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Reviews of Books
reader cannot help but wonder how much of his
perspective on the unraveling of Yugoslavia and his
warm embrace of the Slovenian view, which argued
that the Slovenes were "a Central European people,
[who] feit more and more cut off from Europe" (p. 69),
influenced the German public to defend this Central
European people against "Balkan," "hegemonie," and
"socialist" forces. Nowhere in this study does Meier
hold the Slovenes responsible for their own brand
of nationalism, economie or political. The author
abruptly ends his history in 1991; maybe this is the end
of the story for the Slovenes, but what about the other
peoples of Yugoslavia?
MELISSA BOKOVOY
University of New Mexico
GEORG BERNHARD MICHELS. At War with the Church:
Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Russia. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1999. Pp. x, 354.
$60.00.
The formation of Old Belief in seventeenth-century
Russia is one of the classic themes of Russian history,
and one of the few topics in the history of religion in
Russia to attract much scholarly interest. Though
falling short of its grand claims, Georg Bernhard
Michels's addition to this literature sheds new light on
familiar episodes and brings a large body of sources to
the attention of scholars. Michels's aim is to disprove
what he believes to be the dominant view that Old
Belief became an instant mass movement when the
archpriest Avvakum Petrovich rejected the liturgical
innovations imposed by Patriarch Nikon in 1653. In
fact, only V. S. Rumiantseva has made that assertion,
and her views are much more nuanced than Michels
admits. His first two chapters are consequently pushing
on an already open door. Like his predecessors Ivan
Ivanovich Subbotin, N. F. Kapterev, Pierre Pascal, and
Nikolai Mikhailovich Bubnov, Michels argues that the
earlier opponents of the new liturgy were isolated
clerics without much following before the church
council of 1666. His portrait of the economie and other
tensions within the church hierarchy in those years, by
contrast, is much more original. A great many of the
bishops and abbots of the period were accused of
various sorts of tyrannical behavior, and they may well
have been guilty, though the sources as presented here
cannot definitively prove the case. The emphasis on
Bishop Alexander of Viatka as an important figure,
exceptional in the hierarchy in those years, is again not
as new as claimed, but does expand on earlier work by
Bubnov to reinforce the impression that Alexander
was indeed a key figure.
In the second half of the book, Michels surveys
various forms of popular dissidence among monks,
priests, and laymen in the second half of the seventeenth century. This is his most original scholarly
contribution, based on an extensive use of archival
material that earlier historians have ignored. The
author's contention that there were other issues at
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
work beyond rejection of the liturgy is convincing. It
would be even more so if he did not feel the need to
downplay all instances where his own data reveal the
rejection of the new liturgy as part of the case. Human
beings are rarely so simple that one motive must
exclude any other. What Michels cannot prove is how
extensive any of these phenomena were: the Russian
church and state lacked the bureaucratie apparatus of
their counterparts farther west, and, as Michels himself noten, the church could not control provincial
parishes. The result is that the cases Michels has found
are only part of a reality that remains hidden to us. It
is clear that Old Belief (after the 1660s) had some
popular appeal, as did Michels's other types of dissent,
but how much is hard to gauge. Thus his assertion that
the other types were more numerous and important
than Old Belief is no more sustainable than the
opposite assumptions of textbook and popular writers.
His argument would have been better served had he
presented his new material more fully and given the
reader a better sense of its context. Where he is surely
on the right track, as he has more clearly explained
elsewhere, is in arguing that the Old Believer tradition
was reformulated in the early eighteenth century in a
series of canonical texts, and that historians must move
beyond them to understand the phenomenon (see
Georg Michels, "The First Old Believers in Tradition
and Historical Reality," Jahrbacher far Geschichte Osteuropas 41 [1991]: 481-508).
Michels's work would inspire more confidence if it
had fewer mistakes. Fedor Ivanov did not write in the
name of the "majority of all the people" because
vsenarodnoe mnozhestvo means "a great many of all the
people" (p. 217). F. M. Rtishchev, Savelii Kozlovskii,
and Ivan Gundorov were not boyars (pp. 92, 130).
Spiridon Potemkin did not come from the boyar
aristocracy (p. 88), for no Potemkin ever rose above
the much lower rank of stol'nik. There is no proof that
the monks Bogolep L'vov and bov Saltykov came from
the boyar families of the same name (pp. 137, 150).
All this being said, the author's impressive archival
research and new insights have great value. Michels's
work forces the historian to rethink accepted notions
about religious dissent in seventeenth-century Russia
and its ecclesiastical and social dimensions.
PAUL BUSHKOVITCH
Yale University
DOUGLAS SMITH. Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in Eighteenth-Centwy Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 1999. Pp. x,
257. $38.00.
