The Legacy
Under Catherine and Alexander, Russia had moved deep into Europe physically and spiritually but had not equipped itself to share in the political and institutional development of the West. Russian cities had been rebuilt on neo-classical models, but Russian thought had remained largely untouched by classical form and discipline. An experiment that had begun with Catherine's promise to provide the most tolerant and rational rule in Europe had ended with Magnitsky's intolerance and glorification of the Mongols. Imprecise hopes had given way to equally vague fears without the major problems being defined, let alone solved. The debate was cut off before Russia had achieved either a rationalized political system or a rational theology; and the imperial government committed itself to the difficult reactionary position of simply preventing the questions from being asked.
The religious purge of 1824 ended all broad discussion of belief within the official Church, just as the repression of the Decembrists the following year ended all discussion of basic political questions within the government. But expectations once raised are not easily dispelled. Denied a hearing in official circles, the problems continued to agitate Russia unofficially.
Indeed, the leading agitators of the Alexandrian age acquired in martyrdom an historical significance they had been unable to gain in action. The trial and humiliation of the Decembrists left a keen impact on the newly awakened moral sensibilities of the aristocracy. Having been unable to agree on their own political program, the aristocratic thinkers were united by their opposition to the spectacle of a "generation on trial" and by their revulsion at the execution of the leaders and the sanctioning of odes in praise of those throwing mud at others en route to Siberian exile. The "Hannibalic oath" of Herzen and Ogarev to avenge the fallen Decembrists is the real starting point of Russia's modern revolutionary tradition.
Equally remarkable was the continued appeal throughout Nicholas' reign of the new religious answers that had been offered under his predecessor. The Catholic Church attracted many Russian aristocrats-particularly after the official anti-Catholicism that accompanied the crushing of the Polish rebellion. The beautiful Zinaida Volkonsky, a close friend of Alexander I and former maid of honor to the dowager empress, became a leading figure in Catholic charity work in Rome and an apostle of reunification of the churches and conversion of the Jews.109 Sophia Svechin, the daughter of one of Catherine's leading advisers, became a leading benefactress of the Jesuit order in Paris. She set up a chapel and Slavic library and helped induce a young diplomat, Ivan Gagarin, to join the order.110 The Decembrist Lunin became a Catholic and the freethinker Pecherin a Redemptorist friar ministering to the poor of Dublin. Most remarkable of all was the conversion of a large part of the Golitsyn family, which had pioneered since the seventeenth century in the secular Westernization of Russia. Dmitry Golitsyn, son of Diderot's main Russian contact, joined the Church and went to Baltimore, Maryland, where he became the first Catholic priest to receive all his orders in the United States. Ordained in 1795, he led a Sulpician mission to western Pennsylvania, administering a vast area stretching from Harrisburg to Erie, Pennsylvania, from a log church near the present town of Loretto.111
Prophetic sectarianism continued also to exercise an appeal. The various "spiritual Christians" in the south continued to flourish: the "milk drinkers" in the Caucasus, whence they were deported in 1823 and began establishing new contacts extending into Persia; the "spirit bearers" in the
Cossack center of Novocherkassk, where various followers of Kotel'nikov told of his martyrdom in Solovetsk and predicted the end of the world in 1832, 1843, and 1844.112
For better or worse the unorthodox religious ideas of the Alexandrian era were to have far greater impact on subsequent Russian history than the reformatorial political ideas of the age. Speculative religious thinkers of the late nineteenth century tended to pick up where men of Alexander's time left off. Faithful to the main line of Alexandrian spirituality, they tended to oppose both revolution and rationalism. They also tended to vacillate between De Maistre's idea of a disciplined inquisitorial church and Lopukhin's idea of a spiritual "inner" church.
