Wednesday, Feb. 09, 2011
Decembrists' Square, St. Petersburg
The St. Petersburg plaza, which was dubbed Decembrists' Square following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, recalls an earlier rebellion: the uprising led by mostly well-to-do revolutionaries, many of them army officers, who were in favor of reform and opposed the ascension of Czar Nicholas I. Some 3,000 men massed in the square during the December 1825 revolt, which was violently put down. Five Decembrists were executed, while many more were jailed or sent to waste away in obscurity in Siberia.