As Russian society slowly grew in complexity with some hallmarks of modernity and began to move away from state tutelage, the government began to sense the need for a newer conception of itself. Autocracy alone was not enough, as it implied only obedience by the public, including the upper classes, and society outside the peasantry was by now too sophisticated for simple obedience. In the early years Nicholas relied on the traditions of cosmopolitan monarchism inherited from his brother and the Holy Alliance. The main government spokesman in the press (and a major informer for the Third Section) was Faddei Bulgarin, journalist and author of moralizing novels of Russian life. Bulgarin, however, was actually the Pole Tadeusz Bułharyn, who had even fought against Russia in 1812. His support of Russia over his native country was the result of firmly anti-revolutionary views and loyalty to the idea of monarchy: Russia’s greatness lay in its adherence to these ideas. Another note entered the chorus of conservative ideas with count S. S. Uvarov. Uvarov was also cosmopolitan in education, more comfortable in French than in Russian, and Nicholas appointed him Minister of Education. In 1832 he sent around a rescript to the ministry’s institutions informing them that their task was to encourage “autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality,” and thus was born the doctrine of official nationality, as it came to be called. Autocracy was not new, and Alexander and others had believed religion was the natural prop to the throne, but Uvarov specified Orthodoxy and added nationality to the mix. For the time this notion remained mainly the ideology of his ministry; for Nicholas, whose ministers and entourage included generals Benckendorff and Dubelt in the police, Karl von Nesselrode as foreign minister, and whose court included numerous Baltic Germans, Finns, and even conservative Polish aristocrats, could hardly advocate a purely Russian state. Russian nationality was still more a vague idea than a strict ethnic principle. The result was a contradictory mix of ideas, a mix that remained until the death of Nicholas and to a large extent until the end of the old regime in 1917. The mix was perfectly incarnated in the architecture of Konstantin Toon, the builder of the Kremlin’s Grand Palace and the Church of Christ the Savior – the two great projects of the later reign of Nicholas. To provide the tsar with a modern Moscow residence Toon, consulting the tsar at every step, produced an essentially classical building that, seen from a distance, was no different from dozens of St. Petersburg palaces. At the same time decorative details like the window frames and décor were adapted from the older Russian architecture still visible in the Kremlin. The Church of Christ the Savior was much more Russian looking, but Toon took the style of the much smaller twelfth-century churches and simply blew it up to colossal size and placed it on a high platform with classical (or at least non-Russian) decorative elements such as massive lions.
Not just the architecture of church buildings but the church itself became an integral part of the autocratic regime. Nicholas put a final end both to the mild enlightenment of the eighteenth-century church and the fascination with Biblical evangelicalism of Alexander’s time. In 1836 he appointed to the post of ober-procurator the Most Holy Synod Count N. A. Protasov, a general of hussars. Protasov’s task was to make the church more “Orthodox,” to restore its doctrinal purity and eliminate practices and intellectual trends from the West. He continued to manage the affairs of the church until 1855, and in the process he succeeded in making the church into a consciously conservative and obedient instrument of autocracy. In his time the church also absorbed a large dose of nationalist ideology, a combination that endured to the end of the old regime. Protasov’s church was not the whole of Orthodoxy. Paradoxically the secularization of monastic lands in the eighteenth century led to a revival of monasticism, the “elders” (startsy), becoming the most charismatic figures of Russian Orthodoxy in the nineteenth century. The elders were monks whose asceticism included a large element of spiritual service to the surrounding society. In the 1820s the most famous was Saint Seraphim of Sarov, and at mid-century Makarii and Amvrosii of the Optina Monastery in southern Russia. Famous writers and intellectuals as well as ordinary laymen of all classes came to visit the monks and seek their guidance, a practice that formed a new element alongside the more traditional pilgrimages to the shrines with the relics of the saints. In spite of all these efforts, however, some twenty-five percent of the Russian peasantry followed the various versions of Old Belief rather than the Orthodox Church.
Uvarov’s ideological experiments and the commitment to autocracy that lay behind them probably reflected the sentiments of most of the gentry, but they did not have universal success, even in the government and the imperial family. Mildly liberal circles existed even at the pinnacle of Petersburg society. The salon of the tsar’s sister-in-law Elena Pavlovna (1806–1873) was one such place. Born Princess Frederike Charlotte Marie of Württemberg, she came to Russia in 1824 to marry the younger brother of the tsar, Mikhail Pavlovich (1798–1849). Grand Duke Mikhail was mainly interested in his military duties, and Elena became one of St. Petersburg’s most important figures. Her drawing room in the Michael Palace, still carefully preserved in the building that became the Russian Museum, was an important artistic salon, especially for music and art. In the 1840s the emphasis was artistic, but the Thursdays with the Grand Dutchess also saw discussion of issues that never appeared in the press and were frowned upon in other aristocratic houses.
In Russian society at large the absence of political discussion in the press or any public forum did not imply that everything was calm below the surface. By this time a whole generation of young men, mostly of gentry origin, had finished a university or one of the elite schools like the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée. This education was supposed to fit them for state service, and indeed most of them with such an education chose that path, if only as a livelihood rather than an avocation. If public political discussion did not exist, however, literature and philosophy flourished. To some extent they served as an outlet for otherwise frustrated reflection on Russian life, but the absorbing interest in art and thought was also a response to cultural trends in Western Europe, especially Germany.
Starting in the late 1820s more and more young Russians fell under the influence of the metaphysical idealism of Friedrich Schelling, whose popularity in Germany was then at its peak. Schelling’s appeal was the result of his extensive writing on religion, art, and the philosophy of nature and his desire to find a single unifying spirit in them all. For the esthetically inclined Russians of this moment, Schelling, for all his murky abstraction, seemed a real guide to understanding the world of culture and thought. By the 1830s Schelling’s thought seemed so restricted to that sphere that some of the students at Moscow University turned to the more all-embracing and more rigorous world of G. F. W. Hegel. Their leader was Nikolai Stankevich (1813–1840). From 1831 until his departure for Europe in a vain search for a cure for his tuberculosis, Stankevich included in his circle nearly everyone who would make a difference in Russian thought for the next generation.