The Icon and the Axe

Tatishchev, the third of these Petrine harbingers of new secular thought patterns, lived longest and attained his greatest influence after Peter's death. He formed, together with Prokopovich and the learned poet-diplomat Antioch Kantemir, a group known as the "learned guard," which was in many ways the first in the long line of self-conscious intellectual circles devoted to the propagation of secular knowledge. Tatishchev's career illustrates particularly well how Peter's interest in war and technology led Russian thought half-unconsciously to broader cultural vistas.

Tatishchev was first of all a military officer-trained in Peter's new engineering and artillery schools and tested by almost continuous fighting during the last fifteen years of the Northern War. He spent the last, peaceful years of Peter's reign supervising work in the newly opened metallurgical industries of the Urals (later to become his major vocation) and journeying to Sweden to continue his engineering training at a higher level. The combination of geographic explorations in the East and archival explorations in the West turned this officer-engineer toward the study of history. In 1739 he presented to the Academy of Sciences the first fruit of a long and panoramic History oj Russia: the first example of critical scientific history by a native Russian.

Tatishchev's history was not published until thirty years after it was written and twenty years after his death. Even then, it produced a remark-

able effect, for it was still decades ahead of its time. Unlike the Sinopsis of Gizel, which remained the basic history of Russia throughout the early eighteenth century, Tatishchev's History was a scientific work, seeking to combine his knowledge of geographical and military problems with a critical, comparative examination of the manuscript sources. Its aim was, moreover, the frankly secular one of proving useful background reading for those engaged in war and statecraft. Not only was its framework free of the traditional preoccupation with sacred history and genealogy, but it was even free of a narrowly Russian focus, making an effort to include the history of the non-Russian peoples of the empire. It introduced a descriptive scheme of periodization, defended unrestricted autocracy as the only form of government suited to a country of Russia's size and complexity, and generally served as a model for many of the subsequent synthetic histories of Russia.57

'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