The Icon and the Axe

imperial authority and partial popuTaT7u1e~wKIcTi~until then Novgorod had shared with many commercial cities of the West. The ideal of non-despotic, representative government impelled the early-hineteenth-century reformer to

take myself in imagination back to Novgorod. I hear the ringing bell of the popular assembly … I throw the chains off my feet, and to the "Who goes there?" of the guard, I proudly reply: "a free citizen of Nov-

s°rod!"9'4

and the romantic poet to

sound forth like the bell in the assembly tower in the days of the people's celebrations and misfortunes.94

When, a few years later, lyricism turned to anguish^_Gogol gave_a new, more mysterious quality to the image in one of the most famous passages in all Russian literature. Likening Russia to a speeding troika (carriage with three horses) near_fj}ejend of Dead Souls, he"asks its destination. But "there was no answer save the^eUpouring forth rnarvellous sound."

A prophetic answer came a few years later in the prefatory poem to the first issue of Russia's first illegal revolutionary journal-appropriately called Kolokol (The Bell). The long-silent social conscience of Russia will henceforth-promised the editor, Alexander Herzen-sound out like a bell

swinging back and forth with a tone which shall not cease to reverberate until … a joyful, orderly, and quietly heroic bell begins to ring in every man.1*5

but Herzen's summoning bell was soon drowned out by the shrill sounds of the Nabat: the special alarm bell traditionally used in times of fire or attack and the name of the first Russian periodical urging the formation of a Jacobin recolutionary elite.96 Tkachev, the editor of Nabat, was vindicated by the eventual victory of Lenin's professional revolutionaries. BujLunder {Bolshevismj_a.il} bells fell silent-their function to some extenttak^_up_by__ the hypnotic sounding of machine^1_whicluamiQuji«d_-^e_coming of an earthly rather than a heavenly paradise.

The enduring Russian fascination with cannon was evidenced in Ivan IV's storied stonrmT^~qf^Kazajg^ui"i552"; the""shooting ????????"?????? by a Moscow mob in 1606 of the remains of the False Dmitry, the only foreigner ever to reign in the Kremlin; the determination of Chaikovsky to score "real cannon fire into his "oVSrfure ???????????????? the defeat of NapgleojijirTffia; and in the iaterlsare' use~of a hundred cannon to announce their annointment during a coronation.97 Stalin was neurotically preoccupied with massed artilTeTyTormafiohs throughout the Second World War; and his military pronouncements conferred only on the artillery the adjective grozny ("terrible" or "dread") traditionally applied to Ivan IV,,?JL^ ~5ub sequent Soviet success with rockets can be seerTaTan extension of this long-time interest. Tshere seems a kind of historic justice to the~Interde-p"endence in the late 1950's between the dazzling effects of cosmic cannoneering and the renewed promises of a classless millennium.

The Communist world that had come into being by then corresponded less to the prophecies of Karl Marx than to those of an almost unknown Russian contemporary, Nicholas Il'in.99 While the former spent his life as an uprootedJnteDectual in Berlin, Paris, and London, the latter spSurhis~as'"a" patriotic artillery officer lffRussian central AsiaCWTiel:elisTn7former iookecT to the rational emergence of a new, basically Western European proletariat under German leadership, the latter looked to the messianic arrival of a new Eurasian religiou^__ciyjhrationunder Russian tutelage. At the very time Marx was writing his Communist Manifesto for German revolutionaries refuged in France and Belgium, Il'in was proclaiming his Tidings of Zion to Russian sectarians in Siberia. U'in's strange teachings reflect the childlike love of cannon, the primitive ethical dualism, and the suppressed fear of Europe, which were all present in Russian thinking. His followers marched to such hymns as "The Bomb of the Divine Artillery"; divided the world into men of Jehovah and of Satan (Iegovisty i Satanisty), those sitting at the right and left hand of God (desnye i oshuinye); and taught that a new empire of complete brotherhood and untold wealth would be formed by the followers of Jehovah along a vast railroad stretching from the Middle East through Russia to south China.