The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  In Sturdza's view, Germany's unrest was a direct result of undisciplined student activities. The Western Church had mistakenly granted the universities autonomy from the guiding discipline of the Church. Germany should revoke the medieval liberties of its universities. Orthodox Russia should not permit any such liberties to be granted in its new universities "and should limit the numbers and regulate the curriculum of the German professors who were flooding into Russia's universities and seminaries.

  If Sturdza sounded the warning, it was the remarkable figure of Michael .Magnitsky who produced the call to battle stations and the detailed blueprints for an Orthodox Christian assault against the armies of godless rationalism. Magnitsky illustrates the new blend of bureaucratic opportunism and philosophical obscurantism that was frequently to reappear in court circles during the remaining century of tsarist rule. In the early years of Alexander's rule, Magnitsky had done all the proper things for a member of the lesser nobility anxious to get ahead. He had served in the Preobra-zhensky Regiment and in Russian embassies in Paris and Vienna. He had composed sentimental verses and participated in masonic and philanthropic societies. Indeed, so liberal had his posture been that he was identified with Speransky's reformist ideas and forced to share his downfall in 1812.

  Exiled to Vologda, Magnitsky's talents were soon put to use (like those of Speransky) in the provincial civil service. He became vice-governor of Voronezh on the upper Don, then governor of Simbirsk on the Volga. This city had a long record of extremism; it was the former center of peasant rebellion and was to be the birthplace of Lenin. It was in Simbirsk that

  Russian Realism

  PLATES XIII-XIV

  Russian realist painters, is a rarity among modern Russian artists in that he had a relatively long life (1844-1930) and enjoyed the favor of both official and radical circles. His career began with successful prize paintings in the Imperial Academy of Arts in the 1860's and imperial commissions in the 1870's, and he flourished during the brief liberal democratic era, when he painted portraits of leading politicians, and lived on in the U.S.S.R. (although he spent his last years abroad as an emigre), where he was hailed as a founder of the monumentalism and exhortative realism of Soviet art.

  Repin capitalized on the peculiar fascination with historical themes that has animated Russian culture since the early illustrated chronicles. His famous representation of Ivan the Terrible with his murdered son (1885; Plate XIII) used the new realistic medium melodramatically to convey the horror and fascination with which Russians had always regarded this decisive act in the severing of the sacred line of succession from Riurik. The real-life model for Repin's picture of the tsarevich was the prophetic writer Vsevolod Garshin, who died three years later at 33, the same age as Christ, whom friends thought he resembled.

  Many of Repin's portraits (such as his Tolstoy standing barefoot in peasant dress) provided the images by which a famous personality came to be remembered. Particularly revered by fellow Russian artists was Repin's painting of Musorgsky (Plate XIV), completed during four days of visits to the psychiatric hospital just a few days before the composer died in March 1881. Repin's rendering of his suffering friend caused many figures of the populist era to contend that Musorgsky had-almost literally -"survived" death through this vindication of Repin's own search for a natural "people's" art.

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  PLATE XIII

  PLATE XIV

  fication with the simple, suffering people. His "Haul- £.Ub amp;lur

  ers on the Volga" (1870-3; Plate XV) became a Realism

  monumental icon of populist revolutionaries (even

  PLATE XV

  though it had been commissioned by the Grand Duke Vladimir) and vaulted Repin to the symbolic leadership of the new quest for a realistic "art of the people" which the "wanderers" had launched a decade earlier. Partly inspired by the famed song of the Volga boatmen, the painting in turn inspired Musorg-sky to seek a new music of redemption from the spontaneous sounds of his native Volga region. Revolutionaries saw a call to defiance and a plea for help in the proud bearing and searching gaze of the unbowed young boy. The ship provided a hint of other, distant lands to the East to which the river led; perhaps even of romantic deliverance by some future Stenka Razin from the toil and bondage of the landlocked empire.

