The Icon and The Axe

1. The Troubled Enlightenment

AS DISTINCT from the pattern that developed in the early modern West, secular enlightenment in Russia began late, proceeded fitfully, and was largely the work of monks or foreign technicians—always in response to imperial commands and patronage.

Even Soviet scholars who minimize the importance of religion and generally maximize Great Russian influences now tend to date the beginning of the Russian Enlightenment from the influx of learned White Russian and Ukrainian monks into Moscow at the time of schism in the Russian Church.¹ Monks and seminarians indeed continued to play a large role in the Russian Enlightenment down into the twentieth century, and are responsible for some of the religious intensity of much Russian secular thought. At the same time, the Westernized regions of the empire played a key role in opening up the Russian mind to the speculative philosophy and classical art forms which soon dominated aristocratic culture. While under Polish dominance, Kiev had been transformed into an eastern bastion of scholastic education and baroque architecture. For nearly a century after its return to Russian control, Kiev was the most literate city in the empire. The Kiev-Mogila Academy (which was not made a theological academy until the nineteenth century) was the closest approximation to a Western-style liberal arts university. Between 1721 and 1765, twenty-eight seminaries were founded—all on the Kievan model; and it is probably not too much to say that Kiev taught Russia not only to read and write in the eighteenth century, but also to think in the abstract, metaphysical terms which were to prove so attractive to the aristocratic intellectuals.²

Foreign technicians were also bearers of literary and secular ideas in the early modern period of Russian history. Yet the various military, commercial, and medical specialists that flooded into Russia in increasing numbers from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century were, for the most part, kept in hermetically sealed settlements in the major ports and administrative centers. The price of extensive residence or broad Russian contact was almost invariably complete assimilation: change of name, religion, and dress. Those willing to pay this price did not generally have very much intellectual or cultural vitality to contribute to their adopted land.

Peter the Great was important not for introducing foreign technical ideas into Russia, but for making them the basis of a new state-sponsored type of education. By making a measure of elementary education obligatory for much of his service aristocracy and by introducing an official civil script, a reformed alphabet, and innumerable Western words and concepts into the language, Peter prepared the way for a more purely secular enlightenment. Shortly after his death, the first institute of secular scientific learning, the Academy of Sciences, was established in St. Petersburg along lines that he had prescribed. By entrusting the organization and staffing of the Academy to the German mathematician and natural philosopher Christian Wolff, Peter recognized the dependence on foreigners that would continue under his successors but willed to them his own bias in favor of secular learning. Whereas the school system set up early in Peter’s reign in key Russian cities by Pietist evangelists from Halle soon collapsed, the academy organized by Wolff (who had been forced to leave Halle by fearful Pietists) survived and gradually became the center of a new educational system.³

Only, however, under Elizabeth in the 1750’s did the work of the Academy begin to have a broader impact on Russian culture. By then the many-sided effects of Peter’s opening to the West had begun to reach a fruition that can properly be called a Russian Enlightenment. Within the space of a few years in the mid-fifties the Academy issued a number of ethnographic and geographic publications that broadly stimulated aristocratic society with fresh information about other cultures; and Russia acquired a university, permanent theater, academy of arts, decorative porcelain factory, and so on.

The early years of Catherine’s reign were perhaps the most decisive of all, for the new sovereign virtually commanded the literate public to consider a new spectrum of problems—problems ranging from politics to architecture to agriculture. Whereas the number of books printed annually in the Russian empire had risen from a low of seven in the year after Peter the Great’s death to twenty-three by the end of the fifties, the average in the 1760’s leaped to 105 a year: the first in a series of geometric increases. Whereas almost all of the few books printed in the first half of the eighteenth century were religious, 40 per cent of the eight thousand books printed in the second half of the century (almost all of them during Catherine’s reign) were purely secular.⁴ The number of new books put in circulation in Russia in the 1760’s and 1770’s was more than seven times the number for the 1740’s and 1750’s.⁵

Accompanying this sudden growth in the number of books printed (and also imported) went an extraordinary spread of secular learning to the provinces. Outlying regions that had been bastions of religious conservatism and xenophobia began to make important contributions to secular enlightenment. The poet Tred’iakovsky came from Astrakhan; Lomonosov from Kholmogory; and the personnel for the first permanent Russian theater from Yaroslavl. The director and principal playwright of the theater, Sumarokov, came from Finland—as did most of the granite used for rebuilding St. Petersburg. The first provincial journals in Russian history appeared late in the eighties in Yaroslavl and in Tobol’sk in distant Siberia.⁶ Voltaire’s best translator (and most eloquent defender even after Catherine had become disillusioned with the Russian Enlightenment) came from the Siberian city of Orenburg.⁷

The sudden influx of private foreign tutors, and the efforts to transform provincial cities into imperial cultural and administrative centers, increased provincial involvement in the new secular culture. Also important were the sudden rash of scientific expeditions to the north and east in the sixties and seventies led by the great biologist, mineralogist, and linguist Peter Simon Pallas. Sponsored by the Academy of Sciences, these large-scale attempts to gather and collate scientific information of all sorts necessarily drew into their activities many provincial figures with first-hand knowledge of local conditions and problems.

The arrival of the Academy of Sciences as a serious institution for the higher scientific education of native Russians can be dated from the beginnings of group research by the Russian apprentices of Pallas and of the great mathematician Leonhard Euler. Despite blindness which overtook Euler shortly after he returned permanently to Russia in 1766, Euler wrote almost half of the eight hundred papers in his completed works during the years that remained in his life, which were eminently productive ones. His very infirmity forced him to rely on young Russian apprentices; and his previous experience as head of the Berlin academy fortified him with an ability to organize as well as inspire his fellow scientists. When he died in 1783, he left Russia with a significant number of Russian-speaking scientists capable of introducing advanced mathematics into the curricula of other educational institutions.⁸

Having taken away from Catherine the Great her personal cook, who provided his aging physique with richer food than it could digest, Euler repaid her by providing Russia with more food for thought than its youthful intellect could yet assimilate. But after his death three of his sons remained in Russia, at least for a time, to help begin the process; and Nicholas Fuss, the man who pronounced the eulogy at Euler’s burial in St. Petersburg, married his granddaughter and helped found an indigenous tradition of higher mathematical study in early-nineteenth-century Russia.

Even more important than this development of a native scientific tradition was the prior emergence of scientific self-confidence in the person of Michael Lomonosov, the best-known figure of the Russian Enlightenment. He was a scientist in both the Renaissance and the modern sense of the word: a universal man, symbolizing the arrival of Russia as a contributor to, rather than a mere dependency of, the secular scientific culture of Europe.⁹ The decisive moment in Lomonosov’s life came in the mid-thirties, when a new director of the Academy of Sciences requested that a number of well-trained Russian students be transferred from theological academies for scientific training at the gymnasium of the academy. As one of the small group chosen, Lomonosov arrived in St. Petersburg on New Year’s Day of 1736—a milestone in the cultural rise of the new capital, no less important than the arrival of Empress Anna for permanent residence just four years before.

From St. Petersburg, Lomonosov went to study with Christian Wolff, who had left the domain of Prussian pietism at Halle for the University of Marburg. There Lomonosov acquired not only the scientific training which enabled him to become a pioneer in the field of physical chemistry, but also a fascination with the institution of a university hitherto nonexistent in Russia. Upon his return, he immersed himself in the scientific activities of the St. Petersburg Academy, and also helped found Moscow University and give it an initial Germanic bias in favor of developing a library and research institutes.

Lomonosov was not only a scientist and educator but a poet, essayist, orator, and historian. He gathered the material which was sent to Voltaire for his biography of Peter the Great; questioned the then dominant “Norman” emphasis on the Germanic elements in early Russian civilization; and wrote a Russian grammar which served as the basic text on this subject from its appearance in 1755 until the 1830’s. By praising vernacular Russian and providing guidance for its use, Lomonosov helped clear the way for truly national forms of expression—even though he wrote most of his literary production in a more bombastic language replete with Church Slavonic forms.

Lomonosov was in no sense a revolutionary. He rejected sloth and superstition wherever he found it. But he admired royalty no less than most other leaders of the European Enlightenment, and his religious beliefs were considerably more fervent. His new methods of rhetoric and panegyric were invoked for the commemoration of coronations and Christian holidays; his new chemical techniques for glass manufacture were used for church mosaics. His curiosity extended up into the sky (where he and a colleague duplicated Benjamin Franklin’s experiments with electricity and fascinated St. Petersburg society by producing “thunder machines” that brought electrical charges into bottles during thunderstorms), and far out to sea (where he proposed the founding of an international academy to develop more scientific methods of navigation and championed an expedition to find a northern passage to the Orient).

Lomonosov is, together with Pushkin, one of those rare figures admired by almost all factions in subsequent Russian thought. Those who came after him have looked back longingly, not only at the breadth of his accomplishment, but at his practical-minded attitude toward life. The passion of their nostalgia no less than the uniqueness of Lomonosov himself serves as a reminder that the Enlightenment in Russia was a relatively frail and insecure phenomenon compared to that of the West. Indeed, much of Lomonosov’s scientific work was not fully uncovered and understood by his countrymen until the early twentieth century.

After Lomonosov’s death in 1765, the Enlightenment seemed to be moving toward its greatest triumphs under the new empress, Catherine the Great. If Peter had opened a window to Europe and Elizabeth had decorated it with rococo frills, Catherine threw open the doors and began to rebuild the house itself. She looked beyond the technological accomplishments of the North European Protestant nations to the cultural glories of France and Italy and the political traditions of England. But this early optimism was soon to fade. The all-pervading sun of the Enlightenment found the Eastern skies more cloudy than they at first appeared.

The Dilemma of the Reforming Despot

THE REIGN of Catherine illustrates dramatically the conflict between theoretical enlightenment and practical despotism that bothered so many eighteenth-century European monarchs. Few other rulers of her time had such sweeping plans for reform and attracted so much adulation from the philosophes, yet few others were so poor in practical accomplishment. In her failure, however, she created the conditions for future change—posing vexing questions for the aristocracy while creating intolerable conditions for the peasantry. As the only articulate ideologist to rule Russia between Ivan IV and Lenin, she changed the terms of reference for Russian thought by linking Russian culture with that of France, and by attempting to base imperial authority on philosophic principles rather than hereditary right or religious sanction.

The attractions of France had, of course, been noticed earlier. Peter had visited the Sorbonne and sent three students to Paris for study in 1717. Kantemir and Tred’iakovsky both spent most of the thirties absorbing French culture in Paris. The former translated Molière and wrote independently in the manner of French satire; the latter, as secretary of the Academy of Sciences and court poet, began the wholesale introduction of Gallicisms into Russian speech. From the beginning, the uneasy aristocracy looked to French thought for philosophic guidance as well as forms of expression; and this philosophic thirst brought them into conflict with the guardians of Orthodoxy in the new state Church. Throughout Elizabeth’s reign the Holy Synod made repeated efforts to suppress Fontenelle’s Discourse on the Plurality of Worlds, with its popularized image of an infinite universe.¹⁰

Under Catherine, however, the stream became a flood. Fontenelle was freely published but hardly noticed. New books and ideas flowed in from France and were soon superseded by more daring and fashionable ones. The previous book was discarded before it had been used, like an unworn but suddenly outmoded hat. The first French thinker to enjoy popular vogue under Catherine was “the immortal Fénelon,” whose poem Télémaque provided an exciting image of a utopian society and whose Education of Girls partly inspired Catherine’s experiments in educating noble women.¹¹ Fénelon was succeeded by Montesquieu, and Montesquieu by Voltaire—with each infatuation more intense than the last.

Francomania had an artificial and programmatic quality that did much to determine the character—or lack thereof—of aristocratic culture. Contact with France took place frequently through intermediaries. Catherine herself acquired her own taste for things French during her education in Germany; the first systematic Russian translations of French works were by the German “Normanist” Gerhard Friedrich Miller, in a Russian journal which was an imitation of German imitations of Addison and Steele; Molière reached Russia largely through Baltic intermediaries, and his influence on Russian satire of Catherine’s day was mixed in with that of Ludvig Holberg, “the Danish Molière.” The Russian word for “French” is derived from German, and the word for “Paris” from Italian.¹²

If French culture often reached Russia through intermediaries, it was nonetheless generally viewed as a single, finished product to be rejected or accepted en bloc. Even more than in the original confrontation with the Byzantine, Russians sought to transplant French achievement without the critical spirit which had accompanied it. Catherine saw in the French Enlightenment the means of placing her rule on firm philosophic foundations and providing a national guide for the moral leadership of Europe. The Russian aristocracy used French culture to establish a common identity. The French tongue set them off from both the Russian- or Ukrainian-speaking peasantry and the German-, Swedish-, or Yiddish-speaking mercantile elements of the empire. Chateaux, parks, and theatrical productions provided a congenial and elegant place for leisured gatherings and communal functions and a relief from the austerities of long years of warfare.

Catherine described the purpose of her reign in one of her many philosophical parables: “the thornless rose that does not sting.”¹³ The rose represents virtue which can be attained only by following the guide, reason, and avoiding the irrational temptations that try to impede this secular pilgrim’s progress. Catherine saw no element of pain or unhappiness in true virtue which must naturally lead to “the heavenly city of the eighteenth century philosophers”: the rule of justice and right reason.

Her self-confident optimism helped her to create, and forced her to confront, the dilemma of the reforming despot. This dilemma was also to haunt her grandson Alexander I and his grandson Alexander II, while his grandson Nicholas II was to flee in terror from even facing it. How can one retain absolute power and a hierarchical social system while at the same time introducing reforms and encouraging education? How can an absolute ruler hold out hope for improvement without confronting a “revolution of rising expectations”? The two Alexanders, like Catherine, were to find it necessary to check the liberality of their earlier years with despotic measures later. Each of them was to be succeeded by a despot who would seek to block all reform. But the Prussian methods of these successors—Paul, Nicholas I, and Alexander III—could not solve essential problems of state, and thus rendered the need for reform even more imperative. By frustrating moderate reformers, moreover, Paul, Nicholas I, and Alexander III strengthened the hand of extremists in the reformist camp and saddled their imperial successors with artificially pent-up and exaggerated expectations.

The scent of violence hovered about all these imperial reformers. Catherine and Alexander I had each come to power by encouraging the assassination of their predecessors and next of kin; Alexander II, whose reforms were the most far-reaching of all, was rewarded not with gratitude but assassination.

It was almost certainly fear which drove Catherine first to confront the dilemma of reforming despotism. Her position on the throne was initially little more secure than that of her recently murdered husband, Peter III. Threatened in particular by the plan of Nikita Panin to limit severely imperial authority by an aristocratic Imperial Council, Catherine turned in 1763 to the drawing up of a comprehensive defense of absolute monarchy. After three separate drafts, she submitted it to a specially convened legislative commission of 1766–7 which had a majority of non-aristocratic elements subject to her bidding. The commission unanimously awarded Catherine the title “Catherine the Great, Wise, Mother of the Fatherland” and arranged for the publication in Russian, German, French, and Latin of the final draft of her flowery philosophic defense of monarchy, generally known as the Instruction, or Nakaz.¹⁴

Catherine and her successors paid a severe price, however, for this curious method of legitimizing usurpation. By undercutting the Panin proposals for bringing the aristocracy into the business of government, Catherine added to the already substantial sense of rootlessness which beset this class. The fact that she subsequently granted the aristocracy vast compensatory economic authority over their serfs and exemptions from government service only increased their capacity for idleness without increasing their sense of participation in affairs of state.

