The Icon and the Axe

The last decade of the eighteenth century was a bleak period for Russian culture. Catherine was frustrated physically by the increasing difference in age between herself and her courtiers and ideologically by the increasing difference between her old ideals of enlightenment and the reality of revolution. Only a few days after the fall of the Bastille she received prophetic warnings from her ambassador in Paris about the new "political enthusiasms" of the revolutionaries. Slowly she turned her back on France. By 1791 she had recalled all Russian students from Paris and Strasbourg and declared ideological war on the revolutionary "constitution of Antichrist." The assassination of Gustav III of Sweden at a masked ball in 1792, followed closely by the execution of Louis XVI and of Catherine's close friend Marie Antoinette in 1793, deepened Catherine's gloom and precipitated an almost farcical witch hunt in St. Petersburg. A French royal ist general wearing a red hat was mistakenly arrested by an official anxious to find a Jacobin; illiterate police officials ordered to destroy suspect books ended up destroying books adjacent to them in the library for fear they had been contaminated.

Poetic transcriptions of psalms were censored, and all copies burned of an innocuous melodrama, Vadmi_oi_Movgorod, by one of Catherine's former favorites. The play depicted the love of Vadim for the daughter of Riurik, who had come to rule over them. Realizing that his attachment to the old ways in Novgorod makes him bad building material for the new order, Vadim commits suicide together with his beloved. Everything is done with stoic dignity in the interest of good government and to the glory of Russian rule; but Vadim's occasional nostalgic soliloquies in praise of the lost liberties of Novgorod sounded too much like revolutionary oratory to Catherine.119

Catherine had, however, let out the leash too far to be an effective dictator. She was unable to gain the cooperation of university professors and other educated groups for tightening the censorship; and only her son and successor Paul was willing to institute a real purge and establish a blanket censorship. Under his brief rule it became a crime to use the word

"citizen" or to possess a copy of his mother's legislative proposal In 1797, his first complete year of rule, the number of regular periodicals published in Russia declined to 5 (from 16 in 1789), the number of books printed during the year to 240 (from 572 in 1788) .12°'But Paul lacked the authority to stake out a new course for Russia. His reign made the need for reform more urgent than ever and affected the course of Russian thought under Alexander I in two important ways. First of all, Paul's overt admiration of Prussian ideas had the negative effect of driving much of the nobility back I to the French Enlightenment. Whereas there had been a strong wave of reaction against all things French in the early stages of the Revolution, Russian aristocrats now tended to look again to France for political guidance in preventing a recurrence of Paul's arbitrary rule. Thus Paul unintentionally stimulated the renewed discussion of political reform during the first half of Alexander's reign.

At the same time, however, Paul's methods for combating revolutionary thought anticipated in many respects the pattern which prevailed in the second half of Alexander's reign. For Paul sought to enlist mystical religion in the counter-revolutionary cause. He formally assumed the title "Head of the Church" at his coronation (administering communion to himself) and became an enthusiastic patron of both higher order Masonry and the Roman Catholic Church. Shortly after his coronation be released NpV-ikovand promoted Repnin, head of the "New Israel" sect, to the post of field marshal and special adviser. In 1798 he made himself the new commander of the Maltese Order of the Knights of Jerusalem (who had been evicted from Malta by the advancing tide of the French Revolution), and appointed the higher Masonic leader Labzin as its official historian. He also offered shelter to the Pope from the Revolution and approved the establishment of a Catholic parish in St. Petersburg and of a Catholic academy in Vilnius under a former general of the Jesuit Order.121

Thus the "spiritual mobilization" against revolution during the second half of Alexander's reign was in some respects a development of ideas and techniques first crudely tried out by Paul. This frail yet Draconian ruler often complained that there were ghosts in the castle at Gatchina, before he was strangled by reform-minded guards officers in 1801. But it was his ghost that returned a quarter of a century later to strangle at the gallows five Decembrist officers who had led the aristocratic counterattack against autocratic discipline. In the intervening Alexandrian age, expectations of thoroughgoing political reform were raised as they had never been before.