VI

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Panslavism and the Balkan Crisis

POBEDONOSTSEV returned to Moscow from St. Petersburg in 1846 to begin his career as a bureaucrat at a time when the celebrated controversy raged among a handful of intellectuals over the nature and destiny of Russia. He did not participate in this battle of books, or of journals, between the Slavophils and the Westerners, in part because of his youth and in part because he never joined a group or school or took part in a public discussion of this kind. The other members of his family also lacked sufficient conviction or interest to take a stand on either side of this issue. His brother Sergei, for example, published articles and stories in both Slavophil and Westerner journals. Sergei met the leading Slavophil philosopher, Alexei Khomiakov, by chance on the platform of the North Station in Paris in 1847, but this introduction did not lead to closer acquaintanceship or friendship, in part because of the social gap which separated the Pobedonostsevs from the leading Slavophils.¹

Generally, the Slavophils were highly cultured and civilized members of the rural gentry class, intellectuals of some ability, and leisurely and amateurish in their approach to life and to philosophy. They were strongly religious, tended to stress religion rather than rationalism, and were uninterested in politics or political philosophy in the Western sense, largely of course because of the absence of this tradition in Russia and because the reign of Nicholas I was forbidding and oppressive. Widely travelled and heavily influenced by Western philosophy, especially by the French and German romantics of the previous two decades, the loose Slavophil group was highly personal, friendly, and soaked in a quietistic and romantic spirit of good will and brotherly love.

Fundamentally, the Slavophils, particularly their most articulate leaders, such as Khomiakov, Constantine and Ivan Aksakov, Ivan Kireevsky, Iurii Samarin, and Alexander Koshelev, were moderate conservatives in search of a Utopian Christian peasant kingdom. Their rivals, the Westerners, believed that European civilization was clearly superior to any other, that Russia was or should be a part of Europe, and that the future of Russia lay in adapting itself to the main lines of European culture as quickly as possible. The Slavophils, on the other hand, had an especial affection for the peasant and for the narod (or Volk), the mass in which folk tradition and wisdom resided and which possessed a peaceful, collective insight and harmony which the individualistic, anarchic, money-grubbing West could never envisage. They also thought that Russia was different, indeed unique and superior, largely because it possessed a pure Christianity embodied in the Russian Orthodox Church and sheltered in an harmonious Muscovite state. The fresh, vigorous, unspoiled Russians not only had avoided or escaped the institutions and philosophies which had debilitated western Europe, but they had also created healthy and fruitful institutions of their own, such as the patriarchal family, the commune or village community, and the artel or rural cooperative, all of which promised much for other peoples in the future.

The Slavophils sought to separate society from the state. They supported the autocracy loyally, and they advocated no changes in the Russian political structure. At the same time, partly because they were rural gentry and partly because of the main lines of their thought, they were strongly critical of the bureaucracy, which they considered a barrier between the tsar and the people, an artificial and legal means of conducting government affairs, and a German innovation introduced by Peter the Great and destructive of the living, vital, harmonious springs of the Muscovite system.²

Pobedonostsev’s political and social philosophy was not firmly established until 1865 or 1870, and even after these dates some emphases changed significantly as Russian history unfolded. As a conservative and traditionalist Muscovite with a strong commitment to Russian Orthodoxy, he accepted throughout his life many of the beliefs fundamental to the Slavophils. Thus, he had a special reverence for Orthodoxy and a growing conviction that Orthodoxy was the distinguishing characteristic of Russian civilization, superior in every way to Western Christianity and, ultimately, the faith necessary for all those who lived within the Russian empire. He considered the family the basic unit of any stable society and thought the patriarchal family system, with the tsar at the head, essential for Russian life. Finally, especially after 1875, he came to believe that the narod existed as a collective entity and that this unified mass embodied a wisdom and political vision which could be clearly identified and which invariably supported autocracy and conservatism.

While the main outlines of his philosophy as it developed resembled the vague Slavophil doctrine of the 1840’s, there were also substantial differences which prevent us from identifying him as a Slavophil. First, he emphasized and elevated autocratic rule far higher than did Khomiakov and his generation. Moreover, he saw no distinction between the state and society. Indeed, after the 1870’s in particular, he assigned the autocratic state functions of control which the Slavophils clearly would have denied and even resisted. His vision of the Russian Orthodox Church was also quite different from that of the Slavophils: they saw it as a free, popular, independent institution exuding a spirit of harmony and guided by the collective wisdom of the Orthodox community, while he came to define it as an instrument of the state designed to convert all inhabitants of the empire, Russian and non-Russian alike, to reverent submission to autocracy. Pobedonostsev had no faith in the concept of sobornost’ or community, which he would have described as a splendid Christian ideal which had no reality and no possible practical significance in the hard life of the nineteenth century. While he wrote a great deal about the narod and often professed to be its true interpreter, or at least to know those who could in fact identify the people’s will, he lacked the special veneration for the people which marked the Slavophils. In particular, he knew nothing about Russian rural life, had no reverence for the peasant or for rural institutions, such as the commune or artel, and was indeed an urban Slavophil, with a knowledge and point of view quite different from that of the romantic, leisurely, amateur gentry of the 1840’s.

As the history of Russia and of Europe unfolded in the nineteenth century, the course of Russian intellectual history changed significantly. Indeed, the changes were so great that both the intellectual temper and the ideas of the 1870’s were sharply different from those of the 1840’s. There were, of course, a number of streams or schools of thought, which scholars have carefully identified and labelled. Pobedonostsev had no connection with many of these groups and their ideas, particularly with the various radical and revolutionary philosophies. In fact, he was so resolutely hostile to these ideas that he made no effort to understand them and hoped that they would be uprooted and destroyed.

Panslavism was one of the most striking and significant of the schools of thought which appeared in Russia in the two or three decades after the Crimean War. The doctrine of the panslavs was so forceful, the vigor with which it was presented so shocking, and their leaders often of such political importance that Russians and foreigners alike tended to exaggerate the significance of the movement. In fact, panslavism sent a wave of alarm throughout western Europe, which saw it as an irresponsibly aggressive doctrine and movement with powerful influence in the highest reaches of the Russian government. Many Western statesmen feared that the panslavs might launch a disruptive drive into the Balkans, thereby threatening the European state system and bringing the states of Europe and Turkey to the brink of a world war.

It is as difficult to define panslavism as it is Slavophilism, in part because it was “an attitude of mind and feeling” and in part because each man in a sense carried his own version of the doctrine. Moreover, the movement as a whole was so harsh and noisy that contemporary observers and scholars have found formidable the task of separating the sound and the fury from the substance. In the twentieth century, scholars and observers alike have encountered the same obstacle in trying to evaluate the significance of the Action Française, a doctrine and movement which had some parallels in intellectual temper and forcefulness with the panslav movement in Russia in the 1870’s.

The main development in the history of nationalism in Russia between 1850 and 1880 was the gradual transformation of Slavophilism into panslavism, just as a principal change between 1880 and the outbreak of the First World War was the evolution of panslavism into a great Russian nationalism, or pan-Russianism, one of the most profound currents of the last century of Russian history. These transformations were in some ways similar to that which German nationalism underwent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but Orthodoxy and the existence of other Slavic peoples under the rule of foreigners exerted an important influence upon Russian nationalism which German national doctrine lacked until the appearance of Hitler.

