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Russian Political and Intellectual Life

POBEDONOSTSEV’S relationship with Alexander III, his role in the Church in a society where the Church was deeply involved in all political and intellectual questions, and his membership in the central organizations of the state in a loosely organized autocratic system provided him splendid opportunities for influencing state policies. As this study indicates, his authority over Russian life during the 1880’s was considerable. In particular, the decisive role he played in the spring of 1881 in destroying the possibility for creating a base for greater participation in state affairs by at least the educated elite proved a decisive point in Russian history. His actions throughout the next quarter-century, particularly the next decade, reinforced the 1881 decision. Moreover, he set the tone or controlled the climate of Russian state policy throughout the 1880’s in particular and helped create the invisible web which made change or reform in St. Petersburg almost impossible.

Pobedonostsev’s influence has been considerably exaggerated, both by his contemporaries and by later observers, especially those critical of or hostile to him. This inaccuracy is due to a number of factors: the crucial role he did play at the very outset of the reign of Alexander III; the nature of the tsarist government, whose methods of operations were often so inscrutable as to encourage devilish theories concerning its workings; Pobedonostsev’s forbidding character and personality and his lack of concern about public opinion; and the powerful discontents and dissatisfactions which wracked Russian society throughout these years.

Pobedonostsev’s influence could have been considerably greater than it was and could easily have become as substantial as most observers considered it. However, while he possessed remarkable capabilities as a politician, he lacked the open zest for power and the ambition to use the authority he had acquired. He was so much a man of the study, a man who preferred to read books than to deal with men, and a man of the past rather than of the present or future, that he failed to seize and exercise the authority within his reach. He believed in government by men, not by laws or institutions, and he was much more interested in affecting appointments than in molding or revising important institutions. His mind was much more clear on policies he opposed than on those he favored. He did exercise considerable influence in Russian political and intellectual life, especially in the 1880’s, but this was achieved in a fitful and unsystematic way, reflecting the kind of man he was and his approach to government. More and more after 1880, he devoted his energy simply to maintaining the status quo, from the system of government to internal passports, from religious marriage to the old system of property rights. In addition, he became increasingly pessimistic about what could be done to preserve the Russia he revered. He referred to himself even in the 1870’s as “the last of the Mohicans,” and his defensive efforts became more feeble as he grew older.¹

His main responsibility and interest were the Russian Orthodox Church and its effort to restrict the number and power of other religious groups in Russia. The Church’s power ramified throughout Russian society because of the nature of the state, so his actions as Director General of the Synod often led him into issues not considered of a religious or moral character in the West. Aside from the Church and its extensive responsibilities, he was especially interested in the appointment of ministers of departments and of governors, because he thought the character and views of those in important positions were decisive. He was also especially attentive to the administration of justice, in part because of his training and his work as a jurist, in part because of the role he had played in preparing the 1864 reform, and in part because he thought the courts could and should play an important part in defending authority and in throttling discontent. Education, particularly at the university level and in primary school, was also a burning concern for him, because he was convinced that training the elite and indoctrinating the peasant masses would help ensure stability for Russia. Finally, because of his concern with ideas and information, he devoted great attention to control of the flow of information, particularly through censorship, and to spreading abroad or publicizing what he considered the proper point of view.

Pobedonostsev’s triumph in the spring of 1881 over the Loris-Melikov plan for bridging the gap between the government and society were followed quickly by the resignation of Loris-Melikov and those who supported him. Pobedonostsev was then able to advise Alexander III concerning the new ministers, most of whom were appointed at his suggestion. A year later Count Ignatiev was replaced by Count Dmitrii Tolstoy as Minister of Interior, when Ignatiev made the mistake of advocating that a zemskii sobor, or territorial assembly, meet on the occasion of Alexander Ill’s coronation. Moreover, Baron Alexander P. Nikolai proved unsatisfactory as Minister of Education and had to be replaced by Ivan D. Delianov. Early in the reign of Nicholas II, Pobedonostsev set the tone for the new administration by drafting the famous speech for the tsar which referred to hopes “about the participation of representatives of the zemstvos in matters of internal administration” as “senseless dreams.” While he showed no interest in the appointment of the Minister of Foreign Affairs at any time, even late in life he played a decisive role in selecting other ministers he thought central. Thus, in 1895, when Nicholas II asked him to choose between Viacheslav K. von Plehve and Dmitrii S. Sipiagin as Minister of Interior, he said that one was a scoundrel and the other a fool and recommended instead Ivan L. Goremykin, who was at least a lawyer. When Goremykin resigned in 1899, Pobedonostsev recommended Sipiagin, who was assassinated in 1902. Von Plehve, who then succeeded him, was assassinated in 1904.²

Pobedonostsev’s preoccupation with the western border areas, inhabited largely by non-Russians who were usually not members of the Orthodox faith and who were becoming increasingly nationalistic and restive under Russian and Orthodox rule, led him to emphasize to the tsar the need to appoint strong and firm men who were both Russian and Orthodox as governors general in these territories. His influence on the selection of the governors for the borderlands in particular was therefore considerable. He probably had more authority in these important appointments, especially during the reign of Alexander III, than any other member of the government, even the Minister of the Interior, to whom these administrators were responsible. In fact, it is evident that most governors were recommended by him and that none was named without his approval. In 1887, and again in 1888, he reviewed the administration of the Baltic and western provinces for the tsar. His detailed comments then on problems, policies, and individual administrators no doubt were the primary influences upon the tsar so far as these territories were concerned.³

The principal new institution introduced into the Russian administration during the reign of Alexander III was the zemskii nachalnik, or land captain or rural leader, a salaried central government agent who was made virtual ruler over the peasants in his district. This office was established in 1889, largely to undermine or destroy the authority among the peasants of the justice of the peace and to reduce the significance of the zemstvo, the representative institution of local self-government allowed in 1864 and granted limited financial authority to build roads, schools, bridges, and hospitals. It was also a belated effort on the part of the autocracy to rebuild the position and authority of the landowning nobility, which had been weakened by the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and which had gradually deteriorated since.

The effort to establish the rural leaders took more than three years to achieve, even though the principal government leaders all sought such an institution. Alexander D. Pazukhin in the Ministry of Justice made the original proposal late in the winter of 1885–86, and Pobedonostsev was a member of a committee established in April, 1886, to review the proposal and to recommend the reorganization of local government and of the administration of justice at the local level. Apparently the only disagreements were over whether the rural leader should have judicial as well as administrative authority and whether he should be elected by the landowners of the area or named by the tsar through the Minister of the Interior. Pobedonostsev’s letters, the published accounts of the discussions within the Ministries of Justice and of the Interior, and a Soviet study based on the archives of the Council of State all agree that Pobedonostsev triumphed in having the rural leader named by the tsar and in giving him both administrative and judicial powers. Pobedonostsev drew up the decree of July 12, 1889, for the tsar, and the final document reflects closely the draft which he prepared for discussion by the Council of State. A decade later he was dissatisfied with the way the new institution operated and with the failure of the landed nobility to recover its strength. Moreover, at that time he was convinced that the very principles on which the zemstvo was based were immoral and that the zemstvo institution and the city duma or legislature should be eliminated if Russia were to survive. However, by that time he was unwilling to attack that problem and left it to Count Witte and others more energetic than he.⁴

Pobedonostsev’s most impressive achievements as a young liberal were his numerous studies critical of the administration of justice and his work in helping to draft the judicial reform legislation of 1864. A decade later, he was a vociferous critic of the jury trial in particular. His venom against this “Western institution” continued to increase after 1875. However, preoccupied by other matters he considered even more important, he began to consider revision of the 1864 law only in 1882 or 1883. At that time, he urged the Minister of Justice, Vladimir A. Nabokov, one of the few ministers who had survived the overturn of 1881, to draft changes, particularly to abolish the irremovability of judges and the right to jury trial. Nabokov, while agreeable to chis, was reluctant to accept several other Pobedonostsev proposals and seemed slow, so Pobedonostsev in November, 1885, persuaded Alexander III to replace him with Senator Nicholas A. Manasein, who had just drawn Pobedonostsev’s attention by his rigorous review of policy in the Baltic provinces.⁵

At the same time that Pobedonostsev succeeded in putting Manasein into Nabokov’s position as Minister of Justice, he forwarded the tsar a memorandum suggesting a comprehensive revision of Russia’s judicial procedures. This was probably his own work, because it reflects his views accurately and is written in his style, and there is no indication that others worked with him. In any case, it established government policy for the next few years, because it proposed the ending of permanent tenure for judges, which was achieved in 1889, the denial of public trials in cases which the state considered harmful to public morals, reduction of the role and influence of the lawyer, the withdrawal of cases from the regular courts which the state considered sensitive, restrictions on the kinds of case which should go before juries, and the increased use of written evidence in trials. The 1864 reform was so appreciated even within the administration itself, the lawyers were so skillful and well organized in their defense of the earlier law, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was so opposed to some of Pobedonostsev’s proposals because of the damage they did to Russia’s rights and reputation in other countries, that he was not able to achieve all the goals outlined in the 1885 memorandum. Indeed, in 1894, after Pobedonostsev and his friends had assailed the jury trial in Russia for two decades, a committee of judges and prosecutors named by the Minister of Justice disagreed with his view that the jury handed down an exaggerated number of acquittals. The committee in fact reported that courts with a jury were even more repressive than those without and that “the activities of the jury correspond perfectly to its aims and that it has an ennobling influence on the people’s sense of equity.”⁶

Pobedonostsev fought strenuously to withdraw cases involving crimes against the state from jury trial and to have cases such as those involving marital problems and charges of religious proselytizing kept from public view. He campaigned rigorously within the Council of State. He made use of newspapers, including Katkov’s Moskovskiia Vedomosti (Moscow News), to win support for his position. He insisted that the new zemskii nachalnik have both administrative and judicial powers, thus violating one of the cardinal principles of the 1864 reform. He also urged the tsar simply to transfer some cases from public trial to military courts. While he was not completely successful, he did reduce the effectiveness of the reform legislation and strengthen the hand of the autocracy.⁷

There had been rumors in the late 1870’s that Pobedonostsev was to be named either Director General of the Synod or Minister of Education, positions which Count Dmitrii Tolstoy held at that time. When Tolstoy was removed in April, 1880, Pobedonostsev replaced him at the Synod and Alexander A. Saburov at the Ministry of Education. Saburov, who had recently been Russian ambassador in Berlin and who was known to be an honorable man of moderately liberal views, soon alarmed Pobedonostsev and other conservatives by associating zemstvo and city duma leaders with discussions in the Ministry and, above all, by proposing that disorders in the universities could best be handled by allowing student organizations more freedom and by increasing the authority of the administration of the university, rather than that of the Ministry or of the police. Pobedonostsev, who then considered students “crowds of monsters and scoundrels with whom nothing could be done, no matter how university life was administered,” opposed Saburov in Council of Ministers’ meetings and privately urged the heir and later the tsar to remove Saburov, who was replaced by Baron Nikolai only three weeks after Alexander III became tsar.

