The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  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 propagandistic 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.133 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 (yeche) 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 ail-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 Kiichelbecker, 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 Decembr
ist 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 tha» 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.

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  2. The Anti-Enlightenment

  /v central question haunts any consideration of Russian thought in the aristocratic century: Why was political reform, so much discussed under Catherine and Alexander I, so decisively removed from the intellectual agenda under Nicholas I? This waning of political interest among the upper class proved not just a temporary change of fashion but an enduring malady of the late imperial period. The aristocratic passion for political discussion all but died with the Decembrists. Lonely survivors of the movement, like Nicholas Turgenev, could not arouse interest in political questions even among fellow exiles. The reforms which were eventually enacted by Alexander II in the 1860's touched on administrative and legal procedure rather than political authority. Reformers were preoccupied with the legal and economic bondage of the peasantry, not the political servitude of the entire country. There was no important modification of autocracy until the flood tide of twentieth-century war and revolution swept across Russia in 1905 and 1917. By then interest in political reform had lost all its connections with aristocratic culture, and was largely the province of harassed nationality groups within the empire, full-time revolutionaries, and the demimonde of urban and professional workers.

  The narrow fears and insular perspectives of court life may explain why the imperial family and most of its immediate entourage proved incapable of creative involvement in domestic politics after the reign of Alexander I. But the general abdication of interest by the educated and well-traveled aristocracy seems difficult to understand, particularly when so little had been accomplished of what they had been led to expect from the Tsar. Nicholas I frankly confessed his dependence on the landed aristocracy serving as "unsleeping watchdogs guarding the state." Why then did the aristocrats remain content in their kennels and not extract in return at least some of the political concessions they had long demanded?

  Some of the explanation lies in the absence of external stimulus, a

  perennially important factor in initiating movements for reform inside the amorphous Russian realm. Under Nicholas no discussion was launched from above by the Tsar as under Catherine and Alexander I. Nor was Nicholas' reign shaken from without by a sudden invasion either of foreign reformers (as under Catherine) or of military conquerors (as under Alexander). Yet the landed aristocracy would seem to have had enough contact with the outside world and enough domestic stimulus from peasant unrest and economic insolvency to sustain the pressure for political reform.

  To understand why this pressure was not sustained-and why the reactionary rule of Nicholas I was in fact idolized by most educated aristocrats -one must look beyond the usual psychological and economic arguments for conservatism, and behind the predictably Prussian figure of Nicholas. He merely formalized developments which he had neither the ability to initiate nor the imagination to understand. The foundations of his reactionary rule were laid during the late years of Alexander I's reign. This turn to obscurantism under Nicholas' mystical and visionary predecess
or is one of the most fateful developments in modern Russian history: it coincided with the increase in national self-consciousness that followed the Napoleonic wars to produce in Russia an identification of nationalism with social conservatism which did not become widespread in the rest of Europe until the late nineteenth century.

  Many figures and interests were involved in Alexander's reactionary turn: Arakcheev, the new military leader and author of plans for the military colonies; Photius, the spokesman for the xenophobic Church hierarchy; and Rostopchin, the vulgar, anti-intellectual spokesman for much of the higher civil service. But to understand more fully this decisive turn of events, one must consider the dominant ideological current of the age: the powerful surge of religiously tinged reaction against the rationalism and scepticism of the French Enlightenment.

  The main force behind this anti-Enlightenment was higher order Masonry. The Moscow "Martinists" had created higher fraternities dedicated to combating scepticism and license, but had not provided any clear idea of where new belief and authority were to be found. They had left Russians with only a vague belief in spiritual rather than material forces, in esoteric symbols rather than rational propositions. These occult, quasi-religious circles led the aristocratic retreat from the rationalism of the Enlightenment. The retreat was not to be sudden and precipitous, as Paul had hoped, into a kind of garrison state ruled by a knightly order of mystical obscurantists. It was, rather, a gradual progression under Alexander I from the high noon of the Enlightenment into the gathering dusk of morbid romanticism.