“Pobedonostsev His Life and Thought”
★
POBEDONOSTSEV’S view of the world and his political and social philosophy remained remarkably constant throughout his long life, particularly the last forty years. Indeed, between 1890 and 1910, he reprinted without change several books he had written or translated originally in the 1860’s. There were exceptions, of course, and there were variations in his views from time to time as new issues arose and as the political atmosphere changed. Moreover, the years of crisis from 1876 through 1881 introduced both a sharp rigidity and a fervor not previously characteristic of him. However, the variations and new concepts were almost invariably developments of well-established judgments. Thus, when he advocated the parish school system in the 1880’s and 1890’s, he was in fact expressing in practical and concrete form ideas he had adumbrated twenty years earlier concerning education by the Church. Even his most daring essay, his bitter indictment of Count V. N. Panin’s administration of the Ministry of Justice, which was published anonymously in London in 1859 in Herzen’s Golosa iz Rossii, was a faithful representation of views he held throughout his life concerning sound administrative principles. In short, his statements in the Council of State in 1880 and 1896 supported positions similar to those he had advocated in 1859, even though his role and the nature of the problems facing the government had both changed immeasurably.1
The thought of most conservative philosophers tends to be unsystematic and sometimes even unclear, in part because of the very nature of conservatism and in part because of conservatives’ rooted opposition to the expression of political philosophy in neat, pithy formulas or theories which ignore and confuse the realities of life and politics and seek to substitute wishes and even dreams for the institutions and practices which in fact shape man’s destiny. Inevitably, the observations of conservatives reflect the society in which they are produced, its social forces, its problems, reactions to these issues and strains, and its very atmosphere. This is true for Pobedonostsev, who as a conservative took on the coloration of the society in which he lived and who borrowed somewhat indiscriminately in his effort to create a policy which would justify and defend the status quo.
His views naturally not only represent and reflect the circumstances in which he lived and worked and the qualities of the system he sought to preserve, but also the particular family atmosphere in which he grew up and his personal qualities. He wrote a great deal and reflected occasionally on the nature of man. Indeed, his views concerning the permanent and indelible qualities of man are at the core of his philosophy. It is therefore ironic that his ideas should echo so clearly his own personal virtues and shortcomings and that his role as a statesman and conservative spokesman should reflect so well his character and personality. Some description of his qualities and temperament will help explain the character and temper of his thought.
Pobedonostsev was essentially a plain, simple, colorless, humorless man, in dress and in personality not unlike Calvin Coolidge. Tall, thin, pale, dry, he dressed in black and always wore a black bow tie. The German ambassador, General Hans von Schweinitz, said that he reminded him of a French professor, while the pastor of the Evangelical Church in St. Petersburg, Hermann Dalton, who was acquainted with Pobedonostsev for more than thirty years, thought he resembled a German research scholar. He was almost as invisible as G. K. Chesterton’s postman. He had no interest in the little things of life. In the immense material which he preserved and in the memoir literature about him, there is no reference to the ordinary pleasures. He never mentioned clothing. In all of his papers and books, he referred to food only once, and then to mention a wine he had tasted while visiting the Don Cossack country with the heir to the throne in 1863. Even English cooking failed to elicit a comment.
In short, Pobedonostsev as a man was an enlarged and older version of the lad in the School of Jurisprudence, whose diary for the 1840’s reveals a serious, hard-working, joyless young man interested only in work and possessing study habits which today would label him a “grind.” The grave and impersonal young boy grew up to the mature “man of the study” without warmth or affection for other human beings. The Pobedonostsevs entertained very rarely and paid little attention to their comfort or the quality of their furnishings. In fact, they lived a thoroughly plain, simple, and even frugal life. Apparently, they gave no more than a half-dozen dinner parties in the forty years they were married. Dostoevsky, for example, was surprised that their apartment was so barren and that they had only one servant. The German ambassador found him ascetic both in appearance and in life.2
Throughout his life, except for plagiarism and other forms of intellectual dishonesty which he skillfully concealed, Pobedonostsev was a person of exemplary character and conduct, completely foreign to improper social behavior. He became a great admirer of Emerson during the 1860’s, and the standards of the proper New Englander supplemented those he had acquired in the strict and severe home on Bread Lane. He apparently did not drink vodka or wine. However, until he was about fifty, he did not censure those who did, even to excess. He was naturally to some degree indignant concerning the wasteful and immoral behavior of St. Petersburg society, but he recognized that “purity exists only in the desert” and that false idols have always tempted some men successfully. As late as February, 1877, he wrote with gentle irony of a conversation in the heir’s study during a party at Anichkov Palace. He was amused to hear Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich and Princess Maria Vasil’evna Vorontsov condemn contemporary luxury and reminisce on the simplicity of earlier days, on an occasion when the princess was dressed in great luxury and wore many diamonds and the Grand Duke wore an elegant uniform. However, Pobedonostsev went on to say that the princess was “one of our most remarkable and attractive women,” that he loved her lively spirit and sensible conversation, and that she belonged to those “who have loved much even though they have perhaps sinned.”3
Pobedonostsev was a moralist throughout his life, and the puritanical viewpoint pervades all of his work. However, the Balkan crisis turned him into a savage critic of society and gave his puritanism the sharp edge which thereafter he turned against the world and which provides an essential flavor to his thought. He railed at senseless luxury, particularly among women who spent a thousand rubles for a gown while collecting a hundred rubles for the Red Cross. The strain of the Balkan war led him to denounce all waste and to urge the establishment of a league against luxury in dress by women of good character, who would agree on what could be worn, select and educate dressmakers, and establish drawing rooms to which only women in simple dress would be invited. Later, dances, fancy balls, and elaborate banquets came under his criticism. In the late 1880’s and in the 1890’s, he worked hard to establish teetotalling societies, convinced by then that drunkenness was a national scandal and that temperance societies were ineffective. Ambassador von Schweinitz wrote in February, 1882, shortly after he had met Pobedonostsev, that he talked like an anchorite and had the point of view of a medieval monk. An English observer noted that he was “a man who would have sent his own son to Siberia.”4
He had always a reflective, pessimistic, and melancholy cast of mind. Secular celebrations did not excite his interest, although funerals and cemeteries attracted both him and his wife. He wrote on a number of occasions that the beginning of a new year was always a melancholy day and that he could not understand why others celebrated. Even in early middle age, he was obsessed by the flight of time and the approach of death. On January 4, 1875, he wrote: “Why rejoice, when another drop has disappeared from the cup and one can hear a deep echo from the dark chasm into which it fell?” A year earlier, writing in the summertime about the Russian countryside, he declared that a Russian village was the best place in the world in summer, “especially when it stands on old foundations, or memorials to fathers and grandfathers, on old graves, on an old church and a homestead filled with old people. Alas, few such corners remain.”
He loved funerals and often wrote about those he attended. He told Catherine Tiutchev in August, 1881, that his wife had returned enthusiastic from a funeral celebrated in Sergiev monastery, near Peterhof, because the day and the singing had been so beautiful and the burial ceremony so peaceful, “a holiday not to death but to life.” Long before he became old and very pessimistic, melancholy poetry fascinated him. He loved verses about twilight, such as this one:
The radiant colours in the West are paling,
Fast fades the gold, and green, and crimson light,
And softly comes, each trivial object veiling,
The all-ennobling mystery of night.5
There are few elements in human affairs more difficult to measure with any confidence than the depth and sincerity of a man’s most private religious beliefs and feelings. So far as we can tell, Pobedonostsev throughout his life was a man of deep religious faith; Orthodoxy was the central fact of existence both for him and for his wife. He prayed devoutly every day, he attended religious services every Sunday, preferably in small churches and at early Mass so he could be among those who came to worship reverently and quietly, and he very often attended services Saturday evenings. Throughout his adult life, he spent Easter Week and a few days before Christmas at a monastery, and he frequently spent other periods in monasteries for reflection and rest. Long before he became Director General of the Synod, he had acquired such a reputation as a man of faith and as a churchman that clerics visiting St. Petersburg always called on him. However, he showed remarkably little interest in doctrine. He emphasized heavily the emotional and ceremonial aspects of Orthodox Christianity: the church bells, the splendor of the services, particularly the choral singing, and the cherished memories particular churches and holidays held for him. Throughout his life, he preferred the “Christian” early morning Mass, evening vespers, opportunities for quiet prayer in deserted churches or ancient monasteries, which he sometimes referred to as “green islands,” and the beauty of services in which deacons of especially devout bearing and excellent voice participated. Thus, in some ways the Russian Orthodox Church provided the romance and majesty and splendor which were otherwise absent from his life. It also brought him among the Russian people, from whom he isolated himself in his study, and it renewed his faith in himself and in man. Indeed, in a quite uncharacteristic turn of phrase, he once wrote Catherine Tiutchev that “a sea of Orthodox people embraced us and poured prayers over us” in a most impressive Trinity Sunday service.6
His asceticism and puritanism are reflected in his life and thought, and the forbidding visage he presented to the ordinary world was to some degree responsible for the reputation he acquired as the Grand Inquisitor. He had a softer, gentler side, however, which was almost never shown to the public. For example, in 1865 he founded an organization to support a school for orphans, in memory of the Grand Duke Nicholas Alexandrovich. He devoted the proceeds of his translation of Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, of which eight editions were published between 1869 and 1899, to this organization and its school. He drafted the constitution of the Red Cross, although late in his life he considered it and its work fraudulent, and he also helped to support a number of other charitable institutions. He contributed a translation of a favorite Emerson essay, “Works and Days,” to a volume of essays edited by Goncharov, Kraevskii, and others to collect funds for those affected by the 1873 famine. The income from the sale of 20,000 copies of a lecture he gave in 1880 in memory of Empress Maria Alexandrovna, the wife of Alexander II, was assigned to assist poor seminarians.
