IX

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The RussianOrthodox Church Abroad

FOR POBEDONOSTSEV, Russia meant the state, which represented the national will and to which the narod was attached by a powerful mystical bond. Its main functions were to ensure unity, to provide stability and harmony, and to prevent the rise of nationalisms or other divisive forces through a combination of persuasion and of force. As a servant and even weapon of the state, the Church was to maintain the essential unity in faith and belief, which he called “the community of believers.” At a time when some of his contemporaries in western Europe were developing political programs labelled “integral nationalism,” Pobedonostsev’s might have been defined as “integral national Christendom.”

Pobedonostsev considered religion the homogenizing cement of society. He assumed that a society or state was an independent organism and could therefore have only one religion, because all other beliefs and churches could only be “agents of disintegration.” It was therefore senseless for a state to attempt to borrow ideas or philosophies from another state or society, just as it was for one state to seek to impose its customs and political system on another people, a process which would be harmful and destructive for all.¹

Consequently, he was not a supporter of Russian expansion or of an aggressive or even active foreign policy. He was as conservative in his approach to international affairs as he was to political or social change. He saw Russia as a member of a European state system and as one of a number of states in the world with some of which, but only some of which, it had to maintain formal relations, and then “only at the top.” However, he did not believe that Russia should participate actively in world affairs. He considered the Russian empire a jerry-built system plagued by so many fundamental problems that it could not expend energy on areas beyond its frontiers.

In other words, Pobedonostsev was an isolationist. The only exception to this stand helped solidify the rule, for in 1876 and through much of 1877 he was an ardent advocate and later supporter of war with Turkey to free the Balkan Slavs and to unite them with Russia in a Slavic federation. However, as the war progressed, Pobedonostsev reversed his opinion. From that time forward, he turned Russian state power inside, not outside. He therefore remained generally aloof from participation in the formal discussion or definition of Russian foreign policy, even in times of great tension. He was opposed to alliances, rejected panslavism after his one escapade had ended, and resisted policies actively or forcefully promoting Russian interests abroad.

At the same time, he accepted and supported programs using the Russian Orthodox Church and its agents to promote Russian culture and the interests of the secular Russian state. Thus, he considered cooperation with the Church of England and with the Old Catholics against their common enemy in Rome. In other parts of Europe, in the Americas, and in Japan, he sought to create Orthodox communities which would be cultural and political centers for Russia. In the Balkans, he apparently sought the expansion and strengthening of Orthodoxy so that the Balkan states would be cordial to Russia and might accept relaxed political links. In Galicia and trans-Carpathian Ruthenia, he took advantage of national, social, and religious discontents to harass and annoy the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. He even used subvervise agents to try to bring the Ruthenians, who were generally Uniates, over to Orthodoxy, in the hope that they would one day join their Orthodox brethren in the Russian empire. Finally, in Palestine and Abyssinia he supported vigorous and often quite unscrupulous efforts to create Orthodox centers of influence which, if successful, might have significantly affected the course of international relations in the Middle East and in eastern Africa.

The nature of Pobedonostsev’s ideas and policies toward Russian Orthodox colonies abroad is illuminated in a curious but direct way by his attitudes toward the other Orthodox churches, the Papacy, the Church of England, and the Old Catholics. Basically, he paid little attention to the Eastern Orthodox Church. Except for the guide book which he wrote about the history of Orthodoxy for seminaries and church schools and except for the courses on this subject which he had the seminaries introduce, he devoted the same attention to the various patriarchates as he did to Latin American countries of whose existence he knew but in which he had no interest. Representatives of other Orthodox churches did attend the celebration in Kiev, in 1888, of the conversion nine hundred years earlier of Vladimir, but visiting prelates from Abyssinia received more attention than they did. In fact, the principal contact between the Russian Orthodox Church and the old centers was the subterranean campaign which Pobedonostsev helped lead and through which the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society sought increased religious authority in the Holy Land. However, here the veiled opponent was not so much another Orthodox Church as it was the power of Greek prelates in churches and lands in which the Russian Orthodox Church sought increased power.

While the other Orthodox Churches were not in Pobedonostsev’s field of vision, he was very much aware of the Vatican, if only because millions of Catholics in the western border areas were such a constant torment. He thought of all Poles as Catholics or “Latins,” and of all Catholics as Poles, and he considered them all by nature hostile to Russia. Moreover, every Catholic everywhere was an agent of Polonism, of Austria, and of the Vatican against the vital interests of Russia. In an article he wrote in 1888 seeking to prove that the various religious creeds enjoyed freedom in Russia, he wrote that the Catholic Church sought to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church, that the West was its base of operations against Russia, and that the Poles were one of the main weapons. “I would find it difficult today to identify a part of Russia where there lives a Catholic who is neutral, tolerant, unmarked by a spirit of animosity against the Orthodox and not preoccupied with taking from Russia the basically Russian provinces on its western borders.” Pobedonostsev loved to travel in Europe, and he visited northern Italy at least twice. However, while he was attracted by Rome and was eager to hear of others’ impressions of the city, he could not bring himself to visit it, simply because it was the center of Catholicism. It is instructive to note that Pobedonostsev never mentioned Constantinople or considered going there.²

Alexander II in general had been quite benevolent toward Catholics and Uniates. He issued a decree under which a Catholic or a Uniate could marry a member of the Orthodox Church without being required to promise that the children of the marriage would be raised in the Orthodox Church, he issued amnesties to several Uniate priests, he named a committee to study the problems raised by a concordat with the Vatican, and he was reasonably prompt in allowing the Vatican to fill vacant Catholic bishoprics.

When Leo XIII became pope in 1878, he sought to improve the position of the Catholics in Russia and to establish regular diplomatic relations with the Russian government. Naturally, Pobedonostsev was resolutely opposed to this, defending the imprisonment of Catholic bishops because of their open support of Polish nationalism and arguing that official relationships with the Vatican would only increase Polish arrogance and pertinacity. However, Leo XIII was able to have quiet talks begun in Vienna and in Rome in 1881. The rigorous stand of the Russian government over treatment of the Uniates and over the vacant bishoprics melted in 1883, when the pope skillfully sent Monsignor Vannutelli, a Dominican scholar well acquainted with Russia and Central Europe and a warm admirer of the Orthodox Church, which he did not consider schismatic, as his personal representative at the coronation of Alexander III. Pobedonostsev was unbending in his conversations, and the tsar insisted that Catholics must remain out of politics. Vannutelli was unable to persuade the Russians to establish a legation in Rome, but he did complete the appointment of two archbishops and six bishops in western Russia and he did establish contacts which he and other Vatican representatives were able to use later.³

Leo XIII reopened his campaign to improve the situation of Catholics in Russia in 1887, at about the same time that he sought similar goals in France under the policy commonly known as ralliement. Nicholas K. Giers, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Soviet diplomatic historians have both concluded that the Vatican was seeking diplomatic support from Russia against Germany and Italy and that the simultaneous efforts to modify the policies of the French and Russian governments toward Catholics, and perhaps of Catholics toward those governments, were also part of a campaign to bring Russia and France together. These interpretations are almost certainly exaggerated. In any case, the Vatican let the Russian ambassador to the King of Italy know that Leo XIII would welcome a message from the tsar on the occasion of the golden anniversary of his consecration as a priest. Moreover, three of the grand dukes, Vladimir, Sergei, and Paul, all former students of Pobedonostsev, had an audience with the pope in January, 1888.

