did clubs, such as the English Club, founded in St. Petersburg in 1770 with a
membership of Russians, English, nobles, professionals, and merchants. The gov-
ernment sponsored the Free Economic Society, where political discussion was more
muted. As Colum Leckey shows, when the Society (under direct pressure from
Catherine II) ran a competition in 1768 for proposals of reform in the peasant
economy, the vast majority of entrants and eventual winner were foreign, and
argued against serfdom on moral as well as economic grounds. But the majority of
members of the Society—Russian nobility—opposed the winning entry and tried
to stop publication. A sanitized version (omitting the most overt calls for abolition)
was published with the Empress’s urging. Only one Russian submission, by Aleksei
Polenov, argued against serfdom (on the grounds of natural law) and proposed a
gradual and voluntary emancipation of serfs through training and establishing of
village welfare institutions. Polenov’s empathy for serfs ran against the grain of
noble attitudes; most regarded peasants as crude and in need of their benevolent,
patrimonial care. Only under the influence of sentimentalism in the very end of the
century, exemplified by Alexander Radishchev’scri de coeuragainst serfdom of
1790, did an alternative vision of peasants begin to be expressed. Significantly, after
the strident debate in the Free Economic Society over publications touching on
serfdom, the Society abjured political themes, for the next century publishing in its
Trudyonly practical, technical studies of agrarian and economic improvement.
A PUBLIC SPHERE?
All this activity has prompted scholars to ask whether a“public sphere”developed
in Russia, following Jürgen Habermas, who theorized that the French Revolution
was made possible by the emergence of a“public sphere,”a space generative of free-
standing“public opinion”about political and social life that governments needed to
heed. The public sphere thrived with the participation of a broad public in
discussion, made possible by expanded literacy, publications, means of communi-
cation, and most of all institutions of sociability. In eighteenth-century France and
England, those ranged socially from elite salons, Masonic lodges, and voluntary
societies to coffee houses, pubs, and taverns. The point of the public sphere was its
being turned to real political critique.
Russia’s intellectual energy of the late eighteenth century falls short of this high
threshold. Overt political critique was rare and loyal identification with the status
quo was sincere and deep; civil society independent of the state never developed.
Theater in the capitals was under state support; many voluntary societies were
under imperial aegis and the state maintained sufficient power to close down public
discussion, as it did in the early 1790s. With pressure from the Orthodox Church,
mistrustful of Enlightenment free-thinking and shocked at French revolutionary
violence, Catherine II cracked down on perceived political publication and gath-
erings. In 1792 she arrested Nikolai Novikov and shut down his printing press as
subversively Masonic; he was sentenced tofifteen years in prison (released after her
death in 1796). When Kniazhnin’s playVadim of Novgorodwas posthumously
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