  The substantial amount of time that Repin spent planning this composition and traveling about in search of real-life models represented a continuation of the obsessive preoccupation of Russian painters with some single redemptive masterpiece-a tradition that began with Ivanov's "Appearance of Christ" and which has continued to the present with a painting like "Requiem of Old Russia, the Uspensky Sobor," which P. D. Korin, a principal designer of the monumental historical frescoes in the Moscow subway, has worked on for more than twenty-five years. Repin's greatest obsession (from 1878 to 1891) was his "Za-porozhian Cossacks Write a Letter to the Turkish Sultan," in which a historical theme was successfully blended with the genre style. Revolutionaries took heart at the rustic glorification of Cossack liberties, while conservative Pan-slavs took equal pleasure in the anti-Turkish subject.

  Magnitsky began in i§i8 his extraordinary war on the educational system of the Russian empire. In an anonymous letter to the Simbirsk branch of the Bible Society he urged the establishment of a Russian Inquisition to extirpate heresy from all published works. He then began public attacks on the influential new Masonic lodge, "Key to Virtue," in Simbirsk, as a center of subversion.88 Early in 1819 he was empowered to investigate the University of Kazan, where Lopukhin's ideas had found particular receptivity;89 and in April he became famous overnight with his lurid expose.

  Twenty of twenty-five professors are "hopeless," Magnitsky reported as a result of his inspection tour. Heretical German philosophy has replaced Orthodox theology in the curriculum, but "fortunately the lectures are so badly delivered that no one can understand them."90 Like an outraged taxpayer, Magnitsky rhetorically demands to know why two million rubles have been spent on a den of heresy and subversion in which lectures are mainly given in languages unintelligible to Russians.

  His proposed remedy administered a real shock to the vague euphoria of tolerance then prevalent in the empire. He recommended to Golitsyn that the university be not reformed, but closed, formally sentenced like a criminal, and then razed. In its place should be established a controlled gymnasium, a medical institute, and a school for indoctrinating Tatars and teaching the Orthodox about the East.91 These measures were not adopted, but he was made head of the university in June and proceeded with reforms that were almost as drastic.

  The university was henceforth to base its entire curriculum on the Bible and "on piety, in accordance with the decrees of the Holy Alliance."92 Each student was required to own a Bible, and scriptural passages were I written all over the walls and corridors often in ornate gold letters. Geology was outlawed as hostile to Biblical teachings, and mathematicians were instructed to point out that the hypotenuse of a right triangle represented the mercy of God descending to man through Christ.93 Books were removed from the library, professors forced to write long spiritual autobiographies, and puritanical discipline and communal scripture readings instituted. Three grades of punishment were instituted for student infractions, the highest involving solitary confinement in a barred room containing only a wooden table and bench, a large crucifix, and a picture of the Last Judgment. Students were ordered to pray for offenders in this category, who were in some cases forcibly transferred to military service.94

  The supreme danger of modern universities was, in Magnitsky's view, their teaching of philosophy, which was bound to raise doubts about repealed religion. He found an invaluable ally in Runich, the first curator of the new university in St. Petersburg, who was called "Magnitsky's echo"

  and "a corpse stimulated to life by Magnitsky." A German professor had been dismissed at Kharkov in 1816 for teaching that Napoleon's crimes lay in overthrow
ing the natural rights of the people rather than the traditional rights of monarchs. In 1820 Runich and Magnitsky broadened the assault with a combined attack on a professor of the Imperial Lyceum at Tsarskoe Selo who had just presented a copy of his book, Natural Law, to the Emperor. In the following year they succeeded in obtaining the dismissal of three key professors from St. Petersburg University.