Alexander III’s friendly message on the pope’s jubilee annoyed many Russian nationalists, who noted that no European monarchs sent similar messages to any Russian metropolitan and that the tsar did not congratulate other religious leaders on such great occasions. However, it did allow Leo XIII to reply on January 28, 1888, thanking the tsar and expressing his esteem and friendly wishes. The pope then noted that he was concerned because the tsar’s Catholic subjects were not allowed freely to practice their religion. The next month, Giers informed the embassy in Rome that quiet talks might be launched with a Vatican representative, but warned the ambassador that the Russian representative should not be tricked into formal negotiations, should not mention reestablishing relations, and should seek “certain and positive guarantees of the intentions of the Holy See and of the conduct of the Roman Catholic clergy.”

The discussions between Cardinal Rampolla and Alexander P. Izvolskii in 1888 led to the filling of three more bishoprics, the restoration of another bishopric, the appointment of several suffragan bishops, and the completion of several unfulfilled promises made in 1883. The Grand Duchess Catherine Mikhailovna and her daughter then had an audience in November, 1888, with the pope, who began to work immediately for reestablishing diplomatic relations with St. Petersburg. Pobedonostsev was apparently so opposed to this that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not consult him during the five or six years these quiet discussions consumed, but relied instead upon the Ministry of the Interior for information and judgments concerning the effect the new relationship would produce. Izvolskii served as a special representative in Rome until May, 1894, when the Russian government officially named him minister to the Vatican. This appointment was made only after the tsar, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the Minister of the Interior had agreed that the pope’s most recent encyclical had indicated that the Polish Catholic clergy would no longer support Polish nationalism against Russia. Thus, while ralliement was being undermined by conservative Catholics and, later, by the Dreyfus Affair in France, it achieved a minor success in Russia.⁴

Pobedonostsev supported the Izvolskii appointment because he thought it might dampen Polish nationalism. However, he vigorously resisted the appointment of a papal nuncio in St. Petersburg because it would bring the envoy of a hostile religion into the court, give respectability and prestige to Catholicism, and weaken Orthodoxy in the “eternal, life-and-death struggle” in the western provinces. His power and resistance were such that he was successful.⁵

At the same time, Pobedonostsev also fought successfully against a vague and woolly effort on the part of some leading members of the Church of England to establish close ties and even some kind of union between the Anglican and the Russian Orthodox Church. He welcomed English converts to Orthodoxy; indeed, probably because of his interest in England and the recommendations Olga Novikov gave to English visitors to Russia, he often met Englishmen who were interested in joining the Orthodox Church. He was an effective spokesman for his Church, and he and his wife on occasion devoted many hours to Englishmen seriously studying Orthodoxy. In doing this, of course, he was honoring the old Slavophil tradition, for the Slavophils had also had a special admiration for English life and had attracted the interest of Englishmen, such as William Palmer of Magdalen College in Oxford, who had sought communion with the Orthodox Church in Russia in 1841 and 1842 and who ultimately joined the Catholic Church and died in Rome.⁶

Between 1870 and 1875 and again in the 1890’s, a handful of Anglicans, Russian Orthodox and, in the 1870’s, Old Catholics, or Catholics who refused to accept the dogma of Papal infallibility announced in 1870, sought to form a united anti-Catholic front. Olga Novikov, her brother Alexander Kireev, and other enthusiastic Slavophils and panslavs were much impressed after 1870 by the opportunity for creating some kind of religious unity against Rome in an organization which they thought would surely be dominated by Russian Orthodoxy. Pobedonostsev expressed some interest in the annual conference representatives of these groups held in Germany until 1876, when the Balkan crisis at one stroke dissolved the interest of the Russian participants. However, from the very beginning he ridiculed those who believed any kind of union possible, and he refused the heir’s suggestion that he participate in the Freiburg Conference in 1874 as an observer.⁷

In July, 1888, Edward Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, was the only Western prelate who congratulated the Russian Church on the occasion of the nine hundredth anniversary of the introduction of Christianity into Russia. This gesture and the presence at the ceremonies of William J. Birkbeck, a Fellow of Magdalen College in Oxford as Palmer had been fifty years earlier, pleased the Russians. Indeed, Metropolitan Platon replied that he agreed fully with the archbishop’s statement that “the Russian and Anglican Church have common foes. Alike we have to guard our independence against the Papal aggressiveness which claims to subordinate all the churches of Christ to the See of Rome . . .” However, the archbishop’s proposal in 1889 that the two churches begin to progress toward union by agreeing first to admit believers in either church to communion in the other church was quietly ignored, largely because Pobedonostsev considered it nonsense, “nothing more than a dream.”

However, Pobedonostsev was able to take advantage of the eager admiration of the Russian Church displayed by Birkbeck, who was an Orthodox fellow-traveller, and to use him to advance the ambitions of the Russian Church. Pobedonostsev took a special interest in Birkbeck at the Kievan celebrations, invited him to the banquets and ceremonies, entertained him at the Pobedonostsev dacha, and arranged for him to meet other leaders of Church and state, to visit several monasteries, and in general to enjoy the kind of favored treatment twentieth-century states provide important visitors. Birkbeck was completely conquered. His books and articles, his lectures in England, and his friendships with English scholars and Anglican leaders were thoroughly exploited by Pobedonostsev and his colleagues. Birkbeck “explained” panslavism to England, helped organize the Eastern Orthodox Association, demonstrated that “the Catholic press” of Austria and “the Jewish press” of Germany peddled misinformation about Russia, and ridiculed charges of “socalled persecution of the Jews” in Russia. He accompanied Mandell Creighton, Bishop of Peterborough and later of London, to Russia in 1896, and the following year guided Archbishop Maclagan of York. Both of these visitors were entertained handsomely, were introduced to Nicholas II, and left full of admiration and praise for Pobedonostsev, Orthodoxy, and Russia. Their expressions of interest in “a gradual approximation” and “eventual union” of the two state churches were warmly received, but Pobedonostsev in his private talks and correspondence with Russians ridiculed these hopes; only the golden glow remained after these visits. However, Pobedonostsev had succeeded in creating a sympathetic climate of opinion within an important segment of the British intellectual and political community.⁸

In other areas of the world, Pobedonostsev used quite different methods to promote Orthodox and Russian national interests. In some areas, such as Galicia and Carpathian Ruthenia, the Balkans, the Holy Land, and Abyssinia, he was able to use the authority of the state in an indirect way to advance toward religious and national goals. In other sections, he simply used Church funds to assist in building and maintaining Russian Orthodox churches as Russian cultural centers. He also used secret funds of the Synod to assist a handful of foreign clergymen and scholars interested in Orthodoxy. He gave annual subsidies to journals in Belgium and England, and he assisted some of the scattered Russian Orthodox Churches around the world with small annual subsidies and grants for special purchases. In addition, he arranged that Orthodox priests be attached to some of the major embassies abroad, and the Synod helped in the construction of churches attached to Russian legations.

