Discussion
“Disruption and Resistance: Studying the Decembrists’ Wives”
The archives of the Third Section contain letters from the Decembrists’ wives addressed to A. Kh. Benkendorff dating from June 1830 that advocate for better living conditions for their husbands and themselves upon their transfer from Chita prison to the newly constructed fortress at Petrovsky Zavod in Siberia. These letters clearly contradict earlier perceptions of the Decembrists’ wives as passive participants in the lives of their husbands. This view, posited by Iurii Lotman in his seminal article “The Decembrist in Everyday Life,” serves to reduce the wives’ individual and collective agency and depicts them as women who chose to follow their Decembrist husbands into Siberian exile because they were conditioned to follow literary models, specifically, the example of Natalia Dolgorukova in Kondraty Ryleev’s poetry. Closer examination of their letters indicates that a much more nuanced reading is necessary, and that the wives’ resistance disrupted societal conventions in several ways. My analysis builds upon the work of Michelle Lamarche Marrese in “’The Poetics of Everyday Behavior’ Revisited: Lotman, Gender, and the Evolution of Russian Noble Identity.” Marresse calls for a new approach to studying noblewomen’s lives. To provide this new perspective, I will contextualize the Decembrists’ wives’ letters as well as highlight their actions which facilitated the establishment of a tradition of active resistance to authoritarianism by prisoners’ wives. We can even see direct parallels in the present day to the statements made by Yulia Navalnaya and Evgeniia Kara-Murza, though their husbands’ incarceration in the most severe penal colonies in Siberia under the most dire conditions surpasses what the Decembrists experienced (with the exception, perhaps, of Mikhail Lunin in the Akatui prison). Vladimir Kara- Murza directly compares his wife to a "dekabristka," though both Evgenia Kara-Murza and Yulia Navalnaya combine the traditional values of spousal duty and devotion with very public proclamations of resistance to authority and demonstrate their disruptive power.
