The charter of the union of welfare in the reflection of investigative testimony and memoirs of S. P. Trubetskoy

The charter of the Union of Welfare, the largest Decembrist organization, the “Statute of Laws”, also known as the “Green Book” has survived to this day. A significant amount of the document’s provisions focused on the internal structure, as well as the main activities of the secret society. One of the authors of the statute, S. P. Trubetskoy, in his investigative testimony and memoirs, presented several versions of the most important points of the “Statute of Laws”. This opens up an opportunity for the researcher to compare these descriptions with the original text of the charter to analyze the features of Trubetskoy’s memory and verify the accuracy and reliability of his testimony and memories. A comparative analysis of retrospective descriptions with the text of the charter document also makes it possible to identify the ideas, plans, and intentions of the organizers of the Union of Welfare, which were not reflected in the original statute of the Decembrist society and were preserved only in the memory of S. P. Trubetskoy. Until now, the historiography has not set the task of comparative analysis of the descriptions of the charter of the Union of Welfare belonging to one of the leaders of the Decembrist movement.