The Icon and the Axe

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