The new minister was recommended to the tsar by Pobedonostsev, who then had to overcome Nikolai’s heavy reluctance to accept the position and who soon discovered he had erred. Nikolai in January, 1882, planned a meeting of representatives of the zemstvo and city schools to discuss reorganization of the system of education, a proposal Pobedonostsev considered so close to the zemskii sobor and other ideas concerning representative institutions that he persuaded the tsar to order that the meeting not be held. A few days later, he had to intervene to prevent a meeting of teachers in Pskov guberniia because of the precedent that might establish. The final straw came in March, when Nikolai proposed that Professor Nicholas A. Liubimov be retired from the Department of Physics at Moscow University. According to the regulations of the Ministry and of the University, Liubimov should have been retired in 1877. However, his close friend, Michael Katkov, had persuaded the heir to the throne to intervene, set aside University rules, and allow Liubimov to remain on the faculty another five years. When Nikolai chose to end Liubimov’s career, both Katkov and the professor vehemently denounced Nikolai and his “reform programs” in Katkov’s powerful newspaper, and Katkov, who had opposed Nikolai’s appointment before it was made, asked the tsar to renew Liubimov’s appointment. In this instance, Pobedonostsev sought to persuade the Minister of Education to accept another violation of the regulations and, failing that, had to ask him to resign after less than a year of service.

The new minister, Delianov, who had been Pobedonostsev’s first recommendation in 1881 but whom Loris-Melikov had rejected as “a man of limited intelligence and an extreme reactionary,” had been an associate of Pobedonostsev for about ten years. They had worked together in the Senate and on a special committee established in 1875 to review Russian education. An extreme conservative who was in full agreement with Pobedonostsev concerning university education, Delianov sought and accepted his advice often, survived as Minister of Education for fifteen years, and was made Count Delianov as a reward.⁸

Student disorders in the late 1870’s and early 1880’s, the sympathy demonstrated by many university professors and teachers for radicals and revolutionaries and their ideas, the constant suspicion of educators as soft and dangerous liberals, and the atmosphere of fear and tension, especially after the assassination of Alexander II, led to another intensive reorganization of university regulations. The decree issued by the tsar on August 25, 1884, was a day of triumph for those like Pobedonostsev and Delianov who believed that the state had to exert firm and exacting control over the universities. However, it was a part of the zig-zag pattern of the position of higher education in Russia in the nineteenth century. Thus, the relatively relaxed and open system established by Alexander I in 1804 was replaced early in the reign of Nicholas I by a statute which restricted access to the gimnazii or high schools and the universities to the “free orders of society,” with those few local and parish schools “to afford the children of tradesmen, artisans, and other town dwellers such instruction as would be most useful to them, having regard to their manner of life and their special needs and customs.” Under this ruling, the universities lost their autonomy and were put under the direct rule of the Ministry of Education. After the revolutions of 1848 racked western and central Europe, regulation of university life was made even more strict: courses in constitutional and state law were prohibited, and only priests were allowed to teach philosophy and psychology. By the time of the outbreak of the Crimean War, travel abroad for scholars was prohibited, and foreign scholars were not allowed to teach in Russian universities, which in 1855 had only 3,659 students. No student organizations were allowed, meetings of students could be held only with special permission, and students from poor families were no longer exempted from tuition. Russian university life was thus very tightly controlled by a fearful state.⁹

In 1863, both the Ministry of Education itself and the university statutes were revised. Each of the six universities was given autonomy, and the rector, deans, inspectors, and professors were elected by the faculty, which also governed itself through an elected university council. The chairs abolished after 1848 were restored, tuition was lowered, and poor students were given tuition exemptions. Tolstoy, who was Minister of Education from 1866 until 1881, tried to whittle down these rights and succeeded on occasion in violating them with irregular appointments and dismissals. However, until the great fear of 1881 and the decree of 1884, the universities retained a considerable amount of independence and freedom.

Pobedonostsev thought that most Russian professors were a menace to society because of their irreligiousness and their political liberalism. To him, the student demonstrations reflected a chronic weakness in the state. He used his authority in the Synod to send unruly seminarians into the army, and he urged the Council of State to adopt such a policy for all troublesome students. He and Delianov were in complete agreement on state policy toward the universities. He apparently helped to draft the original proposal for the 1884 decree, he recommended it to the tsar, he defended its most repressive measures in the Council of State, against even Katkov, who thought it too extreme, and he persuaded the tsar to issue the decree although the majority of the Council of State did not support it. Consequently, he bears a considerable amount of responsibility for the ruling which kept Russian higher education in shackles until another decree in September, 1905, restored autonomy to the universities and allowed students to hold meetings.

Portrait of Pobedonostsev painted by Repin in 1903 for canvas, “Meeting of the Council of State.” Now in Russian Museum, Leningrad. (From Igor E. Grabor, Repin [Moscow, 1964], II, 132.)

Briefly, in 1884, the Russian universities lost the independence and freedom they had acquired only two decades earlier. The Ministry of Education received authority to name all rectors, deans, and inspectors and to approve all appointments and promotions. Student organizations were forbidden again, membership in a student organization was declared a crime, and special uniforms were required. Tuition rates were raised, the curriculum was revised in order to reduce the number of students from classes below the gentry and bureaucracy, and control of examinations was given to committees named by the Ministry of Education. New efforts were made to expand vocational education for those who might otherwise have entered a university.¹⁰

The 1884 decree did not eliminate the tension and disorder nor give the universities the class character Delianov and Pobedonostsev thought they ought to have, so they continued their activities. Thus, they delayed establishment of a new university in Tomsk. Convinced that allowing high school education “for the lower classes” was harmful to them and to Russia, they asked the tsar in 1887 for permission to allow into high schools only children of those estates not lower than second guild merchants. When Alexander III refused because he feared foreign reaction would weaken Russia’s unstable credit, Delianov then issued the famous “cooks’ children decree” in June, 1887, the language of which is like that of many of Pobedonostsev’s statements on this subject.

Gymnasiums and progymnasiums are freed from receiving the children of coachmen, servants, cooks, launderers, small tradesmen, and the like, whose children, with the exception, perhaps, of those who are gifted with extraordinary capacities, ought by no means to be transferred from the sphere to which they belong, and thus be brought, as many years’ experience has shown, to slight their parents, to feel dissatisfied with their lot, and to conceive an aversion to the existing inequality of fortune, which is in the nature of things unavoidable.¹¹

Pobedonostsev believed firmly that woman’s place was in the home. He was a warm supporter of his wife’s effort to provide elementary education and home economics training for the daughters of priests who would then marry priests and work with them in the countryside, and he lavished praise on other women who founded and directed schools of that kind. He was willing to admit that some particularly talented young ladies of high birth should receive the equivalent of a high school education. However, even though Dostoevsky and his good friend, Baroness Edith Raden, advocated higher education for women, and even though the baroness wrote several memoranda for the tsar advocating it, Pobedonostsev remained adamant. As a member of a committee named by Alexander in 1882 to review proposals for establishing a medical school for women, he not only wrote a stiff negative report, but persuaded the tsar to close the courses established for midwives by military hospitals. These were reopened when some St. Petersburg social leaders and several zemstvo units collected the necessary funds and petitioned the tsar for permission. In 1891, when the supporters of these schools sought permission to establish a medical school for women, Pobedonostsev succeeded in persuading Alexander III to deny their request. He had to fight the same struggle again in 1895.¹²

The policies and administrative appointments which he recommended for higher education were an accurate reflection of his policy toward Russian cultural development and toward access to information. Even though at one point in his career at least he considered opening mail and denying educated Russians the opportunity to read Western books childish and ridiculous, his positions with regard to freedom were almost instinctively restrictive. In the third volume of his Kurs grazhdanskago prava (Course on Civil Law), which was published in 1880 but which he had written and corrected during the previous five years, he made an elaborate defense of the system of internal passports. He admitted that “the fact that no one among us can absent himself from his regular residence without his passport” is restrictive, “but on the other hand, the conditions of our life make this a comparative convenience.” The passport serves “as a graphic and visible certificate of personality,” of enormous importance in a vast and disorganized land. It reduced the likelihood that some local government would arrest and hold an unwary traveller unable to identify himself or to prove his good intentions. It ensured both the worker and the employer that the worker complete his task before becoming free to move on. In other words, the restrictions inherent in the internal passport system were a blessing for which all Russians should be grateful, just as they should appreciate the other benefits of autocratic government.¹³

While he was writing and correcting this volume and reading proof on it, Pobedonostsev and Catherine Tiutchev complained bitterly in private to each other about the restrictions which invaded their own reading and correspondence. Both of them, especially Pobedonostsev, had come to know well Sir Donald MacKenzie Wallace, the most competent and celebrated correspondent of the London Times, and author of a remarkably perceptive book on Russia, the first edition of which Pobedonostsev himself called a classic and which he recommended to the tsar. In fact, both of them had spent long evenings with Wallace between 1875 and 1877, correcting what they considered his errors in understanding Russia, especially the character and role of the Church. Wallace sent Miss Tiutchev a copy of the first edition of his volume early in 1877, but the censor seized it. She then appealed to Pobedonostsev and other friends at court in order to obtain the book, which even in that troubled year in Anglo-Russian relations she found of “remarkable fidelity, precision, and accuracy.” However, before she was allowed to obtain it, she had to submit to the ultimate indignity of signing an agreement that she would not give or lend the book to anyone else.

Pobedonostsev had even more difficulty, because he had to spend more than two months prying his copy from the Main Administration of the Press in St. Petersburg. He noted that “something needs to be done about the insanity of our censorship,” the main characteristics of which are “ignorance and bureaucratic cowardice.” He wrote two letters, one of which he called an ultimatum, to censorship officials and made at least two visits to the main office, “a scandal through all of Europe,” before he could get his copy.