Slavophilism developed in Russia during an extremely tight-fisted and repressive reign, one in which there was little freedom of expression or organization and one which gave Russia the reputation of a reactionary police state. The thaw which Alexander II introduced in 1856, the abolition of serfdom and the other basic reforms which followed, and the economic and social changes which began to burgeon in the second half of the nineteenth century launched the transformation of Russia after a silent, frozen period of thirty years. The new Russia was naturally more attractive than that of Nicholas I to Slavs under Ottoman and German rule, particularly when these peoples sought outside support in their efforts to obtain their freedom and to set up independent national states. Even so, the tsarist Russia of Alexander II was gravely handicapped in any effort to attract the support of Slavs and others under foreign rule in the Balkans, as the Russian panslavs discovered in the 1870’s. Many of the southern Slavs were not Orthodox and often were firmly hostile to Orthodoxy. Their leaders simply wanted independence from Ottoman, Magyar, or German rule, if possible with Russian support but not with the goal of becoming a part of a Russian-controlled or Russian-protected Slavic federation. Most of the other Slavs, particularly the Czechs, the Croats, and the Slovenes, looked West more than East, were opposed to autocratic government, and wanted to establish liberal, constitutional governments in their own lands. They not only rejected the Russian political model, but they also considered Russia culturally underdeveloped or backward, particularly in comparison with the French and English models they usually preferred. Finally, of course, in any discussions which considered Slavic problems, the position of the millions of Poles under oppressive Russian rule intervened to smash the vision of a Slavic community living in harmony.

Russian panslavism in the 1860’s and 1870’s was much affected by the changes occurring then within Russia, just as its power among other Slavs was increased by these same reforms. However, even more powerful external forces helped to shape this doctrine and to give it the aggressive, anti-Western character which so alarmed many Europeans. Thus, panslavism was in part a reaction to the bitter defeat Russia suffered in the Crimean War and to the reversal, almost revolution, in Russia’s policies toward Europe which resulted from that disaster. Nicholas I had constructed his foreign policy toward Europe on the assumption that the established system must be maintained at all costs. Among other requirements, this meant that Russia must support Austria and therefore assist in maintaining the Austrian empire against Magyars and Poles and Croats as well as against other kinds of revolutionaries. When the Russians learned that their reward for this policy was the “malevolent neutrality” of Austria during the Crimean War, one of the props for the old conservative foreign policy disappeared, to be replaced in some minds by the desire to harass the Ottoman and Austrian empires through exciting their subject Slav populations to revolt. This aggressive policy of intervention, a sharp reversal from the policy of Nicholas, was strengthened also by the national need for action and for recognition to overcome the effects of the Peace of Paris in 1856.

One must remember, too, that panslavism appeared in Russia during the years when Napoleon III dreamed aloud of reorganizing Europe along national lines and when Bismarck and Cavour were using guile and force to unite Germany and Italy and to revise the entire map of Europe. These impressive achievements, launched and completed by leaders of states as relatively insignificant as Prussia and Piedmont, naturally stimulated some Russians into assuming that imaginative use of the resources of the Russian empire and of those Slavs under foreign rule might bring enormous advantages to Russia, perhaps even greater benefits than Bismarck and Cavour had obtained. The defeat Prussia administered to Austria, the creation of a powerful unified Germany on Russia’s western border, and the great likelihood that Bismarck’s Germany would assume real authority over the Balkan Slavs and the Balkan future, allied with and in the name of Austria, of course, alerted Russians both to the massive new threat and to the means by which it had been achieved. It also awakened them to the vulnerability of Russia’s western borderlands to campaigns making skillful use of the disaffected peoples living there.

Panslavism reflects the Russian and European conditions in which it grew. It was therefore less genial, leisurely, and amateurish than was Slavophilism. It placed less emphasis on Orthodoxy and more on power politics, less on internal harmony and the moral order and more on foreign policy, less on purifying and improving Russia and more on assisting the southern Slavs, to the disadvantage of the Turks, the Magyars, and the Germans and to the advantage of the Slavs, including the Russians. Consequently, panslavism was harsh, strident, and aggressive both in tone and in policy.

The substance of Russian panslavism is quite simple. The Russian panslavs believed that the Slavs constituted a definable family with ethnic, psychological, and religious qualities necessary for establishing a superior society, if not a civilization. In this family, the Russians were the responsible big brother, free, powerful, and eager now to assist the other members to win their freedom from foreign rule and then to band together in some sort of Slavic federation, under vaguely defined Russian protection or control. The process of freeing the Balkans from Ottoman, Magyar, and German domination would have the added advantage of providing Constantinople as a reward or prize for Russia.³

Although the panslav movement in Russia was small, it was influential. This was true in part because many of its members were important figures in the army, the court, the diplomatic service, the Church, the government, and the wealthy Moscow merchant body, and in part because panslavism enrolled some of Russia’s most distinguished journalists and intellectuals in a noisy and effective public relations campaign. Thus, both Russians and foreigners were impressed by the active participation of glamorous and daring generals, such as Chernaiev, Fadeev, and Skobelev, all of whom had played dramatic roles in Russian expansion through central Asia and the Caucasus; by the support provided by the empress, the wife of the future emperor, and women such as Countess Bludov, whose salon in the 1870’s assumed the significance which that of Grand Duchess Helen Pavlovna had occupied earlier; by the dramatic and daring diplomacy of Ignatiev; by the blessings of Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow and of other high Church leaders; and by the large gifts made by Moscow merchants, such as Timofei Morozov and A. K. Trapeznikov. Ivan Aksakov, Michael Katkov, and the great Dostoevsky were the thundering scribes of the movement, using their newspapers and journals in a savage press campaign to excite the people of the two capitals to rush to the aid of their fellow Slavs.

The strengths of the panslavs were impressive, but the movement was also shallow and unsound. In addition to the disadvantages the orthodox, autocratic Russian government had to endure in dealing with the southern and western Slavs, the movement was hampered from the very beginning by other serious flaws. First of all, even the leaders were astonishingly ignorant concerning the other Slavs, often not knowing the basic facts concerning their principal beliefs, traditions, and ambitions. Very few had ever travelled in the Balkans, and Pobedonostsev was one of only a handful who could speak another Slavic language. Moreover, the Russian government and Russian people were even less well informed and were, as well, unconcerned and even disinterested in the Balkans. The base of panslavism in Russia was shockingly fragile.

Finally, of course, the strength of panslavism was not significant even where it appeared to be. While Chernaiev, Fadeev, and Skobelev were dashing and successful generals in battle against Central Asians or Caucasian tribesmen, they had the same lack of political sense which their contemporaries Boulanger and Gordon displayed. Moreover, Count Dmitrii Miliutin, Minister of War, and those who decided military policy, were not among the panslavs. Similarly, Alexander II did not share the enthusiasms of his wife and sister-in-law, and Gorchakov, who was Minister of Foreign Affairs, was not in agreement with his stormy petrel, Ignatiev. The responsible authorities in the Russian Orthodox Church after Filaret died in November, 1867, were well aware that their energies and funds were demanded by their own people, while the Moscow merchants, like all fund-givers, quickly reached the limit of their generosity, even under skillful prodding from panslav courtiers. Finally, the eminent journalists all encountered difficulties with the censor over their fiery articles, even though they were protected to some degree by men such as Pobedonostsev. Aksakov, for example, had a number of issues of his newspapers confiscated, the Moscow police even entered homes in an effort to collect all published copies of one speech he had given, and he was exiled from Moscow and his newspaper closed in June, 1878, for a critique of the government after the Congress of Berlin which had exceeded the boundaries of accepted toleration.⁴

Panslavism appeared formally in Russia when a number of Muscovites in 1858 established the Slavonic Benevolent Committee to aid the south Slavs to develop educational and religious institutions and to bring young Slavs to Russia for higher education. The Committee (later Society) had the approval of Alexander II, and it soon had somewhat more than three hundred members. A similar organization was established in St. Petersburg in 1868, and Kiev and Odessa founded branches the following year. The Muscovites concentrated their efforts on Bulgaria, and the St. Petersburg branch on the Czechs. The organization in St. Petersburg began with one hundred forty members and had increased to seven hundred by 1872. Its principal achievement before 1875 was financial assistance for construction of an Orthodox church in Prague which was consecrated in 1874. During the Balkan crisis, the panslavs collected considerable sums of money. For example, the St. Petersburg branch collected more than 800,000 rubles (approximately $400,000) between September, 1875, and October, 1876. Ivan Aksakov reported in November, 1876, that the Moscow committee had collected 3 million rubles and material worth about 500,000 rubles during the same period.

