ABSTRACT
The spread of freemasonry in Russia has to be viewed as part of the process of 'Westernization' originally embarked on by Peter I. One of the features of Russian intellectual life in the eighteenth century is the extraordinary concentration into a very short space of time of the influence of powerful trends coming from the West. Eighteenth-century Russian freemasonry has been extensively studied in pre-revolutionary Russia and a reasonably up-to-date bibliography will be found in P. Bourychkine, Bibliographie sur la franc-maconnerie en Russie, completee et mise au point par Tatiana Bakounine, Paris, 1967. During his six-month reign Peter III is said to have become a mason, but freemasonry at this time cannot be identified with any political orientation. This takes to some final remarks on the political aspects of freemasonry. The system preached by Reichel had always warned adepts against any masonry which had political aims, which he regarded as false.
