'There is a kind of continuity between the reign of Peter and that of the Empress Anna, the most important of his immediate successors. During her rule throughout the 1730's, the influence of Baltic Germans continued to predominate. Bartolomeo Rastrelli, the son of a metal forger and sculptor brought to Russia by Peter, built a new Winter Palace-the first permanent imperial residence in the new capital-but he devoted more of his talent to building a new palace for her favorite, Biron, miles to the west at Mitau (Jelgava) in Courland. St. Petersburg was still looked on as a kind of hardship post for mercenary officers. Court life in the new capital was marked by continued crudeness and vulgarity. Like Peter, Anna relied on dwarfs and freaks for entertainment and enjoyed mocking traditional ceremonies and court personalities. Probably the most remarkable jnew building of her reign was the great ice palace she built on the Neva during the severe winter of 1739-40. Eighty feet long and thirty-three feet high, the palace was equipped With furniture, clocks, and even chandeliers-all molded from be. It was built largely as a mock gesture to an unfaithful courtier, who was forced to marry an old and ugly Kalmyk and spend his wedding night naked in the icy "bedroom" of the palace, with his "bride" the only conceivable source of warmth.58
Like Peter, Anna was suspicious of intellectual activity that had no practical value and might conceivably lead men to question the imperial authority. She conducted a personal vendetta against the most cultured Russian of the age, the new scion of the Westernized Golitsyn family, Dmitry. Even more than his first cousin once removed, Vasily, who had been exiled by Peter, Dmitry Golitsyn was a man of ranging cultural interests. As an ambassador to Constantinople and voevoda of Kiev from 1707-18, he had amassed a six-thousand-volume library and launched an
extensive personal project for translating such Western political theorists as Grotius, Pufendorf, and John Locke. Under their influence, "golitsyn_be-came, m effect, Russia's first secular political theorist. He waTthe first native Russian to popularize the familiar Western idea of objective natural law.^Al.the same time, Golitsyn became the spokesman for the new service nobility by drawing uptheconstitutional project of 1730 in an effort to limit autocratic authority by a council of the higher nobility. This project represented a genuine innovation rather than a traditionalist protest movement. The models were Swedish, and the objective was to extend the Petrine reforms further in the same Westward direction which the original reforms pointed.60 The Senate, which Peter had created in 1711, was not basically a legislative or even a consultative body, but an executive organ of the emperor for transmitting his commands to the provinces and to the administrative colleges, which were created subordinate to it in 1717. Like Peter, Anna was inhospitable to any limitation on her power; and Golitsyn suffered an even crueler fate than had befallen Tveritinov and Pososhkov in the preceding decades. His library was taken, and he was imprisoned in the Schliisselburg fortress. In 1737 he became the first in a long line of reformers to die within its walls.
Nonetheless, Anna was forced to concede a few new privileges to the service nobility. The founding in 1731 of a school for the Corps of Nobility accelerated the trend begun by Peter of providing a veneer of Western manners to his crude new ruling class. The name of the corps, shliakhetsky korpus, was derived from the Polish word for nobility, szlachta, and reveals the source of inspiration for this effort to civilize the ruling classes. But the teachers and the language of instruction were-as in the Academy of Sciences-primarily German. This school, like that founded for the Corps of Pages in 1759, provided the non-technical curriculum of an aristocratic finishing school.61 Graduates of these schools (and of the somewhat more rigorous gymnasium of the Academy of Sciences) provided the nucleus of a Western-educated minority.^A new secular culture slowly began to emerge under Anna as the first orchestra was assembled and the first opera was performed on Russian soil. Certain emphases of this new culture were already apparent by the end of her reign.
First of all this new world rejoiced in the discovery of the human body. The cutting off of the beard destroyed man's sense of community with the idealized likenesses of the icons. The introduction of secular portraiture, of heroic statuary, and of new, more suggestive styles of dress-all aided in the discovery of the human form. The beginnings of court ballet and of stylized imperial balls under Anna placed a premium on elegance of form and movement that had never been evident in Muscovy.
Gradually, the individual was being discovered as an earthly being with personal attributes, private interests, and responsibilities. The word persona was used to describe the new portraits which were painted of men in their actual, human state rather than in the spiritualized saintly manner of the icons. By the late seventeenth century, this word had begun to acquire the more general meaning of an important or strong individual. Even he who was not important enough to become a persona in his own right was now considered an individual "soul" by the all-powerful state, which began to exact taxes and services directly from the individual rather than from the region or household.
Prokopovich introduced the word "personal" (personal'ny) in its modern sense early in the eighteenth century; and the first precise terms for "private" and "particular" also entered the Russian language at this time. Words that are now used for "law" and "crime" had long existed in Slavic, but "they did not penetrate into the language of Russian jurisprudence with their modern meaning until the eighteenth century."62
There was also a new love of decorative effects, of embellishment for its own sake. The lavish ornamentation and illusionism of the European baroque quickly imposed itself on the new capital. Guided by the bold hand of Rastrelli, the first original style for Russian secular architecture emerged under Anna's successor: the so-called Elizabethan rococo. At Peterhof and in the rebuilding of Tsarskoe Selo and the Winter Palace, this style superimposed decorative effects drawn from Muscovite church architecture on the giant facades, theatrical interiors, and monumental staircases of the European baroque. A similar ornateness soon became evident in furniture, hair styles, and porcelain.