Thus, between 1881 and 1894, the Synod gave financial assistance for the construction of at least eight Orthodox churches abroad, two in European Turkey, one in the Austrian Empire, one in Italy, two in France, one in Germany, and one in Argentina. Eight more churches were built with Synod support in the next decade, three in Germany, three in the United States, one in Korea, and one in China. Sometimes these churches were built to counteract the influence of Old Believers, as in Thrace, sometimes to serve Russians on vacation, as on the Riviera or at the baths in Bohemia, and sometimes at the request of diplomats who believed that a church would assist the legation and help attract local support, as in Seoul and Buenos Aires. At the turn of the century, the Synod was aiding about sixty churches scattered around the world.⁹

Pobedonostsev was especially interested in Orthodox mission work in Japan and the United States, although in both cases the numbers of church members involved were very small. A chaplain had been attached to the Russian consulate in Nagasaki in 1860, and the church grew very slowly in Japan in the next two decades. In 1883, the Synod reported there were 8,863 members, which grew to 19,000 in 1891 and 25,000 in 1900. Pobedonostsev had been interested in Russian Orthodoxy in Japan even before he became Director General of the Synod. He met clergymen from Japan and introduced them to the heir and to his other friends at court, and he collected money for mission work in Japan even during the Balkan crisis. Shortly after he became Director General, he raised an old acquaintance, archimandrite Nicholas, to bishop. By 1900, largely through financial support he provided, a cathedral, a bishop’s residence, a seminary, and a girls’ school had been built in Tokyo. Only three of the thirty-four priests were Russian, and Pobedonostsev was convinced that the subsidy of about fifty thousand rubles a year was a most fruitful one for improving understanding of Russia.¹⁰

The United States represented a separate series of problems and opportunities. The Bishopric of Alaska and the Aleutians was a complex issue, because of the size of the see and the stormy relations between the bishop and his flock, especially in San Francisco. There were only 17,000 Church members in the United States in 1889, but Pobedonostsev considered mission work there of considerable importance. He was particularly eager to convert Uniates who had emigrated from Galicia to cities such as Pittsburgh and Chicago, in part because this might assist his campaign among the Uniates in Galicia, the Carpatho-Ukraine, and Russia itself.¹¹

He was naturally more active in seeking to extend the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church among other Slavs who were Orthodox or who had at one time been members of the Russian Orthodox Church. He became aware of the Slavs outside of Russia shortly after he moved from Moscow to St. Petersburg in 1865, and he began then to instruct the heir to the throne about their history and significance. He was especially fond of Prague, which he visited at least three times in the 1870’s and which became a kind of gateway to the other Slavs for him. His interest in Orthodoxy and in history led him to intensive study of the history of Christianity, particularly of the Eastern Orthodox Church and its complicated relations with western Christianity and of the areas where the two church systems were in conflict. Thus, in the early 1870’s, he studied the books and articles of Andrei N. Muraviev of Kiev, who wrote extensively from 1830 until his death in 1874 on the history of Christianity, with especial emphasis on the relations between the Russian Orthodox Church and other churches. Moreover, his visits to London and to Prague, particularly his participation in the consecration of a Russian Orthodox Church in Prague in 1874, awakened him to the importance Orthodox churches abroad would have for Russians travelling and working there and for attracting those interested in Orthodoxy and in Russia.¹²

After the Balkan crisis, he developed a two-edged program concerning the southern Slavs and the Balkans in general, seeking to increase knowledge of the southern Slavs in Russia, especially within the government and among the leaders of the Orthodox Church, and providing economic and educational assistance to Orthodox churches and monasteries in the Balkans. Thus, he sent Russian scholars and members of the Holy Synod staff into the Balkans and Central Europe to collect information, to prepare memoranda for Church and government officials, and to make the Holy Synod the central point for information on the Orthodox Church in Slavic lands. His correspondence with Alexander III is full of data concerning Balkan politics, particularly about organized religion. Much of the information he collected and the views it reflected were naturally forwarded to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Thus, in December, 1884, he gave to Giers, the Foreign Minister, copies of memoranda prepared for him by Professor Trotskii of the St. Petersburg Ecclesiastical Academy concerning the position of the Orthodox Church in Bulgaria and the new hierarchy in Serbia.

He had the Holy Synod Press reprint the works of Muraviev on the Eastern Orthodox Church, he had books on Orthodoxy collected abroad for the libraries of Russian seminaries, and he obtained journals and books from Orthodox seminaries in the Balkans for Russian seminaries. He also established chairs in Russian seminaries on the history of Orthodoxy in the Slavic lands. Finally, in 1891 he published a history of the Orthodox Church for use especially in institutions training teachers. This volume, which aroused some criticism because he borrowed so heavily from the work of Alexandra Nikolaevna Bakhmetev, without acknowledgment, appeared in nine editions before he died.¹³

He was even more interested in providing financial, intellectual, and spiritual support to the Orthodox churches in the Balkans than he was in educating Russians concerning that area. Carefully selected Orthodox clergymen were invited to Moscow and St. Petersburg to receive protection, encouragement, advice, and support. Thus, Metropolitan Michael of Serbia, who had been assisted by Ignatiev for fifteen years but who was dismissed by King Milan in October, 1881, was advised by Pobedonostsev by special courier and was then brought to Russia, where he was maintained, and to some degree restrained or controlled, because the policies he proposed were considered too drastic and dangerous by Ivan Aksakov, Ignatiev, Pobedonostsev, and other Russian leaders.

In 1885, Pobedonostsev invited archimandrite Mitrofan Ban of Montenegro to Russia. He was presented to the tsar, given five handsome sets of vestments and other gifts by the Holy Synod, and honored by the Slavonic Benevolent Society in a special meeting in St. Petersburg. Moreover, the Holy Synod provided him an annual subsidy after he returned to Montenegro.

Other prelates from the Balkans were similarly treated. Pobedonostsev devoted especial efforts to making certain that the Orthodox Church in other Slavic lands be well represented at important religious ceremonies in Russia, such as the celebration in Kiev in 1888 of the nine hundredth anniversary of the introduction of Christianity into Russia. The Austrian and Roumanian governments recognized the political importance of these gestures and sought unsuccessfully to prevent the clergymen invited from attending.¹⁴

Pobedonostsev also continued a tradition which began about 1840 of bringing young Bulgarian and Serbian seminarians to Russia for education. In 1886, he reported that there were thirty-seven foreigners in Orthodox seminaries in Russia, eighteen of whom were Bulgars and six Serbs. Of the thirty-seven, nineteen were in Kiev and nine in Odessa, but only two in Moscow and four in St. Petersburg, because Pobedonostsev wanted to keep the seminarians away from the capital cities and in surroundings believed to be similar to those of their native lands. This program for training Orthodox priests was supplemented by grants of Russian liturgical books and of other religious publications to schools and seminaries in the Balkans. Most of the funds for these books were provided by the Holy Synod, but Pobedonostsev also allowed the Slavonic Benevolent Society, the panslav organization, to collect money after church services for sending literature to the southern Slavs.¹⁵