The two ideals confront one another in Dostoevsky's "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor." The returning Christ figure is Lopukhin's ideal spiritual knight who opposes the dedicated and articulate Inquisitor with the spiritual weapons of silent suffering and freely given love. The two ideals are also present in Vladimir Solov'ev, whose personal rapprochement with Roman Catholicism and with De Maistre's views on war conflicted with his vision of churches reunited in a "free theocracy."113 Even Constantine Pobedon-ostsev, the semi-Inquisitorial procurator of the Synod, felt the contrary appeal of the "inner church," and translated Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ.
It seems appropriate that the most famous convert to the ideal of a new inner church in nineteenth-century Russia, Leo Tolstoy, spent several key years of his life studying the history of the Alexandrian era. The fruit of his study was, of course, Russia's greatest historical novel, War and Peace, which began as a study of the Decembrists and ended as a panoramic epic of the war with Napoleon and of the spiritual strivings which accompanied it.
Tolstoy subsequently became an archetype of Lopukhin's "spiritual knight" with his "conversion" to a new non-doctrinal Christianity that abjured violence and taught that "the kingdom of God is within you." Tolstoy's idea that man could rid the world of evil by reading the secret message on a little green stick represents a perhaps unconscious borrowing from higher order Masonry for which a green stick was the symbol of eternal life. Even his celebrated parody of the externals of Masonic rituals in War and Peace reflects the contempt for mere ritual which was central to Novikov's and Lopukhin's ideal of higher spiritual orders. Tolstoy's first youthful vision of a new fraternity "of all the people of the world under the wide dome of heaven" went by the name of "Ant Brotherhood" {muraveinoe bratstvo), which was apparently a mutation of the idealized Moravian Brotherhood (Moravskoe Bratstvo).114 Tolstoy's tendency to
keep himself surrounded with Bibles or Gospels in all languages116 and his general sympathy for pietistic Protestant teachings was reminiscent of the Bible Society. In his old age he devoted great energy to aiding the original persecuted sect of "spiritual Christians," the Dukhobors.116 Tolstoy opposed De Maistre's ideal of an inquisitorial Church, though Solov'ev implied that he secretly wished to set up one of his own.117 De Maistre's historical scepticism and pessimism also profoundly influenced War and Peace.118
However rich in speculative ideas, the Alexandrian age tended to discredit religion in the eyes of many thinking people. Alexander's personal vacillation encouraged a jockeying for imperial favor among the various religious confessions, which soon degenerated into inter-confessional polemic and intrigue. Terms like "Jesuit" and "Methodist" were used as epithets almost as often as "Jacobin" and "illuminist." Thus, ironically, Alexander's efforts to encourage tolerance only intensified sectarian bitterness.
To compound the irony, Alexander's manifest failure to provide leadership strengthened rather than weakened the adulation that he personally received. All the partisans of reform idealized the tolerant Alexander and cherished the thought that the benign and enigmatic emperor really subscribed to their particular views. Alexander was indeed until his death the one concrete focal point for all the vague hopes of the age. He remained Alexander the Great to a host of would-be Aristotles throughout Europe and a near god to the peasantry, who launched no great insurrection against him. Catholics cherished the thought that Alexander had contemplated conversion at the time of his death; and the popular religious imagination clung to the idea that Alexander was not dead at all but lived on as the wandering holy man, Fedor Kuzmich.119
The hopes for a transformation of Russia through Alexander were too vague and romantic, too unchastened by experience in the real world. Yet Alexander-like other well-meaning political leaders who have been looked to as saviors-appears to have become hypnotized by the adulation he received. In
his late years he became even more incapable than before of sober statesmanship. "Moving from cult to cult and religion to religion," complained Metternich, "he has upset everything and built nothing."120 He died in a distant Southern retreat from reality, after visiting various churches, mosques, and a synagogue and rejecting medical treatment.121 The champion of tolerance had permitted Russia to become the scene of ideological interrogation, anonymous denunciation, and arbitrary exile. The most beloved tsar in modern Russian history had let Russia drift into policies that were in some respects even more reactionary than those of Paul.
