Russia under the Old regime

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also a political innovation of revolutionary dimensions. Novikov broke with the tradition which held that the state and it alone had the right to act on behalf of'the land'. From him and his associates, society first learned it could take care of its own needs.

Novikov is nevertheless classified as a political conservative because of his determination to work 'within the system', as one would put it today. A freemason and follower of Saint-Martin, he thought all evil stemmed from man's corruption, not from the institutions under which he lived. He mercilessly exposed 'vice' and promoted with such enthusiasm useful knowledge because of the conviction that only by improving man could one improve mankind. He never questioned the autocratic form of government or even serfdom. This stress on man rather than the environment became a hallmark of Russian conservatism.

Alexander Radishchev, the pioneer Russian liberal-radical, was a figure of far lesser import although thanks to the tireless and well-financed efforts of Soviet propaganda institutes he is the better known of the two. His fame rests on one book, The Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow (p. 149) in which, using the then popular device of a fictional travel account, he exposed the seamier sides of Russian provincial life. The writing is execrable and on literary merits alone the book would hardly deserve mention. The ideology is so confused that critics are still in fundamental disagreement about what the author intended: to advocate violent change or merely to warn that unless reforms were made in good time violence would inevitably break out. Unlike Novikov, whose intellectual roots were in freemasonry and Anglo-German sentimental-ism (he abhorred Voltaire), Radishchev drank deeply at the source of French Enlightenment, showing a marked preference for its more extreme materialist wing (Helvetius and d'Holbach). In one of his last writings, completed before his death by suicide, he dealt with the question of the immortality of the soul; and although he came out on the affirmative side of the argument, the negative side clearly was written with greater conviction. In a last message before his suicide he wrote -anticipating Dostoevsky's Kirillov-that only he who took his life was his own master.

A man holding such ideas was not likely to accept the old regime at face value or agree to work within its framework. His proposals, as has been said, were extremely vague, and yet because of his philosophic position and indubitable opposition to serfdom he has been acknowledged by liberals and radicals as their forerunner. Pushkin's instinct told him that Radishchev was an impudent fool, and it is apparently no accident that the figure of Evgenii in the 'Bronze Horseman' bears resemblance to Radishchev.8 Both Novikov and Radishchev were arrested during the panic which