The Icon and the Axe

Keith left Russia to enter the service of Frederick the Great in 1747; but Masonry continued to grow in Russia. By the late 1750's lodges had appeared in almost every country of Europe, in North America, in some sections of the Middle East, and-on a large scale-in Russia. In 1756 a lodge including many men of letters was formally established in St. Petersburg under the Anglophile Count Vorontsov; and the first official police investigation of "the Masonic sect" was conducted in response to hostile rumors about its foreign and seditious plans. Masonry was exonerated, however; and during his brief reign, Peter III appears to have joined the movement, founding lodges near his residences in both St. Petersburg and Oranienbaum.

The existence of an organized command structure within the Masonic lodges dates from the installation of a wealthy courtier, Ivan Elagin, as Provincial Grand Master in the Russian Empire. Elagin was a figure of extraordinary influence in the early years of Catherine's reign. She sometimes jocularly signed letters to him "Mr. Elagin's chancellor,"84 and he stands as the organizer and apologist for the first phase of Russian Masonry; the practical-oriented, St. Petersburg-based English form of Masonry which Catherine found relatively acceptable.

English Masonry partook, indeed, of the dilettantish atmosphere of Catherine's court. Elagin admitted that he turned to the movement originally out of boredom; and his main addition to the standard practices of English Masonry lay in the addition of exotic initiation rituals, which he justified on practical grounds as needed substitutes for the rites of the Church. His definition of a Mason differed little from the description of any enlightened member of Catherine's entourage: "a free man able to master

his inclinations … to subordinate his will to the laws of reason."85 Elagin's lodges had a base membership in 1774 of some two hundred Russian and foreign aristocrats, almost all occupying leading positions in the civil or military service.86

Novikov first joined the Masonic order in 1775 through Elagin's lodge in St. Petersburg. But he refused to submit to the usual initiation rituals and was dissatisfied with the way they "played 'mason' like a child's game."87 Within a year he had broken away to form a new lodge and to send Russian Masonry into a second, more intense phase, which was mystical-Germanic rather than English in origin, and had Moscow rather than St. Petersburg as its spiritual center. Novikov took the lead in turning Russian Masonry from the casual fraternal activities of Elagin to the inner groups and esoteric higher orders which were characteristic of this second, Moscow phase of Russian Masonic history and were to have such an important impact on the subsequent development of Russian culture.

This new trend in Russian Masonry was part of a general European movement away from English toward "Scottish" Masonry, which taught that there were higher levels of membership beyond the original three: anywhere from one to ninety-nine additional stages. This "higher order" Masonry88 introduced closer bonds of secrecy and mutual obUgation, special catechisms and vows, and new quasi-Oriental costumes and rituals. Their lodges claimed origins in the sacred past through the Knights Templars or Knights of Jerusalem back to the Gnostics and the Essenes. In Russian these higher orders were generally known as the "Orders of Andrew," the apostle who allegedly brought Christianity to Russia even before Peter took it to Rome.

The turn to "true Masonry" had rather the effect of religious conversion for many members of the aristocracy. Chudi, the "literary chameleon" who had been a leading symbol of frivolity and sensuality, became a passionate apologist for the movement as the only bulwark against the moral disintegration of Europe. From writing pornographic literature, Chudi turned to the writing of Masonic sermons and catechisms, and the founding of his own system of higher lodges of "The Flaming Star."89

The Russian aristocracy was a fertile field for such conversions in the 1770's and 1780's. Increasing numbers were anxious to dissociate themselves from the immorality, agnosticism, and superficiality of court life, and the higher aristocracy was bound together by a new sense of insecurity in the wake of the Pugachev uprising. They felt cut off from the religion of the people they were now empowered to rule, yet not content with the Voltairianism of Catherine's court. "Finding myself at the crossroads between Voltairianism and religion," Novikov writes of his own conversion,