Eleven women followed the condemned Decembrists to Siberia, giving up the lives they knew. Two of them — Ekaterina Trubetskaya and Maria Volkonskaya — spent years in Irkutsk, and their homes are now museums.
The decision
After the uprising of 14 December 1825, more than a hundred of its participants were sentenced to hard labour and exile in Siberia. Their wives were allowed to follow them — at enormous cost. They gave up the privileges of their rank, and children born to them in Siberia lost their noble status by law. Eleven women followed their husbands or fiancés.
Ekaterina Trubetskaya was the first to go, in 1826. Maria Volkonskaya, daughter of General Raevsky, a hero of 1812, had to leave her infant son behind in the capital; she was not allowed to take him with her.
Hard labour and settlement
The years of hard labour were spent at the Nerchinsk mines, the Chita stockade and Petrovsky Zavod. The women lived beside the prisons, fought for visits, wrote letters on behalf of husbands who were forbidden to write, and sustained the whole exile community. Then came settlement: families were scattered among the villages of Irkutsk Province, and in the 1840s some were permitted to live in Irkutsk itself.
The Irkutsk houses
The Trubetskoy house became a place where children were taught — not only the family’s own. The Volkonsky house, said to have been moved from the village of Urik, became a centre of the city’s social and musical life, with evenings, amateur theatricals and concerts. Irkutsk society, wary at first, came to accept the exiled families as its own.
Ekaterina Trubetskaya died in Irkutsk in 1854 and was buried at the Znamensky Convent with her children who had died young. She did not live to see the amnesty proclaimed by Alexander II in 1856.
Remembrance
The story of the Decembrist wives became one of the best-known in Russian culture, not least through Nikolai Nekrasov’s poem “Russian Women” about Trubetskaya and Volkonskaya. Today both houses belong to the Irkutsk Decembrists Museum, and music is played again in the Volkonskys’ drawing room.
