Not all the implications ofthis theory enjoyed universal acclaim. The regime itself remained ambivalent about its anti-Western ramifications, while many educated Russians believed that, by defeating Napoleon's tyranny and upholding Russian independence, the nation in 1812 had won the right to a freer, less authoritarian sociopolitical order. Yet most accepted the nationalist conception's key propositions - the focus on Muscovite history and Russian ethnicity, the sense of Russian national uniqueness, the moral valorisation of the common folk and the importance attributed to their spiritual bond with the regime. Perhaps aided by the growth of the education system and the propaganda campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars, these views also reached the general population, as is apparent from the notebook into which the provincial goldsmith Dmitrii S. Volkov in the 1820s copied readings that were particularly meaningful to him: a patriotic, anti-French diatribe by the nationalist Fedor V Rostopchin, a primer on how to behave in church, a sermon by an Orthodox Greek preacher and a text cataloguing Russia's monarchs from the legendary Riurikto Peter I.[141] 'Orthodoxy', 'Autocracy' and 'Nationality' were all represented.
The war and Russian political culture
Russians by 1800 had recently experienced two very different models of monarchy: Catherine II had presented herself as a consensus-builder who welcomed input from 'society' and favoured an embryonic form of electoral politics - exemplified by the Legislative Commission of 1767 and by her support for noble and municipal self-government - that pointed in the direction of political liberalism, while her son Paul I had favoured the opposite role of authoritarian, militaristic commander-in-chief. Alexander I was torn between these two options, but ultimately political liberalism suffered disastrous setbacks under his reign. Aside from the court politics of the time, this was due to the convergence of two forces whose growth was fatefully accelerated by the Napoleonic Wars. One was the nationalist conception of history that added a powerful layer of ideological armour to autocracy by depicting it as the indispensable corollary to Orthodoxy, Russianness and national unity. The other was the way in which the political culture was poisoned by the growing tendency to imagine politics as a succession of malicious conspiracies.
Because of the absence of a civil society and the vast power wielded by small, secretive groups of unaccountable individuals, conspiracy had long played an important role in Russian government. Conspiracies traditionally involved lower-class pretenders who claimed to be the 'true tsar', or else power struggles within the dynasty. However, the mischief by pretenders faded after the Pugachev revolt, and the last dynastic coup took place in 1801 when Paul I was assassinated and replaced with Alexander I. Instead, from the late 1780s onwards, conspiracy theories increasingly centred on ideologically or ethnically motivated opposition to the regime as such, especially by freemasons, liberals or socialists, and Poles or (later) Jews, often at thebehest of Russophobic foreigners. Two factors accounted for this. First, the upheavals of the era - Paul's capricious oppressiveness, Alexander's stabs at liberal reform and, of course, the shock waves radiating from France - made clear how much more was now at stake in politics than in the past. Second, it came to be widely believed across Europe that the upheavals that began in 1789 and continued far into the nineteenth century were caused by a conspiracy to overthrow monarchy, religion and the existing order everywhere.[142] This notion originated in the West, particularly France, and came to Russia largely through the influence of francophone conservatives such as abbe Augustin Barruel and Joseph de Maistre.
Fuelled by Russia's military defeats in the wars against Napoleon and by the fact that Alexander I's entourage - as opposed, for example, to Catherine II's - contained a conspicuous numbers of foreigners with agendas driven by the interests of their homelands, the Russian version of this conspiracy theory imagined traitors to be present at the very top of the regime. It focused on social and ethnic outsiders: Alexander's liberal adviser Mikhail Speranskii was attacked as a priest's son out to undermine noble rights, while the Baltic German Mikhail Barclay de Tolly (the hapless commander of the Russian army during its retreat in 1812) and the liberal Pole Czartoryski were presumed to be disloyal to Russia. 'In the Russian interpretation', Zorin points out, 'the anti- masonic mythology fused almost immediately with time-honoured notions of a secret conspiracy against Russia that was being hatched beyond its bor- ders.'[143] The suspected wire-puller was Napoleon, whom - according to a verse making the rounds in 1813 - 'the first Mikhail (that is, Speranskii) summoned, the second Mikhail (Barclay) received, and the third Mikhail (Prince Kutu- zov) drove out'.[144] To pacify public opinion, Alexander had to send Speranskii into ignominious exile and replace Barclay with the popular General Kutu- zov, while Fedor Rostopchin, the governor-general of Moscow during the 1812 war, demonstratively deported foreign residents, purged freemasons from the bureaucracy and turned over the merchant's son Vereshchagin, accused of serving the masonic conspiracy, to a lynch mob. According to Zorin, whose chapter on this subject bears the chillingly evocative title 'The Enemy of the People', Rostopchin's real target had been Speranskii; only when that prize proved beyond his reach did he fall back on the wretched Vereshchagin as a substitute scapegoat whose killing by the 'people' would symbolically restore the unity of the nation.16
After 1814, Alexander I and his entourage were convinced that the continuing troubles in Europe and subversion in Russia were co-ordinated by a nefarious 'comite directeur' based in Western Europe, while Alexander's conservative critics regarded his own beloved Russian Bible Society as part of an Anglo-masonic plot against Russian Orthodoxy. Meanwhile, ironically, no one took action against the real conspiracy that almost overthrew Alexander's successor in December 1825. Spooked by the Decembrist revolt and the European revolutions of 1830 and 1848, the regime of Nicholas I offered an even more inviting field for conspiracy theories; thus, it seems that the disgraced ex-official Mikhail Leont'evich Magnitskii, in a secret 1831 memorandum, was the first to claim that Jews and freemasons were collaborating in a grand anti-Russian plot.17 By the 1860s, stereotypes of this sort were sufficiently entrenched to convince the satirist Mikhail E. Saltykov-Shchedrin that his hilarious 'history' of the town of Glupov - a ludicrous compilation of the cliches of eighteenth-century Russian society and politics set in the microcosm of an imaginary provincial backwater - required a few absurd 'Polish intrigues' to be complete.18
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Douglas Smith,