  Early in 1823 Magnitsky launched an expanded campaign against the "Hellish Alliance" which he claimed was now at war with the Holy Alliance. He claimed to find the "doctrines of Marat" in one professor's book and the secret plans of "illuminists" in another. In February he proposed the outlawing of philosophy, warning that "from one line of a professor can come 200,000 bayonets and 1,000 ships of the line."95 In May he denounced the "bloody cap of freedom" which "used to be called only philosophy and literature and is now already called liberalism."™

  "Down with altars, down with sovereigns, long live death and hell." They are already howling forth in several countries in Europe. How can one fail to recognize who is speaking? The Prince of Darkness himself is coming visibly closer to us; the veil covering him is becoming more and more transparent and soon, no doubt, will fall altogether. This assault, the last perhaps that he will lead against us, is the most terrible, for it is spiritual. The word is being spread from one end of the world to the other invisibly and rapidly like an electric shock, and suddenly culminates in a shattering of the earth. The human word, that is what transmits this diabolical force; the printing press is its arm. Godless university professors are distilling the atrocious poison of disbelief and of hate towards legiti mate power for our unhappy youth. . . .97

  Russia should simply

  separate herself from Europe so that not even a rumor about the horrible events taking place there could reach her. The present war of the spirit of evil cannot be arrested by the force of arms, for against a spiritual assault an equally spiritual defense is needed. A clairvoyant censorship united with a system of popular education founded on the unshakable base of faith is the only dike against the flood of disbelief and depravity engulfing Europe.98

  There was little support within the ministry of education and spiritual affairs for such an extreme position. One member pointed out that countries like Spain and Portugal in which revolutions had occurred were precisely the ones in which enlightenment was least far advanced;89 another wrote

  that a successful state could not function in this manner even "if we could surround our fatherland with a Chinese Wall. . . transplant to Russian soil the Spanish Inquisition . . . and blot out everything that has ever been written about philosophy."100 But Magnitsky found more powerful allies in Archimandrite Photius, a young ascetic influential with the Tsar who had recently turned from long friendship with Golitsyn to violent denunciation of the Bible Society. "It is the cleverness of Hell itself that the ancient faith is being destroyed by pious foreigners," echoed an anonymous informant of Admiral Shishkov.101 Runich wrote that it was essential "to pluck even one quill from the dark wing of the foe of Christ."102

  Magnitsky followed the new Metropolitan of St. Petersburg, Seraphim, to the Winter Palace in the spring of 1824, when the latter went to request Golitsyn's dismissal. He waited outside on Admiralty Boulevard in order to tell immediately from the expression on Seraphim's face whether or not the Tsar had acceded to the request. The news was, of course, good for the Orthodox reactionaries: Golitsyn was dismissed from all posts: replaced as head of the Bible Society by Seraphim, as minister of education by Shishkov. "Foreign cults" were placed in a separate category, subordinate at last to the Orthodox Synod and to the Draconian Arakcheev. Thus, Golitsyn's unique concentration of spiritual and pedagogical authority was broken up; and the dream of a new universal church destroyed.

  The Orthodoxy which Magnitsky opposed to syncretism made use of the same supra-confessional terminology from higher order Masonry that Lopukhin had used before him. He described life as "passing through the Great Temple … in holy darkness" in order to reach "the all-seeing eye of holiness … the Church of the first centuries."103

  Like De Maistre, Magnitsky's main concern was the mobilization of Russia to combat the infection of Russia with the rationalism that had been spawned by the Protestant Reformation in religion and by the French Revolution in politics. But there were critical differences between the absolutist remedies proposed by the two men. Whereas De Maistre had sought the rule of an international church hierarchy subordinate to the pope, Magnitsky looked rather to the Russian tsar as supreme authority and to his civil and ecclesiastical bureaucracy as the "hierarchy." Whereas De Maistre assumed that the new Christian civilization would be suffused with the classical culture of the Latin world, Magnitsky insisted that Russian civilization must deepen its sense of identification with the East.

