Under Peter the political opposition often justified itselfin traditional Christian terms. Vasilii Sokovnin, arrested in 1697 on charges of conspiracy to kill the tsar, told interrogators that Peter 'has ruined everyone, and for that reason it is permissible to kill him, and it will not be sinful'.[94] In March 1712 Stefan Iavorskii (1658-1722), criticised Peter's comportment from the pulpit, the sermon being an archetypal vehicle for conveyance of 'good advice' to an errant sovereign. Iavorskii's sermon later helped inspire Crown Prince Alexis to resist Peter's policies. The tsarevich's conduct in 1716-18 - flight from Russia, passive resistance to an ungodly tsar, then tacit support for active resistance - followed to the letter the Muscovite script for legitimate opposition.
Peter's allies deployed religious and secular arguments to counter this traditionalist Christian opposition. In his 1716 historical essay on the rebellions against Peter 'Opisanie v sovremennom ispytaniem i podlinnym izvestiem o smutnom vremeni' (A True Account of the Time of Troubles), Andrei Arta- monovich Matveev (1666-1728) attributed the resistance to 'fratricidal and ineradicable hatred rooted in human nature'.[95] Rejecting the notion that opposition might be justified in Christian terms, Matveev suggested that Peter's opponents had learned the art of rebellion from the Ottoman janissaries, whose 'insidious designs and actions' were based on the 'lawless Quran'. The issue of opposition to Peter was also raised in Petr Pavlovich Shafirov's Ras- suzhdenie (Discourse) of 1716 on the Swedish war, a book to which the tsar contributed several pages. Shafirov (1669-1739) accused the Swedes of 'stirring up His Majesty's subjects to rebellion', and he implied that Crown Prince Alexis had treasonously undermined the Russian campaign against Sweden. Shafirov's Discourse explained Russia's conduct in the war as consistent with contemporary European thinking on international law and sovereignty, citing texts from Grotius and Pufendorf. Yet Shafirov also quoted biblical texts in support of Peter's conduct, and called the Swedes 'infidels' for violating 'the custom of all civilized and Christian nations' by spreading of sedition in Russia.[96]
Archbishop Feofan Prokopovich (1618-1736) categorically attacked Peter's opponents for disobeying anointed authority In Slovo o vlasti i chesti tsarskoi (Sermon on Royal Power and Honor, 1718), written during the affair of Tsarevich Alexis, Prokopovich warned Christians that to disobey sovereign authority 'is a sin against God warranting not only temporal but eternal punishment'.[97] He rejected interpretations of the Bible purporting to justify resistance to ungodly magistrates on the ground that the Scriptures order obedience not only to righteous authorities, but to perverse and faithless ones. Later, Prokopovich propounded a secular defence of undivided sovereignty and royal absolutism in the tract Pravda o voli monarshei (Truth Concerning the Monarch's Will, 1722). Here he added historical and philosophical justification for hereditary monarchy from Grotius, Pufendorf and Hobbes.
Peter's death in 1725 and the absence of able successors shook the stability of the system he had fostered and led to further debate over the legitimacy of resistance to the crown. In Proizvol'noe i soglasnoe razsuzhdenie i mnenie sobravshagosia shliakhtsva russkago o pravlenii gosudarstvennom (Personal and Collective Discourse and Opinion of the Russian Landed Nobility on Royal Government, 1730), Vasilii Nikitich Tatishchev (1686-1750) defended legally unrestricted monarchy. Accepting Aristotle's prejudice that monarchy is the best form of government, he argued that Russia had flourished under undivided monarchical rule. In his horror of divided sovereignty, Tatishchev showed the influence of Pufendorf, Hobbes and Prokopovich. Although Tatishchev has most often been read as a secularist thinker, he demanded that the tsar pay attention to close advisors lest dismissing their wisdom provoke divine punishment. In his dialogue Razgovor dvukh priiatelei o pol'ze nauk i uchilishch (Conversation of Two Friends on the Utility of the Sciences and of Schools, 1733), he portrayed religion as a shaper of human will and statutory law. In Istoriia rossiiskaia (Russian History, I768-84) Tatishchev predicted all peoples in the empire would embrace the Russian language and Russian Orthodoxy.