He was dismayed that the government should have at least three men read a book written in English and prohibitively expensive (twelve rubles, or six 1877 dollars) before releasing it, with some pages removed, to a Senator and a member of the Council of State. At the same time, he accepted the system of censorship, simply resenting the stupid and capricious decisions made concerning books in which he himself was especially interested.¹⁴

However, even more annoying and humiliating than these incidents involving the Wallace book, or than the troubles he often had in obtaining copies of Carlyle and other favorite Western authors, was their suspicion that their private correspondence was opened and read by state officials and the need therefore to have friends carry their letters by hand between St. Petersburg and Moscow.¹⁵

In short, Pobedonostsev resented the ignorance, stupidity, and inefficiency of the censorship when it affected his own affairs, yet he accepted without question the authority of the state over all information. After he had achieved a position of influence, he used his authority to strengthen the state’s control over access to information. The archives of the Synod in Leningrad reveal that he worked closely with Count Ignatiev, Minister of the Interior, in drafting the rules of August, 1882, which tightened severely the state’s control over the press and other media of information and which gave the government the right to prevent publication of a newspaper or journal, without redress.¹⁶

The first instrument which he used in his campaign as guardian of political loyalty, public morality, and good taste was the Office for Ecclesiastical Censorship in the Synod, which he reorganized and expanded and the powers of which he sought to extend beyond what had been considered issues affecting the Church and religion. This office kept all publications dealing with religious affairs under close review, closing down those which ignored admonitions and often denying the right to publish to groups not associated with the Russian Orthodox Church. Lutherans in the Baltic area, for example, were often prevented from publishing hymnals. Journalists and dramatists beyond the authority of the Synod were often warned; if the warnings proved ineffective, Pobedonostsev then turned to the Main Administration of the Press, the Minister of the Interior, or the tsar himself.¹⁷

Generally, however, he relied on the Main Administration of the Press, a part of the Ministry of the Interior, which had the principal responsibility then for most forms of censorship or control of information. The Director of this branch of the Ministry from January 1, 1883, until May, 1896, was a contemporary and a close associate of Pobedonostsev, Evgenii M. Feoktistov, who served his official and private interests during his years in office. A graduate of the law faculty of Moscow University in 1851, and a special admirer there of the celebrated Granovskii, Feoktistov worked as a chancery clerk for three years in the provinces and then joined the office of the Governor General of Moscow in 1854. After the Crimean War, he travelled in western Europe, returning to Russia during the exciting days of “the thaw” of Alexander II. At that time, he was an advocate of the various reforms and wrote essays in the liberal press advocating that Russia should become more Western. In fact, his principal associate at that time was apparently Katkov, who was also then in his liberal phase. Late in 1862, Feoktistov joined the Ministry of Education, where he worked for twenty years, serving from 1871 to January, 1883, as the editor of the Ministry’s important journal, Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnago prosveshcheniia (The Journal of the Ministry of National Education).

Count Dmitrii Tolstoy, as Minister of Education, gave Feoktistov his important position in 1871. Feoktistov’s views changed during the middle of the 1860’s, apparently along the same lines and at about the same time as those of Katkov, Pobedonostsev, and others of that generation. In any case, he abandoned his 1861 dream of a free press in Russia and of a Russian Tory party, joined Tolstoy, and became known as a staunch conservative. In 1882, he worked with Pobedonostsev to increase the role of the Church in the zemstvo primary schools. After he was put in charge of censorship in 1883, with Pobedonostsev’s warm approval, they worked very closely together. In fact, Pobedonostsev wrote him seventy-nine letters between 1883 and 1896, even though their offices were close to each other and they met often at various committee meetings. Feoktistov executed Pobedonostsev’s requests concerning censorship, he turned to him often for advice, and he made no major decisions without making certain first of Pobedonostsev’s support. Some of his principal assistants were former employees of the Synod whom Pobedonostsev had recommended for positions where he thought their judgment could be trusted. Moreover, his successor, Michael P. Soloviev, was nominated by Pobedonostsev, had been a student of Pobedonostsev at the law faculty of Moscow University, and had later, as a competent painter, prepared illustrations for publications issued by the Press of the Synod. Thus, from 1883 until 1900, the main official responsible for censorship in Russia was a nominee and collaborator of Pobedonostsev.¹⁸

His service as guardian of the state was by no means restricted to review of the newspapers, and the historical record provides much evidence that no aspect of Russian cultural life was beyond his attention. Thus, in the fall of 1881 he persuaded the Governor General of Moscow to remove photographs of Old Believer priests from shop windows. Four years later, he wrote to Alexander III denouncing the “disgusting, critical, accusatory” painting, “Ivan the Terrible and the Corpse of His Son,” one of Elia E. Repin’s most famous, and persuaded the tsar not only to order that it be removed from the exhibition but that its owner, Paul M. Tretiakov, not be allowed to show it in public. In 1890, he found Nicholas N. Ge’s “What Is the Truth,” even more revolting, and asked the tsar to remove it from an exhibition of Russian art which was to tour provincial cities. Two years later, he appealed to the tsar concerning another painting by Ge, but then learned that Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich had already acted.¹⁹

A great lover of the theater as a young man, Pobedonostsev saw only one play in the last three or four decades of his life. However, he was devout in his attention to the hazards the theater raised. He sometimes appealed directly to the tsar to close a play which affronted his view of Russian history, and he helped prevent tours of plays which escaped the censor’s watch in St. Petersburg. Finally, he urged Feoktistov to establish a special division within his office to review and inspect the theater.

Books, journals, libraries, and bookstores were also the subject of careful scrutiny. He had few complaints to make concerning Russian literature, except for Count Leo Tolstoy, apparently because Feoktistov was alert and active in this area of traditional concern. However, he did identify popular novels which insidiously glorified banditry or threatened to undermine public morality. He was particularly alert concerning foreign literature, perhaps because he read so widely and had so low an opinion of the censor’s judgment when dealing with unfamiliar issues and scenes. Thus, he cautioned against careless permissions to publish translations of novels printed in the Revue des Deux Mondes. He was outraged that bookstores were not allowed to sell the works of Thomas Carlyle, one of his favorite authors, whose works were “thoroughly penetrated by moral principles,” at a time when it was possible to buy Russian translations of Das Kapital, “one of the most incendiary books,” but the second volume of which the censor had passed in 1885 as “serious economic research, available, though only to specialists, because of its contents and its exposition.” Pobedonostsev wrote to Delianov in November, 1887, that he knew from several sources that “many” seminarians and students in ecclesiastical academies were reading Marx.

He urged Feoktistov to “take all necessary measures” to prevent the publication of a Russian translation of Germinal, even though he considered it Zola’s finest novel. When the censor asked his advice, he urged that In Praise of Folly, by Erasmus, not be published in translation. Boccaccio’s Decameron he agreed might be printed in one hundred copies at a price of one hundred rubles ($50), with a larger edition with a number of excisions priced at ten rubles. But he resolutely opposed an inexpensive edition.²⁰

He called the attention of the Minister of the Interior to a reading room in Tomsk because harmful Russian and translated foreign books might be placed there. In 1894, when he heard that the director of the principal Synod bookstore in Moscow was planning to establish a reading room for workers, he insisted that a catalogue or full list of the books be sent to him for approval. Even the reading rooms and libraries of seminaries were not exempt. In December, 1883, he asked Nikanor, Bishop of Ufa, to inspect the library of the seminary there because he had heard it contained books by men such as Goncharov, Daudet, and Hugo.²¹

The foreign and dead authors whose works were prohibited or were allowed only in limited or censored editions were, of course, unable to protest against his actions. Moreover, neither Repin, who later painted his portrait, nor the director of the reading room in Tomsk could defend himself with success, although both were able to increase the unpopularity of Pobedonostsev and of the regime by drawing attention to the censorship. However, Pobedonostsev’s efforts to control or hamper the circulation of the works and the actions of more distinguished and independent artists and philosophers encountered serious difficulties and, in fact, hampered his program for maintaining full control over the course of Russian culture.

Pobedonostsev was critical of all systematic philosophers, because he was convinced that their thought inevitably became remote from life, abstract, and therefore dangerous. Fortunately for him as guardian of the purity of Russian life, Russian philosophy was not notably distinguished in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the influence which Marxism began to acquire in the last years of the century reflected in part the poverty of Russian philosophical thought. One of the most dramatic and exotic Russian philosophers from the 1870’s until his death in 1892 was Constantine Leontiev, who was employed as a censor in Moscow from 1880 until 1887, almost certainly with the knowledge and consent of Pobedonostsev, some of whose views he appreciated. Thus, while Leontiev was critical of Pobedonostsev’s lack of imagination and historical perspective, he thought him a competent administrator of the Church and approved his emphasis on discipline and on autocratic rule. However, much of Leontiev’s writing, especially his cult of beauty and the panegyrics he devoted to Byzantium, had no appeal for Pobedonostsev, who approved Leontiev in principle but kept him at a distance.²²

Vladimir Soloviev was more influential in Russia during these years, and was viewed with hostility by Pobedonostsev. Soloviev, who was born in Moscow in 1853, was the son of Sergei M. Soloviev, the eminent historian whom Pobedonostsev admired as one of the few professors at Moscow University in the 1860’s and 1870’s who was “of Russian soul and mind.” He used to obtain archival material in St. Petersburg for the professor, and he visited him in his Moscow home just before he died in 1879. At that time, they almost certainly discussed the brilliant prospects facing Vladimir Soloviev, who in 1874 had published a brilliant thesis at St. Petersburg University attacking positivism. Pobedonostsev, who was bored by most lectures and who attended few in his life, heard each one of a series of twelve which young Soloviev gave in St. Petersburg in 1878, and found his discussion of the philosophy of religion most stimulating. Dostoevsky was at the same time an admirer and friend of the young philosopher, whose future seemed very bright indeed to these conservatives.²³

However, from the early 1880’s until his death in 1900, Soloviev was an accursed problem for Pobedonostsev and the censor. Pobedonostsev was appalled when Soloviev in a public lecture in 1881 urged that the murderers of Alexander II not be executed. He persuaded the Minister of the Interior to prevent a lecture by Soloviev in February, 1883, because he thought he would criticize the government for its policies toward the various religious sects. He had articles published in Katkov’s Moskovskiia Vedomosti criticizing Soloviev’s philosophical views and his proposals for greater freedom in Russia. He had some Soloviev books transferred from the Main Administration of the Press to the censor of the Synod because they were so critical of Orthodox doctrine and of the hierarchy and because they could be more easily quashed there. When Soloviev began to publish abroad, especially in Zagreb, he intervened to make certain that none of these “Papist” publications with their “disgusting verbiage” was admitted into Russia. Soloviev’s vigorous defense of his freedom to write, his condemnation of religious persecution and of the use of pressure to convert others to Orthodoxy, and his skillful criticisms of Pobedonostsev in his poetry only made the conflict more bitter. Pobedonostsev was especially irritated because Soloviev defended liberty of expression, while writing as a religious philosopher, and thus to some associated liberty and religion, which Pobedonostsev thought inevitably in conflict.²⁴

