I should also cite the influence of Rodion Koshelev, who, as we recall, had initiated Alexander into Freemasonry. Alongside Golitsyn he now helped the tsar discover the other spiritual thinkers of his age—Lavater, Swedenborg, Eckartshausen, Jung-Stilling—as well as the Quakers and Moravian Brothers, pietists who were well established in the Baltic provinces and who preached a form of spiritual egalitarianism among Christians and the reading of the Bible in vernacular languages,14 and with whom Koshelev had developed a correspondence.15 By the end of the 1810s or in the spring of 1821 at the very latest, the three men had formed a lodge called “Three-One,” directed by Golitsyn, where they performed regular spiritual exercises and made commentaries on holy scripture. The GARF archives contain many short notes sent in 1821 by Tsar Alexander to Golitsyn in order to confirm or postpone their meetings for sacred readings and discussions of scripture. They were systematically signed with the phrase “Devotedly in Our Lord.”16 Alongside Golitsyn and Koshelev, others played roles in the tsar’s religious practice. He had turned away from Baroness de Krüdener, who had moved to St. Petersburg in 1818 and whom he expelled from the empire in 1822, so weary was he of her sermons and repeated demands for money and her appeals for the cause of Greek independence. But meanwhile he found a new prophetess: the Russian Catherina Tatarova had a circle of ecclesiastics and laity who commented on scripture and prayed together, meditated, and even experimented with hypnosis.
He was also reading a great deal: holy books, works of piety, the great Christian writers. This heterogeneous reading is surprising for an Orthodox sovereign because the authors were largely Catholic. Among his correspondence with his sister Catherine figures a curious and interesting text titled “On Mystical Literature”17 that Alexander wrote during 1812 about various theological doctrines of his day. He begins by recalling the distinction between an external religion that is politically necessary and the interior one:
The policy of sovereigns has transformed this mysterious doctrine18 into the one common religion of nations. But in promoting worship, policy could not manifest the mysteries. Consequently, even now as always, there is an external Church and an Internal Church.
The doctrinal foundation is the same for both—the Bible—but in the former one knows only the letter, while in the latter the meaning is taught.
There is countless literature for the external Church, whose systematic exposition is called Theology.
There is also considerable (but not as prodigious) for the internal Church, the ensemble of which is called mysterious or mystical Theology. We should not understand this as referring to any single system (for there is no exact or systematic exposition of this kind of theology) but as applying to all writing in general that belongs to this genre, known under different denominations such as Spiritual, Theosophical, or Ascetic Works, etc.
Then he went on to commentaries on the books he had read and contemplated, establishing a scale of values. Fundamentally, and thus at the foot of the ladder, he mentions works by Jakob Böhme (translated by Saint-Martin), Swedenborg, Saint-Martin, Jung-Stilling; then he goes on to St. Augustine’s Confessions, Malebranche’s treatise Search after Truth,19 the works of Eckartshausen, and the spiritual writings of Fénelon as more important. His ultimate preference is for the writings of Saints Francis de Sales and Teresa of Avila, and Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, which are all considered as “pure unalloyed gold.” Finally, he finishes his paper by underlining how essential it is to read the Bible, especially the four Gospels.
