The Icon and the Axe

Even Soviet scholars who minimize the importance of religion and generally maximize Great Russian influences now tend to date the beginning of the Russian Enlightenment from the influx of learned White Russian and Ukrainian monks into Moscow at the time of schism in the Russian Church.1 Monks and seminarians indeed continued to play a large role in the Russian Enlightenment down into the twentieth century, and are responsible for some of the religious intensity of much Russian secular thought. At the same time, the Westernized regions of the empire played a key role in opening up the Russian mind to the speculative philosophy and classical art forrns which soon dominated aristocratic culture. While under Polish dominance, Kiev had been transformed into an eastern bastion of scholastic education and baroque architecture. For nearly a century after its return to Russian control, Kiev was the most literate city in the empire. The Kiev-Mogila Academy (which was not made a theological academy until the nineteenth century) was the closest approximation to a Western-style liberal arts university. Between 1721 and 1765, twenty-eight seminaries were founded-all on the Kievan model; and it is probably not too much to say that Kiev taught Russia not only to read and write in the eighteenth century, but also to think in the abstract, metaphysical terms which were to prove so attractive to the aristocratic intellectuals.2

Foreign technicians were also bearers of literary and secular ideas in the early modern period of Russian history. Yet the various military, commercial, and medical specialists that flooded into Russia in increasing numbers from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century were, for the most part, kept in hermetically sealed settlements in the major ports and administrative centers. The price of extensive residence or broad Russian contact

was almost invariably complete assimilation: change of name, religion, and dress. Those willing to pay this price did not generally have very much intellectual or cultural vitality to contribute to their adopted land.

Peter the Great was important not for introducing foreign technical ideas into Russia, but for making them the basis of a new state-sponsored type of education. By making a measure of elementary education obligatory for much of his service aristocracy and by introducing an official civil script, a reformed alphabet, and innumerable Western words and concepts into the language, Peter prepared the way for a more purely secular enlightenment. Shortly after his death, the first institute of secular scientific learning, the Academy of Sciences, was established in St. Petersburg along lines that he had prescribed. By entrusting the organization and staffing of the Academy to the German mathematician and natural philosopher Christian Wolff, Peter recognized the dependence on foreigners that would continue under his successors but willed to them his own bias in favor of secular learning. Whereas the school system set up early in Peter's reign in key Russian cities by Pietist evangelists from Halle soon collapsed, the academy organized by Wolff (who had been forced to leave Halle by fearful Pietists) survived and gradually became the center of a new educational system.3

Only, however, under Elizabeth in the 1750's did the work of the Academy begin to have a broader impact on Russian culture. By then the many-sided effects of Peter's opening to the West had begun to reach a fruition that can properly be called a Russian Enlightenment. Within the space of a few years in the mid-fifties the Academy issued a number of ethnographic and geographic publications that broadly stimulated aristocratic society with fresh information about other cultures; and Russia acquired a university, permanent theater, academy of arts, decorative porcelain factory, and so on.

The early years of Catherine's reign were perhaps thr, most decisive of all, for the new sovereign virtually commanded the literate public to consider a new spectrum of problems-problems ranging from politics to architecture to agriculture. Whereas the number of books printed annually in the Russian empire had risen from a low of seven in the ) ear after Peter the Great's death to twenty-three by the end of the fifties, the average in the 1760's leaped to 105 a year: the first in a series of geometric increases. Whereas almost all of the few books printed in the first half of the eighteenth century were religious, 40 per cent of the eight thousand books printed in the second half of the century (almost all of them during Catherine's reign) were purely secular.4 The number of new books put in circulation in Russia in the 1760's and 1770's was more than seven times the number for the 1740's and 1750's.5