Russia under the Old regime

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seized St Petersburg after the outbreak of the French Revolution and sentenced to lifelong exile. They were pardoned and released on the death of Catherine by her contrary son, Paul 1.

The Decembrist movement, to which allusion has been made earlier (p. 188), was for sheer drama and the number and eminence of persons involved not equalled until the socialist-revolutionary turmoil of the 1870s. Yet it is difficult to make a case that it was a Russian movement properly speaking because its inspiration, ideals, and even forms of organization came directly from western Europe. They were all derived from the experience of post-Napoleonic France and Germany where many Russian dvoriane spent two or three years during the campaigns of 1812-13 and the occupation which ensued. It was testimony to the cosmopolitanism of young Russian aristocrats that they felt so completely at home in the political ferment of the Restoration era they thought it possible to transplant to their native land the political programmes of a Benjamin Constant, Destutt de Tracy, or the American constitution. Once the conspiracy failed, these ideas evaporated, and the next generation of intellectuals turned to an entirely different source. That source was German Idealism. Not that Russian intellectuals understood the intricate and often exceedingly abstruse doctrines of the Idealist school: for few of them had the requisite philosophic training and some (e.g. the critic Belinskii) lacked knowledge of German and had to rely on secondhand accounts. But as is always the case with intellectual history - in contrast to history or philosophy - the important fact is not the exact meaning but the public reception of a man's ideas. Russian intellectuals of the 1820S-40S turned with such enthusiasm to the theories of Schelling and Hegel because they rightly sensed that they would find in them ideas capable of justifying what they felt and yearned for; and indeed they extracted from them only what they needed.

In Russia, as elsewhere, the principal consequence of Idealism was greatly to enhance the creative role of the human mind. Kant's critique of empirical theories had this inadvertent result that it transformed the mind from a mere recipient of sensory impressions into an active participant in the process of cognition. The manner in which intelligence, through its inbuilt categories, perceived reality was in itself an essential attribute of that reality. With this argument, the Idealist school which sprung up to overshadow Empiricism, gave a weapon to all those interested in promoting the human mind as the supreme creative force - that is, in the first place, the intellectuals. It was now possible to argue that ideas were every bit as 'real' as physical facts, if not more so. 'Thought' broadly defined to include feelings, sensations, and, above all, creative artistic impulses was raised to a status of equality with 'Nature'