The Icon and the Axe

Nevertheless, the majestic, artificial city of Catherine's era provided a new center and symbol for Russian culture. Catherine's new cities were not basically commercial centers, the traditional arenas for the development of a practical-minded bourgeois culture, but rather aristocratic cities: provincial showplaces for the newly acquired elegance and pro-consular power of the aristocracy. Town planners were more concerned with providing plazas for military reviews than places for trade and industry; architects devoted their ingenuity to convertible theater-ballrooms rather than convenient facilities for ordinary goods and services.

Because so many of her new cities were administrative centers for her newly created provincial governments, the city center was dominated by political rather than religious buildings. Horizontal lines replaced vertical ones as the narrow streets, tent roofs, and onion domes of the wooden cities were swept away. The required ratio of 2:1 between the width of major streets and the height of facing buildings became 4:1m many cases. Such artificially broadened promenades and the sprawling squares visible from pseudo-classical porches and exedras gave the ruling aristocracy an imposing sense of space.

Having just conquered the southern steppe and settled on a provincial estate, the officer-aristocrat in the late years of Catherine's reign was newly conscious of the land; and its vastness seemed both to mock and to menace his pretensions. In the new cities to which he repaired for the long winter, he could feel physically secure in a way that was never before possible in Russian cities. The danger of fire was greatly reduced by the progressive elimination of wooden buildings and narrow streets; the last great peasant uprising had been quelled; and the key bases of Tatar raiders in the south were finally captured.

Yet gone also was the psychological security of the old Muscovite cities with their outer walls and inner kremlins capped by the domes and spires that lifted eyes upward. The city was now dominated by the horizontal stretch of roads leading from a central space at the heart of the city to the greater spaces that lay all around. Into such cities, the ruling aristocrats brought an inner malaise not unrelated to the limitlessness and monotony of the steppe and to the artificiality of their own position on it.

A belief in the liberating and ennobling power of education was per-

haps the central article of faith in the European Enlightenment. But the practical problem of providing secular education for the relatively rootless and insecure Russian aristocracy proved profoundly vexing. Both the limited accomplishments and the deeper problems are illustrated in the career of Ivan Betskoy, Catherine's principal court adviser on educational matters. His long life spanned ninety-two years of the eighteenth century; and most of his many-sided reformist activities were dedicated to the central concern of that century, the spread of education and public enlightenment.

The ideal of an expanded, Western type of school system had been present for several decades in the more advanced Western sections of the Russian Empire. German-educated Ukrainian seminarians like Gregory Teplov drew up elaborate plans; Herder, while a young pastor in Riga, dreamed of installing a system of instruction modeled on Rousseau's Emile. Baltic German graduates of Tartu, in Esthonia, brought with them the ideas of the Enlightenment that had begun to permeate that institution. Officers like Andrew Bolotov returned from the Seven Years' War with plans for streamlining Russian aristocratic instruction along lines set down by the victorious Frederick the Great.44

At first glance, Catherine's educational projects appear to be nothing more than another example of high hopes and minimal accomplishment. Encouraged by Locke's On the Education of Children (translated into Russian in 1761) and his Essay Concerning Human Understanding to think of man as a tabula rasa on which education is free to print any message, Catherine discussed plans for education with everyone from the encyclopedists to the Jesuits (to whom she offered shelter after the Pope abolished the Society in 1773). However, the statute for public schools in the empire, drawn up with the aid of Jankovich de Mirievo, a Serb who had reorganized public education within the Hapsburg empire, remained largely a paper proclamation. While she talked of sowing seeds of knowledge throughout the empire, she let the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences lapse into a relatively fallow period in which little serious work was published.45