On 13 December 2025, the exhibition 14 december 1825 begins its run in the Winter Palace, marking the 200th anniversary of the Decembrist Uprising on Saint Petersburg’s Senate Square.

The display brings together more than a hundred works of painting, graphic art, sculpture and applied art, as well as manuscripts and documents. The central theme is the events of 14 December. Attention will also be paid, however, to the interregnum – a special period in history of which the conspirators took advantage – and the investigation into the Decembrists’ affair.

Among the exhibits are autograph writings, portraits and personal belongings of participants in the uprising, watercolour views of Nicholas I’s rooms in the Winter Palace, painted depictions of the events on Senate Square, and officers’ and soldiers’ uniforms belonging to the rebellious regiments and units that sided with the Emperor.

The narrative is built upon materials from the collections of the State Hermitage Museum, State Archive of the Russian Federation, Institute of Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Pushkin House), All‑Russia Pushkin Museum and Military‑Historical Museum of Artillery, Engineers and Signal Corps.

The exhibition is housed in the Winter Palace for good reason – it is not only where one of the largest collections of artefacts from the Decembrist movement is kept, but also where the memory of the events of 14 December 1825, which took place here, remains alive. To give the fullest possible impression of all the locations directly or indirectly connected with the first revolutionaries from the nobility, a quest has been devised. It will immerse museum visitors in the atmosphere on the day of the uprising and the slightly later period that saw the interrogation and investigation of the Decembrists.

The curators are Viacheslav Anatolyevich Fyodorov, Head of the Department of the History of Russian Culture, and Irina Mikhailovna Zakharova, Chief Curator of the Department of the History of Russian Culture.

A scholarly catalogue has been prepared for the exhibition, with articles by Sergei Vladimirovich Mironenko, Victor Mikhailovich Faibisovich, Olga Valerianovna Edelman, Marina Viktorovna Sidorova, Irina Mikhailovna Zakharova and Galina Alexandrovna Printsova, as well as an illustrated publication by Irina Mikhailovna Zakharova, Dekabristy v Sibiri [The decembrists in Siberia].