XIII

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Russia and the West

FOR POBEDONOSTSEV, and for most Russians of his generation and indeed of this century as well, one of Russia’s central problems was its relationship with the West. There may be no better method of illustrating his thought than describing and analyzing his knowledge of and attitude toward this critical geographical and cultural area. It is naturally difficult, perhaps impossible, to provide a clear definition of “the West,” although Pobedonostsev and others very frequently used the word. Moreover, the definition used by any one person changes from year to year. Similarly, the West itself is not a constant: the West of Hitler or Picasso is not that of Gladstone or Goethe.

Generally, most informed Russians and Europeans throughout the nineteenth century assumed that Russia was a part of the European state system and a leading member of the concert of Europe. This had probably been so since the time of Catherine the Great, and the role of Russia in the Napoleonic wars, in the peace settlement in 1815, and in international affairs in general ensured it. In fact, Russia became a world power during the nineteenth century, because of her powerful position in Europe and because of the conquest, during the century, of the Caucasus, Central Asia, and substantial areas in the Pacific Far East.

At the same time, there was a serious gap between Russia’s apparent position and the foundation of this position. During the first half of the nineteenth century, Russia’s reputation rested generally upon her massive size and upon her large parade-ground army. This reputation was pricked by the Crimean War, and the new economic foundations which underlay British and German power as the century progressed exposed Russia further. Moreover, the growing dichotomy between the congealed political system of Russia and the changing forms of western Europe contributed to the gap between Russia and the West. Finally, as more Russians appreciated the significant differences which distinguished Russia from the West, they became critical of their own government and society. In other words, Russia in the nineteenth century was in the West, but not of it. Even those Russians who believed that Russia was and ought to remain distinct from the West recognized Western superiority in some fields and borrowed from it.

Pobedonostsev’s knowledge of the West, his definition of it, and his attitudes toward it inevitably reflected the age in which he lived and its inheritance. As Russia more and more became a part of Europe in the nineteenth century, the knowledge which educated Russians had of Europe increased. Despite the backwardness of Russian culture, the level of Russian education, the censorship and controlled isolation which generally prevailed, and the ignorance of the rest of the world of the vast group which Avvakum in the seventeenth century had described as “the ignorant, self-sufficient majority untouched by any cultural influence,” Russians among the aristocracy in particular began to develop clearly defined views of Europe and of its various parts. However, even the best-educated Russians were poorly or inaccurately informed, so that their views on occasion were both shallow and indefinite and changed in remarkable ways from time to time as political and other crises affected the country.

The interest some educated Russians developed concerning Europe began in the Middle Ages, but it was only in the middle of the eighteenth century that a handful, most of them in the aristocracy and residents of Moscow or St. Petersburg, began to acquire the kinds of knowledge from travel and study that enabled them to create coherent views. Interest originally, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, concentrated upon France. French influence probably reached its apogee during the period from 1780 to 1815, but it grew remarkably after 1740 and it remained high throughout the nineteenth century.

The reign of Catherine the Great was, of course, the great landmark for intellectual relations between Russia and Europe, and the age of the Enlightenment therefore occupies a central position. It has been estimated that three-quarters of the books which were imported into Russia in the last third of the eighteenth century were published in France and that most of these books represented the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Thus, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the established tradition reflected both in reading and in travel made France and its culture the principal subject of study in the Russian empire.

Basically, “the boneless man of Europe” was afflicted then by “idol worship” with regard to France, in large part because the Russian aristocracy lacked well-established beliefs of its own. This enthusiasm about every aspect of French culture survived the powerful waves of disenchantment created by the violence of 1793 and the invasion of 1812. Thus, even during the French revolutionary period and during the period of the most strict censorship, several journals were published in St. Petersburg and in Moscow which translated articles from French newspapers and magazines and selections from the classics of the age of Louis XIV and of the eighteenth century. As has been discussed earlier,* Pobedonostsev’s father, a pious member of the Orthodox Church, a nationalistic Russian, a professor of Russian literature, and a founder of the Society of the Lovers of Russian Literature, devoted a good part of his time and energy to publishing journals, the main function of which was the dissemination of material from Western (mainly French) books, journals, and newspapers. One mark of the changes in the Russian view of Europe which unfolded as the nineteenth century progressed was the contrast between Professor Pobedonostsev and his distinguished son, who learned early to read French and who read the Revue des Deux Mondes consistently as an adult, but who refused to visit Paris and who turned to the English and Germans rather than to those whose works his father had published or to French writers of his own era.¹

Throughout the nineteenth century, the court played an important part in shaping the Russian view of other parts of the world. The St. Petersburg court was basically a German institution, most of the princesses whom Russian state leaders married after Peter the Great were German, and Germans, usually from the Baltic area, occupied many important state positions. The education of the court was German throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the German state system very often served as the court’s model. Sumner has pointed out that four of the nine Russian ambassadors to the Court of St. James between 1812 and 1917 were Baltic Germans and that these four men served Russia in London for a total of eighty-three of the one hundred and five years. In other words, the court when looking westward tended to concentrate on Germany, while the aristocracy when looking in the same direction tended to see only France.²

The court’s attitude was inevitably affected by the French revolution and by the invasion of Napoleon. During the era of reaction after 1815, both Alexander I and Nicholas I tightened the censorship to a degree beyond that practiced even during the revolution. Nicholas I in 1830 was prepared to invade France to crush the revolution which broke out in that year, and he abandoned this intention only when he realized such an action was not possible. Alarmed by developments in France and fearful that the infection would spread from Paris, after 1830 he in effect closed Paris and France to Russian tourists and students. Indeed, he began to send Russian students to Berlin for their studies, particularly after 1840. It was in Berlin, of course, that young Russians encountered the doctrines first of Hegel and later of Marx. Ironically, therefore, the policies of Nicholas I led to the importation of doctrines from Berlin which proved more dangerous than the ideas which Russian scholars would have imported from Paris.³

The efforts of Nicholas I to isolate Russia from France failed because the culture of the aristocracy had been so powerfully shaped in earlier years. The libraries which had been imported in the eighteenth century and which continued to grow in the nineteenth century included many French volumes, particularly the classics of the age of the Enlightenment. These collections in the great homes of the aristocracy and in homes such as that of Professor Pobedonostsev proved to be time bombs, because the Herzens and the Kropotkins in reading these volumes as youngsters imbibed doctrines and information which Nicholas I was trying to obliterate.

