The Icon and the Axe

to be an ideal to serve. TMs^j.deal was the vision of a coming golden age in which there would be no more serfdom, bureaucracy, private property, or oppressive_central authority. In its place menwould ???^?~???????1??1 Christianity, build socialism on the model of the peasant commune, and live under a lapse federal system vaguely like that of distant America. These themes were to be developed more explicitly and fully during the reign of Alexander II, and particularly in the populist movement; but all of them are already present in this initial turn to social thought in the late Nicholaevan period.

More than any other single event, the Crimean War opened Russia up-for a moreseriQijsand widespread discussion of social issues. Indeed, of all thef leitmotivs of modern Russian history, few are more striking than the unsettling influence of great wars on Russian thought and culture. Just as the" schism in the Church was an outgrowth of the first northern war and Peter's reforms of the second, just as the agitation of the late years of Alexander I's reign and the Decembrist uprising grew out of the Napoleonic invasion, so did the great wars of the late nineteenth and the twentieth century have a profound ancl unsettling~tnffiact on Russian .cultural development. The Turkish1 waf Of the"rriid-seventieswas followed by the movements of revolutionary populism inside Russia; the Japanese war of 1904-5, by the Revolution of 1905; and the First World War, by the revolutions of 1917. War invariably put new strains on the outmoded social and economic system and aTthe^sameJS^exposeQ^^trssKtrrthinkel'S ? the methods and ideas of

the outsig

The Crimean War appears as a watershed in Russian history. Resounding defeaTon Kussian soil shattered"! hn ???1?|????????1?????"? of ?cr7-olaevan Russia and left a legacy of national bitterness as well as an incentive'' f6Finnovation_and reform. The failure of Russia's traditional allies, Austria

and Prussjau. to comejtoJier affidiscteffitejjlhrae'SoBtmefu; forced Russia to look to the victorious liberal nations of tBe

fdisiSrfeSecfttescr^

Vest, France

and England, for techniques and ideas. Russia embarked Hesitantly but ir- / reversibly on the path toward m3ustrialization and the redefinition of its ' social structure. No one realized better than the admirers of Nicholas' rule what defeat in the Crimea meant for Russia. Even before the war was irrevocably lost, Thitchev saw in it "the birthpangs of a new world."24 Pogodin summoned up the fire symbol with a strange mixture of apocalypticism and masochism that was to become characteristic of the new nationalism:

?

Burn with your burning fire which the English have lighted in hell, burn … all our political relations with Europe! Let everything be burned with fire! Qui perd gagne!25

"ii iu rMEVV SHORES

1. The Turn to

3

°f a^e^materiaUigns of change in post-Crimean Russia, none was moretangibleand lnescaplEETEanTSrbnflaingaf ranroads7Noth!rIglp7e~ad to t^ro^ncg?so"girectly anTSamaticluh^^

in thejnaE5g'"as' tEeTorward ??^?^?????? |gS^^^-CQ^g^^rtgBr^TBqrmterior of Russia in the sixties and seventies." / The gM^mpdmg,^rTroSaToTRu^ia hadj^en ini8i2 (as they wereltiif ? t0 be in 1941) a form o£defense against heayjahTequip^ed invadersfaom the

L WesS-JSLa,ggurre^~pctoreiquelppeal to the romantic inW^rmH^

Radishchev, for all his reforming zeal, had been charmed by the oldToad used on his famous trip from St. Petersburg to Moscow; and Gogol had made them symbols of the beauty and mystery of Old Russia.

The new railroads were to become symbols gf modern Russia with its interrejatsd^rocess of spiritual destructionlnTrnaterial progress" At first

into Russian culture. Fedor Chizhov, the son of a priest and a close friend of Gogol, Ivanov, and Khomiakov, lectured in physics and mathematics at St. Petersburg and published in 1837, at the age of 26, an anthology giving a history and description of steam machines. He wrote that "the railroad is for me the slogan of our time," and his resolve to lead Russia into the railroad age was undampened by a long period of arrest for allegedly fostering discontent among the Slavs of the Hapsburg empire during the late years of Nicholas' reign. When railroad building began in earnest under Alexander II',?ni?!10v became consumed with a passionate desire to prevemlorelgners

fro£f2fifr0^

this newfoliroT^oweTTKr^in i860 formed a company

which had as its first project the penitential building of a railroad from Moscow to the Monastery of the Holy Trinity and St. Sergius. But he was soon outstripped by his Anglo-French rivals and died disillusioned in 1877, to be buried near Gogol.26 The sense of^conf^joji_an£bitoriiessJsward the' railr°^ds^is_reflected in the speech whichjhe rectoToTthe RjgaTheoTogiFaT

bridge:"-~-