The Moscow Slavonic Benevolent Society’s main undertaking during the first decade was the Slavonic Ethnographic Exhibition it organized in May and June, 1867, which became a Slav congress attended by eighty-one representatives from the other Slav groups. The foreign participants saw a little of Russia, met Aksakov, Pogodin, and other leading Russians interested in the Slavic world, were introduced at receptions to the tsar and to Gorchakov, and discussed political, religious, and cultural problems with each other and with their Russian hosts. A third of the guests were Czechs, and almost another third were Serbs and Croats. Two-thirds of the non-Russian Slavs were not members of the Orthodox Church. German frequently had to be the language used, because few Russians knew other Slavic languages and few of the other Slavs knew Russian. The Muscovites were considered heavy-handed, the absence of the Poles was noted by the guests, there was some friction over inefficient organization, and the conference disclosed basic disagreements over political and religious issues. Yet even though planned later meetings were not held, the Russian hosts considered the conference a success. Panslavism among the other Slavs did increase after 1867, contacts between leaders were established, and a base was laid for the excitement of the years of the Balkan crisis.⁵

Panslavism in Russia was largely the work of men like Danilevsky, Fadeev, and Ignatiev, who reached middle age during the 1870’s and who were reacting to developments within and beyond Russia after the Crimean War. B. H. Sumner noted that Professor Nicholas Danilevsky’s Rossiia i Evropa (Russia and Europe) was called “the Bible of panslavism.” This book did indeed have considerable influence. Published first in 1869 in a journal, produced as a book in 1871, reprinted in five Russian editions within twenty-five years, and translated into the principal European languages, this volume gave panslavism a useful pseudo-scientific stamp. A botanist-agricultural economist who was fifty years old in 1872, Danilevsky developed a cyclical philosophy of history, much like that later elaborated by Spengler. He declared that there are recognizably different societies or civilizations and that these civilizations are each like plants which grow, flower, decay, and die. He provided his readers an anti-European review of the nineteenth century, declared that Europe was characterized by individualism and violence, announced that the decline of Europe had begun, and foresaw the rise and triumph of a distinct and superior Slavic civilization. Indeed, he interpreted the conflict between Russia and Europe as the result of the European effort to “Europeanize” Slavic culture, a campaign which Philip of Macedon had launched and of which the Crimean War was only the latest episode. A Slavic federation, minus the Poles but including Constantinople, would ensure the peaceful, historic development of all the Slavs, under Russian leadership and with Russian the necessary common language.⁶

Danilevsky justified Russian expansion and militarism, gave the panslavs a sense of grandeur and of confidence in their inevitable triumph, and provided an apparently lofty metaphysics. General Rostislav Fadeev, on the other hand, in a very brief book published originally in 1869, established a political and military program for the movement. Fadeev, who was quietly dropped from the army by Miliutin in 1867 for his attacks upon the army reforms, had no knowledge of or interest in the main ideas of the panslavs, knew nothing of the other Slavs, and was indeed the very model of the empty-headed soldier. However, his book, which was translated and widely read in western Europe, had the power of a hammerblow in its simplicity. Fadeev argued that “the way to Constantinople lies through Vienna” and that Russia must proceed to liberate the Slavs under Austrian and Ottoman rule by force or retreat to the Dnieper river. After liberation, a Slavic federation, with Russia in control of defense and foreign policy and perhaps with Russian grand dukes on the new Slav thrones, would ensure a Slavic empire from the Pacific to the Adriatic.⁷

A third panslav musketeer was Count Nicholas Ignatiev, who was the foreign minister of the movement and who led the panslavs and the Russian government to the very brink of incredible diplomatic triumph early in 1878, only to see Bismarck and Disraeli snatch the victory from the Russian grasp. He reflects both the strengths and the weaknesses of panslavism. Born in St. Petersburg and forever lacking the attitude toward Moscow, the Orthodox Church, and the narod which the earlier Slavophils had had, Ignatiev was a remarkably effective diplomat and agent, often acting independently of the foreign minister and often in contradiction to the policies of the government. He achieved astounding success while only twenty-eight when he negotiated the Treaty of Peking in 1860. This treaty ended border conflicts with China and acquired the Maritime Province and the Amur river boundary for Russia.

Ignatiev’s major interest, however, was in the Balkans and in acquiring Constantinople and the straits for Russia. He had visited Vienna in 1857 and had met some of the Czech and Ruthenian leaders, and he devoted the last forty-eight years of his life to promoting a panslav program. Until early 1877, he had splendid positions from which to campaign. From 1861 until 1864, he was director of the Division of Asian Affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a section which included European Turkey in its responsibilities, and from 1864 until early 1877 he represented Russia in Constantinople, acting with an authority that is unimaginable for an ambassador today. As minister and then ambassador to the Turks, Ignatiev abused his position by intriguing with the Slavic minorities under Ottoman rule, encouraging various schemes to increase their power, and suggesting that the mighty Russian empire would rush to their assistance if they should rise against their oppressors. Ignatiev boldly fanned the flames of Balkan nationalism in the 1870’s, encouraged the revolts and then the wars of 1875 and 1876, hastened Russian entry into the Balkan wars, and drove Russia to the great triumph of the Treaty of San Stefano in the spring of 1878, a victory which was erased by the Congress of Berlin in the summer of that year.⁸

The differences between Pobedonostsev’s ideas and the main lines of panslav thought were considerably greater than those which had divided him earlier from the Slavophils. Moreover, the tone and temper of panslavism were quite alien to him, a reserved and quiet person strongly opposed to war and not impressed by large abstract ideas or by noisy campaigns. He never became a member of the panslav organization, although he did accept an honorary membership in 1885, when the movement had lost most of its energy and force. Nevertheless, he did serve as a panslav briefly during the Balkan crisis in 1875–78. The influence on him of this period and of the panslav failure was enormous. Indeed, these years and his flirtation with an aggressive nationalist movement were almost certainly the turning points in his life and thought.

Pobedonostsev’s basic concern was the political and spiritual welfare of Russia. Throughout his life, he placed Russia and things Russian first in his thoughts and in his policies. Basically, he was an isolationist, believing that Russia was and should be separated from other states and societies, resisting influences from foreign societies, and not seeking to expand Russian influence there. At the same time, of course, he had been raised and educated as a European, with a deep knowledge of several European languages and of European culture. For him, however, most Slavs, except for the Czechs, were on the periphery of Europe and did not attract interest. Prague was the only Slavic city outside the Russian empire which he is known to have visited. Even when he contributed twenty-two articles to Dostoevsky’s Grazhdanin (The Citizen), mostly on Europe, none touched a Slavic people, although two or three did concern Spain, which Pobedonostsev never visited and the language of which he could not read. He knew little about the other Slavs, and what little he did know antagonized him. Thus, in July, 1876, when he was already showing signs of becoming a “war hawk,” he wrote: “It is impossible not to sympathize with Serbia, but it is bitter to think that this same Serbia in its political and social life reflects the basic forms of Western civilization: they have a parliament, courts, hotels on Western standards . . . and have created a party of progressive youth, striving in Western ways for freedom of every kind. I fear that Serbia will in time become for the western Slavs what Poland became for the eastern.”⁹