Letters to his closest friends indicate that his private charities, especially to aged poor whom he had known for a long time, were very considerable. Dostoevsky’s widow has even recalled the successful effort he made to delay the exile of a woman who was ill and whose husband was considered a dangerous criminal. His most private letters reveal that he was especially generous with poor teachers and professors and that he helped support a number of old ladies who had no other means of assistance.7
During his last few months, when he had less than a year’s salary in a savings account and considered selling the family home on Bread Lane, one of his principal concerns was the problems those whom he had assisted would face after his death. He wrote in October, 1906, that he had given 47,000 rubles (approximately $23,500) to people in need between 1890 and 1905. His salary in 1897 was raised to 18,000 rubles a year and was 22,000 rubles when he was retired in 1905. Moreover, between 1890 and 1905 he received a total of 58,217 rubles in royalties from the sale of his books. In other words, his private charities were considerable. His knowledge of them was also precise.8
His charitable actions began in the late 1860’s and probably represented in part the humanizing influence of Grand Duchess Helen Pavlovna, Baroness Edith Raden, and the other generous women whom he knew at court and who were deeply engaged in charitable enterprises of one kind or another. At the same time, they no doubt sprang from the deep Christian spirit he had imbibed at home and which strongly affected his view of life around him, though perhaps not of Russian life in general. His generosities are especially noteworthy because he was so obsessed with money and kept such a precise and niggardly account of his income and expenditures. He refused to borrow money, hated the very idea of credit, and felt insecure unless he had no financial worries, attitudes which almost certainly had their roots in his childhood, when his father had worked so hard to educate his large family and to provide them a respectable life in a society in which the Pobedonostsevs did not possess social standing. Genteel poverty and jollity need not be associated, although they often are, especially in fiction, and ambition may also be clothed in casual and relaxed approaches. However, the Pobedonostsev family atmosphere was austere and even grim, and the puritanical training he received at home colored and strengthened his precise, pedantic approach toward life. This approach helps to explain both his scorn for idlers and his venomous criticism of abstract ideas.
Not only were Pobedonostsev’s personal accounts meticulously detailed, but he displayed a remarkably petty interest in the income from his various publications. Authors are traditionally sensitive to every action which can affect the sales and influence of the works which have consumed their time and intellectual energy. However, the abundant material available concerning Pobedonostsev’s direction of the Synod Press, the attention he devoted to advertising his publications, his correspondence with the business manager of the Moscow office of the Press, and other evidence reveal that he was almost scandalously involved in the sale of his books, and possessed an extraordinary interest in increasing income from them. In the last twenty years of his life, he had the Synod Press advertise his publications on the covers of all of its books and pamphlets. He pressed Michael Katkov, Sergei Petrovskii, and other newspaper editors to ensure that his books and pamphlets received attention early, and he devoted careful effort to the advertisements for which he paid. He harassed his printers and publishers about bookstores which were deficient in making his publications available, about the frequency and accuracy of their accounts for each volume, and about suggestions designed to increase sales, from more attractive jackets to a range of discounts. In short, his concern with money was considerably greater than one would expect and sheds some illumination upon his attitudes and ideas.9
The petty puritanism and the zeal and care Pobedonostsev devoted to his finances help explain the style of his thought and the thrust of his thinking and actions. The fervor he devoted to his cause is also reflected in the intellectual dishonesty which marred the work of the last three decades of his life. In fact, his righteousness may have become fierce because of his own secret shame at transgressions he would have denounced in anyone else. A frank person, never touched personally by the breath of corruption, ruthless for what he believed the good of Russia, he often deliberately distorted the meaning of some of the books and articles he translated and edited. Although he had been trained as a lawyer and was himself a competent historian, he often failed to indicate in any way that he was not translating the original fully and accurately. Those passages which he did not distort by omissions were translated correctly. This quality is a great aid for anyone who seeks to understand Pobedonostsev, because his omission of sentences, paragraphs, and even pages often revealed his views perhaps more clearly than what he actually wrote or translated.
Perhaps a few examples will suffice to demonstrate how his zeal as a publicist or propagandist overcame his training and the high intellectual and moral standards he claimed for himself and required of others. Some of these unmarked excisions are revealing in their very pettiness; others illuminate his whole philosophy by their significance. Thus, his translation of Emerson’s essay, “Works and Days,” omitted election day and Thanksgiving Day from the list of American national holidays Emerson had included. His translation of Edmond Demolins’ A quoi tient la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons included the critique made by William II of the German school system for allegedly neglecting character and failing to prepare for a life of struggle, but eliminated the passage in which Demolins attacked the German emperor for asserting that the function of schools was to produce tools of the state. Similarly, his version of Demolins’ L’Education nouvelle omitted Demolins’ criticism of a French law prohibiting foreigners from teaching other languages in France.10
When publishing translations which dealt with the church and the state, he was similarly precise in his excisions, without any indication of this fact. Thus, his translation of a part of Herbert Spencer’s The Study of Sociology did not include Spencer’s criticism of the drift toward increased government action in social fields and toward a more centralized government. In the same chapter, Pobedonostsev omitted, also without any indication of this fact, a brief section in which Spencer declared that morals could not be taught, even by the school or by the church. Finally, in his translation from a chapter in Gladstone’s The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture, which he deeply admired, he omitted Gladstone’s very last paragraph, with no indication of this fact:
I have yet one more closing word. I have desired to make this humble offering at the shrine of Christian belief in general, and have sought wholly to avoid the questions which concern this or that particular form of it. For there is a common cause, which warrants and requires common efforts. Far be from me the intention hereby to undervalue particular beliefs. I have not intentionally said a word to disparage any of them. It will in my view be an evil day, and a day of calamity, when men are tempted, even by the vision of a holy object, to abate, in any region or in the smallest fraction, the authority of conscience, or to forget that the supreme title and the supreme efficacy of truth lies in its integrity.11
He not only grossly misrepresented, by omissions, the thoughts of those whose works he “translated,” but he was also guilty of deliberate distortion of the words of others and of plagiarism. Thus, in January, 1887, he requested that Bishop Savva, who was editing the works of Metropolitan Filaret, remove from one of Filaret’s letters an indication that a member of the imperial family had not been a member of the Orthodox Church. Two years later, when Alexander III in some anger asked him to explain his policies toward the Baltic Lutherans, for which the Russian government was being bitterly attacked, in his defense he fabricated a damaging quotation from a sermon supposedly made by a Lutheran bishop in Riga in 1864 and misrepresented an official report of the same year on the Baltic area. He admitted this privately when queried by the German ambassador, but argued that no one could expect such a busy man as he to go to the sources for every statement he made.12
His “borrowing” from Bakhmetev’s book on the history of the Church is only one of several examples of plagiarism. Perhaps the most interesting illustration is revealed by comparing the final section of the fourth chapter of Max Nordau’s popular Die conventiollen Lügen der Kulturmenschheit, which was published in 1883, and Pobedonostsev’s chapter in Moskovskii sbornik (Moscow Collection) entitled “The Great Lie.” Pobedonostsev clearly borrowed ideas, phrases, and even entire sentences from Nordau, without acknowledgment. Moreover, his correspondence reveals that he had also inserted translations of sections of Nordau’s “remarkable book, . . . which contains a masterly critique of both parliamentarism and of the press,” into Grazhdanin, without indicating the source. The irony is that Pobedonostsev was antisemitic and thought positivism a mortal danger for Russia. However, he was willing to use, without credit, the words of a Jew whom he also recognized as “a great radical and positivist.”13
Pobedonostsev’s personal qualities and temperament help explain both the fundamentals and the style of his political philosophy, which was in the Karamzin tradition of Russian thought in its attitude toward the state. He thought first of the state as naturally as an American thinks first of the individual. The individual, indeed humanity itself, had less significance in his thinking than did the state, and was relegated to fourth place behind the state, the Church, and the family. The state, and the Church in union with the state, were the foundations upon which his political philosophy was erected, with the family a cooperating instrument of these senior agencies, to all of which the individual was subject. Even so, and perhaps because of this, his philosophy can best be explained by beginning with his view of the nature of man, of Russian man in particular, and of the evils of his age.