Some of Russia’s great writers created even more serious problems. Dostoevsky, of course, was a friend during the last decade of the author’s life, and their views were close. Chekhov, for some reason, never attracted Pobedonostsev’s attention or interest. Tolstoy and Turgenev, however, roused his effort to control the directions of Russian cultural life to its peak. Turgenev spent most of his time abroad and died in 1883, but Pobedonostsev despised him, welcomed his long residence abroad, and sought to isolate him while he was in Russia. In 1879, before he had authority to prevent such incidents, he was enraged when “so-called writers,” most of them “bribed by Poles,” gave a banquet for the popular novelist, a “grayhaired idiot, like a crow flattered by the fox.” When Turgenev returned to Russia in 1881, Pobedonostsev asked an old acquaintance, the poet Iakov P. Polonskii, who was on the staff of the censor in St. Petersburg, to persuade him to leave the city for his country estate quickly and quietly. Polonskii refused categorically, just as Metropolitan Isidore and Father Sokolov did later, when Pobedonostsev proposed that Turgenev should not be given a Church funeral and, above all, that he should receive no eulogy.²⁵

Count Leo Tolstoy was, of course, the giant of Russian literature during Pobedonostsev’s lifetime, as he remains today. His views, especially after 1880, were such that conflict between Tolstoy and the state, with its self-appointed spiritual guardian, was inevitable. In his conversations with foreigners, Pobedonostsev often reflected Russian national pride in Tolstoy as one of the glories of his country. He read War and Peace for the first time only while he was in Salzburg on vacation in 1875, five years after it had been published in book form, but he thought it a splendid novel and a great intellectual achievement. Anna Karenina, which he read as it appeared, did not please him so much because he thought Anna unreal, an artificial puppet. Later, both he and Rachinskii came to admire Tolstoy’s schools, which were in fact very much like those of Rachinskii, except that Tolstoy ignored the heavy emphasis Rachinskii gave to religion.²⁶

However, after 1881, Pobedonostsev was a relentless, if careful, tormentor of Tolstoy, whose influence within Russia he sought to restrict in every way possible. The original spark for this prolonged and bitter hostility was a request which Tolstoy sent directly to Pobedonostsev and which he also asked Nicholas N. Strakhov, a well-known St. Petersburg publicist, to give Pobedonostsev for the new tsar, asking him to pardon those who had just assassinated Alexander II. Pobedonostsev was incredulous and from that time forward considered Tolstoy a dangerous lunatic out to destroy the very bases of the Russian state. He refused to forward the request to the new tsar and then denounced it when the tsar received a copy through Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. Three months later, he wrote Tolstoy that their religious beliefs and goals were obviously quite different. Indeed, he remarked that in Tolstoy he thought he “detected the features of one who is feeble and himself needs to be cured.”²⁷

Pobedonostsev devoted his main campaign against Tolstoy to preventing publication of his books and the appearance of his plays, especially of those which seemed to him most subversive of the Church and of morality. He alerted Feoktistov to rumors early in 1883 that Tolstoy was going to publish a new philosophical work. When Tolstoy published V chem moia vera (What I Believe) in only fifty copies in order to evade the censor, Pobedonostsev had even this limited edition seized, although he had Feoktistov forward him two copies so that he himself might read the volume and add it to his library. Three years later, he was unable to persuade Feoktistov to prohibit publication of Tolstoy’s play, The Power of Darkness, but as soon as he had read it and had heard reliable rumors that the tsar had authorized production of the play in both St. Petersburg and Moscow, he made such a blistering attack to both the tsar and Feoktistov that this permission was immediately and categorically withdrawn. Pobedonostsev saw the play as an “abasement of art” which would persuade the educated people in the capitals that the popular masses wallowed without resistance in sin and which would lead foreigners to believe Russia was a foul and decadent country. The very fact that evil was not resisted and that the play offered no ideals was a shattering demonstration to him of the moral degradation of Tolstoy and of the threat he posed for Russia.

The Kreutzer Sonata in 1890 disturbed Pobedonostsev so much that he could complete reading it only after he had made three resolute efforts. He considered it a “very powerful work, . . . all true, as though in a mirror.” At the same time, he insisted that changes be made and requested that one entire chapter be eliminated before he would give approval for even a limited edition. Moreover, he complained the next year when Alexander III gave Tolstoy’s wife permission to include The Kreutzer Sonata in the new complete edition of Tolstoy’s work which she was publishing. He quickly warned Feoktistov that this decision affected only the full edition and that The Kreutzer Sonata could not be printed separately, particularly in an inexpensive version.²⁸

Pobedonostsev also condemned Tolstoy’s books and ideas in his annual reviews and in the journals and newspapers published by the Synod. He published rumors about his extravagance and laziness which he almost certainly knew to be untrue. He personally translated for publication by the Synod press an English attack on Tolstoy in order to demonstrate that foreigners shared his critical view of the great Russian writer. In his translation, he carefully omitted the praise given Tolstoy, a suggestion that Tolstoy really did love and respect the Orthodox Church, and the remark that “he is not more unorthodox than thousands in and out of his own country who live and die at peace with their Established Churches, to the comfort of their friends and relatives.”

By 1890, Pobedonostsev had come to recognize that prohibiting publication “does not attain its aim in one time. It is impossible to prevent in any way the distribution and reading of the works of Tolstoy.” One could only hope to limit the damage. Moreover, he believed that the work of Tolstoy had already had a profound influence on faith, the Church, society, and the state. At the turn of the century, when student disorders like those at the end of the reign of Alexander II received Tolstoy’s sympathetic support, and when Pobedonostsev decided that neither the state nor the Church could prevent Tolstoy’s actions, he accepted a suggestion that Tolstoy’s influence be reduced by a formal announcement separating him from the Russian Orthodox Church, but without labeling him a heretic. On February 24, 1901, the official Church paper, Tserkovnyia Vedomosti (Church News) published an announcement signed by the three metropolitans, the archbishop of Kholm and Warsaw, and four bishops, which identified the principal attacks that Tolstoy, “seduced by intellectual pride,” had made on the established Church and faith. “Therefore the Church does not consider him a member and cannot consider him one so long as he does not renew relations with it.”

Although Pobedonostsev was the Director General of the Synod and had in fact drafted the announcement, he did not join the other members of the Synod in signing the decree, probably in the hope that the absence of his layman’s signature would strengthen the weight of the Church’s charge as a religious document. The announcement of the separation, which was not formally an excommunication, was reprinted by most Russian newspapers and of course caused a tremendous sensation within Russian and abroad. Tolstoy, who had in fact separated himself from the Church and had therefore justified the Synod’s action, received wide publicity for his charge that the decision was arbitrary, without foundation, and illegal. Although the Synod reiterated that Tolstoy had removed himself from the Church and that the Church was only recognizing his action, Tolstoy won the sympathy and support of most Russians, as Pobedonostsev himself confessed. Even before the tempest became a storm, Pobedonostsev had to apologize to Nicholas II for publishing the Synod communication without his approval, although he had agreed in principle. Later in the year, when Tolstoy was seriously ill, the Synod sent instructions through the Minister of the Interior to all governors and police chiefs that no memorial services in Tolstoy’s honor were to be allowed. In January, 1902, Pobedonostsev even planned to have a priest join the Tolstoy household and announce at his death that he had recanted in his last hour and had rejoined the Church. Tolstoy’s survival wrecked this perfidious plan, just as his towering strength and international prestige destroyed Pobedonostsev’s other efforts to reduce or destroy his influence.²⁹

While Pobedonostsev was unsuccessful in caging or controlling the great force which Count Leo Tolstoy represented in the world, he did achieve substantial triumphs in limiting the press, which he despised for spreading what he considered deliberate falsehoods and political poison. His efforts to restrict the power of this “monster” reflected a deeply held philosophy, for he thought the press overpowering in its crushing or swallowing customs and laws and more characteristic of his era than even technology. As a convinced believer in autocracy and that the Russian Orthodox Church possessed “the one and only truth,” he concluded that the government had an obligation “to guard the little ones who believe in it” and that tolerating views other than those of the state and the Church was like bringing a mistress into one’s home. Public opinion, on the other hand, was derided and denounced as a creation of the press, a new and powerful conformism which could create wars and revolutions but had no responsibility or sense of responsibility. Since anyone with sufficient funds could purchase or found a newspaper, virtue and ability were not required or even allowed. In fact, Pobedonostsev thought that all journalists were chatterboxes and liars, that they were men “who see one thing and write another,” and that they inevitably pandered to the base instincts of the readers. He generally referred to the press as “the father of lies,” and was convinced that history would view press attacks upon him as “a sample of the falseness of so-called public opinion fabricated by newspapers and journals.” The press as a whole therefore constituted a “basic disintegrating force,” and the public opinion it created threatened the institutions and values he held central to survival.³⁰

Pobedonostsev believed that foreign newspapers and journals should not be allowed within Russia, except for those like him who had a responsibility to remain informed about foreign opinion. In fact, he viewed the foreign press much as Soviet rulers do in their efforts to maintain ideological purity and to prevent publication of the picture of Soviet reality. He also sought to ensure that the discussion of critical issues by government officials be safeguarded from the press and even that no government action or consideration be mentioned in the press without official permission. Third, he worked for complete and fully effective control of all the press through the Main Administration of the Press in the Ministry of the Interior. Finally, he urged state financial support and special privileges for those editors and journalists who supported the state’s position and who could be relied upon to represent its point of view faithfully.

