The Icon and the Axe

The advent of Western-type drama, painting, music, and philosophy during the later years of Alexis' reign. Efforts to find religious answers from the West, especially during the regency of Sophia (1682-9); the beginnings of the flagellant, sectarian tradition. The consolidation of a Westernized, secular state under Peter the Great (1682-1725), particularly after his first visit to Western Europe in 1697-8. The foundation of St. Petersburg in 1703; the Dutch-type naval base on the Baltic which became an enduring symbol of the geometric uniformities, Westward-looking vistas, and underlying cruelty and artificiality of rule by the Romanov dynasty. The found-

ing of the Academy of Sciences in 1726, and the discovery of the human body in portraiture and ballet. Various attempts in the eighteenth century to defend and reassert the old Muscovite order amidst the general trend toward centralized and secularized aristocratic rule; the communalism of the Old Believers; recurrent, Cossack-led peasant rebellions; and the monastic revival by the "elders" of the late eighteenth century.

The price of Russian involvement in Europe was participation in the almost continuous fighting out of which emerged the new monarchical absolutism of the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century. Russian involvement was part of a deeper interrelationship that was developing between Eastern and Western Europe. Gustavus Adolphus, who made Sweden a model for much of Europe, sensed the interconnection in the late 1620's, explaining-even before his alliance with Russia-that "all European wars are being interwoven into one knot, are becoming one universal war."1

Universal war seems, indeed, a good designation for a combat which moved rapidly from super-celestial ideals to subterranean behavior, and swept back and forth across the continent with a certain rhythm and logic of its own. The Catholic-Protestant war between Swedes and Poles at the beginning of the century abated just as the conflict spread West via Imperial Bohemia in 1618. Then, in 1648, the very year that the complex and savage Thirty Years' War drew to a close in Western Europe, fighting erupted again in the east with the greatest single massacre of Jews prior to Hitler.2 For most of the next seventy-five years Eastern Europe was a battlefield. Veterans of the Thirty Years' War and English Civil War hired on as mercenaries for the highest bidder, bringing with them plague, disease, bayonets, and the resigned belief that "the very state of mankind is nothing else but status belli."* Gradually, though by no means decisively, Russia emerged victorious in fighting that was animated by the passion for total victory (and the unwillingness to grant more than a temporary truce) previously confined to frontier warfare between Moslems and Christians."1 Confessional lines disintegrated altogether in the fighting of the 1650's and 1660's. Russians fought Russians and used Scottish Catholic royalists to humiliate the Catholic king of Poland. Simultaneously, Catholic France fought Catholic Spain; Lutheran Denmark, Lutheran Sweden; Protestant Holland, Protestant England. As exhaustion set in and fighting spread out to such distant places as New York, Brazil, and Indonesia, forces of stabilization ????? to bring order back to continental Europe. By the end of the

War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, and of the Great Northern War in 1721, Europe was relatively secure. The Turks had been contained, and peace attained under monarchs uniformly dedicated to maintaining a monopoly of power at home and a balance of power abroad.

It is a final irony that the Swedes, who initially encouraged the Russians to enter "the universal war," were defeated by the same Russians in the last great battle of the war, at Poltava, in 1709. This effort of Charles XII to defeat a vastly superior Russian force in the distant Ukraine and to conspire with the even more remote Cossacks and Turks seems strangely in keeping with the heroic unreality of the age. The strategic vistas of the "universal war" in Eastern Europe were animated throughout by a kind of baroque splendor and thirst for the infinite: from Possevino's vision of a renewed Catholicism moving through Russia to India and linking up with a Jesuit-controlled China to the fantastic Russo-Saxon project late in the century for an alliance between Moscow and Abyssinia to join with Persia for a crusade against the Turks and then, presumably, with Protestant Europe to vanquish Rome.5