Economic assistance to significant churches and individuals or for especially important occasions was provided in a variety of ways, sometimes through grants from the Holy Synod, sometimes with funds from the Russian state treasury, and sometimes through the Slavonic Benevolent Society. Thus, in 1890 Pobedonostsev encouraged the panslav organization to collect funds for the famine in Montenegro; almost 300,000 rubles (approximately $140,000) were collected at churches and forwarded. On another occasion, he permitted an Orthodox group from the Dobrudja in Bulgaria to solicit funds in Bessarabia. Usually, however, he assigned funds from the Church itself or from other state funds, for vestments for priests in Albania and Montenegro, for bells for a church in Bulgaria, for an iconostasis in Montenegro, and for construction and repair of churches throughout the Slavic lands. Some churches which he considered particularly critical or needy, such as that in Prague, received annual subsidies from the Holy Synod, usually through a Russian diplomatic representative. The Russian ambassador in Vienna transmitted the subsidy there, while the Russian consul in Albania, who was especially trusted by Pobedonostsev, was given funds to distribute to Orthodox churches in that poor land. On occasion, when the Russian subvention was especially great (as for the construction of an Orthodox cathedral in Vienna to which the tsar may have contributed as much as $200,000 by 1899 figures), Pobedonostsev ensured that Russian aid was highly publicized. Thus, the church was consecrated by the archbishop of Kholm-Warsaw, the Russian ambassador and the entire embassy staff attended the ceremony, and Pobedonostsev sent the choir of the Synod from Moscow for the occasion.¹⁶

The foreign territories in which Pobedonostsev had the most intense interest and which he apparently hoped would one day be annexed were Carpathian Ruthenia or the Carpatho-Ukraine and the province the Austrians called Galicia, both then troubled parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Carpathian Ruthenia and Galicia were both primitive areas, with powerful magnates, a heavily exploited peasantry, and few artisans and professional people. However, the two great cities of Galicia, Lvov and Cracow, the latter of which was added to Austria only in 1846, were among the great cultural centers of Europe.

Carpathian Ruthenia in 1880 was inhabited by about 700,000 people, most of whom considered themselves Ruthenians or western Ukrainians and most of whom were Uniates, Christians of the Eastern rite who acknowledged the pope’s primacy and accepted Roman Catholic doctrine, but whose liturgy was in some ways different from that of the Catholic Church and whose priests were allowed to marry. Carpathian Ruthenia was a part of Hungary. Galicia, on the other hand, had been a part of Austria since the last years of the eighteenth century. In 1910, it contained about 8 million people, of whom approximately 40 percent were registered as Ruthenians and about 60 percent as Poles. The substantial Jewish population registered generally as Poles, and the area contained about 100,000 Germans. The Poles were almost all Catholic. The Ruthenians, who were concentrated in the eastern part, were generally Uniates, but some were Orthodox and the upper class was often Catholic.

National and religious friction in these backward areas was endemic, but it became more fierce as the nineteenth century progressed. In Galicia the Catholic Church, led largely by Jesuits and assisted by the Austrian government, carried on an effective campaign to strengthen its position. Before 1867, the Austrian government had generally favored the Ruthenians against the Poles, in order to keep the larger and more threatening Polish group under control, to attract the sympathy of Ruthenians living under Russian rule, and to counter any Russian program designed to win the support of the Orthodox Ruthenians. After the Ausgleich in 1867, however, the government in Vienna decided to support the Polish landlords (the szlachta) against the peasant, whether they considered themselves Ruthenians or Polish. This policy intensified both conflicts on religion and nationality.

During the 1840’s, a group known as Old Ruthenians appeared, with its base in Lvov and most of its members Uniates, and with support in both Galicia and Carpathian Ruthenia. It was represented in the Panslav Congress held in Prague in 1846, and some of its leaders came to know leading Russian panslavs, particularly Professor Michael Pogodin of Moscow University. As Austrian and Hungarian policies which the Ruthenians considered oppressive became more effective, the Old Ruthenians turned to Orthodox Russia for help and protection. However, toward the end of the nineteenth century, an even more powerful force appeared, a group that called itself the Young Ukrainians and that believed the Ruthenians were Ukrainians and ought to be a part of an independent, democratic Ukraine, in which the power of all churches should be restricted. This group naturally alarmed Pobedonostsev, who alerted the Ministry of the Interior and the censor.

Thus, Galicia and the Carpatho-Ukraine were both unsettled areas at the time Pobedonostsev became interested in them. Political and social conflict between the landlords and the peasants intensified the national and religious strife. Heavy emigration provided some outlet for the restless population. On the other hand, there was no middle class outside Lvov and Cracow, and the areas as a whole represented tense border provinces where foreign meddling could be both profitable and immensely dangerous.¹⁷

Pobedonostsev considered Galicia and the Carpatho-Ukraine Orthodox and Russian in culture. He was especially interested in them because they contained more than three million Ruthenians or Western Ukrainians, many of whom were members of the Uniate Church. He was convinced that the Ruthenian Uniates had been Orthodox and would have remained members of the Orthodox Church but for three centuries of Polish and Catholic oppression. Moreover, he believed that the reunion of these Uniates and Ruthenians to Russia would make easier the conversion and absorption of the Uniates in the western provinces.

He almost certainly met several Old Ruthenians in Prague in 1874, and he probably assisted one of them, Father Ivan Naumovich, to contribute an article to the first publication of the Russian panslav organization, Slavianskii sbornik (Slavonic Collection), which appeared in 1875. The Old Ruthenian leader, Adolf Dobriansky, visited Pobedonostsev in St. Petersburg in 1875. Twenty or thirty years earlier, Dobriansky had created a program for uniting the areas inhabited by Ruthenians in Hungary in a single unit with administrative autonomy and the right to use the Ruthenian language, rather than German or Magyar. By 1875, Dobriansky thought that this could be achieved only with powerful Russian support. Indeed, at that time, incorporation into Russia was probably his goal. Pobedonostsev, who described him as an “Ugro-russe,” was impressed by his tales of persecution, by his conviction that “the Orthodox faith is the main guardian of nationality [narodnost’],” by his lack of interest in political theory, and above all, by the enthusiasm which he felt and showed for Russia and for Orthodoxy. Pobedonostsev arranged that Dobriansky should have a long conversation with the heir, whom he had previously instructed concerning these complicated areas, and he also introduced him to the Muscovite panslavs, who were just then launching the wave of emotional panslavism which made the Balkan crisis so intense two years later. When Pobedonostsev became the Director General of the Synod, he sent subsidies to Dobriansky and to Naumovich, mainly through Father Michael Raevskii, a Russian Orthodox priest attached to the Russian embassy in Vienna, and through the Russian consulate at Chernovitz. On at least one occasion, he went to Vienna while on vacation in the Salzburg area in order to carry funds to the Old Ruthenians. These grants may have been quite substantial: a letter to Pobedonostsev from an agent in Galicia indicates that Father Raevskii had received 42,000 rubles (approximately $21,000) from Pobedonostsev that year.¹⁸

Dobriansky and Naumovich fled to Russia with their families in 1883, when they and other Old Ruthenians were charged with treason in trials in which the prosecutor often referred to Pobedonostsev as the Russian official responsible. Pobedonostsev was especially irritated at the actions taken by the Austrian and Hungarian governments, not only because he was identified in the courts but also because this failure coincided with the collapse of Russian influence in liberated Bulgaria. He provided Holy Synod support for these Orthodox priests and their families, gave them useful functions to perform in Russia, and financed the preparation and publication of their writings, which he distributed through the Synod Press and which he also sought to distribute in Austro-Hungarian territory.

