It was impossible to shut out ideas. The years of conflict with Napoleon had shown to many of the Russian officers who had entered Paris with the victorious allies the difference between the situation in Russia and that in western Europe, and they willingly joined with the surviving older enlightened thinkers of the eighteenth century to make certain demands upon the government. The success of the United States as a republican federation affected many of them, and they began to dream of reorganizing their own country in the same fashion. The result was the development of a number of secret societies modelled on the Tugendbund (League of Virtue) in Germany and the Carbonari in Italy. Most of them demanded at least the limitation of the power of the tsar and the granting of more or less definite rights to the rest of the population. Some even demanded the complete abolition of serfdom. These societies, which were parallel to secret societies in Russian-occupied Poland, existed in all important garrisons of the Russian Empire. The Southern Society formed by Colonel Pestel among the Russian troops in Ukraine was the most radical of the entire number. Yet it cannot be said clearly that even this Society thought much of any special rights for Ukraine. It was composed largely of Russians or Russianized Ukrainians who had acquired rank and wealth in the Russian service, and they were not disposed in any numbers to do anything to harm the national unity. They made no effort to reach the masses of the people and win them over to any special cause. In a word these secret societies, instead of building on the past, sought rather to create something new and theoretically ideal. Conditions came to a head on the occasion of the death of Alexander I, when there ensued a dynastic tangle. The succession should have gone to the next younger brother Constantine, but he had abdicated under confusing circumstances. Finally on December 14, 1825, when it became certain that he was not going to assume the power, the third brother Nicholas ordered the troops to swear allegiance to him. When part of the Guards Regiments in Petersburg refused, under the leadership of members of these societies, he suppressed the recalcitrants by military force. It is interesting that the only serious fighting was in Chernihiv, where the regular garrison revolted under the influence of Colonel Pestel and was almost wiped out by loyal troops. Yet it is difficult to say that this was a manifestation of a Ukrainian desire for independence, since it was closely tied up with the movement in St. Petersburg and there is little evidence that the leaders of the movement had given any thought to the nature of the decentralization which they wished to introduce.