Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Freemasonry was now interpreted as a dangerous religious heresy. Deviations from Orthodoxy were punished severely. Novikov was condemned to death, which Catherine commuted to fifteen years in a St. Petersburg prison.

She had commuted another sentence two years earlier of another seditious writer—Alexander Radishchev, author of the daring anti-monarchic critique Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Earnest and incorruptible, Radishchev, who was an early collaborator with Novikov (and eventually became head of customs in St. Petersburg), published his pamphlet in 1790 on a home printing press in 650 copies, of which only twenty-five went on sale. The tone of his work was set by the famous phrase from his introduction: “I looked around me and my soul was wounded by human suffering.”

Written in the then-popular genre of travelogue, Radishchev’s book was a howl of horror at the sight of the difficult lot of serfs and a “satirical call to outrage” (from a later review by Pushkin) against their masters, the heartless landowners: “The Russian people are very patient, and they suffer to the extreme, but when their patience ends, nothing will be able to contain it from turning to violence.” Those words sounded a terrible warning.

It is not often that a work with such limited circulation creates such a fuss. Radishchev’s timing was very bad. In Paris the revolutionary “ferocious monsters,” as Catherine called them, had stormed the Bastille, which gave the empress a serious fright: it became clear that it was just one step from small books to major upheavals.

Even though Journey was published anonymously, Radishchev was quickly identified, arrested, tried, and, like Novikov, sentenced to death, which Catherine commuted to Siberian exile.

The cases of Novikov and Radishchev are usually used as evidence of Catherine’s cruelty to Russian writers. A hundred and fifty years after her death, the influential philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev maintained that the martyrology of the Russian intelligentsia began with the persecution of Novikov and Radishchev.

Of course, the treatment of Novikov and Radishchev was harsh. Still, they had knowingly broken the rules. We can denounce the excessive severity of domestic law in the Russian Empire of the period, but it would be unfair to accuse Catherine of personal sadism, as is often done to this day.

Peter the Great personally tortured rebel streltsy (members of his Imperial Guards); during his reign, in 1689, the important poet Silvester Medvedev was beheaded, but for some reason Medvedev did not make it into any future martyrologies. The persistent rumors that Catherine’s investigator had Novikov and Radishchev tortured are rejected by the most recent archival research.

Pushkin is sometimes used as a reference, since he wrote about Catherine’s cruelties in his notes. But Pushkin, as we know, based one of his famous “little tragedies” on a rumor that has been totally discredited in our time: that the composer Antonio Salieri poisoned Mozart. Just as Salieri was not a poisoner, Catherine did not torture her writers.

It was another matter that the empress had no intention of being an obedient student of writers and philosophes, be they even such European intellectual superstars as Diderot and Voltaire. Catherine truly was interested in their views and could enjoy endless philosophical discussion with them, but running a huge empire soon taught her a dirty little secret known only by professional politicians: theory, however brilliant, is one thing, and daily political practice is quite another.

When Diderot came to St. Petersburg in 1773 at Catherine’s invitation, with the right to unlimited access to the empress, he flooded her with his utopian ideas and proposals: how to emancipate the serfs immediately, how to organize agriculture and the army properly, how to improve education in the schools drastically. Seeing how attentively Catherine listened, Diderot grew extremely animated, gesticulating, grabbing the empress’s hands, and thought that she would turn his wise suggestions into reality without delay.

But here is what Catherine said to him one day:

Monsieur Diderot, I have listened with great pleasure to everything that your brilliant mind has produced; but all your great principles, which I understand very well, while making wonderful books, will not manage a state. In all your transformational plans, you forget the difference in our situations: you work only on paper, which bears everything, it is soft, smooth, and does not stop your pen or imagination; whereas I, the poor empress, work on human skin, which, on the contrary, is very irritable and ticklish.¹²