The Icon and the Axe

Yet certain important developments did take place in education; and almost all of them were connected with Betskoy, who, like most eighteenth-century Russian aristocrats, was widely traveled, trained to think in abstract, universal terms, and almost totally without deep roots in his Russian homeland. Estrangement was built into his very name, for Betskoy was a contraction of the old aristocratic name of Trubetskoy, of the sort frequently assumed by the illegitimate children of noble families. The Vorontsovs gave birth to more than a few Rantsovs; Golitsyns, Litsyns; Rumiantsevs, Miantsovs; Griboedovs, Gribovs, and so on. Betskoy was not alone in bearing this constant reminder of aristocratic profligacy. Ivan Pnin, whose

1804 treatise, On Enlightenment in Russia, went even further in proposing education for the peasantry, was also the bastard offspring of an old aristocratic line. His father, Prince Nicholas Repnin, was a friend of Betskoy known as the "Russian Aristides" for his enlightened administrative activities in western Russia.46 Herzen, whose publications abroad later helped revive interest in the reformist currents of Catherine's time, also bore the stamp of illegitimate aristocratic birth.

Betskoy was born in Stockholm, educated in Copenhagen, spent most of his early life in Paris, and had close if not intimate relations with a host of minor German princesses, including the mother of Catherine the Great. Thus, when Catherine ascended to the throne, Betskoy commended himself to the young empress as a man with excellent intellectual and physiological qualifications for the court. Like Catherine's special favorites, Orlov and Potemkin, Betskoy was drawn to the Empress and her projects for reform partly because of antagonism to the more established aristocracy. Whereas most older aristocrats sympathized with Panin's efforts to have an aristocratic council limit tsarist authority, Betskoy and his allies sought to expand that authority as a means of furthering their own relative position in the hierarchy. Whereas the older aristocrats tended to adopt the measured rationalism of Voltaire and Diderot, Catherine's less secure courtiers tended to prefer the visionary ideas of Rousseau. There was perhaps a certain sense of identity between these relative outsiders to the Russian aristocracy and the Genevan outsider to the aristocratic Paris of the philosophes. Basically, however, the Russian turn from Voltaire to Rousseau reflected a general turn in intellectual fashion among European reformist circles of the 1770's and 1780's. Orlov invited Rousseau to come to Russia and take up permanent residence on his estate; one of the Potemkins became Rousseau's principal Russian translator; Catherine retreated increasingly to her own Rousseauian "Hermitage"; and the "general plan of education" which Betskoy presented to her was partly based on Rousseau's Emile.47

Betskoy sought to create in Russia "a new breed of man" freed from the artificiality of contemporary society for a more natural way of life. The government was to assume responsibility for this new type of education, seeking to develop the heart as well as the mind, to encourage physical as well as mental development, and to place the teaching of morality at the head of the curriculum. In his search for elements suitable for remolding through pedagogical experiment he had to look no further than his own origins. Bastards and orphans-the rejected material of society-were to become the cornerstones of his new temple of humanity. On the basis of a close study of secular philanthropic activities in England and France, Betskoy set up in Moscow and Petersburg foundling homes which were to

become major centers of initiation into the new Russian Enlightenment. Foundling homes are even now called "educational" (vospitatel'nye) homes in Russia, and these first ones were set up

… to overcome the superstition of centuries, to give the people their new education and, so to speak, their new birth (porozhdenie).48

They were to remain totally removed from the outside world in these secular monasteries from age five or six to eighteen or twenty; but, in fact, many entered at two or three, and were neither bastards nor orphans.