There is a legend that the Decembrists on Senate Square forced soldiers to shout: “Long live Konstantin, long live the Constitution!”, explaining that the Constitution is the wife of the heir to the throne, Konstantin Pavlovich. We checked how true this legend is.

On December 14 (26), 1825, an attempted coup took place in St. Petersburg, which will go down in history as the “Decembrist uprising.” The formal reason for it was a complex legal situation when, after the death of the childless Emperor Alexander, the throne was to be inherited by his next oldest brother, Constantine. The latter, three years before these events, notified Alexander in writing of his renunciation of the throne, and the emperor secretly approved this decision and the transfer of inheritance to the third son of Paul I, Nicholas. However, after Alexander's death I Grand Duke Nicholas, along with other senior officials of the state and the regiments of the Imperial Guard, took the oath to Emperor Constantine. And only after some time, having become convinced of his relative’s reluctance to rule, he decided to declare himself emperor. This decision was supported by the Senate early in the morning of December 14, and in the morning the officers, whose goal was the abolition of the autocracy and the abolition of serfdom, led about 800 soldiers of the Moscow Life Guards Regiment against the future government. Later they were joined by units of the 2nd battalion of the Grenadier Regiment and sailors of the Guards Marine Crew in the amount of at least 2,350 people.

This is how Maya Kucherskaya describes one of the key episodes of the uprising in book "Konstantin Pavlovich" from the series “ZhZL”:

“In the square there were random shouts: “Long live Emperor Constantine! Long live the constitution!” The conspirators assured the soldiers and ordinary people that the Constitution was the wife of the new emperor. This looked like the truth: everyone knew that Konstantin’s wife was a Pole, which means her name must be non-Russian, non-native, you’ll break your tongue... It’s unknown what kind of wit was making a pun here, but his joke went down in history.”

This description of events has become widespread and is found in the works of more than one historian.

To begin with, we note that the introduction of a constitution was indeed one of the main goals of the Decembrists. And if in Poland, the homeland of Konstantin Pavlovich’s wife Zhanetta Grudzinskaya, the basic law appeared in 1815 thanks to Emperor Alexander, then in the rest of the Russian Empire the power of the monarch was still essentially unlimited. The Decembrists offered a variety of options for stopping this - from moderate project Nikita Muravyov to radical "Russian Truth" Pavel Pestel.

As for the slogan “Long live Emperor Constantine!” Long live the Constitution!” it definitely sounded. Historians differ only in the exact wording: in particular, some write that the exclamation sounded like “For Constantine and the Constitution!”, which does not change the meaning of what was said. This is precisely the option demonstrated in the 2019 film “Union of Salvation.”

However, this does not answer the main question for us: did the Decembrists really present the constitution to the soldiers as the name of the wife of the legitimate monarch? One of the first printed references to this episode occurs in “Notes of Pyotr Andreevich Karatygin. 1805–1879", published by the son of the famous actor a year after the death of his parent. In them, Karatygin, who witnessed the uprising, writes: “So, for example, everyone knows that the soldiers carried away by the rebellion positively did not know the real reason for the indignation; their bosses and leaders, forcing them to shout: “Long live the Constitution!”, assured the soldiers that this was the wife of Konstantin Pavlovich.”

But even earlier, in 1869–1870, they came out memories a direct participant in these events, the Decembrist Andrei Rosen, in which the following quote appears:

“It is also true that when cries were heard in the crowd: “Better instead of Constantine, a constitution!” and when several people were asked, “Who is this constitution?” - then they answered: “This is the wife of Constantine.”

Thus, we have at least two eyewitness accounts confirming the version about the “wife of Constantine.” However, this episode is nevertheless called “apocryphal” by many historians, and the description of the details varies among different authors. Therefore, we cannot give a confident verdict of “True” here.