The Icon and the Axe

Thus, contact with the West brought sectarian Protestant ideas into Russia along with secular rationalism. The centers of this strange sectarian tradition were the relatively new, western cities of Russia: St. Petersburg and the cities that had arisen on the southern plain of Russia during the Tatar and Ottoman recession: Voronezh, Kharkov, Ekaterinoslav, and Tambov. This latter city played such an extraordinary role in producing prophetic sectarians that it was often popularly called Tambog ("God is there").34 It seems darkly fitting that Tambov should prove a center of Utopian anarchism during the Civil War, one of the last to capitulate to

Bolshevik rule, and the one to which anxious Soviet academicians flocked in the late 1950's seeking to discover why sectarian sentiment continued to exist after forty years of atheistic rule.35 Perhaps it is also appropriate that the leading defender of an ascetic and Utopian reading of Communist doctrine amidst the waning of ideological fervor in post-Stalinist Russia was Michael Suslov, who was brought up in a family of religious dissenters and bore the name of the founder of Russian sectarianism.

The New World of St. Petersburg

The eighteenth century was greeted in Moscow with parades, festivities, and bonfires that lasted for an entire week. Like almost everything else in the official culture of the century to follow, these activities were ordered from above for reasons of state. Author of the decree-and ofjjthe change in New Year's Day from September to January-was, of course, Peter the Great, who has remained in the eyes of historians as towering a figure as his six feet eight inches rendered him to contemporaries. Having finished his tour of Western Europe and crushed the unruly streltsy, Peter was to turn in the first quarter of the new century to the administrative reforms and military campaigns that were to consolidate the position of Russia as a great and indisputably European power. In 1700 he took the first decisive step: he decreed that^beardsjshould henceforth be shaved off and'short, [German style of coats worn for "the glory and beauty of the government."36

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.