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officers, but they were educated through the Napoleonicwars in Western, primarily French, ideas, and theylooked forward not backward; they were the firstexamples of that 'conscience-stricken' nobility whichplayed so notable a part in the cultural and social developmentof nineteenth-century Russia. The Decembristsplanned a radical reconstruction of government andsociety; some of them on liberal and (borrowing fromthe American constitution) federal lines, with a strictlylimited monarchy, abolition of serfdom and the guaranteeof the rights of the individual; others of them ondemocratic republican lines but with a strong, centralized,revolutionary dictatorship. Thus they were notunited in their aims. Nor did they have any backingin the country at large. They were easily, thoughbloodily, suppressed by the army, the great bulk ofwhich proved loyal to Nicholas I (cf. pp. 349-350).The struggle of 1730 had settled that autocracy shouldnot formally be limited, but there had been no attemptto define the succession to the throne, which continuedto be all too uncertain until tsar Paul in 1797 issued a' fundamental law,' the first appearance of the term inRussian law. This was an adaptation of the rulesgoverning German princely families (Paul's wife was aWurttemberg princess) and its essential was that thecrown should pass in the direct male line. Thus atlong last an orderly basis of succession was laid down,and one that was followed. Yet destiny ironicallydecreed that Paul himself, like his father Peter III,should be deposed, with the assent of his son Alexander I,and murdered; that his second son should renounce hisright to succeed his childless brother Alexander; thathis grandson, Alexander II, should be assassinated; andthat his great-great-grandson, Nicholas II, should beforced to abdicate and be butchered.So the Romanov dynasty ended; or more strictly thatof Holstein-Gottorp. Ever since 1762 all the rulers ofRussia were descended from Catherine the Great,German on both sides, and her husband Peter III, dukeof Holstein-Gottorp, German by his father, Russian byhis mother, a daughter of Peter the Great. And all86