Victories of the Counter-Revolution 479
were three large Masonic lodges in Moscow. A German, a certain Professor
Schwarz of the University of Moscow, introduced Rosicrucianism, which in Russia
more than elsewhere soon turned into a secret movement for social reform. The
Scottish chemist, John Robison, mixed in Masonic circles in St. Petersburg in the
1770’s. He found Russian Masonry very different from the British in its commit-
ment to a kind of world salvationism. One night, at midnight, according to Robi-
son’s own account, a strange Russian gave him custody of a locked box full of
Masonic papers, and thereupon disappeared. Years later he opened it in Edin-
burgh; and it was from the contents of this box, and from reading the Neueste Re-
ligionsbegebenheiten published in Germany, that he learned of the Masonic plot for
world revolution whose details he purported to reveal, in 1797, in his Proofs of a
Conspiracy against all the religions and governments of Europe, carried on in the secret
meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati and reading societies.^6 Thus Russia in its turn ex-
erted an influence in Western Europe.
It was in the Russian higher classes and literary circles that the impact of the
French Revolution was most evident. So much has always been well known. The
same circles had shown enthusiasm for the American Revolution also. Alexander
Radishchev, when he published his Voyage from St. Petersburg to Moscow in 1790,
included parts of the ode to liberty that he had written on America several years
before; and the whole book was so outspoken in its picture of the brutalities that
occurred under serfdom, and so unfavorable to Russian institutions of govern-
ment, that Radishchev was exiled to Siberia, and is still regarded as the first mod-
ern Russian revolutionary. N. I. Novikov was active both in Masonry and in more
public ways, editing journals for popular education, such as the Village Inhabitant,
and helping to organize a public library in Moscow and a school for translators of
foreign books. Censored in 1785, obliged to see his school closed in 1787, he was
sentenced to fifteen years in prison in 1792. N. M. Karamzin was somewhat excep-
tional in that, after long travels in Europe, he began after returning home to pub-
lish idealized pictures of rural life and serfdom in Russia, for which, however, he
was much criticized by more progressive members of the nobility.
Among the high- born who took a positive attitude to new ideas, if not to popu-
lar revolution, the most notable were Catherine II’s two grandsons, the future tsar
Alexander I and his brother Constantine. These two young men, at the ages of
fifteen and thirteen, were heard to discourse on the abuses of “feudalism”; their
tutor, the Swiss La Harpe, was ordered out of the country in 1794, and soon there-
after began to figure in the revolution in Switzerland.^7 Among the nobility, the
best known in this connection is Count Stroganov, one of the largest serf- owners
in the empire, who as a young man went to Paris with his French tutor, Gilbert
Romme. Stroganov belonged to the Paris Jacobin club in 1790, and after Stro-
ganov’s return to Russia Romme became a member of the National Convention,
where he spoke up in favor of Condorcet’s project for public education. When in
6 4th ed. (Edinburgh, 1798), 1–4. Whatever judgment may be made of his political opinions,
Robison was a man of good repute and a credible witness on matters of his own biography, except as
his memory may have betrayed him after so many years.
7 On La Harpe and Alexander see two articles by L. Mongeon in Revue historique vaudoise
(1938), 83–102, 129–45.