The Icon and the Axe

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