Even more important was the unsettling effect of justifying one’s right to power on the totally new grounds of natural philosophy. Though the legislative commission did not in fact codify any laws, its detailed discussion and formal approval of Catherine’s treatise helped put a large number of new and potentially subversive political ideas in circulation. According to the Nakaz, Russia was a European state, its subjects “citizens,” and its proper laws those of the rational, natural order rather than the traditional historical one. Although the Nakaz was not widely distributed within Russia, the legislative commission was broad enough in its representation to carry its ideas to every social group in Russia except the bonded peasantry. With four out of 18 million Russians represented by the 564 deputies, the commission was the first crude attempt at a genuinely national assembly since the zemsky sobors of the early seventeenth century;¹⁵ but it was strikingly different from all previous assemblies ever held on Russian soil in that it was totally secular. There was one deputy from the Synod, but none at all from the clerical estate.

Catherine’s basic idea of the “good” and “natural” encouraged scepticism not only toward revealed religion but toward traditional natural philosophy as well. Her “Instruction” directed men’s thinking not to ultimate truths or ideal prototypes but to a new relativistic and utilitarian perspective. It seems altogether appropriate that Jeremy Bentham, the father of English utilitarianism, was one of the most honored of foreign visitors to Catherine’s Russia; and that translated books of and about Bentham in Russia soon began to outsell the original editions in England.¹⁶

Like a true utilitarian, Catherine defined legislation as “the Art of conducting People to the greatest Good,” which is “whatever may be useful to mankind” in a given tradition and environment. Autocracy must rule through intermediary powers and clear laws, which require that the individual “be fully convinced that it was his Interest, as well as Duty, to preserve those Laws inviolable.” The French monarchy rightly appraised the subversive implications of such an approach to the justification of authority, confiscating some two thousand copies en route to France in 1771, and preventing any of the twenty-four foreign versions of the work from being printed there.¹⁷

Catherine admired not only Bentham but his adversary, Blackstone, whose Commentaries she carefully studied and had translated in three volumes. She was widely admired not only in England but also in Italy, where a vast treatise was dedicated to her in 1778, celebrating the victorious alliance of power and reason in the eighteenth century.¹⁸ Nearly one sixth of the articles in Catherine’s Nakaz were taken directly from the work of another Italian, Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishment, which armed Catherine with her conviction that crime comes from ignorance and poor laws, and punishment should be precise and pedagogic rather than arbitrary and vindictive.¹⁹

But it was always with the French that Catherine felt the greatest kinship. Commenting on the new alliance with France in 1756 just after it was concluded and well before her own accession to the throne, Catherine wrote that “if the gain is not great in commerce, we shall compensate ourselves with bales of intelligence.”²⁰

The bales had already begun to arrive with the first appearance of a French-language journal on Russian soil in 1755, and with the unprecedented sale of three thousand copies of Voltaire’s Philosophy of History in St. Petersburg alone within a few days of its appearance in 1756.²¹

Voltaire soon became the official historian of the Russian Empire and a kind of patron saint for the secular aristocracy. The many-sided French Enlightenment was thought to be all of a piece, with Voltaire at its center. Friend and foe alike spoke of Vol’ter’ianstvo (“Voltairianism”) as the ruling force in Western culture, just as they had spoken of Latinstvo (“Latinism”) in the fifteenth century. With Catherine’s active encouragement, much of the Russian aristocracy became enamored with Voltairianism, which had the general meaning of rationalism, scepticism, and a vague passion for reform. In the first year of her reign, at the age of 34, she opened a correspondence with Voltaire, who was nearly 70. Almost all of the sixty-odd separate works of Voltaire translated into Russian in the last third of the eighteenth century appeared during Catherine’s reign. At least 140 printed translations of Voltaire’s works were published in the course of the aristocratic century; numerous abstracts and handwritten copies were made; and no aristocratic library was thought complete if it did not contain a substantial collection of his works in the original French. The name of Voltaire was enthroned literally as well as figuratively; for the new high-backed, thin-armed easy chair in which Russian aristocrats seated themselves for after-dinner conversation was modeled on that on which Voltaire was often depicted sitting, and is known even today as a Vol’terovskoe kreslo or “Voltaire chair.”²²

If Voltaire was the symbol, the Gallicized German Friedrich Grimm was the major source of information for Catherine’s court. He supplemented his famed literary newsletter on the intellectual life of the salons with a voluminous correspondence with the Empress, who showered him with many favors, including eventual appointment as her minister in Hamburg. Grimm became a kind of public relations man for Catherine, and was probably only partly jesting when he rephrased the Lord’s prayer to read “Our mother, who art in Russia…”; changed the Creed into “I believe in one Catherine…”; and set a “Te Catherinam Laudamus” to the music of Paisiello.²³ Voltaire avoided distinctively Christian terminology, addressing Catherine as “a priest in your temple,” confessing that “there is no God but Allah, and Catherine is the prophet of Allah.”²⁴ Only a more systematic materialist like Helvetius was able to refrain from theistic references altogether, dedicating his last great work, On Man, His Intellectual Faculties and His Education, to her as a “bulwark against ‘Asiatic despotism,’ worthy by her intelligence of judging old nations as she is worthy of governing her own.”²⁵

On this all-important question of government, Catherine was most indebted to Montesquieu. His mighty Spirit of the Laws was both the final product of a lifetime of urbane reflection and the opening salvo in the “war of ideas” against the old order in France.²⁶ Within eighteen months of its first appearance in 1748, Montesquieu’s work had gone through twenty-two editions, and infected previously untouched segments of society with its ranging curiosity about politics, its descriptive and comparative approach, and its underlying determination to prevent arbitrary and despotic rule.

All these features of Montesquieu’s work appealed to the young empress as she sought to fortify herself for combat against the political chaos and religious mystique of Old Russia. Her attitude upon assuming power was that of one of her generals, who satirically remarked that the government of Russia must indeed be directed “by God himself—otherwise it is impossible to explain how it is even able to exist.”²⁷ Her Nakaz sought to introduce rational order into the political life of the Empire, and Montesquieu was her major source of inspiration. She set aside three hours each day for reading the master, referred to his Spirit of the Laws as her “prayer book,”²⁸ and derived nearly half of the articles in the Nakaz from his works.²⁹

To be sure, Catherine’s entire effort went against Montesquieu’s own assumption that Russia was foredoomed by its size and heritage to despotic rule; and she distorted or neglected some of his most celebrated ideas. Montesquieu’s aristocratic “intermediary bodies” between the monarch and his subjects served not, in Catherine’s proposal, to separate power between executive, legislative, and judicial functions but rather to consolidate government functions and create new lines of transmission for imperial authority.

Nevertheless, Catherine was closer to the spirit of Montesquieu’s politics than many who followed him more literally on specific points. Her effort to make monarchy unlimited yet fully rational; her sense of adjusting political forms to environmental necessities; her increasing recognition of the need for active aristocratic support so that the spirit of honor could be enlisted to support the rule of reason—all of this was clearly in the spirit of the man who did so much to turn men’s eyes away from the letter to the spirit of law.

If the Spirit of the Laws provided Catherine with the image of rationally ordered politics, the Encyclopedia of Diderot and D’Alembert, which began to appear three years later in 1751, provided the image of rationally ordered knowledge. Her enthusiasm for this work soon rivaled her passion for Montesquieu. D’Alembert declined Catherine’s invitation to serve as tutor to her son; but Diderot considered transferring the editorial side of his work to Riga, and eventually sold his library to Catherine and came to St. Petersburg.³⁰ Three volumes of the Encyclopedia had been translated almost immediately into Russian under the supervision of the director of Moscow University. A private translation was concurrently being made by the future historian Ivan Boltin, and many articles and sections were translated individually.

For the rational ordering of economic life, Catherine turned first (at Diderot’s suggestion) to the French physiocrat, Lemercier de la Rivière; then, following his unhappy visit to Russia,³¹ she sent two professors from Moscow to study under Adam Smith in Glasgow. Her most original approach was the founding in 1765 of a Free Economic Society for the Encouragement in Russia of Agriculture and Household Management: a kind of extra-governmental advisory body. Two years later she offered one thousand gold pieces for the best set of recommendations on how to organize an agricultural economy “for the common good.” The society received 164 entries in this remarkable Europe-wide contest, with the greatest response and the prize-winning essay coming from France.³²

In practice, however, there was no reorganization of agriculture, just as there was no new law code or synthesis of knowledge. The shock caused by the Pugachev uprising put an end to the languishing legislative commission and to the various efforts to make the Encyclopedia the basis for widespread public enlightenment. Boltin’s translation died at the letter “K”—the first of the host of uncompleted reference books with which Russian history is so tragically full.³³

Yet even while Cathering was preparing Pugachev for quartering, she continued to correspond with the Corsican revolutionary Paoli (and another restless Corsican, the then obscure Napoleon Bonaparte considered entering her service).³⁴

Only after the French Revolution did Catherine’s thoughts turn away from reform altogether to a final assertion of unleavened despotism. Even then she bequeathed the dilemma to Alexander I by assigning to him the Swiss republican La Harpe as a tutor and by surrounding him with an aristocratic entourage of Anglophile liberals. Alexander I in turn willed to Alexander II some of this dangerous taste for partial reform when a friend from his own liberal days, Michael Speransky, became one of the tutors.

At the end of her long trail of literary and literal seductions, Catherine left aristocratic Russia stimulated, but in no way satisfied. By sending most of the aristocratic elite abroad for education, she imparted a vague sense of possibility, a determination to “overtake and surpass” the Enlightenment of the West. Yet the actual reforms accomplished in her reign were too meager even to provide clear guidance toward this goal. From Catherine, aristocratic thinkers received only their inclination to look Westward for answers. They learned to think in terms of sweeping reforms on abstract, rationalistic grounds rather than piecemeal changes rooted in concrete conditions and traditions.

Particularly popular under Catherine was the vague idea that newly conquered regions to the south could provide virgin soil on which to raise out of nothing a new civilization. Voltaire told Catherine that he would come to Russia if Kiev were made the capital rather than St. Petersburg. Herder’s earliest dream of earthly glory was to be “a new Luther and Solon” for the Ukraine: to make this unspoiled and fertile region into “a new Greece.”³⁵ Bernardin de Saint-Pierre believed that an egalitarian agricultural community, possibly even a new Pennsylvania, might be created in the region around the Aral Sea.³⁶ Catherine herself dreamed of making her new city below Kiev on the Dnieper, Ekaterinoslav (“Praise Catherine”), a monumental center for world culture and her newly conquered port on the Black Sea, Kherson, a new St. Petersburg.³⁷

Rather than come to grips with the concrete problems of her realm, Catherine became infatuated in her declining years with her “grand design” for taking Constantinople and dividing the Balkans with the Hapsburg emperor. She named her second grandson Constantine, placed the image of the Santa Sophia on her coins, and wrote a dramatic extravaganza, The First Government of Oleg, which ends with this early Russian conqueror-prince leaving his shield behind in Constantinople for future generations to reclaim.³⁸

Having subdued at last the entire northern coast of the Black Sea, Catherine adorned it with a string of new cities—often on the site of old Greek settlements—Azov, Taganrog, Nikolaev, Odessa, and Sevastopol. The latter, built as a fortress on the southwest corner of the Crimean peninsula, was given the Greek version of the Roman imperial title Augusta. Built by an English naval engineer, Samuel Bentham, the “august city” (sevastē polis) inspired nothing original except for the eerie plan of Samuel’s famous brother Jeremy for a panopticon: a prison in which a central observer could peer into all cells.³⁹ Sevastopol is remembered not for the awe it inspired but for the humiliation it brought to Russia when captured by British and French invaders during the Crimean War. More than any other single event, the fall of the “august city” in 1855 dispelled illusion and forced Russia to turn from external glory to internal reform.

But external glory preoccupied Catherine during the latter part of her reign. Her world of illusion is symbolized by the famed legend that portable “Potemkin villages” were devised by her most famous courtier to camouflage the misery of the people from her eyes during triumphal tours. She spent her last years (and almost her last rubles) building pretentious palaces for her favorites, foreign advisers and relatives: Tauride in St. Petersburg and nearby Gatchina and Tsarskoe Selo (which she intended to name Constantingorod). The costumes and sets were more impressive than the actual plays in Catherine’s theater. She expressed a preference for extended divertissements, and insisted that serious operas be cut from three acts to two. It seems strangely appropriate that four different versions of the Pygmalion story were staged during the reign of Catherine. This minor German princess had been transformed into a northern goddess by the sages of the eighteenth century; but in this case the reality was less impressive than the figure on the pedestal. Even today the monument to her in front of the former imperial (now Saltykov-Shchedrin) library in Leningrad still is usually seen rising up from a sea of mud. Her every movement was surrounded with cosmetic camouflage and rococo frills. In an age when cutout silhouettes and surface flourishes were in vogue throughout Europe, Catherine brought the silhouette without the substance of reform to Russia.⁴⁰ As a final monument to her vanity, she left behind five feast days consecrated to her alone on the church calendar: her birthday, day of succession to the throne, day of coronation, name day, and the day of her smallpox vaccination, November 21.⁴¹

Catherine’s turn from inner reform to external aggrandizement is dramatically illustrated by the three-sided and three-staged dismemberment of Poland. Having helped place her youthful friend and lover, Stanislaw Poniatowski, on the Polish throne in 1764, Catherine participated in the first partition of Poland in 1772; then took the lead in the last two, which followed Stanislaw’s adoption in 1791 of a reform constitution not dissimilar to those which Catherine had considered in earlier days.⁴² The absorption of Poland had, however, the ironic effect of helping to perpetuate the very tradition that Catherine was rejecting. For Stanislaw promptly moved to St. Petersburg along with his relatives, the Czartoryski family, and many other reform-minded survivors of the old Polish republic.

Catherine’s first grandson, Alexander, resembled less the Macedonian conqueror for whom he was named than the Polish visionaries whom he met in his youth. Her second grandson, Constantine, became the rallying point for the reformist elements in the guards regiments who assembled in Senate Square in St. Petersburg on December 14, 1825, after Alexander’s death. But these “Decembrists” related the name Constantine not to Constantinople but to constitution—some of their illiterate followers even believing that the Russian word konstitutsiia was the name of his wife. The Decembrists were calling not for an imperial commander but for a man who had become the governor of Poland and was thought to provide some kind of link with its more moderate reformist traditions. To understand why these moderate constitutionalists were crushed, and the dilemma of the reforming despot firmly resolved in favor of despotism under Nicholas I, one must turn from symbols and omens to the crucial substantive changes which were effected in the direction of Russian thought under Catherine.

The Fruits of the Enlightenment

THE CONCRETE ACHIEVEMENTS of Catherine’s domestic program seem strangely insignificant: the introduction of vaccination, paper money, and an improved system of regional administration. Yet her impact on Russian history went far deeper than the superficial statecraft and foreign conquest for which she is justly renowned. More than any other single person prior to the Leninist revolution, Catherine cut official culture loose from its religious roots, and changed both its physical setting and its philosophical preoccupations. Important changes in architecture and ideas must thus be analyzed if one is to understand the revolutionary nature and fateful consequences of Catherine’s Enlightenment.

Catherine substituted the city for the monastery as the main center of Russian culture. She, and not Peter, closed down monasteries on a massive scale and tore down wooden symbols of Muscovy, such as the old summer palace of the tsars at Kolomenskoe. In some of the monasteries that remained open she placed pseudo-classical bell towers that clashed with everything else and demonstrated her inability to make even token gestures to the old religious culture of Muscovy.

Convinced that men have always honored “the memory of the founders of cities equally with the memory of lawmakers,”⁴³ she appointed a commission at the beginning of her reign to plan a systematic rebuilding of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and encouraged it to draw up plans for building or renovating some 416 other cities. St. Petersburg was soon transformed from an imitation Dutch naval base into a stately granite capital. New cities were built, and the over-all urban population, which had increased only slightly since the time of Peter the Great, nearly doubled between 1769 and 1782. In many of her rebuilt cities, from Tver to Tobol’sk, Catherine was able to realize her ideal of rational uniformity. Yaroslavl, second in size only to Moscow among cities of the interior, was beautifully transformed by superimposing a radiocentric grid of broad streets onto the jumbled city, and by subtly converting its ornate late-Muscovite churches into decorative terminal points for streets and promenades. The perfection and large-scale manufacture of uniform-sized bricks created new practical possibilities for rebuilding wooden provincial cities. Throughout the realm, architectural mass began to replace the florid decorative effects of both the high Muscovite style and the Elizabethan rococo. Simple, neo-classical shapes—semi-circular arches and domes and Doric columns—dominated the new urban architecture, where the design of the ensemble generally determined the proportions of the individual structure.