At the same time, he pressed Giers and Alexander III to protest to Emperor Francis Joseph and to the Austrian Foreign Ministry about the trials of Uniate and Orthodox leaders and about the treatment of the Old Ruthenians. He protested bitterly to the Austrian and German ambassadors on behalf of the Old Ruthenians and even conferred with Count Herbert Bismarck in the hope that his father would persuade the Austrian government to modify its policies, policies which were in fact less repressive than those which he was supporting on the Russian side of the border. He even introduced Father Naumovich to the German ambassador, and he refused the latter’s request to cease Russian propaganda and financial support in Galicia and the Carpatho-Ukraine.

At Bismarck’s suggestion, the German ambassador in the fall of 1886 talked with him about the hazards his policies raised at a time when Bismarck believed the three great conservative states of Europe should unite against the menace of revolution. This conversation apparently had no effect, but the deaths of Dobriansky and Naumovich a few years later and the apparent lack of progress did persuade Pobedonostsev to abandon his dangerous tactics in the early 1890’s. After his death, in particular just before the outbreak of the First World War, the panslav and pan-Orthodox move which he had fostered was revived. A Galician Benevolent Society was founded in St. Petersburg in 1913, using the techniques he had adopted. After the Second World War, the Carpatho-Ukraine and almost all of Galicia were annexed by the Soviet Union, which immediately incorporated the Uniate church into the Russian Orthodox Church and introduced into these areas the institutions and values which characterize Soviet life.¹⁹

Pobedonostsev’s aims and activities with regard to Galicia and the Carpatho-Ukraine reflected Russian ambitions which the Soviet regime has been able to achieve since the Second World War. In the same way, undertakings which he and his associates launched in the Holy Land have been followed since the Second World War by Soviet efforts designed to capitalize on these enterprises and to advance Soviet influence throughout the Middle East. The Orthodox Palestine Society, which Pobedonostsev helped to found in 1882 and which became the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society in 1885, was renamed the Orthodox Palestine Society after the March, 1917, revolution, withered away in 1926 as the Russian Palestine Society, and then was revived in January, 1952, as part of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In 1954, the Academy resumed publication of the old Society’s Palestinskii sbornik (Palestine Collection), with the first Soviet volume and each succeeding volume bearing two numbers. (Thus, the 1954 issue is identified as volume one to indicate that it is the first of a series; however, the number sixty-three is alongside in parentheses to indicate that this is the successor to the old series, the last number of which, sixty-two, was published in 1916.) The new Soviet journal paid generous tribute to the earlier Society for its scholarly publications and its other “scientific work,” such as its expeditions, its collections of archeological materials, and its library. It has also praised the Society for establishing monasteries, hostels, and clinics and for its work in education. The Soviet society has sought to continue these same activities, which is flattery indeed.²⁰

Russian interest in the Holy Land was based on the veneration for consecrated territory felt by generations of devout Christians, some of whom in the nineteenth century sought to make a pilgrimage to this sanctified area. When Catherine the Great in 1774 imposed the treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji on the Ottoman Empire, won recognition for Russia’s claim to protect the Orthodox Christians living under Ottoman rule, and acquired full liberty for Russian pilgrims in the Ottoman Middle East, she put into the hands of Russian rulers splendid instruments for interfering in Ottoman affairs. In particular, of course, the dramatic upsurge of Russian influence gave body to the dream of acquiring Constantinople, cradle of the Greek Orthodox Church, and thus of control of the straits, opening the Mediterranean to Russia.

Russian interest in and ability to use the tools Catherine created waxed and waned during the following century, reaching its nadir with the humiliating defeat in the Crimean War, which cost Russia its monopoly as protector of Christians living under the Turks. While the state’s direct authority in the Middle East reflected the crises and wars, churchmen and scholars, with the knowledge and support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, began to carry forward a kind of cultural imperialism much like that waged in many areas of the world in the twentieth century. In 1841 the first Russian hostel for pilgrims was constructed in Jerusalem. Six years later, the first Ecclesiastical Mission was established in Palestine, at the suggestion of Foreign Minister Nesselrode and with a remarkable clerical missionary-imperialist, Bishop Porfirii Uspenskii at its head. Following the Crimean War, a second Ecclesiastical Mission was established and Grand Duke Constantine Nikolaevich organized the Palestine Committee, which built a center for Russian pilgrims in Jerusalem, with a hostel, hospital, cathedral, home for a Russian consul, and headquarters for the Mission. The Committee’s work was so successful that it was made a part of the Asiatic Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1864 and its name was changed to Palestine Commission. However, these efforts were handicapped by conflict between the Mission and the Commission and between the Holy Synod and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs back in St. Petersburg. Moreover, the creation of an independent Bulgarian church, the noisy explosion of Russian panslavism in the 1870’s, and the Balkan crisis all alarmed Greek churchmen throughout the Middle East and created suspicion and hostility among them toward the Russians.²¹

The freezing of these efforts to expand Russian Orthodox influence attracted the attention of Pobedonostsev and others, who in May, 1882, therefore formed the Orthodox Palestine Society, with the aim of collecting and distributing information about the Holy Land in Russia, encouraging and assisting pilgrims, and establishing schools, seminaries, hospitals, old age homes, monasteries, and churches in the Holy Land. The first meeting of the Society was called at Pobedonostsev’s invitation, and he helped to draft the organization’s statutes. Most of the meetings during the first years were held in his residence, although he was only an honorary member, probably because he believed that official support from the Synod would increase the suspicion of the Greek clergy. Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, a witless former student and even servitor of Pobedonostsev, was elected chairman of the Society, and many courtiers and members of the hierarchy became members. In 1892, for example, Alexander III, the empress, fifteen other members of the imperial family, and almost all the hierarchy were among the 980 members.²²

The history of the Orthodox Palestine Society in many ways resembles that of the Slavonic Benevolent Society, the panslav organization which was founded in Moscow in 1858 by a group of scholars and bureaucrats to expand knowledge concerning the other Slavs and to assist their religious and intellectual development. The panslav movement soon became a noisy, wealthy, jingoist organization dominated by publicists and army officers, which helped to create a military atmosphere in St. Petersburg and Moscow and to bring on the Balkan crisis and the wars of 1875–78. Similarly, the Palestine Society changed and became more active politically as it grew. An important part of its membership throughout its career consisted of scholars, but they played an especially important role only in the first six or eight years.

The Society’s statutes in May, 1882, provided that it could have three hundred active members, who were to pay lifetime membership fees of five hundred rubles (about $250) or annual dues of twenty-five rubles; an undefined number of associate members, who were to pay lifetime membership fees of two hundred rubles or annual dues of ten rubles; and up to one hundred honorary members. At its second meeting, in December, 1882, the organization had 172 members, in the spring of 1883 it had 257. Participation grew slowly, to 674 in 1885, to 735 in 1886, and to 873 in 1887. The Synod publicized the organization widely and exerted considerable pressure upon the hierarchy to join and to persuade other leading Russians to become members or to contribute. It set aside Palm Sunday as the day on which all Russian Orthodox men and women were urged to contribute to the Society.²³

For the first few years of its existence, the Society concentrated on scholarly activities, encouraging pilgrims—especially through reduced-rate transportation—and building and repairing schools and hospitals, particularly in and around Nazareth. However, the energy and activity of the new organization created new fears among the Greek clergy, especially the Greek hierarchs, in the Holy Land and in Syria. The new organization also collided with the second Ecclesiastical Mission and with the Palestine Commission of the Asiatic Division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. After considerable discussion in 1888 and 1889 within the government, Alexander III, at the request of Pobedonostsev, merged the Society and the Palestine Commission, which Grand Duke Sergei at that time also headed. In effect, the Society absorbed the Commission, over the protests of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It had already become “Imperial,” but the 1889 merger ultimately meant that the Society was subject to direct government control. Moreover, even though the Society was required to make use of Ministry of Foreign Affairs channels for its overseas operations only in 1894, the leadership, the membership and the nature of its work, the history of other such Russian organizations, and the suspicion with which Middle Easterners viewed all such efforts by foreign powers strengthened their conviction that the Society was in fact an arm of the Russian government, or a “front organization.”