Most of the leading theorists of the age-whether Russians like
Radishchov, Novikov, Karamzin, Speransky, Pestel, Lopukhin, and Magnit-sky, or foreign teachers like Schwarz, De Maistre, Baader, and Fesler- had been active in the Masonic movement. Though Masonry was formally neither a political nor a religious movement, it had profound influence in both of these areas. Higher order Masonry excited Russians to believe that self-perfection was possible and that the new temple of Solomon to be built by "true Masons" was nothing short of the world itself. But there was no way of knowing exactly how or where this rebuilding was to take place. "One can have knowledge about Masonry," one leader was fond of saying, "but Masonry itself is a secret."122
The lodges filled for the culture of aristocratic Russia something of the role that had been played by the monasteries in the culture of Muscovy. They provided islands of spiritual intensity and cultural activity within a still bleak and hostile autocratic environment. Like the monasteries of old, the Masonic lodges represented both a challenge and an opportunity to the ruling authorities. But Catherine and eventually Alexander chose to view Masonry as a challenge, just as Peter had regarded monasticism. If the various protest movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represent a kind of counterattack against the autocratic destruction of the old monastic culture, so the ideological rebellion of the nineteenth-century intellectuals appears in some ways as a form of protest against the autocratic destruction of the new Masonic culture.
The sacred chants of this Masonic culture were the declamatory hymns consecrated to abstract virtues and mythological deities. Initiation into the lodge was a kind of second, adult baptism. Sacred texts were those of Boehme, Saint-Martin, Jung-Stilling, and other mystical thinkers who were regarded as equal to the evangelists and early Church fathers. The Masons, however, sought no salvation in the next world, which was the goal of the monks, but truth in this world: pravda, the "two-sided truth" of wisdom and justice.
The icons of the Masonic culture were statues and busts of great figures of the past. It was only under Catherine that statuary had first assumed importance in Russian art.123 The bronze statue of Peter the Great was her monumental icon to Westernization, her statue of Voltaire her icon for private veneration. Lopukhin had a private garden full of symbolic sculpture and busts of the "spiritual knights" of his "inner church."124 Magnitsky made statuary crucifixes a key part of his decor for the reformed university at Kazan; and Runich kept a private bust of Christ with a crown of thorns.125
The extraordinary attention paid to physical characteristics of the face was partly the new enthusiasm of a people just discovering the naturalistic art that had been present in the West for several centuries but partly also a
new version of the iconographer's old belief that a painting was a means of communing with the saints. The private gallery of busts and paintings in the castle that Rastrelli built for the Stroganovs in St. Petersburg became a kind of hall of icons; and the Decembrist Bestuzhev's painting portraits in exile of all those who had participated in the uprising marked the beginnings of a new martyrological portraiture.126
Herzen, who launched the secular revolutionary tradition in an effort to avenge the fallen Decembrists, was also influenced by the culture of higher order Masonry: in his youthful oath-taking, his early talk of palingenesis ("rebirth");127 in the title of his first journal, Polar Star (which was taken from a Decembrist paper named after a key Masonic lodge and symbol); and in his decision to edit, even amidst the exciting early years of Alexander IPs reign, the works of the original "spiritual knight," Lopukhin. Many symbols of higher order Masonry seem, indeed, strangely applicable to the Russian revolutionary tradition: the basic slogan "Victory or Death"; the supreme symbol of the sword (representing the need to fight for an idea); the lower symbol of the knife (representing the need to punish traitors); the idea of inscribing messages on a cross; and the candles within the temple symbolizing the light of Adam within man and the perfection of the starry firmament which they would soon bring down to earth. In extinguishing these candles, the Romanovs did not succeed in snuffing out the spark that had lit them; and the journal in which Lenin first developed his revolutionary ideas was to bear the name of this key Masonic symbol, The Spark-again through the intermediacy of Decembrist usage.
