Political Freemasonry in Russia, 1906-1918

Over the past twenty years, Russian Freemasonry has emerged from its shadowy existence as a staple of the literature of paranoia and taken its place as a factor both in the February Revolution of 1917 and, much more tenuously thus far, in the history of the Provisional Government. It has been woven into interpretations of the fall of the Monarchy as far apart on the spectrum as those of George Katkov and Leopold Haimson.l It figures in the recent work on February by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa and is treated with scholarly rigor in a lengthy article by Barbara Norton.2 Even Soviet historians, who have hitherto avoided the question most studiously, now acknowledge the legitimacy of its study.3 Yet the subject cannot be said to have come of age. It has not really been integrated into the political history of the decade preceding the Bolshevik Revolution; as a rule, it is discussed apart from the main narrative channel. The reason for the relative freshness of this topic is the paucity of source materials-particularly puzzling

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