From the late 1730s to 1762 Russian thinkers redefined the ideal of the virtuous tsar. The polymath Mikhail Vasil'evich Lomonosov (1711-65) asserted that an ideal ruler should protect Russia from foreign aggression and expand its borders at its neighbours' expense. Domestically, an ideal ruler should promote useful enterprises and should display moral discernment and 'self-restraint'. Lomonosov's portrait of the ideal ruler resembled Prokopovich's image of Peter as the energetic warrior tsar and simultaneously recalled the Muscovite image of the pious sovereign.
The playwright Aleksandr Petrovich Sumarokov (1717-77) looked forward to a society of patriotic, dutiful, virtuous nobles governed by an equally patriotic, dutiful and virtuous legislator tsar. His play Sinav i Truvor (Sinav and Truvor, 1750) suggested that a morally irreproachable private life is a precondition of just rulership. That private virtue was not a sufficient condition for social justice was demonstrated by his drama Pustynnik (The Hermit, 1769), which observed that service to God can sometimes harm one's family and society as a whole.
Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment: civic virtue, absolutism and liberty
The most consequential thinker of the Russian Enlightenment was Catherine the Great (1727-96), whose Nakaz (Instruction, 1767) treated liberty as a crucial ingredient of just rule. The Instruction was not without a substantial conservative component. The first article cited the Christian imperative 'to do mutual good to one another as much as we possibly can'.[98] The section on education called on parents to inculcate into children 'all those duties which God demands of us in the Ten Commandments and our Orthodox Eastern Greek religion'.[99] Furthermore, the Instruction insisted that Russia's sovereign power 'must rest in the hands of an absolute ruler', for there 'is no other authority . . . that can act with a vigour proportionate to the extent of such a vast domain'.[100] Meanwhile, Catherine defended 'natural liberty', by which she meant the innate human desire to improve social conditions. She also defended political liberty, defined as 'the right of doing what the laws allow'. Catherine seemed not to notice that, by equating political liberty with specific legal obligations, she contradicted her subjects' natural liberty to the degree that their own impulses for social improvement ran in different directions from her own. For subsequent thinkers Catherine's Instruction legitimated concepts such as the legislator monarch, civic virtue, and liberty under law.
Among the leaders of the Russian Enlightenment were Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin (1744-92), Nikolai Ivanovich Novikov (1744-1818) and Aleksandr Nikolaevich Radishchev (1749-1802).
Fonvizin and Novikov were supporters of Catherine who became disillusioned by her policies. Fonvizin's satirical plays Brigadir (The Brigadier, I769) and Nedorosl' (The Adolescent, 1781) pilloried the equation of high service rank with virtue and attacked the adoption by Russian noblemen of foppish French fashions - both by-products of Catherine's service system. In his Rassuzhdenie o nepremennykh gosudarstvennykh zakonakh (Discourse on Indispensable State Laws, 1784) Fonvizin argued for the adoption in Russia of fundamental laws. The Discourse depicted the monarch as 'the soul of society'. 'If the monarch is proud, arrogant, crafty, greedy, a sensualist, shameless or lazy, then ... all these vices will spread to the court, the capital and finally to the nation at large.'[101] Clearly preferable was a monarch who was 'righteous' and 'gentle', who understood that 'between sovereign and subjects exist mutual obligations'. In Fonvizin's opinion, subjects owed the crown obedience when policy was based on legal principle (pravo), but, in turn, the crown owed respect to the nation's political liberty, defined as the right of each subject 'to do what he/she wishes, and not to be forced to do what he/she may not desire to do'. Fonvizin departed from Catherine's Instruction by criticising serfdom as an illegitimate property system wherein 'each person is either a tyrant or victim'.
94
Quoted in P. Bushkovitch,
95
96
'A Discourse Concerning the Just Reasons Which his Czarist Majesty, Peter I, Had for Beginning the War against the King of Sweden, Charles XII', in P. P. Shafirov,
98
F. W. Reddaway (ed.),
101
D. I. Fonvizin,