The Icon and the Axe

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