In the absence of dispassionate investigation, the confused impression grew that some kind of spiritual invasion was indeed underway. Concealment and suspicion grew apace and helped encourage nervous displays of loyalty to the Tsar. With relentless logic, the denunciations and purges ran their course until Magnitsky himself fell a victim. An accusation that Magnitsky was a secret illuminist was among Alexander's papers at the time of his death. Shortly thereafter his administration of Kazan University was in-
vestigated and his foes treated to the revelation that he had employed a Jew as supervisor of studies, had spent as much in seven years as his predecessor had been accused of spending in twelve, and so on. In vain Magnit-sky argued that the apostles themselves were converted Jews and that his accusers were repeating the arguments of Voltaire. He journeyed to St. Petersburg to plead his case and wrote two eleventh-hour detailed analyses of the "world-wide illuminist plot" for the new Tsar from his exile in Es-thonia early in 1831.
The illuminists were attacking at four levels: academic, political, ecclesiastical, and popular. "Levelers," "millennarians," "methodists," and "schismatics" were bracketed together as part of a giant conspiracy to substitute a "Tsar-Comrade" for the "Tsar-Father" of simple Russians. Even conservative Austria was alleged to be sending in agents to subvert Russian institutions.107
But Magnitsky had made too many enemies, and his main friend, Arakcheev, had fallen from power. Having ridden the wave of obscurantism, he was now swept aside into the stagnant backwaters of the provincial civil service from which he was to witness the success of the policies he advocated without benefiting from them. He wrote briefly for a journal bearing a title from the symbolism of higher Masonic orders: The Rainbow. But his last writings represent only a broken-spirited endorsement of his longstanding anti-rationalism: a treatise on astrology and a series called "simple thinker," which defended the unquestioning faith of "muzhik Christianity."108
The Legacy
Under Catherine and Alexander, Russia had moved deep into Europe physically and spiritually but had not equipped itself to share in the political and institutional development of the West. Russian cities had been rebuilt on neo-classical models, but Russian thought had remained largely untouched by classical form and discipline. An experiment that had begun with Catherine's promise to provide the most tolerant and rational rule in Europe had ended with Magnitsky's intolerance and glorification of the Mongols. Imprecise hopes had given way to equally vague fears without the major problems being defined, let alone solved. The debate was cut off before Russia had achieved either a rationalized political system or a rational theology; and the imperial government committed itself to the difficult reactionary position of simply preventing the questions from being asked.
The religious purge of 1824 ended all broad discussion of belief within the official Church, just as the repression of the Decembrists the following year ended all discussion of basic political questions within the government. But expectations once raised are not easily dispelled. Denied a hearing in official circles, the problems continued to agitate Russia unofficially.
Indeed, the leading agitators of the Alexandrian age acquired in martyrdom an historical significance they had been unable to gain in action. The trial and humiliation of the Decembrists left a keen impact on the newly awakened moral sensibilities of the aristocracy. Having been unable to agree on their own political program, the aristocratic thinkers were united by their opposition to the spectacle of a "generation on trial" and by their revulsion at the execution of the leaders and the sanctioning of odes in praise of those throwing mud at others en route to Siberian exile. The "Hannibalic oath" of Herzen and Ogarev to avenge the fallen Decembrists is the real starting point of Russia's modern revolutionary tradition.
Equally remarkable was the continued appeal throughout Nicholas' reign of the new religious answers that had been offered under his predecessor. The Catholic Church attracted many Russian aristocrats-particularly after the official anti-Catholicism that accompanied the crushing of the Polish rebellion. The beautiful Zinaida Volkonsky, a close friend of Alexander I and former maid of honor to the dowager empress, became a leading figure in Catholic charity work in Rome and an apostle of reunification of the churches and conversion of the Jews.109 Sophia Svechin, the daughter of one of Catherine's leading advisers, became a leading benefactress of the Jesuit order in Paris. She set up a chapel and Slavic library and helped induce a young diplomat, Ivan Gagarin, to join the order.110 The Decembrist Lunin became a Catholic and the freethinker Pecherin a Redemptorist friar ministering to the poor of Dublin. Most remarkable of all was the conversion of a large part of the Golitsyn family, which had pioneered since the seventeenth century in the secular Westernization of Russia. Dmitry Golitsyn, son of Diderot's main Russian contact, joined the Church and went to Baltimore, Maryland, where he became the first Catholic priest to receive all his orders in the United States. Ordained in 1795, he led a Sulpician mission to western Pennsylvania, administering a vast area stretching from Harrisburg to Erie, Pennsylvania, from a log church near the present town of Loretto.111
Prophetic sectarianism continued also to exercise an appeal. The various "spiritual Christians" in the south continued to flourish: the "milk drinkers" in the Caucasus, whence they were deported in 1823 and began establishing new contacts extending into Persia; the "spirit bearers" in the
Cossack center of Novocherkassk, where various followers of Kotel'nikov told of his martyrdom in Solovetsk and predicted the end of the world in 1832, 1843, and 1844.112
For better or worse the unorthodox religious ideas of the Alexandrian era were to have far greater impact on subsequent Russian history than the reformatorial political ideas of the age. Speculative religious thinkers of the late nineteenth century tended to pick up where men of Alexander's time left off. Faithful to the main line of Alexandrian spirituality, they tended to oppose both revolution and rationalism. They also tended to vacillate between De Maistre's idea of a disciplined inquisitorial church and Lopukhin's idea of a spiritual "inner" church.
The two ideals confront one another in Dostoevsky's "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor." The returning Christ figure is Lopukhin's ideal spiritual knight who opposes the dedicated and articulate Inquisitor with the spiritual weapons of silent suffering and freely given love. The two ideals are also present in Vladimir Solov'ev, whose personal rapprochement with Roman Catholicism and with De Maistre's views on war conflicted with his vision of churches reunited in a "free theocracy."113 Even Constantine Pobedon-ostsev, the semi-Inquisitorial procurator of the Synod, felt the contrary appeal of the "inner church," and translated Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ.
It seems appropriate that the most famous convert to the ideal of a new inner church in nineteenth-century Russia, Leo Tolstoy, spent several key years of his life studying the history of the Alexandrian era. The fruit of his study was, of course, Russia's greatest historical novel, War and Peace, which began as a study of the Decembrists and ended as a panoramic epic of the war with Napoleon and of the spiritual strivings which accompanied it.