A PUBLIC SPHERE?
All this activity has prompted scholars to ask whether a "public sphere" developed in Russia, following Jurgen Habermas, who theorized that the French Revolution was made possible by the emergence of a "public sphere," a space generative of freestanding "public opinion" about political and social life that governments needed to heed. The public sphere thrived with the participation of a broad public in discussion, made possible by expanded literacy, publications, means of communication, and most of all institutions of sociability. In eighteenth-century France and England, those ranged socially from elite salons, Masonic lodges, and voluntary societies to coffee houses, pubs, and taverns. The point of the public sphere was its being turned to real political critique.
Russia's intellectual energy of the late eighteenth century falls short of this high threshold. Overt political critique was rare and loyal identification with the status quo was sincere and deep; civil society independent of the state never developed. Theater in the capitals was under state support; many voluntary societies were under imperial aegis and the state maintained sufficient power to close down public discussion, as it did in the early 1790s. With pressure from the Orthodox Church, mistrustful of Enlightenment free-thinking and shocked at French revolutionary violence, Catherine II cracked down on perceived political publication and gatherings. In 1792 she arrested Nikolai Novikov and shut down his printing press as subversively Masonic; he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison (released after her death in 1796). When Kniazhnin's play Vadim of Novgorod was posthumously published in 1793 in a journal edited by Princess Dashkova, Catherine ordered its entire print run destroyed and Dashkova dismissed, simply because the topic (not its moral lesson) concerned revolution. The most celebrated case centered around Alexander Radishchev's 1790 publication, on his own printing press, of one of the few overtly critical political works of the Russian eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Modeled on Sterne's Sentimental Journey, a traveler's successive stops expose the abuses of serfdom and venal officialdom and provide opportunities for sentimentalist, emotional appeals to rulers to abolish serfdom and institute justice. Although Radishchev did not call for overt rebellion, Catherine II took the work in those terms and sentenced him to ten years of Siberian exile. In 1796 private presses were abolished and censorship committees for imported books in major cities were created; more rigorous laws were instated thereafter (1804, 1811, 1828, 1839, and 1851).
Overt critiques like Radishchev's were rare; his was paralleled in his day only by one other such work. Prince M. M. Shcherbatov wrote a scathing critique of corruption and favoritism at Catherine II's court in 1787-8, but entrusted it to his family to remain unpublished (until 1896). These men pushed their educations to the logical limits: French Enlightenment thought to which they were exposed in their European educations did indeed challenge them to rectify injustice and create social equality. But these men were exceptions. Many Russian noblemen and intellectuals of their time were concerned with abuses of serfdom, venality in the judicial system and the corrupt insularity of the imperial court. But few questioned the empire's institutions—autocracy, Church, serfdom, social estates. Rather, as we have sketched out, they strove for moral improvement—perfecting the individual, the landlord, the autocrat.
Marc Raeff, the brilliant student of the eighteenth century, argued that the life course of eighteenth-century noblemen—raised without strong parental input, domineering over their serfs, like their fathers peripatetically serving across the empire—left them psychologically alienated. Men like Radishchev and Shcherba- tov, trained in Leipzig, Berlin, and Paris to believe in universal human rights and to serve humanity, returned to Russia to find no place for such humanitarian dreams. In Raeff's dramatic reading this fateful tension created the critical intelligentsia of the nineteenth century. Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii complemented Raeff's hypothesis of psychological alienation by reading the eighteenth century through the prism of the nineteenth. In the literary trope of "superfluous man" found in Pushkin, Lermontov, and others, they found a nobility that was essentially theatrical, not authentic. Emblematic oftheir view is Alexander Herzen's observation of the 1840s: in Europe the nobility "dresses," while the Russian nobility "dresses up."
These stimulating paradigms provoked decades of scholarship on the nobility— Michael Confino and Boris Mironov, Douglas Smith and Ol'ga Glagol'eva, Wirtschafter and Whittaker, and many others have pored over memoirs, prose and poetry, cultural habits, dress and portraiture, interactions with serfs, provincial estate life. They generally reject the idea that Russia's eighteenth-century nobility was psychologically adrift, and depict an estate that was grounded, loyal to state and service, connected to family and corporate group, committed to social justice through moral reform. Scholars have explored how eighteenth-century intellectuals deployed the Orthodox theme of Russia as a worldly paradise into a preoccupation with pastoral and paradise imagery. Not only did they describe the realm as a harmonious garden, blessed by God, they also cultivated their gardens as spaces to express their botanical interests or explore their own sentimental introspection. Placing themselves in so harmonious a context expressed a basic contentment with state, society, and self.
Russia's nobility was diverse, to be sure, in politics, culture, and behavior. Certainly some yearned for social justice, as attested by the proliferation ofMasonic lodges, where political discussion was generally liberal. Certainly, as Priscilla Roosevelt and Douglas Smith have shown, some noblemen manipulated their serfs as objects in imaginary worlds. But neither of these extremes represents the general experience of nobility and educated elite in the eighteenth-century Russian empire. Russia's elite was fundamentally conservative, seamlessly blending teachings of Enlightenment liberty and self-development with "enlightened Orthodox" moral imperatives to change organically from within one's soul, one's family, and one's community. Even in their day, Russian nobles lamented the cultural chasm they saw developing between themselves as a Europeanized elite and their traditional peasantry; Nikolai Karamzin allowed himselfan uncharacteristic criticism of Petrine Europeanizing reforms in these terms. But their path to repair that chasm was through personal improvement, not institutional change.
One should not exaggerate the angst of Russia's educated elite in the eighteenth century. This was a century of confidence. Noblemen were proud of their empire and of their autocrat; they thought of themselves as an honorable elite; they were committed to their country as a European state moving on a progressive path; they were committed to their Orthodox faith. In the eighteenth century, Russia's nobility and educated elite looked forward confidently and expansively.
English translations of the Table of Ranks of 1722, Emancipation Charter of 1762, and Charter to Nobility of 1785 are in Vol. 1 of Paul Dukes, Russia under Catherine the Great, 2 vols. (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1977). The two 1785 Charters are translated with excellent commentary in David Mark Griffiths and George E. Munro, Catherine II's Charters of 1785 to the Nobility and the Towns (Bakersfield, Calif.: C. Schlacks, Jr., 1991). On Enlightenment in Russia: Marc Raeff, "The Enlightenment in Russia and Russian Thought in the Enlightenment," in J. G. Garrard., ed., The Eighteenth Century in Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 25-47; Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, "Thoughts on the Enlightenment and Enlightenment in Russia," Journal of Modern Russian History and Historiography 2 (2009): 1-26. On the nobility as an imperial amalgam, see Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History (Harlow: Longman, 2001). For biographies of non-Russians in tsarist service: Donald Ostrowski, "Semeon Bekulatovich (?—1616)" and Sean Pollock, "Petr Ivanovich Bagration (1765-1812)," in S. M. Norris and W. Sunderland, eds., Russia's People of Empire (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2012), 26-35, 92-103. On the endurance of elites, see Jonathan Powis, Aristocracy (Oxford and New York: B. Blackwell, 1984).