The Icon and the Axe

Although the Petrashevtsy were not explicitly Christian (unlike the contemporaneous Ukrainian circle, the Brotherhood of Cyril and Methodius), they didclaim to be rediscovering "the teaching of Christ in its original purity.," which "had as its basic doctrine "charity ana its ?? the realization of freedom and the destruction of private ownership."1* Following Saint-Simon and Comte, they spokeof a "new'Qvristianityj4a new "nor mal" and "natural" society ofso£ialharrhwty"That was evolving peaceftrHy

frdfh history.

Essential to the idea of a "new Christianity" among Russian social thinkers was theneed to avoid the pattern of social and political life that was developing in thebourgroirWestrTtrosTflie /,efras/iev£ry"^eresceptical (as the Decembrists had never been) of both the institution of private property and the value of constitutions.

Defenders of constitutions forget that the human character is contained not in personal property but in personality, and that in recognizing the political power of the rich over the poor, they are defending the most terrible despotism.13

TJie early social thinkers followed Belinsky in regarding socialism as "the.ideaj)nagas" which "has absorbed history,je%ion, and pMosophv^14 Maikov used "so^fl*SIr^_a^a_2™^^1 f°r his^nhilnspphy of W™gJ3^_^g£p!( specifically^d^o^ateTme shMTngofprofits wrthafi workers. The Pocket Dictionary guardedly uses the synonym L'Owe1usirP; and Petrashevsky described Fourier as "my only God," attempting rather pitifully to set up a communal house for seven peasant families on his estate near Novgorod. The peasants burned down his model phalanstery; but the detailed Fourier-ist blueprint for harmonizing passions and solving all the conflicts of man with nature, himself, and his fellow men had a profound impact on the formation of Russian social thought. Fourier's plan was the most sensually appealing of all images of the coming golden age with its ideal of a free "play of passions." The phalansteries were, moreover, to be built around agricultural and craft manufacturing activities and thus seemed peculiarly

*

suited to Russian conditions. However passing the infatuation with Fourier, the belief in a kind jpXXlu^tianize4_socialism remained JLJSflnslant.-fif -Russian socijl_ft£ueht:Those like Speshnev who advocated more violent VTrand conspirajorjajjmethods in the forties were careful to call themselves '^''Commimkts^^and^Herzen went to some pains to distin^uishethical and aristoc^atic_sacial.ism ?????!?????4??11?"???1 metaphysical communism, "the_socialism of revenge."15

Along with "socialism,'Ulje__social thinkers of the forties tended to

????^?_|?]2^???????.'' The Pocket Dictionary defined it as the form of

government where "each citizen takes part in the review and decisions of the

affairs of the whole hafxon." It was destined to prevail everywhere, alsTmilng"

different forms "in accordance with the stage of development of the moral

forces in a people and the consciousness of true, rational freedom."16 J[he_

political goal for Russia is never spelled outJbut_the Pocket Dictionary also

incrtidj^je^erTn^"national gat|Srmg??r"andr"some

forcesjva^jdfiaa^Zassjmied.

Lp*

"Democracy'' in Russian__sjjgial thought was, however, juxtaposed

??? the" beginning to constitutionalism or liberalism as understood in the

West. Democrats and liberals were in fact often contrasted, the formeF be

ing portrayetfasi^lifariarr*^English rJuiinessmefi

interested in pT5:eryTormirTibbr^s~Ior~the imdllle~^ss715ne article" of the

fifties insisted that SiBeria^wasamore congenial land for true democrats

than liberal England. A dictionary of foreign terms prepared in the early

sixties in imitation of the Petrashevsky dictionary defines a liberal as

a man loving freedom, usually a boyar [who enjoys] freedom to look through a window without doing anything, then to go for a walk, to the theatre, or a ball-that is what is known as a liberal man.17

1840 to 1845. In the foUowin^ihreejjearj^ publications were imported into Russia.18

At ?????????^^moved back

from Moscow to St. P^grs6urg_in trJeTfepSi's. StPetersburgnadaornmated^ RussiarT^tundlife under Catherine until the movement of Novikov and Schwarz to Moscow and the final disillusioned years of her reign. Peter's city had also dominated the optimistic early years of Alexander's reign until the burning and reconstruction of Moscow made that city the focus of the nationalist revival. But the gradual triumph of the Westernizers (or the "Europeans" and "Cosmopolitans" asthey were "more often* called during the ''remarkable decade") was to a lafge extent a victory of St. Petersburg over Moscow, Chaadaev's~"eity ? tile dead."