Alexander Labzin

Alexander Fyodorovich Labzin (Александр Фёдорович Лабзин; 1766–1825) was a leading figure of the Russian Enlightenment who developed an idiosyncratic mystical system and founded an influential St. Petersburg masonic lodge, The Dying Sphinx.

Labzin attended the Moscow University, where he came to know two leading Freemasons, Ivan Schwarz and Nikolay Novikov.

He curried favour with Emperor Paul by preparing a historical account of the Order of Malta and held a string of offices during his reign and that of his son, including Chief of the Navy Department and Vice President of the Imperial Academy of Arts.

Labzin revived the tradition of Novikov's "libertine" magazines with "The Messenger of Sion", a religious monthly that celebrated a "religion of the heart" and rebelled against the ritualistic side of Orthodox worship.

Labzin's young protégés included Alexander Witberg, an architect who won the commission to construct in Moscow the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour but tsar Nicholas I abandoned the "Masonic" plan for a less "Roman Catholic" neo-Byzantine construction.