VIII

★

Director General of the Synod

POBEDONOSTSEV’S reputation in Russian history rests largely upon his actions as Ober-Prokuror or Director General of the Most Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church from April, 1880, until October, 1905. For twenty-five years, he was in effect Minister for Religious Affairs in a state which recognized and supported a national church and in which the Church’s range of responsibility and authority had always been great. Moreover, Pobedonostsev remained a member of the Council of State and of the Senate, and after November, 1880, was also a member of the Council of Ministers. These official positions and his relations with the tsars, their wives, the imperial family, and the court insured him enormous influence in Russian political life in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.*

The Code of Laws of the Russian Empire declared firmly that “the foremost and dominant faith in the Russian Empire is the Christian Orthodox Catholic Eastern Confession.” As the official state religion, the Russian Orthodox Church enjoyed a number of important benefits and privileges. It was protected and promoted by the government, which also officially denied missionary work and often even ordinary parish functions to other religious groups. The Orthodox Church possessed a monopoly of religious propaganda and also had the right of censorship of literature dealing in any way with religious or moral issues. It not only enjoyed state protection and support for all its activities, but it also was represented in Russian political institutions at all levels. Thus, the Director General of the Synod gave it representation in the various organs of the central government. At the same time, the bishops had the right to name representatives of the Church to the county and provincial zemstvos and to the town councils. After 1718, the parish church was the official place for publication or announcement of laws and decrees. Parish priests were required to report to the civil authorities the confessions of those “with evil intent” toward the state or the sovereign and to report on general disaffection as well.

The state’s financial contribution to the Orthodox Church was considerable. Nicholas I in 1840 had begun the practice of grants to the Church for salaries of the clergy, and later tsars gradually increased these sums. In 1892, Pobedonostsev persuaded Alexander III to grant 250,000 rubles toward raising the salaries of the clergy. Thereafter, direct grants from the state treasury for priests’ salaries began to increase enormously. By 1905, funds for salaries alone from the treasury amounted to almost 12 million rubles (approximately $6 million), almost half the total cash income of the clergy. In 1897, almost 99 percent of the funds for the salaries of Pobedonostsev’s Synod staff came from the state treasury. Professor Curtiss has estimated that state funds constituted about 20 percent of the Church’s total income at the turn of the century.¹

The Russian Orthodox Church was not only the officially recognized and supported religious institution in Russia, but it was also under the direct authority and control of the state. Thus, the tsar, “supreme defender and preserver of the dogmas of the ruling faith,” had the right to supervise “the orthodoxy of belief and decorum in the holy Church.” It appears the tsar selected and appointed Pobedonostsev as Director General of the Synod without having consulted any members of the hierarchy or the clergy on this important decision. Moreover, the tsar on occasion interfered directly in important Church affairs. As Pobedonostsev wrote to Catherine Tiutchev on February 8, 1882, Platon, the new metropolitan in Kiev, had been named “at the personal order of the tsar,” an order which it was “impossible to oppose.” When Platon died in October, 1891, Pobedonostsev asked the tsar for advice in the selection of his successor, as he did when other high clergymen died. On occasion, the tsar criticized Pobedonostsev for releasing messages for the clergy through the Synod without first receiving his permission. Even the empress sometimes interfered in important religious matters. In 1902 she pressed the tsar to have the hermit Serafim Sarovskii, who died in 1833 and whose biography she had just read, raised to sainthood. The tsar strongly urged this on Pobedonostsev and the Synod in order to please his wife, and he ratified the decision the following year.²

Under the organization established for the Church by Peter the Great in 1721, an act which in itself reveals clearly the state’s authority, the supreme governing body of the Church was the Most Holy Synod. For the following two centuries, the Synod had full power over the Church, its dogma and ritual, the education of its clergymen and monks and all Church educational establishments, the diocesan administration, Church property, and discipline of both monastic and parish clergy. The hierarchy and the clergy were so subject to the rule of the Synod that they could not protest or oppose its rulings.

The Synod was composed of the Ober-Prokuror or Director General, the metropolitans of St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kiev, the exarch of Georgia (who almost never attended a meeting), and eight or nine bishops nominated for short terms by the Director General, appointed by the tsar, and “summoned” to sessions by the tsar. The Synod ordinarily held three annual sessions, generally with only six prelates in attendance. These prelates were chosen by the Director General, who thereby controlled attendance at the meetings. Pobedonostsev and his staff established the agenda for the meetings, which were hasty and provided little time for discussion. Indeed, Pobedonostsev very rarely placed important items on the agenda, and the meetings of which we have record devoted a great deal of time to trivial matters which should not have come before such an apparently important body.

The Holy Synod was completely under the control of the Director General, who was a layman appointed and removed by the tsar and who was considered “the eye of the tsar” in the Church. The Director General as the representative of the all-powerful tsar reported directly to him, served as the intermediary between the Church—including even the highest prelates—and the tsar, and alone within the Synod had the power to issue its decrees. As a result of pressure from Pobedonostsev upon Alexander II and Alexander III, the position of Director General of the Synod within the government was strengthened considerably. Thus, after November, 1880, Pobedonostsev was a member of the Council of Ministers. In 1887, he obtained the same rights as other ministers to participate in the decisions of the Senate, a right the Director General had held until sixty years earlier. Ten years later, in 1897, he persuaded Witte and the tsar that the salary of the Director General ought to be the same as that of the other ministers, 18,000 rubles a year.³

The prelates were isolated and weak and were so often transferred that they were unable to create bases of power. Under Pobedonostsev, for example, some bishops were transferred almost every year, and most of them spent less than four consecutive years at one post. All members of the hierarchy were monastics, or “black” clergy. Moreover, the bishops had little authority within their own dioceses, in which the administrative work was the responsibility of the religious consistory. The four or five priests in the consistory were dominated by the lay officials of the consistorial chancery. The chief of these lay officials, the secretary, was appointed by the Director General, who therefore obtained authority for the Synod in every diocese. Certainly, much of the responsibility for the redtape and corruption which afflicted the administration of the Church, as well as of the state, was due to this highly centralized system of control.

The clergy were naturally even less able than the hierarchy to resist the Holy Synod’s control. Almost all of the clergy were sons of clergymen, men of little education or culture, and they reflected that background of poverty and submissiveness. Poorly educated, overworked, generally unloved by their own parishioners, the clergy accepted meekly the orders they were given and served their people, the state, and the Church as simple bureaucrats.⁴

The services of the Church to the state were considerable. The most important was the intangible, pervasive influence which a state church can provide in an underdeveloped country in which the population feels respect and reverence for authority. The Church published and announced manifestoes and ukases, maintained important official records, solemnized official ceremonies with its rituals, and sanctified oaths and other expressions of loyalty and support. It preached submission to authority, respect for the status quo, and patriotism, particularly at times of stress or crisis, and it considered the opponents of respectability and order its enemies also.

Throughout his life, Pobedonostsev unthinkingly accepted and supported this system, as did most Russian officials and churchmen and indeed most Russians. In fact, even at the end of his life, when this arrangement was obviously crumbling, Pobedonostsev defended it as beneficial to Church and state, sanctified by tradition, and even absolutely essential. By that time, some other Russians, including a growing number of churchmen, were becoming convinced that the Church was severely handicapped by its ties and even subservience to the state. When they noted the serious deficiencies of the Church, the popular distrust of it as an instrument of the government, the advantages which other religious groups enjoyed even under state and Church harassment, and the thriving conditions of free churches in other countries, they began to propose that the Russian Orthodox Church break its ties and become independent, devoting its energies entirely to its spiritual functions. This reform movement became powerful within the Church, as it did in Russia in general, and contributed importantly to the overthrow of the system which Pobedonostsev represented.⁵

Pobedonostsev was a man of profound religious faith. He was well known to a large number of important churchmen, who in the 1870’s came to consider him a kind of special representative of the future tsar for religious affairs and who visited him when in St. Petersburg. In some ways, his knowledge of the situation of the Russian Orthodox Church was excellent. He had a low opinion of the princes of the Church, many of whom he had met and others of whom he knew through official reports or comments from friends and associates. He was aware of the poverty and ignorance which afflicted the clergy and never idealized them or the role they might play. Indeed, his correspondence with members of the hierarchy and with friends from the very beginning of his career as Director General of the Synod reveals a cynical awareness of the shocking ills which beset the clergy and the Church as a whole, as well as strong suspicion that these shortcomings could not be repaired. In fact, the opinions concerning the clergy and the Church which Pobedonostsev expressed privately did not differ substantially from those of their most severe critics.⁶

Pobedonostsev’s knowledge of the Church was naturally increased considerably by his work as director of Church affairs and by the visits of review he paid to different parts of Russia, particularly during the first five or six years of his service as Director General. However, even though he was uncomfortably aware of some of the Church’s shortcomings, he had no conception whatsoever of the massive ills which afflicted the spirit and body of Orthodoxy, of the remarkably feeble influence of the Church upon all segments of society, including the peasants, and of the striking lack of spiritual vitality which undermined the Church’s foundations. Moreover, it is clear from his official reports, the policy explanations which he issued, and his private letters and utterances, that he was completely unable to understand the effective appeal which the Old Believers, the various evangelical sects, and the mystical sects exerted.

Thus, he estimated with reasonable accuracy, indeed probably exaggerated, the power of Mohammedanism in Central Asia, of Lutheranism in Finland and along the Baltic, and of Roman Catholicism among the Poles along the western borders of the empire. However, his massive annual and biannual reports to the tsar on the Church ordinarily did not include the non-Russian, non-Orthodox inhabitants of the empire in his official statistics, as though he assigned them some kind of special status outside the Church and the state. The figures he did provide concerning these populations are sensible and probably as close to objective as the data of those years allow. He was not hopeful that the Church could make any inroads among the Lutherans and the Catholics on the western borders. In fact, he would have been delighted to keep these faiths from expanding their influence.⁷

However, Pobedonostsev, like most other official Orthodox observers, completely underestimated the number and spiritual vitality of the Russian inhabitants of the empire who rejected Orthodoxy for some other faith. Indeed, official estimates of the number of Russian non-Orthodox were grossly misleading throughout the period after the 1660’s, when the Old Believers resented the efforts of Patriarch Nikon to correct the prayer books and liturgy and left the Russian Orthodox Church to remain true to the customs, gestures, and words of their fathers. During the succeeding centuries, especially in the nineteenth century, the Old Believers themselves were riven as new sects splintered. Moreover, a number of other evangelical sects appeared, such as the Molokane, the Dukhobors, and the Stundists in particular, and mystical sects, such as the Khlysty and Skoptsy, rose also.