After Pobedonostsev moved to St. Petersburg and became deeply involved in the education of the future Alexander III, he became interested in learning about the Slavs and in instructing his important student, who confessed in 1867 that he knew “almost nothing” about the Slavs. Pobedonostsev therefore sent Grand Duke Alexander Alexandrovich copies of the works of panslav historians, such as Michael Pogodin of Moscow University, one of the founders of the Moscow Slavonic Benevolent Committee, and Nil Popov, of Moscow University, who in 1869 published a two-volume book, Rossiia i Serbiia (Russia and Serbia). Samarin and Fadeev were other authors whom he recommended to his pupil. He also arranged that other panslavs read lectures at the court on the Slavs, and he introduced visiting Orthodox priests from Galicia and the Balkans to the future tsar. In March, 1875, he arranged a twenty-minute appointment for Adolf Dobrianskii, a leader of the Orthodox against the Magyars in Carpathian Ruthenia and a man who was subsidized by the Russian government through the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. In the same year, he presented to the heir the publications of the Moscow Slavonic Benevolent Society, praising the organization’s work and recommending particular articles and maps for study.¹⁰

Pobedonostsev developed a special interest in the Czechs, perhaps because he had learned to read Czech as a young man but also because he visited Prague from Salzburg in July, 1874, to attend the consecration of an Orthodox church. He loved Salzburg, but was disappointed that it lacked an Orthodox church, so the Prague church, with a Russian priest, an excellent choir, and bells which sounded like those of Moscow brought joy to his heart. The Pobedonostsevs were delighted by their first four days in Prague, and he compared Hradcany castle to the Kremlin. The ceremonies were conducted in excellent taste and were attended reverently by throngs of Czechs. A tea and a musicale which some Czechs arranged were very pleasant occasions and provided him an opportunity to meet and to have long talks with several Czech leaders, particularly Palacky, Rieger, and Brauner. Pobedonostsev returned to Prague again in 1875 and 1876; in the latter year he served as godfather for two Czechs who joined the Russian Orthodox Church.¹¹

Pobedonostsev assured both his Czech friends and the Grand Duke Alexander Alexandrovich that he was not a member of the panslav organization, that he was visiting Prague on vacation, and that he had no official connection or role. However, he did meet and evaluate the Czech leaders and collect information about their views which he passed on to the tsar and to Russian diplomats. Thus, he talked with Palacky, whose conservative approach to political theory he appreciated, on each of his visits before Palacký’s death, and he visited Brauner several times whenever he was in Prague. Brauner wrote to him in the fall of 1877, providing him an estimate of the impact among the Czechs of an agreement ending the Balkan crisis which would increase the number of south Slavs under Austrian rule. Brauner thought Pobedonostsev a sound scholar and a shrewd politician, a great Slav leader, and a dreadful reactionary, but he did provide him information and introduce him to other Czechs and to members of the Orthodox Church whom Pobedonostsev used later in his subversive campaigns against the Austrians. Pobedonostsev showed Brauner’s letters to other officials and to the heir, and he also had some of them published anonymously in the panslav press.

Pobedonostsev published other materials in the Russian press which Brauner and Rieger forwarded to him through Russian women who had married Czechs or Austrians and even through Czech journalists. Rieger and Brauner also assisted young Czechs going to Russia for higher education, often recommending them to Pobedonostsev for assistance. In 1878, Fedor Kovařík was helped by Rieger and a friend to get to St. Petersburg, where Pobedonostsev obtained a loan for him, procured both a waiver and a scholarship for university study, and later assisted him in getting positions in the Ministry of Communications and as a teacher in a gymnasium in Poltava.¹²

One of Pobedonostsev’s Czech acquaintances, probably Brauner, also put into Pobedonostsev’s hands a copy of the popular memoirs of Wenceslas Wratislaw, Baron von Mitrowitz, a Czech who was a member of the mission headed by Frederick von Kregwitz which Emperor Rudolph III sent to the sultan in 1591. The Adventures of Baron Wratislaw in Constantinople and as a Captive of the Turks while with the Austrian Mission in 1591 was written in Czech in 1599. Pobedonostsev translated it into Russian in the summer of 1877 on behalf of the Russian Red Cross, with all the proceeds from the sale of the ten thousand copies printed devoted to the care of soldiers wounded fighting the Turks. The volume, which is still a fascinating memoir, describes in graphic detail the corruption, brutality, and barbarism of the Turks, with especial emphasis upon the treatment of Christian slaves and upon the condition of the prisons. Pobedonostsev’s footnotes and comments added anti-German and anti-Catholic touches to this propagandistic venture. Thus, he identified the Janissaries as “blindly and unconditionally devoted to the will of the rulers,” a group who “could be compared to the Jesuits.” He had a second edition of this book published in 1904 to assist those wounded in the Russo-Japanese war.¹³

The rise of a popular clamor for war has often been compared to a fever, and the transformations through which Pobedonostsev proceeded in 1876 and 1877 certainly resemble a strange attack and a gradual return to normalcy. His interest in the Balkan Slavs was minimal until 1875, and even the outbreak of the revolts in Bosnia and Herzegovina failed to move him. However, the victories of the Turks over those in revolt, the massacres in Bulgaria, the Turk victories over the Serbs, Montenegrins, and Russian volunteers, and the general wave of Russian nationalism engulfed him and converted him by late summer, 1876, into a war hawk. He wrote in May, 1876, how delighted he had been to learn that Russia was far more significant as a world language than French or German, equalled English and Spanish already in the geographical extent of the area in which it was used, and was clearly the world language of the future. At the same time, he was in terror of war, “with all of its afflictions, especially with all the disorders and weaknesses which already mark our administration and our society.” By June, 1876, while on vacation in Marienbad, he rushed for a newspaper twice a day. He pitied the Serbs, although he considered them Western, but damned the West for inciting the Serbs while at the same time demonstrating a vile hatred for all Slavs.

In July, 1876, Pobedonostsev wrote to the heir that he hoped and believed to be untrue rumors he had heard that the heir had offered the Serbs a large cash subsidy. “The business of liberation is sacred, but patience is golden.” In September, however, he urged the heir to use his influence for the release of three hundred thousand “old” weapons for the Serbs. Early in October, he noted the rapid rise in popular feeling, especially in Moscow, and emphasized that the government must immediately seize the leadership of this wave of nationalism and direct it against a foreign enemy or face the likelihood that the movement would turn against the state, first in distrust and then in enmity. “Our people are ready to create miracles of valor if they are given leadership,” but failure in policy will create a gap between state and people “larger than any in our history.”

His letters to the future Alexander III in the fall of 1876 hammered on the need for leadership, on the cunning, hypocrisy, and ambition of the English, and, finally, on the inevitability of war. Indeed, on October 18, he wrote that without war it would be impossible to untangle the knot Russian diplomacy and irresolution had produced. The heir replied five days later that they were in complete agreement, that Gorchakov and Miliutin were old and wanted to avoid war, and that Ignatiev was a splendid exciting influence. However, “diplomacy has so confused the situation that it is impossible to declare war on Turkey without a clear reason.” The heir and his tutor were both disappointed when the Turks accepted a forty-eight-hour ultimatum.

