The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  Yet the suddenness of such reforms and the ruthlessness of their enforcement generated a passionate reaction. From many directions men rose up to defend the greater "glory and beauty" of the old ways. In the same year, 1700, an educated Muscovite publicly proclaimed that'Peter was in fact the Antichrist, and a violent Cossack uprising on the lower Volga had to be crushed by long and bloody fighting.37 Such protest movements continued to plague the "new" Russia and to influence its cultural development. A history of that culture must, therefore, include not only the relatively familiar tale of Peter's modernizing reforms but also the counter-nil ack launched by Old Muscovy.

  The soldiers of the new order, Peter's glittering new guards regiments, were, after the total destruction of the streltsy, opposed only by a disorganized guerrilla band of Muscovite loyalists. The guards regiments had all the weapons of a modern, centralized state at their command, but the guerrilla warriors had the advantage of vast terrain, ideological passion, and grass

  roots support. Although the ultimate victory of the new order was perhaps inevitable, the defenders of the old were able to wage a more protracted and crippling warfare against modernization than in most other European countries. Within the amorphous army of those opposed to the Petrine solution were three groups of particular importance for the subsequent development of Russian culture: merchant Old Believers, peasant insur-rectionaries, and monastic ascetics. Even in defeat these voices of Old Muscovy were able to force the new state to adopt many of their ideas as it sought to extend and deepen its authority.

  Before looking at the counterattack of Moscow, however, one must consider the new legions which Peter called into being and their new cultural citadel, St. Petersburg. This city was the most impressive creation of his turbulent reign: the third and last of Russia's great historic cities and an abiding symbol of its new Westernized culture.

  In 1703 Peter began building this new city at the point where the Neva River disgorges the muddy water of Lake Ladoga out through swamps and islands into the eastern Baltic. The way had been cleared for Russian activity in the area by the capture in 1702 of the Swedish fortress city of Noteborg at the other end of the Neva. This was the first turning of the tide of military fortune from Sweden to Russia in northeast Europe, and the vanquished city was appropriately renamed Schliisselburg: "key city." The key made possible the opening of what an Italian visitor soon called g£u£sia^_ "window to Europe."38 In February, 1704, the first of a long line of foreign architects arrived to direct all construction on the new site-assuring thereby that the "window" would be European in style as well as in the direction it faced. Within a decade, St. Petersburg was a city of nearly 35,000 buildings and the capital of all Russia-though it was not fully recognized as such until the Empress Anna permanently transferred her residence from Moscow to St. Petersburg in 1732 and a fire gutted Moscow five years later.

  Almost no buildings have survived from the original city, whose bleak appearance bore little resemblance to the elegant city of later periods. The utilitarian structure of early Petersburg reflects the taste and preoccupations of its founder. Originally known by the Djyi^narrie^)f_^nkl_EiteLBojirklL (the abbreviation Piter remaining a familiar term for the city), St. Petersburg was conceived as a kind of Dutch-style naval base and trading center. In partial imitation of Amsterdam, the new city was systematically laid out along canals and islands. The pattern of construction was geometric and the pace rapid. The human cost of building in such a damp, cold climate was probably greater than that involved in building any other major city of Europe. Even more illustrative of Peter's military preoccupations was a

  second city founded in 1703 and bearing his name: Petrozavodsk, or "Peter's factory." Built to provide an arms manufacturing center near the metal resources of the north, this dktantcityjjriLake Onega was thrust into an even more cold and inhuman location than Petersburg.

  Military expediency and raison d'etat were the abiding considerations of Peter. The practical-minded, shipbuilding countries of the Protestant North were the source of most of his reformatorial ideas and techniques. Sweden (and to a lesser extent Prussia) provided him with quasi-military administrative ideas: a utilitarian "table of ranks" requiring state service on a systematic basis and a new synodal pattern of church administration subject to state control.ltJpHand provided him with the models (and much of the nautical terminology) for the new Russian navyjSaxony and the Baltic German provinces provided most of the teachers for his military training schools and the staff for the new academy of sciences that was set up immediately after his death.39 His efforts to advance Russian learning were almost completely concentrated on scientific, technical, or linguistic matters of direct military or diplomatic value. "To Peter's mind, 'education' and 'vocational training' seem to have been synonymous concepts."40

  This practical, technological emphasis is evidenced in the first periodical and the first secular book in Russian history-both of which appeared in 1703, the year of the founding of St. Petersburg. The printed journal, Vedomosti, was largely devoted to technical and order-of-battle information. The book, Leonty Magnitsky's Arithmetic, was more a general handbook of useful knowledge than a systematic arithmetic.41 Though often labeled the first scientific publication in Russian history, the term "science" (nauka), as used in its subtitle, carries the established seventeenth-century Russian meaning of "skilled technique" rather than the more general European meaning of theoretical knowledge.42 Far more general and abstract than Peter's "science" was the lexicon of political and philosophical terms that Peter took over from the Poles. This process of borrowing also continued a seventeenth-century Russian trend, whereby new labels were adopted piecemeal as the practical need for them arose.43

  Thus, although Peter met and corresponded with the doctors of the Sorbonne while in Paris, and made the first purchase while in Holland for what was to become a magnificent imperial Rembrandt collection,44 his reign was not one of philosophic or artistic culture. Indeed, from this point of view,|Peter's reign was in many ways a regression from that of Alexis or even Sophia. There was no painting equal to that of Ushakov, no poetry equal to that of Polotsky, no historical writing equal to that of Gizel. The perfunctory dramatic efforts of Jeter's reign represent an aesthetic decline from those of Alexis'; and even the theological disputes between Yavorsky

  and Prokopovich came as an anticlimax after the intense controversies that had raged about Nikon, Medvedev, and Kuhlmann.

