The Icon and the Axe

At the same time, there was a new desire within the monasteries to communicate more directly with people in all walks of life. The emphasis on ascetic piety tended to break down the older ritual and formality of the communal monasteries, just as the confiscation of monastic lands had taken away the former preoccupation with economic affairs. The influence of Protestant pietism tended to turn monastic elders like Tikhon into part-time popular evangelists. Elements of self-doubt may lie behind the almost masochistic desire of the new monks to humble themselves. Tikhon requested that he be buried under the entrance stone of a simple church so that he could be literally trampled underfoot by the humblest believer. When hit by a freethinker in the course of an argument, Tikhon replied by throwing himself at the feet of his astonished assailant to ask forgiveness for driving him to such a loss of self-control.95 It is perhaps fitting that Tikhon was canonized and his works studied anew in the 1860's, when Russian thinkers were turning again to the problem of moral purification and humbling themselves before the simple people. The principal ideological movement of that age, the famous "movement (literally 'procession' or 'pilgrimage': khozhdenie) to the people," was in many ways only an extension and secularization of the effort to take the monastic ideal out to a bonded but still believing peasantry. Indeed, the complex populist movement-the most genuinely original social movement of modern Russian history-appears in many ways as a continuation of all three post-Petrine forms of conservative protest to the Westernization and secularization of the Russian empire. Like all of them, populism was a loose tradition rather than an organized movement. Like most Old Believers, the populists believed in preserving the old communal forms of economic life and in the imminent possibility of sudden historical change. Like the peasant insurrectionaries, the populists believed in violent action against police and bureaucrats and in the ultimate benevolence of the "true tsar." Even after killing Alexander II in 1881, the populists could conceive of no other program than to address Utopian appeals to his successor.96 Like the monastic revivalists, the populists believed in ascetic self-denial and in humbling oneself before the innocently suffering Russian people.

But before considering this and other movements of the late imperial period one must turn to the new and distinctive culture that took shape under Elizabeth and Catherine and lasted for a century. During this period the schisms and tensions that had been opened in Russian society by the reforms of Alexis and Peter were plastered over with the decorative effects of aristocratic culture. It is to the brilliant and self-confident culture of the aristocratic century-and to its lingering inner concerns-that attention must now be turned.

The Mid-Eighteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Century

The unchallenged reign of a distinctive, if disturbed aristocratic culture during the century from 1755-6 (the date of the Russian alliance with the France of Louis XIV and the founding of the first Russian university and permanent theater) to 1855-6 (the year of decisive military defeat in the Crimea and the advent of the reforming tsar, Alexander II). The constant struggle between French and German influences, between rationalistic and romantic impulses; the adoption of the French language and the importation of French ideas as an aristocratic badge of class beginning in the reign of Elizabeth (1741-62); the emphasis on Prussian discipline under Peter III (1762) and Paul I (1796-1801) immediately before and after the long Francophile reign of Catherine the Great. The Russian Enlightenment: the breadth and scientific achievement of Michael Lomonosov (1711-65), the neo-classical art forms and the new cities that accompanied Catherine's age of conquest.

The recurrent dilemma, first met by Catherine, between the desire for rational rule based on natural laws and the concurrent determination to maintain an unlimited autocracy based on rigid class distinctions. The crucial change in the character of opposition to tsarist rule under Catherine, from the last of the great peasant revolts under Pugachev (1773-5) to the first manifesto of the "Pugachevs from the universities": The Journey from Petersburg to Moscow (1790) by the alienated aristocratic intellectual Alexander Radishchev (1749-1802). The struggle against frivolous "Voltairianism," the journalistic activities of Nicholas Novikov (1744-1818), and the seminal importance of Russian Freemasonry in the deepening communal life of the reforming aristocracy.