Some newspapers and journals Pobedonostsev considered so filthy that he could not read them and had to learn of their vices and crimes only from friends. Except for that, he read consistently not only the principal St. Petersburg and Moscow papers but also the English and French press. He even kept an eye on the provincial press through members of the hierarchy and priests who corresponded with him about “the local devils.” While he was on vacation abroad, he often sent the Minister of Interior clippings from German and English newspapers, with the suggestion that their correspondents in Russia be censored and that those who ignored warnings should be forced to leave the country. His correspondence with the tsar, the Minister of the Interior, and Feoktistov was peppered with exhortations to tighten controls; denunciations of particular newspapers and journalists who deserved punishment; complaints because of the treatment given Church appointments, the Old Believers, difficulties within the schools, strikes or disorders, or even scandals; and suggestions that the government be far more rigorous in its policies toward those who distributed information and opinion. In the spring of 1881, the Minister of the Interior dedended himself by pointing out he had already closed more than fifty newspapers and journals. In August, 1882, he wrote that he would like to prohibit all newspapers but that they both realized this would be impossible. Pobedonostsev remained relentless; even advertisements did not escape his attention in the publications he denounced as the work of liberals, Polish agents, or “Yids.”³¹

He fought relentlessly to maintain absolute state control over the press, but he was aware that this negative policy was not sufficient and that the state had also to use the press if it wished to ensure that its point of view prevail. Therefore, just as he sought to discredit and restrict the influence of men such as Turgenev and Tolstoy, so also he sought honors and awards for those whose views he shared or whom he thought brought both stability and honor to Russia. Dostoevsky was therefore provided the connections and recognition from the court which pleased him so much. Pobedonostsev similarly urged the tsar to attend a concert in St. Petersburg by Anton Rubinstein, “a real Russian, by his birth, education, social connections and family, habits, and way of life.” He persuaded the tsar also to provide financial assistance to Tchaikovsky and to Rimsky-Korsakov, as well as to other authors and artists less known but equally loyal, and he helped conservative journals, such as Russkoe obozrente (Russian Review) obtain subsidies.³²

Pobedonostsev’s service for Grazhdanin (The Citizen), both as a protector against the censor and as a frequent contributor while Dostoevsky was editor, began his education as a participant in the struggle within the bureaucracy for and against the right to print. Long before he emerged as a power in the reign of Alexander III, he was approached by colleagues and acquaintances for help against the censor and for intercession for government subsidies. He assisted Dostoevsky by having his journal released from an official critic. He also intervened to protect Nikita P. Giliarov-Platonov, whose Moscow newspaper was being harassed by the Main Administration of the Press, although the publication had “a fundamentally sound policy and stood on serious principles.” He realized that censors lacked a sense of proportion and were alarmed by phrases, and he therefore frequently intervened to assist a paper or journal which shared his views, but which had committed a minor slip. He also on occasion used Katkov’s paper or Grazhdanin to attack a state leader or bureaucrat whose actions he especially disliked and which he could bring to the attention of the court in no other way.³³

Aside from his own extensive publications and the outpouring of the Press of the Synod, his principal weapon in his war as a publicist for the mind of Russia was Michael Katkov, who was without doubt the best-known journalist in Russia from early in the 1860’s until his death in 1887. Pobedonostsev read Katkov’s newspaper every day. They were close associates as early as 1862 when they were both on the side of reform, especially the reform of the judicial system, and were both ardent admirers of England. In the 1870’s, the panslav movement and the subsequent war fever of 1876–77 affected them both, and they were both frightened conservatives in the 1880’s. Katkov did have a romantic attachment to the zemskii sobor, and his advocacy of this in the troubled months after the assassination of Alexander II annoyed Pobedonostsev and caused constant friction with the censor, who at Pobedonostsev’s orders forbade even Katkov to mention this ancient institution. They disagreed also in the early 1880’s on state policy on university education. Moreover, Katkov wished to be Minister of Education and had some support for this in high circles. However, Pobedonostsev considered him a jewel as a journalist but impossible as a state official, and blocked the appointment.

Pobedonostsev utilized Katkov very effectively and also provided him important services. In addition to lending his name as a contributor on a number of occasions, he ensured that the tsar, the empress, and other members of the court read Katkov daily. He warned Katkov of particular sensitivities and of attacks on him which were brewing within the court. He sent him items of information which he found in the foreign press, tips or even “leaks” in twentieth-century terminology, government reports and unclassified documents of limited circulation, and general news about the court and Russia’s leaders which a newsman would find useful, not only for background information but also for avoiding errors. He gave Katkov’s son-in-law, Prince Sergei V. Shakhovskoi, a position as his administrative assistant with the Volunteer Fleet. Later, he helped Shakhovskoi to move to the Ministry of the Interior and then obtain appointment as Governor General in Reval, where he promoted the Russification program. Finally, he helped Katkov obtain regular subsidies through the Ministry of Education for his newspaper, and for a school which the journalist established in Moscow. He intervened twice—in 1875, when the Minister of Finance was reluctant to continue the annual subsidy of 23,000 rubles (approximately $11,500) for the school, and in 1883, when some of Katkov’s critiques of government officials led to a delay in the newspaper subsidy. The size of Katkov’s subsidy is not known, but Witte noted that Prince Meshcherskii received 80,000 rubles each year in 1892 and 1893 for Grazhdanin, which was considerably less significant than Katkov’s journal.³⁴

Katkov’s services to Pobedonostsev and the Russian government were just as significant, though perhaps more difficult to measure, as Pobedonostsev’s assistance to him. Probably his greatest contribution was his providing a platform from which “the Russian Truth” could be purveyed. Moskovskiia Vedomosti not only served as the unofficial government newspaper, but it also denounced other newspapers as unfree and claimed for itself the virtue of independence, just as Soviet papers do today. Thus, in December, 1886, Katkov wrote that the press in Russia was freer than anywhere else. “We do not know a single organ of the foreign press which can truthfully call itself independent. In the so-called constitutional states, in contrast to Russia, there are parties which struggle for power and to participate in power. The political press in those countries serves as organs for those contesting parties. . . . In Russia, where there are no such parties, a newspaper can be completely independent.”³⁵

On the personal level, Katkov arranged that a niece of Pobedonostsev be admitted to his Moscow gimnaziia with a 50 percent reduction in tuition. He called prompt attention to Pobedonostsev’s books and gave them long and favorable reviews. During the crisis of 1876–78 and throughout the period when Pobedonostsev was in charge of the Volunteer Fleet, he gave ample publicity to the Red Cross, in which Pobedonostsev and his wife were both interested, and to the Volunteer Fleet. When Pobedonostsev in 1883 launched the drive to establish parish schools throughout European Russia, Katkov called attention to this movement and praised its creators. Above all, Katkov skillfully published the hints, rumors, and leaks which Pobedonostsev fed him and which were designed to support a particular maneuver or policy.³⁶

The last year of Katkov’s life was a troubled one, for his exuberant and headstrong actions created minor crises for Russian diplomacy and seriously annoyed the tsar and some of his advisors. After the Congress of Berlin in 1878, and after 1881 in particular, Katkov and a number of other noisy patriots had become critical of Ger many and Bismarck and flirted with the idea of a friendlier relation with France. In fact, Pobedonostsev once or twice had had to warn Katkov to be cautious and had had to defend him at the court for some of his less temperate comments about Germany. The humiliating loss of Russia’s privileged position in Bulgaria, where the Bulgars themselves turned against the Russians who had helped them to gain their freedom, led Katkov to urge that Russia occupy and administer Bulgaria, abandon her traditional alliance with conservative Germany and Austria-Hungary, and ally with radical and republican France. By late 1886, Tolstoy, the Minister of the Interior, and some other Russian leaders agreed with Katkov, arguing that Germany was likely to absorb Austria-Hungary and assume her position as the enemy of Russia and the other Slavs in the Balkans. The tsar and Foreign Minister Giers not only disagreed with this thesis, but thought that discussion of it in the press was most unwise. Katkov, old and perhaps even less responsible than usual, was carried away by fervor to assault the motives of some of his critics, some of whom were especially infuriated because they were aware that he was subsidized by the government. Pobedonostsev intervened in this situation to defend Katkov, arranged an audience for him with the tsar, and succeeded in limiting his punishment to an oral reprimand.³⁷

This tempest had hardly settled when Katkov became involved in two other storms, both of which might have had important diplomatic repercussions. In the first of these, Katkov in May, 1887, published secret information he had just acquired from Senator Saburov concerning the creation of the League of Three Emperors in 1880, thereby destroying Saburov’s career, annoying Giers and Alexander III, and raising new problems between Russia and Germany, which were just then discussing another treaty. That crisis had hardly subsided when Katkov was denounced by his rivals, probably unjustly, for a letter he supposedly had written to Premier Floquet of France proposing an alliance between Russia and France.

The scandal raised by public charges concerning Katkov’s direct intervention into Russian foreign policy at the very highest level had hardly subsided when Katkov died. Just as he had done at Dostoevsky’s death, Pobedonostsev drafted a telegram from Alexander III to the widow, declaring that “all true Russians mourn.” He apparently also asked the tsar to provide Mrs. Katkov a pension. Finally, he and Delianov advised the tsar to name Sergei A. Petrovskii, a former student and a close acquaintance of Pobedonostsev, the new editor of the paper, of which the Minister of Education admitted the Ministry was generally considered the owner. Perhaps the best illustration of the alleged independence of Katkov’s paper and of the role Pobedonostsev played in manipulating the press is the correspondence within the government concerning selection of the new editor.³⁸

Pobedonostsev’s influence on Katkov’s newspaper did not end with Katkov’s death. He continued to defend Katkov from attack or even criticism in obituary articles through his influence with Feoktistov. He served as an advisor to Petrovskii, sending him warnings, scoldings, tips, and materials written by members of the Synod staff for anonymous publication. He advised Petrovskii on sensitive subjects, and he defended the paper against the censor when particular articles caused offense. Above all, he placed his imprimatur on the paper by publishing several articles in it, particularly his moving eulogy of Alexander III.³⁹

Ivan Aksakov, who died just a year before Katkov and who was the other stormy petrel of Russian journalism, was more volatile and less subject to control and official use than Katkov. During the first few years after Aksakov married Anna Tiutchev in 1866, his relations with Pobedonostsev were apparently close. Pobedonostsev was the godfather for their first child, in 1867. He was an enthusiastic reader of a journal, Moskva (Moscow), which Aksakov founded in 1867, and he persuaded a number of the grand dukes to subscribe. He visited the Aksakovs whenever he was in Moscow in the late 1860’s, and he advised Aksakov through his sister-in-law of issues which were sensitive at the court.

However, while Pobedonostsev’s relations with Catherine Tiutchev became closer and they began to write to each other two or three times a month, his connections with Aksakov dwindled and cooled. Only a few letters between the two men have survived, and apparently no more than these were written. This drift was probably due principally to the inevitable development of new interests by two newly married couples living in separate cities, but Pobedonostsev by 1868 or 1870 was also alarmed by Aksakov’s lack of sensitivity and tact in dealing with political questions. Pobedonostsev warned him on a number of occasions to avoid potentially troublesome issues and criticized him for drafting the petition to the tsar from the Moscow Duma in November, 1870. This petition, which might be called the last act of the Slavophil movement, supported the autocracy and government policy, but asked for freedom of the press and of religious belief and for what Ivan Aksakov called “respect for our spiritual freedom, our personal quality.” Pobedonostsev considered the tone aggressive and the requests beyond possibility. Aksakov in turn protested bitterly against Pobedonostsev’s “bureaucratic conservatism” and the influence he had used in St. Petersburg to discredit him, Samarin, and the other signers.