  Peter's celebrated new departures in statecraft also moved along lines laid out by his predecessors. The drive to the Baltic was anticipated by Ivan Ill's establishment of Ivangorod, Ivan IV's attempt to capture Livonia, and Alexis's attempt to capture Riga and build a Baltic fleet. His reliance on Northern European ideas, technicians, and mercenaries continued a trend begun by Ivan IV and expanded by Michael. His ruthless expansion of state control over traditional ecclesiastical and feudal interests was in the spirit of Ivan and Alexis, and his secret chancellery in the spirit of their oprichnina and prikaz of secret affairs, respectively. His program of modernization and reform was anticipated in almost all its major respects by the long series of seventeenth-century proposals for Westernization, extending from Boris Godunov and the False Dmitry to Ordyn-Nashchokin and Golitsyn.

  But if Peter's reign represents the culmination of processes long at work, it was nonetheless new in spirit and far-reaching in consequences. For Peter sought not just to make use of Western personnel and ideas but to be made over by them. A century before Peter's important victory over the Swedes, Skopin-Shuisky had begun the process of adopting Western military techniques to defeat a Western rival. Alexis' decisive victory over the Poles had removed a far greater potential threat to Russian dominance of Eastern Europe than Sweden. But all of these earlier victories were won in the name of a religious civilization; Peter's victories were won in the name of a sovereign secular state. Peter was the first Russian ruler to go abroad, to meet foreigners as an apprentice seeking to learn from them. He formally
called himself not "tsar" but "emperor"; and insofar as he provided any ideological justification for his relentless statecraft of expediency, he spoke of the "universal national service," the "fortress of justice," or the "common good." He used "interests of the state" almost synonymously with "utility of the sovereign."45 The official court apologia for Peter's rule, The Justice of the Monarch's Will, echoed the pessimistic, secular arguments of Hobbes about the practical need of a debased humanity for absolute monarchy. Its author, Feofan Prokopovich, was the first in a long line of Russian churchmen willing to serve as "an ideologist of state power using Christianity as its instrument."46

  In plays and sermons Prokopovich exalted the glories of the people whom he designated by the new term Rossianin, "imperial Russian." Russian self-confidence was strengthened by Peter's defeat of the Swedes, whom Prokopovich called "our great and terrible foe … the strongest warriors among the German peoples and, until now, the terror of all the others."47 The new secular nationalism was, however, more limited in its

  ambitions than the religious nationalism of the Muscovite era. Peter, no less than other European monarchs of the early eighteenth century, spoke of "proportion" and the need to "maintain a balance in Europe."48

  His courtiers adopted not only the manners and terminology of the Polish aristocracy but also the self-gratifying feeling of being culturally superior "Europeans." Court poets began to speak patronizingly of other "uncivilized" peoples in much the same manner that Western Europeans had written about pre-Petrine Russia.

  America is wilfully rapacious,

  Her people savage in morals and rule . . .

  Knowing no God, evil in thought

  No one can accomplish anything

  Where such stupidity, vileness and sin prevail.49

  If one uses the essentially organic term perelom ("rupture") to describe the changes under Alexis, one may use the more mechanistic term perevorot ("turnabout of direction") to describe those of Peter.50 Political expediency based on impersonal calculation replaced a world where ideal ends and personal attachments had been all-important. The traditional orders of precedence under Alexis were far less binding and rigid than Peter's new hierarchical Table of Ranks but lacked the special new authority of the modern state. Moscow under Alexis had welcomed more, and more cultured, Western residents than St. Petersburg in the first half of the eighteenth century, but was not itself a living monument to Western order and technology. This new city was, for the pictorial imagination of Old Russia, the icon of a new world in which, as the corrector of books in the early years of Peter's reign put it,

  geometry has appeared,

  land surveying encompasses everything.

  Nothing on earth lies beyond measurement.51

  There was a kind of forbidding impersonality about a world in which the often-used word for "soul" (dusha) was now regularly invoked to describe the individual in his function as the basic unit for taxation and conscription by the new service state; in which the traditional familiar form of address (ty) was rapidly being supplanted by the more formal and officially endorsed vy.