Pobedonostsev was an eternal foe of abstractions or general theories and of those who used them. At the same time, his own views inevitably hardened into abstract theories which became sharply defined as he grew older and more conservative. For him, as for all reactionaries, man by nature was “weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious.” Like Hobbes, who has been called “the Baroque fore-runner of the modern police state” and like the philosophers and practitioners of authoritarianism, he “vilified the human nature.” His writings are saturated with descriptions of the frailties and follies of man and of the particular evils of the age which nourished these inherent weaknesses. In some private meditations, he wrote in November, 1860, “Every man is a lie, and every word said by him is an idle word of self-delusion.” This quotation from Thomas à Kempis reflected his views concerning the “nothingness” of man when he was young. Maurice Bompard, the French ambassador to St. Petersburg from 1903 to 1908, found the old statesman still convinced that man was fundamentally and basically weak and that all his instincts led him to evil. In fact, Pobedonostsev viewed man with a combination of pity and horror and was mildly surprised that humanity had survived.14
Russians constituted a particular case, because he thought he was well acquainted with the nature of the Russian man and because he was convinced that Russians by nature had peculiar Haws. Thus, he believed that “inertness and laziness are generally characteristic of the Slavonic nature” and that for these reasons Russians more than most people required relentlessly firm and vigorous leadership. He thought Russians were particularly obsessed with money, power, and drink and that they were marked by “decomposition and weakness and untruth.” He once declared that outside the imperial palaces lay Russia, “an icy desert and an abode of the Bad Men.” When pressed by foreigners in private conversations to justify his policies, he cited particular weaknesses of Russian character, made worse by the simple fact that Russia was a century behind even Central Europe.15
A corollary to his assumption that man was by nature evil and weak was his condemnation of those who assumed that man could reason or that reason could be an effective tool for any but a tiny minority, whom he called “the aristocracy of intellect.” Except for the minority, he saw man as a vessel, an object of soft wax molded and formed by three forces utterly beyond his control: the unconscious, land, and history. Probably no statesman in modern times, not even Hitler, so directly and openly glorified the unconscious as he did. Noting that “the healthy do not think about health,” he urged that society be allowed by men to operate as an organ of the body does, “simply and unconsciously.” He declared that “true, sound intelligence is not logical, but intuitive, because the aim of intelligence consists not in finding or showing reasons but in believing and trusting.”
Under this philosophy, of course, knowledge itself is evil, except for knowledge of one’s national history. He would have accepted the apothegm of Barrès that the necessary foundation of a state is a cemetery, for he saw the “congenial seed” of a nationality in “the unconscious sphere of feeling, accumulated from our ancestors.” Since the capabilities of all but the minority are so limited, man must realize simply that his roots are in the past and that he derives from his ancestors. More he cannot understand. The man who is not satisfied with instinctive feeling and who by himself seeks truth and his own equilibrium automatically idolizes reason and becomes a dangerous fanatic, threatening the unity and the very existence of society. The great, essential, and living truths are above the mind, and the great mass of men can receive ideas only through feeling. The will of man is hidden deep in the soul, where the intellect cannot penetrate. The only supports of man’s will can be faith and religious feeling, and the Christian faith alone can perforate the principles of egotism and pride, reach the core of man, and give him true freedom in his recognition of necessity. Pobedonostsev so viewed the nature of man that, although he wished ardently to end drinking and drunkenness and supported teetotalling societies, he admitted that prohibition was impossible. In short, society was forced to tolerate sin and evil.16
There were exceptions, of course, and his view was not always that bleak. He had a special affection for childhood and believed either that children did not possess the faults and frailties he noted among their elders or that corrupt society was responsible for the flourishing of these hidden qualities after childhood. Pobedonostsev’s “good society,” if he could envision one, was like Carlyle’s, with freedom in discipline, no sense of time, rest and sleep, and a mother’s love.
Some few individuals also escaped the fatal flaw which affected all other humans. Grand Duchess Helen Pavlovna, Baroness Edith Raden, Nicholas Ilminskii, and Sergei Rachinskii were among these few. Others, who lived quietly as unsung heroes in the countryside, had been born with or had somewhere learned the harmony and equilibrium of thought and action, and had come to recognize that the body works best without thought, silently, “without system.” These sound and sensible men and women unknowingly and unconsciously lived blameless lives and developed unmatched character.17
He knew little of the peasant or of rural life, had no especial veneration for established peasant traditions or institutions, and indeed was far removed from the ideas of the Slavophils, who had had particular respect for the narod and their institutions. Given his view of human nature, he could hardly idolize the people in mass when he had such scorn for them as individuals. However, on his first trip through European Russia, one made in the summer of 1863 with the then heir to the throne, he was deeply impressed by the enthusiastic respect shown for the heir “by the Rus of Moscow and of Suzdal from the depths of the Russian heart, . . . with their purely Russian blood, clear eyes, satisfied faces, radiant with happiness, beauty, and intelligence.” This view of the narod was evanescent, but it did return on occasion when he read the letters and books of Rachinskii and Ilminskii, who were working daily among the peasantry. Above all, however, the narod appear in his letters to Alexander III, for in times of crisis he identified himself as the true interpreter of the narod, that mystical body of Muscovites and of the Russian rural population who supported all of the policies he advocated and who were the reservoir of the pure and good from which the salvation of Russia would ultimately come. In purporting to speak for the simple and unspoiled, he was of course simply using old-fashioned Slavophil nationalism against a simple-minded tsar who had already been led to believe that Russia’s problems were due to feeble leadership, scheming bureaucrats, and ambitious intellectuals.18
Like most dour and pessimistic philosophers and statesmen, he was convinced that his own age was subject to particularly corrosive evils, all thriving because of the basic weakness of Russian character and of Russian society. The principal danger he fought was the presumption that man was perfectible, which led to doubt, discontent, irritation, and fantasies on one hand, and explained laziness, the vogue of credit, and other modern and artificial approaches to life on the other. At the heart of this basic misconception and in part responsible for it was the belief that man was a rational creature and that “the fanaticism of formal logic” could resolve the problems the state faced. He urged that knowledge was the root of evil, and that doubt provided access to it. He considered speculative thought “destructive, suicidal, and sinful.” Proud, sophisticated intellectuals in particular did not recognize that rationalism is an art and not a science. They were instead seduced by arguments, abstractions, and swollen self-interest into attitudes which were irrelevant, subject to vast and rapid fluctuations, and highly dangerous. He would have accepted Iurii Samarin’s phrase, “Revolution is nothing else but rationalism in action,” and he would have agreed with Pascal that most problems arose “because of man’s inability to sit still in a room.” The belief that man and society could be improved by individual or group action and that reason, not faith, should guide Russia was responsible for most of Russia’s problems, particularly for the subversive doctrines concerning parliamentary and democratic government and concerning unbelief.19
The vogue of rationalism, which corroded all of Russia’s healthy values and beliefs, was also responsible for the vanity and vulgarity of Russian life, the increasing hypocrisy, and the spread of drunkenness, even among the clergy. The press was a reflection of these vices as well as a significant contributor. He considered newspapers “the most irresponsible and violent despotism,” “the fatal disintegrating force,” one of the causes of “decomposition and weakness and untruth.” Throughout his life, as a profoundly anti-intellectual moralist, he found Russia characterized by falsehood, irresponsible talk, deceit, injustice, cupidity, hypocrisy, and vulgarity. These and the human foibles which so annoyed him—the theater during Lent, gambling, ostentatious dress, excessive drinking—were all due to the cult of rationalism. “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity” was his perpetual croak of despair. “All fades, all vanishes, all disintegrates, all deceives.”20
