18.12.2025 – 29.03.2026
Curatorial team:
Natalia Avtonomova
Anna Korndorf
Alla Lukanova
Evgeny Lukyanov
Tatyana Potapova
Architect:
Anna Ilyina
In the Manifesto regarding the events of 14 December 1825, Emperor Nicholas I declared: ‘…justice forbids mercy towards criminals. Having been exposed by investigation and trial, they shall each receive the punishment deserved by their deeds’. Five Decembrists —Kondraty Ryleyev, Pavel Pestel, Pyotr Kakhovsky, Mikhail Bestuzhev-Ryumin, and Sergei Muravyov-Apostol — were hanged; more than 120 others were sentenced to penal servitude and exile in Siberia…
Over the two centuries that separate us from the uprising on Senate Square, state memory politics and historiographical assessments of the Decembrists’ activities have changed repeatedly and profoundly. By sending the elite of the noble rebels to Siberia, the Emperor believed he was condemning both them and their projects of state reform to eternal oblivion. History, however, judged otherwise. The centenary of the December uprising was marked with extraordinary pomp and reverence. In the Winter Palace — where interrogations of the principal instigators had once taken place in the presence of Nicholas I — the Museum of the Revolution opened, and documents relating to the history of the Decembrist movement were displayed in the Nicholas Hall.
Since then, many hundreds of serious scholarly studies have been written on various aspects of the Decembrist movement, and the Decembrists themselves have been the subject of novels, films, plays, cycles of paintings and drawings and exhibitions. These works have transformed the image of the brilliant officers who sacrificed themselves for a great utopian idea into one of the most romanticised ideas in Russian culture.
The exhibition at the In artibus Foundation explores an extraordinarily important theme within this tragic history: the lives of the Decembrists in Siberia. The display is built around unique visual materials created during penal servitude and exile by the participants in the uprising and those close to them. Today, most of these intimate yet exceptionally valuable artefacts are held in major Russian collections: the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the State Hermitage Museum, the State Historical Museum, the Scientific Library of Moscow State University, the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) and the All-Russian A.S. Pushkin Museum. Presenting them together in our galleries has been made possible through the joint efforts of an entire team of curators.
Of particular value within the exhibition are three thematic collections that miraculously survived the whirlwind of Russian history.
First and foremost is the unique portrait gallery of the Decembrists created by Nikolai Bestuzhev, one of the leading figures of the Northern Society. The artist portrayed all of the exiles he encountered in penal servitude: leaders and rank-and-file participants, officers and civilians. A separate lyrical strand within this series is formed by portraits of the Decembrists’ wives, who followed their husbands to Siberia despite the hardships and their separation from children and relatives who remained in central Russia.
The second special section of the exhibition examines the vast graphic legacy of the Decembrist naturalist Pyotr Borisov. Over many years of research during his exile, he created images of almost all species of plants of the Daurian flora and bird species of the Trans-Baikal region. This work was an enormous contribution to the study of the region’s vegetation and ornithology and was highly valued by the international scientific community. Scholars believe that Pyotr Borisov produced no fewer than 670 images. Only 465 drawings have survived to the present day, more than 300 of which are included in the exhibition.
Finally, thematically adjoining the gallery of nature studies and portraits of the Decembrists are views of Petrovsky Zavod, Chita and the settlements, made by Bestuzhev and other Decembrists. These are complemented by sheets from the album Gold Washing in Eastern Siberia by the Swedish artist Carl Mazér, who travelled beyond the Urals between 1848 and 1851, and by a series of Siberian landscapes created in the 1860s by Pavel Kosharov, the first professional artist in Tomsk.
The nearly 500 drawings by Decembrists and travelling artists brought together in the exhibition form a kind of living visual history, seen not from the current official vantage point from above, nor from the academic distance of scholarly approaches, but from within, from the closest and most subjective perspective of those involved and witnesses to the events. It is no coincidence that the majority of the works presented are watercolours, the creation of which required neither specialist artistic training nor elaborate materials. Small sheets could be sent home as keepsakes for relatives and preserved even in the harsh conditions of Siberian life. The Decembrists copied Bestuzhev’s portrait and landscape compositions or requested authorised replicas, commissioned bouquets and images of birds from Borisov for their personal albums, and sketched children and friends during shared walks and family celebrations in exile. Today, these fragile testimonies rarely leave their repositories, which makes the exhibition at the In artibus Foundation a remarkable opportunity to see the entire Siberian legacy in a single space.
Executed at the highest level of amateur album drawing, these works not only represent a fascinating cross-section of the watercolour portraiture and landscape art so widespread at the time but are also inseparably connected with the everyday life and practical activities of the Decembrists in Siberia. Images of the meagre prison and settlement existence, sketches of houses built according to the inhabitants’ own designs, their vegetable gardens and greenhouses, Buryat yurts, and surveying work around Chita make it possible, at least in part, to imagine the intense activity that the Decembrists undertook in Siberia despite their sentence of political death. Many of them, notwithstanding the ban on publishing, wrote political, scholarly and literary works and memoirs. A number of settlers devoted themselves to the study of the region’s nature and ethnography, its geography and history. They drew maps, engaged in soap-making and agronomy, meteorology and agricultural breeding. As some of the most educated people of their time, the Decembrists saw education as the key to the future transformation of society and the establishment of better and more just foundations. They not only tirelessly taught local children but also made an enormous contribution to the creation and development of schools and promoted the spread of universal, class-independent children’s education in Siberia — an achievement without parallel in Russia at the time.
Preserving faith in their vocation and demonstrating extraordinary strength of spirit, they managed, in the most unfavourable circumstances, to find absorbing pursuits and to immerse themselves in them completely, achieving results remembered with gratitude by many generations of descendants. And, no less importantly, in Siberia they lived full lives rich in vivid moments, despite the harsh verdict of fate, and did not limit their biographies to a single, albeit ‘historic’, act.