Of course, many of Catherine’s plans for cities were completely impractical; many more were never acted on; and the percentage of total population in the cities remained minute and to a large extent seasonal. Those cities which were built conformed only to a prescribed pattern of roads and squares, and of design on important facing surfaces. Lesser streets and all block interiors were completely uncontrolled—testifying in their squalor to the superficiality of Catherine’s accomplishment. Behind all the façades and profiles lay an enserfed peasantry and a swollen, disease-ridden army distracted from their collective misfortunes by a running tide of military conquest. Thousands of provincial figures—including many who were neither aristocratic nor literate—participated in building the new cities; and architecture proved in many ways as important as literature in spreading the new ideal of rational order and classical style.

Nevertheless, the majestic, artificial city of Catherine’s era provided a new center and symbol for Russian culture. Catherine’s new cities were not basically commercial centers, the traditional arenas for the development of a practical-minded bourgeois culture, but rather aristocratic cities: provincial showplaces for the newly acquired elegance and pro-consular power of the aristocracy. Town planners were more concerned with providing plazas for military reviews than places for trade and industry; architects devoted their ingenuity to convertible theater-ballrooms rather than convenient facilities for ordinary goods and services.

Because so many of her new cities were administrative centers for her newly created provincial governments, the city center was dominated by political rather than religious buildings. Horizontal lines replaced vertical ones as the narrow streets, tent roofs, and onion domes of the wooden cities were swept away. The required ratio of 2:1 between the width of major streets and the height of facing buildings became 4:1 in many cases. Such artificially broadened promenades and the sprawling squares visible from pseudo-classical porches and exedras gave the ruling aristocracy an imposing sense of space.

Having just conquered the southern steppe and settled on a provincial estate, the officer-aristocrat in the late years of Catherine’s reign was newly conscious of the land; and its vastness seemed both to mock and to menace his pretensions. In the new cities to which he repaired for the long winter, he could feel physically secure in a way that was never before possible in Russian cities. The danger of fire was greatly reduced by the progressive elimination of wooden buildings and narrow streets; the last great peasant uprising had been quelled; and the key bases of Tatar raiders in the south were finally captured.

Yet gone also was the psychological security of the old Muscovite cities with their outer walls and inner kremlins capped by the domes and spires that lifted eyes upward. The city was now dominated by the horizontal stretch of roads leading from a central space at the heart of the city to the greater spaces that lay all around. Into such cities, the ruling aristocrats brought an inner malaise not unrelated to the limitlessness and monotony of the steppe and to the artificiality of their own position on it.

A belief in the liberating and ennobling power of education was perhaps the central article of faith in the European Enlightenment. But the practical problem of providing secular education for the relatively rootless and insecure Russian aristocracy proved profoundly vexing. Both the limited accomplishments and the deeper problems are illustrated in the career of Ivan Betskoy, Catherine’s principal court adviser on educational matters. His long life spanned ninety-two years of the eighteenth century; and most of his many-sided reformist activities were dedicated to the central concern of that century, the spread of education and public enlightenment.

The ideal of an expanded, Western type of school system had been present for several decades in the more advanced Western sections of the Russian Empire. German-educated Ukrainian seminarians like Gregory Teplov drew up elaborate plans; Herder, while a young pastor in Riga, dreamed of installing a system of instruction modeled on Rousseau’s Émile. Baltic German graduates of Tartu, in Esthonia, brought with them the ideas of the Enlightenment that had begun to permeate that institution. Officers like Andrew Bolotov returned from the Seven Years’ War with plans for streamlining Russian aristocratic instruction along lines set down by the victorious Frederick the Great.⁴⁴

At first glance, Catherine’s educational projects appear to be nothing more than another example of high hopes and minimal accomplishment. Encouraged by Locke’s On the Education of Children (translated into Russian in 1761) and his Essay Concerning Human Understanding to think of man as a tabula rasa on which education is free to print any message, Catherine discussed plans for education with everyone from the encyclopedists to the Jesuits (to whom she offered shelter after the Pope abolished the Society in 1773). However, the statute for public schools in the empire, drawn up with the aid of Jankovich de Mirievo, a Serb who had reorganized public education within the Hapsburg empire, remained largely a paper proclamation. While she talked of sowing seeds of knowledge throughout the empire, she let the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences lapse into a relatively fallow period in which little serious work was published.⁴⁵

Yet certain important developments did take place in education; and almost all of them were connected with Betskoy, who, like most eighteenth-century Russian aristocrats, was widely traveled, trained to think in abstract, universal terms, and almost totally without deep roots in his Russian homeland. Estrangement was built into his very name, for Betskoy was a contraction of the old aristocratic name of Trubetskoy, of the sort frequently assumed by the illegitimate children of noble families. The Vorontsovs gave birth to more than a few Rantsovs; Golitsyns, Litsyns; Rumiantsevs, Miantsovs; Griboedovs, Gribovs, and so on. Betskoy was not alone in bearing this constant reminder of aristocratic profligacy. Ivan Pnin, whose 1804 treatise, On Enlightenment in Russia, went even further in proposing education for the peasantry, was also the bastard offspring of an old aristocratic line. His father, Prince Nicholas Repnin, was a friend of Betskoy known as the “Russian Aristides” for his enlightened administrative activities in western Russia.⁴⁶ Herzen, whose publications abroad later helped revive interest in the reformist currents of Catherine’s time, also bore the stamp of illegitimate aristocratic birth.

Betskoy was born in Stockholm, educated in Copenhagen, spent most of his early life in Paris, and had close if not intimate relations with a host of minor German princesses, including the mother of Catherine the Great. Thus, when Catherine ascended to the throne, Betskoy commended himself to the young empress as a man with excellent intellectual and physiological qualifications for the court. Like Catherine’s special favorites, Orlov and Potemkin, Betskoy was drawn to the Empress and her projects for reform partly because of antagonism to the more established aristocracy. Whereas most older aristocrats sympathized with Panin’s efforts to have an aristocratic council limit tsarist authority, Betskoy and his allies sought to expand that authority as a means of furthering their own relative position in the hierarchy. Whereas the older aristocrats tended to adopt the measured rationalism of Voltaire and Diderot, Catherine’s less secure courtiers tended to prefer the visionary ideas of Rousseau. There was perhaps a certain sense of identity between these relative outsiders to the Russian aristocracy and the Genevan outsider to the aristocratic Paris of the philosophes. Basically, however, the Russian turn from Voltaire to Rousseau reflected a general turn in intellectual fashion among European reformist circles of the 1770’s and 1780’s. Orlov invited Rousseau to come to Russia and take up permanent residence on his estate; one of the Potemkins became Rousseau’s principal Russian translator; Catherine retreated increasingly to her own Rousseauian “Hermitage”; and the “general plan of education” which Betskoy presented to her was partly based on Rousseau’s Émile.⁴⁷

Betskoy sought to create in Russia “a new breed of man” freed from the artificiality of contemporary society for a more natural way of life. The government was to assume responsibility for this new type of education, seeking to develop the heart as well as the mind, to encourage physical as well as mental development, and to place the teaching of morality at the head of the curriculum. In his search for elements suitable for remolding through pedagogical experiment he had to look no further than his own origins. Bastards and orphans—the rejected material of society—were to become the cornerstones of his new temple of humanity. On the basis of a close study of secular philanthropic activities in England and France, Betskoy set up in Moscow and Petersburg foundling homes which were to become major centers of initiation into the new Russian Enlightenment. Foundling homes are even now called “educational” (vospitatel’nye) homes in Russia, and these first ones were set up

… to overcome the superstition of centuries, to give the people their new education and, so to speak, their new birth (porozhdenie).⁴⁸

They were to remain totally removed from the outside world in these secular monasteries from age five or six to eighteen or twenty; but, in fact, many entered at two or three, and were neither bastards nor orphans.

Betskoy was Russia’s first de facto minister of education, serving as president of the Academy of Arts, organizing planner for the Smolny Monastery for women (the only one of these “monastic” schools to outlive him), and reorganizer of the curriculum for the infantry corps of cadets—as well as head of the foundling homes and an influential adviser to the Academy of Sciences and many private tutors. He was also a resourceful fund raiser, promoting special theatrical benefits and a lucrative tax for education on another favorite aristocratic recreation: playing cards. He died in 1795, just a year before his sovereign benefactor, and willed his substantial private fortune of 400,000 rubles to his educational projects. As he was lowered into the grave, the most honored poet of the age, Gabriel Derzhavin, read a specially written “On the End of the Philanthropist” to this “ray of goodness.” The poem was, as it were, the secular substitute for the “Eternal Memory” of the Orthodox burial service. Now “heaven, truth, saintliness” were made to “cry out above the grave” that their “light” was immortal even if their lives were only “smoke.” “Without good deeds,” Derzhavin concludes, “there is no blessedness.”⁴⁹

One can, of course, question what the real number of “good deeds” or extent of civic “blessedness” was under Catherine. She never shared her courtiers’ fondness for Rousseau, and forbade—long before the Pugachev uprising—the circulation of many of his key works, including Émile. She viewed Rousseau as “a new St. Bernard,” who was arming France and all of Europe for “a spiritual crusade against me.”⁵⁰ Nevertheless, the all-important fourth part of Émile, the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” readily slipped through the hands of the censors when it appeared in Russian translation in 1770 under the “Aesopian” title “Meditations on the Majesty of God, on His Providence and on Man.”

The historical importance of the Russian Enlightenment under Catherine cannot be denied. Russians had been introduced to a new world of thought that was neither theological nor technological, but involved the remaking of the whole man in accordance with a new secular ideal of ethical activism. Moreover, the idea was established that this moral education was properly the responsibility of the government. Betskoy was thoroughly devoted to autocracy, and sought to enlist government support for his educational program on the grounds that it would serve to produce a select elite uniquely loyal to the imperial cause.

Like Montesquieu in politics, Betskoy in education set the tone for much subsequent discussion in Russia, without seeing many of his practical prescriptions adopted. Betskoy’s interest in using the Russian language was disregarded by academies and tutors alike, who were expected to familiarize aristocratic youth with Western European rather than Russian or Byzantine tradition. His interest in a measure of practical training in trades was never able to modify the pronounced emphasis on non-technical and broadly philosophical subjects. Time spent in higher educational institutions generally counted as state service for noblemen or for those aspiring to a title. A leisurely and dilettantish education was better preparation for life among the aristocracy than industrious specialization.⁵¹ Betskoy’s more earnest boarding schools were remembered mainly as the object of humorous barbs, usually aimed at the “child-like Betskoy” (detskoy-Betskoy).

Betskoy’s last important service to Catherine was supervising the embellishment of St. Petersburg. With characteristic thoroughness he organized expeditions to Siberia to bring back rare and decorative stones, arranged for importation of stone from Finland and the manufacture of bricks in St. Petersburg, and helped put in their final place a variety of statues, including Falconet’s long-labored equestrian statue of Peter the Great in the Senate Square.⁵² This imposing memorial to Peter became, through Pushkin’s famous poem “The Bronze Horseman,” an enduring symbol of both the majestic power and the impersonal coldness of the new capital. Catherine’s pretense in placing a monumental façade over widespread suffering seems in some ways anticipatory of the dostoprimechatel’nosti (“imposing sights”) in the midst of terror in the Stalin era. Her city below Kiev on the Dnieper (Ekaterinoslav, now Dniepropetrovsk) became the site of the first and most celebrated mammoth construction project of the Soviet era: the hydroelectric dam of the 1920’s.

The most important link between the Russia of Catherine and that of the revolutionary era lies, however, in the creation of a new class of secular intellectuals vaguely inclined toward sweeping reform. Betskoy had spoken of developing through education a “third rank” of citizens along with the aristocracy and the peasantry.⁵³ The educated intellectuals did indeed come to constitute a new rank in society outside the table of ranks created by Peter. They found their solidarity, however, not as a class of enlightened state servitors, as Betskoy had hoped, but as an “intelligentsia” estranged from the state machine. This was the “new race of men” to come out of Catherine’s cultural upheaval: the unofficial “third rank” between the ruling aristocracy and the servile peasantry.

For Catherine’s reign saw a profound and permanent change in the source of internal opposition to imperial authority. Whereas the first half was plagued by violent protest movements among the lower classes, climaxing in the Pugachev uprising, the latter half of her reign saw the first appearance of “Pugachevs from the academies”: a new kind of opposition from within the educated aristocracy. The estrangement of these intellectuals from their aristocratic background resulted not so much from any changes in the sovereign’s attitude toward reform as from an inner ripening of ideas within the thinking community itself. Since this intellectual ferment was to play a vital role in subsequent Russian history, it is important to consider the first steps on the path of critical questioning that was to lead Russia to form an intelligentsia, a “new Soviet intelligentsia,” and perhaps something even beyond that in the post-Stalin era.

The Alienation of the Intellectuals

THE ALIENATION of the intellectuals in modern Russia was, from the beginning, not so much a matter of conflict between different classes and factions as of conflicting feelings and impulses at work within the same groups and even the same individuals. The conflicts inside these disturbed groups and individuals were, in a sense, minor compared with the great sense of distance that was felt between those who participated in the conflicts and those who did not; between what came to be called intelligentsiia and meshchanstvo, “intelligence” and “philistinism.”

The inner conflict that first created the modern Russian intelligentsia was a personal and moral one within the ruling aristocracy. This fact created a peculiar psychological compulsion for passionate personal engagement in ethical questions, which was to become a key characteristic of the alienated intellectuals.

The personal moral crisis for the ruling aristocrat of Catherine’s era was not, in the first instance, created by economic and political privilege but rather by the new style of life within the aristocracy itself: by the vulgar hedonism and imitative Gallomania of their own increasingly profligate lives. Much of this self-hate was sublimated into biting denunciations of foreign forms and customs, which led in turn to an increased, if hyper-sensitive national self-consciousness by the late years of Catherine’s reign.

But there was also much introspection and self-criticism. Russians expressed distress that “the worship of Minerva was so often followed by the feasts of Bacchus,” and sought to discover how the wisdom of Minerva might be applied to problems of practical conduct. Still, however, the need was felt for some external source of their perversion; and one was soon found in the symbolic figure of Voltaire, who was said to have “made animal life the sole aim of man.”⁵⁴ Voltairianism came to be viewed as a force leading into self-indulgent immorality.

As was so often to be the case subsequently, thoughtful Russians tended to unite around what they rejected rather than what they accepted. A convenient object for this collective hatred was provided by Theodore Henri Chudi, the principal foreign agent of the Francophile Shuvalov family and a major vehicle for the importation of French culture into Russia.

Chudi was one of the more odious sycophants in the Russian imperial entourage. He was a Swiss actor who had first come to Russia as a minor figure in the new imperial theater. After adopting a more impressive name (Chevalier de Lussy) and a synthetic French noble ancestry, he made a successful career at court as a gigolo and glorified gossip columnist—editing the first French-language journal on Russian soil, Le Caméléon littéraire. On its pages, he frankly admitted that he would be “lost without frivolity.”

I am French, one would expect it, the frivolity of my work announces a man of my nation. To this first quality, I could add the title of Cosmopolitan.⁵⁵

Under such unfortunate auspices was introduced the term “cosmopolitan,” which became a classic term of invective in Imperial and Soviet Russia alike. Sensuality, superficiality, and cosmopolitanism were interrelated sins—all equated with the virus of Voltaire and with bearers of the infection like Chudi.

