Education and social change in the 18th century

Secular education had been actively propagated by Peter I. At first it focused on technical subjects—those directly related to the prosecution of war, the building of a navy, and the running of the government. This was also the original emphasis of the Academy of Sciences and the school connected with it. But, as education became the prerequisite for advancement in service and as Western ways of life spread among the upper classes, the focus of education gradually broadened. There developed a class of nobles who were interested in culture for the sake of their own development, as well as for cutting a good figure in society. Beginning in the 1760s, the demand for western European artistic and cultural works grew increasingly in the salons of St. Petersburg. By the 1780s the major classics of European literature had become easily available in translation to any educated person. Private boarding and day schools proliferated, as did the tutors hired by wealthy nobles for their children (and for less fortunate neighbours and relatives). The Academy of Sciences took its place among the major academies of Europe. Moscow State University and the chief schools of the military, naval, and civil services had become regular institutions.

There were also ecclesiastical schools. The seminaries and theological academies not only trained future members of the episcopate and officials of the Holy Synod but also staffed government bureaus on the middle and higher levels and produced the first native Russian academics, scholars, and scientists. Russia's lack of professional experts in such fields as jurisprudence, civil and military engineering, astronomy, and geophysics brought a great influx of foreigners. They brought with them French and German philosophy: the metaphysics and epistemology of Ren& #233; Descartes (Descartes, Ren& #233; ) and the natural law doctrines of the German school of Gottfried Leibniz (Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm), Samuel, baron von Pufendorf (Pufendorf, Samuel, Freiherr von), and Christian, baron von Wolff (Wolff, Christian, Freiherr (Baron) von). These emphasized social obligation and the individual's dependence on the community and thereby laid the foundation for a critique of society. The critique was at first directed against the moral inadequacies of individuals, but it soon broadened into the view that the educated man had an obligation to help others improve themselves. In the Russian context the class most obviously in need of improvement was the peasantry. Moral progress, it was quickly realized, was not possible without material progress, and this led quite naturally to an advocacy of practical philanthropy and social action.

Imported German professionals furthered the dissemination of German Pietism, with its emphasis on spiritual progress and on the need to serve man and the community. Similar tendencies underlay the most influential branch ofFreemasonry; the Freemasons devoted themselves to disseminating knowledge, relieving hunger, and caring for orphans and other destitutes. The publisher Nikolay Novikov (Novikov, Nikolay Ivanovich) carried the Pietist and Masonic messages to the public in his satiric journals and periodicals for women and children. The major writers of Catherine II's reign (including the empress herself, who dabbled in journalism and drama) produced satires, fables, and comedies of manners attuned to the belief that moral and spiritual progress would lead to social improvements. A similar approach was noticeable in education, which stressed the development of moral feeling in the conviction that a good heart would guide the well-filled head in the proper direction.

All these intellectual currents combined to awaken among educated Russians a sense of national pride (nationalism) and a feeling that, thanks to the impetus given by Peter I, Russia had managed to lift itself to the cultural and political level of a great European state. The educated Russian was no longer a servile and mute slave of the tsars; he had made himself into a gentleman, a man of heart and honour, a “true son of the fatherland, ” concerned about his compatriots and his country's condition and future.

The response of the empress and her entourage to these intellectual developments was ambivalent. The new sense of national pride and personal dignity enhanced the government's prestige and was in line with Catherine's own aspirations for the nobility. But moral criticism of abuses could easily turn into criticism of Russia's social and political system. The outbreak of the French Revolution in the late 1780s made Catherine II particularly anxious. She felt that large-scale private philanthropic and educational activities without government guidance and control were trespassing on her own prerogatives as an enlightened autocrat. By the end of the 18th century, the ideal of service to the state, which had underlain the Russian nobility's value system, had been transformed into one of service to the people; this meant the elite's separation from the state, which Catherine II could not accept. A dramatic illustration of Catherine's concern occurred on the appearance in 1790 of Aleksandr Radishchev (Radishchev, Aleksandr Nikolayevich)'s A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. In it Radishchev depicted social conditions as he saw them, particularly the dehumanization of the serfs and the corruption of their masters, warning that these threatened the stability of the existing order. Incensed by the book, Catherine had Radishchev arrested and banished to Siberia. He became the first political martyr of the Russian elite; his book and his fate foreshadowed the antagonism between the intelligentsia and the government that was to dominate Russia's history in the 19th century.