Russian Freemasonry 9

Russian Freemasonry 9

loss of life and, perhaps justifiably, they claim their sacrifice saved western

Europe. Of course there are problems here since Napoleon for one had

defeated most of western Europe before the battle of Borodino. Nonetheless,

these ideas reinforced the concept that Russia somehow had acquired a holy

mission.

 

But at the time we were talking about, the typical member of the Russian

intelligentsia still longed for the cultural antecedents of other European

nations. So Novikov derived a rich pre-history based on St. Andrew who he

argued had brought Christianity to Russia before St. Peter's visit to Rome.

 

The Westernising trends for Russia begun by Peter the Great, reached a

zenith with Catherine. She was a cultural vampire, sucking up selected

pieces of European culture and she especially drew to her court out-of-

context aspects of the French Enlightenment. It may be said that the Russian

psyche was such that the spark to evolve a Voltaire, Diderot, D'Alembert or

Montesquieu could never have arisen in Russia.

 

In the West we have an image of melancholy Russians — manic depressives

to a man. On a whole, that is accurate. The HUGE spaces and absolute

loneliness of the Russian forests engender a smallness in individual Russian

mentality. Look around, and you can't see the forest for the trees.

 

In 1756 Russia had entered into a new diplomatic and cultural alliance with

France. On her accession to the throne Catherine wrote:

 

If the gain is not great in commerce, we shall compensate ourselves with

bales of intelligence.

 

So it was, that by the 1770s and 1780s, the Russian aristocracy under

Catherine's influence found themselves at the crossroads of their religion and

Voltairianism (Vol'ter'ianstvo) by which they meant Rationalism, Scepticism

and a vague passion for Reform.

 

Catherine was thirty-four, Voltaire was seventy. His Philosophy of History

had the unprecedented sales' figures of 3000 copies sold in St. Petersburg

within a few days of its publication. He quickly became the official historian

of the Russian Empire and a kind of saint for the secular aristocracy.

Voltarianism became the ruling force in Western Culture much as Latinism

had done in the fifteenth century.

Voltaire led the Deists of the French Enlightenment. Their approach to

religion was ambivalent at best. They argued that the only valuable elements

in Christianity were those identical with the teachings of the great

philosophers. All else was nonsense. The Jews of the Bible, the so-called

Chosen People, were primitive peasants with little culture (a sore point here

in Russia for reasons outlined above) and with bad morals, thieves and

murderers. The Church Fathers were little better; they were ignorant,

superstitious, power-hungry, quarrelsome men. The Bible, both Old and

New Testaments, was a collection of incoherent maxims and improbable

stories celebrating crimes and absurdities.

 

They did believe in a Supreme Being — but one who had created the

Universe and retired. Thereafter the whole thing continued to operate by

immutable laws. Miracles, for example, were impossible as they violated of

the laws of nature.

 

Changes in the Slavonic Church ritual had already lead to a major schism

some hundred years earlier. You may recall the trauma when the Latin Mass

was replaced by the Mass in English. Well, in Russia an almost similar

revision caused many to simply split away and follow the old ways — The

Old Believers — who were prepared and did die for their beliefs. To us the

changes seem insignificant, invoking the name of Jesus twice instead of

three times, reducing the number of genuflections you must make and so on.

But one Old Believer, Avatum, lived for 40 years in a hole in the ice as a

protest. Others burnt themselves alive in their churches and so on.

 

But even those who followed the new church rituals were increasingly

anxious to dissociate themselves from the agnosticism and superficiality of

court life. They found in the Swedish system of Freemasonry a chance for

inner regeneration and for a re-discovery of inner truth and the lost unity of

the early Christian church.

 

Why Swedish?

 

Cross points out that the primary era of English influence on Russian

Freemasonry was between 1770 and 1776. By 1770, there were at least

twelve major lodges in Eastern Germany and the Baltic. This was to rapidly

spread to Prussia and Russia. For example, in 1761 there had been a Field

Lodge formed in the Russian Army which, at the time, had its Winter

quarters in West Prussia and its head-quarters at Marienburg.

 

King Guastav III of Sweden gave Swedish Masonry a special stamp of

respectability by freely flaunting his masonic ties in 1776 during a state visit

to St. Petersburg and won the patronage of Grand Duke Paul — a famous

Russian patriot, historian and political rival to and personal enemy of

Catherine. This lead to a linking of Russian and Swedish Freemasonry into

one system when, in 1778, the Moscow Lodge of Prince Troubetskoy joined

the Swedish System. Novikov closed his Petrograd Lodges and transferred

their activities to Moscow.