Pobedonostsev did not seek to interfere with the censor, as he often did for friends, when Aksakov’s biography of his father-in-law, Fedor Ivanovich Tiutchev, was confiscated in 1874. While he did intercede in 1876 to support Aksakov’s application for permission to produce a newspaper “defending Slavic interests,” he was not enthusiastic or vigorous in his support and indeed he and Catherine were isolated from Ivan and his wife because of their unsuccessful efforts to dissuade him from launching the new publication. In 1880, Aksakov apparently won permission from Loris-Melikov for a new weekly, Rus’ (Russia), and did not even seek Pobedonostsev’s support. Pobedonostsev was critical of this venture, even of the title Aksakov chose.⁴⁰

Some of the positions Aksakov adopted in Rus’ seriously strained relations with Pobedonostsev and the court and illustrated precisely the delicate problems raised in an autocratic state by an energetic and somewhat irresponsible journalist who was a vigorous nationalist and conservative, who at the same time disagreed openly with important government policies, and who had powerful support and personal friends at court. Aksakov fully appreciated the reluctance of the government to warn or reprimand a prominent nationalist journalist, and Pobedonostsev admitted privately that “there is no point in talking with him—he is out of his mind.” Some of his essays on the Old Believers, on religious freedom, on the great virtues of the 1864 reform of the judicial system, and on standing up vigorously against the Germans annoyed Pobedonostsev and other powerful St. Petersburg figures. In December, 1885, a particularly vigorous Aksakov attack upon the censorship itself led Feoktistov and Pobedonostsev to discuss some policy which would quiet Aksakov without making matters worse. At this critical point, Aksakov suddenly died.

The memorial essay which Pobedonostsev wrote after Aksakov’s death said little about him and was really a glowing tribute to the Aksakov family, to the Slavophils, and to the Moscow which Pobedonostsev had known as a child and young man. The Slavophils he described as “honorable and pure Russians, native sons of their land, rich in Russian intelligence, sensitive to the feelings of the Russian heart, full of love for their people and their land ...”[who] “sought truth in the eternal principles of the rule of God and in the basic conditions of the nature of the Russian man.” Ivan Aksakov was “an heir of this tradition, a guardian of the testament left by his ancestors,” and a man whom “the great majority of the simple Russian people” felt “burned with a true fire for the interests of the Russian land.” However, Pobedonostsev did not refer to any of Ivan Aksakov’s journalistic activities or to the ideas with which he was most closely connected before his death.⁴¹

The care which Pobedonostsev lavished on Katkov and Aksakov as voices of the true Russia, regardless of the discordant notes which on occasion they sounded, was less important in his efforts as a publicist than his own writings, the vigor he instilled into the Holy Synod Press and its publication program, and his campaign to establish parish schools throughout Russia. His own extensive work as a writer, editor, and translator reflects accurately his political interests, his concern with public issues, and his inherited devotion to the printed word, if not to the life of the scholar, which he had so enjoyed for the two decades in Moscow between 1846 and 1866. It also helps to explain his failure as a policy-maker or “grey eminence” for Alexander III and as the Director General of the Synod, because he was so actively engaged in front-line sniping that he failed to concentrate on his principal role and on the main problems at hand.

Pobedonostsev was lured from his principal responsibilities into labors as a publicist by elements deep in his character and solidly established by the time he became Director General of the Synod. However, his various endeavors as a publicist and propagandist in the last thirty years of his life reflected above all the fear which dominated him after 1877 and his obsession with defending the values and institutions which he saw threatened. On the official level, he therefore devoted especial care to writing, printing, and distributing his annual and biannual reports to the tsar on his work as Director General of the Synod. These volumes described what he considered the great achievements of the Church and the weaknesses of the other religious groups and of the sects. He also arranged to have his principal state papers and speeches reprinted in the Russian press, reproduced and sold as pamphlets, and published in translation abroad, especially in England, France, and Germany. Indeed, he revealed some of the instincts of the modern politician in his efforts to make certain his point of view received wide publicity.⁴²

A high percentage of his publications during the last two or three decades of his life was sheer, low-quality propaganda, but some of it had a more enduring quality or is at least of considerable interest to the scholar. Thus, reading several French and American books about the American farm, especially the Midwestern homestead, convinced him that a possible solution to Russia’s political, economic, and social problems was the establishment of small, independent family farms. He published an essay about this in 1889 in Russkii vestnik, reprinted it as a pamphlet in 1892, and included it as an appendix in the final edition of the first volume of Kurs grazhdanskago prava in 1896.⁴³

The issues on which he sought to influence Russian opinion were naturally the same as those with which he was concerned as a government leader and as a part-time philosopher, the role of religion in society, the position of the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia, the necessity for expanding the attention given to sound moral instruction in primary school education, and the need to emphasize the central role the family must play in a healthy society. These themes are an index to his political philosophy. They are reflected in his principal writings, especially in Moskovskii sbornik (Moscow Collection), as well as in his efforts devoted to instructing and edifying those who helped shape Russian state policy.

Pobedonostsev as a publicist sought to demonstrate that religion was the foundation of civilized life and that modern civilization, especially the rise of parliamentary government, democracy, and the various freedoms associated with liberal political institutions, posed a dreadful threat to the very core of the institutions and values all should cherish. His own books and articles in this drive were supplemented by translations from a wide range of European authors published in a variety of ways. Thus, he published part of an essay from Gladstone’s The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture in a conservative journal, Russkoe obozrenie, as well as in Moskovskii sbornik. In 1896, he translated and published in a 160-page booklet part of the American government’s Report of Statistics on Churches, printed six years earlier in Washington, apparently to prove that democratic government led to a crazy proliferation of religious sects and that the existence of 117 churches in the United States inevitably reflected and contributed to the decline of religious faith. In the early 1890’s, he published a volume of which ten editions appeared before 1906, which included part of St. Augustine’s Confessions as well as chapters from two books by an Anglican cleric, William Samuel Lilly, Christianity and Modern Civilization and A Century of Revolution. Lilly’s books, as well as selections from the work of a Brussels professor, Adolphe Prins, De I’esprit du gouvernement démocratique, Pobedonostsev used to support his attack on constitutional and democratic government, both in books and in pamphlets. On the other hand, in the official Synod newspaper, Tserkovnyia Vedomosti, he combined an attack on the French government for its anticlerical policies with praise of the views of Theodore Roosevelt on the role of religion in human society, as expressed in The Strenuous Life.⁴⁴

Almost everything he published was directed toward strengthening and glorifying the Russian Orthodox Church and its role in Russian history. In the summer of 1891, he published a volume, Istoriia pravoslavnoi tserkvi do nachala razdeleniia tserkvei (History of the Orthodox Church before the Beginning of the Separation of the Churches) designed especially to increase understanding of the Church’s history and to demonstrate that throughout its history the Church “had overcome all obstacles and still preserved in itself that holy fire which our Saviour Himself brought down to earth,” and that it was in the nineteenth century as it had been in the first centuries of Christianity. This volume was prepared by Pobedonostsev, with the help of his wife, for seminaries and for institutions training teachers for the parish schools. However, the first edition of one thousand copies sold so quickly that a revised and enlarged edition appeared in 1892, and nine editions had been published before his death.⁴⁵

Pobedonostsev’s Istoriia pravoslavnoi tserkvi was a great success, but the way in which he prepared the book sheds most valuable illumination upon his character and also led to sharp criticism among Russian scholars and even among Russian churchmen. In short, this volume, the first edition of which appeared as his own work and which he described to the tsar as his own, was really only an abbreviated edition of a two-volume set published first in 1883 by Alexandra N. Bakhmetev, Razskazi iz russkoi tserkovnoi istorii (Stories from Russian Church History), from which Pobedonostsev borrowed without the original author’s knowledge or consent. Miss Bakhmetev, a resident of Moscow born two years before he was, a good friend of Catherine Tiutchev, and an earlier admirer of Pobedonostsev as an author and administrator, was a successful author of religious books for children. In fact, one volume of her life of Christ for children appeared in eighteen editions, and the history of the Church from which Pobedonostsev borrowed so heavily was published in four editions. She naturally resented his action, and criticism became so sharp that he stopped advertisements and decided not to produce a second edition, even though the first edition was quickly exhausted. When the demand became overwhelming (three printings were published in 1892 alone), he added other materials to the original version and placed a note on the page after the title page acknowledging that “some pages were borrowed from other books, especially from Razskazi iz russkoi tserkovnoi istorii by Bakhmetev.”⁴⁶

He was deeply engrossed in educational problems in Russia, particularly at the primary school level. He devoted enormous amounts of time and energy and a substantial portion of the Church’s funds to expanding the parish school system. At the same time, many of his publications described schools and views which he approved and which he recommended for Russia. Perhaps the most interesting of these volumes is his wife’s translation of The Mighty Atom, a sentimental novel by Minnie Mackay. The dedication inscribed in the American edition reveals the point and the tone of this volume:

To those self-styled “Progressivists,” who by precept and example assist the infamous cause of Education Without Religion and who, by promoting the idea, borrowed from French atheism, of denying to the children in board-schools and elsewhere,

The Knowledge and Love of God as the true foundation of noble living, are Guilty of a worse crime than Murder.”⁴⁷

The Pobedonostsev translation of The Mighty Atom appeared in five editions and was even translated from Russian into Serbian. Another collection of translated essays about primary school education appeared in six editions. In fact, in the last decade of his life in particular, he released a veritable flood of books, articles, and pamphlets on the kind of education Russian children ought to receive. Most of these publications were translations of books and articles describing particular schools or educational systems of France or England or his summaries of information he had acquired about education of a religious kind in various countries of western Europe.⁴⁸

The family was an institution he considered central for any sound society, and his published works during his last years sought to persuade Russian leaders that the state ought to concentrate upon rebuilding this critical social organism. In 1901, therefore, he produced a second edition of his translation of Heinrich Thiersch’s Uber christliches Familienleben, which he had first translated in 1861. In addition, he wrote an essay describing in flattering terms the work of Frederick Le Play, the French Catholic sociologist who devoted most of his research and writing to the family and who founded a school of thought which had considerable influence in France in the last half of the nineteenth century and again in the 1940’s and 1950’s. He also translated and published in 1897 Le Play’s principal work on the family, La Constitution essentielle de l’humanité,⁴⁹

Even the most relentlessly careful search cannot ensure the scholar that he has located all of Pobedonostsev’s publications or that he has been able to find and identify the materials he had published as books or articles or that he forwarded to editors of newspapers or journals for insertion. His letters indicate often that he transmitted original or translated materials to editors. Olga Novikov on occasion translated original essays or articles he found and forwarded to her and had them published anonymously in the London Times or in another English journal or newspaper. Sometimes direct evidence in the correspondence, or indirect information from these or other letters, or from other sources, have enabled discovery of the essay or article. Even then, it has sometimes been impossible to determine whether or not the material was written by Pobedonostsev or was simply transmitted by him after translation. It is clear, though, that he thoroughly appreciated public opinion and worked skillfully to influence it.