Since the decline and final disintegration of the Soviet
Union, the history and nature of freemasonry have
received increasing scholarly attention in Russia (see
for example, the publication of A. I. Serkov). The
major question is the real or putative role of freemasons in bringing about the fall of imperial Russia and
in the polities of the Provisional Government. This
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Europe: Early Modern and Modern
concern has led to a reawakening of curiosity concerning freemasonry in earlier times, in particular the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We can
speak of a reawakening because, in the last decades of
the imperial regime, much valuable work was done to
bring to light important sources and to publish monographic and biographic studies on prominent freemasons. True, even in Soviet times, literary scholars
addressed the fact that seminal figures in the early
history of modern Russian literature (e.g. Mikhail
Kheraskov, Nikolai Novikov, Nikolai Karamzin, Aleksandr Pushkin) had had associations with masonic
lodges. It so happens also that, stimulated by the
seminal work of Reinhart Kosellek, hirgen Habermas,
Roger Chartier, and Franco Venturi, to mention only
a few, historians of eighteenth-century Europe and of
the Enlightenment have turned their attention to
freemasonry as a form of sociability and cultural life
that fostered and disseminated liberal and enlightened
norms of comportment among the educated classes.
Building on this historiographic background, both
Russian and Western, Douglas Smith offers an account
of Russian elite (i.e. educated and noble) society in the
second half of the eighteenth century. Smith places
freemasonry firmly in its historic and existential contexts and, in ,so doing, clarifies its role in and contribution to Russia's europeanization (or "modernization"). He provides a careful reconstruction of the
membership, ritual practices, and activities—cultural
and philanthropic—of the lodges. He draws not only
on the published sources (contemporary periodicals,
plays, tracts) and monographic literature but also on
much unpublished documentation (correspondente,
individual records, and investigatory reports).
The principal purpose and significante of Masonic
lodges in eighteenth-century Russia, concludes Smith,
was to implement Peter the Great's program of transforming Russian society on contemporary European
models. The freemasons took on the didactic task of
promoting new forms of sociability in order to "civilize"—i.e. firmly root civility of comportment—the
service nobility and foster an educated "public." The
practices of the lodges were to enhance their members'
sense of autonomy, dignity, and worth as individuals by
learning "to become civil and polite by curbing their
base desires and passions, a process they called 'working the rough stone' " (p. 5). This in turn made for
their greater spiritual and social self-awareness and
contributed to the moral and cultural progress of the
nation.
Thus freemasonry reflected the neo-Stoic didacticism of contemporary political culture, as exemplified
by enlightened absolutism. It also drew on Protestant
mysticism (Jakob Boehme) and esoterism (Rosicrucians). Smith illustrates (pp. 176-77) the dual nature
of the freemasons' task by describing the symbols
engraved on Count Z. G. Chernyshev's snuff box (now
in the Hillwood Museum in Washington, D.C.). Their
double-pronged goal was to be both loyal, devoted
servants of the state and educated, useful members of
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1091
a civic-minded "public" (i.e. a proto-civil society). Such
a public should be engaged in privately sponsored and
run activities in such field as education, publishing,
theaters, philanthropy, and science.
However, the secretiveness of their meetings and
rituals fanned the distrust of the authorities and the
popular belief that freemasons were engaged in magical and satanic practices. Smith distinguishes three
periods in the public's attitudes toward freemasonry:
masons as Satan's servants (first half of the eighteenth
century); masons as dupes and charlatans (third quarter of the century); masons as and heretics and "Martinists," whom Catherine II held responsible for the
revolutionary turmoil in France and saw as a threat to
established monarchical and social order.
The popularity enjoyed by masonic beliefs and practices all over Europe in the first three quarters of the
eighteenth century began to be displaced by new
currents of thought and feeling on the eve of the
nineteenth, notes Smith. Masonic lodges and membership had dwindled to insignificance by the time Catherine II prohibited them. The arrest and incarceration,
in 1792, of Novikov—the leading public figure in
Russian masonry—was mainly due, argues Smith, to
the excessive suspiciousness and fear of A. Prozorovskii, the governor general of Moscow. That Catherine II did not take masonic activities too seriously is
shown by her mild treatment of other well-known
masons, such as Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Lopukhin, and
Aleksandr Kutuzov.
Permission, given by Alexander I, to reopen the
lodges did not revive freemasonry as a significant
cultural or social movement. Late nineteenth and early
twentieth-century masonry was an altogether different
phenomenon, Smith's clearly written and well-documented study is the best overall English-language
history and appraisal of freemasonry in eighteenthcentury Russia. It will be essential to the toolkit of all
those interested in studying and understanding the
development of modern Russian culture.
MARC RAEFF
Tenafly, New Jersey
RICHARD S. WORTMAN. SCeriariOS of Power: Myth and
Ceremony in Russian Monarchy. Volume 2: From Alexander II to the Abdication of Nicholas II. Princeton:
Princeton University Press. 2000. Pp. 586. $59.95.
In this second of two hefty volumes devoted to the
evolving myth of the Russian monarchy as revealed,
principally, in ceremony—that is, through careful
study ("semiotic analysis") of visual and narrative
representations of coronations, jubilees, commemorations, ritualized voyages, parades, and the like—Richard S. Wortman completes his survey of the entire twohundred-year imperial period of Russian history from
the early eighteenth to the early twentieth century.
It is an impressive work in several respects. It
displays mastery of a huge literature on Russian
political, cultural, and intellectual history, frequently
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