In this grim picture, he identified three institutions which might save Russia and even enable her to provide guidance for other threatened peoples. These institutions, which were at the heart of his philosophy, were the state, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the family, with their functions and authority overlapping and intermingled, but with the state central. As a highly educated, widely read intellectual who came from an academic family, he was also much interested in the educational system as a contributor to the establishment of a stable society. However, he was convinced that an educational system reflected a society, its character, its history, and its climate, and that it neither could nor should be used to transform it. He did agree that “learning is light,” but he ridiculed the proposal that Russia should consider the establishment of compulsory and free primary education. He thought laws restricting child labor were unreasonable and senseless. He was certain that the educational system in its every aspect should remain under the direct control of the state and the Church, as the 1884 regulations established for Russian universities and his active campaign for parish schools reveal. He believed fervently that “a university in the true meaning of the word must serve society with its high authority for analyzing, testing, and controlling all ideas rising in that society.”21
His views with regard to the character and role of education were consistent throughout his life, except for his recognition after 1880 that elementary education of a primitive kind was a necessity and for the lively interest he developed in his last decade in secondary school education for the elite. He paid remarkably little attention to higher education until the 1890’s, apparently because he did not believe that some of the ills of which he complained within the government could be eliminated by improved training for bureaucrats. When he did begin to direct his attention to the secondary and higher education of Russia’s future ruling group, he borrowed heavily from studies of England’s public schools, which impressed him in every way. For the future statesmen and the “enlightened minority,” a detailed knowledge of their family, nation, and Church, and of the climatic and geographic conditions of Russian society were vital. Since they were to be educated for important state duties, they were to know foreign languages, literatures, and societies, though not so well as their own. They were to acquire knowledge of the antagonistic states and racial groups surrounding their nation. They were not only to be learned, but they were also to be experienced “social authorities,” sagacious, intelligent, and respected. They should, moreover, possess wives who would read together with them evenings and who would cooperate in charitable work in the neighborhood.
Pobedonostsev was very precise not only in his insistence upon “the harmonious development of all the human faculties” of the ruling group, but also in his prescription of pedagogical methods. Thus, he advocated that this elite be educated in boarding schools for nine months of the year and live with their families the remaining three months. Life at school was to resemble family life, for a small group of students was to live in the home of each instructor. The faculty was to consist not of learned specialists, but of wellrounded men who would dress as the students did, join in their games, and act as fathers as well as instructors. The curriculum was to create character as well as intelligence, to stimulate incentive and loyalty to duty, and to ensure both physical health and clarity of expression. Learning was to be acquired by seeing, doing, and travelling, not by lectures or memory.
He did not develop so fully his ideas with respect to the highest levels of formal education, but his ideas for university life, the curriculum, the faculty, and pedagogical methods were similar to those for the secondary school. The ideal professor was one who devoted his entire life to his students, with great patience, enthusiasm, and love for them and for his service. He was specifically not to be an intellectual, because this frequently led to irreligion, to liberalism, and to poisoning the entire educational system.22
So far as the mass of the Russian people was concerned, he declared that “schools must fit the people.” Since most children in the community must earn their living, most of their education must be conducted at home, where they should master their father’s work. Sons of miners should become miners, sons of sailors, sailors, and sons of peasants, peasants. The only formal education of these millions should be provided by the Church in a brief period of primary school, which should not be a step to higher education. Knowledge should not be the goal: indeed, no well-ordered schools should have examinations. In fact, the pupils should first learn, “know thyself,” which to him meant their “milieu, their country, their nature, their people with its soul.” The main purpose of primary education was to instruct the youngsters to know, love, and fear God, to love their native land, and to honor and obey their parents. The emphasis was therefore moral, rather than intellectual, and the brief period of primary school should therefore concentrate on the “four R’s,” reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion. He would have agreed with Wellington that “instruction without religion produces only clever devils,” and he was convinced that “educated and unemployed fools,” marred by vanity and conceit, constituted a tremendous danger for Russia.
Thus, for Pobedonostsev, the primary school should provide Russian children with “the basic elements of intellectual and moral culture” and should also “leave them in that place and in the milieu in which they belong.” He emphasized that everyone should remain “in that place, in that area, in that corner where fate has placed him.” The place of women was therefore in the home. He feared lest primary education excite a love of learning or create “discontent and ambition.” He would have approved the statement of Nicholas I, “Instruction must never be given except to teach one to fill better the office to which the pupil is destined. In the countryside, the school sometimes does more harm than good. By teaching peasants to read, one exposes them to knowing bad books.”23
Just as the curriculum of the primary school should emphasize virtue and native Russian skills, so should the teacher exemplify the best qualities of his country. He should naturally be an Orthodox Christian from the same stratum of society as his pupils. He should be concise, clear, patient, lively, attentive, well mannered, highly disciplined, and well prepared. Finally, he should be completely absorbed by and dedicated to his work, not a “hireling” who considers his position a “temporary stage toward a better arrangement of his own life.” Like Socrates, or an unsung hero, he should love his work and should be prepared to give his life to his calling.24
The family for Pobedonostsev was clearly a more central institution than was the primary school. Indeed, he saw the family as the fundamental instrument for educating and controlling man. He referred to it as “the spiritual and cultural nursery of citizens,” “the foundation of the state,” and “the eternal element of prosperous societies.” For him, the family was “the ultimate social institution.” It also reflected the character of the society of which it was a part and therefore served as a perfect illustration of it.
During the years in which he was a scholar in the field of Russian civil law, he devoted a great deal of attention to marriage, the powers and responsibilities of the parents, especially the husband, the problems connected with separation and divorce, the rights of children, issues raised by illegitimacy and adoption, and all of the complications connected with inheritance. His Kurs grazhdanskago prava (Course on Civil Law) reflected enormous learning not only on the history and position of the Russian family, but also on the family among the national minorities on the western frontiers and in central Asia, among other Slavic peoples, in western Europe, and in antiquity. He even read carefully and summarized the views of Lewis Morgan, whose study of kinship relations and rights among the Seneca Indians was published by the Smithsonian Institute in 1871. Morgan’s Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity in the Human Family was studied carefully by Marx and Engels and heavily influenced the views of Engels in particular on the family.25
Pobedonostsev translated two important French and German studies into Russian, Heinrich Thiersch’s Uber christliches Familienleben, published originally in 1854 and produced in Russian in two editions, one in 1861 and the second forty years later, and Frederick Le Play’s La Constitution essentielle de l’humanité, published originally in 1881 and translated in 1897. Thiersch was a conservative Protestant theologian and humanist from Marburg who emphasized the religious and social character of marriage and the family. Pobedonostsev was especially impressed by Thiersch’s ideas concerning the personal qualities required and produced by marriage and family life, the powers of the husband in a Christian marriage, and the role the state church should play.
