Victories of the Counter-Revolution 481
Further evidence, more open to question, of the spread of unsettling ideas to
lower and wider classes of people is furnished by the chorus of conservative writ-
ings that pointed to it with alarm. In this flood of literature (as in the correspond-
ing literature of other countries) it was said that cities are parasitic, that city people
are dangerous to society because peculiarly susceptible to delusions of equality, that
the poor oppose the rich because of envy, and that partisans of new ideas are a
half- educated rabble composed of cobblers and lawyers—all of whom looked alike
from a social point of view sufficiently elevated. In a book published at St. Peters-
burg in 1793, called Thoughts of an Impartial Citizen on the Stormy Changes in
France, concern is especially expressed that the “low- born” intelligentsia are a dan-
ger to Russia, since they agitate the whole “third estate.” The author sees a danger
of international revolution: “The moral epidemic of our present century may have
a more rapid success than the plague that ruined Constantinople, and quarantine
will be necessary.”^11
Quarantine, indeed, became the watchword. Against what disease? It may be
thought, since there was no real possibility of revolution in Russia, and no orga-
nized group working for it in any practical way, that the counter- excitement among
Russian conservative interests was an outburst of hypocrisy and hysteria. It may be
supposed that the idea of quarantine was misconceived, unless we see what it was
really directed against. It was really directed against even moderate change—
against even partial breaches in the system of serfdom, of noble ascendancy and of
a conception of monarchy by which the monarchy should exist to protect these
elements in the Russian way of life. Russians who favored even piecemeal changes
usually favored the French Revolution. Those who opposed such changes not only
opposed the French Revolution, but equated liberalization with revolution and
idealized the existing order. They became fearful of secret societies, which did in
fact exist and a few of which were subversive, and even were afraid of the public
expression of thought, of discussion and disagreement, of news, facts, events in the
outside world or contacts with it. The impact of the French Revolution in the
1790’s, which in the United States helped to form merely a two- party system, laid
the basis in Russia for both revolutionary and counter- revolutionary traditions.
Anti- revolutionism gathered strength and took many forms. Radishchev and
Novikov were arrested. Genet and La Harpe were expelled. The assassination of
the King of Sweden was attributed to Jacobin plotters. The stories and the theories
of French émigrés congregating in St. Petersburg were accepted and publicized.
Police action against secret societies and Masonic lodges became more intense; the
arrests reached their height between 1793 and 1796. Censorship became more
strict, and foreign books and periodicals were banned; the result was a greater cir-
culation of an underground literature of disaffection, both native and foreign.
In the spring of 1792 St. Petersburg was gripped by the fear of an international
revolutionary plot against all nobility and all monarchs, a plot in which Jacobins,
Freemasons, Martinists, and devotees of occult societies everywhere were said to
be involved, and of which the recent deaths of Gustavus III and Leopold II, the
11 Shtrange, 170–71. Where the French translation reads classe intellectuelle roturière I follow my
assistant, Mr. Blackwell, in his rendering, ‘low- born intelligentsia.”