Decembrist

plural Decembrists

1. historicalA participant in, or sympathizer with, the Decembrist revolt.

   These liberal revolutionaries, who have gone down in history as the Decembrists, called on the army not to swear allegiance to Nicholas. The Decembrist-led rebels were surrounded by troops loyal to Nicholas on the banks of the Neva River in St. Petersburg.

   2009, Frank L. Kidner, Maria Bucur, Ralph Mathisen, Sally McKee, Theodore R. Weeks, Making Europe: People, Politics, and Culture, Volume II: Since 1550, Cengage Learning, page 587

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   Thus on the death of Alexander I in 1825 the succession of his brother Nicholas I was delayed and confused by doubts over the heir and was marked by the bloody mutinies of the Decembrists; Nicholas died during the Crimean War when a contemporary wrote that his only choice was between abdication and death; his son, Alexander II, was assassinated by terrorists a quarter of a century later.

   1960, J. P. T. Bury, editor, The New Cambridge Modern History, Volume 10: The Zenith of European Power, Cambridge University Press, page 358

   2003, Catherine O'Neil, With Shakespeare's Eyes: Pushkin's Creative Appropriation of Shakespeare, University of Delaware Press, Associated University Presses, page 81, Many of the Decembrists listed Pushkin's poetry as a source for their "free-thinking," and there were reports of frightened people (Pushkin himself was one of them) hastily burning unfinished poems that had circulated in manuscript.

   Synonyms: Dekabrist

1. not comparableAccording to or derived from the politics or philosophy of the Decembrists.

   Mariia Trubnikova was raised in an atmosphere of pious reverence for Decembrist ideals.

   2006, “Trubnikova, Mariia (1835-1897)”, in Francisca de Haan, Krasimira Daskalova, Anna Loutfi, editors, Biographical Dictionary of Women's Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries, Central European University Press, page 584

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   The word civicism (grazhdanstvennost’) originated in the enlightenment ideal of civic Rome, perceptions of the poet as a patriotic citizen and son of the fatherland, and Decembrist dreams of a republic.

   1994, Lauren G. Leighton, Esoteric Tradition in Russian Romantic Literature: Decembrism and Freemasonry, Penn State University Press, page 17

   War and Peace grew out of Tolstoy's attempts to write a Decembrist novel, a work that first began to take shape in October 1856, when "The Distant Field" was begun.

   2008, Kathryn B. Feuer, Tolstoy and the Genesis of War and Peace, Cornell University Press, page 206