In February, 1877, Pobedonostsev began to worry lest Alexander II, in his eagerness to avoid war, reach an agreement recognizing the Austrian right to rule over additional Balkan territory inhabited by Slavs. “To surrender the Orthodox Slavs to Austria means to surrender them and ourselves to a cunning, selfish, and Jesuitical enemy, with no honor or profit to us.” He informed the heir that Nicholas I had spurned an Austrian offer of its services during the Crimean War because “he was a knight of duty, and he personally and nationally understood deep in his heart where lay the center of gravity of Russian national interest.” When war was declared in April, he wrote, “Something sacred has been accomplished.” At the same time, however, he admitted that he was uneasy and that he could not forget that the reign had also begun in war.¹⁴

The Pobedonostsev correspondence with Grand Duke Alexander Alexandrovich and with Catherine Tiutchev is a barometer of his growing bellicosity and of the influence he exerted upon the heir and the court. He did not play a direct role in any of the major policy decisions which ultimately led to war between Russia and Turkey. However, he did help to create a warlike spirit in the court and in the Russian reading public and to support the war effort vigorously once fighting had broken out. He advised the leaders of the Slavonic Benevolent Society about men who might contribute funds and administrators whom the panslavs might employ to ensure effective use of the money and supplies they collected.

He also helped the more eager war hawks, such as Katkov, Ivan Aksakov, and Dostoevsky, to place their publications before Grand Duke Alexander Alexandrovich, and he defended them at court when they were accused of excesses. Ivan Aksakov was in difficulty several times before he was exiled from Moscow, and Grazhdanin was closed for printing his attack on the Russian government after the Congress of Berlin. However, Pobedonostsev always defended Aksakov’s basic position, extremely nationalistic and aggressive though it was, and assured the heir that his intentions were pure and his sentiments Russian, even though his language on occasion may have been careless and harmful. He devoted a great deal of time and energy to helping the Russian Red Cross, persuaded Catherine Tiutchev to assume important Red Cross responsibilities in Moscow, and rejoiced when his wife transformed their apartment into a “bandage factory.” At the request of the empress, he prepared a prayer book for soldiers, although he became terribly annoyed when some of her closest friends began a long discussion over whether the book should be in Russian, or in Old Church Slavonic, which Pobedonostsev preferred and which he was certain all literate soldiers could read.¹⁵

However, his main contribution during the Balkan crisis was his work as a propagandist, both through important translations he made and through articles he published in Grazhdanin, now edited by V. F. Putsykovich, and in Katkov’s Moskovskiia Vedomosti (Moscow News). Some of the translations, such as that of The Adventures of Baron Wratislaw in Constantinople, not only served to excite military spirit but also provided profits for the Slavonic Benevolent Society or the Red Cross. The most famous of these translations was that of Gladstone’s stirring pamphlet, The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, which was published in London on September 6, 1876, and of which 200,000 copies were sold that fall in England. This was an emotional and moral attack upon the Turks and upon the British government for its policy toward the Turks. After describing briefly the background of the conflict, Turk and British policies, and the massacres, Gladstone urged that the anarchy and butchery in Bulgaria be halted and that the Turk administration then be withdrawn from Bosnia-Herzegovina and from Bulgaria.¹⁶

L. K. Alexander, a Scottish Liberal, obtained Gladstone’s permission to take his famous brochure to Russia, where a translation might “redeem British honor” and contribute to ending the crisis. He was introduced to Pobedonostsev by the Greek ambassador in St. Petersburg, and Pobedonostsev then arranged the translation, which he did in collaboration with Professor K. N. Bestuzhev-Riumin of Moscow University. Gladstone and Alexander had hoped and assumed that the proceeds of the sale of a Russion translation would be given to the Balkan Slavs, but the profits went to the Russian panslav organization. Ten thousand copies were sold within two months after the pamphlet appeared.¹⁷

Pobedonostsev and the panslavs were so impressed by the impact of Gladstone’s classic that he translated another article written by the British Liberal on the virtues of Montenegro and the Montenegrins, whom Gladstone called “Christendom’s most extraordinary people,” an article probably called to his attention by Alexander after it had appeared in the May, 1877, issue of the Nineteenth Century. Pobedonostsev also wrote a long article in Grazhdanin in January, 1877, reviewing a number of recent English books on the Ottoman Empire and on the Balkans and describing the support Gladstone was collecting in England. Later in that same year, he reviewed for Grazhdanin a book which brought together a series of articles published originally in English in W. T. Stead’s Northern Echo and which had in fact been written by Pobedonostsev’s close friend, Olga Novikov, whom Disraeli labelled “the MP for Russia in England.” Pobedonostsev also assisted in the translation of another English assault on the Turks, Sir Tollemache Sinclair’s A Defense of Russia and, the Christians of Turkey, omitting, however, Sinclair’s chapter urging reconstruction of the Byzantine empire. Sinclair was quite antisemitic and exceeded even Aksakov in the fervor of his panslavism: “I firmly believe that the Russian Panslavists, as a body, are infinitely superior, both in intelligence, patriotism, energy, influence, and character, to the great bulk of their countrymen. . . . As far as I can judge, one Panslavist is at least equal to ten average Russians, especially the somniferous Rip Van Winkle Conservative party, who are opposed to all free development of Russian institutions.”¹⁸

Pobedonostsev had a deep appreciation of the importance of the view of Russia held by leading foreigners. He was especially sensitive about England, perhaps because he realized that England stood as a block to Russian foreign policy goals, perhaps because he was so familiar with English literature and politics and enjoyed life in England so much. In any case, he was always especially interested to meet English visitors and to talk about Russia with them. One of his closest English acquaintances during these years was Sir Donald MacKenzie Wallace, who published the first edition of his masterly account of Russia in 1877. During the Balkan crisis, Pobedonostsev used his talks and other connections with MacKenzie Wallace and others to affect the views of the English. Thus, he remained in contact with Alexander, who had brought Gladstone’s pamphlet to St. Petersburg, and he forwarded him information on Russia, particularly with regard to Poland, to place in the English Liberal press.¹⁹

More important, he utilized the close relations which Olga Novikov had developed with Gladstone and other Liberal leaders, such as Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Robert Morier, Lord Napier, and Charles Villiers, and with conservative journalists and intellectuals, such as W. T. Stead, Carlyle, Froude, Freeman, and Kinglake. Pobedonostsev could barely endure Olga Novikov, whom he thought excessively unstable and voluble, but he corresponded with her for more than thirty years and he used her social position in London to advance panslav policy.

Mrs. Novikov had been raised in an Orthodox Muscovite family, strongly Slavophil and Anglophil as well. Both her parents spoke English, and she spent a good part of her life in England after her first visit there in 1868, when she was twenty-eight. She met Gladstone in January, 1873, and became a friend of Carlyle in 1876. Her salon at Claridge’s attracted many Englishmen interested in relations between Russia and England, and Mrs. Novikov became a kind of intermediary or informal ambassador, distributing translations of Aksakov and other Slavophils, introducing visiting Russians to distinguished Englishmen, providing introductions for Englishmen going to Russia, writing essays and translating important Russian articles for English newspapers and journals, and serving as a conduit for some leaders of British opinion to Pobedonostsev and her other friends in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Some of her correspondence with Gladstone during this Balkan crisis was forwarded to Pobedonostsev, who gave it to foreign minister Gorchakov for the tsar. She also forwarded essays and articles which argued that England was not opposed to panslavism, which Pobedonostsev arranged to have translated and published, generally in Grazhdanin or Moskovskiia Vedomosti. Again, during the 1876–78 crisis and during Gladstone’s famous Midlothian campaign, she gave Gladstone material about Russia and the Balkan Slavs which Pobedonostsev and others forwarded to her. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the embassy in London were both angered by her private diplomacy, and she herself was received more sympathetically in London than in Moscow, but she did exercise considerable influence in a kind of action more common in the twentieth than in the nineteenth century.²⁰

On occasion in 1877 and early 1878, Pobedonostsev became so belligerent against the Turks and so aroused by the possibility of war with England that he suggested very radical steps. At one point, for example, he urged that Russia study the strategy of the South during the American Civil War, with particular attention to breaking the blockade, because he wished to prepare for a long struggle with the British fleet. He was much excited by the possibility of developing and producing a submarine which could destroy British sea power. Once he excitedly encouraged the heir to grant a subsidy to the great chemist, Mendeleev, so that he could develop a new bomb. In fact, Pobedonostsev had high hopes that Mendeleev would invent an aerial bomb, and he looked forward to having these devices dropped on London.²¹

However, even when he was most eager to have war used as an instrument for freeing the southern Slavs, Pobedonostsev was generally worried and pessimistic. As the war progressed into the summer and fall of 1877 and as losses accumulated before Plevna, he became deeply upset. The Crimean War had not touched or affected him in any way, and Russian campaigns in Poland, the Caucasus, and Central Asia apparently were so remote that the war against the Turks in 1877 was his first real exposure to the results of military action. The work he and his wife did for the Red Cross, letters from his sister-in-law from a hospital near the front, and the British newspapers he avidly read filled him with horror, and he began to have nightmares crowded with wounded Russian soldiers. As Olga Novikov wrote, “Our military promenade has transformed itself into a gigantic burial procession.”

