Tatishchev, the third of these Petrine harbingers of new secular thought patterns, lived longest and attained his greatest influence after Peter's death. He formed, together with Prokopovich and the learned poet-diplomat Antioch Kantemir, a group known as the "learned guard," which was in many ways the first in the long line of self-conscious intellectual circles devoted to the propagation of secular knowledge. Tatishchev's career illustrates particularly well how Peter's interest in war and technology led Russian thought half-unconsciously to broader cultural vistas.
Tatishchev was first of all a military officer-trained in Peter's new engineering and artillery schools and tested by almost continuous fighting during the last fifteen years of the Northern War. He spent the last, peaceful years of Peter's reign supervising work in the newly opened metallurgical industries of the Urals (later to become his major vocation) and journeying to Sweden to continue his engineering training at a higher level. The combination of geographic explorations in the East and archival explorations in the West turned this officer-engineer toward the study of history. In 1739 he presented to the Academy of Sciences the first fruit of a long and panoramic History oj Russia: the first example of critical scientific history by a native Russian.
Tatishchev's history was not published until thirty years after it was written and twenty years after his death. Even then, it produced a remark-
able effect, for it was still decades ahead of its time. Unlike the Sinopsis of Gizel, which remained the basic history of Russia throughout the early eighteenth century, Tatishchev's History was a scientific work, seeking to combine his knowledge of geographical and military problems with a critical, comparative examination of the manuscript sources. Its aim was, moreover, the frankly secular one of proving useful background reading for those engaged in war and statecraft. Not only was its framework free of the traditional preoccupation with sacred history and genealogy, but it was even free of a narrowly Russian focus, making an effort to include the history of the non-Russian peoples of the empire. It introduced a descriptive scheme of periodization, defended unrestricted autocracy as the only form of government suited to a country of Russia's size and complexity, and generally served as a model for many of the subsequent synthetic histories of Russia.57
'There is a kind of continuity between the reign of Peter and that of the Empress Anna, the most important of his immediate successors. During her rule throughout the 1730's, the influence of Baltic Germans continued to predominate. Bartolomeo Rastrelli, the son of a metal forger and sculptor brought to Russia by Peter, built a new Winter Palace-the first permanent imperial residence in the new capital-but he devoted more of his talent to building a new palace for her favorite, Biron, miles to the west at Mitau (Jelgava) in Courland. St. Petersburg was still looked on as a kind of hardship post for mercenary officers. Court life in the new capital was marked by continued crudeness and vulgarity. Like Peter, Anna relied on dwarfs and freaks for entertainment and enjoyed mocking traditional ceremonies and court personalities. Probably the most remarkable jnew building of her reign was the great ice palace she built on the Neva during the severe winter of 1739-40. Eighty feet long and thirty-three feet high, the palace was equipped With furniture, clocks, and even chandeliers-all molded from be. It was built largely as a mock gesture to an unfaithful courtier, who was forced to marry an old and ugly Kalmyk and spend his wedding night naked in the icy "bedroom" of the palace, with his "bride" the only conceivable source of warmth.58
Like Peter, Anna was suspicious of intellectual activity that had no practical value and might conceivably lead men to question the imperial authority. She conducted a personal vendetta against the most cultured Russian of the age, the new scion of the Westernized Golitsyn family, Dmitry. Even more than his first cousin once removed, Vasily, who had been exiled by Peter, Dmitry Golitsyn was a man of ranging cultural interests. As an ambassador to Constantinople and voevoda of Kiev from 1707-18, he had amassed a six-thousand-volume library and launched an
extensive personal project for translating such Western political theorists as Grotius, Pufendorf, and John Locke. Under their influence, "golitsyn_be-came, m effect, Russia's first secular political theorist. He waTthe first native Russian to popularize the familiar Western idea of objective natural law.^Al.the same time, Golitsyn became the spokesman for the new service nobility by drawing uptheconstitutional project of 1730 in an effort to limit autocratic authority by a council of the higher nobility. This project represented a genuine innovation rather than a traditionalist protest movement. The models were Swedish, and the objective was to extend the Petrine reforms further in the same Westward direction which the original reforms pointed.60 The Senate, which Peter had created in 1711, was not basically a legislative or even a consultative body, but an executive organ of the emperor for transmitting his commands to the provinces and to the administrative colleges, which were created subordinate to it in 1717. Like Peter, Anna was inhospitable to any limitation on her power; and Golitsyn suffered an even crueler fate than had befallen Tveritinov and Pososhkov in the preceding decades. His library was taken, and he was imprisoned in the Schliisselburg fortress. In 1737 he became the first in a long line of reformers to die within its walls.
Nonetheless, Anna was forced to concede a few new privileges to the service nobility. The founding in 1731 of a school for the Corps of Nobility accelerated the trend begun by Peter of providing a veneer of Western manners to his crude new ruling class. The name of the corps, shliakhetsky korpus, was derived from the Polish word for nobility, szlachta, and reveals the source of inspiration for this effort to civilize the ruling classes. But the teachers and the language of instruction were-as in the Academy of Sciences-primarily German. This school, like that founded for the Corps of Pages in 1759, provided the non-technical curriculum of an aristocratic finishing school.61 Graduates of these schools (and of the somewhat more rigorous gymnasium of the Academy of Sciences) provided the nucleus of a Western-educated minority.^A new secular culture slowly began to emerge under Anna as the first orchestra was assembled and the first opera was performed on Russian soil. Certain emphases of this new culture were already apparent by the end of her reign.
First of all this new world rejoiced in the discovery of the human body. The cutting off of the beard destroyed man's sense of community with the idealized likenesses of the icons. The introduction of secular portraiture, of heroic statuary, and of new, more suggestive styles of dress-all aided in the discovery of the human form. The beginnings of court ballet and of stylized imperial balls under Anna placed a premium on elegance of form and movement that had never been evident in Muscovy.