The Icon and the Axe

Absorbed in its narrow ways and self-contained suburbs, closer both historically and geographically to the heart of Russia, and forever suspicious of new ideas, Moscow was the natural center for opposition to the ideals of the European Enlightenment. The features of Catherine's court which most deeply infected Moscow were the venal and self-indulgent ones. Moscow, not St. Petersburg society was to be the butt of Griboedov's celebrated satirical comedy Woe from Wit, in which the hero, Chatsky, is at war with Moscow society and all its vulgarity and monotony. This world, in which forty to fifty aristocratic dances were held each night of the winter season,70 was held up to iambic scorn by Chatsky:

What novelty can Moscow show to me? Today a ball, tomorrow two or three.80

The venality and ennui of Moscow society added an element of vindictiveness to attacks on the Voltairianism and cosmopolitanism of St. Petersburg.

The struggle between Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment went on within both cities-and in others as well. However, St. Petersburg remained the symbol and center of the former, and Moscow of the latter, trend.

To understand the roots of the anti-Enlightenment tradition among the Russian aristocracy one must look at the activities of Novikov's Moscow period. To understand these activities, one must appreciate not only the special atmosphere of Moscow, but also the history of Russian Freemasonry: the first ideological class movement of the Russian aristocracy and the one through which Novikov channeled almost all his varied activities. The split in Novikov's career and in Russian Masonry between a St. Petersburg and a Moscow phase illustrates the deep division in Russian aristocratic thought between rationalism and mysticism-which was later to reappear in the famous controversy between Westernizers and Slavophiles.

Freemasonry was the fraternal order of the eighteenth-century European aristocracy.81 Within its lodges, the landholding officer class of Europe acquired a sense of belonging; and new arrivals gained access to aristocratic society more easily than through the more rigid social system prevailing outside. But Masonry was also a kind of supra-confessional deist church. It provided its members with a sense of higher calling and sacramental mystery which they no longer found in traditional churches. It gave new symbolic elaboration to the basic eighteenth-century idea that there was a natural, moral order to the universe; it offered secret rites of initiation and confession to those who recognized this central truth; and it prescribed philanthropic and educational activities which reassured them of their belief in human perfectibility.

The oft-alleged medieval origins of Freemasonry belong to the category of legend,82 although there does appear to have been some connection with the stone mason guilds, particularly in the period of the rebuilding of London after the fire of 1666. Masonic lodges of the modern type made their first appearance in England in the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century. Members were led through three stages or initiation similar to those of medieval trade guilds: apprentice, journeyman, and master. English tradesmen set up the first lodges in Russia no later than the 1730's, and thereafter, Russian Masonry, like the Russian aristocratic culture which it helped form, was deeply influenced by foreigners.

All of the flamboyant qualities of a medieval knight in search of a

cause are personified in James Keith, the man who brought Masonry from England to Russia. Descended from a Scottish noble family, Keith had been banished from England for his support of the rebellion on behalf of the Stuart Pretender in 1715 and had served in the Spanish army before setting off to Russia in 1728. There he became a leading general, a military governor of the Ukraine, and-in the early 1740's-Provincial Grand Master of Russian Masonry.

Keith was a beloved and cultivated figure, "an image of the dawn," who attracted Russians to the new aristocratic fraternity. As a Masonic song of the time put it:

After him [Peter the Great], Keith, full of light, came to the Russians; and, exalted by zeal, lit up the sacred fire. He erected the temple of wisdom, corrected our thoughts and hearts, and confirmed us in brotherhood.83