The first dim outlines of a deeper moral reaction to Voltairianism was evidenced in the theater: the central ideological arena of Catherine’s era. The importance of the emerging Russian theater derived not solely from the sheer numbers of the plays, operas, ballets, and pantomimes that were written and performed—including those of the imperial playwright and patron herself. Its importance lay in the fact that in a world where the court life of the aristocracy had become stylized and theatrical, the impersonal, formal theater tended to become by ironic transposition the only public arena in which the deeper concerns of the aristocracy could be dealt with in polite society.

The alienation of the intellectuals in many ways begins with the growing antagonism of serious playwrights toward the increasingly frivolous, largely musical theater of Catherine’s later years. A typical comic opera of the 1780’s, Love Is Cleverer than Eloquence, made fun of professors, philosophers, and enlightenment generally, ending with the chorus:

However people deceive,

However reason jokes,

Truth proclaims to everyone:

Love will out-deceive you all.

Catherine forced the entire Holy Synod to sit through another, Le Philosophe ridicule; and her own profligacy was extolled in The New Family Group, which ended with a chorus to happiness at last freed from “either longing or monotony”:

As you wish, so shall you live

We will never interfere…⁵⁶

One sees the beginning of the reaction in Alexander Sumarokov, the director of the St. Petersburg theater, whose tragedies, comedies, and opera libretti provided the mainstay of the repertoire throughout the eighteenth century. Though always operating within the framework of secular enlightenment, Sumarokov tried to lead Russian taste back from hedonistic Voltairianism to Fénelon, Racine, and the Stoic philosophers of antiquity.

He gave Russian tragedy a disciplined fidelity to the classical unities of time and place and at the same time a bias for instructive moralistic themes. The aim of tragedy was “to lead men to good deeds,” “to cleanse passion through reason.”⁵⁷ His short sketches and fables also sought to edify, and his writings did more than those of any other single figure of the age to provide Russian aristocratic thinkers with a new lexicon of abstract moral terminology. Far less religious than a natural scientist like Lomonosov, this natural philosopher attached the supreme value to reason, duty, and the common good. Even when writing “spiritual odes,” he was calling for a new secular morality of aristocratic self-discipline.

To some extent, Sumarokov’s ideal was that of “the immortal Fénelon” in Télémaque: vaincre les passions. This pseudo-classical poem was the first French work to become a smash literary hit in Russia. It was translated several times, and inspired a Russian continuation: the Tilemakhida of Tred’iakovsky—just as the Télémaque had been offered by Fénelon as a kind of continuation of Homer’s Odyssey.

The search for links with the classical world led Sumarokov and other philosophically inclined Russian aristocrats to Stoic philosophy. The play that had been staged in Kiev in 1744 on the occasion of Elizabeth’s pilgrimage to the Monastery of the Caves was The Piety of Marcus Aurelius.⁵⁸ The vanquished villain in the play was Anger, just as it was invariably passions like self-seeking and carnal love in the plays of Sumarokov. Falconet’s statue of Peter was originally modeled on the statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, and was popularly referred to as Marcus Aurelius; Fonvizin’s translation of the contemporary Elegy of Marcus Aurelius appeared in 1771; and La Harpe cited Marcus Aurelius as a model for all kings in his memorandum to Catherine on the education of Alexander I.⁵⁹ The Stoic calm of the Roman emperor was seen as a model for the Russian aristocrat’s efforts to master passion with reason. As Sumarokov put it:

The man of reason

Moves on through time with tolerance,

The happiness of true wisdom is not moved to rapture

And does not groan with sorrows.⁶⁰

The stoicism of Seneca also gained a following through such books as The Moral Cures of the Christianized Seneca, which promised to “correct human morals and instill true health” with the “true wisdom” of Stoic philosophy.⁶¹

This concept of “true wisdom” (premudrost’) was at variance with the ethos of Catherine’s court even when advanced by scrupulously loyal monarchists like Sumarokov. Like the concept of natural law that was simultaneously being introduced into the philosophy curriculum of Moscow University, “true wisdom” seemed to propose a standard of truth above that of the monarch’s will. Unsystematic Voltairianism, with its ideal of a cultivated earthly life and urbane scepticism, was more to Catherine’s liking. Rather than Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, she wanted her courtiers to read Tatishchev’s Honorable Mirror of Youth. By 1767 this manual had undergone five editions, with its homely reminders (often reinforced with proverbs) not to repeat the same story incessantly, pick teeth with a knife, or keep spurs on while dancing. In such a world, morality tended to be Epicurean rather than Stoic. The starting point was self-interest rather than higher reality:

Rational egoism necessarily includes in itself love toward God and one’s neighbor. Man will love independently because one needs the love of others for one’s own happiness.⁶²

Earthy satire was even more important than Stoic uplift in giving dramatic expression to aristocratic discontent with Voltairianism. Catherine wrote a number of plays satirizing the aristocracy, and helped give birth to a new and potentially subversive genre which was first mastered by Denis Fonvizin. If Catherine’s pretensions as a writer far exceeded her accomplishments, exactly the opposite is true of Fonvizin. He was a diffident, self-effacing aristocrat who became incurably ill in his late thirties, yet lived to complete in The Adolescent one of Russia’s first original masterpieces of secular literature and “first drama of social satire.”

The Adolescent challenged the prevailing pseudo-classical literary style and gave an altogether new direction to Russian writing. It anticipates in some ways the distinctively Russian theatrical tradition of “laughter through tears” which was to lead through Gogol to Chekhov. Nearly twenty years in the making, it also stands as the first of those life projects which were to drain away the talents of so many sensitive artists of the late imperial period.

The Adolescent is a short, deceptively simple prose comedy on a contemporary theme—exactly the opposite of the ponderous rhymed tragedies in mythological settings then in favor. It is one of the ironies of Catherine’s reign that Fonvizin, who developed to perfection the satirical form which Catherine introduced, was the secretary to Count Panin, the man who had originally led the fight to limit her autocratic power. Frustrated in their efforts to curb imperial absolutism, her opponents now turned to satire. It was an indication of things to come; for Catherine’s successors were to be limited more by ideological disaffection than political restraint. Dramatic satire became in the nineteenth—and indeed in the post-Stalin twentieth century—the vehicle for a distinctively Russian form of passionate, if seemingly passive, communal protest against tyranny. As an acute German observer of the 1860’s noted: “Political opposition in Russia takes the form of satire.”⁶³ The Adolescent was the first Russian drama to be translated and performed in the West; and it has remained the only eighteenth-century Russian drama still regularly performed in the USSR.

Fonvizin was a cosmopolitan eighteenth-century figure. His German ancestry is revealed in his name (derived from von Wiesen), and his plays betray the influence of the Danish social satirist, Ludvig Holberg (whose plays he read and translated from the German), and of the Italian commedia dell’arte (whose traditions were filtering in through the Italian personnel imported for the operatic theater). His real model was, however, France, and its pre-Revolutionary satirical theater in which—as he put it in a letter from Paris—“you forget that a comedy is being played and it seems that you are seeing direct history.”⁶⁴

The Adolescent comes close to being “direct history” and thus anticipates much of nineteenth-century Russian literature. The play deals with the key problem of the Russian Enlightenment itself: the education of the aristocracy. Part of it depicts the conventional education for virtue and responsibility of an aristocratic couple preparing for marriage. But most of the play and all of its interest centers on the education of “the adolescent,” a brutish, sixteen-year-old provincial aristocrat, Mitrofan, by an unforgettable galaxy of characters “in the village of the Prostakovs” (literally, “Simpletons”). Three fraudulent teachers, a worthless father, a pig-loving uncle, and a gross, doting mother, all hover around the sulking Mitrofan and contribute to his mis-education. Those who preach the gospel of aristocratic virtue are made to appear boring and faintly ludicrous in a world where unvarnished barbarism is still the norm.

Thus, Fonvizin turns Catherine’s world upside down in a way he never had as part of Panin’s political opposition—and in a way he may not entirely have intended. Western education does not lead to the grail of enlightenment in adolescent Russia. At the end of the adventure, there is no “thornless rose that does not sting,” but only a sea of brambles. The last line of the play is: “Here are the worthy fruits of an evil nature.” Perhaps human nature is not perfectible after all. Perhaps there is no point in cultivating one’s garden, as Voltaire advised, because nothing but poisoned fruit will grow.

But such splenetic thoughts were to come later. Fonvizin’s perspective is still one of life-affirming laughter. He shared the breadth of interests that was typical of the Russian Enlightenment, and the sense of confidence and pride that comes from being a privileged member of a rising power. For deeper disaffection one must look to three other figures who deliberately set out to find radically new answers to the problems of the day: Gregory Skovoroda, Alexander Radishchev, and Nicholas Novikov. They were probably the most brilliant men of the late eighteenth century in Russia; and the depth and variety of their searchings illustrate the true seriousness of the alienation of the intellectuals under Catherine. The only common feature of their divergent careers is the intensity with which they all rejected the dilettantism and imitativeness of court culture and the finality with which their own new ideas and activities were, in turn, rejected by Catherine.

Skovoroda represented the most complete rejection of Catherine’s ethos with his ascetic indifference to things of this world and his search for the hidden mysteries of “true wisdom.” Of Cossack descent, Skovoroda studied at the Kiev Academy and attracted imperial attention in the 1740’s as a vocalist in the baroque choirs of Kiev. A brilliant teacher at the Academy, he soon turned to seminary teaching and then left for a life of lonely wandering and reading, relieved only by endless philosophical dialogues and a few close friendships.

He taught for brief periods in all of the great centers of theological education in eighteenth-century Russia: Kiev, St. Petersburg, Kharkov, and the Moscow Academy in the Monastery of St. Sergius. He concluded that happiness lay only in full inner knowledge of oneself, which in turn required a highly personal and mystical link with God. He wandered throughout Russia for most of his last thirty years, with no possessions except a knapsack containing a Hebrew Bible and books in many languages. He wrote haunting poems, letters, and philosophic dialogues rather in the style of Blake, rejecting the high culture of the Enlightenment for the “primordial world which delights my heart’s abyss.”⁶⁵ Influenced by Stoicism and Neo-Platonism, he taught, in his Dialogue of the Archangel Michael with Satan, that there was a fundamental conflict between the spiritual and material worlds. Carnal lust and worldly ambition are the principal lures of the devil; he inveighed against the one in his Israelite Snake and the other in his Icon of Alcibiades. He died in 1794, leaving behind as his epitaph: “The world hunted me but it did not catch me.”⁶⁶

Skovoroda called himself the Russian Socrates, and he was one of Russia’s first original speculative philosophers. He shared, moreover, the Platonic qualities of dedication and perhaps also homosexuality. His songs of praise to “father freedom”⁶⁷ reflect the anarchistic sentiments of his Cossack forebears. His mysticism and dualism made him feel more at home with religious sectarians than with the official Orthodox Church, which was particularly infused with scholasticism in the Latinized Ukraine. Skovoroda helped compose a declaration of faith for the “spirit wrestlers” and music for the psalm-singing ceremonies of the “milk drinkers.”⁶⁸

Skovoroda never joined any sect, however, and is properly described as “a lonely mountain on the steppe.”⁶⁹ He foreshadowed the romantic, metaphysical Auswanderung of the Russian intelligentsia. For he was discontent not so much with the Russia of his day as with the entire earthly world. He was driven on by Faustian discontent with all formal and external knowledge. Favored with positions in all the leading theological centers, he never took holy orders, and he eventually left the Church altogether. He sought to teach religion through poetry and a symbolic study of the Bible. He described himself as “not a beggar but an elder”⁷⁰ and became a kind of secular version of the medieval mendicant pilgrim.

The sincerity and intensity of his quest—like that of many Russian thinkers to follow—commanded respect even among those unable to understand his ideas or language. In his native Ukraine he became a legendary figure, whose manuscripts were passed about like sacred writings and whose picture was often displayed as an icon. Not least among those who stood in awe of him was the tsarist government, which refused to permit any collected edition of his voluminous (and largely unpublished) works to appear until a century after his death. Even then, the edition was incomplete and heavily censored; and subsequent editors have drawn only very selectively from this profound—and profoundly disturbing—thinker. Many of his writings he called “conversations,” and they were apparently the outgrowth of his many oral disputations on metaphysical matters which helped launch the seemingly interminable discussion of cosmic questions by modern Russian thinkers. Skovoroda sought a kind of syncretic higher religion, the essence of which is revealed in this characteristic “conversation” between Man and Wisdom (Mudrost’):

Man: Tell me thy name, tell it thyself;

For all our thoughts are corrupt without thee.

Wisdom: I was called sophia by the Greeks in ancient days,

And wisdom I am called by every Russian.

But the Roman called me Minerva,

And the good Christian gave me the name of Christ.⁷¹

Radishchev’s alienation from Catherine’s Russia assumed the more familiar form of social and political criticism. The first of Russia’s “repenting noblemen” to propose a thoroughgoing reform of Russia’s aristocratic absolutism, Radishchev was a pure creation of Catherine’s Enlightenment. While a boy of thirteen, he was chosen at Catherine’s coronation to be one of forty members of her exclusive new corps of pages and was later one of twelve sent to study abroad at Leipzig. He returned to occupy a series of favored positions in the imperial service, culminating in the lucrative post of chief of customs in St. Petersburg.

Almost from the beginning of his career, Radishchev sought to temper despotism with enlightenment. His early satirical writings were critical of the institution of serfdom; and he soon began arguing for some form of responsible popular sovereignty: particularly in the introduction to his translation of Mably’s Reflections on Greek History in 1773, in his Ode to Liberty of 1781–3, in praise of the American Revolution, and in his essays on legislation in the 1780’s.

His famous Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, which he printed at his own expense in 1790, was the first in a long series of literary bombshells which the privileged aristocracy was to set off against the established order. Yet it was in many ways a typical product of Catherine’s time: moralistic in tone and pretentious in style. Imitating Sterne and Volney, Radishchev couches his social criticism in the philosophic language of the European Enlightenment. Evil comes “from man himself, and often only from the fact that he has not yet seen surrounding places in the right light.” Artificial divisions and restrictions rather than inherent limitations keep man from realizing his “inviolable worth.”⁷²

Even his criticism of serfdom, which was the most novel and daring feature of the book, was in some ways only a kind of delayed response to the demand for social and economic criticism which Catherine herself had made to the Free Economic Society a few years before. The basis for Radishchev’s objections to serfdom were, moreover, in conformity with those of Catherine’s Enlightenment. His protest was based not on practical or even compassionate grounds but rather on the high philosophic plane that the system prevented serfs from using their own rational faculties to conceive of any alternative to their degrading lot.

Appearing as it did without official approval in the first year of the French Revolution, Radishchev’s book alarmed Catherine. She arrested him for treason and sentenced him to decapitation, which was commuted to exile in Siberia. In distant Tobol’sk he reaffirmed his faith in human dignity with verse written in the inelegant singsong style that was to become fashionable among the radical “civic” poets of the nineteenth century:

I am what I have always been, and shall be evermore

Neither cow, nor tree, nor slave, but a man.⁷³

When he returned from Siberia after Catherine’s death, his last years were spent in drafting a republican constitution for Russia which he hoped young Alexander I would put into effect. Radishchev committed suicide in 1802, leaving behind unfulfilled hopes for social and political reform which continued to agitate the aristocracy throughout Alexander’s reign. Interest in his ideas was revived again only during the reform period of Alexander II’s reign, when Herzen brought out a new edition of his Journey in 1858, on the eve of peasant emancipation.

