mastery over its material and, in the last analysis, over nature itself.68 This effort seemed particularly presumptuous and unreal for such an untutored people in such an inhospitable natural environment.
Perhaps there was an unconscious realization of this unreality in Elizabeth's almost compulsive fondness for masquerades. Things were not what they seemed to be in either the decor or the dances of the Elizabethan court. Cryptic maxims, fables, and acrostics had already established themselves at the Tsar's court;64 and ever since 1735 there had been a special chair of allegory in the Academy of Sciences. Elizabeth's coronation in 1740 had been celebrated by two examples of allegorical ballet, her favorite form of theatrical entertainment. Increasingly during her reign, she sponsored not only masked balls of various sorts but a particular type known as a 'metamorphosis,' wherein men came disguised as women and vice versa. A laboratory for making artificial fireworks and a wooden 'theatre of illuminations' jutting out into the Neva across from the Academy of Sciences were other forms of artifice initiated by Elizabeth. The greatest Russian scientist of the day, Michael Lomonosov, seems to have relished his assignment as official chronicler of these illuminations. He describes one in which a giant colossus looks toward the sea, holding up a torch and the initials of Elizabeth.
Far o'er the restless sea its beam would pour And lead the periled vessels safe to shore . . ,65
St. Petersburg, at the eastern extremity of the Baltic, was such a colossus, but it did not rest on firm foundations. It had been built over a swampy region which the Finns and Swedes had used only for forts and fisheries. It was constantly menaced by floods. Pushkin, Gogol, and other writers of the late imperial period were fascinated with the defiance of nature inherent in the creation of the new capital. The history of European culture in this city is rather like that of the extraordinary palm tree in a story by Vsevelod Garshin. Artificially transplanted from more sunlit southern regions to the greenhouse of a northern city, the plant restlessly seeks to bring the expansive freedom of its former habitat to all the docile native
plants confined in the greenhouse. Its brilliant growth upward toward the elusive sun attracts the fascinated attention of all, but leads ultimately to a shattering of the enclosure and a killing exposure to the real climate of the surrounding region.66
By the end of Elizabeth's reign St. Petersburg had a population about equal to that of Moscow and a culture similar to that of the leading capitals of Europe. It was already
. . . one of the strangest, loveliest, most terrible, and most dramatic of the world's great urban centers. The high northern latitude, the extreme slant of the sun's rays, the flatness of the terrain, the frequent breaking of the landscape by wide, shimmering expanses of water: all these combine to accent the horizontal at the expense of the vertical and to create everywhere the sense of immense space, distance, and power. . . . Cleaving the city down the center, the cold waters of the Neva move silently and swiftly, like a slab of smooth grey metal . . . bringing with them the tang of the lonely wastes of forests and swamp from which they have emerged. At every hand one feels the proximity of the great wilderness of the Russian north-silent, somber, infinitely patient.67
The soaring and exotic motifs of Muscovite architecture had been rejected, and the only vertical uplift was provided by the Admiralty and the Peter and Paul Fortress, reminders of the military preoccupations of its founder. The setting was completed by the bleak seasons of the north: the dark winters, the long, damp springs, the 'white nights' of June, with their poetic' iridescence,
and, finally, the brief, pathetic summers, suggestive rather than explicit . . . passionately cherished by the inhabitants for their very rareness and brevity.
In such a city the attention of man is forced inward upon himself. . . . Human relationships attain a strange vividness and intensity, with a touch of premonition. . . .
The city is, and always has been, a tragic city, artificially created . . . geographically misplaced, yet endowed with a haunting beauty, as though an ironic deity had meant to provide some redemption for all the cruelties and all the mistakes.68
Such was St. Petersburg, symbol of the new Russia and a city which was to dominate the quickening intellectual and administrative life of the empire. Yet the victory of St. Petersburg and of its new secular culture was not complete. The thought patterns of Old Muscovy continued to dominate the old capital and much of the Russian countryside. Indeed, its traditionalist, religious culture made a number of powerful-if uncoordinated
and ultimately unsuccessful-counterattacks against the culture of St. Petersburg. These protest movements commanded widespread popular followings and helped turn the ideological split between old and new into a deep social cleavage between popular and elite culture.
The Defense of Muscovy
Already in Peter's lifetime two of the main forms of Muscovite protest reached a fever pitch of intensity: Old Believer communalism and Cossack-led peasant insurrectionism. Each of these movements first appeared under Alexis; but it was only under Peter that each became a distinct tradition with a broad social base and a deep ideology. The two movements often overlapped and reinforced one another-sharing as they did a common idealization of the Muscovite past and a hatred of the new secular bureaucracy. They did much to shape the character of all opposition movements under the Romanovs, not excepting those which brought about the end of the dynasty in 1917.
The Old Believers consolidated their hold over many Great Russians under Peter. The gathering strength of the amorphous Old Believer movement represented not so much increased support for their doctrinal position as resentment at the increased authority of foreigners in the new empire. The transition from Muscovite tsardom to multi-national empire was a particularly painful one for the Great Russian traditionalists. It involved the growth of a government bureaucracy dominated by more technically skilled Baltic Germans and the absorption from former Polish territories of better-educated Catholics and Jews. The confusions of war and social change gave a certain appeal to the simple Old Believer hypothesis that the reign of Antichrist was at hand, that Peter had been corrupted in foreign lands, and that the flood at the time of Peter's death was but a foretaste of God's wrathful judgment on this new world.
The Old Belief became particularly embedded in the psychology of the merchant classes, not only because of its fear of foreign competition, but also because of its special resentment of central bureaucracy. The Great Russian merchants, whose wealth had been amassed in the Russian north and protected by the traditional liberties of its cities, were hard hit by the new policies of increased central control. They tended to find solace in the Old Belief- identifying their own lost economic privileges with the idealized Christian civilization of Old Muscovy. They often preferred to move on to new areas rather than surrender old liberties or change old business
practices. Gradually a pattern developed of internal colonization by disaffected Great Russians who practiced puritanical, communal living along with the old forms of worship. Belief in the coming end of the world was not abandoned in these new communities, but the expectation of judgment was increasingly invoked to provide a sense of urgency about the work of the new community rather than a sense of imminent apocalypse. Salvation was no longer to be found through the sacraments of the Church or the activities of the state after the reforms of Nikon and Peter respectively. One sought salvation now in the grim and isolated communities in which alone the organic religious civilization of the Muscovite past was preserved.
The parallel between the Calvinists of Western Europe and the Old Believers of the East is striking. Both