The statistics concerning the Orthodox Church and concerning these sects as well were difficult to establish until the second half of the nineteenth century, but the sects presented special difficulties because the various penalties against non-Orthodox groups among the Russian members of the population were so heavy and because the Orthodox priests and others who helped collect the data often deliberately falsified the figures. The official statistics were in such flagrant disagreement with the knowledge and judgment of state officials that in 1858 a Statistical Committee was established under Count L. A. Perovskii to review the evidence. This committee found the official count of the non-Orthodox Russians grossly inaccurate. Indeed, when the official figure for the sects was 829,971, the Perovskii committee estimated there were 9,300,000. The previous official figure for non-Orthodox Russians in the province of Nizhni Novgorod was 20,240. The Statistical Committee concluded there were 172,600, and the Bishop of Nizhni Novgorod put his estimate at 233,323. In Yaroslavl province, the Statistical Committee found 278,417 Russian members of various sects at a time when Ivan Aksakov estimated there were 672,687 and the official figure was 7,454.⁸

In the early 1860’s, approximately 15 percent of the Russian population (including White Russian and Ukrainian) of the Russian empire belonged to one or another of the sects. Professor Curtiss in his masterful study published in 1940 estimated that approximately the same percentage of the Russian population belonged to the sects in 1900. Pobedonostsev, however, refused to accept the facts and consistently underestimated the number and verve of the non-Orthodox Russians. His annual reports from 1881 through 1905 show a gradual increase in the number of Orthodox communicants, clergy, churches, and other measurable indices of Church strength, but deny any growth to the Old Believers and the other sects. His statistics for the Orthodox Church show a steady rise from 63 million in 1881, to 77 million in 1895, and 88 million in 1904. Even though his official reports indicate that the total number of converts from paganism and all faiths over this period averaged less than 15,000 a year, and even though his reports and his letters overflow with alarm concerning the vigor and power of the sects, Pobedonostsev estimated in 1903 that about 70 percent of the population held active membership in the Orthodox Church and that there were fewer than 2 million Old Believers in a total population of approximately 125 million.⁹

Pobedonostsev had many of the good qualities of the dedicated bureaucrat, but he was not competent as an administrator. He loved to work and despised those who did not, he was quick and efficient in accomplishing tasks, he was logical and clear in organizing facts and ideas, he was loyal to his superiors, and he was unusually honest in forsaking personal advantage from his work or his relationships. He confessed that he felt uneasy and even unwell when he had nothing to do. The last forty years of his life are filled with complaints about the number of reports he had to prepare and read, the meetings he was required to attend, the men and women from all classes and all parts of Russia whom he had to see, and the functions of all kinds which became his responsibility. Yet, it is clear that keeping busy was essential for him and that he accepted new responsibilities without reflection or review.

He rejoiced in 1878 when he could add another room to his apartment so that he could interview petitioners efficiently. From the early 1870’s on, his apartment and his office were crowded with men and women from all over Russia seeking advice and assistance for collecting funds for a convent, for getting government permission to build a railroad, for publishing a manuscript, for aid in transferring an incompetent priest, for counsel in establishing a new school. He complained eternally in his correspondence about these visitors, who devoured his time and who filled his apartment in the afternoon and evening, but at the same time he never refused to see anyone, and it is clear that he enormously enjoyed this role. In fact, this beloved function was central to his role in the government and to his political philosophy. His obsession with bureaucratic work became greater as his interest in scholarship declined. Indeed, the lonely hours he once devoted to research and publication were then given to bureaucratic tasks, in which he revelled but which at the same time, like many administrators, he declared a waste of time.¹⁰

The qualities which served him and his superiors well with regard to ordinary tasks hampered him when he was given major responsibilities, such as directing the Volunteer Fleet or serving as Director General of the Synod. In these offices, he showed himself unable to define the large, long-term problems, to locate and appoint others to assist him, or to delegate authority to competent and reliable men. Thus, he retained the organization of the Holy Synod as he found it in 1880, although his predecessors had neglected to make the central office of the Church modern and effective. He simply leaped into his new position. There is no evidence that he ever studied the administration of the Church or discussed with his predecessor or with his assistants in the Holy Synod the principal problems and shortcomings. Apparently, he simply entered the Synod office and began to work as hard as he could on the papers which came across his desk.

He complained frequently that he had no one to help him, but there is no evidence that he sought assistance. Every matter which came to the Synod claimed his attention, from anonymous complaints against a bishop to the reorganization of the Church’s courts. Thus, in the late fall of 1880, he confessed that he was trying by himself to create a new policy for dealing with the Uniates in the Kholm areas and on the western border, to advise the tsar on the negotiations then underway with the Papacy concerning the nomination of several Roman Catholic bishops in Russian territory, to review Church policy on remarriage after divorce in several different kinds of circumstance, to nominate secretaries for a number of consistories in various parts of Russia, to review new means of restricting the influence of the Old Believers, and to appoint a number of bishops and rectors of seminaries. While assuming full responsibility for critical questions of this kind without the assistance of an organized staff, he also found time to prepare a report urging the tsar to close all theaters during Lent and on all holidays and to examine the wisdom of continuing the manufacture of candles by diocesan factories.¹¹

Pobedonostsev’s own records and the memoirs of friendly and hostile prelates alike reveal that he considered the Holy Synod meetings unimportant. He rarely introduced the central issues of policy or administration to this group, and there is no evidence that the members of the Holy Synod introduced or discussed important policy problems. Indeed, the sessions were usually desultory, and Pobedonostsev complained that his colleagues rarely had studied the agenda or considered seriously any of the information he had made available to them.

During his first two years in office, he traveled extensively, especially in the northwestern part of European Russia and to the areas where Lutheranism and Catholicism were powerful. These visits gave him considerable insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the Church and into the main problems the Church faced. However, he ceased taking these trips after 1882 or 1883, although he did on occasion visit an area where especially troublesome problems had arisen. He travelled east of the Urals only twice, on brief official missions, and he entered the Caucasus only three times, on inspection tours. Moreover, he never visited some centers, and he relied on bishops’ reports which he knew to be inadequate.

At the same time he developed no alternative system for collecting information and judgments from the bishops, the rectors of seminaries and other religious institutions, and other eminent religious leaders. Indeed, he knew few of the bishops in the church well, and he made no systematic review of their work. He organized three sobors or councils of the hierarchy in his first eight years as head of the Synod, but none of these meetings was fruitful and he did not arrange even regional meetings of ecclesiastics in his last fifteen years of service. His relations with the metropolitans were not close, and the hierarchy in Moscow and St. Petersburg had little influence upon him.

As the Director General of the Synod, he relied heavily upon correspondence with particular friends in the hierarchy, men as remote from St. Petersburg as his lay correspondents, Nicholas IIminskii in Kazan and Sergei Rachinskii in Tatev, near Smolensk. Indeed, just as these two men had a special interest in educating peasants and non-Russian Moslems, so Pobedonostsev’s closest associates in the hierarchy, such as Nikanor, Bishop of Ufa and later of Odessa, Illarion, Archbishop of Poltava, and Makarii, Archbishop of Tomsk, devoted a major part of their energy to missionary activity among the Stundists and Old Believers. These clerics, who received special honors and awards from the tsar, provided him petty and often quite improper information about their colleagues in both the Church and in the civil administration, especially the governors general, and they often pandered to Pobedonostsev’s beliefs. He also made heavy use of correspondence and visits from friends in various European parts of the empire, generally men and women who shared his political philosophy, rather than using the administrative apparatus of the Holy Synod itself. Finally, his wife and friends of the Pobedonostsevs, particularly Catherine Tiutchev until she died in the spring of 1882, often influenced Church policy, especially in appointments within the Synod staff and within the hierarchy. Indeed, analysis of the administrative procedures which Pobedonostsev followed, particularly in obtaining information concerning prelates and in collecting recommendations for appointments and promotions, helps to explain his spectacular failures in judgment concerning those whom he chose or recommended for high office. In other words, he was both a bumbling leader and an incompetent administrator for the Church.¹²

Pobedonostsev’s principal shortcomings as an administrator clearly derived from his failure to define his function and to consider carefully the main problems he faced and the best means of organizing the forces available. He sought to direct a church which claimed 63 million communicants in 1881 with a staff budget as large as that of the sixth department of the Senate when he began work in Moscow in 1846. He did nothing to reorganize, enlarge, or improve his staff, except to bring Vladimir K. Sabler as counsel to the Holy Synod. Sabler, who had begun to study civil law in Moscow University during Pobedonostsev’s last year there as a lecturer, had had an undistinguished record as a scholar and as a bureaucrat, moving from position to position without advancing in responsibility. Indeed, Pobedonostsev’s anonymous article in Grazhdanin on October 29, 1873, attacking Russian jurists, especially those at Moscow University, had singled out Sabler as one of the less competent temporary members of the faculty in the field of civil law.

Pobedonostsev was privately quite critical of Sabler for his lack of organizing sense and discipline, but he admired his energy and relied on him increasingly to help administer the Church. Sabler soon was named director of the chancery, with especial responsibilities for censorship, he became associate director general in 1892, and he was named a Senator in 1896, a member of the Council of State in 1906, and Director General of the Synod in 1911. There is no evidence that Sabler possessed any administrative competence or made significant suggestions concerning Church policy. He did manage, however, to create a large number of bitter enemies among the clergy and even within the hierarchy.¹³

Pobedonostsev’s definition of the Russian Orthodox Church, of the Russian empire, of the relations between the Church and the people who lived within the empire, and of the relationship between the Church and the remainder of the world is naturally at the core of his work as Director General of the Synod and of his entire philosophy. Briefly, he thought that all Russians, White Russians and Little Russians or Ukrainians as well as Great Russians, ought to be and indeed legally were members of the Russian Orthodox Church. He considered that the Church’s first responsibility was to the great majority of the Russians who were active members of the Church; its main function was to provide religious services, guidance, and inspiration to these millions, and its principal problem was to increase their level of knowledge and understanding of Orthodoxy.

Unhappily, some Russians had fallen away from or been enticed away from the Russian Orthodox Church by the Old Believers or one of the many sects. The Church’s second main mission was to return these wandering sheep to the true religious and national fold and then to reduce and even destroy these crippling rival forces. In fact, Pobedonostsev devoted a great deal of his time and energy and the Church’s resources to battle with the Old Believers and the sects in an effort to create a spiritual unity among the Russians who lived in the empire.

The third circle or community in which Pobedonostsev’s Church lived and acted was that inhabited by non-Russians, generally on the borders of the empire or in areas such as Central Asia, far removed from Moscow and St. Petersburg. These included Finns, Germans, Poles, Jews, Uzbeks, and others who held religious beliefs (Lutheranism, Catholicism, Mohammedanism, or Judaism) quite different from Orthodoxy, the Old Believers, and the sects. In different degrees, men of these non-Russian nationalities and non-Orthodox religious faiths were a threat to Orthodoxy, particularly to those Russian Orthodox who lived among them. His goal so far as they were concerned was to restrict their influence and their faiths to the non-Russians and gradually to whittle down and eliminate the religious forces, especially that of the Moslems, which had the weakest organization and offered the least powerful intellectual challenge.

Beyond the boundaries of Russia lived a few Russians who were members of the Russian Orthodox Church, a few non-Russians who were members of the same communion, and millions of Slavs who were members of the greater family of Eastern Orthodoxy. These peoples were also within his vision, although at the very horizon of it, and they provided the outer pan-Orthodox ring of the series of concentric circles in which he viewed Orthodoxy and his responsibilities.¹⁴

Because of his profound pessimism and growing cynicism and because conservatism to him usually meant inaction or at least inertia, his policies for the Church have a markedly passive character. Although he did not appreciate the profound weaknesses of Orthodoxy and its failure to exert significant influence on any part of Russian society, he did have some understanding of the grave shortcomings of the clergy. In fact, the view from what he called his mountain top persuaded him that a substantial reform program was beyond consideration. The great majority of the clergy was ignorant, isolated, overworked, and indifferent even to the most sacred of their duties. A substantial number were disorderly and drunkards, some were even revolutionaries, and scandal in one form or another was common. Even the good priests were passive, and the excellent ones were rare. Pobedonostsev was aware long before he became Director General that the Church had too few priests and that a considerable number of churches had been closed in the 1870’s because of this shortage. Finally, he believed that fewer than half of the bishops were competent, that the Synod itself was an uncertain tool, and that ecclesiastical congresses would have little effect.¹⁵

Pobedonostsev quickly became convinced that creating parish schools throughout Russia to teach reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion at the most basic and elementary level was the principal means for preserving Orthodoxy. He supported this drive with an extensive program of publications, which will be discussed later.

