The Icon and the Axe

Catherine's first grandson, Alexander, resembled less the Macedonian conqueror for whom he was named than the Polish visionaries whom he met in his youth. Her second grandson, Constantine, became the rallying point for the reformist elements in the guards regiments who assembled in Senate Square in St. Petersburg on December 14, 1825, after Alexander's death. But these "Decembrists" related the name Constantine not to Constantinople but to constitution-some of their illiterate followers even believing that the Russian word konstitutsiia was the name of his wife. The Decembrists were calling not for an imperial commander but for a man who had become the governor of Poland and was thought to provide some kind of link with its more moderate reformist traditions. To understand why these moderate constitutionalists were crushed, and the dilemma of the reforming despot firmly resolved in favor of despotism under Nicholas I, one must turn from symbols and omens to the crucial substantive changes which were effected in the direction of Russian thought under Catherine.

The Fruits of the Enlightenment

The concrete achievements of Catherine's domestic program seem strangely insignificant: the introduction of vaccination, paper money, and an improved system of regional administration. Yet her impact on Russian history went far deeper than the superficial statecraft and foreign conquest

for which she is justly renowned. More than any other single person prior * to the Leninist revolution, Catherine cut official culture loose from its religious roots, and changed both its physical setting and its philosophical preoccupations. Important changes in architecture and ideas must thus be analyzed if one is to understand the revolutionary nature and fateful consequences of Catherine's Enlightenment.

Catherine substituted the city for the monastery as the main center of Russian culture. She, and not Peter, closed down monasteries on a massive scale and tore down wooden symbols of Muscovy, such as the old summer palace of the tsars at Kolomenskoe. In some of the monasteries that remained open she placed pseudo-classical bell towers that clashed with everything else and demonstrated her inability to make even token gestures to the old religious culture of Muscovy.

Convinced that men have always honored "the memory of the founders of cities equally with the memory of lawmakers,"43 she appointed a commission at the beginning of her reign to plan a systematic rebuilding of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and encouraged it to draw up plans for building or renovating some 416 other cities. St. Petersburg was soon transformed from an imitation Dutch naval base into a stately granite capital. New cities were built, and the over-all urban population, which had increased only slightly since the time of Peter the Great, nearly doubled between 1769 and 1782. In many of her rebuilt cities, from Tver to Tobol'sk, Catherine was able to realize her ideal of rational uniformity. Yaroslavl, second in size only to Moscow among cities of the interior, was beautifully transformed by superimposing a radiocentric grid of broad streets onto the jumbled city, and by subtly converting its ornate late-Muscovite churches into decorative terminal points for streets and promenades. The perfection and large-scale manufacture of uniform-sized bricks created new practical possibilities for rebuilding wooden provincial cities. Throughout the realm, architectural mass began to replace the florid decorative effects of both the high Muscovite style and the Elizabethan rococo, igimple, neo-classical shapes-semi-circular arches and domes and Doric columns-dominated the new urban architecture, where the design of the ensemble generally determined the proportions of the individual structure.

Of course, many of Catherine's plans for cities were completely impractical; many more were never acted on; and the percentage of total population in the cities remained minute and to a large extent seasonal. Those cities which were built conformed only to a prescribed pattern of roads and squares, and of design on important facing surfaces. Lesser streets and all block interiors were completely uncontrolled-testifying in their squalor to the superficiality of Catherine's accomplishment. Behind all

the facades and profiles lay an enserfed peasantry and a swollen, disease-ridden army distracted from their cohective misfortunes by a running tide of military conquest. Thousands of provincial figures-including many who were neither aristocratic nor literate-participated in building the new cities; and architecture proved in many ways as important as literature in spreading the new ideal of rational order and classical style.