He was shocked and frightened by the incredible waste, blundering, inefficiency, and weakness which became evident in the Russian army and in the supply and hospital services. The absence of preparation and the incompetent leadership in the capital, in the supply lines, and at the front appalled him. He was dismayed by the intrigues which undermined the military effort and destroyed the golden glow the liberation campaign had first provided. He noted that many in St. Petersburg were calling it “Moscow’s war” or “the Grand Dukes’ war,” and he was alarmed by criticism of the Slavonic Benevolent Society and its leaders for stampeding Russia into an unwanted and unnecessary conflict. He began to wonder whether “our happy-go-lucky administration, completely lacking in sense and calculation, indifferent and careless in the choice of its leaders,” could survive.

He was most worried, however, by the criticisms he heard of various members of the imperial family for their intrigues and the failure of campaigns they led. By September, 1877, he was convinced that the autocracy itself was in peril and that the danger was increased because the tsar was unaware of it and was at the front, while the heir to the throne was isolated by family squabbles. He even feared in the summer of 1878 that another “Time of Troubles” was approaching for Russia. In April, 1879, Pobedonostsev urged the heir to avoid concerts and all crowds. At a time when Marx was predicting revolution in Russia, Pobedonostsev foresaw the same possibility. The conclusions he reached because of this crisis shaped his political philosophy and deeply affected developments within Russia for the next quarter of a century. He wrote to Catherine Tiutchev and to the heir that Russia had relied too much on justice, on words, and on arrangements with friends and allies. “We can count now only on our own strength. . . . Our government has lacked intelligence and unity of will.” Russia must awaken to the fundamental principles of autocratic rule, or die. Every morning, his first thought was the question, “What happened during the night?” The reign of fear had begun.²²

The Balkan crisis also cured Pobedonostsev immediately and permanently of his infatuation with the stormy and aggressive doctrine of panslavism. During and after the war itself, he was disappointed by the lack of military virtue displayed by the Bulgarians, by the failures, even though glorious failures, of the Serbs and Montenegrins, and by the inaction of the other Slavs. More important, he began to realize the dangers inherent for the autocratic system in such popular movements as panslavism, particularly when men such as Ivan Aksakov, whom no one could control, assumed the leadership. Even in the exciting fall of 1876, the heir and he agreed that the government should control the panslav committees, for such popular manifestations “left to themselves could lead to regrettable results.” He wrote in October, 1876, that the government would have to seize the popular movement and control it, lest it grow and ultimately turn against the state in distrust and then in enmity. The popular reaction to the war blunders, of course, only confirmed this view.

When Ivan Aksakov on June 22, 1878, made his celebrated attack on the Western powers and on Russian governing circles because of the Congress of Berlin, Pobedonostsev sent a copy of the speech to the heir and said the speech was strongly written but just. He told the future tsar that the Russian people would consider the Congress a disgrace for Russia, regardless of what the diplomats said, and that the nationalist feeling which the war enthusiasm had stimulated was going to be difficult to quell, since it had been allied with other discontentments.

Henceforth, he almost never wavered in his insistence upon complete government control, the preeminence of stability and equilibrium in domestic affairs, and peace in international relations. He realized that panslavism represented a doubly revolutionary idea. Thus, a panslav Russia automatically found the European powers aligned against her. On the other hand, a panslav movement at home created and stimulated popular pressures which might ultimately be turned against the state itself. In other words, from that time forward he turned inside, not outside. Power was to be used to bind society and to control the state.²³

The Balkan crisis in the 1870’s constituted an important stage in the history of Russian nationalism. Pobedonostsev, for example, not only recovered from panslavism, but also developed a strong, vigorous pan-Russianism, with a heavy emphasis upon Russian Orthodoxy as the distinguishing characteristic of Russian civilization. This turn in thought is responsible for his policies in the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church and for his advice to the tsar on education, control of the press and of the arts, and social policy. The most striking illustration of the new emphasis is the policy which he designed for the western border areas, where the Finns, the Baltic peoples, the Poles, and the Jews felt the heavy hand of Russian nationalism after 1880.

Pobedonostsev simultaneously turned his back upon international politics, in which his interest had never been great but which had attracted his feverish attention in 1877 and 1878. Thus, there is no information in any of the materials available of his views concerning the American Civil War, the unification of Italy, Bismarck’s wars to unify Germany, or any of the other events in world politics which so excited his contemporaries. At the same time, however, he paid close attention to the principal new philosophies appearing in Europe, to the Kulturkampf in Germany, and to anticlerical Republicanism in France. After the Balkan crisis, throughout which he had followed international politics closely, he retained his earlier interest in European cultural development and in the political and social issues which concerned Europeans most, but he turned away entirely from international affairs and foreign policy.

Pobedonostsev saw the Russian state as a repressive power and viewed Russia as a single community which must become and remain a “community of believers.” Although his ideas concerning both the necessary unity of society and the role of autocracy were similar to those of men such as Barrès in France and Treitschke in Germany, and to those of Communist leaders later, he lacked completely the conception they had of the dynamic role for the state. Thus, he became as conservative in his approach to foreign policy as he was to political and social change. He did not see Russia as a member of a highly competitive power system. He was a close acquaintance in the 1880’s of the German ambassador, General Hans von Schweinitz, and the American minister and the French ambassador were frequent visitors to his apartment in later years. However, there is no evidence in any of his writings or in the memoirs of these men, in the volumes published after the First World War which made available the documents of the various powers, or in the scholarly studies of international relations in the years between 1870 and 1914, that he had any interest in or influence upon Russia’s participation in the alliance system. As a matter of fact, according to von Schweinitz, Pobedonostsev resented and resisted Russia’s joining the Three Emperors’ League, which he thought an Austrian-German trick to delude the Russians.²⁴

After 1878, Pobedonostsev remained aloof from discussion or definition of Russian foreign policy, even in times of great tension, such as the years before the outbreak of war with Japan. In fact, his indifference to international politics and to some of the delicate problems facing Russia are responsible for some of the blunders which he committed when promoting the expansion of Orthodoxy beyond Russia’s borders. His voluminous correspondence with the last two tsars reveals that his occasional interventions into foreign affairs were limited and discreet. He occasionally forwarded letters from Russians who wished posts as ambassadors. In 1886 and 1887, he supported, without great force and unsuccessfully, the appeals of two Russian financiers, N. A. Novosel’skii and A. S. Poliakov, for government approval and support of their projects for buying the railroad from Ruschuk to Varna in Bulgaria and for building a railroad in Persia. In both instances, he urged government support in order to deny these facilities or opportunities to the British. He was very worried at that time that the new ruler of Bulgaria might be a German Catholic prince and that “Berlin Jews” or Britain might obtain control of Persia.²⁵