So far as the Orthodox clergy was concerned, he sought immediately to increase its number by reducing the training required, reforming the seminaries, and finally, especially after 1893, increasing salaries substantially. Even before he became Director General, Pobedonostsev was convinced that the Church was over-training the rural clergy. He argued that the conditions of rural life were such that graduates of seminaries were not only not required but were even handicapped and frustrated in their pastoral work. He was impressed by the achievements of priests of high character but little learning, and by the vitality of Old Believer parishes whose clergy was infinitely less well trained than even those of the Church. He therefore lowered the educational requirements for the clergy, encouraged bishops to appoint to vacancies men who had not completed their seminary work, and sought to introduce into the seminaries more emphasis on elementary knowledge, on singing, and on effective simple preaching which would not be beyond the capacities of the illiterate peasant. According to the official history of the Church during the reign of Alexander III, the number of priests increased from 46,800 in 1881, to 56,900 in 1894. The School of St. Vladimir, which his wife founded and directed in St. Petersburg for daughters of rural priests who were quite likely to marry priests and to teach, was of the same character, for it emphasized home economics, singing, and the old-fashioned virtues, rather than learning.¹⁶

Pobedonostsev was appalled by the seminaries and religious academies when he first visited them, and during his first decade as Director General of the Synod he paid considerable attention to their improvement. He visited seminaries and tested the students orally in all of their subjects, from Russian language and literature to doctrine and choral work. He sought the appointment of rectors and faculty of high quality and strong discipline, and he tightened the system of inspection in an effort to prevent scandals, which occurred on occasion nonetheless, especially in Tver. Finally, especially in the earlier years before his attention was drawn to other problems, he urged the construction of dormitories and the creation of basic libraries.¹⁷

One of the critical problems for the Church and one of the main causes for the shortage of priests, their dissatisfaction, and the numerous scandals was their very low incomes. At the turn of the century, the annual cash income of the average priest was six or seven hundred rubles (approximately $350). Even this figure represented some improvement within the previous decade. In dividing the funds which he obtained for priests’ salaries, Pobedonostsev gave especially large shares to rural clergy, especially those in the western border areas and in Cential Asia.¹⁸

Of the religious groups which most alarmed him, the Raskolniki or Old Believers, the Stundists and Baptists, and the Pashkovists most attracted his ire. He consistently refused to accept the estimates of the Old Believers themselves and of some observers that they totalled 15 million, but at the same time he asserted that the 2 million Old Believers were a cancerous growth on the Russian body politic and must somehow be eliminated. He wrote in his official report to the tsar for 1890–91, “The characteristic features of the raskol remain what they always were, dark ignorance, callous stagnancy of thought marked by extreme intolerance, deceit, slyness, meanness, and frivolity. Such are the qualities of the mass of the Old Believers and of their leaders as well.”¹⁹

His analysis of the survival and power of the Old Believers was quite different during the last years of his life from what it had been when he first became Director General of the Synod. Thus, late in life, after he had had to admit that his efforts to restrict and reduce the raskol had failed, he emphasized their skill in concentrating in remote areas where the Orthodox Church was weak, such as parts of Siberia, and in taking advantage and on occasion violating the provisions of the 1883 law which defined their very limited rights. Earlier, however, he had ascribed their survival to habit and their already long history; the firmness and stoutness of the rules and formalities they had created; the wealth of some Old Believers, which he said served as a magnet for poor Orthodox peasants and to bribe and enslave Orthodox Church members; and, more and more as time when on, the friendly attitude toward them shown by writers and journalists, “the liberals.” On occasion, he described the Old Believers as a lower middle-class and poor peasant movement, fed by economic forces beyond the control of the state.²⁰

The policies which he recommended toward the Old Believers reflected his analysis of their roots and his determination, first, to remove them and their influence from Russian life, and second, to educate the Orthodox Russian people against their attractions. His position toward the other sects among the Russians was the same, although he considered the Old Believers the greatest threat to the Church and the state and made them his major target. In this he was criticized by his good friend, Catherine Tiutchev, but she died in the spring of 1882, and thereafter few reminded him that “you do not persuade people with persecution.” Instead, he relied through his years of high state service upon the views of a scholar of the Old Believers who was bitterly prejudiced against them, Professor Nicholas I. Subbotin, who had been a member of the Moscow Ecclesiastical Academy faculty in the monastery of the Holy Trinity since 1852. Subbotin, who lived from 1827 until 1905, spent his adult life studying the Old Believers and published more than four hundred articles and forty books on them. Pobedonostsev maintained a voluminous correspondence with him, sent him official data and reports concerning the Old Believers, asked his advice concerning policies and appointments, and followed his suggestions in establishing Church and state policies toward the Old Believers and the evangelical sects as well.²¹

Pobedonostsev and his advisor agreed on a two-pronged policy for restricting and destroying the power of other religious groups. First of all, they consistently urged use of the state’s authority to deny the Old Believers and the sects any rights not clearly granted them under Russian law and to harass them in every way possible. Second, they created an educational and propagandistic program designed to wean Old Believers away from their church and to strengthen Orthodox hostility toward them.

Long before he became Director General of the Synod, Pobedonostsev wrote approvingly in his Kurs grazhdanskago prava (Course on Civil Law) that no member of the Russian Orthodox Church could legally leave “the state religious belief” for another. He believed therefore that the power of the state could be used against anyone or any group which sought to seduce members of the Orthodox faith and that state power could be used to eliminate the attractions which rival faiths offered. In fact, he wrote to Subbotin that “one can do nothing without the support of the state’s authority.” Therefore, he refused all petitions from the Old Believers and the sects for any rights not specifically authorized for them, from building altars in their officially tolerated cemeteries to repairing their chapels. He refused permission for Old Believers in Austria to visit their dying parents in Russia, and he sought to prevent Old Believers from settling along the Chinese Eastern Railroad in Manchuria. Finally, he used his influence to persuade other departments of the government to restrict the Old Believers in every way possible. He sought to place men who viewed these problems as he did in important government positions, particularly in the Ministry of the Interior.²²

The position of the Old Believers and of the evangelical sects was sometimes unclear in Russian law, especially in Moscow, “the center of Church and state power.” Catherine the Great had given the Old Believers the right to have two cemeteries in Moscow, one for those who had a clergy and one for those who did not. The former one, the Rogozhskoe cemetery, had become a real religious center, with chapels, a convent, and other buildings. Under Alexander II, when the judicial reforms were being created, special commissions were established to study the legal position of the Old Believers and of the various sects. Alexander III, who had a brief affection for the raskol, perhaps because some of Alexander II’s bravest guards had been Old Believers, decided the work of these research committees should be used to clarify the position of the non-Orthodox. Count Dmitrii Tolstoy, who became Minister of the Interior in 1882, apparently agreed, perhaps because they wanted the law more carefully defined so that the Old Believers could be restricted more easily. Finally, in May, 1883, after completing the tortuous process established for imperial acts, the law was issued.

The 1883 act gave all schismatics (except the Skoptsy, who were therefore placed beyond the law) the right to hold internal passports, to engage in trade and industry, and to hold minor offices. They were authorized to hold religious services in their homes and in houses of prayer, but these buildings were not allowed to have bells or other distinguishing marks. No new places of worship could be built, and repairs of those which existed could be made only with the permission of the Ministry of the Interior and of the Synod. Funeral services could be held, but religious vestments could not be worn then or at any other time. Moreover, no public demonstrations of worship or processions were allowed, and proselytizing or missionary work was also forbidden.²³

The May law clearly restricted the religious rights of the Old Believers and of the evangelical sects. Pobedonostsev, who had been one of its prime supporters, robustly denied that the rights of anyone were reduced in any way so far as religious belief was concerned or that the power of the state was used to defend the position of the established church, just as other adherents of intolerance in more recent times have defined restrictions as freedom. However, while the raskol and the sects rejoiced that they now had at least some rights defined and had even been recognized and made to some degree respectable in the eyes of the law, Pobedonostsev was pleased with the power he now had to deny the non-Orthodox everything not specifically granted in 1883. Church and state policies from 1883 until 1905 were therefore devoted to a precise interpretation of this law and to an effort to hamper the various sects in every way. Moreover, Pobedonostsev fought consistently, especially late in life, to make the law even more repressive, particularly with regard to the Old Believers’ efforts to enlarge their cemeteries and to build schools and chapels.²⁴

Because of his special interest in education and in propaganda, Pobedonostsev was relentless in denying other religious groups the right to publish or to import materials concerning their beliefs. He searched vigilantly for publications which portrayed the Old Believers or any of the sects in a favorable light. He made extensive use of the censor’s authority to prevent publications by or for the Old Believers. He even succeeded in persuading the Ministry of Education to discharge from one of its bureaus Nicholas S. Leskov, the celebrated novelist whom he knew and whose earlier works he had enjoyed and had even recommended to Alexander III, because he portrayed the Old Believers as being a danger to no one and because Leskov preached religious tolerance. Pobedonostsev used Subbotin and Katkov in skillful attacks on Leskov, and he later persuaded his friends in the Main Administration of the Press to prevent new editions of some Leskov stories which were “extremely harmful” in their portrayals of the Old Believers.²⁵

The Old Believers outnumbered by about six times all the other evangelical sects, but state policy directed toward these groups, especially the Baptists, the Stundists, and the Dukhobors, while precisely the same, attracted even more attention, perhaps because it was more vigorously applied. Thus, in 1881 Pobedonostsev prevented a Russian translation of a German Baptist catechism, arguing that the sect was already “dangerous,” that publication of a catechism indicated they were planning an active propaganda campaign, and that the ignorant Russian peasant must be protected against the allure of a sect which was pacifistic, elected its own clergymen, scorned the Orthodox, and advocated a number of antisocial doctrines. Germans living in Russia could be Baptists, but “there are and must be no Russian Baptists.”²⁶

The Stundists, an evangelical sect with beliefs much like the Baptists, who left the Orthodox Church about 1870 and who grew impressively in number in the bishoprics of Kherson and Odessa, met even more vigorous opposition. This movement appealed especially to peasants and was a kind of peasant puritanism, rejecting smoking, alcohol, and dancing, declaring the state an evil force, relying entirely on personal interpretations of the Bible, rejecting the sacramental system and many of the rites of the Orthodox Church, and even proposing communal property. The May, 1883, law allowed the Stundists the same rights as the Old Believers, but Pobedonostsev quickly became dismayed as they grew in number in the southwestern part of Russia. He arranged a special sobor or conference of the clergy and hierarchy in Kiev in 1884, in order to educate these churchmen about the dangers the Stundists posed. When these measures and a propaganda campaign proved ineffective and when “the evil” continued “to grow and to spread,” he called the forces of the state into action. A new Stundist journal was closed. The hierarchy of the southwest, with his support, tried to have the meeting houses of the Stundists closed, but was unsuccessful until 1894, when Pobedonostsev succeeded in persuading the Council of Ministers to declare them “an especially dangerous sect.” Their schools and chapels were then closed, they were denied internal passports and other official documents, and the laws were applied to them as severely as he could arrange. Thus, the peaceful farmers were persecuted because the Orthodox Church could tolerate no rivals. Both publicly and privately, Pobedonostsev asserted that the Stundists were persecuted not because of their religious beliefs, but because they were hostile to all beliefs, used violence, and preached the use of violence.²⁷

