The Icon and the Axe

Uvarov fought Cartesianism and scepticism not with tradition but with a new ideology that often seems to anticipate modern totalitarianism. In the process, however, he helped create other problems. By introducing narod-nost' ("nationality") as one of the three pillars of official ideology, he gave increased authority to a vague term which radicals later interpreted to mean "spirit of the people." By founding in 1834 and presenting his views regularly in a monthly "thick journal," The Journal of the Ministry of Public Education, Uvarov moved the government into the risky terrain of ideological journalism. By idealizing the "effervescence of ideas"148 in the ancient Orient, he helped encourage the new effervescence of exotic thought that became characteristic of the age of Nicholas. By setting forth an all-encompassing state ideology, Uvarov helped turn Russian thinkers to broad questions of personal and national belief, which increasingly interested Russians as the possibility of political and pedagogic reform faded.

New vistas had been opened to the imagination in the Age of Alexander I. Despite Uvarov's efforts to hold them in check, the aristocrats were to enjoy a last period of creative exploration under Nicholas before the stage became filled with the new social classes and material concerns of a more open and industrialized society under Alexander II.

3. The " Cursed Questions"

nder Nicholas I, the imperial pendulum swung back from French Enlightenment to German discipline far more decisively than it had done during the brief reigns of Peter III and Paul. The various contacts and associations with the German-speaking world that had been growing fitfully but steadily in importance were climaxed during the long and superficially glittering reign of Nicholas by new bonds of princely and aristocratic brotherhood. Russian and German rulers stood together as guardians of the conservative restoration sealed at the Congress of Vienna. Far closer to his Germanophile mother than to his much older and more cosmopolitan brothers, Constantine and Alexander I, Nicholas married a Prussian princess and leaned constantly throughout his own thirty-year reign on his father-in-law and brother-in-law, who successively ruled Prussia as Frederick William III and IV. The addition to the Russian Empire of the Baltic provinces with their German baronial overseers further flooded the Russian aristocracy with Germans, and led to the famous incident whereby an aristocrat given his choice of new rank by the Tsar asked to be redesignated "a German."1 Survivors of the Alexandrian era complained in exile that Russia's movement into Central Europe had been its undoing:

The Germans have conquered Russia in the very process of letting themselves be conquered. This is what happened in China with the Mongols, in Italy with the Barbarians, in Greece with the Romans.2

Extending the Prussian ideal of military discipline to all corners of society, Nicholas became the bete noire of liberals and nationalists throughout Europe. Leaning for civil order on the investigative activities of his newly created "Third Section," Nicholas was said to have meant by the phrase le bien-etre general en Russie, "it is well to be a general in Russia."3

Nicholas' reign occupies in some respects a place in Russian history similar to that of Peter the Great, of whom Nicholas' official apologists were

such great admirers.4 Like Peter, Nicholas came to power at the end of a period of religious and political ferment in which allegiances and institutions all seemed subject to change. Like Peter, Nicholas was primarily a soldier, fascinated from boyhood with military weapons and technology; and sought to re-establish order on military lines with the aid of a Lutheran-style church clearly subordinate to the state. Just as Peter came into power by curbing rebellion within the palace guard in Moscow, so Nicholas ascended to the throne while crushing the Decembrist uprising within the new elite regiments in St. Petersburg.