Skovoroda and Radishchev stand at the headwaters of two mighty streams of thought that swept through modern Russian thought. Skovoroda was the precursor of Russia’s alienated metaphysical poets, from Tiutchev to Pasternak, and of a host of brooding literary figures from Lermontov’s Hero of our Time to Dostoevsky’s Idiot. Skovoroda is the untitled outsider in aristocratic Russia, the homeless romantic, the passionate believer unable to live within the confines of any established system of belief. He stands suspended somewhere between sainthood and total egoism, relatively indifferent to the social and political evils of this world, thirsting rather for the hidden wellsprings and forbidden fruits of the richer world beyond.

Radishchev was the privileged nobleman with a European education, conscious of the artificiality of his position; he was conscience-stricken by the suffering of others and anxious to create a better social order. His preoccupation with social problems foreshadows the civic poetry of the Decembrists and Nekrasov, the literary heroes of Turgenev, and even the search for family happiness and social adjustment from Eugene Onegin to Anna Karenina. At the same time, there is in Radishchev a heroic Prometheanism that anticipates the ecstatic, secular belief in the future of Lunacharsky and Trotsky. In his last book, On Man, His Mortality and Immortality, Radishchev rejects the prosaic materialism of the French Encyclopedists and sees man attaining perfection—even immortality—through heroic effort and a creative evolution that includes a regeneration (palingenesis) of the dead. His conviction was that “if people feared death less they would never become slaves of superstition. Truth would find for itself more zealous defenders.”⁷⁴

Radishchev and Skovoroda were precursors rather than decisive influences in their own right; and it is dangerous to lift their ideas out of the complex context of their own life and times. Nevertheless, they stand as pioneers if not prophets: they were the first to set out on the argosy of alienation that would lead to revolution. Almost all Russian revolutionaries have seen in Radishchev the founding father of their tradition; and it has now been revealed that Skovoroda was one of the very few religious thinkers who was read and admired by Lenin himself. There are many memorials to Radishchev in the USSR, and Lenin planned also to erect a monument to Skovoroda.⁷⁵

Novikov and Masonry

FAR MORE INFLUENTIAL than either Radishchev or Skovoroda in Catherine’s time was Nicholas Novikov, who shared both the philanthropic reformism of the former and the religious anguish of the latter. Novikov was a serious thinker and, at the same time, a prodigious organizer who opened up new paths of practical activity for the aristocracy. A member of the exclusive Izmailovsky regiment and of Catherine’s legislative commission, Novikov imitated Catherine in the sixties by founding his own weekly satirical journal, The Drone, named after the dull pedant in a play then popular at court. In this journal—and even more in its successors of the early seventies, The Painter and The Purse—Novikov voiced the increasing dissatisfaction of the native Russian nobility with Catherine’s imitation of French ways and toleration of social injustice. Novikov’s journals became the first organs of independent social criticism in Russian history. Like later “thick journals,” each of these was shut down by imperial authority. Novikov then linked his publishing energies to two other institutions which were to play a key role in the cultural development of the alienated intellectuals: the university and the small discussion group, or “circle.”

The university was, of course, Moscow University, which, prior to the arrival of Novikov and his circle in the late seventies, had been a moribund institution with a total enrollment of some one hundred students listening to uninspired lectures in Latin and German. When, however, the poet Kheraskov became curator of the university in 1778, it was rapidly transformed into a center of intellectual ferment. Novikov took over the Moscow University Press in 1779 and organized a public library connected with the university. From 1781 to 1784 he printed more books at the university press than had appeared in the entire previous twenty-four years of its existence, and within a decade the number of readers of the official University Gazette increased from six hundred to four thousand.⁷⁶

In 1783 he set up Russia’s first two private printing presses, capitalizing one of them the following year as Russia’s first joint-stock printing company. He also took the lead in organizing Russia’s first private insurance company and, in 1787, a remarkable nationwide system for famine relief. His Morning Light, begun in the late seventies, was the first journal in Russian history to seek to impart a systematic knowledge of the great philosophers of classical antiquity, beginning with translations of Plato and Seneca. He edited a series of journals and collections in the eighties, ranging from children’s books to voluminous documents on early Russian history. His “Library of Russian Antiquity” underwent two large editions during the eighties. Together with the History of Russia and Decline of Ancient Morals by his friend, Prince Shcherbatov, Novikov’s works tended to glorify the moral fiber of old Muscovy, and implicitly challenged Catherine’s cavalier dismissal of traditional elements in Russian life. The publication in the seventies and eighties of Chulkov’s encyclopedic collections of Russian folk tales, songs, and popular legends pointed to a wealth of neglected native material for literary development: sources of popular wisdom neglected by the Voltairians of St. Petersburg. Even Ivan Boltin, an admirer of Voltaire and translator of Diderot, rose up to extol Russian tradition in his Notes on the History of Ancient and Modern Russia by Le Clerc in 1789: a vigorous refutation of the unflattering six-volume history of Russia published in 1782 by a Russophobic French surgeon.⁷⁷

The return of Moscow to intellectual prominence in the second half of Catherine’s reign was closely connected with the upsurge of Great Russian nationalist feeling that followed the first partition of Poland, the first Turkish war, the final crushing of Pugachev, and the subordination of the Zaporozhian Cossacks in the mid-seventies. Kheraskov was totally educated in Moscow and had always been a partisan of using Russian rather than foreign languages in Moscow University. Novikov was also less traveled and less versed in foreign languages than most other aristocrats. Aided by the presence of these two figures, Moscow became a center for the glorification of Russian antiquity and a cultural Mecca for those opposed to the Gallic cosmopolitanism of the capital. The intellectuals opposed to Catherine’s Enlightenment had found a spiritual home.

Moscow alone was powerful enough to resist the neo-classical culture that was being superimposed on Russian cities by Catherine. Catherine made many efforts to transform the city—even placing the European style of government buildings and reception rooms inside the Kremlin. But the former capital retained its exotic and chaotic character. Wooden buildings were still clustered around bulbous and tent-rooved churches; and the city still centered on its ancient Kremlin rather than its newer municipal buildings and open squares. A city of more than 400,000, Moscow was more than twice the size of St. Petersburg, and was perhaps the only city large enough to cherish the illusion of centralized control and a uniform national culture for the entire disparate empire. Foreigners generally found Moscow an uncongenial city. Falconet in the course of his long stay in Russia visited almost every city in Russia (including those in Siberia), but never Moscow. Only late in Catherine’s reign did Moscow come to possess a theater comparable to that of St. Petersburg; but many performers preferred not to play before its spitting, belching, nut-cracking audiences. Sumarokov was not alone in his complaint:

Moscow trusts the petty clerk more than Monsieur Voltaire and me; and the taste of inhabitants of Moscow is rather like that of the petty clerk!⁷⁸

Absorbed in its narrow ways and self-contained suburbs, closer both historically and geographically to the heart of Russia, and forever suspicious of new ideas, Moscow was the natural center for opposition to the ideals of the European Enlightenment. The features of Catherine’s court which most deeply infected Moscow were the venal and self-indulgent ones. Moscow, not St. Petersburg society was to be the butt of Griboedov’s celebrated satirical comedy Woe from Wit, in which the hero, Chatsky, is at war with Moscow society and all its vulgarity and monotony. This world, in which forty to fifty aristocratic dances were held each night of the winter season,⁷⁹ was held up to iambic scorn by Chatsky:

What novelty can Moscow show to me?

Today a ball, tomorrow two or three.⁸⁰

The venality and ennui of Moscow society added an element of vindictiveness to attacks on the Voltairianism and cosmopolitanism of St. Petersburg.

The struggle between Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment went on within both cities—and in others as well. However, St. Petersburg remained the symbol and center of the former, and Moscow of the latter, trend.

To understand the roots of the anti-Enlightenment tradition among the Russian aristocracy one must look at the activities of Novikov’s Moscow period. To understand these activities, one must appreciate not only the special atmosphere of Moscow, but also the history of Russian Freemasonry: the first ideological class movement of the Russian aristocracy and the one through which Novikov channeled almost all his varied activities. The split in Novikov’s career and in Russian Masonry between a St. Petersburg and a Moscow phase illustrates the deep division in Russian aristocratic thought between rationalism and mysticism—which was later to reappear in the famous controversy between Westernizers and Slavophiles.

Freemasonry was the fraternal order of the eighteenth-century European aristocracy.⁸¹ Within its lodges, the landholding officer class of Europe acquired a sense of belonging; and new arrivals gained access to aristocratic society more easily than through the more rigid social system prevailing outside. But Masonry was also a kind of supra-confessional deist church. It provided its members with a sense of higher calling and sacramental mystery which they no longer found in traditional churches. It gave new symbolic elaboration to the basic eighteenth-century idea that there was a natural, moral order to the universe; it offered secret rites of initiation and confession to those who recognized this central truth; and it prescribed philanthropic and educational activities which reassured them of their belief in human perfectibility.

The oft-alleged medieval origins of Freemasonry belong to the category of legend,⁸² although there does appear to have been some connection with the stone mason guilds, particularly in the period of the rebuilding of London after the fire of 1666. Masonic lodges of the modern type made their first appearance in England in the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century. Members were led through three stages or initiation similar to those of medieval trade guilds: apprentice, journeyman, and master. English tradesmen set up the first lodges in Russia no later than the 1730’s, and thereafter, Russian Masonry, like the Russian aristocratic culture which it helped form, was deeply influenced by foreigners.

All of the flamboyant qualities of a medieval knight in search of a cause are personified in James Keith, the man who brought Masonry from England to Russia. Descended from a Scottish noble family, Keith had been banished from England for his support of the rebellion on behalf of the Stuart Pretender in 1715 and had served in the Spanish army before setting off to Russia in 1728. There he became a leading general, a military governor of the Ukraine, and—in the early 1740’s—Provincial Grand Master of Russian Masonry.

Keith was a beloved and cultivated figure, “an image of the dawn,” who attracted Russians to the new aristocratic fraternity. As a Masonic song of the time put it:

After him [Peter the Great], Keith, full of light, came to the Russians; and, exalted by zeal, lit up the sacred fire. He erected the temple of wisdom, corrected our thoughts and hearts, and confirmed us in brotherhood.⁸³

Keith left Russia to enter the service of Frederick the Great in 1747; but Masonry continued to grow in Russia. By the late 1750’s lodges had appeared in almost every country of Europe, in North America, in some sections of the Middle East, and—on a large scale—in Russia. In 1756 a lodge including many men of letters was formally established in St. Petersburg under the Anglophile Count Vorontsov; and the first official police investigation of “the Masonic sect” was conducted in response to hostile rumors about its foreign and seditious plans. Masonry was exonerated, however; and during his brief reign, Peter III appears to have joined the movement, founding lodges near his residences in both St. Petersburg and Oranienbaum.

The existence of an organized command structure within the Masonic lodges dates from the installation of a wealthy courtier, Ivan Elagin, as Provincial Grand Master in the Russian Empire. Elagin was a figure of extraordinary influence in the early years of Catherine’s reign. She sometimes jocularly signed letters to him “Mr. Elagin’s chancellor,”⁸⁴ and he stands as the organizer and apologist for the first phase of Russian Masonry; the practical-oriented, St. Petersburg-based English form of Masonry which Catherine found relatively acceptable.

English Masonry partook, indeed, of the dilettantish atmosphere of Catherine’s court. Elagin admitted that he turned to the movement originally out of boredom; and his main addition to the standard practices of English Masonry lay in the addition of exotic initiation rituals, which he justified on practical grounds as needed substitutes for the rites of the Church. His definition of a Mason differed little from the description of any enlightened member of Catherine’s entourage: “a free man able to master his inclinations … to subordinate his will to the laws of reason.”⁸⁵ Elagin’s lodges had a base membership in 1774 of some two hundred Russian and foreign aristocrats, almost all occupying leading positions in the civil or military service.⁸⁶

Novikov first joined the Masonic order in 1775 through Elagin’s lodge in St. Petersburg. But he refused to submit to the usual initiation rituals and was dissatisfied with the way they “played ‘mason’ like a child’s game.”⁸⁷ Within a year he had broken away to form a new lodge and to send Russian Masonry into a second, more intense phase, which was mystical-Germanic rather than English in origin, and had Moscow rather than St. Petersburg as its spiritual center. Novikov took the lead in turning Russian Masonry from the casual fraternal activities of Elagin to the inner groups and esoteric higher orders which were characteristic of this second, Moscow phase of Russian Masonic history and were to have such an important impact on the subsequent development of Russian culture.

This new trend in Russian Masonry was part of a general European movement away from English toward “Scottish” Masonry, which taught that there were higher levels of membership beyond the original three: anywhere from one to ninety-nine additional stages. This “higher order” Masonry⁸⁸ introduced closer bonds of secrecy and mutual obligation, special catechisms and vows, and new quasi-Oriental costumes and rituals. Their lodges claimed origins in the sacred past through the Knights Templars or Knights of Jerusalem back to the Gnostics and the Essenes. In Russian these higher orders were generally known as the “Orders of Andrew,” the apostle who allegedly brought Christianity to Russia even before Peter took it to Rome.

The turn to “true Masonry” had rather the effect of religious conversion for many members of the aristocracy. Chudi, the “literary chameleon” who had been a leading symbol of frivolity and sensuality, became a passionate apologist for the movement as the only bulwark against the moral disintegration of Europe. From writing pornographic literature, Chudi turned to the writing of Masonic sermons and catechisms, and the founding of his own system of higher lodges of “The Flaming Star.”⁸⁹

The Russian aristocracy was a fertile field for such conversions in the 1770’s and 1780’s. Increasing numbers were anxious to dissociate themselves from the immorality, agnosticism, and superficiality of court life, and the higher aristocracy was bound together by a new sense of insecurity in the wake of the Pugachev uprising. They felt cut off from the religion of the people they were now empowered to rule, yet not content with the Voltairianism of Catherine’s court. “Finding myself at the crossroads between Voltairianism and religion,” Novikov writes of his own conversion, “I had no basis on which to work, no cornerstone on which to build spiritual tranquility, and therefore I unexpectedly fell into the society.”⁹⁰ His philosophic journal of the late seventies, Morning Light, was explicitly designed to “struggle with that sect which prides itself on the title ‘philosophical’”⁹¹ by publishing the great classical and medieval philosophers.

The turn to occult, “higher order” Masonry in Eastern Europe was part of the general reaction against French rationalism and secularism that was gathering momentum in the fifteen years prior to the French Revolution. The model was the so-called Swedish system, which had nine grades and a tenth secret group of nine members known as the “Commanders of the Red Cross,” who met Fridays at midnight and conducted special prayers, fasts, and other forms of self-discipline. This idea of a new mystical-military order attracted wide attention in Germany, where the Swedish system became known as the “strict observance.” Members of these new brotherhoods generally adopted new names as a sign of their inner regeneration and participated in communal efforts to discover through reading and meditation the inner truth and lost unity of the early Christian Church. The theosophic treatises of Jacob Boehme were supplemented in these circles by the works of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who from 1747 to his death in 1772 had written a long series of occult works, such as Secrets of the Universe and The Apocalypse Revealed. By 1770 there were at least twelve major lodges in eastern Germany and the Baltic region; and the next decade was to see a wild proliferation of these higher orders within the two great powers of the region: Prussia and Russia.⁹²

Higher order Masonry appealed to the princes and aristocrats of Eastern Europe as a vehicle for fortifying their realms against the reformist ideas of the French Enlightenment. Two such princes, King Gustav III of Sweden and Crown Prince Frederick William of Prussia, played a major role in bringing the movement into Russia. Gustav gave Swedish Masonry a special stamp of respectability when he flaunted his Masonic ties during his visit to St. Petersburg in 1776 and won over Crown Prince Paul to friendly association if not full membership.⁹³ He entered into negotiations for a royal marriage and sought to link Russian and Swedish Masonry in one system of lodges under the direction of his brother.