An account of his efforts to destroy two other sects, one early in his career and the other near its close, will complete this illustration of his use of state authority against rival religious groups. The Dukhobors, who were settled in the Caucasus in the 1840’s and whom Count Leo Tolstoy helped convert to nonviolence, chastity, and vegetarianism, attracted Pobedonostsev’s attention and wrath in the 1890’s, at about the same time that he encouraged the seizure of the children of some of the Molokane and their conversion under pressure to Orthodoxy. Count Leo Tolstoy succeeded in attracting such attention to the Dukhobors that the policy of persecution ceased and this tiny group was allowed to emigrate, first to Cyprus and then to Canada, where they annoy Canadian officials just as they had Pobedonostsev.²⁸

The followers of guards colonel Vasilii A. Pashkov were dispersed more quickly than the Dukhobors. Pashkov and a number of members of the high aristocracy in St. Petersburg, right under Pobedonostsev’s eyes, had been converted to a form of Protestantism in the 1870’s by Lord Radstock, a Victorian revivalist of the Plymouth Brethren persuasion. In fact, both Pobedonostsev and Dostoevsky had heard sermons of Radstock in 1874 and 1876. Neither had been impressed, but both were dismayed by the sensation Radstock created, especially among old ladies, and by the decision of Colonel Pashkov in 1876 to establish a Society for the Encouragement of Spiritual and Ethical Reading. Pobedonostsev was unsuccessful at first in getting the courts or the police to prevent Radstock’s Bible readings. However, within a month after he had been named Director General of the Synod, he wrote a long memorandum to the tsar, urging that Radstock be forced to leave Russia and that his band of noble followers be broken up. Pobedonostsev noted that Pashkov was preaching without permission, that English hymns were being sung by his audience, that his sermons, which emphasized faith and love, were creating an indifference to sin among the aristocracy, and that the infection could easily spread down from the upper classes. His proposal occupied at least two hours of the time of the Council of Ministers in May, 1880; subsequently, Radstock was forced to leave Russia and Pashkov and some of his aristocratic followers were sent into exile.

A year or two later, Radstock, Pashkov, and their followers were back in St. Petersburg, upsetting Pobedonostsev because they were distributing Pilgrim’s Progress without permission and because the special committee he had established to destroy Pashkov’s sect had proved ineffective. In 1884, when Pashkov sought to ally his band with the other evangelical sects, he drew upon himself and his group the powerful wrath of the Director General. This time, Pashkov and some of his principal followers were forced to leave the country, his property was put in trust, their offices were closed, and their literature was confiscated. To Pobedonostsev’s intense dismay, Alexander III allowed Colonel Pashkov to return to Russia again in 1887, but Pobedonostsev soon forced him to flee again to Paris, where he died in 1902.²⁹

The Orthodox Church had been in combat with the Old Believers for more than two hundred years before Pobedonostsev became Director General of the Synod. During that long period, the Church had used the state’s power and authority, especially in denying opportunities to the Old Believers to spread their beliefs and to enjoy the same limited rights and opportunities as other inhabitants of the empire. Pobedonostsev maintained these programs, continuing the restrictive measures and even defining them more clearly in the 1883 legislation. Missionary work was maintained among the Old Believers in a feeble and limited way, but conversions at no time during the period from 1880 until 1905 exceeded 7,500 a year. Debates between especially qualified Orthodox clergy and spokesmen for the Old Believers were expanded in the 1880’s, but reduced in importance in the 1890’s, when Pobedonostsev came to believe that the Old Believers were profiting too much from the exchange.

Pobedonostsev and Professor Subbotin, his special advisor on the Old Believers, introduced several new ideas in an unsuccessful effort to strengthen the official campaign. Thus, the 1884 congress in Kiev of the hierarchy and clergy of the southwest provinces was designed to increase understanding of the problems and to stimulate a drive in the Ukraine. Another congress in Kazan sought the same goals for the Church in that area. In 1887 and in 1890, Pobedonostsev sought to make use of the edinoverii, or priestless Old Believers, who accepted the rule of the Synod but used the forms and rituals of the Old Believers, by having conferences of missionaries at a monastery of the priestless Old Believers in Moscow. These meetings were small, in spite of the pressure he exerted upon the bishops to send representatives, and their recommendations emphasized more the use of the state’s power against their rivals than missionary activity. Indeed, Pobedonostsev admitted that these efforts were utter failures, and the Synod organized only two conferences or congresses of this kind after 1890, one in Kazan in 1897 and the other in Odessa in 1898. His great admiration for Nicholas Ilminskii in Kazan and Sergei Rachinskii in Tatev near Smolensk no doubt reflected his wish that the Church could somehow organize missionary efforts like theirs.³⁰

The failures of the conferences to excite the clergy and of the missionary congresses to organize effective diocesan campaigns against the Old Believers led Pobedonostsev and Subbotin to introduce a special effort to educate the seminarians so that they would be well prepared when they became priests. Thus, in 1887 the Synod ordered each seminary to establish within three years a chair on the history and evil influences of the raskol and of the sects. Later, Pobedonostsev pressed for courses on the history of the Russian Orthodox Church.

This program was supplemented by a campaign designed to produce inexpensive volumes for the seminaries, the parish schools, and the general public. In January, 1882, the Synod created a fund of 5,000 rubles (about $2,500) for publishing and distributing books and booklets about the Old Believers. This investment grew gradually throughout the decade, and by 1890, Pobedonostsev had created a twenty-five-ruble group of basic books about the Old Believers and the sects, which he tried to place in the library of every bishop and in every parish school. This imaginative scheme was a bitter failure. Pobedonostsev found it difficult to find the right kind of book or pamphlet or to persuade scholars such as Subbotin to prepare the kind of booklet needed. Subbotin, for example, preferred to write multivolume histories or collections of documents which had no appeal whatsoever, and Pobedonostsev was even unable to produce a good handbook on the Old Believers. Some of the pamphlets prepared were too polemical, and others tended to raise interest in the Old Believers. The bishops were ignorant and uninterested, and even the consistories made no use of the literature they were given. The Synod’s bookstores were not successful outlets, and most commercial bookstores would not sell these products.

The effort to publish articles in journals and newspapers was equally unsuccessful. Subbotin lacked the touch necessary for essays in the popular press and vetoed the other contributors whom Pobedonostsev suggested. The polemical tone of many of the articles he arranged was self-destructive, and even Katkov’s Moskovskiia Vedomosti (Moscow News) was usually reluctant to publish materials which Pobedonostsev and Subbotin had prepared for it.³¹

Pobedonostsev’s final weapons against the Old Believers and the evangelical sects were an organization Subbotin founded in 1872, The Brotherhood of St. Peter, and a journal, Bratskoe slovo (Brotherly Word), which he had edited and published briefly in 1875 and 1876. Pobedonostsev encouraged Subbotin to revive the journal in 1883 and gave it an annual subsidy of 2,000 rubles. He also advised Subbotin, urged him to collect and publish each month all of the materials concerning the raskol which were published in the various diocesan journals, suggested promotional ideas, drafted advertisements, forwarded materials for reprinting, urged bishops, priests, and seminaries to subscribe, and in general used his prestige and that of the office to aid Subbotin. In spite of all of their efforts, the journal, the Brotherhood, and the Brotherhood’s program for distributing pamphlets were dismal failures. After six months, the journal had only one hundred and fifty subscribers, including only three priests in the entire Moscow region. In the spring of 1885, the journal still had only four hundred subscribers, and a massive effort that summer and fall by Pobedonostsev raised the number to only nine hundred, which was the peak attained. The journal sold only six or seven hundred copies each year throughout the 1890’s, and it ceased publication and sold all back issues for waste paper at the end of the century.³²

Thus, Pobedonostsev’s work among the Old Believers and the sects was no more successful than his campaign to improve the quality of the Orthodox clergy and of Orthodox spiritual life. He suffered similar failures in his policies concerning the Church in the Russian borderlands and newly acquired Central Asia, areas in which non-Russians predominated and in which the majority of the population, particularly those with power and influence, were members of other faiths. As “the Russian Archbishop Laud” grew older, he saw these non-Russian, non-Orthodox groups more and more clearly as “agents of disintegration,” and he considered it his mission to reduce their power and to restrict and destroy their influence. He created policies of persecution of these rival religious faiths, seeking to prevent them from proselytizing and to hamper their efforts even to survive and at the same time launching an educational and missionary campaign which was extraordinarily ineffective, in spite of the effort he and his administration organized.

For reasons rooted in Russian history and tradition, the Russian Orthodox Church has not been distinguished for the vigor and devotion of its missionary effort. The Orthodox Missionary Society was founded only in 1869. Ten years later, it had less than seven thousand members, almost a third of whom lived in Moscow, and after twenty years there were still less than ten thousand members. After thirty years, when it had only fifteen thousand members, it spent less than $150,000 a year on its activities, about half of which were concentrated in Siberia, with the rest in European Russia and Japan. Throughout this long period, it claimed a total of only120,000 converts. Indeed, throughout the period Pobedonostsev was Director General of the Synod, all of the Church’s efforts, including those of the Orthodox Missionary Society, led to the conversion of less than 400,000 men and women.³³

The Church and its missionary affiliate found the major part of their harvest among the Old Believers, who were clearly the principal target, and among the pagans of Siberia, especially in and near Irkutsk. The border area groups with whom Pobedonbstsev was most concerned, the Baltic Lutherans, the Catholic Poles, the Jews in the southwest in particular, and the Moslems along the Volga, in the Caucasus, and in Central Asia, were quite resistant to the campaigns which he launched. In fact, analysis of his annual reports reveals that only approximately 25 percent of the converts the Church claimed during his period of rule were from these four groups and that the percentage was higher in the first decade than in the last fifteen years. His campaign against these groups was designed more to reduce their compelling power among the Russian Orthodox than to attract them to Orthodoxy. Except perhaps for the Moslems, he had little hope of converting them or even of reducing significantly the menace he thought they raised for the Church and for the State.³⁴

One of the border areas which most attracted his attention was the Baltic region, organized then into two guberniias, Estland and Livland. The Baltic provinces were then controlled by Germans, who dominated both the land and the cities, ruled intellectual and political life, and had made Lutheranism the dominant religion. In fact, Pobedonostsev’s report as Director General of the Synod for 1888–89 noted that these guberniias and Kurland contained more than a million Lutherans and only 200,000 Orthodox, most of whom lived in the cities. Until 1887, German was the official language of instruction in the schools, as well as the language of the administration and of the courts.

A massive Russification program was launched in the Baltic region under Alexander III, with Pobedonostsev playing a central role. During the 1880’s, Russian became the language of administration and of instruction, control of the police was removed from the local nobility and placed in the hands of the Minister of the Interior in St. Petersburg, Dorpat was renamed Iuriev and Russian replaced German officially as the language of instruction in the university, and the power of the Baltic barons over the peasantry was reduced and city government was reorganized to restrict the authority of the Germans and to strengthen that of the government in St. Petersburg. Russifying and imposing a uniform system of control were the keynotes of this vigorous campaign, and by 1900, the rights and privileges which had been recognized in formal agreements and treaties in 1710 and 1712 by representatives of the nobility of Livland and Estonia and of the Russian government had been whittled away.

