The Icon and the Axe

Yet for all his extremism Pestel bears certain similarities to the two other leading political theorists of the Alexandrian age: Speransky and Karamzin. Taken together, the three of them illustrate the diversity within unity of Enlightenment political thought in Russia. All three were patriotic former Masons who based their arguments on rationalistic grounds. Even if Karamzin was driven by a purely sentimental and conservative impulse and Pestel by a purely ambitious and revolutionary one (as their detractors contended), both wrapped themselves in the mantle of dispassionate, rational analysis and seemed to wear it with at least moderate distinction. All believed that sovereignty in Russia must be undivided, that government should impose order and harmony on the nation rather than wait for a chaotic play of conflicting interests. If Karamzin and Speransky advocated a monarchy, they nonetheless recognized a certain attractiveness in republicanism, which they considered far better tha» tyranny or anarchy and inapplicable to Russia only because of its size.

With the ascent to the throne of Nicholas I, despotism lost its links with the Enlightenment. Reason gave way to rationalization as Nicholas borrowed eclectically from various enlightened thinkers while disregarding the basic spirit of their ideas. Nicholas executed Pestel along with other leading Decembrists, and Karamzin's death in the same year enabled Nicholas to claim that the historian's writings provided a carte blanche for autocratic rule. He used Speransky to draw up a new law code in 1833 but not to complete any of the more basic constitutional reforms which had interested Speransky. He assimilated Poland in accordance with Catherine's previous practice, and worked for a unified, Russified state as Pestel had urged-but never even considered the proposals for reform that had interested Catherine and Pestel. Nicholas destroyed the sense of fluid political possibility which had lent excitement to the Alexandrian age. The frustration of political reform turned the thinking classes away from any sense of involvement in the tsarist political system and encouraged them to look outside the political arena altogether for new vision.

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2. The Anti-Enlightenment

/v central question haunts any consideration of Russian thought in the aristocratic century: Why was political reform, so much discussed under Catherine and Alexander I, so decisively removed from the intellectual agenda under Nicholas I? This waning of political interest among the upper class proved not just a temporary change of fashion but an enduring malady of the late imperial period. The aristocratic passion for political discussion all but died with the Decembrists. Lonely survivors of the movement, like Nicholas Turgenev, could not arouse interest in political questions even among fellow exiles. The reforms which were eventually enacted by Alexander II in the 1860's touched on administrative and legal procedure rather than political authority. Reformers were preoccupied with the legal and economic bondage of the peasantry, not the political servitude of the entire country. There was no important modification of autocracy until the flood tide of twentieth-century war and revolution swept across Russia in 1905 and 1917. By then interest in political reform had lost all its connections with aristocratic culture, and was largely the province of harassed nationality groups within the empire, full-time revolutionaries, and the demimonde of urban and professional workers.

The narrow fears and insular perspectives of court life may explain why the imperial family and most of its immediate entourage proved incapable of creative involvement in domestic politics after the reign of Alexander I. But the general abdication of interest by the educated and well-traveled aristocracy seems difficult to understand, particularly when so little had been accomplished of what they had been led to expect from the Tsar. Nicholas I frankly confessed his dependence on the landed aristocracy serving as "unsleeping watchdogs guarding the state." Why then did the aristocrats remain content in their kennels and not extract in return at least some of the political concessions they had long demanded?

Some of the explanation lies in the absence of external stimulus, a

perennially important factor in initiating movements for reform inside the amorphous Russian realm. Under Nicholas no discussion was launched from above by the Tsar as under Catherine and Alexander I. Nor was Nicholas' reign shaken from without by a sudden invasion either of foreign reformers (as under Catherine) or of military conquerors (as under Alexander). Yet the landed aristocracy would seem to have had enough contact with the outside world and enough domestic stimulus from peasant unrest and economic insolvency to sustain the pressure for political reform.