The Icon and the Axe

Completed in 1773 by the court painter of Catiierine the Great, D. Levitsky, this painting is done full figure in the manner of the so-called "parade portraits," amidst pseudo-classical surroundings. The old obraza, or "forms," through which God was thought to have intervened in history were replaced by persony, or "persons," of importance who were thought to be making history in their own right. Demidov is pointing, not like the central figure in the "Old Testament Trinity" to God's mysterious gifts to man, but to his own eminently tangible benefactions to humanity as an "enlightened" patron of agriculture in the countryside and of botanical beau-tification in the new cities. The virtue of the painting lies in the faint note of caricature which Levitsky has injected into his portrayal of this rather vain and venal scion of a famous aristocratic family.

PLATE VIII

???? under Catherine it was unclear what the relationship of the true tsar was to be toward the woman on the throne. For many of his followers, Pugachev was simply the miraculously returned figure of Peter III, the slain husband and imperial predecessor of Catherine. A few thought he should replace Catherine, but many thought he should marry her, and he himself seems to have looked on Catherine as a mother being ravished by her courtiers.84

The fundamentally conservative nature of the belief in a true tsar may be seen from the fact that each of the major pretenders gained national support not through any positive program but through his ability to serve as the focus for a variety of forces resisting change. In each case the tsar most immediately threatened was attempting to extend central authority and cultural Westernization: Boris Godunov (the False Dmitry), Shuisky (Bolotnikov), Alexis (Stenka Razin), Peter the Great (Bulavin), and Catherine (Pugachev). The effect of the heroic rebellions was to strengthen rather than weaken the bureaucratic centralization they were opposing. Peasant animosities were in effect directed into periodic bloodbaths of local officials, who were relatively expendable for the central government, while peasant loyalty to the autocrat, the pivot and heart of the system, was intensified. Even in rebellion the peasants could not conceive of an alternative political system. They refused to believe that the reigning tsar was responsible for the evils of the time and the bureaucrats and foreign elements around him.

As in the case of the Old Believers, the conservative peasant insur-rectionaries bear certain resemblances to other European protest movements against modernization. In social composition and messianic utopian-ism the Russian peasant rebellions resemble those of sixteenth-century Germany. In their conservative longing for a more godly ruling line, they resemble the Jacobites of late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. Just as the Jacobite myth lived on in agrarian Scotland and northern England long after it had failed as an insurrectionary force, so the myth of peasant rebellion lived on in the mentality of southern Russia long after the last great insurrection under Pugachev.

Thus, although the state bureaucracy and army grew steadily and the service aristocracy gained in wealth and local authority throughout the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, many Russians continued to believe in the superiority of the small schismatic communities or to dream of a new Stenka Razin who would lead them to a tsar-deliverer.

Less dramatic than either the schismatics or the peasant insurrection-aries was a third form of religious protest against the new world of St. Petersburg: the monastic revival within the official Church. This movement was the slowest to develop and the most restricted in terms of popular

participation. But it was perhaps the deepest of all and the one most faithful to the culture of Old Muscovy. The central institution of that culture had always been the monasteries; and their ability to recover even in part from the crippling blows of the early eighteenth century is perhaps the surest indication of the continued importance of this "old" culture in the "new" period of Russian history.

The possibility of any such revival must have seemed extremely remote in the early eighteenth century. The efforts of Peter and Anna to bring the Russian Church closer organizationally to the Lutheran state churches of the Baltic regions had resulted in a great weakening of the monastic estate. Whereas there had been about twenty-five thousand in monastic orders at the beginning of the eighteenth century, there were less than fifteen thousand by the end of Anna's reign; and the number was to decline still further after Catherine the Great formally confiscated monastic property in 1763. The listing of 1764 showed that only 318 monasteries remained out of more than two thousand in the late seventeenth century.85