This process of Russification and of extending a uniform system of government to areas which had previously had a special status was extended to Finland in the 1890’s, under Nicholas II. Curiously, Pobedonostsev seems to have played no part in determining policy toward Finland or even to have shown an interest in that area, perhaps because there were only twenty-three Orthodox parishes and fifty thousand Orthodox communicants in Finland in 1890. He apparently never visited Helsinki. When troubles did arise in Finland late in the 1890’s, he was genuinely surprised and puzzled, because he thought Finland “the most happy country in the world.”³⁵

Throughout the 1880’s, he worked closely with Count Dmitrii Tolstoy, Minister of the Interior, in defining and imposing laws and rules to Russify Estland and Livland. A close associate of his and Katkov, the renowned panslavist, Prince Sergei V. Shakhovskoi, served as Governor General of Livland from 1885 until 1894. He and Pobedonostsev agreed that “Russia and Orthodoxy are synonymous” and that “the whole so-called Baltic problem lies clearly in the question of the unity of the local population to Orthodoxy.” They both believed that the Estonians and Latvians, both long subject to German rule, were vulnerable to a program to unite them to Orthodoxy and to Russia in a religious campaign which was simultaneously a Russian political weapon against the rule of German Lutherans. Shakhovskoi used the police and the courts to assist the Russian Orthodox Church; at the same time, he urged Pobedonostsev to build new churches, to establish a new bishopric in Reval (Tallin), and to train missionary priests who knew Estonian. On his side, Pobedonostsev defended Shakhovskoi and his policies before the tsar and sought to create popular understanding and support of his Russification policy.³⁶

The considerable evidence now available indicates that his original aim in Livland and Estland was simply to cleanse and rejuvenate the Orthodox Church there. His first visit to Riga in particular had been disillusioning, for he had met seminary students who could not list the gospels and he had been depressed by the ability and arrogance of the Lutheran clergy and the humility and poverty of the Orthodox clergy, most of whom were Estonian and Latvian peasants. He therefore set out to improve the seminary in Riga, to build new churches and parish schools, to launch an intensive missionary effort, to have religious books translated from Russian, and even to open a Synod bookstore in Riga. The resentment expressed by the German Lutherans, who urged the Orthodox Church to seek to convert pagans, not other Christians, to Orthodoxy, the drumfire of government acts in the political field, and perhaps the death in 1886 of Baroness Edith Raden, who had defended the Baltic Germans for twenty years, all led Pobedonostsev to become more rigorous and even vicious in his church policies and in his defense of them. Thus, he created deep irritation in 1885 when the Synod forbade mixed marriages in that region unless both parties agreed that the children should be raised in the Orthodox faith, reviving a law which had not been in effect for twenty years. The appointment that year of Shakhovskoi, a special grant of 100,000 rubles (about $50,000) from the state to the Church for missionary work among the Lutherans, the award of honors to those who converted Lutherans to Orthodoxy, and Pobedonostsev’s success in transferring cases involving “fanatical” Lutheran pastors from the courts to the Ministry of the Interior sharpened antagonisms. Pobedonostsev’s relations with the German leaders in the Baltic and in St. Petersburg became frigid.³⁷

Pobedonostsev and Tolstoy were able to override the protests of the Lutheran gentry and clergy in Estland and Livland, but by 1886 this opposition was supported in St. Petersburg by members of the aristocracy of German origin and by other Russian conservatives who resented the treatment of one of Russia’s western bastions as though it were “a Merv oasis.” However, when these criticisms reached the Senate and the Council of State and when they were given wide publicity in St. Petersburg by Reverend Hermann Dalton, pastor of the Evangelical Church in the capital, and by a pamphlet by the Evangelical Alliance, an organization of evangelical churches from various parts of Europe and the United States, Pobedonostsev was forced to the defensive. Indeed, the criticism directed against him from 1887 until 1890 over Baltic policy may have preserved Finland from his attention in the next decade.³⁸

The Evangelical Alliance had successfully intervened in the 1860’s and 1870’s to support evangelical churches in Russia against policies which it thought discriminatory, so its later protests drew particular attention. Moreover, the Alliance was strong in Germany and in Denmark, and it took advantage of the close relations between the royal families of these countries and the Romanovs. At first, the evangelical churches in the canton of Schaffhausen in Switzerland wrote to the tsar, protesting against the laws concerning the religious beliefs of children born of mixed marriages, the persecution of Lutheran pastors, and the new prohibition against leaving the Orthodox Church to join the Lutheran Church. Pobedonostsev in his reply denied there was any persecution of religion in Russia and argued that nowhere in Europe was freedom of belief as great as in Russia. He remarked then to the tsar that there were no lies about Russia which Europeans would not believe.

At Easter of 1887, therefore, the Evangelical Alliance itself entered the campaign with a more detailed letter, in fact a booklet, signed by its president Edward Naville and published in several languages, which it sent to the tsar while he was in Denmark. Pobedonostsev devoted great effort to his new reply, which he also had published in church newspapers and in pamphlet form. This January, 1888, statement and Pobedonostsev’s defense to the tsar noted that the actions criticized were properly matters of Russian domestic policy and that the pastors were really serving a German political campaign directed against Russia, supported this time by Jews, fanatical Protestants, and Catholic Ultramontanes, all wildly hostile to Russia. He sought to distinguish between freedom of belief and freedom to proselytize or to spread propaganda, which he found inexplicably related to “a privileged class, jealous of its power, aspiring to absolute rule, and to a clergy allied with it, both employing a system of persecution created with the aim of preventing all rapprochement with the mother country and especially with the Orthodox Church.” Pobedonostsev concluded that the state’s policy was not only proper and more generous than the policies of the states of western Europe, but absolutely vital, because the survival of Russia depended upon religious unity.³⁹

Publication of these open letters and extensive newspaper comment both in Russia and in Europe led to another important round which embarrassed Pobedonostsev and led to considerable tension between him and the tsar. In fact, the decline of his authority about 1890 may date from the incident over Orthodox policy in the Baltic provinces. The protagonist in 1888 and 1889 was Reverend Dalton, a distinguished scholar and clergyman of Pobedonostsev’s own generation who had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances among both Russians and foreigners in the capital. He had been acquainted with Pobedonostsev for almost thirty years, had often discussed German literature with him, and had even written the preface to the German translation of a talk by Pobedonostsev in 1881.

Dalton’s open letter to Pobedonostsev, which was published in 1889 in Russian, German, and English, was a powerful blow against Pobedonostsev’s position and policy, delivered in a grave and scholarly manner by a man whom the tsar knew and respected and whom Pobedonostsev could not denounce as a rascal and as a servant of Germany. Moreover, Dalton was extremely well informed concerning Russian law and custom, had followed the controversy carefully, had studied the various official acts of the previous few years, and wrote from a position absolutely unassailable in its facts, historical tradition, and personal status. He was therefore able to demonstrate easily that Pobedonostsev’s statements consisted of “outrage after outrage upon an entire class and upon the united clergy of a prominent portion of the realm, accompanied by proofs, the worthlessness of which is self-evident.” He demonstrated that one of Pobedonostsev’s charges against the Lutheran clergy was a complete fabrication, that he had twisted and distorted official reports, and that there was no basis in state or Church law for his key policies. Perhaps his most telling arguments were his quotations of vicious statements about Lutheranism from Synod publications, his accounts of rewards to Orthodox clergy who converted peasants from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy, and statements concerning the release of criminals from jail in return for their joining the Orthodox Church.⁴⁰

The tsar was annoyed when he read Dalton’s booklet, not only by the exposures of improper acts but also because he himself had been hoodwinked by his chief advisor on religious matters. He did not want to drive “Russia’s Huguenots” to other countries, and he was irritated by Pobedonostsev’s confession that some of his statements were in fact in error. Rumors abounded in St. Petersburg and Moscow that Pobedonostsev had been reprimanded sharply. The London Times even noted reports that he had been given three months’ leave without pay to prepare a defense against Dalton’s critique. It is clear that Pobedonostsev’s influence sagged noticeably at about this time.⁴¹

The areas of the empire in which Catholic Poles lived were even more central for Pobedonostsev than were the Baltic provinces, but there he did not encounter opposition as skillfully led as that by Dalton or influences within the court which hampered his actions.

Pobedonostsev had been brought up in Moscow during the years after the 1831 insurrection. No doubt in these early days he acquired a deep dislike of the Poles and of Catholicism, which reflected the strongly Orthodox and patriotic home atmosphere of Bread Lane and the traditional Orthodox Russian attitude toward the Poles and Catholics. His early book reviews, his conversations and correspondence with Dostoevsky, and his letters to the heir and to Catherine Tiutchev in the 1870’s revealed a profound dislike and even hatred of the Poles, as Poles and as Catholics. The various editions of Kurs grazhdanskago prava gave favorable notice to the old and new Russian laws which restricted the right of Poles to hold or transfer landed property in the western borderlands. He was convinced that the radical and revolutionary movements were inspired by Poles, and he came to see the hand of Poles or Jews in all Russia’s misfortunes. Catholics to him were always “Latins” and were generally Austrian agents against Russia.⁴²

The drive against the Poles and “Polonism” was renewed immediately after the Russians had crushed the Polish uprising of 1863, but the program of Count Michael N. Muraviev in the “western provinces,” the territories inhabited by Poles, Lithuanians, White Russians, and Ukrainians which Catherine the Great had annexed, was more vigorous than that applied by Prince Vladimir A. Cherkasskii to the old Kingdom of Poland, which was called the Government General of Warsaw after 1863. Pobedonostsev as the Director General of the Synod and as a member of the government also distinguished between these two areas, although he sought to protect the Orthodox Church from Polish and Catholic influence throughout Russia. However, he had no hope of converting Polish Catholics to Orthodoxy. He did harass and move Catholic priests whom he thought too active; he did close at least one Catholic monastery; he promoted the spread of Orthodox literature and the construction of Orthodox churches; he restricted education by Poles and Catholics. However, his main concern was to defend the Orthodox Church against inroads and, above all, to make certain that the Uniates (those Catholics who had been allowed to retain the rites and customs of the Orthodox Church but who had accepted the supremacy of the Pope), who had been forced to rejoin the Orthodox Church in the western provinces in 1839 or in the Kholm-Warsaw diocese of the Government General of Warsaw in 1875, remain firmly in the Orthodox Church.⁴³

Just as Pobedonostsev was advised and guided on matters relating to the Old Believers by Professor Nicholas Subbotin of the Moscow Ecclesiastical Academy, so he found a mentor on the Uniates in Efimi N. Kryzhanovskii, a specialist on religious groups in the western provinces and in the Government General of Warsaw. Born near Kiev in 1831, Kryzhanovskii devoted his spare time as a bureaucrat to the study of Riga, Pskov, the Czechs in Volhynia, and, above all, the Uniates. He founded a school for Uniates in 1865, and in 1871 became the head of a gimnaziia or high school for boys in Warsaw. Pobedonostsev met him there in 1881, when he made a tour of the Government General, and he was immensely impressed by a memorandum Kryzhanovskii gave him on the Uniate issue. He soon brought him to St. Petersburg as a member of the Synod’s Committee on Education and as his special advisor on Baltic and Uniate problems. Until he died in July, 1888, Kryzhanovskii helped form Pobedonostsev’s policies on the western borderlands.⁴⁴

At one time, there had been four Uniate bishoprics in Russia. However, during the reign of Nicholas I, many Uniates in White Russia rejoined the Orthodox Church. The most important single Orthodox conquest came in 1839, when, after long preparation, Uniate Bishop Joseph Semashko of Mstislav effected a union which involved 1,600 parishes and 1,600,000 people. At first, almost a third of the Uniate clergy refused to follow Semashko, but ultimately only about one hundred and sixty were recalcitrant. In 1875, another Uniate prelate, Marcellus Poppel, sought to follow Semashko’s example by uniting the last remaining Ukrainian bishopric, that of Kholm, to Orthodoxy. Only about half of the clergy and of the laymen followed Poppel, who was made bishop of Kholm. Indeed, a quarter of the total fled across the border into Galicia in the Austrian monarchy, where they received shelter and aid.