Whenever Pobedonostsev did act to affect Russian foreign policy, he emphasized a passive and defensive approach. In the fall and winter of 1896, when the Armenian massacres led many Russian officials to fear that the British fleet might seize the straits connecting the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, Alexander I. Nelidov, the Russian ambassador in Constantinople, proposed that the Russian Black Sea fleet be prepared to seize the upper part of the Bosporus, enter the Dardanelles with the British and French fleets, and then negotiate the future of the straits. Witte unsuccessfully opposed this suggestion at a crown council on December 5, arguing that such an action raised the likelihood of war at a time when both Russia and her ally, France, were unprepared. Pobedonostsev later supported Witte, as did the French, so that the Nelidov plan was abandoned in January, 1897. Similarly, in 1899, Pobedonostsev was one of the Russian officials most responsible for persuading the tsar to launch the Hague conference on disarmament, a subject in which he was intensely interested. He was also opposed to the aggressive actions which led Russia to war against Japan in 1904.²⁶

The Balkan crisis led to another development which had a profound effect upon Pobedonostsev’s life and thought, the creation of the Volunteer Fleet in the spring of 1878, between the Treaty of San Stefano and the Congress of Berlin. This effort to create a Russian merchant fleet which could be converted to a cruiser squadron to prey on British commerce during war was the hasty work of a group of Russian patriots, largely Moscow merchants and officials at first, to fashion some weapon for use against the English navy, which was again at the point of frustrating Russian national ambitions. The idea of collecting funds to buy and maintain ships purchased generally in England for potential use against England came easily to men who had been generous in collecting similar funds to help the Balkan Slavs. The land-bound merchants and officials hoped that the merchant ships would not only provide a reserve nucleus for any naval conflict, but would also serve as a school for Russian sailors and officers and as a merchant fleet carrying Russian goods and the Russian flag into ports around the world dominated by her opponents. Once funds had been collected, several ships purchased, and the fleet launched, Pobedonostsev and other supporters saw it as a means of binding the Russian empire together through trade between the Black Sea and Vladivostok and through helping to establish settlements and markets on Russia’s Pacific coast.

Pobedonostsev involuntarily became one of the founders of the Volunteer Fleet when a group of patriots from Moscow asked him to persuade the heir to the throne to grant them permission to solicit funds for the enterprise and even to serve as honorary chairman. The group included such important men—Prince V. A. Dolgorukov, the governor general of Moscow, Count Stroganov, former curator of the Moscow Educational District and Pobedonostsev’s old patron, Senator Nicholas Kalachov, Count Komarovsky, two of the Samarins, Ivan Aksakov, Bishop Amvrosii of Moscow, Professor Babst of Moscow University, and wealthy merchants such as I. E. Ginzburg and Timofei Morozov—that Pobedonostsev acceded to their request. He was almost certainly impressed by their plans for contributing funds, and he had learned from experience with the panslav organization that the government ought to assert direction early if it hoped to keep lively organizations under control. He therefore became one of the seventy-six founders; the heir accepted the chairmanship, Pobedonostsev was the vice-chairman and executive director, and the Fleet was launched.

Pobedonostsev from the very beginning was skeptical concerning the soundness of the scheme, and his anxiety grew as the organization did. However, he drew up the original constitution, which resembled that of a religious order, drafted its appeal for contributions, and protected the heir from those contributors who wanted him to become directly involved in an enterprise which was patriotic but also commercial. He supervised the difficult reorganization of the Volunteer Fleet Committee into a formal society in May, 1879, after the initial blush of enthusiasm had worn off and many of the early participants had lost interest, when the hard work of maintaining the ships in operation had to be faced. During the five years the organization was ostensibly independent and private, he served as its vice-chairman and principal officer.²⁷

Interest in contributing toward a weapon which might be used against England was high in the spring and summer of 1878. Indeed, the Moscow group, which had been informally organized early in March and which obtained permission to solicit funds only late that month, collected 2 million rubles (about a million dollars) by the end of June. By December, 1879, a total of more than 4 million rubles had been collected, more than half of this in Moscow and about one-third in St. Petersburg, where Anichkov Palace, the residence of the heir to the throne, was the collection center. However, enthusiasm quickly flagged. A total of only 120,000 rubles was contributed in 1880 and 1881, and less than 30,000 rubles in the next twenty years.²⁸

As the director of the Volunteer Fleet, Pobedonostsev was handicapped by the supreme lack of concern most of its founders showed after the first few months. He therefore found himself charged with responsibility for managing a corporation which had acquired six sea-going vessels in western Europe, four within six weeks of its formal organization, and which had an original capital of about $2 million, but for whose operations no one had made preparations. He felt incompetent to manage a merchant fleet, particularly in a country where so few had had experience in international trade, and was oppressed by the “blind ignorance” of those with whom he worked. However, Russia’s “patriotic aim” consumed all of his time. After a year, he wrote that he had ceased to read books and was now reading people, “quite another kind of literature.”²⁹

He could not abandon his responsibility, however, because the name of the heir was attached to it, and the Grand Duke wanted him to direct it. He had to rely on volunteer assistance in the harried office for the first five months, and he did not have a clear view of the Fleet’s accounts until January, 1879. His life was full of practical managerial problems which he had never encountered before: purchasing, fitting, repairing, and even naming ships, finding office space and secretary-clerks, identifying commanders of ships and helping to locate crews, mastering the customs and rules of international trade, warding off entrepreneurs with unsound schemes, negotiating railroad rates, and persuading the heir to the throne to give awards to pleasant and distinguished men who interfered in the organization but who needed some recognition for the interest they had shown.

The main problem, however, was to find useful and profitable work for the ships purchased so that they could be used to train officers and crews, and could be quickly outfitted for military action if another crisis should arise. None of the eager founders of the Volunteer Fleet had devoted any thought to its use. Indeed, Pobedonostsev’s first meeting with the Moscow merchant sponsors to discuss using the fleet to import tea from China and to carry goods from European Russia to the Far East occurred in April, 1879, a year after the enterprise was launched. Pobedonostsev had early been appalled that none of the founders had considered the capital needs of a merchant marine, the need for economic ties with other areas of the world if the fleet were to fulfill its logical function, or the specialized knowledge and skills necessary for any group which wished to engage in international trade. He also discovered, to his horror, that the Moscow merchants really had no interest in international trade, or even in developing markets for their products in the Russian Far East.

However, the several ships of the Volunteer Fleet were put to effective use. In its first six years, the organization carried 1,400,000 poods (a pood is the equivalent of 36.113 pounds) of tea from China to Odessa and other Black Sea ports, approximately 400,000 poods of other imports, and about 1,500,000 poods of export cargo. Over the same period, it also transported twenty-one thousand passengers from Odessa to Vladivostok. The cargoes which most excited Pobedonostsev, however, were shiploads of convicts carried from Odessa to Sakhalin. He devoted enormous effort to negotiating arrangements for the first trip, from June to August, 1879, with the Ministry of the Interior and the Naval Ministry. He found an Orthodox priest to accompany the convicts, collected books for a library, and rejoiced to learn that the convicts attended religious services and organized a splendid choir on their journey.³⁰

Curiously, those in autocratic Russia most surprised by the program were high officials of the Ministry of the Navy. Indeed, these men were both stunned and annoyed by this invasion of a field in which they had been lethargic. Pobedonostsev explained to the Ministry officials, especially to the director and to the Grand Dukes Constantine Nikolaevich and Alexander Alexandrovich, that the Fleet had been established to help train Russians and to create a convertible reserve group of ships, that all of the contributors were patriotic Russians, and that the new organization would cooperate with the Navy in every way. His appeals, and his noting that the heir to the throne was most interested in the Volunteer Fleet, were not effective. The conflict was heightened when he obtained a contract with the War Ministry for transporting troops from the Caucasus and Bulgaria to Odessa, rankling Grand Duke Constantine Nikolaevich, who believed that either the Navy or the Black Sea Navigation Company, which he had founded after the Crimean War, should have undertaken the work. By March, 1880, the quarrel had become so bitter and pervasive that Pobedonostsev wrote to the heir, attacking his rivals in the Naval Ministry for advocating that Russia build battleships while the English, alarmed by the Volunteer Fleet, were investing heavily in the construction of new cruisers.