Even more important was the influx from Germany, where the idea of higher orders on the Swedish model was enjoying great vogue. In 1776 Prince Gagarin, a close friend of Paul and leader of the main Swedish type of lodge in St. Petersburg, journeyed to Germany to accept the authority of the Berlin lodge Minerva (“of the strict observance”) and to bring back with him both an aristocratic German leader for the Russian “province” and a dynamic young teacher of occult lore, Johann Georg Schwarz.

A twenty-five-year-old, German-educated Transylvanian, Schwarz was given a position at Moscow University and rapidly threw himself into the business of transforming Russian Masonry in collaboration with the two key Russian admirers: Kheraskov and Novikov. Schwarz’s lectures at Moscow University on philology, mystical philosophy, and the philosophy of history attracted the attention of a host of admirers, including two prominent visitors of 1780: Joseph II of Austria and Prince Frederick William of Prussia.

In 1781 Schwarz, Novikov, Kheraskov, and others combined to organize “the gathering of University foster children,” the first secret student society in Russian history. The following year Schwarz was made inspector of a new “pedagogical seminary” to train teachers for the expected expansion of Russia’s educational system and to reorganize the preparatory curriculum for the university. From this position, Schwarz tried in effect to integrate Russian higher education with higher Masonry. With Novikov organizing a supporting program of publication, Schwarz gradually gained the interest of a number of wealthy patrons who joined the two of them in the new “secret scientific [sientificheskaia] lodge, Harmony,” of 1780.⁹⁴

Like the tenth order in Swedish Masonry, this secret lodge had nine members and was dedicated to “returning the society to Christianity.” The pursuit and dissemination of knowledge was to be intensified but placed under Christian auspices, for “science without Christianity becomes evil and deadly poison.”⁹⁵ In 1782 the Moscow group formed a “fraternal learned society” with an affiliated “translator’s seminary” for publishing foreign books and an “all-supreme philosophic seminary” of thirty-five learned figures, twenty-one of whom had been chosen from the seminaries.

The final form of “higher order” which the leading Moscow Masons adopted was Prussian Rosicrucianism, into which Schwarz was initiated on a trip abroad in 1781-2. He had set out as the Russian delegate to the Wilhelmsbad Convention of 1781-2, which had been summoned to try to bring order out of chaos in the higher Masonic orders. Disillusioned with the charlatanism of so much of higher order Masonry, Schwarz fell under the sway of the Prussian Rosicrucian leader, Johann Christoph Wöllner, who had also converted Crown Prince Frederick William and was shortly to preside over a purge of rationalistic teachings in the Prussian schools.⁹⁶ Schwarz was initiated into the Rosicrucian order and empowered to set up his own independent province in Russia, which he called the society of the “Golden-rosed Cross.” The central conviction of the “Harmony” group was that science and religion were but two aspects of one truth. As Novikov put it in 1781 in the first issue of his new series of publications for the university press:

Between faith and reason … philosophy and theology there should be no conflict… faith does not go against reason … does not take from us the savor of life, it demands only the denial of superfluousness.⁹⁷

For Schwarz’s Rosicrucians the world itself was the “supreme temple” of Masonry and their brotherhood the final “theoretical level” for which all other grades of Masonry were mere preliminaries. The attainment of this level involved a flight from the rationalism of the Russian Enlightenment as Novikov clearly indicated in the opening number of his new journal, Twilight Glow, in 1782:

comparing our present position with that of our forefather before the fall who glistened in the noon-day light of wisdom, the light of our reason can hardly be compared even to the twilight glow.…⁹⁸

The “light of Adam” is, nonetheless, “still within us, only hidden.”⁹⁹ The task is to find it through inner purification, and a dedicated study of the “hieroglyphics” of nature—and of the most ancient history, which still contained some reflections of this lost light. In a series of lectures given in both the university and the lodges, Schwarz sought to provide a guide. Reason, he explained, was only the first and weakest path to the light; feeling (the aesthetic sense of the rose) the second; and revelation (the mystery of the cross) the third. Each led man to the progressively higher stage of knowledge: the curious, the pleasant, and the useful. Following Boehme, Schwarz contended that all of the cosmos was moving in triads toward perfection. Both the triune God (for whom the world was “created out of his own inner essence,” as an “endless wish of his unfathomable will”) and God’s image, man (who also contained a “trinity” of body, mind, and spirit), were moving toward reunion in the ultimate trinity: “the good, the true, and the beautiful.”¹⁰⁰ In order to help bring “unripe minds” back from Voltairianism, Schwarz and Novikov published a series of mystical tracts in large editions in the early eighties, ranging from Boehme’s Path to Christ and Arndt’s On True Christianity to such anonymous compilations as The Errors of Reason and The Secrets of the Cross.

The death of Schwarz early in 1784 was caused largely by an excess of ascetic self-discipline in his quest for inner perfection and knowledge. A large crowd of mourners gathered at his funeral even though it was held in a remote village; and a memorial service was also spontaneously organized by his students in Moscow. He played an important innovating role in the development of Russian thought even though he spent less than five of his thirty-three years in Russia and never formally enjoyed noble status. He was in many ways the father of Russian romanticism, with his deprecation of natural reason, his belief that art was closer to the inner harmony of nature, and his love of twilight, mystery, and chivalric ideals. At the same time he was the first of a long line of German idealistic philosophers to impart to Russia a thirst for philosophic absolutes, insisting that perfection could be realized through the special knowledge and dedication of a select brotherhood. The Moscow Rosicrucians of the eighties began the tradition of semi-secret philosophic circles which became so important in the intellectual life of Russia. They introduced practices which were to become characteristic in varying forms of such circles: assumed names, bonds of friendship and mutual aid, secret discussion and mutual criticism, and an obligatory system of quarterly confession to the grand master of the order.

The casual moralism and philanthropy that had dominated early Masonry was, under Schwarz, transformed into a seductive belief in the realizability of heaven on earth through the concentrated effort of consecrated thinkers. It seems fitting that Schwarz was apparently the first to use the term intelligentsiia. Though using it in the sense of the Latin term intelligentia (“intelligence”), Schwarz gave the term its distinctive Russian spelling, intelligentsiia, and the sense of special power which would eventually come to be applied to the class of people who went by its name. “Chto takoe intelligentsiia?” “What is intelligence?” asks Schwarz in a phrase that was to be much repeated in subsequent Russian history. It is, he says,

that higher state of man, as a mental essence, free from all base, earthly perishable matter; eternally and imperceptibly capable of influencing and acting on all things.¹⁰¹

Intelligentsia was the magical force for which Catherine had prayed at the beginning of her Nakaz: “Domine Deus … da mini intelligentiam …” But it was given a different, mystical meaning by Schwarz. The first comprehensive history of Russian Masonry claimed with some justice that Russian Masonry first gave the aristocracy “a sense of mission as an intellectual class” (kak intelligentnoe soslovie).¹⁰²

After Schwarz’s death, a new grand master arrived from Germany convinced that “true Rosicrucians are the true restorers of order in Europe,” and that a leading role in this restoration would be played by Russia (“a camel that does not realize it is laden with precious goods”).¹⁰³ Numerous young Russians flocked to Berlin for fuller study of the order, some hoping to unravel there the secret of eternal life. The movement received new encouragement in 1786 when a practicing Rosicrucian, Prince Frederick William, became king of Prussia. A bewildering profusion of occult fraternities flooded into Russia in the late eighties: the “New Israelites,” or “people of God,” who called themselves true Masons but seemed more like religious sectarians; the “children of the New Jerusalem” who were followers of Swedenborg; and an aristocratic group formed in Avignon by Admiral Pleshcheev and Prince N. Repnin, which was transferred to St. Petersburg under the ideological guidance of Dom Pernety, a former Benedictine and librarian of Frederick the Great, who had taken up occult studies.¹⁰⁴

Novikov became uneasy about the new occult turn that Masonry had taken, and proposed forming a more purely Christian and philanthropic order in the late eighties. His harsh criticism of the Jesuits in 1784 as being a political order and thus a betrayal of the monastic ideal had brought a sharp rebuke from their benefactress, Catherine. Increasingly she stepped up her harassment of all Masons, wrote three satirical anti-Masonic plays, closed down Masonic printing presses, and finally arrested Novikov in his village home in 1792.

Catherine’s persecution of Novikov is usually bracketed with her treatment of Radishchev as illustrating her general disillusionment with the Enlightenment in France in the wake of the French Revolution. Actually, her opposition to Masonry was of many years standing and appeared in her writings even before her accession to the throne. It was based not on a sudden disillusionment with a former ideological infatuation, but on a deep antagonism to all forms of obscurity and secretiveness. Catherine was suspicious of anything mystical which “inclines the mind away from participation in the affairs of this world,”¹⁰⁵ and was also politically apprehensive of Swedish and Prussian influence over these higher orders.

There may, moreover, have been real acuteness in her premonitions of special danger lurking within this movement. She knew that the occult orders had influence over her son Paul and sensed that they might establish broader links with other disaffected elements of the population. Having defeated religion in the countryside, Catherine was now seeing it stage a comeback in the drawing rooms. The literature of urban nostalgia was beginning. Chulkov, Shcherbatov, Novikov, and others were leading men’s gaze back to the idealized rural and religious culture of Muscovy. Novikov’s increasing interest in the religious traditions of Old Russia was giving his publications a new kind of quasi-religious appeal. Novikov adopted the Old Believer habit of counting dates from creation rather than the birth of Christ and published a number of Old Believer documents. Indeed, his publication of an apologia for the rebellious monks of Solovetsk was the immediate cause of his arrest and deportation.

In the late years of Catherine’s reign there was a general turn toward desperation within the religious community. Monks fled from monasteries to the ascetic “desert” settlements (pustyni) during this period. Within the schismatic community arose the prophetic “wanderers” led by a man who deserted first from the army and then from the sedentary Old Believer settlement itself. He refused even to touch coins or anything else that bore the imperial “seal of Antichrist.” The entire government apparatus was the work of the Antichrist, whose sign was “the division of men into different ranks and the measurement of the forests, seas, and land.”¹⁰⁶ Among the sectarians a new leader of the Dukhobors gave a flagellant cast to his sect that they have retained ever since by proclaiming himself Christ and setting out as an itinerant preacher with twelve apostles.

But the most extreme and ghoulish new form of religious protest to Catherine’s rule appeared within the flagellant movement: the sect of skoptsy, or self-castrators. As with the “runner” movement among the schismatics, the self-castrators among the sectarians were founded by a deserter from the army. Driven apparently at one of the ecstatic flagellant “rejoicings” to the point of self-castration, he began persuading others to follow his example in the course of the 1770’s. For more than a half century he continued to preach the need for this form of purification to interested listeners, which included many of his civil and monastic jailors, General Suvorov, and even Alexander I.

As with the self-burners of the late seventeenth century, the self-castrated of the late eighteenth should not be looked at solely as a masochistic curiosity. Both groups viewed their act as a “new baptism” into the elect of the world to come and as a kind of sacrificial atonement for the redemption of a fallen society. The self-burners appeared at the time of maximum violence and cruelty among the ruling class; the self-castrators, at the time of greatest profligacy. The sacrifice that they each chose to make was thus, in some degree, determined by the character of the society they were protesting against.

The self-castrators, however, had curious political pretensions which provide the first hint of the revolutionary social doctrines that were later to come from the sectarian tradition. They worshipped before icons of Peter III; many believed God had created him impotent in order to lead them.¹⁰⁷ The attempt of their leader Selivanov to characterize himself as a castrated Peter III was based on the old myth of the “true tsar.” What was new was the contention that the skoptsy as a whole were a kind of “true aristocracy” destined to replace the false, promiscuous aristocracy of Catherine’s court. Selivanov’s expressed purpose was to set up a world-wide rule of the castrated. The first stage of admission to this elite (castration) was referred to as “the small seal”; and the second stage (total removal of the sexual organs), “the imperial seal” (Tsarskaia pechat’). Selivanov had remarkable success in gaining converts—particularly in Moscow among wealthy merchants and military leaders who had been denied access to the inner circles of Catherine’s court. One of his converts was the former chamberlain to the king of Poland, who came to Moscow after the final partition of Poland and spoke of the skoptsy leadership as a “divine chancery.”¹⁰⁸

Like the other sectarians the skoptsy considered themselves the true “spiritual” Christians, referring to one another as “doves.”

Among the schismatics, the wanderers devised a loose chain of communication and command centered on a village near Yaroslavl, and the new and more radical Dukhobors in the sectarian community came to view Tambov as the region in which God was coming to gather his true servants for the millennial reign of saints. Thus, all of the new forms of religious dissent under Catherine contained an element of radical if essentially passive protest. They were all determined—as the leader of the wanderers put it in his prophetic book The Garden (Tsvetnik)—not to go on “with one eye on earth and one eye in heaven.”¹⁰⁹ Both eyes were to be lifted above; and the true capital of Russia for these dissonant elements was not St. Petersburg or any of the cities built or rebuilt by Catherine, but the villages or mountains where the leader of the new spiritual army lived—be it the pustyn’ of St. Seraphim, the wanderer center near Yaroslavl, or the perennial sectarian center of Tambov.

Catherine viewed all of this with a mixture of disgust and patronizing sympathy. Her attitude toward religion was the typically modern one of toleration-through-indifference. She had been born a Lutheran, educated by Calvinists and Catholics, and welcomed into the Orthodox fold. She was deeply suspicious of Jews and sectarian extremists; but was otherwise ruled by considerations of raison d’état in matters of religion. She welcomed Jesuits for their intellectual and pedagogic abilities, encouraged the immigration of agriculturally skilled German pietists, and started the “one faith” (edinoverie) movement whereby Old Believers were permitted to rejoin the official Church, preserving most of their old rites so long as they recognized the authority of the established hierarchy.

But she correctly sensed that popular religious sentiment was deeply offended by her rule; and she may have felt that the secret groups meeting under Novikov in Moscow were, or would become, a focal point of opposition. Beginning with her edict of 1785, ordering supervision of the Masonic presses and interrogation of Novikov, she repeatedly expressed the fear that “Martinists” were fostering some concealed schism (raskol) in Russian society. In January, 1786, she referred to the Masons as “that crowd of the notorious new schism” and in a special note to the Metropolitan of Moscow, she suggested that there lay “hidden in their reasonings incompatibilities with the simple and pure rules of faith of our Orthodox and civil duty.”¹¹⁰ Although briefly reassured by the Metropolitan’s vote of confidence in Novikov, she must have been disturbed by his statement that he could not pass judgment on Novikov’s occult books, because he could not understand them. Her steady war on Masonry continued through both satiric writings and increased administrative pressure, particularly after the appointment of a new chief commandant for Moscow in February, 1790. A measure of her special concern about Novikov is the fact that his arrest in April, 1792, was carefully staged at a time when he was outside of Moscow, and carried out by an entire squadron of hussars. “A poor old man plagued with piles,” said Count Razumovsky of Novikov, “was besieged as if he were a city!”¹¹¹ He was sent under guard to Yaroslavl; and then, apparently realizing that this metropolis on the Volga was a center both of Masonic activity and of sectarian agitation, transferred to a more distant and secluded place of confinement.

The term “Martinist,” which Catherine repeatedly used for Novikov’s circles, was well chosen, for it highlights the central importance within higher order Masonry of the mystical teachings of Henri de Saint-Martin, the last of the long line of French thinkers to establish an overpowering influence on Russian thought in the eighteenth century. Saint-Martin was the anti-Voltaire of French thought, and his first and greatest work, On Errors and Truth, was a kind of Bible for the mystical counterattack against the French Enlightenment. Published in 1775, it became known almost immediately in Russia and was translated, copied, and widely extracted within higher Masonic circles.