Pobedonostsev followed these developments through Iurii Samarin and others who were especially interested in the border provinces, and he approved the efforts of Prince Cherkasskii as Governor General to crush Polish hopes for recovery and to Russify administration, education, and religion. Cherkasskii unsuccessfully sought to create a separate guberniia or province incorporating Kholm and the areas to the north and east in which large numbers of Uniates or former Uniates lived, so that the Russification process could be carried out with less opposition from Poles. Pobedonostsev supported the campaign to incorporate all the Uniates into the Church. He took especial pleasure in meeting former Uniates who had joined the Orthodox Church when they visited St. Petersburg in 1875, and he believed that the work of Cherkasskii and Poppel was immensely fruitful.⁴⁵

When Pobedonostsev toured the western provinces and the Government General of Warsaw in the fall of 1881, he discovered that the Uniate issue was far more complicated and difficult than he had believed. Indeed, while he had profound admiration for the work in the Kholm area of Prince Cherkasskii, “who had opened Russian lands forgotten by the Russian government and revived the fading belief in Russian nationality among those surrounded by hostile Poles,” he saw quickly that the incorporation of the Uniate church had been a serious mistake because the Uniate church had been a bridge over which Uniates could gradually be brought over to the Orthodox and Russian side from the Catholic and Polish camp. Destruction of the bridge by a hasty effort to herd all Uniates into the Orthodox Church at once had in fact widened the chasm and created a sharp dichotomy from which the rival Polish Catholics benefited heavily. In fact, many Uniates joined the Catholic Church because of the pressures created by the incorporation of the Uniate Church into Orthodoxy.

In this situation, Pobedonostsev recommended basically the same policies for the Church and the state which he had supported in the Baltic area. However, he had far less confidence in these western provinces in the power of attraction of Orthodoxy and of education and propaganda, because he realized that the strength of the Poles and of Catholicism there was greater than that of the Germans and of Lutheranism in the Baltic. Moreover, he believed that Austria-Hungary and the Vatican were far more interested and effective in assisting the Catholics than were any foreign states or religious groups in regard to the Baltic Lutherans. In fact, he saw “whole armies of Catholic priests” on Russia’s western frontiers, profiting from Russian mistakes. Consequently, while he established parish schools and built new schools, he sought more to defend Orthodox strength than to expand it, and he relied more on “worldly power” against the Poles than against the Lutherans.⁴⁶

He worked closely with Alexander III, with Minister of the Interior Tolstoy, and with the governors of the Government General of Warsaw and of the Siedlce guberniia to strengthen the use of state power against the Uniates, the Poles, and the Catholics. He was particularly eager to prevent the use of Polish in the schools and in the administration. He was also active in seeking to prevent marriages outside the Orthodox Church by enforcing the laws by which no marriage was recognized until it had been celebrated in the Orthodox Church. This effort, and his determined attempt to prevent secret marriages, baptisms, and burials by Uniates, encountered opposition in the Senate and in the Council of State. In fact, the Senate forced him to abandon some of his efforts to “stretch” the laws.

By the 1890’s, Pobedonostsev was reconciled to a long drawn out and presumably unsuccessful struggle on the Uniate and Catholic issue, and he became almost as bitter toward Uniates as toward Catholics. He noted that the number of “the stubborn” were increasing as the century came to a close. Early in the twentieth century, he sought a reorganization of the civil structure to increase the Russification drive, by separating the Kholm area from Warsaw and creating a separate province in which an intensive campaign could be mounted against the Uniates. This effort, which was called “the fourth division of Poland,” failed in 1902, in 1905, and again in the Third Duma, where a conservative nationalist group revived it.⁴⁷

While Pobedonostsev was well informed concerning the tangled region of the western provinces and Poland and devoted enormous amounts of time and energy to his program there, the area ruled by Russia in and south of the Caucasus mountains was one about which he knew very little and to which he and the Synod applied little attention. He visited the region only three times. His first and most important review was in the fall of 1886, after the rector of the seminary in Tiflis had been murdered and a serious crisis had arisen. He saw no subtleties in the problems created by the Georgians and the Armenians: they both simply sought their independence, which was going to be denied them as forcefully as proved necessary. Pobedonostsev refused even to consider the pleas of some Georgians for the reestablishment of the independence of the Georgian church. In fact, the exarch Paul, whom he sent there in the 1880’s and who was himself killed, was a Russian who spoke no Georgian and displayed no sense or tact in his relations with Georgians. Pobedonostsev did not think it unusual when he learned that the principal of the gymnasium or high school in Tiflis always carried a revolver. Instead, he told Alexander III: “The Armenians and Georgians are seeking to free themselves from Russian culture and nourish the mad dream of the reestablishment of their national independence. Only firm power can succeed in containing and crushing this mad dream.” It is not surprising that Georgia produced a large number of revolutionaries.⁴⁸

Pobedonostsev also had little knowledge of or interest in newly acquired Central Asia. He apparently did not travel along the Volga after 1868, and he was east of the Ural mountains only twice. In fact, before he became Director General of the Synod, the Moslems were not a part of his Russia, just as the American Negro was invisible to generations of American whites, and he gave no thought to their role or to a program for conversion or Russification. He not only knew little of the Moslems, but considered Mohammedanism no threat to Orthodoxy. In his annual reports, he failed even to mention the need for the use of “worldly power,” which was central in his policies toward the Baltic Germans and the Poles. Church policy in the areas inhabited by Moslems during Pobedonostsev’s first years as head of the Synod was therefore simply a continuation of the lethargic action of previous years.⁴⁹

The man who turned Pobedonostsev’s attention toward the Moslems and who shaped his and the Church’s policy toward them for the next twenty-five years was Nicholas I. Ilminskii, who was his constant correspondent and mentor throughout the first decade of Pobedonostev’s tenure as Director General of the Synod. Ilminskii was the son of a priest and was born in Penza province in 1821. He completed the Penza Seminary, where he then taught briefly, and moved in 1846 to Kazan. He spent most of the time between 1846 and 1872 on the faculty of the Kazan Ecclesiastical Academy, where he taught a wide variety of subjects—mathematics, the history of philosophy, Hebrew, Arabic, and Tartar—but he also lived from 1851 until 1854 in Cairo and Constantinople and he worked on the Orenburg Boundary Committee for a year. Apparently because of constant changes of policy with regard to the training of seminarians for missionary work among the Tartars, he was on occasion dropped from the faculty of the Academy and taught at Kazan University instead.

Ilminskii had an extraordinary gift for languages and developed a keen interest in the non-Russians who lived in and near Kazan and indeed in all of the Russian territory south, east, and north of that revered city. He apparently had perfect command of Old Church Slavonic, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian, some Turkic languages (Tartar, Chuvash, Bashkir, Tungusic), and some Uralic-Altaic languages (Mordvinian, Cheremiss, Votyak), and he could also read French, German, and English. In part because of his language talents and in part because he remained forever a country boy interested in the simple, homely aspects of life, Ilminskii was able to acquire a remarkable understanding of the various peoples in the vast area with which he became concerned. Profoundly Orthodox and as convinced as Pobedonostsev that Orthodoxy was and ought to be the distinguishing characteristic of Russian culture and life, he created an exciting and quite effective approach toward converting the Moslems and pagans to Orthodoxy and to what he and Pobedonostsev would have agreed to call “the Russian way of life.” The system which Ilminskii perfected was accepted by Pobedonostsev and became the official policy of the Church toward the non-Christian peoples in the Volga area, Siberia, and Central Asia.⁵⁰

Pobedonostsev visited Kazan in 1863, but apparently did not meet Ilminskii at that time. However, in July, 1869, he accompanied the heir to the throne and his wife and Count Dmitrii Tolstoy, then both Director General of the Synod and Minister of Education, on a trip through that part of Russia, during which they attended the ceremonies celebrating the opening of Ilminskii’s Kazan Seminary for Non-Russians. They became acquainted in the early days of the reign of Alexander III, probably through Nikanor, Bishop of Ufa and a frequent correspondent of Pobedonostsev, who had come to know and admire Ilminskii when he had been rector of the Kazan Ecclesiastical Academy from 1868 to 1871. Pobedonostsev obtained scholarly books from St. Petersburg libraries and even from foreign bookstores for Ilminskii, procured funds to assist converts who might otherwise have slipped back to Mohammedanism, provided impressive financial support through the Synod, the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of the Interior for Ilminskii’s schools and other enterprises, helped arrange placement of the graduates of Ilminskii’s institutions, helped organize the publication and distribution of Ilminskii’s books, and provided recognition and honor for the educator and missionary and his supporters. In return, Ilminskii provided Pobedonostsev an immense fund of information concerning religious and political problems from Kazan to Kamchatka and to Tashkent, forwarded information concerning administrators of state and Church in whom Pobedonostsev was interested, advised him on books to publish for schools throughout the empire, and, above all, created for him a policy and a program for converting and Russifying the various peoples east and south of Kazan.⁵¹

Ilminskii was convinced that the various non-Russian groups could be converted to Orthodoxy and to Russian culture if Orthodox services were given in their native languages by native priests and if literature could be provided for them in their native language in the Cyrillic alphabet at the proper intellectual level. He reached this conclusion after analyzing the failure of the effort to convert these peoples from Mohammedanism or from Shamanism by Russian missionaries who spoke only Russian and who assumed that an approach effective with Russian Old Believers or with Georgians would be equally effective with the Chuvash or the Cheremiss. He soon realized that even Russian missionaries who spoke the foreign languages were unsuccessful when they were products of St. Petersburg and Moscow, when their knowledge of the peoples among whom they worked had been acquired only from books, and when they failed to realize that conversion to Orthodoxy was essential. Finally, he learned that the range of publications which could be translated for use among these peoples was very small, and that infinite care had to be exercised in making selections.

Under Ilminskii’s program, the few Russians engaged in this missionary effort among the Turkic and Uralic-Altaic or Finno-Ugric language groups were thoroughly schooled in the language and the culture, as he was. They used only the native language in their missionary work. “The native tongue strongly and deeply penetrates the soul. It possesses an especially lively and powerful impact when it is used in Church doctrine and in religious preaching. . . . The primary education of foreigners in their own language is the most certain path to their adopting the Russian language and to acquiring a Russian education.”⁵²

He therefore sought originally to persuade the Kazan Ecclesiastical Academy to establish a Missionary Division in which instruction in the languages of that area would be emphasized. The disagreement concerning this policy, the refusal of some missionaries to learn the languages, and his growing understanding of the problem led him in 1863 to establish a school for non-Russian children who had joined the Church, the Kazan Central Christian School for Non-Russians. Five years later, he founded the Brotherhood of St. Iurii to collect funds for his program and to organize Russians interested in missionary work among the peoples who accepted Mohammedanism or one form or another of Shamanism. In 1869, he organized the Kazan Seminary for Non-Russians, with the support of the newly organized Orthodox Missionary Society in St. Petersburg. Three years later, Ilminskii resigned from the Kazan Ecclesiastical Academy and devoted the last twenty years of his life to this institution, organized to train native priests for missionary work among the Turkic and Uralic-Altaic language groups on what he called “the frontiers of the Russian empire.” Throughout these years, he directed an expanding project for translating and publishing prayer and song books, the Gospels, and simple handbooks about Orthodoxy for the people he sought to convert.⁵³

Ilminskii’s very first letter to Pobedonostsev, on February 11, 1882, began the process of persuading the Director General to support and expand the Ilminskii program against Mohammedanism. He pointed out that the Moslems outnumbered the Orthodox in the Ufa province, that they were wealthy and had active and able leaders, and that the Church must act quickly and systematically if it were to retain its strength. While the earlier methods had failed, his had been remarkably effective during their brief trial, and he urged that the Church adopt his program for the entire area inhabited by the Moslems. In effect, Ilminskii advocated a program which was nationalist in form, Orthodox in content. He wrote that his principal “shells” were books and religious services in non-Russian languages and that progress would be slow but certain. On his return to Kazan for a brief visit in July, 1883, Pobedonostsev wrote to Katkov that he had been immensely impressed by Ilminskii’s work and was surprised to find Kazan “one of the main centers for religious education in Russia.”