The Masonic culture of the Alexandrian age was, of course, a far different thing from the revolutionary movements that were to make use of its symbols and techniques. All Masons were pledged to belief in God, but he had many names and faces. One could find him equally well in the world (macrocosm), in oneself (microcosm), or in books of revelation (mesocosm). God's very name had symbolic and allegorical meaning for the Russian occultists. The letters BOG stood for blago ("good"), otets ("father"), and glagol' ("the word"), which were the three essential characteristics of the "God above God" of Russian mysticism. The letter "O" stood in the middle -a self-contained circle of perfection signifying that there was neither beginning nor end to God's fatherhood.128 The birth of Christ was said to have occurred in all three forms: as the moral incarnation of the good and the scientific incarnation of the true word. Thus the "imitation of Christ" meant in higher order Masonry the attainment by man of the "two-sided truth" of knowledge and justice.
But how did such a God relate to Russia? Beneath the anguish and frustrations of the Alexandrian age lies the pathos of intoxicated mystics
trying to apply their insights to the real world, and the deeper drama of an awakening nation in search of a national creed. De Maistre offered Russia the Catechism of the Council of Trent. Pietistic sectarians looked to Lopuk-hin's Moral Catechism of the True Free Mason to lead them away from "dreams born of smoke from the dull light of false wisdom."129 Conservative military leaders looked admiringly to the pietistic and patriotic Short Catechism for German Soldiers written in 1812 by Ernst Arndt for German soldiers fighting Napoleon in Russia.130 Rationalistic sceptics turned to Voltaire's Catechism of an Honest Man.131 Patriotic reformers admired the Russian translation of a Spanish Citizen's Catechism drawn up during the Peninsular War, and tended toward the view set forth in the Catechism of the Decembrist Murav'ev-Apostol that Russians should "rise up all together against tyranny and establish faith and freedom in Russia. Whoever rejects this path will, like the traitor, Judas, be cursed with anathema. Amen."182
The creed which Russia adopted under Nicholas I was far closer to that described by Catherine's courtier, the conservative historian M. Shcher-batov, in his "Utopian" novel of 1783-4, A Voyage to the Land of Ofir, than to anything outlined in Alexander's time. Shcherbatov, for all his erudition and his unexcelled fifteen-thousand-volume library, was deeply suspicious of undisciplined intellectual activity. He proposed an absolute monarchy with a rigid class structure and an educational system that would be totally oriented toward practical problems. Religion was to be completely rational and authoritarian. In place of all other reading matter (even the Bible), the ordinary citizen was-to be given two new catechisms: a moral and legal catechism. Both the priests who taught the former and the police who taught the latter should have as their object the maintenance of order and the inculcation of respect for morality and law.133
Under Nicholas I, Russia acquired both its "moral" and its "legal" catechism: the former in Metropolitan Philaret's Orthodox Catechism, the latter in Uvarov's famous circular outlining the doctrine of "official nationality." At the same time,
social and economic policies followed the rigid lines set forth in Shcherbatov's novel. Class distinctions were strictly maintained; the peasantry remained in bondage; and commerce and industry were kept subordinate to agriculture, which Shcherbatov had considered the source of all wealth.
This represented in some ways a return to order and rationality after the confusions of Alexander's time. Nicholas discarded the most extreme figures in the "reactionary uprising" of the mid-twenties: Arakcheev for Benckendorff in the army, Magnitsky for Uvarov in education, Photius for Philaret in the Church, the archaic Slavicisms of Shishkov for the Euro-
peanized prose of Karamzin. Yet Nicholas' policies were more resented because of their finality, their refusal to leave room for further discussion of religion and politics by the aristocracy. His ideal society was the army, in which, "there is order … no impertinent claims to know all the answers … no one commands before he himself has learned to obey."134 God was the supreme commander and Nicholas "a subordinate officer determined to execute his orders well and to occupy an honorable place in the great military review to be held in the next world."135 Never again, except for a few brief years under Alexander II, were the Romanovs to encourage the discussion of political reform. Never again, except in the last decadent days under Rasputin, was the court to encourage the extra-ecclesiastical pursuit of religious truth.
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