Social Ethics of Nineteenth-Century Russia

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Down to Earth Series · 11 pages

First published in The Pioneer, Allahabad, on 12 March 1880, and reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings II pages 351–61 under the heading “The History of a Book.” Boris de Zirkoff's footnote records that the article appeared the day before the assassination of Emperor Alexander II, which took place on 1 March by the Julian calendar then current in Russia. The head-note states the comparison the piece turns on: that the same corrupting influence Paris had upon France, St Petersburg had upon Russia.

Blavatsky writes for an Indian readership with no particular knowledge of Russia, and begins by explaining why the subject is timely — indications in the press all point towards a Russian reign of terror, either before or at the death of the Czar, so a bird's-eye view of the constitution of Russian society will help readers understand events as they come. The analysis divides the aristocracy into three elements: the primitive Slavonian, the primitive Tatar, and the Russianized immigrants from other countries and subjects of conquered states such as the Baltic provinces. The first rank, placed beyond challenge by hereditary descent, is the Rurikovich, descendants of the Grand Duke Rurik and of the once-separate principalities of Novgorod and Pskov that were welded into the Muscovite empire — the Princes Bariatinsky, Dolgoruky, Shuysky, Shcherbatov, Urussov and Viazemsky among them, with long footnotes tracing several of the families. From this account of who the Russian nobility actually are, the article develops its comparison between the two capitals and the effect each had on the country behind it.

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