The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  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 (istind) 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-spravedlivosf 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, Vadmi_oi_Movgorod, 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) .12°'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 I 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 be released NpV-ikovand 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 Schlozer, who had spent many years in Russia and attracted many Russian students to Gottingen, 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. Radish-chev hailed Aleiancterji^"guardian angel";123 and reformers were encouraged by his long association with LaJHarpe, 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: c^^titutional 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 Trfits 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

  plate x

  PLATE IX

  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.

  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.

  The Evolution

  of Old Russian

  Architecture

  PLATES XI-XII

  262

  IV. THE CENTURY OF ARISTOCRATIC CULTURE

  1. The Troubled Enlightenment

  263

  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

  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 lycee 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 Russi
a: 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 liter-

  ary 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.f 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