Pobedonostsev was soon converted by Ilminskii, and the latter’s ideas became official policy throughout the vast areas inhabited by Moslems and pagans. Perhaps the central decision in Pobedonostsev’s support was the announcement by the Synod in February,1883, that Orthodox Church services could be held in non-Russian languages in the East. Pobedonostsev resolutely refused to permit translation of the Bible into Ukrainian on the ground that it would strengthen Ukrainian nationalism. On the other hand, he refused to allow sermons in Catholic churches in the western provinces or in the Government General of Warsaw to be given in Russian, on the ground that Catholicism was Latin and Polish and that the use of Russian in any part of the church service would weaken the barrier separating Orthodoxy from Catholicism. However, he endorsed the use of Finno-Ugric and Turkic languages in the Orthodox service because Ilminskii had persuaded him that this tactic would help draw these peoples into Orthodoxy and thus into “the Russian way of life.”⁵⁴

Pobedonostsev was especially impressed by the school Ilminskii had established in Kazan for Chuvash and Tartar children who had been converted to Orthodoxy. The program for these youngsters included six hours of catechism, six hours of Russian, three hours of Old Church Slavonic, four hours of the child’s native language, and three hours of church songs in the native language in the total weekly schedule of thirty-one and a half hours. The program itself, the verve and charm with which the children sang the hymns, and the demonstrated impact they had on their parents and other relatives convinced Pobedonostsev that Ilminskii had found an ideal system for Russification.

The official opening of what Pobedonostsev came to call “a new epoch in Russian missionary activity” came in July and August, 1885, when the Synod arranged two meetings of the hierarchy and of missionaries, one in Kazan from July 9 until July 25, which both Pobedonostsev and Sabler attended, and the other in Irkutsk from July 23 until August 8, in which Sabler alone participated. These meetings placed missionary activity among the Moslems on the same level as among the Old Believers and then endorsed enthusiastically the Ilminskii approach. From that time forward, Ilminskii was Pobedonostsev’s chief advisor on all missionary activities east of the Volga, and the Church’s programs in Irkutsk, Khabarovsk, Kamchatka, Tashkent—wherever there was missionary activity—reflected Ilminskii’s advice. In 1889, the Kazan Ecclesiastical Academy organized a permanent Missionary Division, with two-year courses in Tartar and Mongol. That same year, Pobedonostsev wrote that the missions in Siberia were not only converting non-Russian peoples but were transforming them “into people with an economy and a way of life like that of the Russians themselves.” Stalin’s Russia agreed with this verdict, when it announced that Ilminskii’s work, especially in creating a Russian alphabet for some Turkic and Finno-Ugric languages, had “progressive significance” and that Ilminskii deserved praise for “contributing to spreading literacy and the Russian language among these peoples.”⁵⁵

The progress made among the non-Russians under Ilminskii’s program is striking. Thus, by the early 1890’s some of the graduates of his Kazan Central Christian School were teachers in other schools for non-Russians in the Kazan uezd or district. Indeed, between 1863 and 1881 alone this school produced 231 such teachers; it also graduated 163 youngsters between 1863 and 1913 who later became Orthodox priests and 29 who became deacons. The Central Chuvash School in Simbirsk was a success, and there were a hundred two- or four-year schools for Chuvash children in the Simbirsk district in 1890, as well as a special missionary society to support them. Each year, the Simbirsk Seminary admitted three Chuvash for study for the priesthood. A two-year school for Cheremiss children in Ufa prospered, and by 1890 a similar school for Votyaks had been established in Karlygan in Viatka province. When Ilminskii died in 1891, the Kazan district had 128 schools for non-Russian Orthodox children. In 1900, the Kazan bishoprics had 154 such schools, and there were 4,494 children in these four-year institutions, of whom more than two-thirds were Tartars or Chuvash. Pobedonostsev naturally cited this progress in blocking proposals of the Ministry of Education or of the zemstvos for establishing schools for Moslem children in Russian, with Moslem teachers and with courses on Mohammedanism.⁵⁶

Ilminskii and Pobedonostsev hoped to create a network of schools for children and of seminaries for teachers based on the Kazan models, and tender shoots of progress were made before Ilminskii’s death removed the driving force. Even by that time, however, there had been failures, as Pobedonostsev ruefully admitted. In 1887, Moslems and pagans outnumbered the Orthodox by 1,100,000 to 800,000 in the Ufa bishopric, where Pobedonostsev’s correspondent, Bishop Nikanor, presided over one of the program’s most active areas, and there were only forty-seven converts to Orthodoxy in that year. A school in Samara for training non-Russian teachers had to be closed in 1888 for lack of local interest. Ilminskii, at a meeting of the Synod’s Committee on Education in the summer of 1891, found that the other members of the committee did not yet understand the principles of his approach. Schools in Orenburg, Tashkent, Tomsk, Perm, and Khabarovsk, built on the Ilminskii model and all supported by the Synod and the Orthodox Missionary Society, were all in a precarious position then in a sea of indifferent Orthodox and passive or hostile Moslems or pagans.⁵⁷

Ilminskii and Pobedonostsev shared another powerful interest, that of publishing religious and moral literature for the narod. Ilminskii naturally had a special concern in translating, publishing, and distributing booklets in various non-Russian languages for those whom he wished to convert or to persuade to remain in the Orthodox fold. Shortly before he died, he wrote that he thought his main mission and greatest successes were in translating and publishing religious and moral literature for non-Russians. His first book, published in Kazan in 1862, was a Tartar primer. Before his death, he had translated or helped to translate more than a hundred books or pamphlets produced in a total of 1,600,000 copies. Most of this work was done through the Kazan Translation Committee of the Brotherhood of St. Iurii, which he founded in 1868 and which was later given an annual subsidy of 4,000 rubles, or about $2,000, by the Orthodox Missionary Society. Pobedonostsev and the Synod took up the support of this work, and many of Ilminskii’s primers, prayer books, New Testaments, and moral guides were published and distributed by the Synod Press.

In February, 1883, the Synod gave special permission to Ilminskii alone to translate the Old and New Testaments into Tartar, Chuvash, Cheremiss, Votyak, Kalmyck, and Mordvinian, but he also translated materials into thirteen other languages, including Korean and Yakut. Ilminskii was convinced that “it is impossible to put the full Bible into the hands of the narod,” because this would lead some to become mystical and others to become “enlightened and independent.” He therefore generally published extracts, with the addition of precepts, rules, and some of the psalms. In some cases, he had to help create or enlarge a literary language. In every case, he put the translation into the Cyrillic alphabet as a means of destroying the influence of rival organizations, such as the English Bible Society, and as a means of increasing progress toward Russification.⁵⁸

The final religious group among those in the non-Russian, non-Orthodox circle which Pobedonostsev surveyed from St. Petersburg consisted of the Jews, who were concentrated largely in the western and southwestern provinces and who were supposed to remain within the Pale of Settlement in that part of the empire. The position which Jews have occupied in Western society has often been a precarious one, and antisemitism is a significant and complicated factor in the history of every state or society in which Jews have lived. Antisemitism has been a traditional, powerful force in many parts of Europe, even in areas such as Brittany where few Jews have ever lived, and periods of tension, such as those produced by the vast social, political, and intellectual changes of the last century, have given this deeply rooted feeling compelling force and political explosiveness. Many political and intellectual leaders, in Russia as elsewhere, have thoroughly rejected and denounced the doctrines and actions of the antisemites, but many others, in some countries in times of tension a noisy and powerful group, have trumpeted antisemitism and made it a cardinal issue.

The character and strength of feeling against Jews, always fluid and elusive, is difficult to measure in nineteenth-century Russia. Our knowledge of this attitude in the various social strata and areas is inevitably limited because emotional attitudes such as this are always evanescent, and the evidence, particularly concerning the illiterate and inarticulate masses, is very imprecise. Even so, it is clear that antisemitism was a powerful force among Russian peasants, with the causes substantially those which afflicted peasants elsewhere. Similarly, it is clear that dislike and even hatred of Jews were quite general and strong, though probably not so common nor so deeply felt among the upper levels of society, the professional classes, bureaucrats, army officers, journalists, and landed nobility. Some Russian leaders were consistent opponents of antisemitism; others rejected it or fought it on occasion; others were infected in such a way that an outburst elsewhere would stimulate it among them.

In any case, antisemitism was a part of the atmosphere or climate of opinion in which Pobedonostsev lived and worked. It was particularly strong among the Slavophil, panslav, conservative nationalist circles in which he grew up and through which he progressed, and it apparently became more prevalent and more powerful in Russia from the time of the Crimean War until the 1880’s. Thus during the early “thaw” under Alexander II, some state leaders discussed ways of improving the situation of the Jews throughout the empire, particularly concerning civil rights and access to education. In 1858, many St. Petersburg and Moscow leaders of thought, including the Aksakovs, Katkov, and Feoktistov, who were later active antisemites, signed a protest published in Katkov’s newspaper against a journal which had ridiculed two writers because they were Jews.⁵⁹

However, many Russian political and intellectual leaders were clearly full of animus against the Jews, although most of them believed that conversion to Orthodoxy would have eliminated the main reason and although most of them believed that the Jews should be protected against violence. The Aksakovs, for example, blamed much of the corruption and poverty of Russian rural life on the Jews. Constantine Aksakov wrote that emancipation of the Jews would “fill the Senate, the Council of State, and, I am afraid, even the post of Director General of the Holy Synod” with Jews. He declared that Russia should be emancipated from the Jews, not the reverse, and he wanted the Jewish “dissolvent” removed from traditional Russian life. Katkov urged the Jews to forget Polish and German, to become more like the Russians, and to recognize that they were responsible for the hate and violence directed against them. Olga Novikov, Pobedonostsev’s London correspondent, noted that some of her best friends were Jews, but defended even the pogroms and the restrictive legislation and argued that the peasants turned against the Jews because of the oppression and plundering to which the Jews had subjected them. Baroness Edith Raden and Iurii Samarin, who disagreed about the role of the Baltic Germans and about Russian state policy in the Baltic provinces, agreed that the Jews were a menace in Russia. Grand Duchess Helen Pavlovna, so generous and humane in her other thoughts and policies, accepted antisemitism. Dostoevsky in the 1870’s spoke of Jews as “Yids,” saw them infecting everything they touched, and believed the legend that the revolutionary movement in the 1870’s was dominated by Jews.⁶⁰

