into a seductive belief in the realizability of heaven on earth through the concentrated effort of consecrated thinkers. It seems fitting that Schwarz was apparently the first to use the term intelligentsiia. Though using it in the sense of the Latin term intelligentia ('intelligence'), Schwarz gave the term its distinctive Russian spelling, intelligentsiia, and the sense of special power which would eventually come to be applied to the class of people who went by its name. 'Chto takoe intelligentsiia?' 'What is intelligence?' asks Schwarz in a phrase that was to be much repeated in subsequent Russian history. It is, he says,
that higher state of man, as a mental essence, free from all base, earthly perishable matter; eternally and imperceptibly capable of influencing and acting on all things.101
Intelligentsia was the magical force for which Catherine had prayed at the beginning of her Nakaz: 'Domine Deus … da mihi intelligentiam . . ,' But it was given a different, mystical meaning by Schwarz. The first comprehensive history of Russian Masonry claimed with some justice that Russian Masonry first gave the aristocracy 'a sense of mission as an intellectual class' {??? intelligentnoe soslovie).102
After Schwarz's death, a new grand master arrived from Germany convinced that 'true Rosicrucians are the true restorers of order in Europe,' and that a leading role in this restoration would be played by Russia ('a camel that does not realize it is laden with precious goods').103 Numerous young Russians flocked to Berlin for fuller study of the order, some hoping to unravel there the secret of eternal life. The movement received new encouragement in 1786 when a practicing Rosicrucian, Prince Frederick William, became king of Prussia. A bewildering profusion of occult fraternities flooded into Russia in the late eighties: the 'New Israelites,' or
'people of God,' who called themselves true Masons but seemed more like religious sectarians; the 'children of the New Jerusalem' who were followers of Swedenborg; and an aristocratic group formed in Avignon by Admiral Pleshcheev and Prince N. Repnin, which was transferred to St. Petersburg under the ideological guidance of Dom Pernety, a former Benedictine and librarian of Frederick the Great, who had taken up occult studies.104
Novikov became uneasy about the new occult turn that Masonry had taken, and proposed forming a more purely Christian and philanthropic order in the late eighties. His harsh criticism of the Jesuits in 1784 as being a political order and thus a betrayal of the monastic ideal had brought a sharp rebuke from their benefactress, Catherine. Increasingly she stepped up her harassment of all Masons, wrote three satirical anti-Masonic plays, closed down Masonic printing presses, and finally arrested Novikov in his village home in 1792.
Catherine's persecution of Novikov is usually bracketed with her treatment of Radishchev as illustrating her general disillusionment with the Enlightenment in France in the wake of the French Revolution. Actually, her opposition to Masonry was of many years standing and appeared in her writings even before her accession to the throne. It was based not on a sudden disillusionment with a former ideological infatuation, but on a deep antagonism to all forms of obscurity and secretiveness. Catherine was suspicious of anything mystical which 'inclines the mind away from participation in the affairs of this world,'105 and was also politically apprehensive of Swedish and Prussian influence over these higher orders.
There may, moreover, have been real acuteness in her premonitions of special danger lurking within this movement. She knew that the occult orders had influence over her son Paul and sensed that they might establish broader links with other disaffected elements of the population. Having defeated religion in the countryside, Catherine was now seeing it stage a comeback in the drawing rooms. The literature of urban nostalgia was beginning. Chulkov, Shcherbatov, Novikov, and others were leading men's gaze back to the idealized rural and religious culture of Muscovy. Novikov's increasing interest in the religious traditions of Old Russia was giving his publications a new kind of quasi-religious appeal. Novikov adopted the Old Believer habit of counting dates from creation rather than the birth of Christ and published a number of Old Believer documents. Indeed, his publication of an apologia for the rebellious monks of Solovetsk was the immediate cause of his arrest and deportation.
In the late years of Catherine's reign there was a general turn toward desperation within the religious community. Monks fled from monasteries to the ascetic 'desert' settlements (pustyni) during this period. Within the
schismatic community arose the prophetic 'wanderers' led by a man who deserted first from the army and then from the sedentary Old Believer settlement itself. He refused even to touch coins or anything else that bore the imperial 'seal of Antichrist.' The entire government apparatus was the work of the Antichrist, whose sign was 'the division of men into different ranks and the measurement of the forests, seas, and land.'106 Among the sectarians a new leader of the Dukhobors gave a flagellant cast to his sect that they have retained ever since by proclaiming himself Christ and setting out as an itinerant preacher with twelve apostles.
But the most extreme and ghoulish new form of religious protest to Catherine's rule appeared within the flagellant movement: the sect of skoptsy, or self-castrators. As with the 'runner' movement among the schismatics, the self-castrators among the sectarians were founded by a deserter from the army. Driven apparently at one of the ecstatic flagellant 'rejoicings' to the point of self-castration, he began persuading others to follow his example in the course of the 1770's. For more than a half century he continued to preach the need for this form of purification to interested listeners, which included many of his civil and monastic jailors, General Suvorov, and even Alexander I.
As with the self-burners of the late seventeenth century, the self-castrated of the late eighteenth should not be looked at solely as a masochistic curiosity. Both groups viewed their act as a 'new baptism' into the elect of the world to come and as a kind of sacrificial atonement for the redemption of a fallen society. The self-burners appeared at the time of maximum violence and cruelty among the ruling class; the self-castrators, at the time of greatest profligacy. The sacrifice that they each chose to make was thus, in some degree, determined by the character of the society they were protesting against.
The self-castrators, however, had curious political pretensions which provide the first hint of the revolutionary social doctrines that were later to come from the sectarian tradition. They worshipped before icons of Peter III; many believed God had created him impotent in order to lead them.107 The attempt of their leader Selivanov to characterize himself as a castrated Peter III was based on the old myth of the 'true tsar.' What was new was the contention that the skoptsy as a whole were a kind of 'true aristocracy' destined to replace the false, promiscuous aristocracy of Catherine's court. Selivanov's expressed purpose was to set up a world-wide rule of the castrated. The first stage of admission to this elite (castration) was referred to as 'the small seal'; and the second stage (total removal of the sexual organs), 'the imperial seal' (Tsarskaia pechat'). Selivanov had remarkable success in gaining converts-particularly in Moscow among wealthy
merchants and military leaders who had been denied access to the inner circles of Catherine's court. One of his converts was the former chamberlain to the king of Poland, who came to Moscow after the final partition of Poland and spoke of the skoptsy leadership as a 'divine chancery.'108 Like the other sectarians the skoptsy considered themselves the true 'spiritual' Christians, referring to one another as 'doves.'
Among the schismatics, the wanderers devised a loose chain of communication and command centered on a village near Yaroslavl, and the new and more radical Dukhobors in the sectarian community came to view Tambov as the region in which God was coming to gather his true servants for the millennial reign of saints. Thus, all of the new forms of religious dissent under Catherine contained an element of radical if essentially passive protest. They were all determined-as the leader of the wanderers put it in his prophetic book The Garden (Tsvetnik)-not to go on 'with one eye on earth and one eye in heaven.'109 Both eyes were to be lifted above; and the true capital of Russia for these dissonant elements was not St. Petersburg or any of the cities built or rebuilt by Catherine, but the villages
