Testimonies of foreign eyewitnesses about December 14, 1825

Abstract. The article is devoted to the testimonies of foreign eyewitnesses about the events in St. Petersburg on December 14, 1825, which was marked by a rebellion in the
troops of the Imperial Guard during the accession of Emperor Nicholas I to the throne. The purpose of the article is to examine the set of all the memoirs and epistolary sources that have been identified over the past 200 years, written by foreign eyewitnesses who described the events of this significant day. Previously, these sources have never been considered as a separate complex, and most of them have not been analyzed in terms of their belonging to a broader body of archival evidence that requires further identification. In addition, almost all of these texts have only been translated into Russian in the last 15 years, published in small-circulation editions, and have not yet been fully understood by Russian experts as a new and valuable group of sources. The sources for this article were the memoirs and epistolary texts of foreign authors themselves. The article highlights the features, main characteristics, and valuable fragments of these sources, including in the light of issues that have already been raised in historiography and have not yet been resolved. The author concludes that it is necessary to systematically examine the surviving archives of foreign embassies in order to introduce new sources that offer new perspectives for research.

Keywords: memoirs, letters, dispatches, foreigners, diplomats, eyewitnesses, St. Petersburg, rebellion, December 14, Decembrists, Nicholas I.