History Commons^™

Bookends: Freemasonry In Russia, Past And Present, James Patrick Greene

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to explore Russian Freemasonry in both the reign of Peter I and in theRussian Federation following the collapse of the Soviet Union, two periods where the relevant scholarship has largely fallen silent. The first chapter argues that early Masonic influences were both present at the court of Peter I and accepted by the Tsar. These intellectual trends, traceable in the libraries, social connections, and writings of individual Jacobites, would reemerge in the institutional Freemasonry in the reign of Catherine II. The printing and translation activities of Novikov and Lopukhin indicate a strong interest in these mystical ideas …