In his struggle to direct the mind of Russia, Pobedonostsev acquired a useful instrument in 1880 when he became Director General of the Synod, because the Synod owned and directed a Press, with printshops in Moscow and in St. Petersburg, a number of bookstores, and a thriving business, particularly in theological works, catechisms, and books for various kinds of religious service. In fact, the Press in 1880 published more than 400,000 copies of books and almost 5 million leaflets, as well as 172,400 copies of books and 6,948 leaflets which it printed on a commercial basis for private individuals. As a devout member of the Church and as a man interested both in intellectual and Church life, Pobedonostsev must have been well acquainted with the Moscow printery and bookstore on Nikolskii Street near Red Square. His acquaintance, Nikita Giliarov-Platonov, had been director of the Moscow printshop from 1863 until 1867, and an old neighbor who became an important correspondent, S. D. Voit, was the business manager of the shop for a number of years.

Pobedonostsev was immensely interested in the work of the Synod Press and was closely engaged in the decisions made concerning the works it published. In 1889, which was an exceptional year because of the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the return of the Uniates in the western provinces to Orthodoxy, the Press published 6 million books and pamphlets and 17 million leaflets. Income from sales leaped from almost 400,000 rubles (about $200,000) in 1881 to more than a million rubles in 1894. After an advisory committee in 1896 recommended special emphasis on books for parish schools and the creation of a kind of basic, package Parish School Library, production of books and booklets for school use and for supplementary reading became a substantial part of the Press’s expanded operations. For example, in 1900, the Press published in the Parish School Library series fourteen books for school use and ten for home use in a total of 2,700,000 copies. In 1901, it produced forty-two books for this series in a total of 3,600,000 copies.⁵⁰

The Synod Press’s published Catalogue in 1886 was 142 pages long and listed 858 titles. Less than half of the titles were sacred scriptures, theology, prayers, and publications for religious services; the majority were spiritual and moral volumes, documents, and learned tomes which Pobedonostsev had published.

He was just as interested in the printing part of the Press’s operations as he was in selecting titles. Thus, he boasted in 1889 that one of the new machines in the shop in Moscow was the only one of its kind in Russia. By the time he retired in 1905, the Moscow shop employed 347 skilled workers in a modern plant which included more than one hundred fifty different machines capable of printing 30 million pages a year. The shop owned 180 tons of Old Church Slavonic, Russian, and foreign type. The St. Petersburg branch was approximately the same size, though probably not so modern or efficient. During the labor troubles in the fall of 1903 and the revolution in the fall of 1905, Pobedonostsev displayed more interest in the attitudes of the workers in the print shops than he did in government policy. He was predictably opposed to Voit’s proposal in January, 1904, that the Press establish a pension system for the workers: “to create rules and reports, even for ten years’ service. God deliver us!”⁵¹

Pobedonostsev and the administrators with whom he worked at the Press were alert and imaginative in their approach to producing and distributing literature. The Press was a semi-autonomous part of the Synod. It was self-supporting, and it invested its profits in new equipment, rather than in financing some other part of the Synod’s program. It not only established the Parish School Library, but it made bulk sales to diocesan offices in a successful effort to place its publications in the hands of children and other readers. Teachers received special discounts for all books, and primitive bookstores were established by the consistories in more than five hundred cities and villages. Pobedonostsev made an especially intensive effort to distribute the Press’s publications in the Baltic region, where the Synod established six bookstores in the Riga bishopric alone, and in the western provinces, where he was convinced that Jews controlled the book trade. In addition, beginning in 1888, the Press published and sold a weekly newspaper, Tserkovnyia Vedomosti, as an official organ for the Church, publishing news of Church affairs and Russian life which Pobedonostsev and its editor thought should be made available. He used this paper frequently to reprint essays he had written or essays he had read or translated and thought should have wide distribution. By the early 1890’s, the Press was publishing a group of weekly papers or journals, each aimed at a special part of the Orthodox audience.⁵²

Pobedonostsev also used the Synod Press as a kind of hobby, publishing books which had some interest or value to churchmen in Russia but which could not have sold well or even paid the cost of publication. Thus, in 1897, he had his good friend Prince Shakhovskhoi edit and the Synod Press publish a two-volume selection of the essays of Nikita Giliarov-Platonov. Even more striking was his decision to publish an edition of the letters of Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow, who was born in 1782 and who died in 1867 after more than four decades in that important position. Pobedonostsev was an admirer of Filaret. He was especially impressed by his firm will, his patriotism, and his asceticism, but Filaret’s rooted opposition to change must also have been a factor. In fact, Filaret had opposed both emancipation and the campaign to end flogging in the army. As soon as he became Director General of the Synod, Pobedonostsev began to study the papers of Filaret, which had been stored in the Synod safe after his death. He assigned the director of the Synod archives, Nicholas S. Grigorovich, the task of putting the letters and papers in order, and asked Bishop Savva of Tver to edit the letters, a selection of which alone filled ten volumes. Pobedonostsev paid close attention to the production of these volumes and even edited one volume of Filaret’s papers himself. There is no evidence that these had any influence on Russian intellectual life, because Filaret was truly a voice of the distant past and had no relevance even for conservative churchmen in the 1880’s and 1890’s.⁵³

The Press of the Holy Synod became a major instrument in his effort to reshape Russian intellectual life. On a different level, the parish schools he promoted vigorously while he was Director General of the Synod represented another major endeavor to change both the spirit and the intellectual content of peasant life and to strengthen popular respect for and belief in autocracy and Orthodoxy. This massive program, which became an official part of Church and state policy in 1884, reflected a sharp change in his view of primary education and of the means of strengthening the Church’s position in the countryside.

A “city boy” throughout his long life, Pobedonostsev was remarkably uninformed concerning the peasantry and concerning primary education in Russia. In fact, as late as 1875, he was opposed to primary school education. He thought compulsory elementary education a mistake even for England, and believed that any effort to introduce elementary education into rural Russia reflected great ignorance of peasant life and would lead to resentment and even to violence on the part of the peasants. However, both then and later in his life, he praised warmly the efforts of women whom he knew who had established schools for peasant girls. He applauded Catherine Tiutchev’s efforts to establish a school on the Tiutchev estate, and he enthusiastically supported the work of Nicholas Ilminskii in organizing Orthodox primary schools for non-Russians in and near Kazan. In 1881, he was one of a number of leading state officials and churchmen who founded a society to promote technical training for peasants and workers. The announcement of this organization declared that “spreading general education or book learning among the narod frequently creates more harm than good; it excites dissatisfaction with their position among the masses.” At about the same time, his letters to Catherine Tiutchev and to the new tsar revealed that Russian primary and secondary schools were dangerous because they “pulled” many beyond their class and their means. However, by 1880, he was beginning to believe that primary education could not be denied and that the Orthodox Church must be placed in full control of it.⁵⁴

The belief that the Church should found and maintain a national system of primary schools, particularly in European Russia, was, of course, not a new one in the 1880’s. Peter the Great had toyed with the concept briefly, and Nicholas I had in fact promoted parish schools systematically. Thus, in 1830, Russia had approximately one hundred parish schools with 1,860 pupils. These figures leaped to 2,500 schools with 19,000 pupils in 1840, to 4,610 schools with 88,512 pupils in 1850, and to 7,907 schools with 133,666 pupils in 1860. In 1861, the Synod sought a monopoly of primary school education and insisted that the clergy obtain in elementary education “the natural preponderance which is due them.” However, the tsar ruled in January, 1862, that the Synod should control only those schools founded by the clergy. The Church’s schools declined heavily in number and significance during the next two decades, due in part to the vigor shown by the new zemstvo institutions and by the peasant communities in establishing schools under the Ministry of Education and in part to the disinterest or even opposition to parish schools shown by Count Dmitrii Tolstoy. The number of parish schools declined gradually under Tolstoy; there were only 7,402 with 205,559 pupils in 1875, and 4,348 with 108,990 in 1880.⁵⁵

Pobedonostsev was convinced of the importance of having a school system under Church control by the very successes of the zemstvo schools. Like many other frightened Russian leaders, he saw a connection between the flourishing zemstvo schools and the rising revolutionary movement. He may also have been influenced by Giliarov-Platonov, who in the 1860’s had sought to persuade the empress and some of her ladies-in-waiting, whom Pobedonostsev knew well, to press for the creation of a national system of primary schools under the control of the Church, with a school in each parish. Pobedonostsev may have been reminded of this idea by its author in the critical days after the assassination of the tsar. He did reprint several essays on this subject by Giliarov-Platonov, who complained just before his death in 1887 that he had never received the credit due him for this concept.⁵⁶

However, Sergei A. Rachinskii was probably the Russian most responsible for persuading Pobedonostsev of the virtues of the parish school system and for the growth of that system throughout European Russia before 1905, a development which consumed much of Pobedonostsev’s time and energy. One might describe Rachinskii as a Christian Populist or as the leader of a one-man Christian going-to-the-people movement, because he had the same respect and even veneration for the peasant as the Populists had and the same burning interest to assist in uplifting the peasants. In fact, the three decades of work he accomplished in and near the village of Tatev in Smolensk province reveal a missionary fervor which was generally lacking in the Orthodox Church in the nineteenth century.

Soviet scholars in the 1930’s ridiculed Rachinskii, to whom they devoted much attention, as a clerical reactionary who sought to preserve the autocracy and a class system and who opposed the introduction of natural science in the secondary schools. He was lampooned for believing that literacy is “the key to secret prayer, to eternal life, and to heavenly wisdom” and for allegedly asserting that enlightenment would reach the Russian peasant “by the incredible but firm belief in the story of the dark wanderer, by travel to a distant monastery, by long readings of the sacred scriptures or of the lives of the saints in the moonlight on endless winter evenings.” More recently, however, Rachinskii has been honored for helping to inspire and educate poor peasant children, such as Nicholas P. Bogdanov-Bel’skii, an eminent Russian painter born of landless peasants in 1868 who studied under Rachinskii, who attended his funeral in 1902, and whose 1895 painting of Rachinskii among his eager young pupils now hangs in the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow.⁵⁷

Rachinskii was a Muscovite just six years younger than Pobedonostsev. After receiving his education at Moscow University and studying at the University of Berlin, he returned to his alma mater as a member of the faculty in botany. A scholar of some merit, if one can judge by his early publications, he joined Professor Boris N. Chicherin and others in 1866 and 1867 in protesting the appointment of Professor V. N. Leshkov as dean of the Faculty of Law. When Minister of Education Tolstoy supported what they considered a violation of the rights of the university corporation, Chicherin and Rachinskii resigned from the faculty. A few years later, Rachinskii left Moscow for life among the peasants, founded the first of several successful schools for peasant boys and girls in a village where even the news of Alexander III’s death was not known for four days, and began by example and by publication to urge the establishment of parish schools for the masses of peasant children.

