The morning of December 26, 1825 (O.S.), opened in St. Petersburg the way Russian winter mornings often do, with cold that does not so much bite as settle in and refuse to leave. Senate Square lay hard and white under the sky, the Neva locked beneath ice thick enough to bear cannon and men, or so it seemed until it did not. By midmorning, roughly three thousand soldiers stood assembled in a rigid square, boots planted, muskets idle, breath hanging like unspoken questions. They were members of the Life Guards, the sort of men raised to obey without hesitation, yet here they were refusing an oath. Not to God. Not to Russia. But to a new emperor whose legitimacy had become suddenly uncertain. In that hesitation, in that pause long enough for frost to creep into fingers and resolve, the first Russian revolution revealed itself, not as a roar, but as a held breath.

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