These various influences and the very personality of Alexander brought forth a sincere piety, founded on assiduous Bible reading and individual prayer—but the tsar was not attached to the public rites, to the great regret of the Orthodox hierarchy. He was capable of praying with the same fervor in an Orthodox church or a Protestant one, or in a Catholic chapel. In 1819, welcoming to St. Petersburg the Quakers William Allen and Stephen Grellet, he took communion and prayed with them, demonstrating great emotion. Later, Grellet would attest that the tsar’s face was “bathed in tears”20 at the end of the service; and Allen would recall the tsar telling him, “When I am with you and am like you who love the Savior, then I can breathe.”21
This eclectic and even liberal conception of religion, which resembles the political principles dear to him, was a fundamental feature of Alexander’s faith. For him, believing was an individual act, founded on an active approach that makes it incumbent on each person to start from his own reflections on the Bible and to construct his personal faith. In his 1818 conversation with Abbot Eylert, he said he was in favor of each person’s reading the Bible “in his own language” and the need to disseminate scripture in the vernacular, without commentary:
Holy books should be disseminated as they were given to us. Commentaries have the disadvantage of more or less substituting for the text the ideas of the person who interprets it to suit his system. Not everybody will accept these ideas. It should be the affair of every Christian, whatever communion he belongs to, to freely let the sacred Code act upon him in its whole impact; this action can only be beneficial and stimulating, as one might expect from a divine book, the Book of Books. Its action on each person will be different, but this is precisely what is grand and extraordinary about it; it makes of each individual what it is possible to make of him due to his particular nature.22
Then he becomes explicit about the link between faith and political activity:
Unity in variety, is that not the great point at which one must arrive in order to make Churches and States prosper? This principle of unity in variety, we perceive everywhere outside, and similarly in the history of nations, except that one should not take as a measure the short space of time in which we live. It is to the centuries and tens of centuries that one has to look when one wants to judge the result of a great struggle between opposing and hostile forces. Contradictions, lies, vain commentaries—all these offspring of time and partisan spirit, will be resolved by time. Truth remains. But the action of truth is slow: it often takes centuries to be accepted; nevertheless it pierces and there is no way of hermetically sealing it up, as some people would like to do with Holy Scripture. Do not the sun’s rays pierce? Those who live in its clarity are the children of light.23
Thus this “unity in variety” is willed by God and should guide both religious and political practices. This enables us to better understand the project of the Holy Alliance: it was precisely aimed in the long term at inspiring unity in geopolitical variety. Alexander would often return to this theme of a duality that haunted him. Witness a conversation with Joseph de Maistre, as reported by the latter in a dispatch to his king in February 1816.24 The concept of the Holy Alliance appeared to many to be enigmatic (if not confused), and so Maistre asked the tsar if the Holy Alliance’s goal was to make “a fusion of all communions, such that each sovereign could no longer exclusively defend his own.” Alexander categorically denied this:
Not at all! Not at all! On the contrary! Each sovereign invariably remains attached to his particular religion. You can see this clearly, since of the three sovereigns who signed it, the Austrian emperor was Catholic, the Prussian king a Protestant, and me Greek. The King of France who is Catholic gave me a copy of the Convention signed and even written in his hand. […] Let us start by attacking non-belief; this is the great evil we should be concerned with. Let us practice the Gospel—that is the main point. I do believe that all communions will one day be united; I hold this as certain, but the moment has not yet come.25
This strong resonance of the spiritual quickly affected the tsar’s religious policy in his empire. At the invitation of Golitsyn who had helped found it in 1813, he joined the Biblical Society as an ordinary member (not wanting to be its leader) and financed its work with an initial donation of 25,000 rubles and an annual subsidy of 10,000. The Society’s main objective (as was happening at the same time in western Europe) was to translate the Bible into the vernacular, in order for believers to have direct
access to it. (We recall Alexander’s ambition formulated with Abbot Eylert.) This meticulous work was entrusted to a group of serious and devoted translators. But the initiative soon encountered criticism from conservatives; grouped around Admiral Shishkov, they made themselves the defenders of the Slavonic Church, for they thought that reading and teaching sacred texts in the vernacular was a sacrilege. In 1818, despite this opposition, the Spiritual Academy of St. Petersburg led by Archimandrite Philaret finished the translation into modern Russian of the New Testament, and by the end of that year the Society had published 371,000 copies in 79 editions in the 25 languages and dialects in use on imperial territory.
But Alexander’s incursion into religious affairs did not stop there. Despite his conviction that the exterior and interior churches could have nothing in common, he took measures, halfway between the religious and the political, that illustrate his gradual slide to conservatism and intolerance.