  Nothing better indicates Peter's preoccupation with state problems and underlying secularism than his complex religious policy. He extended an unprecedented measure of toleration to Catholics (permitting at last the building of a Catholic Church inside Russia), but at the same time expressed

  approval of the stand taken by Galileo against the Church hierarchy and reorganized the Russian Church on primarily Protestant lines. Peter persecuted not only the fanatical Old Believers who sought to preserve the old forms of worship, but also those thoroughgoing freethinkers who sought more drastic and permissive ecclesiastical reforms. Peter curtailed and harassed the established Orthodox Church at home, but simultaneously supported its politically helpful activities in Poland.52 He vaguely discussed the unification of all churches with German Protestants and French Catholics.53 Yet the church he created was more than ever before the subordinate instrument of a particular national state. He recreated the state bureau for supervising monasteries, severely restricted the authority of the "idle" monastic estate, melted down their bells for cannon, and substituted a synod under state control for the independent patriarchate.

  Yet Peter also built the last of the four major monastic complexes of Russia: the Alexander Nevsky Lavra in St. Petersburg. It was a practical necessity for his new capital to be linked-like Kiev and Moscow-with a great monastery; just as it was essential to stability to have an established church. Thus,] Peter built his monastery, naming it for AlgxanderJCgy^ky, patron saint of St. Petersburg and the entire Neva region. The saint's remains were duly transferred from Vladimir for public exhibition, not in Moscow, but in Novgorod, and then floated down river and lake for final reburial in St. Petersburg, the new gateway to the West. The Tsar decreed that henceforth the saint was to be portrayed not as a monk but as a warrior,' and that the saint's festival be held on July 30, the day of Peter's treaty with Sweden.54 The architectural style of the monastery and the theology later taught in its seminary were to be in many ways more Western than Russian.

  The beginnings of rationalistic, secular thought can be seen in the works of three native Russians of the Petrine era-each of whom approached intellectual problems from an earthy background of practical activity of the type encouraged by Peter.

  The apothecary Dmitr^JTrentinov was one of the many men with medical knowledge who were brought to Moscow prior tojthe foundation of the fir^RuMi^iosfitaLin^iTOg^^As a native Russian from nearby Tver, he was more trusted than foreign doctors and soon had many influential friends at court. His rationalistic and sceptical approach to miracles and relics appears to have been an outgrowth both of his scientific training and of his sympathy for Protestantism. Church leaders feared that he was connected with a like-minded group, known as "the new philosophers," within the Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy in Moscow, and /he was imprisoned and forced to recant in 1717.55

  The manufacturer Ivan Pososhkov_was one of a number of self-made men who arose from relatively humble origins to positions of influence during the reign of Peter. By accumulating land and developing state-supported economic enterprises (including a vodka-distilling plant), he acquired great wealth and considerable experience in trade and commerce. Amidst the general reformatorial atmosphere of the Petrine period, he felt encouraged to write in the early 1720's On Poverty and Wealth, the first original theoretical treatise on economics ever written by a Russian. He argued that economic prosperity was the key to national welfare rather than the actual wealth in possession of the monarch at any given time. Trade and commerce should be stimulated even more than agriculture. A rationalized rule of law and an expanded educational program are necessary for economic growth, and both the superstitions of the Old Believers and the Western love of luxury are to be avoided. Pososhkov's tract was evidently designed to appeal to Peter as a logical extension in the economic realm of his political reforms, just as Tveritinov's ideas were designed to represent such an extension in philosophy. But Pososhkov like Tveritinov never gained imperial favor for his ideas. He finished his book only in 1724, was imprisoned shortly after Peter's death the following year, and died in I726.56

  Tatishchev, the third of these Petrine harbingers of new secular thought patterns, lived longest and attained his greatest influence after Peter's death. He formed, together with Prokopovich and the learned poet-diplomat Antioch Kantemir, a group known as the "learned guard," which was in many ways the first in the long line of self-conscious intellectual circles devoted to the propagation of secular knowledge. Tatishchev's career illustrates particularly well how Peter's interest in war and technology led Russian thought half-unconsciously to broader cultural vistas.

  Tatishchev was first of all a military officer-trained in Peter's new engineering and artillery schools and tested by almost continuous fighting during the last fifteen years of the Northern War. He spent the last, peaceful years of Peter's reign supervising work in the newly opened metallurgic
al industries of the Urals (later to become his major vocation) and journeying to Sweden to continue his engineering training at a higher level. The combination of geographic explorations in the East and archival explorations in the West turned this officer-engineer toward the study of history. In 1739 he presented to the Academy of Sciences the first fruit of a long and panoramic History oj Russia: the first example of critical scientific history by a native Russian.

  Tatishchev's history was not published until thirty years after it was written and twenty years after his death. Even then, it produced a remark-

  able effect, for it was still decades ahead of its time. Unlike the Sinopsis of Gizel, which remained the basic history of Russia throughout the early eighteenth century, Tatishchev's History was a scientific work, seeking to combine his knowledge of geographical and military problems with a critical, comparative examination of the manuscript sources. Its aim was, moreover, the frankly secular one of proving useful background reading for those engaged in war and statecraft. Not only was its framework free of the traditional preoccupation with sacred history and genealogy, but it was even free of a narrowly Russian focus, making an effort to include the history of the non-Russian peoples of the empire. It introduced a descriptive scheme of periodization, defended unrestricted autocracy as the only form of government suited to a country of Russia's size and complexity, and generally served as a model for many of the subsequent synthetic histories of Russia.57