For the cultivated aristocracy of St. Petersburg and Moscow, France occupied quite a different position from the one it held at the court. Of course, most of the Russian nobility in the first half of the nineteenth century, and even in the first part of the twentieth century, were no more cultivated or educated than the English gentry whom Macaulay ridiculed in the famous third chapter of his History of England. However, the educated aristocrats, who tended to spend their winters at least in St. Petersburg and Moscow, were highly cultured people, in many ways more French than Russian. Almost all of them spoke French, they had travelled often in France, most of their reading was in French books, journals, and newspapers, and they traditionally had their children educated by French tutors.

For them, France was the France of the eighteenth century, the era of the Enlightenment. It was not just a country or a people, but a corps of ideas which should affect the lives of all men. It represented the belief in the excellence of natural man, the importance of the individual and of the individual’s rights, and the power of reason. It meant the great literature of the eighteenth century, the city of Paris as the City of Light, and, perhaps above all, the fashions and luxuries of Paris. Their readings and travel, their ideals and sympathies, and their definition of France in general therefore produced quite a different view of France and Europe from that held by Nicholas I and the court. For the nobility, the West began west of Berlin and Vienna, while for the court and the state officials, Berlin and Vienna were the centers of the Western world. For the nobility, Victor Hugo, George Sand, and Father Felicité de Lamennais represented the Western giants of the nineteenth century, standing on the shoulders of the great Frenchmen of the eighteenth century.

In short, some of the cultivated aristocracy in the nineteenth century were more French than Russian. They had no real roots in Russian society, the main cultural influences upon them came from abroad, their minds and hearts were always directed westward, they lacked understanding of or sympathy for their native land, and their tradition and upbringing had destroyed many of the beliefs which their ancestors had held. This helps to account for the “betrayal” of Russian tradition by the nobility, a handful of whom turned in revolt against the regime in 1825 and others of whom helped to lead the revolutionary movement later in the nineteenth century.⁴

Probably the most critical period in shaping the view of educated Russians in the nineteenth century was the 1840’s, when the celebrated debate took place between the Slavophils and the Westerners about the nature of Russia and about Russia’s position in the world. This discussion went back, of course, at least to Peter the Great. It was launched by the publication in French in a Russian journal of the Philosophical Letters of Peter Chaadaiev, who argued that Russia had no past, no present, and no future and that Russia had to become a part of Europe if it were to make a significant contribution in world history. This series of essays led to the creation of two schools of the philosophy of history which have had a profound impact on Russian intellectual history and on definitions of Russia and of Russia’s attitude toward the rest of the world.

The Slavophils, who were much influenced by the German romantics, in effect tended to glorify Russia, emphasizing the qualities which separated it from other peoples and other countries and arguing that Russia should remain true to its historical traditions. They glorified the Russian Orthodox Church, the saintly quality of the Russian people, the peace and tranquility which prevailed in Russian social and political relations, and the Christian, peasant kingdom which Russia had always been. This glorification of rural Russia and of the Old Regime influenced the Slavophils’ view that Russia should remain isolated from other cultures and that in borrowing Russia would only poison the springs of its distinctive civilization. Alexis Khomiakov, the Kireevskys, and the Aksakovs also became convinced that Russia had a mission to the rest of the world and that the outstanding qualities which had characterized the history of the Russian people and of the Russian state should be recognized and adopted by others.

The Slavophils had great admiration for England, partly because Khomiakov and his associates believed that England shared some of the fine qualities they found in Russia. In fact, they saw in England a kind of advanced or progressive Russia, a society which respected conservative institutions, the past, and authority, and which possessed the kind of peaceful relations among classes which they thought existed in Russia.

The Slavophils’ view of France was quite different. They thought France an artificial, rational, abstract, depraved, and cruel society, one ruled on occasion by a fierce Catholic monopoly and on other occasions by a bureaucratic and parliamentary despotism. They were convinced that the French people, or at least their rulers, were the prisoners of an abstract rationalism which led them to glorify materialism and cruel despotic rule. One of the Aksakovs wrote that France was “the miserable land called to warn by her fate the rest of mankind, a country flinging herself about between Papacy and atheism, between superstition and disbelief, between slavery and revolt.”⁵ In short, the Slavophils despised France and feared French influence. The only Frenchmen of their generation whom they admired were de Tocqueville and Montalembert, whom they called “western Slavophils” and whom they considered almost English in their view of the state and society.

The Westerners had a different view. Led by Vissarion Belinsky, the celebrated critic of the 1840’s, Herzen, and Nicholas P. Ogarev, they developed a concept of the world which emphasized that Russia was a backward and underdeveloped country which could progress only if it recognized that it was a part of a larger civilization and borrowed effectively from other European countries. The Westerners were in general great admirers of France, particularly of the French Enlightenment and of French socialist thought. They were much influenced by Fourier and Louis Blanc, and they revered Hugo and George Sand, whom Belinsky called “the first poetic glory of the contemporary world” and “the Joan of Arc of our time.” While they were occasionally critical of particular French institutions, they generally considered the French “an heroic and noble people.” They thought that Russia could progress only if it continued to revise its institutions and values along the lines established clearly by France.

Belinsky reflected some of the principal changes which were occurring in the Russian view of Europe in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. He represents what Vladimir Weidlé has called “the coming of the clerks,” because he was of the non-noble class, did not complete his formal education, read French poorly and did not speak it at all, and was more attracted by socialist and radical thought than by the writers of the Enlightenment. In short, he reflected the group which included sons of priests, expelled students, and censored journalists, and which began to have a powerful impact on Russian thinking by the middle of the nineteenth century.⁶

Another important turning point in the Russian view of Europe occurred between 1848 and 1870, when the views of the court, of the leading statesmen, and of the Russian “establishment” became sharply anti-French. The 1848 revolution which spread throughout most of western and central Europe alarmed Russian conservatives. The rise to power of Napoleon III frightened them even more, both because the name of Napoleon meant invasion and because of the radical social policy and the reorganization of Europe which he advocated. Russian failure in the Crimean War, the ensuing “thaw” and reforms, and the unsuccessful revolt of the Poles in 1863 pushed the official Russian view of France even further toward hostility, particularly because of the diplomatic support Napoleon III provided the Poles and because of the traditional Russian fear of the Catholic powers, Poland and France.