Le Play was a conservative French Catholic engineer and sociologist who travelled widely throughout Europe in particular and whose books, articles, journal, and organization helped create the Social Catholic movement in France in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Le Play’s ideas had considerable influence in France during the dark days after 1870 and again during the 1930’s and 1940’s, when Marshall Pétain and his government sought to emphasize some of the institutions and values Le Play had. Pobedonostsev may have been introduced to Le Play and his work by Count Sergei G. Stroganov, who had met the Frenchman in 1837. He particularly appreciated Le Play’s concept of the role the family should play in a stable society. He wrote an essay about Le Play, sought to persuade Count Dmitrii Tolstoy when he was Minister of Interior of the virtues of Le Play’s view, and through Olga Novikov called Le Play to the attention of Gladstone. The great English liberal politician thought highly of Le Play, except for his attitudes toward the Old Regime, Napoleon, and the Papacy. Pobedonostsev agreed with these criticisms, but considered Le Play one of the most profound minds Europe produced in the nineteenth century.26
Pobedonostsev was convinced that the family was “the foundation of all social life and order,” that moral development and all human welfare were based upon it, that it was “the foundation of all enduring happiness,” and that it even resembled and “anticipated” the Kingdom of God. In Russia and among Russians, “for all those familiar with our history and conditions of life,” it had its origins both in Christian doctrine and in history. It was based upon religious faith and upon a religious ceremony. Marriage therefore was an indissoluble contract of a sacred character, broken at peril to society when that society allowed “personal egotism” to triumph over higher values. Pobedonostsev opposed civil marriage, separation, and divorce. He considered divorce a blow against the highest interests of the state, as well as a violation of a solemn contract sanctified by the Church, recognized by the state, and approved by society. He agreed that women might suffer because of such views, but he reasoned that this religious definition of marriage defended their “high moral position” and dignity better than did or could any other marriage system.27
For Pobedonostsev, the family was responsible for repressing the nature of the child, harnessing and controlling one of man’s most fundamental instincts, providing for the orderly perpetuation of the human race, ensuring social stability, and maintaining history and tradition. He believed, as did Le Play, that the child from birth was weak and that God in entrusting it to the parents gave them the choice of raising either a dutiful or a parasitic and destructive child. The parental power, “the only power established by God in the Decalogue, is the highest power,” and “willing obedience . . . is the only virtue of the child.” The function of the parents, particularly the father, was to repress the child’s instincts firmly and surely, through force, love, and fear. “Faithfulness, love, sacrifice, and obedience” should be learned by the child in the home. The father should also instill into the child knowledge of and respect for the Decalogue and provide him the physical and moral education to enable him to assume his alloted place in society.
Pobedonostsev recognized that economic and other worldly considerations were important factors in marriage and in family life. He also believed that the state’s role and interest in marriage and in the family placed upon it some responsibilities and duties, with regard to defending the sanctity of the religious bond and to guarding the interests of minors. It should, in short, seek to ensure that relationships between parents and children were of a Christian character, like those between Christian masters and servants. In fact, the Pobedonostsev translations of Thiersch and Le Play included several strong declarations concerning the responsibility of the state to promote social reform through assisting in the establishment of cooperatives and of workers’ associations. The European Social Christian view of society and the family led Pobedonostsev to urge upon the state active social policies which he ordinarily rejected, probably because he thought carrying out such policies beyond the capacities of the Russian state system.28
Pobedonostsev’s research into the position of the family in various societies led him naturally to study various forms of communities, such as the obshchina or commune in Russia, the zadruga among some of the southern Slavs, and other such groups in other societies. He read a great deal about the commune and other such organizations, but his knowledge was not clear or precise. In fact, as a city boy throughout his life, he knew almost nothing of the Russian countryside and its problems. Except as a member of the Church or of one of the sects or as a statistic, the Russian peasant did not exist for him. Moreover, he wrote nothing significant about the commune until 1875. From the beginning, he was a supporter of it, but believed that “different political and economic conditions” would undermine it as soon as “the economic laws” visibly at work in western Europe began to have an effect within Russia. To him, the commune had many virtues for Russia’s stage of development at that time. It had kept central the idea that land was “the base of the state’s strength, the foundation of the whole structure, the main store of economic strength, the repository of the natural elements of nationality in all their basic characteristics.” It preserved the belief that the land was the peasants’, it provided the optimum form for economic development by pooling labor and capital at the necessarily primitive level, it satisfied the primary needs of all, and it ensured the government a reasonably effective system for collecting taxes and recruiting soldiers. As long as the commune operated satisfactorily, the family would remain a lively institution and Russia would manage to avoid perils which harassed some European states.29
On the other hand, he recognized that the commune was both a primitive and a temporary institution which would wither away when more powerful economic forces appeared. In fact, even before 1880, he noted briefly that what he came to call semeinye uchastki, or family farms, would and should replace the commune. By the late 1880’s, he concluded that the state should seek to hasten the dismantling of the commune and its replacement by small, free farms. This view is presented in considerable detail in an article in 1889 in Russkii vestnik (Russian Herald), which he inserted later into the last edition of his Kurs grazhdanskago prava. In effect, he urged that the Russian government seek the creation of farms much like the American homesteads, of which he read a great deal and which impressed him enormously. He was in fact advocating “the wager on the strong” which Stolypin launched in 1906.
Pobedonostsev was concerned far more with the peasants in the communes than with the large landowners, whose estates were breaking up in the last third of the nineteenth century. Convinced that the old regime on the land could not survive, he urged a national policy of establishing a landholding system in which each peasant family would receive property, “sufficient to satisfy the needs of the family so that its members do not have to go elsewhere for seasonal work to support themselves.” His definition of the size of the property was always vague, in part because of the nature of the problem and in part because he was so poorly informed concerning rural life. He wrote several times of a small holding, “according to the type developed in North America in the Homestead farm,” and he apparently had in mind from one hundred to three hundred desiatin, or from three hundred to eight hundred acres.30
According to Pobedonostsev, the problem was not that the system of landholding had to be changed—economic change was inevitable, as he thought it had been in western Europe—but the way in which it was achieved and timed. Thus, while convinced that the commune was doomed, he also wrote that “it would be extremely dangerous to adopt measures which would lead artificially [sic] to the decay of the commune.” First of all, the state had to direct and control the reorganization. The essential economic and social information was not available, and only the central state authorities could collect and analyze these data. The transfer should also be directed in such a way as to prevent “merchants, Jews, and kulak-usurers, a great evil for the state and for the local population,” from acquiring land. The government should establish a peasant class with “indivisible and inalienable” ownership of property and with a fixed domicile and roots in a particular hearth. Finally, the state should make provisions for capital and credit for the new landowners, so that the change should be economically and socially productive and so that emigration to the cities could be controlled. This would prevent the creation of an urban landless and unemployed proletariat with a high crime rate. In short, he produced a program for Russia’s rural population which he hoped would maintain and strengthen the autocratic system of government and at the same time adapt Russia’s land system to new economic forces.31
The Church was incomparably more important for Pobedonostsev than even the family, the institutions related to the family, or the organization of economic life in the countryside. In fact, the Church and religion were central to his life and saturated his beliefs and policies. Orthodoxy meant the membership of the Russian Orthodox Church or the ethnic Great Russians when he spoke or wrote in general terms about Russia or about the state. While he did recognize that Russia contained other religious groups and many national minorities, he saw the Russians in the Russian Orthodox Church, with those White Russians and Little Russians who were also Orthodox, at the center of his world. The Old Believers and the sects resided in an outer circle, and the non-Russians—Finns, Germans, Poles, Jews, Uzbeks, and others—lived on the empire’s borders in a shadowy, distant circle, given serious thought only when he had to consider issues or policies involving them. Doctrine simply was not a subject of discussion for him, in part because he was not interested in doctrine and in part because he thought it such a rooted matter for any religious group that it was beyond discussion.32
He was convinced that Russia was more than a country, that Orthodoxy was more than a religion, and that they together constituted a world. He considered Russia not necessarily superior to other societies and cultures, but different, so different that perhaps only a Russian could understand his religion and country, just as perhaps only an Englishman could understand his religion and country. He was convinced that churches, like races or ethnic groups, had distinct virtues and defects, reflecting their history and tradition. The Russian Orthodox Church, for example, was weakened by ignorance, superstition, and inactivity, but these were temporary and reflected the country’s backwardness. Similarly, Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, and other forms of Protestantism had particular weaknesses which reflected their histories. Whatever its shortcomings, he saw the Russian Orthodox Church as “the church of all of the people,” one which answered a deep-seated popular need, and “a living organism held together by sentiment and conscience.”