Pobedonostsev was acquainted with Rachinskii when they were both members of the Moscow University faculty, and they were in constant contact after 1878. Catherine Tiutchev in 1879 wrote that a letter from Rachinskii was “like a breath of fresh air,” while Pobedonostsev the following year feared that Rachinskii was being extreme in leaving his home to dress like a peasant and to live with the children he was educating. However, he often quoted Rachinskii to Alexander III as “a simple, good, and honorable man,” one of the true Russians and voices of Russia who worked “in the dark corners” and who offered faith and hope. Rachinskii wrote Pobedonostsev 895 letters between 1880 and 1902, a measure of their relationship. He visited the Pobedonostsevs for several days on three occasions during the last decade of his life and was apparently the only house guest they ever entertained.⁵⁸

It appears likely that Rachinskii interested Pobedonostsev in the parish schools, just as Ilminskii did in schools for children converted from Mohammedanism in the Kazan area. Pobedonostsev began to advocate the establishment of such schools shortly after he had heard of Rachinskii’s successes. In 1882, he named Rachinskii a member of the Synod committee which recommended the parish school system, and in 1883 he had the Synod Press publish and give one of Rachinskii’s principal books on the subject to every bishop and seminary, as it did his later volumes as well.

Rachinskii was aware that the influence of the landed gentry in the countryside was declining, and he proposed to use his schools and the priests who served as instructors to fill the vacuum left, and to prevent the infiltration of Western ideas and institutions through the zemstvo schools. He sought to create boarding schools for both boys and girls which operated throughout the year, combining a careful and highly disciplined schedule with the loving care of the priest who was to take the place of the parents. The four-year school was to emphasize character, honor, duty, and responsibility as much as formal education, and the Christian spirit was to be its distinguishing characteristic. The principal subject was “the law of God,” which was to infuse all courses and every hour of the day. In addition to Church doctrine, the boys and girls were to study Old Church Slavonic, Russian literature, arithmetic, and church songs. Rachinskii assumed that the pupils would remain in the geographical area and class into which they had been born, so he included physical work as part of the curriculum. He believed that only extraordinary children should be allowed to continue their schooling beyond four years, and he urged instruction in the industrial arts for children of workers and peasants. Indeed, he thought that the teachers should also be peasants, preferably trained by him or in a seminary but certainly not in a teachers’ college. The Russian literature he selected included little written after Pushkin and emphasized the work of conservative nationalists. He neglected history and anything connected with politics or government, and even nature drew little attention.

Rachinskii’s single school in 1875 had increased to four in 1883, with five priests serving with him as teachers. By 1900, he was responsible for the founding of thirteen such schools in the Smolensk province and had trained forty priests to serve as teachers. He had also become prominent in the effort to improve church singing and to abolish drunkenness, both causes that were dear to the heart of Pobedonostsev. Ivan Aksakov, Katkov, and conservative journals publicized his work as that of an unsung hero, while Pobedonostsev lavished praise on him, forwarded him funds on his request, and reprinted one of his last essays in the fifth edition of Moskovskii sbornik. One of his books describing his work, Sel’skaia shkola (The Rural School), appeared in five editions, and others also were published in several editions.⁵⁹

As soon as he was convinced that a system of elementary schools under the Synod with the parish priest as the teacher was “the rock on which our salvation shall be achieved,” Pobedonostsev began to describe its virtues to the then heir to the throne, who later became Alexander III. Within six months after he had been made a member of the Council of Ministers, he succeeded in persuading Minister of Education Nikolai to provide funds for the parish schools, where “people of the lowest class could receive the basic education necessary for life, but not for learned science, to which not all can devote themselves.” His campaign with the tsar and his colleagues in the Council of Ministers and in the Council of State led to the Council decision in November, 1882, to provide 50,000 rubles (approximately $25,000) to the Synod for priests to start such schools. He continued to argue for the vital necessity of a powerful spiritual element in elementary education and for the need to have a parish school in every village, which provided the natural school unit, with the priest and the Church in full authority. A special committee he had established early in the fall of 1882 reported to the Synod in April, 1884, proposing a national system of parish schools directed by the Church and supported by the state. Early in June, 1884, Alexander III issued a decree supporting this program, encouraging the clergy to play an active role, and indirectly promising that the state would provide the money necessary.⁶⁰

The 1884 announcement of the Statute on Parish Schools indicated that the aim was “to strengthen the Orthodox faith and Christian morality among the people and to impart useful elementary knowledge.” In January, 1885, Pobedonostsev named a Council within the Synod to provide general direction for the schools. He used Mogilev province as a kind of laboratory in the early years, but sought to spread the system throughout European Russia. Thus, he had each seminary establish a model parish school and organize courses to train priests how to direct them and to teach. He naturally viewed these schools as rivals of those established by the zemstvos, which often neglected the religious aspect of education, and he sought unsuccessfully to persuade Alexander III in 1891 to decree that no other schools could be established without the permission of the Church.⁶¹

The parish schools which Pobedonostsev spread so vigorously throughout the villages of European Russia were much like those which Rachinskii had established in and near Tatev, although they were not boarding schools and few had more than one teacher and two years of study. Each parish was to have a school, and each school was to be the responsibility of a parish. Thus, the school was designed to strengthen the parish unit, which was its base, and to increase the role and influence of the priest, who was the teacher. The entire chain of schools was placed under a School Council within the Synod, with a Council in each diocese responsible to the Synod group. In effect, the Synod’s School Council by 1900 had become a separate Ministry of Education, with the full approval of the Minister of Education.

The Statute on Parish Schools provided detailed instructions which every school was to follow. Each school was to emphasize Christian doctrine and the creation of Christian character and discipline. The one-class, two-year schools provided each week seven hours of Christian doctrine, Bible, and prayers, four hours of Church songs, four of Old Church Slavonic, seven of Russian language and literature, six of arithmetic, and three of writing. They were in effect literacy schools and were not a considerable advance beyond the “alphabet schools” which had appeared in some Russian villages earlier in the century. The two-class, four-year schools, of which there were only one hundred in 1885 and 602 in 1905 and which ordinarily had two teachers, simply extended this program and added a little Russian geography and history. All of these schools placed heavy emphasis upon singing, one of the few subjects about which Pobedonostsev ever displayed genuine enthusiasm.

Pobedonostsev and his School Council worked hard to expand and advance the parish schools. Courses were established in the seminaries to train priests, and three additional seminaries and three schools for teachers were founded. He established the weekly Synod newspaper, Tserkovnyia Vedomosti, to help persuade the clergy to assist in establishing schools and to provide them significant information. In 1896, the Synod began to publish a special monthly journal, Narodnoe obrazovanie (National Education), for the teachers and all those interested in the parish schools. He persuaded the tsar to give special honors to particularly deserving priests, and he also awarded financial prizes to those who had notably distinguished themselves.

Interest in education of any kind was often high in Russian villages, so the parish schools met a genuine need and impressive progress was made between 1884 and 1905. The Synod’s statistics were not handled with the accurate attention common in advanced countries in the twentieth century, and various scholars have compiled different sets of statistics, but it is obvious that growth was extraordinarily rapid. Thus, while there were 4,348 parish schools in 1880 with 108,990 students, and 4,540 schools with 112,114 students in 1884, there were 21,840 schools with 626,100 pupils in 1890, 42,604 schools with 1,634,461 pupils in 1900, and 43,407 schools with almost 2 million students in 1905. According to one compilation, the number of pupils in parish schools increased by 265 percent in the 1890’s and another 27 percent between 1900 and 1914. At the turn of the century, approximately half of the primary schools in Russia were parish schools under the Synod, and slightly more than onethird of all the children receiving a primary school education were in parish schools. (The others were in schools founded by peasant communities or by zemstvos and officially under the Ministry of Education.) All but a handful of the children, less than ten thousand each year throughout the 1890’s, were Orthodox, and the great majority were boys.

Pobedonostsev’s success in persuading the tsars to grant state funds to the parish schools helps explain their rapid growth. The 50,000 rubles granted in 1882 rose in 1886 to 175,500 rubles, all given through the Ministry of Education, in 1900 to 6,821,150 rubles, and in 1902 to 10,338,916 rubles. According to the calculations of Professor Curtiss, these state funds in 1900 accounted for almost half of the total cost of the parish school system, since of the total of 14,552,775 rubles, local taxes contributed 826,947; gifts from rich and poor, 6,335,358; and the Synod itself, 569,320.⁶²

The parish school system reached its height in 1905, after which the number of schools gradually declined, and the number of pupils remained relatively stable. Thus, the 43,841 schools had 1,924,900 pupils in 1904, the 42,836 schools had 1,990,300 in 1905, the 38,226 schools had 1,949,100 pupils in 1910, and the 37,528 schools had 2,079,900 in 1914. However, while the number of pupils in the Synod’s schools remained relatively fixed between 1905 and 1914, the number in schools financed locally but under the administrative control of the Ministry of Education rose by 65.2 percent. In 1898, the parish schools had 1,476,124 pupils and the primary schools under the Ministry of Education, 2,650,058. In 1911, the figures were 1,976,900 and 5,900,000, respectively.⁶³

In spite of the impressive expansion of the system of parish schools during the period when Pobedonostsev was Director General of the Synod, the achievement had only a shallow foundation and little substantial progress was made. The principal reason for this was the Russian Orthodox Church’s ages-old disinterest in education, one of the characteristics that distinguishes its history from that of the Christian churches in western Europe. Pobedonostsev, Rachinskii, and the other crusaders could not overcome attitudes based on centuries of history. Moreover, even they were interested only in the most elementary forms of education for children living in the countryside, where the handicaps were most grave and the resources most feeble. In addition, the massive illiteracy which the parish schools and the other elementary schools were seeking to reduce was such a heavy weight and the annual increase in the size of the population was so great that even the rapid growth of the parish schools in the 1890’s did not reduce the number of illiterates.

Pobedonostsev relied heavily on the rural priests to administer his schools and to serve as teachers, but even he realized that they were both unqualified and disinterested. A few priests welcomed the new crusade and were competent to serve, but most lacked the ability and the sense of dedication necessary. Most of the rural clergy saw the parish school as an additional and unwanted burden, and their participation was half-hearted at best. They were particularly unqualified to compete with the zemstvo schools, which usually had eager leadership and considerable popular support, and which offered more effective instruction. Moreover, many educated Russians were reserved about, if not hostile to, the kind of elementary education the parish schools offered, particularly with their emphasis on Christian doctrine, prayer, and church songs. The parish schools paid teachers so poorly, in more than a quarter of the cases less than one hundred rubles a year, and offered so few other advantages, that the level of instruction was very low. In 1899, more than a third of the teachers failed to complete their first year with a school. In that year, only 5 percent of the teachers had taught more than ten years, 20 percent more than five years, and 37 percent more than three years.