focus of Peter’s interest and had priority over the rest of the structure, which was not completed until 1732. By 1723, the spire, gilded and surmounted with an angel holding a cross, reached a height of 367 feet (112 meters), which exceeded the bell tower of Ivan the Great by 105 feet (32 meters).
On the interior, the large windows that mark the length of the building provide ample illumination for the banners and other imperial regalia. It is not clear whether this great hall was origi1175
PETER THE GREAT
nally intended to serve as a burial place for the Romanov tsars; but with the death of Peter the Great, this function was assumed from the Archangel Cathedral in the Kremlin. The centerpiece of the interior is the gilded icon screen, designed by Ivan Zarudnyi and resembling the triumphal arches erected to celebrate Peter’s victories. The frame was carved between 1722 and 1726 by craftsmen in Moscow and assembled in the cathedral in 1727. Some of the cathedral’s ornamentation was lost after a lightning strike and fire in 1756, although prompt response by the garrison preserved the icon screen and much of the interior work.
The eighteenth century witnessed the construction of many other administrative and garrison buildings within the fortress, including an enclosed pavilion for Peter’s small boat and the state Mint. At the turn of the nineteenth century the fortress became the main political prison of Russia. Famous cultural and political figures detained there include Alexander Radishchev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Nikolai Chernyshevsky. In 1917, the garrison sided with the Bolsheviks and played a role in the shelling of the Winter Palace. During the early twenty-first century the fortress serves primarily as a museum. See also: MENSHIKOV, ALEXANDER DANILOVICH; PETER I
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brumfield, William Craft. (1993). A History of Russian Architecture. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hamilton, George Heard. (1975). The Art and Architecture of Russia. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books.
PETER THE GREAT See PETER I. PETRASHEVSKY, MIKHAIL See BUTASHEVICH-PETRASHEVSKY, MIKHAIL VASILIEVICH.
Given the oppressive power of the state under Nicholas I and the weakness of civil society in Russia, the political ferment that rocked Europe during the 1840s took the relatively subdued form of discussion groups meeting secretly in private homes. The most important of such groups met on Friday evenings in the St. Petersburg home of a young official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mikhail Butashevich-Petrashevsky, from late 1845 until the group was disbanded by the police in a wave of repression following the revolutions that erupted in Western Europe in 1848. More than one hundred members of the group were arrested and interrogated, and twenty-one of the leading figures were condemned to death. In an infamous instance of psychological torture, on December 22, 1849, the condemned men were led to the scaffold and hooded, and the firing squad ordered to shoulder arms, before an imperial adjutant rode up with a last-minute reprieve commuting the sentences to imprisonment or banishment. Among those sent to Siberia was the novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who later depicted the members of the group in his novel The Possessed.
The meetings of the Petrashevtsy, as the police labeled the men who met in Petrashevsky’s home, were open to invited guests as well as regular members. Thus, over the course of the group’s existence, several hundred men took part in the discussions. Some attendees were wealthy landowners or eminent writers or professors, such as the poets Alexei Pleshcheyev and Apollon Maikov and the economist V. A. Milyutin. The majority, however, were of modest means and held middle- or low-ranking positions in state service or were students or small-scale merchants. Serious about political ideas, they amassed a large collection of works in several languages on political philosophy and economics. While Petrashevsky himself was committed to the utopian socialism of Charles Fourier, and socialist thought was the dominant theme of the discussions, members of the group held a range of ideological and tactical approaches to the problem of transforming Russian society. Their most important project was the publication in 1845 and 1846 of A Pocket Dictionary of Foreign Terms, an effort to propagate their ideas through political articles disguised as dictionary entries. The censors eventually realized the subversive nature of the dictionary and ordered it confiscated, but not in time to prevent the sale of part of the second, more radical, edition.
The Petrashevtsy were not opposed in principle to a violent overthrow of the tsar’s government, but in practice most saw little hope of a successful revolution in Russia and therefore advocated partial reforms such as freedom of speech, freedom of
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press, and reform of the judicial system. The more radical members, led by Nikolai Speshnev, hoped to transform the group into a revolutionary organization that would prepare the ground for an armed revolt. Through subsidiary discussion circles that branched off from the original group, such as the one to which the novelist Nikolai Chernyshevsky belonged while a university student, the Petra-shevtsy played an important role in propagating socialist ideas in Russia. See also: CHERNYSHEVSKY, NIKOLAI GAVRILOVICH; DOS-TOYEVSKY, FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH; NICHOLAS I
Seddon, J. H. (1985). The Petrashevtsy: A Study of the Russian Revolutionaries of 1848. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Walicki, Andrzej. (1979). A History of Russian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Marxism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
He became interested in Christian politics and was an activist during the Revolution of 1905. He established the newspaper God’s Truth in Moscow in 1906 and was elected to the first Duma as a Constitutional Democrat.
Petrov never served in the Duma, however, because he was charged before an ecclesiastical court with false teaching. Although exonerated, he was confined to a monastery under church discipline. Despite popular sympathy for Petrov, the church defrocked him in 1908 and banned him from the capital and from public employment. He then became a journalist for a liberal newspaper, The Word. After the revolutions of 1917 he emigrated to Serbia, and then in 1922 to France. He died in Paris in 1925.
Petrov’s main importance was in his contribution to the development of a modern, liberal understanding of Christianity in the Russian Orthodox context. See also: ORTHODOXY
PETROV, GRIGORY SPIRIDONOVICH
(1868-1925), Orthodox priest and a leading proponent of Christian social activism.
Grigory Petrov was born in Iamburg, St. Petersburg province. He was educated at the diocesan seminary and the St. Petersburg Ecclesiastical Academy (1887-1891), and on graduating became a priest in a St. Petersburg church.
Petrov was also active as a writer. In his most successful work, The Gospel as the Foundation of Life (1898), he argued that Christian believers were required to apply the literal teachings of Jesus to every aspect of their lives in order to begin building the Kingdom of God here on earth. Petrov knew of the American Social Gospel movement, but his ideas were shaped by his encounters with new conceptions of pastorship and Christian activism then developing among the clergy of St. Petersburg.
Petrov’s writings found a ready audience and made him famous. In 1903, however, conservatives began to attack his ideas in the ecclesiastical press, and as a result in 1904 the church dismissed Petrov from his pulpit and banned him from public speaking. Nevertheless, Petrov continued to write.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Valliere, Paul. (1977). “Modes of Social Action in Russian Orthodoxy: The Case of Father Petrov’s Zateinik.” Russian History 4(2):142-158.
Petrushka was a Russian puppet theater spectacle and also the name of its main character (cf. the English
