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ColonelPavel Ivanovich Pestel (Russian:Павел Иванович Пестель; 5 July [O.S. 24 June] 1793 – 25 July [O.S. 13 July] 1826) was a Russianrevolutionary and ideologue of theDecembrists.
Pavel Pestel was born in Moscow on 5 July [O.S. 24 June] 1793.[1] He came from aLutheran family ofSaxon descent that had settled in Russia during the reign ofPeter the Great. His great-grandfather, grandfather, father and uncle had all successively served as director of Moscow's postal mail service, forming a dynasty of sorts.[2] His father Ivan (1765–1843) continued to work his way up through the political bureaucracy to become Governor-General ofSiberia from 1806 to 1821.[1] Ivan Pestel, together with his associate Nikolai Treskin, the governor of Irkutsk, established a corrupt regime in Siberia and was eventually dismissed.[3]
In 1805–1809, Pavel Pestel studied inDresden. In 1810–1811, he was a student at thePage Corps, from which he would graduate in the rank ofpraporshchik. Pestel was then sent to the Lithuanian Regiment of theLeib Guard. He took part in thePatriotic War of 1812 and foreign military campaigns of 1813-1814. He was seriously wounded while fighting atBorodino, and for his actions personally received theGold Sword for Bravery from Field MarshalKutuzov. Pestel continued to distinguish himself during the following campaign at the battles ofDresden,Kulm, andLeipzig as an adjutant toPeter Wittgenstein. After serving in a number of cavalry regiments, he was in 1821 appointedcommander of the Vyatka Infantry Regiment quartered inTulchin, where the enlightened generalPavel Kiselyov welcomed liberal-minded officers.
In 1816 Pestel became a member of theUnion of Salvation and one of the authors of itscharter. He managed to make all the society members agree on therepublican program of the Union, thereby laying the foundations for the republican traditions in the Russian emancipation movement. At the same time, Pavel Pestel spoke in support of mass repressions,regicide and physical annihilation of all the members of theimperial family initially. In 1818 Pestel joined a more liberal secret society called theUnion of Prosperity without regicide plans. In March 1821 he established and became the leader of theSouthern Society of the Decembrists. Pestel advocated merging theNorthern Society of the Decembrists with the former and travelled to Saint Petersburg in 1824 to try to make that happen.
Starting in 1821, Pavel Pestel worked on a project of social and economicreforms inRussia, which he would later callRusskaya Pravda (Русская правда) and which would be adopted as a political program. The second edition of theRusskaya Pravda manifested further democratization of Pestel's views. It demanded immediate emancipation of theRussian serfs with their land, limitations of the right tolandownership, creation of public and private land-funds, elimination of classprivileges, and the granting of political rights to males over 20 years of age.
Pestel was a staunch advocate of arepublic and of state centralization. According to his summary of theRusskaya Pravda called "Constitution. State precept" (Конституция. Государственный завет), a one-chamber People'sVeche (Народное вече) would become Russia'slegislative body. A SovereignDuma (Державная дума) was pronounced theexecutive branch. A SupremeSobor (Верховный собор) was givenjudicial powers. In 1825 Pavel Pestel conducted negotiations with thePolish Patriotic Society [pl;ru;uk], discussing the possibility of joint revolutionary actions.
On 13 December 1825 (the day before the Decembrists came out in open revolt in Saint Petersburg) Pavel Pestel was arrested inTulchin (in Podolia) in relation to an attempt to assassinate[citation needed]Emperor Nicholas I. He gave evidence against many Decembrists "to save their names for history" and they were detained because of him. But he did not know the real history of the Decembrist societies. For example, there is an opinion now, that just the Ordain of Russian knights, linked toAlexander von Benckendorff, was the main secret organization and not Pestel's Salvation Union. His andBestuzhev-Ryumin's evidence had the effect of encouraging the members of the Trial Committee (some of them relatives of Decembrists or even the members of secret societies) to hang Pestel and Bestuzhev-Ryumin to stop their evidence.[4][5]He was hanged with four other Decembrists in thePeter and Paul Fortress a few months later.