Consequently, the official Russian position during the years before the Franco-Prussian War helped Bismarck to create a situation in which he was able to isolate and attack France. The Russian court and most Russian leaders supported Germany in the war. So far as can be determined, most educated Russians not involved in the court or in official activities provided sentimental support for France in 1870, and popular sympathy as well seemed to favor the French against the Germans. However, this popular support for France, which had no effect on state policy, was for the “ideal, imaginary France” of the eighteenth and first part of the nineteenth centuries and not for the France of Napoleon III, for whom there was little affection or sympathy.

While the court and the government were becoming more clearly critical of France during the middle years of the nineteenth century, an important change was also occurring among the aristocracy and among a new class, the intelligentsia. One splendid example of this was provided by Herzen, who left Russia in 1847 but who had a powerful influence on Russian thought and political development during the next quarter-century through his journalistic and other activities abroad. Herzen had been brought up to believe in the France of the great century, but residence in western Europe after 1847 disillusioned him. By 1854, he was almost as critical of France as was Nicholas I, although for quite different reasons. His letters, particularly those written between 1847 and 1854, reveal his disenchantment with France and with Europe in general and his growing conviction that the salvation of Russia had to reflect Russian history and tradition and must be found within Russia itself.⁷

Herzen became convinced that France had little to offer Russia, because he was appalled by the role which the petty bourgeoisie played, because the power of Catholicism as an organized religion filled him with alarm, and because parliamentary government as he saw it practiced by Napoleon III in France and by Palmerston in England depressed him. He was so dismayed by French economic development that he denounced “the small, dirty milieu of petty bourgeoisie, which covers all of France like a green slime.” He remarked as early as the 1850’s that he had begun “the moral return to my own country.” Indeed, he began to have great faith in Russian man and in the likelihood that the Russians might form a society superior to anything with which he was familiar in western Europe. It is no doubt symbolic that Herzen wrote most of his letters in French in 1847, that he began then to write some in German, and that he usually wrote in Russian after 1854.⁸

The Populists, or narodniki, whose writings and ideas dominated the Russian social movement in the 1860’s, were also critical of France. One of the leading Populists, Peter Lavrov, referred to France as “the republic of humbug.” They were much impressed by peasant institutions and believed that the future of socialism could be built on native Russian foundations. They were also more affected by philosophers from England and from Germany than they were by those of France. For example, Herbert Spencer and Darwin had much more influence upon their thinking in the 1860’s than the earlier French philosophers or the French Socialists, or even Taine and Comte and Renan, whose writings were among those most popular then in Paris.

Further to the right in the Russian political spectrum, views of France rested on quite different grounds and were even more critical and hostile. The panslavs, the great Russian nationalists who began in the 1860’s and 1870’s to advocate that “big brother” Russia help lead the other Slavic peoples to independence and to some form of federation under Russian leadership, were more critical of France than were the Populists and were more influenced by England and by Germany than by France. Katkov and other panslavs like him were so mesmerized by the rise of German power and by what they considered the threat the Germans raised in the Balkans that France almost ceased to exist for them. Count Nicholas Ignatiev, the Russian ambassador to Constantinople during most of the 1870’s, for example, devoted most of his attention to England and Germany and thought that France was an unimportant power in European politics. Nicholas Danilevsky, whose important volume Russia and Europe was published in 1869, so concentrated on Germany that other European states to some degree ceased to exist. General Rostislav Fadeev dismissed France as a power of no importance and wrote that “Russia’s chief enemy is by no means western Europe, but the German race and its enormous pretensions.” The poet, Fedor Tiutchev, who lived twenty years in Germany, whose two wives were German, and who wrote very often in French, was so consumed by the German problem that he thought France of little importance either politically or culturally.⁹

Dostoevsky illustrates another attitude which fits into this general pattern. He was a great admirer of French literature, read Fourier, George Sand, and Hugo, and was much influenced by Balzac. At the same time, he lived more in Germany than in France, and he was more impressed by German thought and German power than he was by those of the French. For Dostoevsky, Paris was Nineveh, a dying power. In 1868, he criticized a niece who sought a French governess for her daughter because he thought French should no longer be spoken in Russia and because the little girl would learn “vile things” from such a governess. Moreover, France to him represented Roman Catholicism and the idea of force in religion, while Russia represented Orthodoxy and unity in freedom. Dostoevsky saw Catholicism, socialism, the corrupting power of the bourgeoisie, and Western civilization in general as the principal threats to Russia, with France in every case the principal culprit.

Leo Tolstoy represented still another view, but one within this pattern. As a young man, he often read French literature and was particularly impressed by Stendhal. In his teens, he was so influenced by Rousseau that he carried his picture in a locket around his neck. However, Tolstoy visited Paris only twice, in 1857 and 1860. In 1870, he wrote that “civilization and progress are on the side of the Prussians” in the Franco-Prussian war. Although he remained interested and informed about French literature and culture, he became more and more possessed by Russian problems and turned more and more to the Russian peasant and the Russian people for solutions of critical issues. As a consequence, France had little significance in the last forty or fifty years of Tolstoy’s life and thought, reflecting in part the great change which had come over the Russian view of Europe in the course of the nineteenth century.¹⁰

After 1870 and the establishment of the Third Republic, Russian views of Europe again underwent a significant turn. For the court and those involved in guiding the Russian state, the Third Republic was more dismal and even disgusting than the France of Napoleon III. Before the formation of the Russian-French alliance in 1894, the Third Republic was considered a “hot-bed of republicanism, atheism, and anarchy” by those who were engaged in directing Russian destinies. Alexander III once defined France as “nothing but atheists and radicals.” In the two decades of history before the alliance was formed in 1894, there was more friction than friendship between the two countries. The outstanding French intellectuals of the time, such as Taine and Renan, had remarkably little influence in Russia.¹¹

In short, while French culture retained some influence on Russian society after Napoleon’s invasion in 1812, German social thought appears to have attained greater influence than French after approximately 1830. By and large, liberals and conservatives tended to look to England throughout the nineteenth century, and radicals to France and Germany. In addition, those who were most influenced by England tended to be most interested in political ideas, those who turned to France and Germany, in social philosophy and in socialism. Government circles were most influenced by Germany (Iurii Samarin, for example, made a study of the Prussian administrative system), but by the German system of rule rather than by German political and social philosophy.

