The Tsar put down the protest, which took place in December, and for which the group was later labeled The Decembrists.
The uprising failed to unseat the Tsar -- that would not happen for another century -- but it cemented the new ideological undercurrent that would eventually overwhelm Russian society from top to bottom. Essentially, all of this was the result of Peter the Great's challenge to the Russian classes to make Russian a Great Power. From Chaadayav to Kakhovsky, the plea for insurgency was soon ringing out. Peter the Great may have had great social ambitions -- but they were at the expense of the nation's religious orthodoxy which was essentially, as Gogol and Dostoevsky would say, the only restraint truly holding Russia's passionate populace together.
Peter the Great must not receive the entirety of the blame, of course, for Russia's spiral toward twentieth century Stalinism. His ambitions were great and genuine: he restored the nation's military to prominence; he brought prestige and honor to the country; he gave them a hero that appeared to be incorrupt. But the worm at the heart of Peter's challenge was that it was rooted in a new doctrine -- the same new doctrine that Belinsky would recite in his letter to Gogol -- only here it would be recited more loudly and more forcefully and more explicitly than in Peter's time.
The new doctrine was based on French liberalism, but, typically, Christ was used as its messenger -- not Rousseau, who actually spun the narrative. A portion of Belinsky's letter is worth quoting in full, for it gets to the heart of what was to lead to Russia's loss of identity: it was rooted in a new interpretation of the Christian ethos -- the doctrine of the saints was replaced by the doctrine of Voltaire, as Belinsky himself states. On the contrary, Belinsky belittles Gogol for wishing to cling to the ancient sense of morality and the wisdom of the Dark Ages:
Proponent of the knout, apostle of ignorance, champion of obscurantism and Stygian darkness, panegyrist of Tartar morals -- what are you about! Look beneath your feet -- you are standing on the brink of an abyss!... That you base such teaching...
Japanese, Chinese and Russian empires from 1500-1800. We will look briefly at the kind of structures/bureaucratic arrangements that used to keep order and control and to manage their populations . We also will compare and contrast these empires and see that the major thing that paved the way for the eclipse of China and Japan by 1800 was an inward focus while Russia's westward glance gave it the ability
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