One of the very first concerned the Jesuits. As we have seen, they had been long protected by Catherine II, by Paul, and by Alexander himself due to their important role in secondary education. In December 1815 the tsar adopted a ukase that suddenly chased them out of St. Petersburg, forbade them entering Moscow, and obliged them to leave for Polotsk in Polish territory; their pupils were sent back to their families. Contemporaries wondered about this decision, and for some Catholics (Joseph de Maistre and several ecclesiastics)26 it was explained by the refusal of the Jesuit fathers to grant the absolution demanded by Maria Naryshkina, a Catholic, after her rupture with the tsar. But although in December 1815, more than a year after that event, Alexander was still very attached to his former mistress, this explanation is not believable, and direct sources are lacking to support it. More fundamentally, this disgrace seems to me to result from a set of circumstances that were unfavorable for the Jesuits: a wave of conversions to Catholicism being observed in Russian high society (particularly among women), and then that of Alexander Golitsyn, the nephew of the homonymous minister of religion, who became so angry that he began to attack the Jesuits. Maybe the disgrace was even more due to the refusal of the general who headed the Jesuit order in Russia to participate in the Biblical Society.27 Then there was the pope’s condemnation of the Holy Alliance—all of which contributed to quickening the disgrace of the Jesuits. In 1820, newly targeted, they were abruptly forced to leave imperial territory. Made official by a ukase in March, the expulsion of the Jesuits proceeded smoothly:
The trip of 750 of them across Russian land was paid for; their admission to Austria facilitated, where most of them were able to stop in Galicia at the Tarnopol College, which the government in Vienna gave them. Others pushed onto Italy, where the order was starting to recover the favor of the Holy See, and others went as far as China.28
But the eviction produced turmoil among Catholics present at the St. Petersburg court, and it made Joseph de Maistre want to leave. Very affected by a decision that shocked his religious convictions, the diplomat obtained from his king a recall to Sardinia.
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At the end of 1816, profiting from the fact that Razumovsky, minister of public education, was about to retire, Alexander reorganized this department by combining it with religious affairs. The Holy Synod disappeared. Directed by Golitsyn, the new ministry was to look after all religions and was organized into four sections: Orthodox Russians and Old Believers,29 Roman and Uniate Catholics, Protestants and Sectarians, and non-Christians. This interesting structure lasted until the ministry was dissolved in 1824, and it says a lot about Alexander’s religious nonconformism. By creating four sections, he explicitly recognized the empire’s religious diversity, and by associating the Orthodox and schismatics in a single department, he was trying to weaken the prerogatives of the Orthodox Church and to call into question its status as the official church. However, his benevolence toward the Old Believers, tolerated since the reign of Catherine II, will not last: in 1825 they will be placed under the surveillance of a secret committee directed by the metropolitan of Novgorod and the archbishop of Tver, who were in charge of ensuring their respect for the law and for local institutions. Furthermore, a hardening toward and a distrust of the schismatics were back on the agenda in 1820.
The creation of a dual ministry that established a structural link between religion and education, as well hiring committed believers to administer the department charged with educational matters—Alexander appointed as head V. Popov, one of the secretaries of the Biblical Society—led to rapid changes on the pedagogic level.
