Preface

I PROPOSE IN THIS VOLUME to describe and analyze the life and thought of Constantine P. Pobedonostsev, who was a significant and most interesting political leader in Russia in the last third of the nineteenth century. As a young man, before he abandoned Moscow for St. Petersburg and service in the high bureaucracy in 1865, Pobedonostsev displayed outstanding promise as a scholar on the history of Russian institutions and on Russian civil law. He played an important role in the transformation of Russia’s judicial system in 1864, and he was one of those who helped persuade the Russian government to go to war against Turkey in 1877. He is best known, however, for his sixty years of service in the central Russian state bureaucracy. He was a senator for almost forty years, a member of the Council of State for thirty-five years, a member of the Council of Ministers for twenty-five years, the Director General of the Most Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church for twenty-five years, the tutor of the last two tsars, the man most responsible for destroying the efforts of Loris-Melikov and others to close the gap between state and society in 1881, and the principal determinant of Russian domestic policy during the reign of Alexander III. His career therefore provides substantial insight into the administrative shortcomings and failures of the old regime in Russia, a subject which has been slighted by historians.

Pobedonostsev was also an important figure in Russian intellectual life, both for his role in restricting and controlling access to information and education and the expression of ideas and for his position in the history of the Slavophil movement and of panslavism. He was an unoriginal and therefore a representative philosopher; hence he serves particularly well to illustrate or reflect the views and qualities of extreme conservative thought in Russia in the half-century before the revolutions. Finally, he was both a Muscovite Russian nationalist and a Westerner; he spoke several European languages, read widely and deeply in European and American literature, travelled often to western Europe, proposed the transformation of the Russian economy along lines already affecting western Europe, and yet was bitterly opposed to the introduction of Western ideas and institutions into his native land. In this aspect of his life and thought, he therefore symbolizes one of the principal issues facing Russia in modern times.

The ideas and actions of Pobedonostsev are of interest and significance to all those who seek to understand what has happened within Russia during the past century. His view of Russian society and of the larger world of which his country was and remains a part has been systematically rejected and denounced by more liberal Russians and by the Communists. Indeed, few responsible men and women in any society would support or accept many of his views and policies. Nevertheless, the problems with which he dealt have not all disappeared, and the careful reader will be impressed by the continuity between some official Soviet policies and those recommended by this reactionary statesman. In addition, this analysis of the life and views of a significant political figure of another time and of another society should help illuminate the problems which other underdeveloped countries in particular have to face in the twentieth century. Finally, I hope that this study will contribute to our understanding of the curious failure of conservatism in modern times. Pobedonostsev considered himself, and was considered by others, a conservative. In fact, he was not a conservative by any careful definition of that word, which is heavily laden with multiple meanings. His failures, and the failures of the society of which he was a leading representative, should help us to understand that important development of our era.

This volume has been in process a very long time. One reason for this concerns the nature of the study and the fact that many of the principal sources were available only in the Soviet Union. More important, though, was the nature of the age in which we are living. Americans in general, and those of us in academic life in particular, must now respond to new requirements and responsibilities which no one could have foreseen as recently as ten or twenty years ago. The enormously changed role of the college and the university in both national and international affairs; the revolutionary developments within the college and the university with regard to curricula and spirit, as the Anglo-Saxon frame and atmosphere of earlier years have been replaced by policies which have enormously widened the boundaries of our interests and programs; the responsibilities placed upon any scholar interested in this century and in Russia and Eastern Europe—these developments have persuaded me on occasion to put this volume aside for challenges which seemed even more important.

These other obligations have produced a number of distressing delays. At the same time, these responsibilities—especially those involved in teaching undergraduate and graduate students and in working with Soviet educational organizations—have contributed substantially to my understanding of administrative problems and practices in Russia and have given me insights I could have acquired in no other way.

I have profited enormously from the work of others in this country and in the Soviet Union. Indeed, this volume stands as an individual achievement in the sense of its peculiar qualities and shortcomings, but it rests on the collective work of many others. It has benefited from the generous assistance of librarians in the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress and in the libraries of the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia University, Harvard University, Indiana University, and Rutgers University. Abroad, I was immensely assisted by the courteous and efficient staffs of the British Museum, the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Bibliothèque Polonaise in Paris, the Lenin Library, the Social Science Library in Moscow, the libraries of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow and in Leningrad, and the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library in Leningrad. The Manuscript Division of the Lenin Library was an especially rich source for this work, and the Central State Historical Archive in Leningrad, the Manuscript Division of the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkinskii Dom) also in Leningrad, and the archival collections of the other Soviet libraries were also of great use.

The translation of Russian terms and the spelling of Russian names are perpetual problems for Americans. In this study, I have used the customary spelling of the names of Russians such as Dostoevsky and Count Leo Tolstoy, but have followed the Library of Congress system of transliteration for others, such as Sergei A. Rachinskii. However, I have not used feminine endings for names such as those of Catherine Tiutchev. I have referred consistently to the Council of Ministers, instead of Committee of Ministers, although that institution was called a Council only when the tsar presided, as he usually did. I have translated the title of Pobedonostsev’s most important position, Ober-Prokuror of the Most Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, as Director General. There is no clear English definition of Ober-Prokuror, but the functions of that high state official were similar to but greater than those of an executive director. Director General constitutes an accurate title for that important position. Finally, quotations of rubles and dollars throughout the text are based on the rate of exchange that existed during the second half of the nineteenth century, approximately two rubles to one dollar. All dates are old style, or according to the Julian calendar, which in the nineteenth century was twelve days behind the Western, or Gregorian, calendar.

It is a pleasure to thank the editors of the Review of Politics, Indiana Slavic Studies, the Russian Review, the Journal of Modern History, and the Jahrbuch für Geschichte Osteuropa for permission to reprint in this volume materials which were originally published in different form in those journals. Parts of this manuscript have also appeared in H. Stuart Hughes (editor), Teachers of History: Essays in Honor of Laurence Bradford Packard (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1954); Ernest J. Simmons (editor), Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955); Ivo J. Lederer (editor), Russian Foreign Policy: Essays in Historical Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962); and John S. Curtiss (editor), Essays in Russian and Soviet History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963). I am also grateful for permission to reprint from these essays.

This volume was begun when I was a Senior Fellow of the Russian Institute of Columbia University. I take immense pleasure and pride in thanking Professor Geroid T. Robinson and his colleagues for providing me the initial opportunity for the training and research which are at the core of this work. I am especially grateful to the Russian Institute for the understanding it has shown during those periods when I have diverted my time and energy to other issues. No one who has ever worked with Ernest J. Simmons and Philip E. Mosely could fail to appreciate their wisdom and generosity. Above all, no formal expression of appreciation can ever repay Professor Robinson for the immaculate and consuming care with which he reviewed my work in its early stages and for the generosity with which he viewed my delay in completing a volume in which he has always been especially interested.

Nothing I have ever done could have been completed without the constant joyful support of my wife and our children. This is a collective work in many ways, because they have all contributed to it.

Robert F. Byrnes