Late in the nineteenth century, men such as Count Witte began to appear in the Russian state apparatus, men who by character, training, and experience had been affected by Western values and by the Western emphasis upon efficiency and economic progress. Many Russians after the Crimean War began to acquire a new kind of knowledge from Europe, as Russia carried out its reforms and imported capital and technique for industry and transportation. This view of the West came from no one country, though England and Germany were probably the most important single sources, but it had a powerful influence upon Russian action and thought.

Pobedonostsev’s position with regard to the West must be considered in the perspective of this historical background. However, his attitude was based also upon his knowledge of his own country and upon the way he defined or thought of his native land. He was a man of the study who isolated himself even from St. Petersburg society. His knowledge of Russia was based largely upon his voluminous reading, on his correspondence with a few friends and with Church officials, and on talks in his office with men and women who sought his advice or aid. He consumed several Russian daily newspapers, including several he despised and thought dangerous. He was thoroughly acquainted with the great writers of his own generation, including Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Chicherin, whose writings he often thought pernicious. He devoured historical novels, the Russian classics, pamphlet literature on contemporary issues, and journals of all varieties.¹²

He was and remained a Muscovite, and his knowledge of Moscow was extraordinary. St. Petersburg never attracted his attention or his affection, and he was acquainted with very little of it outside the area in which the official world lived and worked. He made four trips of several months’ duration through European Russia, two in the 1860’s when he served as a tutor and two in the 1880’s, when he visited a number of church centers. He was well acquainted with many of the monasteries in European Russia, and he especially enjoyed visiting the old churches in Vladimir, Yaroslavl, Suzdal, and Kostroma. Early in their married life, the Pobedonostsevs spent parts of several summers on the Baltic coast near Narva, and they later often spent Septembers in the Crimea.

However, his information concerning Russian life and conditions was limited. He ventured beyond the Urals only twice, in 1885 and 1889 on official missions, and he never travelled east of Irkutsk or into Central Asia. He travelled into the Caucasus only three times, on each occasion on an official trip which he combined with a holiday. He was forty-two years old before he visited Kiev, and fiftyfour before he stayed in Warsaw. When he travelled, he acquired only the knowledge a contemporary businessman does, for he limited himself to his hotel and the church or office in which he was interested. He had no interest in the life of the city or its inhabitants. The worlds of the merchant or of the worker were equally unknown to him. Moreover, he read constantly while he travelled by train and did not view the countryside. In his youth, he visited several times the country place of Lazhechnikov, the historical novelist who had been a student of his father. He paid several short visits to the estate of his father-in-law near Smolensk, he once visited Ilminskii in that same area, and he once visited the country place of an acquaintance near Moscow. Yet except for his research and writing on legal and economic problems affecting rural life, there is no evidence of knowledge of or concern with peasant life. In other words, like Marx, he was a city boy. Indeed, he was in this way a “typical” member of the Russian intelligentsia.

His lack of concern for the countryside and the peasant help mark him off from the Slavophils, who had a special veneration for the peasant and for the narod and who had a dual image of Russia in which the state, an unavoidable evil, played an artificial and often arbitrary role. They saw Russia as a harmonious organic country, without classes or class divisions, distinguished by vigor, simplicity, love, Orthodoxy, and peaceful change, and they considered the Orthodox Church free from and superior to the Romanov state. The Slavophils spoke often of Holy Russia; Pobedonostsev never used the phrase. Indeed, the Slavophils would have considered him and most other bureaucrats and members of the intelligentsia in the last third of the nineteenth century, conservative or radical, as non-Russians, city-dwellers who had been corrupted by Western ideas without realizing it.

In short, for Pobedonostsev Russia meant the state, the various organs of the state apparatus, and the ideas which held the state together and gave it distinctive meaning. He was convinced that Orthodoxy and the Russian Orthodox Church provided the doctrine and the cement which held society together and gave it meaning and substance. They were at the heart of the distinct and superior Russian way of life. He also saw Russia as a member of a European state system and as one of a number of states in the world, with some of which it should maintain formal relations. Moreover, he did not believe Russia should participate actively in world affairs. Indeed, there is some evidence that he resented and opposed all foreign alliances. In other words, he was an isolationist. During the Balkan war of 1876 and 1877, he adopted a position which was an exception to his basic one and which in fact helped to solidify his view or policy. From that time forward, he turned the interest and the power of the state inside. He opposed entangling alliances or collisions with other states. He assigned to the Orthodox Church and to economic imperialism whatever strength and influence Russia was to have beyond her borders. He profoundly believed that it was impossible and dangerous for one society to attempt to borrow ideas and institutions from another or to impose its customs and system upon another. Each society, in short, was an independent organism.¹³

Both the Slavophils and the panslavs thought Russia was unique in having a messianic role to play in the history of Europe and the world—a different role was envisaged by each group—but Pobedonostsev, and many of his generation, after 1880 believed that Russia’s destiny was simply to preserve and save the territory, institutions, and beliefs which he then cherished.

The education he received from his father was both Muscovite and Western. His family life, religious training, and early education were all heavily impregnated by Russian history and tradition. At the same time, in the little house on Bread Lane he learned to read, write, and speak German, Latin, and French, as well as Old Church Slavonic. He learned Greek and English at the School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg, and he learned to read Polish and Czech, probably at home from his brother Sergei. He was able to translate from all of these languages and to speak and write all except English, in which he could converse but which his wife mastered much more fluently than he. During the two decades in which he devoted enormous time and energy to research in the field of civil law, the emphasis he inevitably placed upon Western systems, principles, concepts, and sources enormously increased his understanding of other societies. This was supplemented during those years devoted to improving the Russian judicial system, for he concentrated then upon an analysis of the legal arrangements in France, England, and the German states. He even considered learning Italian at that time so that Russia could benefit from any improvements which could be borrowed from Italy.

