478 Chapter XX
278 serf rebellions have been counted for the years 1796 to 1798 alone.^3 The two
facts were not unconnected, since Paul, unlike his mother, had shown signs of try-
ing to conciliate the peasants and of opposing the nobles.
With or without events in the West these discords would have continued in
Russia. The question is whether they in any way resembled those of Central or
Western Europe, and whether a knowledge of the European Enlightenment and
the French Revolution acted as a new cause of dissatisfaction, and contributed to a
clearer formulation of goals. The best answer seems to be a cautious and indefinite
affirmative. Assassination of rulers by noble coteries seems less peculiarly Musco-
vite when we recall the death of Gustavus III of Sweden in 1792. Noble self-
assertiveness, carrying with it a demand for more aristocratic privilege, seems quite
foreign to the French Revolution, unless we believe, with Mathiez and Lefebvre,
that such an aristocratic resurgence was part and parcel, at the beginning, of the
French Revolution itself. A rebellion of Russian serfs—desperate, elemental, and
negative, stirred up by religious eccentrics and Old Believers, often led by a strange
meteoric personage who claimed to be the true tsar and father of his people, and
receiving no aid or sympathy from the city- dwellers—was not much like the
French peasant uprising of 1789. When we are told that Russian serf uprisings
resembled the revolution of the French bourgeoisie in that both were directed
against “feudalism,”^4 it is easy to retort that “feudalism” in such a statement has no
meaning except in Marxian dialectic. Yet there is a touch of truth in the observa-
tion that both French bourgeois and Russian serf opposed a privileged class which
was of military and agrarian origin.
In Russia as elsewhere, though starting from a lower base, there was a rapid
development of communications in the latter part of the eighteenth century, both
within the empire and with Europe. Thirty newspapers and magazines were pub-
lished in 1789. The censorship sometimes forced them to use guarded language in
reporting on the French Revolution; if one read that there had recently been a
great change in Paris fashions, one knew that some great political event had oc-
curred. Despite all the difficulties, new papers were also founded, including the
Political Journal established in 1790. In it one could read, for example, that in 1789
“there originated in Europe the beginning of a new era for mankind,” and that this
epoch, unparalleled since the Crusades, was “the epoch of adjustment of the posi-
tion of the so- called lower estates.”^5
With the usual channels for public opinion obstructed by government, and in
an atmosphere where knowledge was expected to be the possession of a special
few, there developed in Russia, through contacts with Germany and central Eu-
rope, a taste for secret and mysterious “enlightenment” or “illumination,” the re-
verse of the publicized and rational Enlightenment that the French philosophes
preferred. There was a fear of “Martinists,” followers of the French writer Saint-
Martin, a kind of pietist in religion, some of whose admirers combined an earthly
reformism with a peculiar religiosity. Freemasonry spread, and by the 1770’s there
3 Shtrange, Rev. fr. et société russe, 208. Most of the present section is drawn from Shtrange.
4 Ibid., 209.
5 Quoted by A. Kaganova, “Frantzuskaya Bourzhuasnaya Revolutziya.. .” in Voprosi istorii
(1947) No. 7, p. 89.