The Church became “identical with and inseparable from the history of the Russian narod” in the ninth century and had since then been the “life, truth, and full foundation of our existence.” He believed that “the power of the state is based solely on the unity of consciousness between the people and the state, on the national faith.” Because the history of the Church and the state had been so entwined for almost a thousand years, the Church was and should always be the state or national church, with no other religious groups allowed or tolerated. In fact, he sought to reduce and ultimately to destroy the power of all other religious groups within the empire. He thought that the Russian state should ignore and refuse to provide official recognition of beliefs other than Orthodoxy, because recognition gave legal status, which strengthened the rival religions and helped delay the day when everyone in Russia would share the same faith. However, while he vigorously advocated forceful policies with regard to the religious minorities, he recognized that elimination of these groups would inevitably require time, because “even lies should be removed slowly.”33
Pobedonostsev believed so strongly that the character and fate of each state were determined by religion and that sooner or later one religious group would acquire absolute dominance that he could not understand the policy of the American government regarding religious toleration. Indeed, he predicted that the Catholic Church would take advantage of the freedom the American Protestant rulers granted and would one day seize power, establish Catholicism as the state religion, and seek to root out all other faiths.34
Just as he believed that the nature of society and religion made coexistence of two or more religions in one state inconceivable, so also he was convinced that the union or even the close cooperation of two creeds was impossible. He declared that each racial group possessed distinctive customs and traditions, that these shaped their religious beliefs and their political institutions as well, and that it was both impossible and dangerous for one society to attempt to borrow ideas and beliefs from another or to impose its values upon another.35 Faith is “parcelled out according to nationalities,” and is “intolerant and uncompromising.” Moreover, the most important elements of a faith cannot be defined, expressed, or separated, even by an articulate believer.36
The role of the Russian Orthodox Church was to maintain the unity in faith and belief essential for the maintenance of stability. In other words, religion was to act as a cement for society. The strong and stable society should therefore have only one religion, regardless of the number of races it contained. He wrote that “there are and there must be no Russian Baptists.” He often said that he who deserts Orthodoxy “ceases to be Russian, not only in his thoughts and work, but also in his way of living and in his dress.”37
Pobedonostsev believed that “the Church and the Church alone has allowed us to remain Russians and to unite our scattered strength.” In fact, the greatest quality of the Church was its unity with the narod. He was persuaded that Orthodoxy alone could provide the unity without which no one would have confidence in the government or in the state. He considered that one of the greatest advantages deriving from this system was the equality provided by the unity. “Our Church is the house of the Russian man, the most hospitable house, the house where all are equal.” The Church in thus satisfying one of man’s elemental desires helped at the same time to strengthen the stability of society.
The Church was to accomplish its mission through providing and supporting the traditions, the loved ceremonies and spectacles, and the revered superstitions and beliefs. Pobedonostsev thought the “majestic, simple, unifying” rituals of Orthodoxy the embodiment of religious and national principles. He was enormously interested in religious song, which he valued most highly. In other words, the Church was to link society with the past and to consecrate the national history. He had great contempt for those who opposed or ridiculed his philosophy, and he considered intellectuals, those without faith who exalted reason, as Russia’s most dangerous citizens. He argued that the fall of the Roman Empire was due largely to the decline of faith among the intellectuals. Indeed, his principal series of essays, Moskovskii sbornik, identified intellectuals and unbelief as the greatest single danger facing Russia and Europe. He so emphasized tradition and unconscious acceptance of ritual and ceremony that he considered colorful, eloquent, and even notably spiritual priests dangerous. He preferred priests who quietly promoted “unconscious conservatism.” For this, the best type of priest was one firm in his beliefs and in his adherence to traditions, modest, quiet, unlearned, and devoted to his simple duties.38
The character and temper of Pobedonostsev’s approach to the problems of government are as important as his ideas themselves. He had a positive dislike and distaste for any kind of enthusiasm or liveliness. He was extremely critical of imaginative literature, he was savage concerning eloquence, he lacked a sense of humor, and passion or high feeling was completely remote from him. Even his hatreds were cold and bureaucratic, and he lacked originality, system, or organization. In his political philosophy he was critical of anything original. In many ways, he was a Plyushkin of Russian political institutions and thought, jealously guarding all the scraps and rags of history, so long as they were old. He was not only suspicious and resentful of anything new, but, as an ambassador once noted, he saw “the work of the devil everywhere.”39
Most, if not all, of Pobedonostsev’s ideas after 1880 were borrowed directly from others. More than half of his publications during the period after 1880 were translations of others’ works, and in his own writings he frequently reiterated or rephrased the ideas of other people. Moreover, he did this without any deep understanding or system. In fact, to understand Pobedonostsev’s view of the state and of the Russian government, one must note carefully the position he occupied in the 1860’s and 1870’s and the view this gave him of the governing process. First of all, he had no close friends, above all male friends of his own age. Prince Odoevskii and Fedor Tiutchev, for example, were both a quarter of a century older than he. Dostoevsky, who cooperated closely with him in 1873 and who saw him frequently between 1877 and 1881, was only six years older than Pobedonostsev, but their friendship was quite brief and never truly close. None of the men with whom he worked, at Moscow University, in the judicial reform campaign, or in various administrative offices, became a friend. The memoirs and documents of these years reveal that he set himself apart behind an invisible social wall and had no close friendships with other Senators or members of the Council of State or with any of the leading statesmen of the day. His connections with other government leaders were remarkably slight. For example, when he joined the Council of Ministers in November, 1880, he had not met some of his new colleagues, even though they had all been high government officials in St. Petersburg for more than a decade.
The contemporaries besides Catherine Tiutchev with whom he had the warmest relations were two men who lived far from Moscow and St. Petersburg and with whom he carried on extensive correspondence. Sergei Rachinskii, a professor of botany at Moscow University until he resigned in 1866, spent the last twenty-five years of his life in the village of Tatev, near Smolensk. There he established a rural school and trained teachers for country schools, emphasizing reading, writing, arithmetic, and religious instruction. Between 1880 and his death in 1902, he wrote almost nine hundred letters to Pobedonostsev. His other closest friend, Nicholas Ilminskii, spent his adult life in Kazan, first at the seminary and later at a special school he started for training teachers to work among the non-Russian Moslem groups around Kazan. His correspondence with Pobedonostsev, most of which was published in 1895, was just as intensive as Rachinskii’s. In fact, Pobedonostsev considered these distant men the voice of true Russia and often cited their views when he wished to persuade Alexander III that the Russian people supported a particular position.40
During his first fifteen years in St. Petersburg, his closest friends were women, generally ladies-in-waiting whom he had come to know because their function and status originally resembled his. They were almost all a generation older than he, and their greatest days of influence had ended before he came to know them. Thus, his closest confidante for twenty years was Catherine Tiutchev, who was a lady-in-waiting at the court with her sister when Pobedonostsev became a tutor there. In the 1860’s and 1870’s, he became known to those who did help rule Russia largely through the salons of the Grand Duchess Helen Pavlovna, the aunt of Alexander II, who died in 1873; her daughter Catherine Mikhailovna, who died twenty years later; Countess Bludov, whose salon was one of the most important in the decade after 1873; and Baronness Edith Raden. Finally, he was a favorite of the Empress Maria Fedorovna, the wife of Alexander III, and of the last empress, Alexandra Fedorovna, often breakfasting with these influential women while waiting to see their husbands. He advised them and their children on books to read or places to visit, and walked and talked with them more than with the tsars when he stayed at Tsarskoe Selo or at Yalta in the Crimea.
Thus, the people Pobedonostsev knew well at court tended to be women and most were members of an earlier generation. The collection of nine essays about departed friends which Pobedonostsev published in 1896 is quite revealing: four (including the first three) are devoted to women; one to the Aksakov family; one to Nicholas Ilminskii; one to Senator Nicholas Kalachov, who had published some of his first articles forty years earlier; and two to Alexander III. The four women about whom he wrote included three of those in whose salons he found refuge during these years, Grand Duchess Helen Pavlovna, her daughter Catherine Michailovna, and Baroness Raden.41
Pobedonostsev’s view of the imperial family and of court life was also affected by the manner in which he entered the court and reached high position in the bureaucracy. He was introduced as a tutor, a bright and promising young university lecturer and government bureaucrat with no great connections and no important family. His rise in many ways was spectacular, but it was due to his own ability, to grinding hard work, and to simple good fortune. He remained an outsider, he lacked defenders, he was always aware that even his intellectual merit might not ensure his position, and he was surrounded by men of inferior ability who usually owed their rank and power to family connections or court intrigue. If it is difficult for a man to be a hero to his valet, it is even more demanding for him to acquire distinction in the eyes of his tutor. Thus, the views of the court which Pobedonostsev received were not attractive ones; the salons of the grand old ladies and the tutor’s chair both served to disillusion him about the character of the St. Petersburg government.
