Decembrist wives

A group of young St.Petesrburg officers revolted in December 1825. They demanded a new liberal costitution and the peasants' freedom from serfdom. December is in Russian dekabr and this is why the revolutionaires are called dekabrists or decembrists. The revolt was soon crushed. A few of the movement's leaders were hanged. The rest were sent to exile in Siberia, first to Chita and Nerchinsk and later to nearby locations where new mines had jus been opened.

Eleven wives of the condemned followed their husbands to exile. This was allowed only if they abandoned their relatives, their name, property and even their children. Among them were princess Marija Volkonskaja, countess Jekaterina Trubetskaja and Polina Annenkova, who did not even speak Russian because she was French. The wives could meet with their husbands once in a week escorted by an officer. Other times the husbands toiled in 300 feet deep chilly mines from six in the morning to eleven in the evening. Because of the energetic activity of the wives the quality of living of the condemned gradually picked up. And thirty-one years later, Summer 1856, with the ascent of Alexander II to the throne, the Decembrists received amnesty, their rights, privileges, and titles restored. When this happened, Anton Henrik and his accomplices had served just one year in the same Nerchinsk mining region.

Dekabrist wife is still a well-known notion in Russia. It means an exemplary and self-sacrificing wife. Above Polina Annenkova, born Greub and her husband Ivan Annenkov who had met her in a fashion shop in St.Petersburg. Annenkov was fabulously rich, married Polina in Siberia, and the couple was released with the others after the thirty-one years' exile. For the rest of her life Polina Annenkova used a link of her husband's iron chains as a bracelet. She recorded life in Siberia in detail in Russian Antiquity Jan-May 1888 (Annenkova, P.E. Autobiography).