Pobedonostsev lost his struggle to preserve the Volunteer Fleet. In a decree issued on March 14, 1883, of which he learned only after it had been published, the young merchant navy was absorbed into the Russian Navy, although the ships and the basic concept did retain some kind of identity. He protested bitterly, predicted “monstrous consequences,” and denounced those in the Navy responsible. His warnings were correct, because the training and cruiser reserve goals for which the Fleet had been founded were neglected. In the Russo-Japanese War in 1904–1905, only three of the Fleet’s ships played any role, and their contribution was minor. Jane’s Fighting Ships, in 1899, declared that the Volunteer Fleet was “no more a war force than the Cunard Line.” This authoritative survey pointed out that the ships were old and slow, that they had been built in England, and that Russia had no bases between Odessa and Vladivostok. Five years later, the same source announced, “There is no Russian ‘bogey’ that is quite so really harmless as the Volunteer Fleet.”³¹

The conflict between the Volunteer Fleet and the Russian Navy was embittered significantly by the man whom Pobedonostsev chose as his principal assistant, Naval Captain Nicholas M. Baranov, who had much of the flamboyance and color of his contemporaries, Gordon, Boulanger, Chernaiev, and Skobelev, and who played a brief role in Russian history. Pobedonostsev’s judgment of men was generally unsound. He was especially subject to err concerning brash and energetic men, such as the forty-two-year-old Baranov. When Pobedonostsev first met him and accepted him as his principal assistant and technical adviser, he was both impressed and puzzled. He noted that there were “two Baranovs”; while on occasion he was alive with vigor and seemed in perpetual motion, the next week he would collapse in nervous fatigue. Although Pobedonostsev thought him bombastic and sly, he was overwhelmed by Baranov’s forceful energy and by his large, if not wild, ideas. Pobedonostsev wrote the future Alexander III in February, 1879, that Baranov, with all his virtues and shortcomings, “which recall to us the French character, is unquestionably Russian.” He was so dazzled by a report in which Baranov outlined how Russia could destroy British sea power that he sent it to Count Dmitrii Miliutin, the Minister of War, and to the heir. Pobedonostsev, by the spring of 1879, was wondering why Baranov had not achieved greater eminence, and Catherine Tiutchev, who had originally not been impressed, was then calling him “a man of steel.” Pobedonostsev recommended him at that time as the strong man who would resolve the problems facing Russia which Gurko and other weaker men seemed unable to settle.³²

Baranov was apparently of enormous assistance in establishing and operating the Volunteer Fleet. As an experienced captain in the Russian Navy, he possessed a great deal of technical information and data concerning ports and trade. He purchased ships for the Fleet in western Europe, supervised the construction of one steamer in Marseilles, and did most of the travelling which Pobedonostsev was reluctant to undertake. He came to see Pobedonostsev every day at four o’clock and often interrupted his reading or other work in the evenings as well. On one or two occasions, he even came to a monastery to talk with Pobedonostsev, who began to divide his days into two parts, “before and after Baranov.”

Captain Baranov served the Volunteer Fleet while on leave from the Russian Navy. He was annoyed when he occasionally was not given the privileges he expected from the Navy on some of his travels, but his complaints increased the difficulties. More important, he was very critical of a battleship design favored by Admiral Popov and by the Grand Duke Constantine Nikolaevich, who considered Baranov an irresponsible and noisy ignoramus. In the fall of 1879, Baranov sued a journalist for slander and asked to be retired. His superiors in the Navy then charged him with preparing woefully inaccurate reports of his activities during the Russo-Turkish war in 1877–78. Baranov was tried and dismissed from the service on December 19, 1879, in a trial which Pobedonostsev attended and which he thought was a triumph for Baranov and a disaster for the Navy. Baranov used Katkov’s paper, Moskovskiia Vedomosti, to attack the Naval Ministry, both before and after his court martial. He was not restricted or reprimanded for this by Pobedonostsev. Indeed, the director of the Volunteer Fleet took pleasure in introducing the controversial officer to his friends in court and to the members of Countess Bludov’s salon.³³

Baranov brought a bitter personal element into the quarrel brewing between Pobedonostsev and the Grand Duke Constantine Nikolaevich and others in the court whom Pobedonostsev thought were “liberal.” The disagreements over ship design, Russian strategy, the Volunteer Fleet, and Baranov himself sharpened the issues for Pobedonostsev and probably for the Grand Duke as well and therefore helped make 1881 a particularly crucial year for Russia.

None of the dreams of the founders of the Volunteer Fleet was ever achieved. However, the five years which Pobedonostsev devoted to this organization are of considerable significance. They brought him into contact with large numbers of merchants whom he would otherwise not have met, and they gave him considerable insight into their views concerning political and economic issues. He also came to meet a wide range of other nationalists through the Volunteer Fleet, men for whom he purportedly spoke when he advised the tsars later on the wishes of the narod. In addition, his services as administrator of this merchant fleet provided him a liberal education concerning the Russian government, supplementing what he had learned as a reformer in the 1860’s and as an official in the Senate, as a Senator, and as a member of the Council of State. Being head of the Volunteer Fleet, he obtained first-hand knowledge concerning the inefficiency, red tape, intrigues, and corruption which hampered able and ambitious men. The “viper’s wisdom” he acquired during these years affected his view of government from that time forward.³⁴

However, the principal significance of the Balkan crisis and of the Volunteer Fleet was the relationship they established between the heir to the throne and Pobedonostsev. Before the crisis, Pobedonostsev was just a tutor to the heir and his wife, one who had retained a close connection but who was basically a former teacher in an important position as a Senator. The Balkan crisis, with its enthusiastic wave of emotional panslavism, the war against the Turks, the triumphs and failures of the peace treaties of 1878, and the fright produced by the discovery that the autocracy was threatened by disunity at the center and by obvious dissatisfaction at several levels in Russian society had brought Grand Duke Alexander Alexandrovich and Pobedonostsev close together; the Volunteer Fleet sealed the alliance and made it effective. The Grand Duke was the chairman of the Fleet and took a personal interest in its affairs, particularly during the first two years, while Pobedonostsev as vice-chairman managed the complex operations, kept his superior fully informed of the main problems and decisions, and served as the ideal executive associate. The Grand Duke and Pobedonostsev were in constant contact and complete agreement concerning the merchant marine. Thus, between June 2, 1878, and May 28, 1879, Pobedonostsev wrote forty-seven letters, most of them quite long, to the heir about the Volunteer Fleet. They conferred frequently, inspected the Fleet’s ships, attended meetings and banquets, and toured Russian ports. In short, the Volunteer Fleet allied them in an important enterprise. The heir came to rely upon and trust Pobedonostsev and to consider him both his necessary right-hand man and his confidential advisor. Pobedonostsev’s position in Russian politics derives largely from the alliance which was formed during these years, when in the heat of the crisis he forged the core of his political philosophy and impressed it upon the feeble brain of the next tsar. From this base, Pobedonostsev ascended quietly into a position of enormous power when the grand duke became Alexander III.³⁵