In pressing for the reorganization which led to the transformation of the Society, Pobedonostsev must have concluded that the Society required powerful state support to overcome the harassments and delays the Turks and Orthodox Greeks created. The conflicts with the Palestine Commission, and with the Ecclesiastical Mission were glaring examples of wasteful duplication of effort even in a shockingly inadequate administrative system. From his earlier experience with the Volunteer Fleet, Pobedonostsev must have concluded that even an organization under the tsar and chaired by a grand duke could not survive against a rival institution within the state apparatus.²⁴

In the 1890’s, the Society acquired a closer connection with the government and a more clearly political tone and program. The 1889 reorganization put representatives of the Synod and of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Executive Council. After 1898, the Ministry of Education as well was represented. The Russian consuls in Damascus and Jerusalem, particularly in Damascus, worked so closely with the Society that any objective observer must have concluded that the Society was a government institution. In fact, A. P. Beliaev, the executive secretary of the Society from 1903 until he died in 1906, had been extremely active in the Society’s behalf in the decade before 1903, when he was Russian consul in Damascus, and he retained a position in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when he accepted the new position in St. Petersburg.

Moreover, the meetings of the Executive Council from 1887 through 1905 were held in the official residence of Pobedonostsev’s deputy in the Holy Synod, Vladimir K. Sabler. The Synod not only helped collect a good part of the contributions made to the Society, but contributed annually about 50,000 rubles. In 1899, Pobedonostsev helped persuade the Council of State to grant 30,000 rubles annually, and in 1901 the state made a loan of 500,000 rubles to the Society. In fact, careful analysis of the Society’s budgets indicates that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs must also have been contributing substantially. Thus, even though the membership and income from dues and from gifts rose throughout the 1890’s, expenditures considerably outweighed ordinary income. Even in the 1890’s, annual income from dues was less than 50,000 rubles and at no time did gifts exceed 300,000 rubles a year. In 1894, when the Society had less than 2,000 members, its expenditures amounted to almost 700,000 rubles. In 1897, when the 3,139 members contributed 47, 259 rubles in dues and the Society received 230,000 rubles in gifts, it spent almost 856,000 rubles.²⁵

Perhaps the Society’s most permanent contribution was its impressive list of scholarly publications, most of which were collections of historical documents but some of which were research products in the fields of archeology, literature, and language. These volumes, of which thirty-one were published as early as 1891, are a great addition to knowledge of Palestine and of Byzantium as well. The several expeditions which the Society organized and financed have also stimulated research in the history of the Holy Land.²⁶

Encouraging and assisting pilgrims constituted the second reason listed in the 1882 statutes for organizing the Society, which devoted approximately one-third of its income to this purpose. Here, too, the Society’s work was impressive. It arranged tours for pilgrims at reduced prices, particularly through the round-trip “pilgrim’s ticket”; it established hostels in Russian ports and in various cities in the Middle East; and it provided guidance, comfort, and Russian quarters or centers for the pilgrims, two-thirds of whom were peasants. Above all, after 1889 it had complete control over all Russian pilgrims; in assisting them, it protected them from the Greek Orthodox in the Middle East and used them to buttress Russian interests and institutions in the area. The flow of pilgrims naturally increased under the Society’s encouragement; it rose from 2,000 in 1880 to 3,817 in 1889, 4,000 in 1894, and 6,000 in 1900 to 12,000 in 1913.²⁷

The third major goal of the Society, to support and expand the influence of Russian Orthodoxy in the Holy Land, was sought mainly through building and maintaining educational, medical, and religious institutions. The Society built six primary schools within the first six years of its existence. By 1900, it was supporting and directing sixty-eight free schools in Palestine and Syria with a total of almost ten thousand students. To train teachers for these schools, the Society established an institute for teachers; it also sent a few of the most promising teachers and students to Russia for higher education. In addition, the Society operated several hostels, a hospital, four clinics, a home for the aged, and four monasteries.²⁸

The Society encountered numerous difficulties, even after the merger in 1889 had eliminated much of the duplication and conflict among Russians. The Ottoman government was inevitably suspicious of such a Russian enterprise, particularly when it noted the important state positions some of its leaders occupied, the role played by various members of the imperial family, and the cooperation between the society and Russian officials in Constantinople, Damascus, and the Holy Land. Consequently, the Turks restricted and harassed the Society. They refused recognition of its schools until 1902. They delayed and sometimes refused permission to construct new buildings. When the Russians sought to escape or evade the Turks’ controls, they usually only increased the difficulties.

The Greek patriarchates, especially that in Jerusalem, were also worried about Russian expansion. Panslavism had been directed as much against Greek rule of the Orthodox churches in the Balkans as it had been against Ottoman political rule. The Greek Orthodox hierarchy, therefore, was sensitive to a Russian state program that made use of the Russian Orthodox Church in territory traditionally dominated by the Greeks. The school program for Arab children; the Russian effort to win the allegiance of the Arab clergy against the Greeks; the presence of known panslavs, such as Ignatiev and Alexei S. Suvorin, the editor of Novoe vremia (New Times), among its active members; and Russian success in electing an Arab, Meletios Doumani, Patriarch of Antioch in 1899, persuaded Greek church leaders that the Society was continuing the panslav program of the 1870’s in the Balkans.

The Greek Orthodox hierarchy therefore supported the Ottoman government in hampering the Society. It was so difficult after 1895 to build Russian schools in the Holy Land itself because of the opposition of the Greek Patriarch of Jerusalem that the major emphasis was shifted to Damascus, where the Patriarch and the Arab clergy were both friendly. By the turn of the century, two-thirds of the Society’s schools and pupils were in Syria, where the Society had originally planned no schools.

Friction with French Catholics in the tangled web of the Holy Land was almost inevitable. In 1893, a struggle between Russian Orthodox pilgrims and French Franciscans on the stairway of the Grotto of the Nativity caused a scandal and, according to the French, the death of a Franciscan. In fact, the Russian effort could only remind the French of the history of conflict there, and lead them to cooperate with the Greeks and the Turks in preserving the status quo.²⁹

The various forms of opposition or resistance which the Society excited naturally reduced its capabilities to achieve its goals. Scholarly publications continued to appear, the schools remained active, and the flow of pilgrims persisted, but the Society gradually declined after the turn of the century, particularly after the Russo-Japanese war. Membership gradually declined, from 5,000 in 1900 to 3,266 in 1911, while income declined more precipitately. The principal reason was probably that the philanthropic and religious goals of the Society did not attract the interest of Russians after 1900 as they had in the 1880’s and 1890’s. In addition, the death of principal officers, Khitrovo in 1903, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich in 1905, Beliaev in 1906, and Pobedonostsev in 1907, symbolized the aging of the organization and its vitality. In short, the organization seemed to reflect the decline of the pietistic patriotism of the generation of Pobedonostsev, which died out in the early years of the twentieth century.³⁰

The other area of the world which attracted a flare of missionary zeal from Pobedonostsev was Abyssinia, and the consequences of the foolish venture he helped inspire there persuaded him to turn his back upon the world again and to concentrate upon tightening domestic controls instead. The fiasco in Abyssinia also clearly weakened Pobedonostsev’s position with Alexander III and in the court in general and contributed to the deeper strain of pessimism which marks his thought and activity after 1890.