Finally, a cult of classical antiquity began to emerge on Russian soil. Taken over first from Poland and then from Italian and French visitors was the idea that classical forms of art and life might serve as a supplement (if not an alternative) to Christian forms. The belief subtly grew that classical antiquity could-unaided by Christian revelation-answer many of the pressing problems of life. The first work of classical antiquity translated into Russian in the eighteenth century was Aesop's Fables; and the first ensemble in the new medium of sculpture to be displayed in St. Petersburg was a series of statues by the older Rastrelli, illustrating the morals of these fables. The new poets and writers that emerged under Elizabeth's reign in the 1740's all used classical forms of exposition: odes, elegies, and tonic verse rather than the syllabic verse of the late seventeenth century. The new operas, plays, and ballets of the Elizabethan era were built around classical more often than scriptural subjects-in marked contrast to the theater of Alexis' time. Peter the Great had himself sculpted in the guise of a Roman
emperor; and Latin became the scholarly language of the new Academy of Sciences.
This summoning up of classical images in a land so remote from the classical world points to the underlying unreality of early post-Petrine culture. The turquoise blue with which buildings were painted lent an unreal coloration to the great edifices of the new capital. The endless proliferation of three-dimensional decorative effects-artificial pilasters, statuary, and garden pavilions-reflects the general desire of baroque art to achieve mastery over its material and, in the last analysis, over nature itself.68 This effort seemed particularly presumptuous and unreal for such an untutored people in such an inhospitable natural environment.
Perhaps there was an unconscious realization of this unreality in Elizabeth's almost compulsive fondness for masquerades. Things were not what they seemed to be in either the decor or the dances of the Elizabethan court. Cryptic maxims, fables, and acrostics had already establis
hed themselves at the Tsar's court;64 and ever since 1735 there had been a special chair of allegory in the Academy of Sciences. Elizabeth's coronation in 1740 had been celebrated by two examples of allegorical ballet, her favorite form of theatrical entertainment. Increasingly during her reign, she sponsored not only masked balls of various sorts but a particular type known as a "metamorphosis," wherein men came disguised as women and vice versa. A laboratory for making artificial fireworks and a wooden "theatre of illuminations" jutting out into the Neva across from the Academy of Sciences were other forms of artifice initiated by Elizabeth. The greatest Russian scientist of the day, Michael Lomonosov, seems to have relished his assignment as official chronicler of these illuminations. He describes one in which a giant colossus looks toward the sea, holding up a torch and the initials of Elizabeth.
Far o'er the restless sea its beam would pour And lead the periled vessels safe to shore . . ,65
St. Petersburg, at the eastern extremity of the Baltic, was such a colossus, but it did not rest on firm foundations. It had been built over a swampy region which the Finns and Swedes had used only for forts and fisheries. It was constantly menaced by floods. Pushkin, Gogol, and other writers of the late imperial period were fascinated with the defiance of nature inherent in the creation of the new capital. The history of European culture in this city is rather like that of the extraordinary palm tree in a story by Vsevelod Garshin. Artificially transplanted from more sunlit southern regions to the greenhouse of a northern city, the plant restlessly seeks to bring the expansive freedom of its former habitat to all the docile native
plants confined in the greenhouse. Its brilliant growth upward toward the elusive sun attracts the fascinated attention of all, but leads ultimately to a shattering of the enclosure and a killing exposure to the real climate of the surrounding region.66
By the end of Elizabeth's reign St. Petersburg had a population about equal to that of Moscow and a culture similar to that of the leading capitals of Europe. It was already
. . . one of the strangest, loveliest, most terrible, and most dramatic of the world's great urban centers. The high northern latitude, the extreme slant of the sun's rays, the flatness of the terrain, the frequent breaking of the landscape by wide, shimmering expanses of water: all these combine to accent the horizontal at the expense of the vertical and to create everywhere the sense of immense space, distance, and power. . . . Cleaving the city down the center, the cold waters of the Neva move silently and swiftly, like a slab of smooth grey metal . . . bringing with them the tang of the lonely wastes of forests and swamp from which they have emerged. At every hand one feels the proximity of the great wilderness of the Russian north-silent, somber, infinitely patient.67
The soaring and exotic motifs of Muscovite architecture had been rejected, and the only vertical uplift was provided by the Admiralty and the Peter and Paul Fortress, reminders of the military preoccupations of its founder. The setting was completed by the bleak seasons of the north: the dark winters, the long, damp springs, the "white nights" of June, with their poetic" iridescence,
and, finally, the brief, pathetic summers, suggestive rather than explicit . . . passionately cherished by the inhabitants for their very rareness and brevity.