Throughout his life, he had an intense curiosity concerning intellectual life in western Europe, and he clearly enjoyed and valued the months he spent there. The range of his interests was immense. He read book reviews with extraordinary care. He visited libraries and bookstores in every city to which he travelled, both Russian and foreign, to scan the old and new books and journals. Even on his first trip to London, he became acquainted with some of the staff members of the British Museum.

Similarly, he was eager to meet foreigners who came to Moscow and St. Petersburg. He especially enjoyed quiet chats concerning intellectual developments with the Greek, German, and English ambassadors, with the American minister, and with interesting junior men on their staffs. Journalists and scholarly observers of the Russian scene, such as MacKenzie Wallace of the London Times, author of the classic volume in English on Russia in the nineteenth century, were occasional evening companions and correspondents. Eugene Schuyler, whose volumes on Central Asia created great interest in the English-speaking world in the 1870’s and 1880’s; Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, who later angered Pobedonostsev by referring to him as “The Russian Torquemada” but whose books helped increase French interest in Russia after 1880; George Kennan, “who arrived with most impressive credentials” but whose book in 1885, Siberia and the Exile System, candidly exposed the horrors of Russian treatment of the political opposition—these men and their colleagues in journalism and scholarship attracted the interest and attention of Pobedonostsev, who was always eager to meet them. Visiting statesmen and clergymen, regardless of their national origin and faith, were invited to his study for conversation. In short, he was intensely interested in learning from European and American visitors and informing them of his views concerning Russia and the world.¹⁴

His knowledge of the West was derived mainly from omnivorous and constant reading, however, and, to a much lesser but still significant degree, from travel and holidays in western Europe. He loved to be busy, but he resented the arrival of visitors “who took the books” from his hands. He sometimes took a train from St. Petersburg to Moscow in order to acquire an opportunity for uninterrupted reading. He read consistently the London Times, the Daily News, the Manchester Guardian, Blackwood’s, the Review of Reviews, Fraser’s, The Nineteenth Century, and the Revue des Deux Mondes. During times of tension, such as the period from 1876 through 1878, he devoted particular attention to the foreign press. When he was abroad, he read all of the newspapers he could purchase in or near his hotel.

Books, however, were the main staple of his diet of Western publications, with Victorian England the principal contributor. He was a great admirer and constant reader of Thomas Carlyle, whose views concerning the nature of man, of government, and of peoples (for example, the Jews) very much resembled his own. During the last twenty years of his life, he was especially interested in the writings of William Morris, whom he called “the finest of all contemporary writers” and whose photograph he obtained for his desk through Olga Novikov. He enjoyed the Whig historian Macaulay and the Tory Froude, the work of great liberals, such as Gladstone, John Morley, and John Stuart Mill, and the volumes of rooted conservatives, such as Sir Henry Maine and Kinglake. Spencer, Seeley, and Darwin were balanced by the novels of Marie Corelli and Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Browning, Shelley, and Swinburne were among his favorite English poets.¹⁵

American literature was, of course, less rich then and less well known, even in western Europe. He had very high admiration for Emerson, some of whose essays he translated. In fact, he tried to read a little of Emerson every day, and he told the American minister that he always had a copy of an Emerson volume on his desk. Hawthorne, Lowell, Mark Twain, and James Fenimore Cooper were also among his favorites.¹⁶

Although his research in civil law reflects extensive study of German law and of work in German on the history of civil law, he read considerably less in German than in English. The great scholar in the history of law, Savigny, was one of his early mentors and had a profound influence upon his view of institutional history. In fact, he referred to Savigny’s System des heutigen römischen Rechts as “a book unequalled in the strictness of its juristic analysis, for the soundness of its conclusions, for the simplicity of its organization and method of thought, and for the grace and elegance of its style.” He also read Max Nordau, Schopenhauer, and Schiller, as well as Goethe, Heine, and Lessing. Late in life, he was delighted to have many of his views confirmed by the volumes of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose Die Grundlagen des XIX Jahrhunderts had a significant impact upon Wagner and Hitler and upon the Nazi movement. However, there is no evidence that he ever read Treitschke or Nietzsche.¹⁷

His range of reading in French was also not so wide as that in English. As a young man, he had been deeply moved by Lamartine and by the “sentimental socialists,” especially Fourier, whom he later called “an insane genius.” Le Play was a constant favorite, as was Fustel de Coulanges. He was immensely impressed by Taine’s Les Origines de la France contemporaine and by Taine’s other work, which supported his own theses concerning intellectual and political developments in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The novels of Zola in a different way also confirmed his views, while Molière, Montaigne, and Racine represented the good old France which had been swept away by the Revolution.¹⁸

In short, Pobedonostsev’s reading reveals that he was in many ways a highly cultivated European, as much a European as Gladstone, Bismarck, Pius IX, or Andrassy. One should note, however, that Europe or the West to him really included only England, the United States, Germany, and France. He read nothing written in Scandinavia, except for Ibsen. Italian literature, even Dante, did not exist for him, and neither did Spanish. Even the other Slavs were neglected. In fact, the Europe in which he was interested and about which he read was largely the “Anglo-Saxon Europe” of which he often wrote. Moreover, he concentrated almost entirely upon the writings of his contemporaries, even of his own generation, both in his scholarly research and in his general reading. Thus, he did not read such writers as Hobbes, Burke, and de Maistre, who might have been expected to have appealed to him. Finally he read almost entirely in belles lettres, philosophy, and intellectual history. Politics, economics, international relations, and science, for example, were almost completely absent from his fare.

His travels reflect the same interests and qualities and help to illuminate both his knowledge of Europe and his attitude toward it. He wrote Anna Tiutchev in November, 1864, that he could not imagine himself “outside my native air,” particularly because “they” hated, despised, and ridiculed Russia and Russians. He was forty-one years old before he went abroad, but he visited Europe for a month or six weeks in the summer in more than half of the remaining years of his life, in every case with his wife. His last trip, to Marienbad, was made when he was seventy-five years old.

