The Icon and the Axe

To understand why this pressure was not sustained-and why the reactionary rule of Nicholas I was in fact idolized by most educated aristocrats -one must look beyond the usual psychological and economic arguments for conservatism, and behind the predictably Prussian figure of Nicholas. He merely formalized developments which he had neither the ability to initiate nor the imagination to understand. The foundations of his reactionary rule were laid during the late years of Alexander I's reign. This turn to obscurantism under Nicholas' mystical and visionary predecessor is one of the most fateful developments in modern Russian history: it coincided with the increase in national self-consciousness that followed the Napoleonic wars to produce in Russia an identification of nationalism with social conservatism which did not become widespread in the rest of Europe until the late nineteenth century.

Many figures and interests were involved in Alexander's reactionary turn: Arakcheev, the new military leader and author of plans for the military colonies; Photius, the spokesman for the xenophobic Church hierarchy; and Rostopchin, the vulgar, anti-intellectual spokesman for much of the higher civil service. But to understand more fully this decisive turn of events, one must consider the dominant ideological current of the age: the powerful surge of religiously tinged reaction against the rationalism and scepticism of the French Enlightenment.

The main force behind this anti-Enlightenment was higher order Masonry. The Moscow "Martinists" had created higher fraternities dedicated to combating scepticism and license, but had not provided any clear idea of where new belief and authority were to be found. They had left Russians with only a vague belief in spiritual rather than material forces, in esoteric symbols rather than rational propositions. These occult, quasi-religious circles led the aristocratic retreat from the rationalism of the Enlightenment. The retreat was not to be sudden and precipitous, as Paul had hoped, into a kind of garrison state ruled by a knightly order of mystical obscurantists. It was, rather, a gradual progression under Alexander I from the high noon of the Enlightenment into the gathering dusk of morbid romanticism.

Three figures can be said to have led this retreat: Joseph De Maistre, Ivan Lopukhin, and Michael Magnitsky. Each had roots in higher order Masonry. Each illustrates the basically rootless nature of reactionary political thought and the desperate quality of the search for some new principle of authority. De Maistre looked to Catholicism, Lopukhin to Protestant pietism, Magnitsky to Orthodoxy. Yet the churches to which they looked were not the historical churches of their respective communions but rather the private creations of their own disturbed minds. All three thinkers were haunted by memories of the French Revolution and fear that revolution was the inevitable by-product of secular enlightenment. Against the real and imagined dangers of Jacobins, "illuminists," and revolutionaries, this reactionary trio created some of the first ideological blueprints in modern Europe for what may be fairly called "the radical right."

De Maistre and Lopukhin, who were essentially transmitters of Western counter-revolutionary ideas onto Russian soil, are key figures in the ideological ferment of the early years of Alexander I's reign. Magnitsky, who was more extreme than either of them, was almost unknown during their period of influence. His sudden rise to prominence in the second half of Alexander's reign was a dramatic indication of the extent to which the anti-Enlightenment had struck roots in Russian soil. Through Magnitsky, Russia produced an original "Orthodox" species of counter-revolutionary theory, which was then refined and codified by Count Uvarov as the official ideology of the Russian Empire.

Catholics

Of all the counter-revolutionaries, De Maistre was the most philosophically profound in his denial of the possibility of human enlightenment. He rejected not just the light of reason but also Rousseau's "inner light" and Pascal's "reasons of the heart." There are, he warns, "shadows within the heart"1-and even darker shadows lengthening across the path of history. His famous philosophical dialogue Evenings of St. Petersburg is suffused with the metaphor of gathering darkness; and his elliptical imagery and polemic intensity represents a further setting of the sun of enlightened discourse. This process had begun in Russia with Novikov's Twilight Glow and would culminate in another lengthy and obscure philosophic dialogue of the 1840's: Prince Odoevsky's Russian Nights. As the work of a Western emigre in Russia, de Maistre's Evenings also stands as a kind of eastward extension of the romantic revolt against optimistic rationalism which had

begun with Young's Night Thoughts and culminated in Novalis' Hymns to the Night.