In such a city the attention of man is forced inward upon himself. . . . Human relationships attain a strange vividness and intensity, with a touch of premonition. . . .
The city is, and always has been, a tragic city, artificially created . . . geographically misplaced, yet endowed with a haunting beauty, as though an ironic deity had meant to provide some redemption for all the cruelties and all the mistakes.68
Such was St. Petersburg, symbol of the new Russia and a city which was to dominate the quickening intellectual and administrative life of the empire. Yet the victory of St. Petersburg and of its new secular culture was not complete. The thought patterns of Old Muscovy continued to dominate the old capital and much of the Russian countryside. Indeed, its traditionalist, religious culture made a number of powerful-if uncoordinated
and ultimately unsuccessful-counterattacks against the culture of St. Petersburg. These protest movements commanded widespread popular followings and helped turn the ideological split between old and new into a deep social cleavage between popular and elite culture.
The Defense of Muscovy
Already in Peter's lifetime two of the main forms of Muscovite protest reached a fever pitch of intensity: Old Believer communalism and Cossack-led peasant insurrectionism. Each of these movements first appeared under Alexis; but it was only under Peter that each became a distinct tradition with a broad social base and a deep ideology. The two movements often overlapped and reinforced one another-sharing as they did a common idealization of the Muscovite past and a hatred of the new secular bureaucracy. They did much to shape the character of all opposition movements under the Romanovs, not excepting those which brought about the end of the dynasty in 1917.
The Old Believers consolidated their hold over many Great Russians under Peter. The gathering strength of the amorphous Old Believer movement represented not so much increased support for their doctrinal position as resentment at the increased authority of foreigners in the new empire. The transition from Muscovite tsardom to multi-national empire was a particularly painful one for the Great Russian traditionalists. It involved the growth of a government bureaucracy dominated by more technically skilled Baltic Germans and the absorption from former Polish territories of better-educated Catholics and Jews. The confusions of war and social change gave a certain appeal to the simple Old Believer hypothesis that the reign of Antichrist was at hand, that Peter had been corrupted in foreign lands, and that the flood at the time of Peter's death was but a foretaste of God's wrathful judgment on this new world.
The Old Belief became particularly embedded in the psychology of the merchant classes, not only because of its fear of foreign competition, but also because of its special resentment of central bureaucracy. The Great Russian merchants, whose wealth had been amassed in the Russian north and protected by the traditional liberties of its cities, were hard hit by the new policies of increased central control. They tended to find solace in the Old Belief-identifying their own lost economic privileges with the idealized Christian civilization of Old Muscovy. They often preferred to move on to new areas rather than surrender old liberties or change old business
practices. Gradually a pattern developed of internal colonization by disaffected Great Russians who practiced puritanical, communal living along with the old forms of worship. Belief in the coming end of the world was not abandoned in these new communities, but the expectation of judgment was increasingly invoked to provide a sense of urgency about the work of the new community rather than a sense of imminent apocalypse. Salvation was no longer to be found through the sacraments of the Church or the activities of the state after the reforms of Nikon and Peter respectively. One sought salvation now in the grim and isolated communities in which alone the organic religious civilization of the Muscovite past was preserved.
The parallel between the Calvinists of Western Europe and the Old Believers of the East is striking. Both movements were puritanical, replacing a sacramental church with a new, this-worldly asceticism; an established hierarchical authority with local communal rule. Both movements stimulated new economic enterprise with their bleak insistence on the need for hard work as the only means of demonstrating one's election by a wrathful God. Both movements played leading roles in colonizing previously unsettled lands. The Old Believer communities pushing on into Siberia were, like the pilgrims sailing to North America, driven on both by the persecution of established churches and by their own restless hope of finding some unspoiled region in which God's ever-imminent kingdom might come into earthly being.69
Perhaps the most extraordinary of these new communities were those -that spread out along the frozen lakes and rivers of northern Russia. Inspired by the heroic resistance to central authority of the Solovetsk monastery
,70 these new communities continued their old communal business practices and traditional forms of worship in surroundings where the imperial authority was less likely to pursue them. The model community for the efitire region was that which developed in the 1690's along the Vyg River between Lake Onega and the White Sea. By 1720 there were more than 1,500 Old Believers in this community, and a rich hagiographical and polemic literature was developing in the Old Muscovy style. An impoverished princely family of the Russian north, the Denisovs, became the administrative and ideological leaders of the new community: in effect, lay elders of a new monastic civilization. The older brother, Andrew Denisov, provided the first systematic defense of the Old Belief in his Answers from Beside the Sea, drawn up in response to theological interrogation by the Holy Synod in 1722. His younger brother Semen developed and codified the martyrology of the schismatics with his History of the Fathers and Sufferers of Solovetsk and his Vineyard of Russia.71
The Icon and the Axe Page 29