As Saunders writes, the Decembrists were primarily an organization of military intelligentsia – 253/289 men sentenced were officers at one point or another (pp. 97). In popular culture, they are often remembered as bureaucrats, writers, academics, and Freemasons, but what they had in common most of all were military backgrounds, and their visions for what Russia could be, brought home after their tours were over.
It’s notable here that (according to Saunders) the political question of the time was whether or not Orthodoxy and the state had “made” Russia and its people into what they were. The Decembrists fell on the left side of the debate – Russia had succeeded in driving off Napoleon “in spite of the system rather than because of it, and the community as a whole deserved a larger say in its fate,” (96).
Perhaps in part because Russia has the tradition of soldiers making and unmaking czars, these men began to organize together in secrecy. It’s written in the Statute of the Union of Welfare that “… the Union does not conceal it [its aim] from well-meaning citizens, but in order to avoid the censure of malice and jealously its activity must be conducted in secrecy,” (Dmytryshyn, 208). At the time that the Decembrists attempted their coup, Saunders writes that Russian society “turned away from them and manifested its legitimate stand and loyal attachments to the throne,” (112). Likewise, the serfs did not know of the Decembrists’ goals of emancipation, and looked on the czar as their only protector.
With all this in mind, was the Decembrists’ insistence on secrecy possibly part of their downfall? If Saunders is correct when he writes that intellectual currents were both conservative and progressive, and that the regime could handle almost any amount of free-thinking on the part of poets/journalists/professors/retired gov’t ministers/middle-grade civil servants. Could it perhaps have handled free-thinking on the part of the Decembrists? If the Decembrists had abandoned secrecy at a sooner point, could things have gone differently for them in the end, and to what extent?
Considering some things we’ve learned more recently, I would say that it was absolutely necessary for the Decembrists to remain a secret organization. The rulers of mid-19th century Russia were not in the mood for reform of any sort, and it comes as little surprise to me that the Decembrists were brutally crushed when they made a move in the open.
I think ouvert progressivism in Russia at the time was limited to certain areas of culture and the arts, and had to remain unchallenging to the czar.
I believe it was necessary because in order for something to work, it is best that it is known by few people and a tighter group so that that is is unopposed and will be unexpected.