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.
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