England was his first interest and affection, and he spent parts of the summers of 1868, 1869, and 1873 there, largely in London and on the Isle of Wight. He wrote Catherine Tiutchev that he went to England first “because England after Russia pleases me most.” He was fascinated by the British Museum, the monuments, and, above all, Westminster Abbey and the variety of churches. His summers in England may have significantly influenced his philosophy, for they led him to reflect on the nature of institutions, the differences between societies, and the special qualities which set Russia off from even England and which dictated her future course.¹⁹

In 1874, he spent a month in Salzburg, which was thereafter his favored vacation center, even though it did not offer a Russian Orthodox Church. He was impressed by its trees and flowers, its marvelous views, its museums and churches, its libraries and bookstores, and the old portraits one found everywhere. He wrote that he liked Salzburg more than any other place in the world except Moscow. Salzburg, Marienbad, and Wiesbaden thereafter were his European vacation centers. From these sites, he travelled to Prague to meet interesting Czech priests and statesmen, to Bayreuth to hear Lohengrin, to Vienna to give assistance to Ruthenians living under Austrian or Hungarian rule, and to northern Italy to see the golden city of Venice and the mosaics at Ravenna.²⁰

The Europe to which he travelled and in which he spent his holidays resembles the Europe whose literature he read. He did not visit Prague after 1876, and he never travelled in the Balkans. He did not visit any part of Scandinavia, except for six days in Copenhagen in 1873, when the Pobedonostsevs travelled with the children of Grand Duke Alexander on their way to England. He never visited Helsinki, even though it was then a part of the Russian empire. Moreover, he never travelled to France or to any part of French territory, even though he visited Brussels in 1873. He was much pleased in 1888 by his being elected a corresponding member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques of the Institut de France, even though the other foreigner so honored that year was Sir James Stephens, whose views he abhorred. He kept the Academy informed concerning his achievements and honors, and he forwarded it copies of his publications. He even considered going to Paris to attend the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Academy. However, he could never bring himself to step on French soil, particularly to visit Paris.²¹

Similarly, he enjoyed hearing foreigners and other Russians describe Rome, and he was immensely interested in that great city. He wrote that he often dreamed of going there, and he spoke enviously to Angelicans who had attended services in St. Peter’s. However, even before he became Director General of the Synod, he thought it was impossible, “almost illegal,” to visit the center of the Roman Catholic Church. As he wrote to one English acquaintance, he was so much a Russian that he could not also become a citizen of the world, which an Orthodox visitor to Rome inevitably became.²²

He travelled to Europe for a rest and a renewal of his health and spirits, but he also went because of his powerful interest in the West. His vacations were devoted in part to reading and in part to tours of places of historical significance. He attended Catholic churches where there was no Orthodox Church, he studied carefully churches of other denominations, and he attended services of many denominations, Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, Unitarian, and Deist. He even studied the Salvation Army, visited missions and soup kitchens in the slums of London, and analyzed various nonconformist sects. He commented on the architecture, seating plans, organ music, choirs, sermons, and financing of churches. He concluded that the various churches in England, for example, revealed the differences between “the Russian and the Anglo-Saxon world.” In the Anglican church, he was alienated by the seating arrangements, the individual prayer, the absence of a sense of union or communion, and the stiff and uncomfortable character of the services. The preferment system he considered outrageous, and the flourishing of so many varieties of churches in England proved to him that none met the national need. Even so, the English seemed satisfied, which showed that “all institutions are shaped by history, grow out of historical conditions, and develop in a logical and necessary way from the past.”

He was impressed by parts of the Catholic services he attended, but he was appalled by the apparent isolation of the priest from the parishioners. Moreover, he considered most of the service “theatrical mimicking.” The kulturkampf, on the other hand, he described as “one of the most interesting and important events of our time.”

In short, travel abroad, conversations and correspondence with ministers of faiths other than Orthodoxy, and study combined to persuade him that Russia and the West possessed two different ways of life. Above all, the ignorance and hostility he found concerning Orthodoxy and Russia convinced him that neither side could hope to influence the other or even to trust the other. “This ignorance of the Latins about the Russian Church and people is astonishing. It of course comes from their contemptuous attitude toward the East in general, and from the pride of their own culture.” Since the West thought it possessed light and the East darkness, and since the West did not see or understand national peculiarities and differences between races, relationships between Russia and the West would have to remain stiff and reserved.²³

In his definition of the West, he was no more clear or consistent than we are today. Generally, however, for him the West meant that part of Europe west of Vienna and Berlin. Geographically and culturally, the West did not include the Balkans or any territories inhabited by Poles or other Slavs. Scandinavia was a part of Europe and therefore of the West, but it was generally neglected. Italy and Spain were naturally Western and European geographically and culturally, but Italy smelled too strongly of the Papacy and Spain was too forlorn and backward to deserve serious consideration. Pobedonostsev and his generation, of all political groupings, had much interest in American politics, economic development, and literature. Indeed, when he referred to Anglo-Saxon ideas and institutions in the last decade of his life, he often seemed to include the United States, although he did not make it explicit. In fact, he believed that England and the United States would succeed in maintaining constitutional and democratic government, which would fail elsewhere.

However, he defined the West not in terms of geography, but in terms of institutions, values, and ideas. The West to him meant that part of western Europe, including the British Isles, where four significant ideas were widely accepted: the concept of the excellence of natural man and the belief that man was a rational being, which he thought fundamental to Catholicism and to Protestantism and which he considered the foundation of Western political institutions; the idea that the individual was important, perhaps even more important than the state or society; the belief in the effectiveness and propriety of government by law and parliamentary democracy; and the emphasis upon freedom and diversity. Pobedonostsev believed that none of these ideas and values could or should be adopted in Russia. Indeed, borrowing in this case could only be destructive, perhaps fatal.

In addition, however, as he grew older and travelled more extensively, the West for him also meant industrialization: the telegraph, the railroad, electric power, the comforts of Western hotels, and the inevitable growth of national economic and military power and status. He was well aware of the social consequences the transformation of western Europe was producing, but he was equally convinced that the achievements and promise of industrialization must be imported from the West.