Finally, the peculiarities of the angle at which Pobedonostsev was introduced to high position gave him a singular definition of authority or power and of the way in which the government worked. The contempt he had for the bureaucracy, his faith in autocratic rule and his scorn for the autocrats he knew and their advisors, his belief that power ought to be husbanded and sheltered from the view of the public or its representatives, his conviction that “curves rule” in human affairs and that the central art of government is manipulation, and his conclusion that only a highly trained and knowledgeable elite could govern effectively—all these attitudes and ideas were shaped to some degree by the women who drew him into their circles and by his service as a tutor to the future tsars.42
During the twenty-five years he was under continuous attack as the man most responsible for the government’s repressive policies, even his most violent critics did not accuse him of profiting from his position, of assisting friends and relatives to advance in the bureaucracy or to profit from business with the state, or of being devoted to anything but his principles, harmful though they may have been. Even his most bitter critics admitted that Pobedonostsev neither sought power nor was grasping and ambitious. He preferred the power behind the throne or the role of invisible governor to that of ruling directly. Shortly after being named Director General of the Synod, the only important official administrative position he held, he wrote to the heir that he had always envied those who had minor and undemanding positions in which they could work quietly.
But people are so insane that they always try to enlarge their destiny and to extend their fate. I am not guilty in this. I have always feared to widen my responsibilities, but, against my will, fate has carried me further and further from my quiet enclosures and brought me to my present activity. I am not complaining, because I see in this the will of God, but I tremble before the great test, and I consider my life ended, that is, my life for my own sake. Now, I am bound hand and foot by fate.43
Somewhat later, Pobedonostsev wrote to Catherine Tiutchev, “I have always looked on it [power] as on a calamity, knowing that one in power must lose his freedom and become a servant to all.” He was often compared to Speransky, both by his contemporaries and by later observers, because both were the sons and grandsons of priests, were interested in reform of the judicial system, were welleducated Westerners, translated Thomas à Kempis, and acquired important positions in the Russian administration. Pobedonostsev always professed to be flattered by these comparisons and declared he had high admiration for Speransky’s intellectual ability and energy, even though his policies were “not always to my taste” and “his moral character did not always excite my sympathy.” However, he wrote that he could not understand Speransky’s “passionate drive for power,” his pining in quiet positions, his suffering when removed from power, and “his eagerness to grovel to be let out again.” Pobedonostsev could see no strength or greatness in the possession of power, and was stunned by the egoism and violence of those who sought it. He was always reverent of autocratic power and eager to serve as an advocate or advisor in its shadows, but he was a reluctant and unimaginative official.44
Since Pobedonostsev did not develop his thought into a consistent philosophic system, he did not describe with any systematic clarity his view of the nature and purpose of society and of government. Most of his work as a member of the governing class dealt with pressing practical problems, and much of his writing, particularly in his letters, was concerned with daily affairs. Nevertheless, even in these records, there is a considerable amount of data concerning his political philosophy, due to his custom frequently to describe the basic, fundamental, even “eternal” principles by which he believed governments and societies should operate. He did this particularly in his letters to Alexander III, who was, in fact, always a student of Pobedonostsev.
There was, of course, a very clear distinction in Pobedonostsev’s mind between the best procedure to adopt under given circumstances and the ideal practice under ideal circumstances. There was, too, a clear recognition of the distinction between the present community and the best attainable human community. This distinction for him was not so great as it has been for most people interested in politics. First of all, as a conservative he believed that the society which he surveyed contained many highly satisfactory institutions and that the changes which should be made were by no means drastic or revolutionary. In addition, and this is certainly even more significant, his view of human capabilities was not high. He ridiculed any idea of an “ideal society,” and he would certainly have used the word “utopian” as a term of ridicule. He sought the best attainable society, not the unattainable perfect community.
It is important also to recognize that Pobedonostsev’s Russia was not a secure or unchanging society. He believed that stability was the supreme virtue of a social organism, and his entire system was one which glorified static relationships. However, he did not believe that the struggle between good and evil, right and wrong, darkness and light, would cease, even in the best attainable society. Actually, even the best attainable society would not be reached. Even this finite community would always be “becoming,” would never “be.”
It should be clear now what the principal function or purpose of the autocratic state was: simply to provide balance, stability, or equilibrium, and to supply “the daily interests and needs of society.” These were its ultimate goals. To reach these goals, the absolute government was to provide “rational direction” by means of a “calm, humane, indulgent, and arbitrary administration.” It was to distinguish between light and dark, good and evil. It was, above all, to prevent the rise of nationalisms in the multinational Russian empire, through providing both force and equality. It was to override established laws and institutions whenever those laws and institutions interfered with the maintenance of equilibrium.
From this peace and quiet, he believed that splendid fruits would develop. These fruits, of course, compared to those envisoned by Aristotle or Sir Thomas More or Edward Bellamy—or even the makers of the American Constitution—are quite meager. Pobedonostsev declared that the first great consequence of the “establishment” of a well-organized and stable state would be reliance upon inertia, which he considered a vastly underrated force. Once stability had been obtained, inertia would work its slow magic, the “good side” of man would flower, and there would be a “slow moral improvement and uplift of the soul in society.”45
If one compares Pobedonostsev’s aims with those expressed in the preamble of the American Constitution, it becomes apparent that two of the goals sought by the American leaders, unity and tranquility, were also sought by Pobedonostsev. For the founders of the United States, however, unity and tranquility were not ends to the same degree that they were for him. They were also, to a considerable degree, means to the acquisition of three of the other expressed aims, justice, the general welfare, and the blessings of liberty. Of these, Pobedonostsev says nothing.
It is not surprising, given his view of the nature of man and his philosophy of government, that he viewed the Russian state in some ways as a family, with absolute parental authority and paternal care on one hand and unquestioning obedience and love on the other. He was certain that the ideal time for each individual was his childhood, and his state was designed to make that era permament. As a child, with no responsibilities or sense of time, with firm but gentle parental care and direction, surrounded by love and certain truth, and above all, with instinct and feeling ruling over the illusions of reason and freedom, man is truly happy. The short spiritual essays which he published in 1894 but which were written between 1856 and 1864 reveal that in his early thirties, as well as late in life, he frequently looked back upon his own childhood in Moscow as the time in which he had been happiest. He and his wife translated and published Minnie Mackay’s The Mighty Atom in 1897 because it demonstrated how modern pedagogical methods were destroying this paradise while at the same time failing to instill the necessary moral attitudes in children. His political philosophy in many ways represented an effort to create conditions under which the narod could live as a child lived.46
His translations of Frederick Le Play, Edmond Demolins, St. Augustine, and commentaries on St. Augustine and the City of God reveal that models for Pobedonostsev’s society had existed. He hoped to organize a Christian society such as the one which for a thousand years had made religion more important than race, except that the Christendom he sought was simply a national Christendom. He would have agreed with Ammianus Marcellinus that “life is never sweeter than under a pious king.” His ideal monarch was Louis IX, King of France in the second half of the thirteenth century, when everyone in each of the “estates” knew his place, social peace prevailed, the Church and the state ruled in harmony, and the king, a saint, sat under a tree and decided those few disagreements which arose within the society. In the 1880’s, he thought the reign of Nicholas I one of the “most clear and brilliant periods” of Russian history, with few and simple problems, clear policies, gifted advisors for the tsar, and a government strong enough to persuade the lion to lie down with the lamb. The reign of Alexander III, during which Pobedonostsev played a very important role, was a highly satisfactory one, though far from perfect, because it at least had preserved the principle of divine right and “the rule of the fittest.”47
The state, and the Church in union with the state, were the foundations upon which his political philosophy was erected. Although he wrote a great deal about the vital question of the sanctions of authority, his ideas were not completely clear. He wrote on occasion that the Russian ruler derived his power from divine right, but more frequently and insistently he spoke of the power of the tsar as “based solely on the unity of consciousness between the people and the state, on the national faith.” In his most important statement of this philosophy, the impassioned attack upon the proposals of Loris-Melikov which he gave at the Council of Ministers meeting on March 8, 1881, he asserted that “Russia was strong, thanks to the autocracy, thanks to the unlimited mutual confidence and intimate relationship between the narod and the tsar.” The most important justification for autocracy, of course, was historical, but he so clearly assumed this that he wrote little about it. The family played an important connecting role in the relationship between the narod and the state, especially in the essays he wrote in the last decade of his life. However, the idea of sobornost’, or community, so dear to the Slavophils, he never mentioned. Moreover, he did not seek to provide a legal rationale for the autocracy and would have scorned the very idea that this was necessary or even useful. Thus, the state for him was an expression of truth. “Power is founded on truth, and truth on power.” The state, power, good, and the narod were, thus, all connected in one indissoluble and blurred unity.48
Pobedonostsev recognized that autocracy was not a perfect form of government, but it was built on Russian history and tradition and “the evils of autocracy are the evils of society itself.” He vigorously opposed a zemskii sobor (territorial assembly) or other arrangements to provide some kind of representation for the most important and most highly educated groups in Russia. During the last ten or fifteen years of his life, the best defense of autocracy he could devise was a series of blistering attacks upon other forms of government, especially parliamentarism, in which the “personal ambition, vanity, and self-interest” of the members prevailed, eloquence and ambition were the most important qualities required, and “manipulators” acquired rule. They combined bribery and dogma in maintaining control, and the national interest was not even considered. Constitutions for him were “the instruments of the unrighteous, the weapon of intrigue.” Popular sovereignty was “the great falsehood of our time,” and democratic government was the most complex and difficult form of government known to man. It could not survive in a state which contained a number of nationalities, and it led inevitably to a Napoleonic dictatorship by way of materialism, infidelity, disorder, violence, and anarchy.49
In short, autocracy was the best form of government and the only conceivable one for Russia. It operated most effectively when the monarch was a dutiful father or shepherd for his country, distinguished by high moral standards. The autocrat was to represent the narod’s interests. By his travels and his presence at ceremonies, he was to strengthen the love of the narod for the state. In addition, he was to select able and energetic executive aids and to accept their advice in directing the state. These executive agents for Pobdonostsev were the principal instruments of rule, and efficient operation of the system depended upon them. Essentially, he sought to modernize the autocracy. His advice to Alexander III was, “Cherchez des capables.” His letters to the tsar and his correspondence with Catherine Tiutchev constantly reiterated that a few able men in responsible positions could resolve Russia’s principal problems.