Saint-Martin was in many ways a caricature of the alienated intellectual: a small, sickly bachelor with an oversized head, no real occupation, and few friends. As a wealthy aristocrat he had ample time to read and travel; but he appears to have found a sense of purpose and identity only when he met Martinez de Pasqually, said to be a Portuguese Jew, who introduced him to spiritualism through his own secret order of “elected Cohens (priests).” It was under the spell of this order that he wrote his On Errors, signing it mysteriously “the unknown philosopher.”¹¹²

The meaning of the book is deliberately obscure, heavily draped with portentous talk of spiritual forces and sweeping attacks on the alleged sensualism and materialism of the age. “I was less the friend of God than the enemy of his enemies, and it was this indignation that impelled me to write my first book.”¹¹³ The opposite of the animal man is the man of intelligence, whom he later also calls the “man of desire,” the “man of spirit.” Thus Saint-Martin gives to the term “intelligence” an even broader meaning than Schwarz. Intelligence can alone save the world, for it is impelled by desire and spirit and its object is a return to God. Following the Neo-Platonists, Saint-Martin insists that all beings are emanations from God. The original perfection of man has been lost only because his spiritual nature has been diluted with matter; but “the reintegration of beings in their primal wholeness”¹¹⁴ is now possible through the use of “intelligence” within the new spiritualist fraternities.

Saint-Martin attracted many Russian followers through his promise to lead men to this reintegrating principal, or—as he also called it—“the thing” (la chose). Nobody knew exactly what “the thing” was; but the place to look for it was in occult writings and the higher Masonic lodges. More than any other single man, Saint-Martin established the idea among Russian thinkers that the real world was the world of spirit, and that the key to truth lay in establishing some kind of contact with, or understanding of, that world. This introduction of spiritualism within the intellectual community gave it a potential community of interest with sectarian “spiritual Christianity.” Catherine seems to have sensed instinctively that some such unified opposition to her might develop on a religious basis under the “Martinists,” and that firm action was necessary to defend the strength of the state.

Whatever her reasoning, Catherine’s arrest of Novikov and dispersal of the Moscow Martinists also brought an end to her program of enlightenment. For Novikov had combined within himself both aspects of the Russian Enlightenment: the St. Petersburg and Moscow, practical philanthropy and theoretical mysticism. His early career shows the predominance of satire, moralism, and Anglo-French influences. All of this was typical of the early, casual forms of English Masonry and of the cosmopolitan and activistic capital.

With his move to Moscow, he became preoccupied with religious themes. From the world of Addison and Steele, he moved to that of Bunyan and Milton. Novikov encouraged the translation of Paradise Lost and Pilgrim’s Progress, and began his own Selected Library of Christian Readings in 1784 with the first Russian translation of a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ. He involved himself less in practical activities than in the search for a new esoteric religion through studying the theosophy of Boehme and the older religious traditions of the Russian people.

The later struggle between “Westernizers” and “Slavophiles” is anticipated in the difference of perspective between lower and higher order Masonry. In both cases the Westernized activism of St. Petersburg contrasts with the more contemplative Eastern preoccupations of Moscow. But in both cases, there was a close bond between the parties. Herzen said of the Westernizers’ relationship with the Slavophiles: “Like Janus or like a two-headed eagle we looked in different directions while the same heart throbbed within us.”¹¹⁵ In like manner the rationalist Radishchev dedicated his Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow to the mystic Kutuzov a half century earlier: “My opinion differs from thine … but thy heart beats as one with mine.”¹¹⁶

Thus, the real sense of solidarity among the alienated, aristocratic intellectuals lay not so much in the mind as in the “heart”: in their common sense of caring. The word “intelligence” included “desire” and “spirit” for Saint-Martin, and these qualities were important to men whose heirs were to call themselves collectively the intelligentsiia. It was Catherine’s lack of concern, rather than her lack of intelligence, that alienated the intellectuals.

The quality most highly valued by these dedicated aristocratic circles in the late years of Catherine’s reign was “love of truth” (pravda-liubov’). This was the pen name of Novikov and a favorite inscription on gravestones. The aristocratic intellectuals believed that there was such a thing as Truth; in search of it they joined higher Masonic orders, set off on travels, and read new books from the West with special intensity. Following Boehme and Saint-Martin, they attributed their failure to read the “hieroglyphics” of truth to their own fallen sinfulness. Reading came to be regarded not as a casual form of leisure activity but as part of an over-all program of spiritual and moral regeneration. Foreign books became sacred objects that were thought to possess redeeming powers; key sections were often read in an intoned, semi-liturgical manner. Yet behind all these mystical activities of the “circle” stood the supreme Enlightenment belief in an “inner reason,” an “ultimate harmony” behind all the seeming incongruity and misfortune in the world. Thus there was a logical connection between the “rational” and the “mystical” side of the Enlightenment, as well as a psychological connection through the personality of Novikov.

Of course, the flight into occult methods of exegesis was partly the result of virginal enthusiasm. Holy chants of the Church were replaced by new declaratory hymns consecrated to abstract virtues and mythological deities. Icons were replaced by statues—above all busts of great philosophers. The pseudo-science of physiognomy was flourishing in Russia thanks to the extraordinary influence of the Swiss mystic Johann Caspar Lavater; and the belief was widespread that one could divine the inner characteristics of a man (and by extension the essence of his ideas) from a careful study of his facial contour and features. Gardens and rooms full of realistic busts or portraits were increasingly common; and Catherine’s famous smashing of her bust of Voltaire as a result of the French Revolution was almost a totemistic act.

But what did the “lovers of truth” expect to find inside their circles and behind the sculptured masks of philosophers? The answer may be partly revealed by the Russian word for “truth,” pravda. As one nineteenth-century aristocratic intellectual said:

Every time that the word pravda comes into my head I cannot help but be enraptured by its wonderful inner beauty. Such a word does not, it seems, exist in any other European language. It seems that only in Russia verity (istina) and justice (spravedlivost’) are designated by one and the same word and are fused, as it were, into one great whole.… Truth in this wide meaning of the word has been the aim of my searching.¹¹⁷

Truth thus meant both knowledge of the nature of things and a higher form of justice. Some indication that it had both meanings for the aristocrats of the Russian Enlightenment can be found by looking at the classical divinities they substituted for the saints of old as revered intermediaries between ultimate truth and the world of men. Two goddesses stand out in the pseudo-classical pantheon of the Russian enlightenment: Astrea and Athena, the goddesses of justice and of wisdom; of pravda-spravedlivost’ and pravda-istina. Elizabeth had a large statue of Astrea built for her coronation and a temple to Minerva (the Latin form of Athena) placed in front of the Winter Palace shortly thereafter. Catherine had a masquerade, “Minerva Triumphant,” performed for her coronation and had herself depicted as Astrea when she drew up her legislative proposal. The first higher order Masonic lodge to establish a chain of dependencies in Russia was the Berlin lodge Minerva; and the last and most influential chain of higher order lodges was that of the Russian lodge Astrea.

The influence of higher order Masonry on the development of Russian intellectual life can hardly be exaggerated. The concept of small circles meeting regularly, the idea of a corporate search for true knowledge and higher justice, the love of esoteric ritual and readings, the tendency to see moral, spiritual, and aesthetic concerns as part of one higher concern—all this became characteristic of Russian aristocratic thought and was to leave a permanent if ambiguous legacy of chaos and intensity. These circles—rather than the government chanceries or the new universities—were the main channels for creative thought in early-nineteenth-century Russia. Mar-tinism had charged the air with expectation and created a sense of solidarity among those searching for truth, even if they differed as to what it was. Most important, ideas were creating a thirst for action. As one speaker put it at a “creative gathering” of a new “fraternal literary society” at the turn of the century:

… The good lies in the order which we bring into our meetings; the beautiful in the union of friendship.… What is to be done? … how and who will open this rich treasury which sometimes lies too deeply hidden in the invisible future? Activity. Activity is the guardian and mother of all success. It gives us the key and shows us the path to the sanctuary of nature. Labor, unhappiness, and the crown of victory unite us closer than all our speeches.¹¹⁸

The Frustration of Political Reform

THE LAST DECADE of the eighteenth century was a bleak period for Russian culture. Catherine was frustrated physically by the increasing difference in age between herself and her courtiers and ideologically by the increasing difference between her old ideals of enlightenment and the reality of revolution. Only a few days after the fall of the Bastille she received prophetic warnings from her ambassador in Paris about the new “political enthusiasms” of the revolutionaries. Slowly she turned her back on France. By 1791 she had recalled all Russian students from Paris and Strasbourg and declared ideological war on the revolutionary “constitution of Antichrist.” The assassination of Gustav III of Sweden at a masked ball in 1792, followed closely by the execution of Louis XVI and of Catherine’s close friend Marie Antoinette in 1793, deepened Catherine’s gloom and precipitated an almost farcical witch hunt in St. Petersburg. A French royal ist general wearing a red hat was mistakenly arrested by an official anxious to find a Jacobin; illiterate police officials ordered to destroy suspect books ended up destroying books adjacent to them in the library for fear they had been contaminated.

Poetic transcriptions of psalms were censored, and all copies burned of an innocuous melodrama, Vadim of Novgorod, by one of Catherine’s former favorites. The play depicted the love of Vadim for the daughter of Riurik, who had come to rule over them. Realizing that his attachment to the old ways in Novgorod makes him bad building material for the new order, Vadim commits suicide together with his beloved. Everything is done with stoic dignity in the interest of good government and to the glory of Russian rule; but Vadim’s occasional nostalgic soliloquies in praise of the lost liberties of Novgorod sounded too much like revolutionary oratory to Catherine.¹¹⁹

Catherine had, however, let out the leash too far to be an effective dictator. She was unable to gain the cooperation of university professors and other educated groups for tightening the censorship; and only her son and successor Paul was willing to institute a real purge and establish a blanket censorship. Under his brief rule it became a crime to use the word “citizen” or to possess a copy of his mother’s legislative proposal. In 1797, his first complete year of rule, the number of regular periodicals published in Russia declined to 5 (from 16 in 1789), the number of books printed during the year to 240 (from 572 in 1788).¹²⁰ But Paul lacked the authority to stake out a new course for Russia. His reign made the need for reform more urgent than ever and affected the course of Russian thought under Alexander I in two important ways. First of all, Paul’s overt admiration of Prussian ideas had the negative effect of driving much of the nobility back to the French Enlightenment. Whereas there had been a strong wave of reaction against all things French in the early stages of the Revolution, Russian aristocrats now tended to look again to France for political guidance in preventing a recurrence of Paul’s arbitrary rule. Thus Paul unintentionally stimulated the renewed discussion of political reform during the first half of Alexander’s reign.

At the same time, however, Paul’s methods for combating revolutionary thought anticipated in many respects the pattern which prevailed in the second half of Alexander’s reign. For Paul sought to enlist mystical religion in the counter-revolutionary cause. He formally assumed the title “Head of the Church” at his coronation (administering communion to himself) and became an enthusiastic patron of both higher order Masonry and the Roman Catholic Church. Shortly after his coronation he released Novikov and promoted Repnin, head of the “New Israel” sect, to the post of field marshal and special adviser. In 1798 he made himself the new commander of the Maltese Order of the Knights of Jerusalem (who had been evicted from Malta by the advancing tide of the French Revolution), and appointed the higher Masonic leader Labzin as its official historian. He also offered shelter to the Pope from the Revolution and approved the establishment of a Catholic parish in St. Petersburg and of a Catholic academy in Vilnius under a former general of the Jesuit Order.¹²¹

Thus the “spiritual mobilization” against revolution during the second half of Alexander’s reign was in some respects a development of ideas and techniques first crudely tried out by Paul. This frail yet Draconian ruler often complained that there were ghosts in the castle at Gatchina, before he was strangled by reform-minded guards officers in 1801. But it was his ghost that returned a quarter of a century later to strangle at the gallows five Decembrist officers who had led the aristocratic counterattack against autocratic discipline. In the intervening Alexandrian age, expectations of thoroughgoing political reform were raised as they had never been before.

Rarely have the vague hopes of so many different groups converged so clearly on one man as on the handsome young prince who became tsar in 1801. Alexander’s loosely worded promises of reform at his coronation encouraged the hopes of everyone. The peasant hailed him as “blessed Alexander” after the harsh reigns of Catherine and Paul. Dissenting religious groups were heartened by his promises of tolerance. The venerable historian, Professor Schlözer, who had spent many years in Russia and attracted many Russian students to Göttingen, hailed the nineteenth century as “the Alexandrian century.”¹²² Optimism was everywhere as Russia prepared to send its first round-the-world naval expedition under a flagship appropriately named Hope.

Hope ran perhaps highest of all among the liberal reformers. Radishchev hailed Alexander as a “guardian angel”;¹²³ and reformers were encouraged by his long association with La Harpe, his repeal of the ban on secret societies, and his decision to charter four new universities. Liberated from the harsh reign of Paul and exhilarated by Russia’s growing importance in Europe, they were anxious to aid Alexander in his professed intention to modernize the political system of Russia. As he introduced modern ministries and gathered about himself a liberal-minded entourage of advisers known by the French revolutionary designation “Committee of Public Safety,” Alexander placed political reform squarely on the agenda.

In response, the aristocracy produced a bewildering array of political ideas during Alexander’s reign. Three major currents of thought predominated: constitutional monarchism, autocratic conservatism, and federal republicanism. The first current dominated the first or “liberal” period of Alexander’s reign; the second predominated in the second half; and the third was an undercurrent which came to the surface only briefly after his death. Each of these three positions was defended in the measured manner of the Enlightenment as the best rational alternative for Russia. Each of the positions was drawn up without much consideration of economic and social problems; each was deeply aristocratic in its assumption that only a few were qualified either to discuss or to implement political change.

Constitutional monarchy was the predominant ideal for the first decade of Alexander’s reign, the dominant figure of which was Michael Speransky. Like most other leading thinkers of the Alexandrian age, Speransky divided his time between political theories and religious concerns. He began his career as a student and teacher at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy and ended it as a mystical student of the occult. His most lasting accomplishment lay in law and administration: as a reforming governor-general of Siberia in the 1820’s and the principal editor of the new law code of 1833.¹²⁴ But in the first decade of Alexander’s rule he advanced more sweeping programs for transforming Russia into a constitutional monarchy of a Western type. As the son of a priest and a relative outsider to the higher levels of Russian society, Speransky was far more interested in heightening the position of the state servant than most of the independently wealthy aristocracy. As the husband of an Englishwoman and an admirer of Bentham, he was particularly interested in the English tradition of public service.¹²⁵

The Evolution of Old Russian Architecture

PLATES IX-X

The late-twelfth-century Cathedral of St. Dmitry in Vladimir (Plate IX) illustrates the creative development of Byzantine architecture which began in the Kievan period and which was particularly characteristic in this wooded heartland of Great Russia. The storied “white stone” (limestone and mortar) here replaced the Byzantine brick and cement still in use in both Kiev and Novgorod—encouraging massive and simple structural forms while providing surfaces suitable for sculptured relief of a kind previously confined to impermanent wooden surfaces. Traces of Armenian and Romanesque influences in the structural forms and a profusion of unfamiliar flora and fauna in the lavish reliefs, all reveal the relative cosmopolitanism of pre-Mongol Russo-Byzantine culture.

Later architecture in the same region reflected the growing Muscovite intolerance not only of secular subject matter in sacred art, but of sculptured forms as such. New traditions of inventiveness in church construction nevertheless accompanied the great growth of monasticism. The early-sixteenth-century Church of the Annunciation over the entrance to the women’s monastery of the Protection of the Virgin in Suzdal (Plate X) illustrates one of the many places in which churches were built and special services held in this increasingly ritualized and intensely ecclesiastical society. The cult of the Virgin was particularly intense in the Russian North (where indeed the feast of the Protection of the Virgin was introduced); and the three asymmetric cupolas—a special feature of Suzdalian architecture—illustrate the transposition into stone of the decorative, onion-shaped gables previously used in wooden architecture.