 

Swedish Masonry at this time had nine grades and a secret tenth group of

nine members... Commanders of the Red Cross. The strict observance and

mystical-military nature of this had appeals in Prussia and by a kind of

cultural osmosis spread to Russia. Members of the Swedish groups generally

adopted new names as a sign of their inner regeneration and participated in

communal efforts to discover through reading and meditation the inner truth

of Christianity. I've explained the special role and relationship Russia saw

for itself in Christianity. The Russian aristocrats saw this system as a vehicle

whereby they could fortify their realm against incursions of the reformist

ideas of the French Enlightenment.

 

On 25 May 1779, a Swedish Grand Provincial Lodge of Russia was

officially opened according to the Swedish ritual and thereafter vied for

supremacy with the Grand Provincial Lodge of Elagin. Efforts to unite all

Russian lodges under one system and one grandmaster (the Duke of

Sudermania, brother of Guastav III — had failed when Elagin refused to hand

control of Russian Freemasonry into foreign hands. The two Masonic

systems therefore remained separate. Fears were aroused that the Swedish-

directed lodges of strict observance were Jesuit-inspired, Catholic and

absolutist in tendency. It was their political implications, however, rather

than their esoteric aspects which alienated some Russians and many moved

to Elagin' s system.

 

In 1782 secret societies were prohibited by the Russian government, but

Freemasonry was not included in this decree. Yet, in 1784 Elagin decided to

close all lodges under his jurisdiction due to increased political pressures 

from the Crown.

More importantly for the Russian Freemasons, Prince Gagarin, a friend of

Catherine's son Paul, founded links to the Berlin Lodge Minerva and brought

back with him to Russia the teacher of occult lore Johann Georg Schwartz.

Schwartz, a Transylvanian by birth, had arrived in Moscow in 1779 to take

up a post as professor of German in the gymnasia of Moscow University, a

post probably secured through his Masonic connections (see Madariaga,

Russia in the Age..., p. 522)

 

With Novikov, Schwartz immediately began to transform Russian Masonry.

They formed the first secret society in Russia (The Gathering of University

Foster Children) and tried to integrate Masonry with the Russian higher

educational system. Schwartz was made inspector of a seminary established

to train teachers for the expected expansion of Russia's educational system.

 

Novikov founded his own weekly satirical journal Truten' (The Drone) in

which he voiced the increasing dissatisfaction of the native Russian nobility

with Catherine's imitation of French ways and her toleration of social

injustice. In the first issue, Novikov posed a question destined to be the

central preoccupation of the Russian Intelligentsia movement. Confessing he

had no desire to serve in the army, civil service or at court, he asked what

could he do for society?; adding by way of explanation that to live on this

earth without being of use is only a burden to it (see Pipes p.256).

 

His solution was to turn to publicistic and philanthropic work. He and his

friends took over the moribund Moscow University Press and transformed

the institution itself into a centre of intellectual ferment. The university then

had less than 100 enrolled students who listened to uninspired lectures in

German and Latin. Novikov organised a public library to be associated with

the University and between 1781 and 1784 published more books than had

appeared in the entire previous 24 years.

 

By 1791 the number of readers of the official University gazette rose from

600 to 4000.

 

Novikov set up the first two private printing presses in 1783. The next year

he established the first joint-stock insurance company and organised a

surprisingly successful nationwide famine relief system along with the first

private insurance company. He published a regular journal Morning Light in

which he sought to impart the philosophical basis of the classical thinkers.

He also wrote a considerable number of books ranging from children's tales

to history.

 

In all his writings, Novikov's principal target of attack was the "vice" he

identified with the Russian 'aristocratic' qualities of idleness,

ostentatiousness, indifference to the sufferings of the poor, immorality,

careerism, flattery, ignorance and contempt for knowledge. In comparison,

his "virtues" were industriousness, modesty, truthfulness, compassion,

incorruptibility and studiousness.

 

The University Press made a considerable profit from Novikov's translations

program. Works translated included Blackstone's Commentaries on the

Laws of Old England (a work commissioned by Catherine herself), Bunyan's

Pilgrim's Progress, Rousseau's Emile, and Grotius' Discourse Against

Atheism (translated by Archbishop Ambrosius of Moscow). For his part,

Novikov's literary output included contributions to a number of periodicals,

some with a pronounced Masonic slant, others catering to the developing

interest in economic or cultural affairs designed to place informative rather

than diverting literature in the hands of the noble and burgher families.

These included such publications as Gorodskaya i derevenskaya biblioteka

(Town and Country Library') or Poko yushchisya trudolyubets (The Busy

Man at Rest') or his popular series for children Detskoye Cheniye.

 

But Novikov also held a passionate interest not only in editing and

publishing, but in distribution and took a prominent role in the development