He could not have agreed with Chaadaiev, or with the Westerners in general, that “not one useful thought has germinated on the barren soil of our country; not one great truth has sprung up in our midst.” He would have disagreed strongly with Nicholas Turgenev, who wrote in 1847: “In Europe, in most civilized countries, institutions have developed by stages; everything that exists there has its source and roots in the past; the Middle Ages still serve, more or less, as the basis for everything that constitutes the social, civic, and political life of the European states. Russia has had no Middle Ages; everything that is to prosper there must be borrowed from Europe; Russia cannot graft it on her own ancient institutions.”²⁴

In other words, Pobedonostsev did not have the Westerner’s view of Russia and of the West. He did not consider the West as the cradle of a superior universal civilization which could flourish anywhere. He did think Russia had a national culture with its own distinct personality. At the same time, he was neither a Slavophil nor a Eurasian: he could not have said that “Russia has preserved the childhood of Europe” nor that it is “a world apart.” Russia to him was simply another one of the world’s societies or civilizations. It had been heavily influenced by the West since Peter and Catherine, but these influences had been limited to the structure and operation of the central government and to the process of industrialization. The effort to maintain the old system, especially the old values, in the face of economic change and of the rise of liberal and radical political ideas which flourished in part because of these changes, was extremely difficult for him and others like him. Indeed, this was largely responsible for his pessimistic assumption that a revolution would sweep away the Russia he knew and bring in European ideas and institutions.²⁵

His old friend in the country near Smolensk, Nicholas Ilminskii, wanted to abandon the accepted system of musical notation, because he considered it an “Italian, Catholic, and foreign” creation which “had brought evil and corruption into our Church.” Nicholas Ilminskii, in Kazan, was opposed to the construction of railroads, even though he recognized that a railroad would bring “golden rain.” Pobedonostsev viewed the West and importations from it through the same kind of spectacles, but his hostility and fear were concentrated upon political and religious ideas and upon some of the main intellectual currents then dominant in western Europe, especially positivism and secularism. The main hazards the West posed were unbelief, which threatened to dissolve the very foundations of the Russian state, and western political systems, with their growing emphasis upon constitutional government, universal suffrage, equality, liberty, and the rule of parties. The last four decades of his life were devoted to the defense of Russia against these elements from the West. Even the Salvation Army constituted a threat.²⁶

Thus, basically he rejected the Europe of the second half of the nineteenth century, just as Pius IX did in the Syllabus of Errors. He was contemptuous of the idea that an individual had sacred rights and that all should participate in government: the rights of the state and society must always prevail over those of the individual. He saw constitutional government as “the tyranny of the mass” and the “weapon of the unrighteous.” Parliamentary government and democracy to him meant party rule, which produced the division and weakening of the state, rule by party ministries dominated by eloquent and ambitious scoundrels, the predominance in society of party machines and corruption, and the triumph of general ideas, meaningless and destructive but attractive to ambitious and unscrupulous politicians and to the ignorant masses. He was opposed even to advisory councils, such as the zemskii sobor. He believed that the greatest dangers for Russia derived from intellectuals and the ideas they produced and carried. Freedom of the press was a Western device for inundating Russia with lies.

On the other hand, his hostility to the West was not so blind or consistent as to prevent him from admiring some aspects of European life and from seeking benefit for himself and for Russia from Europe. One of the satisfactions which he enjoyed, but which he thought should always be restricted to the trusted intellectual elite, which he labelled “the aristocracy of intellect,” was access to the learning and information of the West. His beloved Russia clearly provided him little intellectual excitment; this he found in Western newspapers, journals, and books. His holidays abroad also represent a part of his exploitation of the West. He used ideas and information acquired from the West in his scholastic debates with other Russians concerning the nature and future of Russia and the most fitting policies for the government. In fact, the West was a kind of reserve armory or storehouse of ammunition for him, and Le Play, Thiersch, Emerson, Carlyle, and Thomas à Kempis were quarried for arguments he used in defense of the old regime. At the same time, of course, he denounced other ideas and beliefs as “foreign” and therefore dangerous for the Russian body politic.

His attitudes toward the West were therefore marked by a number of paradoxical ambivalences. Although he resented and despised much of the West, it was at the same time the hub of his universe, as Boston was the center of the universe for Emerson and his fellows. He was simultaneously a Westerner and a Westernizer, and an Orthodox, fundamentalist, Russian nationalist. He was opposed to Western influence, but wished to use Western innovations to strengthen state power. He sought to preserve the state system and the privileged position of Orthodoxy in a system guided by religious faith, while he also sought to have the patriarchal, absolute state introduce reforms from the top. He was excited and inspired by the West, although at the same time he hated and feared it. Russia was superior to the West, and yet he believed the state should increase its efforts to “catch up” with the West without affecting society or philosophy. Indeed, he almost seems to prove Chaadaiev’s charge that “only Russia’s government is Western.”²⁷

In the history yet to be written of Russia’s intellectual relations with the West since the eighteenth century, Pobedonostsev represents a critical stage in the transition from the “idol worship” which generally characterized the aristocracy in the eighteenth century to the combination of relentless and frightened hostility with intensive scientific and technological borrowing, which are important parts of the Soviet position. He reflects the transition from the Slavophils through the panslavs to the Russian nationalism of the period just before the First World War. He also represents the decline of religion and of the religious framework through which the West was viewed. In addition, the dry and dusty character of his feeling for Russia and the Russian people is demonstrated by the absence of enthusiasm on his part for the nobility, the narod, or any identifiable Russian group or class.

His role in the transition can be demonstrated perhaps most effectively by comparing his views with those of one of his predecessors and of several of the men just one generation younger than he. Thus, Nicholas I and his chief administrator in cultural affairs, Count Uvarov, were hostile not to Europe, but only to a particular definition of Europe. Uvarov, the symbol of the repressive policy toward culture and education in the 1830’s and 1840’s, considered himself a true European. He spoke several European languages, and he had received the kind of education which Nicholas I considered dangerous for other Russians. He was a great admirer of Europe, but of the Europe that existed before 1789. He feared the French revolution with its secularism and liberalism and its effort to destroy the old France, which he considered the soul of Europe. Consequently, just like Pobedonostsev, he sought to preserve the regime which he and others like him had cherished, but to destroy the Europe of the first half of the nineteenth century, which he considered a perversion of European history and tradition.

