet of the Decembrist movement is the fact that, despite the fact that it was inspired by the French Revolution and the overall liberalization of Europe, it was very much based within ideas of Russian nationalism. On the one hand, David Saunders presents many of the patriotic and “Volkish” artistic movements that took place after the Napoleonic wars as inherently conservative. Specifically, Saunders mentions Nikolai Karamzin, who as Foreign Minister under Alexander I championed working with France under the Tilsit Alliance, but who took a sharp turn to the right after Napoleon’s invasion. Karamzin in his later years spent money and time working on the culture and the history of the Slavs, his work later going on to inspire the philosophy of Slavophilism, which, according to Saunders was, “A doctrine which asserted Slavonic uniqueness and emphasized the danger of mingling the doctrines of east and west.” (Saunders, Pg. 95) Other slavophiles mentioned include the playwrights Ozerov and Shakhovskoi, Admiral Shishkov who advocated against the coining of new words in the Russian language, the poet Nikolai Gnedich, and the Polish ethnographer Adam Czarnocki.
On the other hand, Saunders exclaims that the idea of Russian “peopleness” was also a liberal concept, taken from the French idea of “peopleness. Furthermore, the term created to describe Russian “peopleness”, naradost, was originally created by Viazemskii in order to distance the idea of the Russian people away from the institutional strength of the Church and the autocratic state, even though later the term became muddied as conservatives tried to support the claim that the Russian people depended upon these two institutions.
One can say that the idea of the “Russian people” evolved as the Decembrist movement progressed, and accordingly became more linked to the idea of citizenship, but still there is a hint of volkish and slavophile attitudes. For instance, in Project for a Constitution by Nikita M. Muraviev, the power of the government is vested within the Russian people. This is in contrast with other forms of liberal government (such as our own), that derive their power only abstractly from the people, and concretely from the system itself, and the constitution that lays down the rules of said system. Additionally, it is important to note that in Project for a Constitution, only Russian citizens are have the right to participate in the political system, and that even more importantly, to be considered a Russian citizen, one must be literate in the Russian language. This is important due to the fact that it privileges Russian over the languages of other peoples, even other Slavs in a multi-ethnic empire. Additionally, in the Statue of the Union of Welfare, only Russian citizens are described as being allowed in the Union, a Russian citizen being further defined as someone who was both born in Russia and who speaks the Russian language. Even those foreigners who left their country to serve Russia are considered Russian citizens if they have contributed a tremendous amount to the nation. This contrasts with Project for a Constitution by the fact that in that document, there is at least a method by which foreigners could obtain Russian citizenship (that being Russian residence for 7 years or more and the consent of a court).
It’s interesting how the Decembrist movement had fingers in both the westernizing and Slavophile pots. Perhaps that dichotomy was running out its welcome by their generation. Maybe after previous westernization efforts had found some success, it would be easier to envision a future where Western-influenced political goals could be fulfilled without sacrificing the individuality of Slavic culture.
The Decembrist movement was definitely rooted in nationalism (perhaps with a different definition than the one we are used to today) but the extent to which its rooted in Slavophilism seems less to me.
While it’s true that some Decembrists were Slavophile leaning, the movement was very loosely organized and comprised many men of varying political outlooks, so one cannot say that the views of some were representative of the whole (especially because the whole had few coherent views overall). Besides that, the Decembrists two concrete goals were to bring a constitutional monarchy to Russia, and to abolish serfdom, which are Westernizer-leaning ideals much more than they are Slavophile ones.