The Icon and the Axe

The casual moralism and philanthropy that had dominated early Masonry was, under Schwarz, transformed into a seductive belief in the realizability of heaven on earth through the concentrated effort of consecrated thinkers. It seems fitting that Schwarz was apparently the first to use the term intelligentsiia. Though using it in the sense of the Latin term intelligentia ("intelligence"), Schwarz gave the term its distinctive Russian spelling, intelligentsiia, and the sense of special power which would eventually come to be applied to the class of people who went by its name. "Chto takoe intelligentsiia?" "What is intelligence?" asks Schwarz in a phrase that was to be much repeated in subsequent Russian history. It is, he says,

that higher state of man, as a mental essence, free from all base, earthly perishable matter; eternally and imperceptibly capable of influencing and acting on all things.101

Intelligentsia was the magical force for which Catherine had prayed at the beginning of her Nakaz: "Domine Deus … da mihi intelligentiam . . ," But it was given a different, mystical meaning by Schwarz. The first comprehensive history of Russian Masonry claimed with some justice that Russian Masonry first gave the aristocracy "a sense of mission as an intellectual class" {??? intelligentnoe soslovie).102

After Schwarz's death, a new grand master arrived from Germany convinced that "true Rosicrucians are the true restorers of order in Europe," and that a leading role in this restoration would be played by Russia ("a camel that does not realize it is laden with precious goods").103 Numerous young Russians flocked to Berlin for fuller study of the order, some hoping to unravel there the secret of eternal life. The movement received new encouragement in 1786 when a practicing Rosicrucian, Prince Frederick William, became king of Prussia. A bewildering profusion of occult fraternities flooded into Russia in the late eighties: the "New Israelites," or

"people of God," who called themselves true Masons but seemed more like religious sectarians; the "children of the New Jerusalem" who were followers of Swedenborg; and an aristocratic group formed in Avignon by Admiral Pleshcheev and Prince N. Repnin, which was transferred to St. Petersburg under the ideological guidance of Dom Pernety, a former Benedictine and librarian of Frederick the Great, who had taken up occult studies.104

Novikov became uneasy about the new occult turn that Masonry had taken, and proposed forming a more purely Christian and philanthropic order in the late eighties. His harsh criticism of the Jesuits in 1784 as being a political order and thus a betrayal of the monastic ideal had brought a sharp rebuke from their benefactress, Catherine. Increasingly she stepped up her harassment of all Masons, wrote three satirical anti-Masonic plays, closed down Masonic printing presses, and finally arrested Novikov in his village home in 1792.

Catherine's persecution of Novikov is usually bracketed with her treatment of Radishchev as illustrating her general disillusionment with the Enlightenment in France in the wake of the French Revolution. Actually, her opposition to Masonry was of many years standing and appeared in her writings even before her accession to the throne. It was based not on a sudden disillusionment with a former ideological infatuation, but on a deep antagonism to all forms of obscurity and secretiveness. Catherine was suspicious of anything mystical which "inclines the mind away from participation in the affairs of this world,"105 and was also politically apprehensive of Swedish and Prussian influence over these higher orders.

There may, moreover, have been real acuteness in her premonitions of special danger lurking within this movement. She knew that the occult orders had influence over her son Paul and sensed that they might establish broader links with other disaffected elements of the population. Having defeated religion in the countryside, Catherine was now seeing it stage a comeback in the drawing rooms. The literature of urban nostalgia was beginning. Chulkov, Shcherbatov, Novikov, and others were leading men's gaze back to the idealized rural and religious culture of Muscovy. Novikov's increasing interest in the religious traditions of Old Russia was giving his publications a new kind of quasi-religious appeal. Novikov adopted the Old Believer habit of counting dates from creation rather than the birth of Christ and published a number of Old Believer documents. Indeed, his publication of an apologia for the rebellious monks of Solovetsk was the immediate cause of his arrest and deportation.

In the late years of Catherine's reign there was a general turn toward desperation within the religious community. Monks fled from monasteries to the ascetic "desert" settlements (pustyni) during this period. Within the