Henceforth, all education would be inspired by scripture. Armed with this principle, the minister vigorously took Russian universities in hand, a campaign conducted by Mikhail Magnitsky. Coming from a noble but poor family, a Freemason, Magnitsky had been Speransky’s right-hand man, and in 1812 he had paid dearly for his faithfulness to his minister by being sent into exile. Given an amnesty and named vice-governor of the province of Voronezh in 1816, he became governor of Simbirsk a year later and had subsequently been evolving toward conservative positions—in this, he was similar to Golitsyn and Arakcheev. It was he who orchestrated the clampdown on the universities: he wanted to stamp out European ideas, particularly German ones, which were corrupting Russia, and to return to a national education that celebrated God and the Russian identity. This program decreed, Magnitsky spent six days in 1819 inspecting the University of Kazan. The freedom and atheism that reigned there so shocked him that he asked Alexander to close the establishment immediately. The emperor refused to take such a drastic measure, but named Magnitsky as inspector of the Kazan school district, giving him every latitude to haul the university into line. Twelve professors, or more than half the teaching body, were fired; the library was purged of suspect titles like Machiavelli, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Kant; subjects like geology (considered incompatible with Biblical teaching) were forbidden and others, like mathematics and philosophy, were placed under strict surveillance. From Kazan the crackdown was extended to other universities. In St. Petersburg the rector, who was close to Magnitsky, led the charge against the teaching body, accused of professing ideas contrary to scripture, and he dismissed four people. These measures aroused perplexity and then anger among students, who soon deserted the new sites of clerical propaganda; in a few months, there were only 40 left at the University of St. Petersburg, 50 at Kazan—less than a third of previous undergraduates. In parallel, secondary school curricula were also revised: potentially subversive subjects like philosophy and applied sciences (political economy, technology) were reduced if not suppressed, while subjects like history, ancient languages, and geography were favored. At the level of district schools, courses in natural history and technology were replaced by daily lectures on the New Testament.
In addition, under the joint influence of Arakcheev and Golitsyn, both concerned with purging the harmful influences of liberal and atheistic ideas among youth, censorship hardened, and young writers soon paid the price—foremost Pushkin. Born in 1799 of a well-educated father of the old nobility and a mother who was descended from the African Abraham Hannibal, who had been godson and comrade-in-arms of Peter the Great, the young Alexander Pushkin received French culture from his parents. At the age of 12, he entered the Imperial Lycée of Tsarskoye Selo and began to write verses he declaimed before his fellow pupils. In January 1815, he composed a poem that earned him the enthusiastic encouragement of the poet Zhukovsky and opened the doors of the Arzamas Literary Society, where he could meet the greatest writers of his time. Leaving the lycée in 1817, he settled with his parents in St. Petersburg on the Fontanka Canal and was introduced into salons and literary societies, including the Green Lamp, founded in 1819 and of liberal inspiration, where he became an assiduous member. In 1820 he completed his first great poem, Ruslan and Ludmila. Inspired by a medieval novel adopted by Russian folklore, the poem belonged to the Romantic movement, which took inspiration from historical subjects to affirm the cruelty of individual destinies, while keeping clas
sical rhythms and versification. The young writer proclaimed his liberal convictions, indefatigably calling for political liberty. In his Ode to Freedom in 1819, he pronounced in favor of a constitutional monarchy, and in The Village, composed the same year, he hoped that people would one day be “free of all oppression” and that “enlightened freedom” would reign in Russia. These texts (especially the violent epigram he aimed in 1817 against Arakcheev) finally provoked Alexander’s anger. On May 6, 1820, at the age of 21, Pushkin was exiled, first in Ekaterinoslav, then in Bessarabia, which had been recently annexed to the Russian Empire.30 The conservative hardening was therefore patent with respect to intellectuals and artists who were too enamored of liberty.
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Seized by his new faith, desiring to submit entirely to “the decrees of Providence,”31 while still maintaining that he wanted to make the happiness of his people, Alexander was also questioning his power and gripped by the idea of abdication.
In fact, we observe a clear correlation between the consolidation of his faith, strengthened by various ordeals, and the doubts that assailed him as emperor. Admittedly, as we may recall, the idea of abdicating figured back in 1796 in a letter to Viktor Kochubey, but since he had ascended the throne in 1801, there was no question of this. However, at the end of 812, at the moment when he found faith, this temptation returned. In Vilnius, in his conversation with Countess Choiseul-Gouffier, he confided in the midst of his indisputable triumph, “No, the throne is not my vocation, and if I could honorably change my condition, I would do so gladly.”32
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