In the aftermath of the failed Decembrist uprising of December 1825, a special commission under Tsar Nicholas I worked through February 1826 to determine punishments for the rebel officers who had sought to install a constitutional government. Five ringleaders would eventually be hanged and dozens more exiled to Siberia, cementing Nicholas's reputation as a reactionary autocrat.
The Decembrist revolt had erupted almost by accident in St. Petersburg's Senate Square, when a group of idealistic young army officers, many of whom had absorbed liberal ideas while fighting Napoleon across Western Europe, refused to swear allegiance to Nicholas I and instead demanded a constitution. The rebellion collapsed within a day when loyal troops fired grapeshot into the crowd of mutineers.
What followed was a methodical, months-long interrogation process. Nicholas personally involved himself in questioning prisoners, alternately charming and threatening men he had grown up around in court circles. By late February 1826 the investigating commission had assembled damning testimony and began finalizing the graduated scale of punishment, from death to hard labor to simple demotion.
The eventual sentences, handed down in July, sent five men to the gallows and exiled well over a hundred others to Siberia, where many spent decades in exile alongside spouses who voluntarily followed them. The Decembrists became enduring martyrs for later generations of Russian revolutionaries, and Nicholas's brutal, personal handling of the affair set the tone for thirty years of repressive rule.