The Icon and the Axe

ary activities had already established him as a champion of Westernization and linguistic modernization. Like others who became politically conservative after the French Revolution, Karamzin preferred the wisdom of history to that of abstract laws: the rule of "people" to that of "forms." He had been abroad in 1789, during the Revolution, and had a real aversion to revolutionary slogans. In an ode to Alexander at the time of his coronation he wrote pointedly:

Freedom is where there are regulations, Wise freedom is holy; But equality is a dream.130

With verve and erudition he hammered away at the need to return to the absolutism of the past. The simplicity of his message appealed to an age perplexed by the profusion of new proposals for reform and by the fact that the reformer-in-chief of Europe, Napoleon, had suddenly become the foe of Russia. The sophistication of his arguments also made conservatism appear intellectually respectable. His examination of possible political alternatives was typical of the Enlightenment and similar to that of Speransky .[Anarchy is the worst solution of the political problem, and despotism almost as bad.f Republicanism is theoretically the best but requires a small country to be effective .(Aristocratic rule can lead only to fragmentation and political domination by foreigners. (Therefore, autocratic monarchy is the best form of rule for Russia.131

For all its elegance, however, Karamzin's position remains little more than an attack on innovation fortified with sentimentality and casuistry. He attacks Speransky unfairly as a "translator of Napoleon," makes the questionable contention that the aristocracy is a more faithful servant of the crown than civil servants, and plays on the anti-intellectualism of the petty nobility by ridiculing Speransky's educational requirements for state service. His History, too, for all its style and erudition, is propagandistic in intent. All history is that of the triumphant state, which is a patrimony of the tsar, whose moral qualities determine success or failure. For decades histories of Russia were merely paraphrases of this work, which at times seems closer to the historical romances of Walter Scott than to analytic history.

Karamzin was a kind of monastic chronicler in modern dress. He rehabilitated for the intellectuals of St. Petersburg many of the old Muscovite beliefs about history: the belief that everything depended on the tsar, that Providence was on the side of Russia if it remained faithful to tradition, that foreign innovation was the source of Russia's difficulties. He echoed the Old Believer and Cossack defenders of Old Muscovy by professing hatred for bureaucracy and compromise; but he gave these attitudes a totally new

appeal in St. Petersburg by suggesting that the true ally of the tsar was not the isolated defenders of the old rites or the old liberties but rather the aristocracy. Any dilution of the powers that Catherine had wisely given it would be dangerous for Russia. Karamzin criticizes Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great for their indifference to established authority, praising the holy fools and prophets who warned against headstrong innovation and Westernization. Karamzin seems to have viewed himself as a latter-day version of these court prophets, warning Alexander against liberalization.

Karamzin's hero in Russian history is Ivan III, in whom tsarist authority was undiluted and under whose all-conquering banners the chivalric aristocracy of that time spontaneously rallied and marched off to heroic battle. In his story "Martha the City-leader or the Subjugation of Novgorod," Karamzin glorifies the conquest of that city by Ivan III. "They should have foreseen," one of the characters asserts, "that resistance would lead to the destruction of Novgorod, and sound reasoning demanded from them a voluntary sacrifice."132 In another speech, one of the conquering princes notes that "savage people love independence, wise people love order, and there is no order without autocratic power." Or again, in lines that could have been taken from any dictator of modern times, one of the characters notes that "not freedom, which is often destructive, but public welfare, justice, and security are the three pillars of civil happiness."133 It is curiously fitting to see Soviet editors defending the "progressiveness" of Ivan's conquest and of Karamzin's interpretation against the glorification of Martha and of Novgorod's freedom by the revolutionary Decembrists.134