The interest of Russians in Abyssinia was several hundred years old, with its origins in the late medieval legend concerning Prester John, the mythical powerful king of the unknown, wealthy empire. In the seventeenth century, Russian monarchs, especially Peter the Great, were impressed by the advantages offered by cooperation with Christian Abyssinia against the Moslem Turks, and there was even talk of alliance with Abyssinia in the 1670’s and 1680’s. Porfirii Uspenskii, the dynamic cleric who headed the first Ecclesiastical Mission to Palestine after 1847, sought then to attract Russian attention to Abyssinia, pointing out that the Abyssinian Church was closer to Orthodoxy than to any other church. He urged that scientific and educational groups be sent to Abyssinia, that the Russian Church provide fraternal support of various kinds to the Abyssinian Church, and that political advice and assistance also be extended to the only Christian and still independent country in Africa. In 1848, he proposed that the Abyssinian monks living in Palestine be placed under Russian protection. His mission and later Russian missions in Palestine were especially friendly to the Abyssinians, whom they saw as natural allies against the Moslem Turks, the Orthodox Greeks, and the Catholic French. His efforts may have led King John IV of Abyssinia in 1876 to send Alexander II a gold cross as a token of friendship and hope that relations between Abyssinia and Russia would become closer.

However, Russian preoccupation with other matters and the Crimean and Balkan wars undermined Uspenskii’s ambitions. In fact, the tsar did not reply to John IV’s message and gift for more than a decade, when a Cossack adventurer, Nicholas I. Ashinov, reawakened some interest in Abyssinia. However, by the time Ashinov made his first visit to the African Christian kingdom in 1885 and 1886, the “congeries of feudal principalities” had attracted the attention of three other great powers, England, France, and Italy, all drawn or propelled into that part of Africa in the wave of imperialism which swept over Europe at that time. The French had occupied Obock in Somaliland in 1862 and in 1883 began to develop it as a base for operations inland. About the time that Ashinov returned to St. Petersburg, they occupied Jibuti on the Gulf of Aden, the port for a caravan route leading into the Harrar province of Abyssinia. In 1888, the British and French reached an agreement delimiting their spheres in that region. In the next year, however, Italy signed an agreement with Menelik, who had succeeded John IV earlier that year, which Italy claimed gave it a protectorate over all of Abyssinia. This definition was denounced by Menelik four years later, and in 1895 the Italians went to war with Abyssinia. French and Italian actions in this part of Africa and the great British concern with the upper Nile waters no doubt helped attract the attention of Ashinov and other Russians.³¹

Ashinov, a self-styled Cossack ataman, was typical of many of the adventurers who appear in Russian and European history in times of movement and expansion. When he met and bewitched the sober and studious Pobedonostsev, he was a handsome six-foot giant, twenty-nine years old, full of vitality and confidence. Uneducated, perhaps even illiterate, originally an Old Believer, Ashinov by 1885 had already seen a great deal of the Middle East and had picked up ideas current in that restless area. Born on the Terek in 1856, he visited Iran in 1870, was a caravan leader in Turkey in 1874, served with Russian forces in Bulgaria in 1883, and had acquired fluent Arabic and some Turkic by the time he first appeared in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1883. His original mission was to obtain land for a Cossack group with which he proposed to guard the frontier against Turkey in the Caucasus. A man of incredible self-assurance, he took advantage of the easy ways of Petersburg officialdom to talk with Witte, Generals Otto B. Richter and Nicolas N. Obruchev, the Minister of State Property, Prince Dondukov-Korsakov, who had been the head of Russian forces in Bulgaria, and a number of courtiers concerning his petition. In May, 1884, he was in fact given a large tract of land near Sukhumi. That fall, he was again in St. Petersburg seeking permission to name the new Cossack village Nikolaevsk. Before the summer of the next year, he had won the confidence of Ivan Aksakov and of Michael Katkov, the most vigorous panslavs in Moscow, and through them and others met Pobedonostsev, Metropolitan Isidore, and Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. By 1885, he was complaining about the quality of the land he had been given and was seeking instead other territory along the Black Sea coast. He also let it be known that the English were trying to recruit him and his Cossacks for work in the Caucasus or in Afghanistan.

Ashinov may have visited Cairo and the Red Sea shore in 1884–85. In any case, he travelled through the Middle East again in the summer and fall of 1885, financed probably by the old panslav warhorse, Ignatiev. Perhaps invited by several Abyssinian priests he met in Palestine, he went to the Italian port, Massawa, on the Red Sea late in the fall of 1885 and then went inland to Abyssinia. No doubt presenting himself as an official representative of Russia, Ashinov was royally welcomed by the various local chieftains, particularly Menelik of Shoa in the south and Ras Alula in the north, and was passed on to John IV himself. The king bestowed honors upon him, promised land for him and his Cossacks, gave him icons and manuscripts for Alexander III, and asked him to convey to the tsar greetings like those sent a decade earlier.³²

On his next visit to St. Petersburg, Ashinov created quite a stir in court circles, where Abyssinia represented something new and different. Alexander III received him, and Ashinov’s suggestion that a Russian colony be established in Abyssinia was discussed in an informal way in church and court circles. In the summer of 1887, Ashinov visited Paris, where he represented John IV in an effort to obtain arms for Abyssinia. Some French nationalists were just as intrigued as the Russians had been, but Ashinov suddenly departed for Constantinople and Cairo. He later appeared at the Italian port of Tadjoura, where he met two Abyssinian priests whom he escorted to Kiev to attend the celebrations of the nine-hundredth anniversary of the introduction of Christianity into Russia, and to Moscow and St. Petersburg, where they met the tsar, the metropolitans, Pobedonostsev, other high officials of Church and state, and high members of society. This service gave Ashinov contacts and a respectability even greater than before and provided him the opportunity to win support for an expedition to Abyssinia.³³

The ideas of Ashinov and of those who supported and financed him were not very clear. Basically, he exploited the religiosity and curiosity of pious Russian bureaucrats and merchants with eloquent descriptions of opportunities to assist a people whose religious beliefs and rituals were close to Orthodoxy, to expand the Russian Orthodox world, and to advance Russian state interests in an exciting, unknown area which might become of enormous significance. He argued that Russia needed a base and a colony in Africa “as from there she could always duly impress the English and other enemies. . . . Not without reason all the European countries are ready even to risk war in trying to secure important points on this world route. Why should not Russia seize one? We need it even more, if we wish to develop our trade with the East, as well as with Vladivostok. And Abyssinia is the key to the whole of Egypt and Africa, and those who will rule Abyssinia will also hold this main route . . . And the chief political interest can always, of course, without informing our diplomacy, be shifted from the Balkans to Africa. . . .”³⁴