  Magnitsky's fascination with the East was in part a reflection of occult Masonry and the related vision of a new church coming from the East. Masonic temples were always built facing the East, and the term "Orient" was used as a synonym for a city in which Masons were active.104 Pietist

  missionaries and the vernacular translators of the Russian Bible Society had spoken excitedly of the rich "harvest" they hoped to reap in the Russian East; and Lopukhin had insisted that Russia's "most sincere collaborators" in combating revolution and secularism were to be found among "Asians [Aziattsy] from Peking to Constantinople."105 Magnitsky criticized Karam-zin for saying that the Mongol period was one of decline for Russia, since the Tatars saved it from Europe and enabled it to preserve the purity of its Christian faith at a time when all others were failing into heresy. Beginning with his proposal of 1819 for evangelizing the Tatars, Magnitsky displayed a romantic fascination with the idea that the cultivation of Eastern links would help qualify Russia for the role of redeeming the fallen West.

  Orientalism received a new boost with the establishment of a chair in Arabic at St. Petersburg in the same year; and in 1822 Magnitsky drew up a plan for an "Institute of the East" to be established in Astrakhan to train future Russian civil servants and place them "in touch with the learned circles of India." He cherished the belief that an unspoiled apostolic Church still flourished in India and claimed to see Biblical influences in Hindu sacred writings. The wife of Brahma, Sara-Veda, was thought to be Sarah, the wife of Abraham in the Old Testament. He organized the search for lost treasures in the monasteries of Armenia and sought to sponsor cultural safaris to Siberia and Samarkand.106

  The career of Magnitsky illustrates the vulnerability of the Russian body politic to extremist pressures. The very extremity of his denunciations exercised a certain fascination and made some of his victims almost anxious to believe that they were as powerful and purposeful as Magnitsky alleged them to be. In a confused intellectual atmosphere he offered a simple explanation for all difficulties: an enemy to replace Napoleon as a stimulus to national unity. All difficulties came from the "illuminists." Revolutions in Spain, Naples, and Greece were interrelated parts of their eastward-moving plot. Students in Germany had already been infected; but Orthodox Russia, the anchor of the Holy Alliance, was its principal target. In denouncing a Masonic leader in Simbirsk, Magnitsky added the accusation of secret links with the Carbonari; in denouncing Fesler, he hinted at Jewish and Socinian connections.

  In the absence of dispassionate investigation, the confused impression grew that some kind of spiritual invasion was indeed underway. Concealment and suspicion grew apace and helped encourage nervous displays of loyalty to the Tsar. With relentless logic, the denunciations and purges ran their course until Magnitsky himself fell a victim. An accusation that Magnitsky was a secret illuminist was among Alexander's papers at the time of his death. Shortly thereafter his administration of Kazan University was in-

  vestigated and his foes treated to the revelation that he had employed a Jew as supervisor of studies, had spent as much in seven years as his predecessor had been accused of spending in twelve, and so on. In vain Magnit-sky argued that the apostles themsel
ves were converted Jews and that his accusers were repeating the arguments of Voltaire. He journeyed to St. Petersburg to plead his case and wrote two eleventh-hour detailed analyses of the "world-wide illuminist plot" for the new Tsar from his exile in Es-thonia early in 1831.

  The illuminists were attacking at four levels: academic, political, ecclesiastical, and popular. "Levelers," "millennarians," "methodists," and "schismatics" were bracketed together as part of a giant conspiracy to substitute a "Tsar-Comrade" for the "Tsar-Father" of simple Russians. Even conservative Austria was alleged to be sending in agents to subvert Russian institutions.107

  But Magnitsky had made too many enemies, and his main friend, Arakcheev, had fallen from power. Having ridden the wave of obscurantism, he was now swept aside into the stagnant backwaters of the provincial civil service from which he was to witness the success of the policies he advocated without benefiting from them. He wrote briefly for a journal bearing a title from the symbolism of higher Masonic orders: The Rainbow. But his last writings represent only a broken-spirited endorsement of his longstanding anti-rationalism: a treatise on astrology and a series called "simple thinker," which defended the unquestioning faith of "muzhik Christianity."108