Pobedonostsev’s knowledge of the Jews in Russia was limited. The circles in which he lived and worked in Moscow and St. Petersburg included very few Jews, except perhaps for some of the merchants who supported the Volunteer Fleet. He visited the areas in which the great majority of the Jews in Russia lived only once before he had become Director General of the Synod, and even then there is no evidence that he visited any community inhabited largely by Jews. His comments about the few Jews whom he encountered in 1863 on a trip with the heir to the throne revealed no animosity whatsoever. In fact, he treated the Jews then precisely as he did members of other non-Russian nationality groups whom they met. His comments in the various volumes of his Kurs grazhdanskago prava, on which he had completed the research and most of the writing before he became Director General of the Synod, gave calm and measured approval to the various legal restrictions placed upon the Jews in the ownership and transfer of property, legal areas of residence, marriage rights, name changes, and employment in particular professions. He wrote the heir to the throne in February, 1863, “It seems to me that it is always necessary to exercise some caution in relations with the Jews because under their present system they hold themselves aloof from the rest of society, which treats them in large part unsympathetically.” Pobedonostsev simply reflected the Orthodox Muscovite nest from which he had come. Jews lived in a different world from his, at least until the Balkan crisis of 1875–78 injected a note of passion and urgency into his thinking.⁶¹

Before 1875, Pobedonostsev in his published work and in his correspondence referred to the Jews as evrei, or Jews. His first reference to them as “Yids” or zhidi was in a letter from Salzburg in August, 1875, to Catherine Tiutchev, in which he denounced “the Yiddish-Jewish newspapers” which criticized the rebels in Bosnia-Herzogovina and supported the Ottoman effort to crush the rebellion. He continued to use evrei in his correspondence with the heir to the throne, but his letters to Catherine Tiutchev, Dostoevsky, and his other correspondents after 1875 generally used “Yid” instead. Indeed, his August 14, 1879, letter to Dostoevsky summarizes explicitly both his views and the intensity of his feelings under the impact of the wave of nationalism engendered by the Balkan crisis and his fear of revolution:

What you write about the Yids is completely just. They have engrossed everything, they have undermined everything, but the spirit of the century supports them. They are at the root of the revolutionary socialist movement and of regicide, they own the periodical press, they have in their hands the financial markets, the people as a whole fall into financial slavery to them; they even control the principles of contemporary science and strive to place it outside of Christianity. And on top of all that—whenever anyone raises a question about them a shower of voices rises in favor of the Jews in the name of civilization and tolerance, of indifference to faith. Among the Roumanians and Serbs, and among us as well, no one dares to say a word about the simple fact that the Jews have won ownership of everything. Even our own press is becoming Jewish. Russkaia Pravda (Russian Truth), Moskva (Moscow), even Golos (Voice) are Jewish organs, and the Jews have even closed down their special journals, such as Evrei (Jews) and Vestnik Evreev (Jewish Herald), and Biblioteka Evreiskaia (Jewish Library).⁶²

Pobedonostsev came to believe that “our great ulcer has penetrated everywhere,” and his main, and false, charges against the Jews were typical of his generation and indeed of much of modern history. He assumed that the Jews were acquiring enormous economic power, and charged that they were buying landed estates, destroying the old nobility, and allowing the great country houses to deteriorate. Perhaps because he knew so many Moscow and St. Petersburg bankers and merchants and realized that few Jews lived in the capitals, he did not decry their economic power in banking and industry; indeed, he rejoiced that there were no Jews among those wealthy men he knew or met. However, his first concern was alleged Jewish control over much of the Russian press. He assumed that any liberal newspaper or journal, or any publication which adopted a position he did not approve, was Jewish. In fact, Jewish and liberal were synonymous for him, and he found their “mangy sheets” wherever he went in Russia. He believed that Russian Jews fed “lies” to foreign newspapers about Russia, and that foreign journals critical of Russian actions were also owned and controlled by Jews. Naturally, on occasion all Jews were considered foreign agents, as all foreign agents were Jews or servants of Jews. Finally, he believed the Jews responsible for much of the corruption, demoralization, and decline in religious and patriotic fervor which he found in Russia. In particular, he charged that Jewish ownership of public houses in the rural west and southwest and their Sunday trade were responsible for much of the immorality and crime among the peasants.⁶³

Within the empire, Pobedonostsev thought that the Russian government ought to repress and isolate the Jews and at the same time to educate Russians concerning the dangers they raised. However, he also was very sensitive to foreign opinion, and he paid great attention to efforts to persuade foreign leaders that there was no persecution of the Jews in Russia. He was eager to have published in Western journals and newspapers information that was favorable to the Russian government’s point of view. He maintained an extensive correspondence with Olga Novikov in London and used her as a conduit for the ears and minds of both conservative and liberal English statesmen and for liberal newspapers. He assured foreign ambassadors and visitors that no Russians hated the Jews, but that half of the world’s Jews lived in Russia, that they were an active, intelligent and well-organized group with whom the simple Russian peasants could not compete, and that there were occasional spontaneous outbursts of fury, which often got out of control, directed at the local tormentors and exploiters. The government sought to protect both the Jews and the peasants in a reasonable way by restricting the Jews to certain parts of the empire and to certain professions.⁶⁴

Pobedonostsev indicated in his first annual report as Director General of the Synod that he had no hope of spreading Christianity among the Jews because of their concept of the chosen race, the power of family ties, and their long tradition of holding fast to their religion. Moreover, he considered Jewish converts to Orthodoxy unreliable. The Church, therefore, made no organized effort to convert Jews, and less than five hundred Jews a year joined the Orthodox Church during the years Pobedonostsev was Director General. In the long run, he hoped one-third of the Jews would emigrate, one-third would be assimilated, and one-third would die out. However, this he thought a very remote and even unlikely solution.

In the meantime, he believed that the Jews should be isolated from the Russians, especially from the centers of national life, and that their influence should be limited in every way possible. Thus, he rejoiced when he found a community where there were no Jews and had been none. He supported the 1882 decrees designed to restrict residence for the Jews to the Pale in the southwest, and he later supported decrees designed to keep Jews from moving into other regions, such as the Don and Terek areas. He prohibited Jews from doing business with any part of the Church, and he tried to keep them from all government positions. He naturally approved the July, 1887, decrees which restricted the Jews’ access to higher education to specific norms: 10 percent of the total in areas set aside for Jews, 5 percent outside that area, and 3 percent in St. Petersburg and Moscow. He advised Alexander III to appoint governors who were reliable and firm in dealing with Jews. He was apparently instrumental in replacing Prince Dolgorukov as Governor General of Moscow in 1891 with Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, a former student of his who shared his beliefs and who within the first twelve months expelled approximately 20,000 Jews who had been living in Moscow illegally.⁶⁵

While Pobedonostsev was eager to deny rights and opportunities to the Jews and to provide Russia’s provinces with vigorous and forceful governors, he was resolutely opposed to pogroms and popular violence. In 1882, he denounced the Ministry of the Interior for allowing racist demagogues to stimulate riots and demonstrations against the Jews. The same year, he informed Ignatiev that the government must make clear that it not only disagreed with newspaper articles denouncing Russians with foreign names but that it would impose heavy fines for such articles. Later, he argued that panic-stricken crowds rioting out of control were a direct threat to the state and that such popular outbreaks should be prevented, lest they destroy state order and turn against the state itself. Thus, he was not an instigator of the pogroms directed against the Jews, if only because the Balkan crisis had taught him that popular movements easily got out of control. In fact, much of the ire he directed against foreign newspapers was due to their ascribing to him responsibility for violent acts against the Jews, of which he thoroughly disapproved, althought he did support the official repressive acts, for which he was assigned responsibilty as well.⁶⁶

Pobedonostsev was also opposed to the establishment of the Sviashchennaia Druzhina, or Holy Brotherhood, a kind of private police force founded by a number of extreme conservatives in 1881 to help prevent assassination attempts and to infiltrate revolutionary organizations. Baranov, whom Pobedonostsev had recommended to Alexander III as governor of St. Petersburg, may have had this kind of organization in mind when he proposed a Grand Council or Council of Twenty-Five. Count Illarion Vorontsov-Dashkov, who was head of the palace guard then, shortly after March 1 suggested a Guard, and Count Peter A. Valuev also proposed a volunteer organization of dedicated patriots to help protect the tsar and the imperial family. Little is known of this organization, which acquired a sinister reputation, but Pobedonostsev was often denounced as one of its founders and supporters. He may in fact have favored the Holy Brotherhood in the panic of March, 1881, but he consistently opposed amateur organizations of this kind. A recent American analysis of the organization concluded that “there is no reason to believe Pobedonostsev was involved in it.” A 1939 Soviet study reported that the only evidence in the correspondence and the archives concerning Pobedonostsev’s relations with this organization was his letters to the tsar in 1882 denouncing the Brotherhood and recommending that it be dissolved, as it was on January 6, 1883.⁶⁷

As a prolific author and publicist, Pobedonostsev used the printed word to further his effort to isolate and control the Jews. Many of his publications, including his annual reports as Director General of the Synod, contained clearly antisemitic material. He also urged Feoktistov, who was in charge of censorship throughout most of the 1880’s and 1890’s, to allow publication of articles and books criticizing the Jews. Finally, as Director of the Synod, he encouraged the publication by the Synod Press of the collected works of an old acquaintance of his, Nikita Giliarov-Platonov, which contained vicious charges against the Jews. Born in Moscow in 1824, a graduate of the Moscow Ecclesiastical Academy, and a member of the Academy’s faculty from 1848 until 1855, Giliarov-Platonov failed spectacularly at everything he tried, even though Pobedonostsev and others of his generation thought him in many ways a brilliant man. Too critical to hold his post in the Academy, too lenient with the Slavophils to retain his position on the Moscow Censorship Committee after 1863, too lax for the Ministry of Education, too inefficient to direct the Moscow office of the Synod Press, Giliarov-Platonov edited an unsuccessful journal, Sovremennyia izvestiia (Contemporary News), for the twenty years before his death in 1887, with the help of subsidies arranged by Pobedonostsev and others, even though his wild and untidy articles sometimes annoyed them seriously.

Giliarov-Platonov read widely and wrote about almost everything of any interest to an educated Russian. He was a profoundly Orthodox man and believed that the Orthodox doctrine of Christian love would one day bring genuine unity to Russia. From his early days in the seminary, he had been a special student of the Old Believers and of the evangelical sects. He was deeply antisemitic, accepting and publishing the usual charges about the malevolent power and influence of the Jews. The volumes of his articles which Pobedonostsev helped publish after his death contained many antisemitic essays. Indeed, the Director General of the Synod stooped to reprinting several of Giliarov-Platonov’s essays which accepted the ritual murder legend, probably the most vile tale of all used against the Jews. Pobedonostsev even sent copies of these volumes to the tsar, and he advertised them extensively in Synod and Church publications.⁶⁸

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* I have not been able to examine the archives of the Synod and of the other government departments, which contain some quantity of information concerning Pobedonostsev’s activities as Director General of the Synod and as an important participant in discussions of high policy from 1880 until 1905. Moreover, Soviet scholars have devoted remarkably little attention to this period and to the institutions and issues with which Pobedonostsev was most concerned, so that even their research in these closed materials is not of much use. However, the voluminous official reports which Pobedonostsev prepared for the tsar on his responsibilities at the Synod, his correspondence and that of others, and other official reports, memoirs, and contemporary journals provide an immense amount of information concerning Pobedonostsev’s career as an official during these critical years.