The Icon and the Axe

. . . one of the strangest, loveliest, most terrible, and most dramatic of the world's great urban centers. The high northern latitude, the extreme slant of the sun's rays, the flatness of the terrain, the frequent breaking of the landscape by wide, shimmering expanses of water: all these combine to accent the horizontal at the expense of the vertical and to create everywhere the sense of immense space, distance, and power. . . . Cleaving the city down the center, the cold waters of the Neva move silently and swiftly, like a slab of smooth grey metal . . . bringing with them the tang of the lonely wastes of forests and swamp from which they have emerged. At every hand one feels the proximity of the great wilderness of the Russian north-silent, somber, infinitely patient.67

The soaring and exotic motifs of Muscovite architecture had been rejected, and the only vertical uplift was provided by the Admiralty and the Peter and Paul Fortress, reminders of the military preoccupations of its founder. The setting was completed by the bleak seasons of the north: the dark winters, the long, damp springs, the "white nights" of June, with their poetic" iridescence,

and, finally, the brief, pathetic summers, suggestive rather than explicit . . . passionately cherished by the inhabitants for their very rareness and brevity.

In such a city the attention of man is forced inward upon himself. . . . Human relationships attain a strange vividness and intensity, with a touch of premonition. . . .

The city is, and always has been, a tragic city, artificially created . . . geographically misplaced, yet endowed with a haunting beauty, as though an ironic deity had meant to provide some redemption for all the cruelties and all the mistakes.68

Such was St. Petersburg, symbol of the new Russia and a city which was to dominate the quickening intellectual and administrative life of the empire. Yet the victory of St. Petersburg and of its new secular culture was not complete. The thought patterns of Old Muscovy continued to dominate the old capital and much of the Russian countryside. Indeed, its traditionalist, religious culture made a number of powerful-if uncoordinated

and ultimately unsuccessful-counterattacks against the culture of St. Petersburg. These protest movements commanded widespread popular followings and helped turn the ideological split between old and new into a deep social cleavage between popular and elite culture.

The Defense of Muscovy

Already in Peter's lifetime two of the main forms of Muscovite protest reached a fever pitch of intensity: Old Believer communalism and Cossack-led peasant insurrectionism. Each of these movements first appeared under Alexis; but it was only under Peter that each became a distinct tradition with a broad social base and a deep ideology. The two movements often overlapped and reinforced one another-sharing as they did a common idealization of the Muscovite past and a hatred of the new secular bureaucracy. They did much to shape the character of all opposition movements under the Romanovs, not excepting those which brought about the end of the dynasty in 1917.

The Old Believers consolidated their hold over many Great Russians under Peter. The gathering strength of the amorphous Old Believer movement represented not so much increased support for their doctrinal position as resentment at the increased authority of foreigners in the new empire. The transition from Muscovite tsardom to multi-national empire was a particularly painful one for the Great Russian traditionalists. It involved the growth of a government bureaucracy dominated by more technically skilled Baltic Germans and the absorption from former Polish territories of better-educated Catholics and Jews. The confusions of war and social change gave a certain appeal to the simple Old Believer hypothesis that the reign of Antichrist was at hand, that Peter had been corrupted in foreign lands, and that the flood at the time of Peter's death was but a foretaste of God's wrathful judgment on this new world.

The Old Belief became particularly embedded in the psychology of the merchant classes, not only because of its fear of foreign competition, but also because of its special resentment of central bureaucracy. The Great Russian merchants, whose wealth had been amassed in the Russian north and protected by the traditional liberties of its cities, were hard hit by the new policies of increased central control. They tended to find solace in the Old Belief-identifying their own lost economic privileges with the idealized Christian civilization of Old Muscovy. They often preferred to move on to new areas rather than surrender old liberties or change old business