The Icon and the Axe

The most important link between the Russia of Catherine and that of the revolutionary era lies, however, in the creation of a new class of secular intellectuals vaguely inclined toward sweeping reform. Betskoy had spoken of developing through education a "third rank" of citizens along with the aristocracy and the peasantry.53 The educated intellectuals did indeed come to constitute a new rank in society outside the table of ranks created by Peter. They found their solidarity, however, not as a class of enlightened state servitors, as Betskoy had hoped, but as an "intelligentsia" estranged from the state machine. This was the "new race of men" to come out of

Catherine's cultural upheaval: the unofficial "third rank" between the ruling aristocracy and the servile peasantry.

For Catherine's reign saw a profound and permanent change in the source of internal opposition to imperial authority. Whereas the first half was plagued by violent protest movements among the lower classes, climaxing in the Pugachev uprising, the latter half of her reign saw the first appearance of "Pugachevs from the academies": a new kind of opposition from within the educated aristocracy. The estrangement of these intellectuals from their aristocratic background resulted not so much from any changes in the sovereign's attitude toward reform as from an inner ripening of ideas within the thinking community itself. Since this intellectual ferment was to play a vital role in subsequent Russian history, it is important to consider the first steps on the path of critical questioning that was to lead Russia to form an intelligentsia, a "new Soviet intelligentsia," and perhaps something even beyond that in the post-Stalin era.

The Alienation of the Intellectuals

The alienation of the intellectuals in modern Russia was, from the beginning, not so much a matter of conflict between different classes and factions as of conflicting feelings and impulses at work within the same groups and even the same individuals. The conflicts inside these disturbed groups.and individuals were, in a sense, minor compared with the great sense of distance that was felt between those who participated in the conflicts and those who did not; between what came to be called intelligentsiia and meshchanstvo, "intelligence" and "philistinism."

The inner conflict that first created the modern Russian intelligentsia was a personal and moral one within the ruling aristocracy. This fact created a peculiar psychological compulsion for passionate personal engagement in ethical questions, which was to become a key characteristic of the alienated intellectuals.

The personal moral crisis for the ruling aristocrat of Catherine's era was not, in the first instance, created by economic and political privilege but rather by the new style of life within the aristocracy itself: by the vulgar hedonism and imitative Gallomania of their own increasingly profligate lives. Much of this self-hate was sublimated into biting denunciations of foreign forms and customs, which led in turn to an increased, if hyper-sensitive national self-consciousness by the late years of Catherine's reign.

But there was also much introspection and self-criticism. Russians ex-

pressed distress that "the wworship of Minerva was so often followed by the feasts of Bacchus," and soought to discover how the wisdom of Minerva might be applied to problersms of practical conduct. Still, however, the need was felt for some external 1 source of their perversion; and one was soon found in the symbolic figure» of Voltaire, who was said to have "made animal life the sole aim of man."a'54 Voltairianism came to be viewed as a force leading into self-indulgent ii immorality.

As was so often to I be the case subsequently, thoughtful Russians tended to unite around whaat they rejected rather than what they accepted. A convenient object for thliis collective hatred was provided by Theodore Henri Chudi, the principal ft foreign agent of the Francophile Shuvalov family and a major vehicle for the s importation of French culture into Russia.

Chudi was one of the : more odious sycophants in the Russian imperial entourage. He was a Swiss 5 actor who had first come to Russia as a minor figure in the new imperial t‹ theater. After adopting a more impressive name (Chevalier de Lussy) and ; a synthetic French noble ancestry, he made a successful career at court asis a gigolo and glorified gossip columnist-editing the first French-language jcjournal on Russian soil, he ??????? litteraire. On its pages, he frankly adimitted that he would be "lost without frivolity."

I am French, one wouuld expect it, the frivolity of my work announces a man of my nation. To this first quality, I could add the title of Cosmopolitan.65