480 Chapter XX
1801 Stroganov became one of the circle of reformers about Tsar Alexander I he
had not forgotten Romme and Condorcet; and the five new Russian universities
created in 1804 embodied Condorcet’s ideas.^8 La Harpe also paid a visit to his
former pupil in 1801; he now offered the experience of a Swiss revolutionary to
the new Tsar who hoped to revolutionize his empire from above.
The penetration of French and revolutionary ideas into the Russian lower classes
is insisted on by M. M. Shtrange, the most recent authority on the subject. It must
be remembered that “lower” in Russian usage meant anything lower than the no-
bility; and the “low- born” intelligentsia were mainly middle- class people, though
the number of educated and even intellectual serfs (usually belonging to humane
families like the Stroganovs), while not large, was increasing. The evidence for this
deeper social penetration of the new ideas is to be found in detailed examination
of provincial periodicals, in police records on the circulation of forbidden materi-
als, in the surviving caricatures and engravings showing sympathy for the French
or dislike of aristocrats, in booksellers’ catalogues, and in the perusal of books and
pamphlets that have been forgotten because their authors were neither literary nor
famous. For example, about 1793 a manuscript pamphlet circulated surreptitiously
in Western Russia, called the Gospel to the Russian Israel. It declared for the rights
of man, questioned the rights of property and of noble distinctions, urged that “all
the Russian and Slavic peoples” should be freed from serfdom, and proposed that
“all gentry, lords, counts and princes should be universally destroyed.”^9 As already
mentioned, some 278 peasant uprisings were recorded officially in thirty- two gu-
berniyas of the empire in the later 1790’s.
This new insistence, in Soviet historical writing, on the penetration of French,
Western, and revolutionary ideas into relatively popular levels tends to confirm,
curiously enough, the observations made at the time by the French diplomatic
observer, the much decried Edmond Genet. Genet, as French chargé and a noble-
man himself, mixed readily in Russian court circles, though barred officially from
Catherine’s presence after the episode of Varennes, and ordered out of Russia in
the summer of 1792. Genet was an enthusiast, but not a fool; he saw that all the
talk of “liberty” that he heard among the Russian nobility might mean no more
than the traditional palace revolution, and that many excited Russian aristocrats
admired the Polish revolution more than the French, being more interested in
powers for themselves than in rights for others. But Genet thought also, like Pro-
fessor Shtrange, that the peasants were very restless, and that the growth of schools
and of reading habits had created a class of people who “devour the news from
France which is published fairly accurately in the Russian magazines.” (He was
writing in 1791, before the censorship tightened.) “There exists in this empire,”
reported Genet, “a real germ of democracy.”^10 Argument will fall on the dimen-
sions of this “germ.”
8 G. Vernadsky, “Reforms under Czar Alexander I: French and American Influences,” in Review
of Politics (1947), 47–52.
9 Shtrange, Rev. fr. et soc. russe, 196 –9 7.
10 Genet to Montmorin, St. Petersburg, Nov. 8, 1791, in Recueil des instructions données aux am-
bassadeurs et ministres de France... Russie (Paris, 1890), II, 518–19.