These executives were first of all to be men of courage, willing to accept responsibility and to speak frankly to the tsar. They were to be hard-working, practical, sagacious, efficient; they were to have organizing ability; they were to operate with clear lines of authority and responsibility. In their advice to the Russian ruler, they were to consider “history, tradition, the actual position of the state, and the needs of national life.” Thoroughly schooled in the history and tradition of their nation, they were also to ignore and smash its binding laws and institutions when they believed this was required in the state’s interest. He justified violent and arbitrary government action and angrily denounced the moralistic interpretation of history and of political action for ignoring or giving insufficient weight to the national interest, which should always be the main concern of the state and its rulers. He defended “the conscious lie” of the statesman in a world which inevitably contained a considerable amount of evil, and he believed that superior men should be beyond criticism in life as well as in recorded history.50
In short, while he was a supporter of autocracy, he really believed in the forms of absolutism and in rule by an “aristocracy of intellect” or by men whom Le Play called “social authorities.” This group was quite different from those whom Burke called a “true natural aristocracy” and “an essential integral part of any large body rightly constituted,” because Pobedonostsev neglected the cultural framework or social institutions within which they would work. Authority by men such as these in a strong and respected centralized government would insure stability, just as the absence of such men and confusion in policy had led to a series of disasters and destroyed popular faith in the system.
Pobedonostsev’s admiration for bold men of energy and action, such as Captain Nicholas M. Baranov, Nicholas I. Ashinov, General Michael D. Skobelev, and Count Nicholas P. Ignatiev reflected his central views. It was unfortunate for him and for Russia that his judgments on men were so unsound, but his search for leaders of this type represented his own philosophy accurately, as did his scorn for the bureaucracy. Throughout his years of service in the Russian state system, he poured scorn on the bureaucrats, from the notaries he encountered in the Senate in 1846 and Panin and the others who sought to block the judicial reform in 1864 to the men with whom he had to deal in the last years of his career. He wrote that “all the evil from which we suffer came up from the bureaucracy, not down.” He remarked that “paper will tolerate all things.” He declared that one of the great curses of Russia was the spineless government official who was smooth and polished, solved small and unimportant problems, eliminated personality and efficiency from government, and skillfully and perpetually evaded major issues. One of them he noted “resembled an inadequate meal.” He did not identify any relationship between the size and quality of the Russian bureaucracy and the autocracy, although he did wonder why the English were successful in identifying immensely able men and in giving them authority. In fact, of course, his proposal for a kind of dictatorship of the few within the autocracy was a proposal to resolve the problems the government itself created.51
He wrote remarkably little about the landowning nobility. He apparently visited a landed estate only rarely, and then for brief visits to his father-in-law’s Smolensk property when he and his wife were en route to Salzburg for vacation. In fact, industrialists and merchants were much more the subject of his comment than were landowners, and he clearly preferred representatives of the middle class (but not intellectuals!) for executive positions. Indeed, he stated in the fifth edition of Moskovskii sbornik (Moscow Collection) in 1901 that the landed nobility as a class had ceased to have power and influence in Russia. However, he did believe that the nobility had acquired a special place of honor for their labors throughout Russian history, and he was convinced that they were more loyal to the state than were the bureaucrats, intelligentsia, merchants, or peasants.
Pobedonostsev was certain that “it is important in the highest degree that the landowning nobility remain on their estates within Russia and not crowd into the capitals.” He resisted those who sought to arrange congresses of the nobility, but he urged that their economic and political position be strengthened in every way possible and that they retain their preponderant position in the administration of justice, in the army, and in the creation of national ideals. It is significant that he urged that the landed nobility live in the country and did not propose that their role in the central administration or even at the highest levels of provincial administration be increased or even maintained. In short, the “aristocracy of intellect” and the “social authorities” could include members of the aristocracy, but that class should not dominate the government and should instead be one of the pools of talent from which the state should select its leaders. Pobedonostsev explicitly opposed on grounds of efficiency a system restricting the possibility of attaining positions of authority to only one class, and he did believe that merit should ideally be the determining factor.52
The base of the triangle of the Russian state system was the narod, a word he used frequently but failed to define clearly. The virtues he considered desirable and necessary for this group were duty and sacrifice, obedience, love of work and of order, Christian love for one’s fellow man, and submission to one’s inner, unconscious balance. He recognized that a man with these virtues would be considered uncreative by many, but he reiterated that a stable society, composed of placid and obedient citizens “who knew their place,” would develop a force more productive of enduring achievement than any other kind of society. In summary, then, his ideal citizen was the unsung hero, working constantly, quietly, and peacefully in his own sphere, seeking no reward but life itself, uncomplaining, and devoted to service to his community. The most frequent examples he offered were the rural teacher and the rural priest, poorly paid, unrewarded by the authorities for their contributions, but blindly devoted to their work and to service.53
A brief analysis of Pobedonostsev’s political philosophy and a quick survey of his state’s armory of instruments reveals several striking characteristics. To begin with, his ideas concerning the nature of man were fundamental to his entire philosophy and “justified” the arbitrary and authoritarian government he advocated. In addition, his belief that the character of the state was shaped by its national religious faith and by its traditional political and social institutions provided a base from which he could oppose “alien” ideas and institutions.
Nevertheless, Pobedonostsev’s system was not so well organized or traditional as it appeared. Perhaps this can be shown most clearly by neglecting for the moment the obvious weapons in the state’s hands and by identifying some of the principal instruments or elements he ignored or slighted. Neither justice nor the general welfare were of great significance to him. He did not appreciate the significance of a political façade, and there is a striking absence of color and trappings, except for the song and ceremony of the Church. Neither the army nor the police played an important role. However, it is in his treatment of the established nineteenth-century political trinity, the throne, the altar, and the aristocracy, that the most serious lacunae appear. For Pobedonostsev, of course, the main bulwark of the state was the Orthodox Church. The other two members of the trinity, though, were very shaky indeed. He was a fervent supporter of autocracy, but his advocacy was based neither on functional nor on religious grounds, and his arguments were generally vague. His autocrat was in effect a figurehead, and Pobedonostsev sought to replace the landed nobility with a group of middle-class executive managers and efficiency experts, the technocrats of the twentieth century.
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.