To understand the roots of the anti-Enlightenment tradition among the Russian aristocracy one must look at the activities of Novikov's Moscow period. To understand these activities, one must appreciate not only the special atmosphere of Moscow, but also the history of Russian Freemasonry: the first ideological class movement of the Russian aristocracy and the one through which Novikov channeled almost all his varied activities. The split in Novikov's career and in Russian Masonry between a St. Petersburg and a Moscow phase illustrates the deep division in Russian aristocratic thought between rationalism and mysticism-which was later to reappear in the famous controversy between Westernizers and Slavophiles.
Freemasonry was the fraternal order of the eighteenth-century European aristocracy.81 Within its lodges, the landholding officer class of Europe acquired a sense of belonging; and new arrivals gained access to aristocratic society more easily than through the more rigid social system prevailing outside. But Masonry was also a kind of supra-confessional deist church. It provided its members with a sense of higher calling and sacramental mystery which they no longer found in traditional churches. It gave new symbolic elaboration to the basic eighteenth-century idea that there was a natural, moral order to the universe; it offered secret rites of initiation and confession to those who recognized this central truth; and it prescribed philanthropic and educational activities which reassured them of their belief in human perfectibility.
The oft-alleged medieval origins of Freemasonry belong to the category of legend,82 although there does appear to have been some connection with the stone mason guilds, particularly in the period of the rebuilding of London after the fire of 1666. Masonic lodges of the modern type made their first appearance in England in the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century. Members were led through three stages or initiation similar to those of medieval trade guilds: apprentice, journeyman, and master. English tradesmen set up the first lodges in Russia no later than the 1730's, and thereafter, Russian Masonry, like the Russian aristocratic culture which it helped form, was deeply influenced by foreigners.
All of the flamboyant qualities of a medieval knight in search of a
cause are personified in James Keith, the man who brought Masonry from England to Russia. Descended from a Scottish noble family, Keith had been banished from England for his support of the rebellion on behalf of the Stuart Pretender in 1715 and had served in the Spanish army before setting off to Russia in 1728. There he became a leading general, a military governor of the Ukraine, and-in the early 1740's-Provincial Grand Master of Russian Masonry.
Keith was a beloved and cultivated figure, 'an image of the dawn,' who attracted Russians to the new aristocratic fraternity. As a Masonic song of the time put it:
After him [Peter the Great], Keith, full of light, came to the Russians; and, exalted by zeal, lit up the sacred fire. He erected the temple of wisdom, corrected our thoughts and hearts, and confirmed us in brotherhood.83
Keith left Russia to enter the service of Frederick the Great in 1747; but Masonry continued to grow in Russia. By the late 1750's lodges had appeared in almost every country of Europe, in North America, in some sections of the Middle East, and-on a large scale-in Russia. In 1756 a lodge including many men of letters was formally established in St. Petersburg under the Anglophile Count Vorontsov; and the first official police investigation of 'the Masonic sect' was conducted in response to hostile rumors about its foreign and seditious plans. Masonry was exonerated, however; and during his brief reign, Peter III appears to have joined the movement, founding lodges near his residences in both St. Petersburg and Oranienbaum.
The existence of an organized command structure within the Masonic lodges dates from the installation of a wealthy courtier, Ivan Elagin, as Provincial Grand Master in the Russian Empire. Elagin was a figure of extraordinary influence in the early years of Catherine's reign. She sometimes jocularly signed letters to him 'Mr. Elagin's chancellor,'84 and he stands as the organizer and apologist for the first phase of Russian Masonry; the practical- oriented, St. Petersburg-based English form of Masonry which Catherine found relatively acceptable.
English Masonry partook, indeed, of the dilettantish atmosphere of Catherine's court. Elagin admitted that he turned to the movement originally out of boredom; and his main addition to the standard practices of English Masonry lay in the addition of exotic initiation rituals, which he justified on practical grounds as needed substitutes for the rites of the Church. His definition of a Mason differed little from the description of any enlightened member of Catherine's entourage: 'a free man able to master
his inclinations … to subordinate his will to the laws of reason.'85 Elagin's lodges had a base membership in 1774 of some two hundred Russian and foreign aristocrats, almost all occupying leading positions in the civil or military service.86
Novikov first joined the Masonic order in 1775 through Elagin's lodge in St. Petersburg. But he refused to submit to the usual initiation rituals and was dissatisfied with the way they 'played 'mason' like a child's game.'87 Within a year he had broken away to form a new lodge and to send Russian Masonry into a second, more intense phase, which was mystical-Germanic rather than English in origin, and had Moscow rather than St. Petersburg as its spiritual center. Novikov took the lead in turning Russian Masonry from the casual fraternal activities of Elagin to the inner groups and esoteric higher orders which were characteristic of this second, Moscow phase of Russian Masonic history and were to have such an important impact on the subsequent development of Russian culture.
This new trend in Russian Masonry was part of a general European movement away from English toward 'Scottish' Masonry, which taught that there were higher levels of membership beyond the original three: anywhere from one to ninety-nine additional stages. This 'higher order' Masonry88 introduced closer bonds of secrecy and mutual obUgation, special catechisms and vows, and new quasi-Oriental costumes and rituals. Their lodges claimed origins in the sacred past through the Knights Templars or Knights of Jerusalem back to the Gnostics and the Essenes. In Russian these higher orders were generally known as the 'Orders of Andrew,' the apostle who allegedly brought Christianity to Russia even before Peter took it to Rome.
The turn to 'true Masonry' had rather the effect of religious conversion for many members of the aristocracy. Chudi, the 'literary chameleon' who had been a leading symbol of frivolity and sensuality, became a passionate apologist for the movement as the only bulwark against the moral disintegration of Europe. From writing pornographic literature, Chudi turned to the writing of Masonic sermons and catechisms, and the founding of his own system of higher lodges of 'The Flaming Star.'89
The Russian aristocracy was a fertile field for such conversions in the 1770's and 1780's. Increasing numbers were anxious to dissociate themselves from the immorality, agnosticism, and superficiality of court life, and the higher aristocracy was bound together by a new sense of insecurity in the wake of the Pugachev uprising. They felt cut off from the religion of the people they were now empowered to rule, yet not content with the Voltairianism of Catherine's court. 'Finding myself at the crossroads between Voltairianism and religion,' Novikov writes of his own conversion,
'I had no basis on which to work, no cornerstone on which to build spiritual tranquility, and therefore I unexpectedly fell into the society.'60 His philosophic journal of the late seventies, Morning Light, was explicitly designed to 'struggle with that sect which prides itself on the title 'philosophical' '91 by publishing the great classical and medieval philosophers. The turn to occult, 'higher order' Masonry in Eastern Europe was part of the general reaction against French rationalism and secularism that was gathering momentum in the fifteen years prior to the French Revolution. The model was the so-called Swedish system, which had nine grades and a tenth secret