The character of the changes which had taken place can be demonstrated by comparing Uvarov’s views with those of outstanding Russians of the quarter-century before the First World War, such as Count Sergei Witte, who began the massive industrialization of Russia and who represented the new businessman’s spirit at the very highest levels of the government. Witte was born in Tiflis, which was quite removed from European influence and the rise of which illustrates the growing significance of areas remote from Moscow and St. Petersburg. His early career was based on important achievements in the railroad industry. As he rose to power over the railroad system and then to a commanding position over Russian finance and economic development, his view of Europe began to be impressed upon the Russian state.

Uvarov, who had sought to resist European influence, was in many ways more European in culture than Witte, who did not read easily or well in any foreign language, and who did not travel extensively. However, Witte was interested in making Russia a modern European power and in borrowing from the new Europe as effectively as he could. The Europe from which he borrowed was industrial Germany. For many members of the educated aristocracy in the first third of the nineteenth century, such as Uvarov, Berlin was on the easternmost fringe of the frontiers of Europe. For Witte, however, Berlin and all of Germany were the very heart of Europe, even though France became an ally of Russia and French funds helped the Russian drive toward industrialization. To him, German industrial power constituted the heart and the future of Europe.

Peter Stolypin, who was the principal political leader in Russia from 1906 until his death in 1911, represented in many ways the same kind of development. Born in Dresden and resident of that part of the empire closest to East Prussia, Stolypin’s view of Europe concentrated upon Germany. He was particularly influenced by the agricultural progress he saw in East Prussia when he set out to “wager on the strong” by abolishing the mir and by seeking to establish an independent farming class. Stolypin, in other words, looked first of all to Germany, and to a lesser degree to the United States, when he sought to reorganize the Russian rural economy and social system. France was a very minor power indeed, so far as Stolypin and his generation of those remaking Russia were concerned, and the qualities which had attracted the attention and affection of earlier generations did not interest them.

Lenin provides another example. He was born in Simbirsk on the Volga in a family in which French and German were read and spoken. He was well educated within Russia and spent an important part of his life abroad, being as much at home in London, Paris, and Capri as he was in Moscow or St. Petersburg. However, he had very little regard for France or England and was very little influenced by French or English thought. As a disciple of Marx, he was especially learned in German thought, and he declared Germany “the classical country of capitalism and of socialism.” The central point of Europe had therefore moved east from Paris, where it had been earlier in the century for most educated Russians, and the focus was now on economics rather than belles lettres.

For most educated Russians, France remained “old France” and had less intellectual and political impact and effect than did “new Germany.” The rise of Germany and its place in the Russian view of Europe is also naturally reflected in philosophy and in statecraft. For example, Hegel had replaced Voltaire by the middle of the nineteenth century in Russian political thought. Bismarck clearly had more influence on the Russian state and on Russian politics in the latter part of the nineteenth century than did Napoleon III or any of the statesmen of the Third Republic. Consequently, when the modernization of Russia was begun, particularly under Count Witte, and when Russia’s army, industry, and state system were reorganized during the course of the last part of the nineteenth century, the Russians almost inevitably turned to Germany rather than to France.

This changing attitude is represented clearly in the Russian state structure and in institutional developments. The Napoleonic Code had considerable influence outside France during the first part of the nineteenth century, even in Russia, and Michael Speransky, to whom Alexander I assigned the responsibility for planning the reorganization of the central government in the first decade of Alexander I’s reign, turned to French institutions as his models. The institute established by Prince Peter Oldenburg in St. Petersburg in 1836 to provide training in law for future Russian bureaucrats paid as much attention to the Napoleonic Code as it did to Roman law. However, by the middle of the nineteenth century, Russian law professors were studying under Savigny in Berlin, and it was German and English, rather than French, influence which helped to shape the judicial reform of 1864 and the legal institutions and attitudes which developed in Russia following that momentous change.

This new view of Europe naturally was a result of a number of changes within Russia, particularly the decline of the aristocracy and the various waves of social revolution which swept over the country. As the nobility lost its influence and power, its view of Europe became less significant. At the same time, the new radical view of the West which began to develop after the 1840’s and the increasing effort to modernize Russia led to a view which was quite critical of France as a bourgeois country and as one which possessed very little dynamism. Even the court, especially the men with power in the higher levels of government, such as Witte and Stolypin, had a low regard for France as a model for Russia, and turned more to Germany and even to the United States for patterns of development which Russia might follow.

This change naturally derived to some degree from changes which occurred within France during the course of the century. The Old Regime and the Enlightenment had a clear and powerful attraction for Russians, one which diminished as France became less stable and more bourgeois. The rise to power of the middle class in France occurred at the same time that the anti-bourgeois tradition in Russia increased in strength, both among the nobles and among the lower classes as they achieved intellectual and political significance. In fact, it is illuminating to note the similarities between the views of many Russian radicals and of Pobedonostsev with regard to the West. As Professor Venturi’s masterful study of the Populists has shown, their attitude was quite similar to his toward prominent Western ideas and institutions: constitutional government, political democracy, the party system, Western judicial procedures, Darwinism, Spencer, and capitalism. Moreover, the similarities of view between Pobedonostsev and even later Russian radicals, including the Bolsheviks, were even more remarkable, for they not only shared attitudes toward liberalism and its institutional forms but also saw Russia as a model society surrounded by hostile states and threatened by cultural infection from abroad.²⁸

There were and remain dissimilarities, however. The most important of these is the contrast between the verve and optimism of the Bolsheviks and the gloomy pessimism of Pobedonostsev. He emphasized the historical origins of the society he was defending and believed the creative forces were all in the West. He was confident that constitutional forms of government would not survive on the continent of Europe, except perhaps in Belgium and in the Scandinavian states, but he also believed that Russian society and the Russian state would soon collapse because of the hollowness of its internal strengths and the persistence of powerful external pressures.

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* See pp. 5-9.