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.
In a similar, but even more visionary vein, Nicholas Fedorov, an. ascetic 'and self-effacing librarian in late nineteenth-century Moscow, propKesiedlHat a new fusion of science and faith would lead even to the physical resuscitation of dead ancestors. Russia was to give birth in concert with China to a new Eurasian civilization, which was to use artillery to regulate totally the climate and surrounding atmosphere of this world, and-thrust its citizens, into the stratosphere to colonize others. His vision of cosmic revolution fascinated both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and influenced a number of Promethean dreamers in the earliest Soviet planning agencies.100 His most inspired followers fled, however, from Bolshevik Russia to Harbin, Manchuria, to form a quasi-religious commune, which was in turn engulfed when the wave of Leninist, political revolution spread from their native to their adopted land.
Russian historyJsfulIof_sjachprophetic anticipations, just as it is of
reappearingsyjiMsangMixa^axe~oT
cannon has often buried itself into the consciousness, ifnot the conscience, of the executioaex. That which is purged from the memory lives on in the subconscious; that which is expunged from written records survives in oral folkJore,Jrideed, one finds in modern Russian jhistory much j)f__the_ same__ recu^ejic^ofjjasic themes that one finds in the unrefined early traditions of bell ringing and popular singing.
It may be, of course, that these echoes from childhood no longer reverberate in the adult Russia of today. Even if real, these sounds may be as enigmatic as the ringing of Gogol's troika; or ^erhapsonly a dying echo: the perezvon thatjpmains misleadingly audible after the bell has already fallen silent. To determine how much of Old Russian culture may have survived, one must leave aside these recurring symbols from the remote past and turn to the historical recol:d7wrntch-begTnriirth€'fourteenth IJentury to provide a rich if bewildering flow of accomplishment that extends without interruption to the, present Having looked at the heritage, environment, and early artifacts of Russian culture, one must now turn to the rise of Muscovy and its dramatic confrontation with a Western world in the throes of the Renaissance and Reformation.
The Early Fourteenth to the Early Seventeenth Century
The rise of a distinctive civilization under the leadership of Moscow from the establishment of its metropolitan seat in 1326 to the achievement of military hegemony and the first assumption of imperial titles during the reign of Ivan III, 'the Great' (1462-1505). Monastic leadership in the colonization of the Russian north (particularly in the century between the founding by St. Sergius of the Monastery of the Holy Trinity in 1337 and the founding of the Solovetsk Monastery on the White Sea in 1436), and in the creation of a sense of national unity and destiny. Increased militance and xenophobia in the face of attacks by knightly orders from the West, continuing conflict with the Mongols, and the Byzantine collapse of 1453. The growth of prophetic passion as an intensification of the historical bias of Russian theology: the fools in Christ, Moscow as the 'third Rome.'
The complex, traumatic confrontation of a powerful but primitive Muscovy with a Western Europe in the throes of the Renaissance and the Reformation. The destruction of the rationalistic and republican traditions of cosmopolitan Novgorod; the victory of the Moscow-oriented hierarchy over the Westward-looking heretics. The importance of Catholic ideas in the formation of the authoritarian 'Josephite' ideology of the sixteenth century adopted by the Muscovite Tsars even while denouncing 'the Latins.' The growing military and technological dependence-under Ivan IV, 'the Terrible' (1533-84), Boris Godunov (1598-1605), and Michael Romanov (1613-45)- on the North European 'Germans' despite ideological opposition to Protestantism.
The reign of Ivan IV as both the culmination and the first breaking point in the Muscovite ideal of building a prophetic, religious civilization. On the one hand, his fixation with genealogical sanctification, his attempt to monasticize all of Russian life, and the similarities of his rule with that of the kings of ancient Israel and of contemporary Spain. On the other, Ivan's breaking of the sacred ruling line (dating back to the legendary summons of Riurik to Novgorod in 862) and preparing the way for the tradition of 'false pretenders,' and his involvement of Russia in Western politics through his attempt to move west into the Baltic during the costly Livonian Wars of 1558 -83. The coming of the Western European religious wars to Russian soil, as Lutheran Sweden and Catholic Poland begin a long, losing struggle with Muscovy for control of northeastern Europe during the Russian interregnum, or 'Time of Troubles' (1604-13).
i. The Muscovite Ideology
1 he uniqueness of the new Great Russian culture that gradually emerged after the eclipse of Kiev is exemplified by the tent roof and the onion dome: two striking new shapes, which by the early sixteenth century dominated the skyline of the Russian north.
The lifting up of soaring wooden pyramids from raised octagonal churches throughout this period probably represents the adoption of wooden construction methods which pre-existed Christianity in the Great Russian north. Whatever obscure relationship the Russian tent roof may bear to Scandinavian, Caucasian, or Mongol forms, its development from primitive, horizontal log construction and its translation from wood into stone and brick in the sixteenth century was a development unique to northern Russia. The new onion dome and the pointed onion- shaped gables and arches also have anticipations if not roots in other cultures (particularly those of Islam); but the wholesale replacement of the spherical Byzantine and early Russian dome with this new elongated shape and its florid decorative use-not least atop tent roofs-is also peculiar to Muscovy.1 The supreme surviving example of the Muscovite style, the wooden Church of the Transfiguration at Kizhi, on Lake Onega, has been likened to a giant fir tree because of the massive, jagged shape produced by superimposing twenty-two onion domes on its sharp, pyramidal roof. The new vertical thrust of the tent and onion shapes is related both to the material need for snow- shedding roofs and to the spiritual intensification of the new Muscovite civilization. These gilded new shapes rising out of the woods and snow of the north seemed to represent something distinct from either Byzantium or the West.
The Byzantine cupola over a church describes the dome of heaven covering earth; the Gothic spire describes the uncontainable striving upward, thi lifting up from earth to heaven of the weight of stone. Finally, our fatherland's 'onion dome' incarnates the idea of deep prayerful fervor rising towards the heavens. . . . This summit of the Russian church is like a tongue of fire crowned by a cross and reaching up to the cross. When
looking from afar in the clear sunlight at an old Russian monastery or town, it seems to be burning with a many-colored flame; and when these flames glimmer from afar amid endless snow-covered fields, they attract us to them like a distant, ethereal vision of the City of God.2
Of all the gilded spires and domes that drew Russians in from the countryside to new urban centers of civilization none were more imposing than those of Moscow and its ecclesiastic citadel, the Kremlin. Seated on the high ground at the center of Moscow, the Kremlin had, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, gathered behind its moats and walls a host of objects which seemed to offer the Orthodox some 'distant, ethereal vision of the City of God.' Here were the largest bells, the most splendid icons (including the Vladimir Mother of God and Rublev's greatest iconostasis), and a cluster of magnificent new churches rising over the graves of princes and saints. Highest of all stood the domes of the bell tower of Ivan the Great. Its more than fifty bells represented the
