The Icon and the Axe

Betskoy was Russia's first de facto minister of education, serving as president of the Academy of Arts, organizing planner for the Smolny Monastery for women (the only one of these "monastic" schools to outlive him), and reorganizer of the curriculum for the infantry corps of cadets-as well as head of the foundling homes and an influential adviser to the Academy of Sciences and many private tutors. He was also a resourceful fund raiser, promoting special theatrical benefits and a lucrative tax for education on another favorite aristocratic recreation: playing cards. He died in 1795, just a year before his sovereign benefactor, and willed his substantial private fortune of 400,000 rubles to his educational projects. As he was lowered into the grave, the most honored poet of the age, Gabriel Derzhavin, read a specially written "On the End of the Philanthropist" to this "ray of goodness." The poem was, as it were, the secular substitute for the "Eternal Memory" of the Orthodox burial service. Now "heaven, truth, saintliness" were made to "cry out above the grave" that their "light" was immortal even if their lives were only "smoke." "Without good deeds," Derzhavin concludes, "there is no blessedness."48

One can, of course, question what the real number of "good deeds" or extent of civic "blessedness" was under Catherine. Slje never shared her courtiers' fondness for Rousseau, and forbade-long before the Pugachev uprising-the circulation of many of his key works, including Emile. She viewed Rousseau as "a new St. Bernard," who was arming France and all of Europe for "a spiritual crusade against me."50 Nevertheless, the all-important fourth part of Emile, the "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar," readily slipped through the hands of the censors when it appeared in Russian translation in 1770 under the "Aesopian" title "Meditations on the Majesty of God, on His Providence and on Man."

The historical importance of the Russian Enlightenment under Catherine cannot be denied. Russians had been introduced to a new world of thought that was neither theological nor technological, but involved the remaking of the whole man in accordance with a new secular ideal of ethical activism. Moreover, the idea was established that this moral educa-

tion was properly the responsibility of the government. Betskoy was thoroughly devoted to autocracy, and sought to enlist government support for his educational program on the grounds that it would serve to produce a select elite uniquely loyal to the imperial cause.

Like Montesquieu in politics, Betskoy in education set the tone for much subsequent discussion in Russia, without seeing many of his practical prescriptions adopted. Betskoy's interest in using the Russian language was disregarded by academies and tutors alike, who were expected to familiarize aristocratic youth with Western European rather than Russian or Byzantine tradition. His interest in a measure of practical training in trades was never able to modify the pronounced emphasis on non-technical and broadly philosophical subjects. Time spent in higher educational institutions generally counted as state service for noblemen or for those aspiring to a title. A leisurely and dilettantish education was better preparation for life among the aristocracy than industrious specialization.51 Betskoy's more earnest boarding schools were remembered mainly as the object of humorous barbs, usually aimed at the "child-like Betskoy" {detskoy-Betskoy).

Betskoy's last important service to Catherine was supervising the embellishment of St. Petersburg. With characteristic thoroughness he organized expeditions to Siberia to bring back rare and decorative stones, arranged for importation of stone from Finland and the manufacture of bricks in St. Petersburg, and helped put in their final place a variety of statues, including Falconet's long-labored equestrian statue of Peter the Great in the Senate Square.52 This imposing memorial to Peter became, through Pushkin's famous poem "The Bronze Horseman," an enduring symbol of both the majestic power and the impersonal coldness of the new capital. Catherine's pretense in placing a monumental facade over widespread suffering seems in some ways anticipatory of the dostoprimechatel'nosti ("imposing sights") in the midst of terror in the Stalin era. Her city below Kiev on the Dnieper (Ekaterinoslav, now Dniepropetrovsk) became the site of the first and most celebrated mammoth construction project of the Soviet era: the hydroelectric dam of the 1920's.