PLATE IX

PLATE X

PLATE XI

PLATE XII

The Evolution of Old Russian Architecture

PLATE XI-XII

By the late Muscovite period, the composed, semicircular Byzantine dome had given way altogether to the soaring, pointed forms of tent roof and onion dome, first developed in the wooden architecture of the North. At the top (Plate XI) is depicted the relatively simple Church of the Epiphany, built in 1605 in Chelmuzhi, Karelia. The increasing importance attached to bells in Muscovite worship accounts for the large bell tower, which is characteristically joined to the church itself. The sharp slope of the roofs and towers shed snow and protected the heavy horizontal log structures beneath, which were often raised to permit entrance atop snowdrifts. Fire and frost have destroyed all but a few of these older churches in the relatively unsettled regions of Karelia and further north and east from Archangel, where Soviet expeditions have recently discovered wooden churches and chapels dating back as far as the fourteenth century.

The wild proliferation of onion-shaped gables and domes during the century that followed the building of this church represented an increasing preoccupation with external silhouette; and a rustic, Muscovite defiance of both the neo-Byzantine style introduced by Patriarch Nikon and the purely Western architecture of Peter the Great. At the very time when Peter was building the totally Westernized city of St. Petersburg on the spot where the Neva River flows into the Baltic Sea, defenders of the old order were raising up the magnificent Church of the Transfiguration (Plate XII) on one of the Karelian lakes from which the Neva ultimately drew its water. The silhouette of this church at Kizhi on Lake Onega has been likened to the jagged fir tree from which its wooden substance was largely hewn.

Thus, while Speransky edited Radishchev’s last contribution to Russian thought, the “Charter of the Russian People,” he had little sympathy with the latter’s abstract, rhetorical approach.¹²⁶ He spent his early years in practical administrative activity: reforming Russia’s chaotic financial system and attempting to establish clear responsibility and delineation of authority within the newly created ministries. Recognizing the need for a better-educated civil service, he helped organize two new schools for training them: the polytechnical institute and the lycée at Tsarskoe Selo. The latter in particular became a major channel through which reformist ideas were to penetrate the Russian aristocracy.¹²⁷

After Alexander’s rapprochement with Napoleon at Tilsit in 1807, the idea of a thoroughgoing reform of the Russian government on French models gained favor. Asked to prepare a secret plan for the reform, Speransky proposed a constitutional monarchy with a separation of powers, transformation of the senate into a supreme judiciary, and a system of regional representative bodies under a central legislature. The executive was to be responsible to the central legislature; but ultimate control remained with the tsar and an imperial council responsible solely to him.¹²⁸

This ingenious, somewhat eclectic proposal of 1809 was never taken any further than the creation of the imperial council with Speransky himself as secretary. Speransky’s determination to tax the aristocracy more effectively and to require systematic examinations for the civil service was resented by the aristocracy. As a man of humble origins popularly identified with the French alliance, Speransky was vulnerable to attack when Napoleon invaded Russia. Thus, although Alexander had assured La Harpe only the year before that “liberal ideas are moving ahead”¹²⁹ in Russia, he dismissed Speransky and exiled him to the East in 1812. With him went the most serious plan for the introduction of representative and constitutional forms into the Russian monarchy that was to appear for nearly a century.

Nicholas Karamzin, the spokesman for autocratic conservatism, entered the political arena dramatically with his Note on Old and New Russia: a frontal attack on Speransky written at the request of the Tsar’s sister in 1811. The Tsar was delighted by the piece and invited Karamzin to take up residence at the Anichkov palace, where he secured his position as the new court favorite by writing his famous multi-volume History of the Russian State.

Karamzin was a widely traveled aristocrat whose journalistic and literary activities had already established him as a champion of Westernization and linguistic modernization. Like others who became politically conservative after the French Revolution, Karamzin preferred the wisdom of history to that of abstract laws: the rule of “people” to that of “forms.” He had been abroad in 1789, during the Revolution, and had a real aversion to revolutionary slogans. In an ode to Alexander at the time of his coronation he wrote pointedly:

Freedom is where there are regulations,

Wise freedom is holy;

But equality is a dream.¹³⁰

With verve and erudition he hammered away at the need to return to the absolutism of the past. The simplicity of his message appealed to an age perplexed by the profusion of new proposals for reform and by the fact that the reformer-in-chief of Europe, Napoleon, had suddenly become the foe of Russia. The sophistication of his arguments also made conservatism appear intellectually respectable. His examination of possible political alternatives was typical of the Enlightenment and similar to that of Speransky. Anarchy is the worst solution of the political problem, and despotism almost as bad. Republicanism is theoretically the best but requires a small country to be effective. Aristocratic rule can lead only to fragmentation and political domination by foreigners. Therefore, autocratic monarchy is the best form of rule for Russia.¹³¹

For all its elegance, however, Karamzin’s position remains little more than an attack on innovation fortified with sentimentality and casuistry. He attacks Speransky unfairly as a “translator of Napoleon,” makes the questionable contention that the aristocracy is a more faithful servant of the crown than civil servants, and plays on the anti-intellectualism of the petty nobility by ridiculing Speransky’s educational requirements for state service. His History, too, for all its style and erudition, is propagandists in intent. All history is that of the triumphant state, which is a patrimony of the tsar, whose moral qualities determine success or failure. For decades histories of Russia were merely paraphrases of this work, which at times seems closer to the historical romances of Walter Scott than to analytic history.

Karamzin was a kind of monastic chronicler in modern dress. He rehabilitated for the intellectuals of St. Petersburg many of the old Muscovite beliefs about history: the belief that everything depended on the tsar, that Providence was on the side of Russia if it remained faithful to tradition, that foreign innovation was the source of Russia’s difficulties. He echoed the Old Believer and Cossack defenders of Old Muscovy by professing hatred for bureaucracy and compromise; but he gave these attitudes a totally new appeal in St. Petersburg by suggesting that the true ally of the tsar was not the isolated defenders of the old rites or the old liberties but rather the aristocracy. Any dilution of the powers that Catherine had wisely given it would be dangerous for Russia. Karamzin criticizes Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great for their indifference to established authority, praising the holy fools and prophets who warned against headstrong innovation and Westernization. Karamzin seems to have viewed himself as a latter-day version of these court prophets, warning Alexander against liberalization.

Karamzin’s hero in Russian history is Ivan III, in whom tsarist authority was undiluted and under whose all-conquering banners the chivalric aristocracy of that time spontaneously rallied and marched off to heroic battle. In his story “Martha the City-leader or the Subjugation of Novgorod,” Karamzin glorifies the conquest of that city by Ivan III. “They should have foreseen,” one of the characters asserts, “that resistance would lead to the destruction of Novgorod, and sound reasoning demanded from them a voluntary sacrifice.”¹³² In another speech, one of the conquering princes notes that “savage people love independence, wise people love order, and there is no order without autocratic power.” Or again, in lines that could have been taken from any dictator of modern times, one of the characters notes that “not freedom, which is often destructive, but public welfare, justice, and security are the three pillars of civil happiness.”¹³³ It is curiously fitting to see Soviet editors defending the “progressiveness” of Ivan’s conquest and of Karamzin’s interpretation against the glorification of Martha and of Novgorod’s freedom by the revolutionary Decembrists.¹³⁴

The gradual triumph of Karamzin’s conservatism at court forced proponents of reform in the second half of Alexander’s reign to assume more extreme positions than those taken by Speransky. The exposure of the officer class to the West after the pursuit of Napoleon gave them new ideas. Alexander kept alive the old hope of “reform from above” by vaguely promising to make the constitution granted Poland a pattern for his entire empire and by appointing a commission under Novosiltsov to draft a federal constitution for Russia.

The political reformers that history has come to call the Decembrists can be thought of as returning war veterans, hoping to make Russia worthy of the high calling it had assumed through victory over Napoleon. They were unified mainly by certain things they opposed: the military colonies of Arakcheev, the irrational cruelties of petty officialdom, and the succession of Nicholas I to the throne. They were, in part, simply bored with Russia, determined to “awake it from its slumber,” to prove themselves the heroes at home that they had been abroad. They spoke of themselves initially as “Russian knights” and “free gardeners” and considered vaguely everything from building a web of canals between Russia’s great rivers to annexing Serbia, Hungary, and even Norway.¹³⁵ The Decembrist movement had its origins in the formation by guards officers early in 1817 of a “Union of Salvation or of Sincere and Loyal Sons of the Fatherland,” and patriotic journals, such as Son of the Fatherland, were important media for the publication of their initial proposals for political reform.¹³⁶

A romantic interest in the history and destiny of their own country was as important to these new radicals as it was to the new conservatives like Karamzin. “History leads us,” wrote the Decembrist Lunin, “into the realm of high politics.”¹³⁷ He called himself “the False Dmitry,” whose Westernizing policies he glorified in defiance of Karamzin, and he started the general Decembrist chorus in praise of the traditions of Novgorod.¹³⁸

The parliament (sejm) of early Poland and Lithuania was glorified along with the assembly (veche) of Novgorod. The aristocratic reformers had many links with Poland and Lithuania.¹³⁹ Some of the more radical officers sublimated nationality altogether in such new brotherhoods as the Society of the United Slavs. Poland was a model for the hoped-for transformation of the entire empire, because it had been allowed to keep its sejm by Alexander I, who had appeared before it.¹⁴⁰ From Lithuania came one of the first and most far-reaching plans for an all-Russian constitution, Timothy Bok’s Note to Be Presented and Read to an Assembly of the Lithuanian Nobility. Bok was arrested shortly after sending it to Alexander I in 1818, but his work helped put in circulation the romantic idea that genuine popular rule had existed throughout Eastern Europe prior to the German Drang nach Osten of late medieval times. The spontaneous and communal qualities of the Baltic peoples and their deep opposition to Germanic autocracy was a theme in the writings of the gifted Esthonian poet-Decembrist Wilhelm Küchelbecker, which was echoed by the Decembrist poet Bestuzhev-Marlinsky and by the great Polish writer and friend of the Decembrists Adam Mickiewicz.¹⁴¹ There was also a tendency to glorify the Cossacks for their methods of “gathering the ‘eldest ones’ from all tribes for the promulgation of laws in accordance with the spirit of the people.”¹⁴²

Aside from their general bias in favor of increased constitutional liberties and some form of representative government, the Decembrist reformers were most concerned with turning the Russian empire into a federation. The United States was generally the model, Nikita Murav’ev actually proposing that Russia be divided into thirteen original states with the Moscow and Don district serving as an oversized version of the District of Columbia.¹⁴³ The change of the “Union of Salvation” into the “Union of Commonweal” in 1818 involved the adoption of a new decentralized organizational system among the reformers. The Moscow congress of the various regional councils of the Union early in 1821 was the first nationwide, secret political meeting in Russian history, and it called itself a “constituent duma.”

But in the early 1820’s Alexander began to take alarm. The model for the “Union of Commonweal” had been the radical German “Union of Virtue.” In the face of unrest among these German students and a confused mutiny in 1820 within his own favored Semenovsky regiment, Alexander took drastic measures to cut Russia off from the Western Enlightenment: he purged professors and burned books, expelled the Jesuit order, and finally, in the summer of 1822, abolished all Masonic and secret societies.

Secret societies nevertheless continued to exist and to discuss the political questions that Alexander had himself once raised. Still faithful to the concept of reform from above, these groups focused their hopes for a constitutional monarchy on the heir apparent to the throne, the Grand Duke Constantine. A former Mason and long-time resident of Poland, Constantine was thought to be sympathetic with constitutional forms of rule; but when it became apparent after Alexander’s death late in 1825 that Constantine’s Prussian-trained brother Nicholas was to be the successor, the St. Petersburg reformers staged a large, confused demonstration on December 14 in the Senate Square, which was followed a few days later by an equally foredoomed if somewhat more protracted rising in the Kiev district.

Although the Decembrist movement is often regarded as the starting point of the Russian revolutionary tradition, it is perhaps more properly considered the end of aristocratic reformism: the last episode in the sixty-year period of political discussions that had begun when Catherine first convened her legislative assembly. The majority of Decembrists sought no more than to realize the original aspirations of Catherine and Alexander, to prod their nation into political and moral greatness commensurate with the military greatness assured by Suvorov and Kutuzov.

Most of these loosely affiliated reformers sought only some kind of constitutional monarchy with a federated distribution of power without any major changes in the economic or social order. One of the Decembrist leaders, however, did advocate a more radical course of action for Russia in the 1820’s. In so doing, Paul Pestel, leader of the southern wing of the movement, identified himself less with the romantic age in which he lived than with the age of blood and iron which was to follow. He is the most original and prophetic of the Decembrists; a kind of lonely, halfway house between the Russia of Peter and Catherine and that of Lenin and Stalin.

Pestel gave more consideration to the problem of power than any of his reform-minded associates. He believed that a homogeneous, highly centralized state was necessary in the modern world. Nationalities that will not assimilate (the Jews and Poles) are to be excluded from it; and all other nationalities are to be completely absorbed and Russified. He looked for guidance not to the romantic past traditions of Novgorod and the Cossacks, still less to what he considered the “opiate” of an English- or French-style constitution. Rather he looked to Russia’s first national law code, the Kievan Russkaia Pravda, which he made the title of his own major political treatise. Only uniform, rational laws could bring order out of chaos in Russia; and under current Russian conditions, this required radical social and political change: agrarian redistribution and the transfer of sovereign power to a unicameral republican legislature.

All of this was to be brought about by force if necessary and would require a kind of Jacobin network of organized plotters as well as an interim military dictatorship between the seizure of power and the full realization of “Russian justice.”¹⁴⁴ Pestel devoted great attention to matters of military reform and reorganization and made the most serious effort of any Decembrist to utilize the forms of Masonry for the purposes of revolutionary organization.¹⁴⁵ He recognized the value of maintaining the Orthodox Church as an official unifying force in Russia, although he himself was a freethinker, with a partly Protestant background.

His extremism and preoccupation with power link Pestel with Lenin more than with his fellow Decembrists. His vague belief in the peasant commune as a model for social reorganization and his willingness to consider assassination as a weapon of political struggle form a link with the future populists and Social Revolutionaries. His program for resettling the Jews in Israel (though partly anticipated by Potemkin) represents a curious anticipation of Zionism by an unsympathetic outsider.

Yet for all his extremism Pestel bears certain similarities to the two other leading political theorists of the Alexandrian age: Speransky and Karamzin. Taken together, the three of them illustrate the diversity within unity of Enlightenment political thought in Russia. All three were patriotic former Masons who based their arguments on rationalistic grounds. Even if Karamzin was driven by a purely sentimental and conservative impulse and Pestel by a purely ambitious and revolutionary one (as their detractors contended), both wrapped themselves in the mantle of dispassionate, rational analysis and seemed to wear it with at least moderate distinction. All believed that sovereignty in Russia must be undivided, that government should impose order and harmony on the nation rather than wait for a chaotic play of conflicting interests. If Karamzin and Speransky advocated a monarchy, they nonetheless recognized a certain attractiveness in republicanism, which they considered far better than tyranny or anarchy and inapplicable to Russia only because of its size.

With the ascent to the throne of Nicholas I, despotism lost its links with the Enlightenment. Reason gave way to rationalization as Nicholas borrowed eclectically from various enlightened thinkers while disregarding the basic spirit of their ideas. Nicholas executed Pestel along with other leading Decembrists, and Karamzin’s death in the same year enabled Nicholas to claim that the historian’s writings provided a carte blanche for autocratic rule. He used Speransky to draw up a new law code in 1833 but not to complete any of the more basic constitutional reforms which had interested Speransky. He assimilated Poland in accordance with Catherine’s previous practice, and worked for a unified, Russified state as Pestel had urged—but never even considered the proposals for reform that had interested Catherine and Pestel. Nicholas destroyed the sense of fluid political possibility which had lent excitement to the Alexandrian age. The frustration of political reform turned the thinking classes away from any sense of involvement in the tsarist political system and encouraged them to look outside the political arena altogether for new vision.