Pobedonostsev met Ashinov in May, 1885, through Ivan Aksakov, who asked Pobedonostsev to support his Black Sea project, as Katkov was already doing, even though he is “a swindler, but a clever one.” Professor Subbotin warned that Ashinov had been a violent Old Believer and that churchmen should beware of such men, but Ashinov impressed Pobedonostsev, who noted that “as a cutthroat, he can be useful in a war.” In the summer of 1888, he urged Alexander III to talk with Ashinov; Pobedonostsev compared Ashinov to Yermak and Christopher Columbus and remarked that history was made by “ruffians” like them. He corresponded about Ashinov with his old collaborator of the Volunteer Fleet and of the 1881 crisis, Captain Nicholas Baranov, who was then governor of Nizhni Novgorod. Apparently Pobedonostsev persuaded Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich that the Orthodox Palestine Society should launch a fund drive for Ashinov’s project. Indeed, he also identified men and women in Kharkov, Kiev, Moscow, Nizhni Novgorod, and other centers who might support this effort to establish an Orthodox Russian colony in Africa.

Finally, at Ashinov’s request, he located a monk who had the necessary languages, knowledge of the Middle East, and health and character to serve as prior or chaplain for the group. Paisii, a Cossack who had been born in the Urals or in Orenburg in 1822, who had fought in Central Asia in the 1840’s and 1850’s, who had then left the Old Believers and become a monk, and who had served Russian interests in the monastery of St. Pantheleimon on Mount Athos, was summoned to St. Petersburg by Pobedonostsev, ordained a priest and made an archimandrite within a week, and named spiritual advisor to Ashinov and his group. The appointment of Paisii and the campaign waged by the Palestine Society led many Russian and foreign observers to conclude that the Ashinov expedition had the official support of the Church, if not of the state as well.³⁵

Both the French and the Italian governments had been disturbed by Ashinov’s first visit to Abyssinia and by the rumors which naturally attended such a brash and hardy adventurer. The French Foreign Minister, Goblet, asked his ambassador in St. Petersburg to determine whether or not Ashinov had any official support and what his activities meant. The Italians were even more concerned, because John IV had asked Ashinov to help the Abyssinians procure arms, and there were well-substantiated rumors that Ashinov was active in Paris in gun-running activities. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, pressed by states whose friendship Russia wanted and naturally eager to assert control over activities such as these, sought to discredit Ashinov and to prevent his departure. However, his protectors were so powerful, their motives were so vague and confused, and the entire enterprise was so surrounded by an aura of unreality that Giers and Lamzdorf were unsuccessful.³⁶

Financed by 40,000 rubles (approximately $20,000) obtained through the Palestine Society, given the moral support and the blessing of the Synod, and assisted also by the Ministry of the Navy, which discreetly provided equipment through its Odessa headquarters and at one time was planning to loan a ship as well, Ashinov and about one hundred and fifty men, women, and children left Odessa in December, 1888. After transferring to a Lloyd Trieste ship in Port Said, the expedition sailed through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, followed by an Italian gunboat and observed by the British as well. After two or three brief stops, the group disembarked late in January, 1889, at Obock, on the Gulf of Aden, occupied an old Egyptian fort at Sagallo, which they named New Moscow, and settled down. The events of the next three weeks are unclear in detail. Ashinov was asked by the local French official to leave, but refused. Apparently, discipline among the Russians was not effective, and difficulties arose within the group and between it and the French. In any case, after again refusing to leave, Ashinov and his followers were bombarded on February 5, 1889, by three French gunboats. Several of his followers were killed.

Even while Ashinov and his group were en route, Giers was busy denying to the Italian, English, and French governments that Ashinov was acting for the Russian government and trying at the same time to reach him and to order him back. After the tragic incident, when telegrams began to fly between Paris and St. Petersburg, the Russian government formally disclaimed all responsibility for Ashinov and Paisii. Both Alexander III and Giers publicly announced that the French had acted correctly, and the tsar ordered Ashinov to submit to French orders. Two months later, in an effort to make certain that the French government and the informed Russian public should understand clearly the history of the incident and the Russian government’s position, a full report, including Ashinov’s interpretation, was published. Each member of his group was given the opportunity to proceed to Abyssinia; all were then returned to Odessa. Giers recommended that Ashinov be sent to Siberia for five years and his companions for three, but Alexander III reduced his sentence to three years in Saratov. However, in the fall of 1889, he was allowed to move to Chernigov, and all restrictions on his movements were removed in April, 1890. Father Paisii was stationed in Alexander Nevsky monastery in St. Petersburg for a year and then rewarded by being named head of a wealthy monastery in Nizhni Novgorod.³⁷

In the unfolding of European diplomatic history, the Ashinov expedition does not occupy an important place. The flurry of concern in the various foreign offices was followed by muted expressions of dissatisfaction in Moscow and St. Petersburg about the government’s yielding to the French, but many Russian nationalist leaders had been involved in the idiotic incident and were therefore delighted to have it forgotten. Some extreme French nationalists criticized the French administration, particularly after Ashinov escaped to France in 1891 and was petted by Madame Juliette Adam and other critics of the Third Republic. However, the shelling of New Moscow was followed so quickly by the collapse of Boulangism in the spring of 1889 that French criticism quickly became silent. In fact, the efficiency with which the French had acted and the candor and good will displayed on both sides during the tension may have contributed to Franco-Russian rapprochment and to the Franco-Russian alliance.³⁸

However, this incident did increase Russian interest in Abyssinia and in Africa. Less than a year later, Metropolitan Platon of Kiev sent an emissary to King Menelik, probably to thank the ruler for the representatives sent to the Kievan celebration in 1888, and a geographical expedition was sent in 1891. The Ethiopians then sent an ecclesiastical mission in 1895 which was received with full honors and remained in Russia six weeks. Diplomatic recognition was extended in 1896, and Russia established a medical mission the following year which soon became a permanent fixture in Addis Ababa.³⁹

Ashinov threw a quick light upon the chaotic and ineffective way in which Russia’s international relations were managed, as did the coming of the war with Japan in 1904. Alexander III was so distressed by this ridiculous incident that he ordered a review made. The analysis within the government was not searching and press comment also was shallow, but Alexander III did remember that Pobedonostsev had described Ashinov as another Yermak or Christopher Columbus and did learn that he had introduced him to high clergy and wealthy merchants. Moreover, the Foreign Minister described the use Pobedonostsev and Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich had made of the Palestine Society to collect funds for Ashinov. Documents from the expedition itself and from the Ministry of the Navy revealed that Pobedonostsev had been an eager supporter of the expedition. When Prince Vladimir P. Meshcherskii published much of this information in Grazhdanin (The Citizen), to which Pobedonostsev had been a contributor fifteen years earlier, he blackened Pobedonostsev’s reputation for careful judgment in the court. Pobedonostsev’s efforts to deny his responsibility only increased the zeal of Giers and his deputy, Lamzdorf, to fasten responsibility on him. Coming as it did at the same time that Pobedonostsev was so rudely shaken by the criticism presented by the Evangelical Alliance and Pastor Dalton on Church policy in the Baltic area, this incident undermined his position with the tsar and at the same time increased his bitterness and pessimism.⁴⁰