I have turned my old PhD dissertation into a book on Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev, the imperial Russian statesman who was a tutor of the last two tsars and Over Procurator of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church from 1880 to 1905. It is based on several years of research in the relevant historical documents, including an academic year in Russia. I don't yet know where or if that book will be published, but it contains a brief final section titled "Some Concluding Remarks." I find it to be a very good summation of my conclusions about Pobedonostsev, and I thought at least some people might be interested in it. So here it is:
Some Concluding Remarks
(c) Thomas C. Sorenson, 2019
What
has our study of Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev revealed? Most importantly
it has revealed that he had a well-developed political ideology that we can
characterize as both conservative and populist. He was a conservative in the
spirit of Edmund Burke. He apparently never read Burke, or at least he left no
direct evidence that he did. He was however familiar with the writings of
Thomas Carlyle, and it was precisely the Burkean elements in Carlyle’s thought
that appealed to him. Burke’s principles of prejudice and prescription were the
essential elements of his ideology. The Burkean notion of prescription is seen
in Pobedonostsev’s historicism. For Pobedonostsev as for Burke political and
social institutions were legitimized only by history. Such institutions which
had developed through history, he believed, corresponded to the needs of a
given country as no institution created on the basis of political theories ever
could. In Russia’s case the two most important institutions created and
legitimized by history were the autocracy and the Russian Orthodox Church.
Together they had made Russia strong. Pobedonostsev was convinced that Russia’s
continued greatness depended upon their preservation into the future
essentially unchanged from what they had been in the past.
Pobedonostsev’s
historicism was also influenced by the school of German legal historicism
founded by Savigny. Pobedonostsev was trained as a lawyer. He became a widely
respected legal scholar. Savigny’s historicism was the dominant tendency in
European legal literature when Pobedonostsev graduated from the Academy of
Jurisprudence in 1846, and he clearly accepted the fundamental assumptions of
Savigny’s approach to law. Because the German historicists were familiar with
Burke, their work reinforced Pobedonostsev’s commit to the Burkean principles
he found in English literature. German historicism was another way in which
Burke’s ideas found their way into Pobedonostsev’s mind.
Burke’s
idea of prejudice was even more central to Pobedonostsev’s thought than was
Burke’s idea of prescription. Prejudice for Burke meant a rejection of abstract
reason and a reliance on ideas and loyalties accepted largely uncritically
simply because they were there. Pobedonostsev rejected abstract reason in terms
virtually identical to Burke’s, although Pobedonostsev did not make Burke’s
distinction between abstract reason and political reason. Pobedonostsev denied
the validity of all conclusions arrived at logically on the basis of general
principles. In the place of this approach he put a reliance on what he claimed
were the ideas and loyalties of the mass of the Russian people, the narod. The narod, he said, had a sure guide to knowledge and action in its
reliance on faith and immediate impression. Because the narod, he believed, rejected the Western notion of reason and
abstract rights based on reason it remained true to Russian beliefs and
customs. It also retained its traditional fidelity to the two primary
institutions of Russian life, autocracy and Orthodoxy.
Pobedonostsev
was then a conservative in the standard Western sense of that term. He was also
a consistent populist. We have seen that a populist, as that term was
originally understood in Russia, was one who desired to subordinate his or her
own wishes to those of the narod and
to work with the narod to attain
goals that the narod defined for
itself. Pobedonostsev fits that definition quite well, although it seems that
he fits it because he attributed goals to the narod that he actually defined himself. He was not entirely naïve
about the Russian narod. He knew full
well that most of its members were illiterate. He knew that far too many of
them drank far too much vodka and other spirits. Still, he believed in the
basic goodness of the narod, and he
desired that the autocratic government base its strength directly on the narod and on what he insisted was the narod’s reliable loyalty to the regime.
He rejected the claims of the liberal intelligentsia to speak for the narod. He rejected its claim of a right
to formulate policies for it. He seems, however, not to have been bothered by
the reality that he was a member of the conservative intelligentsia who claimed
to speak for the narod and claimed
the right to formulate policies for it. In other words, he did precisely what
he denied his opponents the right to do. Still, he was a populist in the
technical, etymological meaning of that word.
One
of the most important aspects of Pobedonostsev’s thought was its consistency
from the beginning of his career to its end. Pobedonostsev was never a liberal
despite the fact that he has often been considered by observers to have been
one. In his first important published work, the article “On Reform in Civil
Judicial Procedure,” which appeared in 1859, the fundamental elements of his
ideology are already apparent. In his work on the judicial reform of 1864 he
consistently stressed that any reform had to be based on the needs and desires
of the Russian narod, not on abstract
judicial theory. He stressed the historically conditioned nature of judicial
institutions and rejected any effort to transplant institutions from one
society to another. These are the basic principles of his fully developed
conservatism. He held those principles from the time of his first significant
publication until his death in 1907.
It is not surprising that even
in 1859 Pobedonostsev was a consistent conservative. He was in many respects a
product of the reign of Nicholas I, the reactionary tsar who came to the throne
in 1825 after putting down the revolt of the Decembrists, a group of nobles and
military officers who undertook what was essentially a coup d’état upon the
death of Alexander I. Pobedonostsev’s father was a conservative nationalist.
The education he received at the Academy of Jurisprudence was designed to
produce competent and loyal servants of the autocracy. Pobedonostsev was not
exposed to the lively and often radical intellectual atmosphere that so
significantly influenced some of his contemporaries in Moscow in the 1840’s. He
was not the sort of person attracted to fashionable intellectual doctrines or
heated debates. He was not part of the debate between the Westerners and the
Slavophiles, and he was untouched by Russian Hegelianism. His training and
personality helped make him a supporter rather than an opponent of autocracy.
There are other significant
parallels between Pobedonostsev’s thought and the doctrine of Official
Nationality that was prevalent under Nicholas I. Official Nationality stressed
Orthodoxy, autocracy, and Russian nationality, as did Pobedonostsev. Nicholas I
and his supporters believed in the uniqueness of Russian institutions, as did
Pobedonostsev. It seems probable that he was influenced at least in a general
way by the atmosphere of Official Nationality in which he grew up. We have seen
that much of the legislation he initiated as Over Procurator of the Holy Synod
was designed to return to the status quo that had existed under Nicholas I
before the reforms of Alexander II. He seems to have seen the years before
1855, the year in which Nicholas I died and Alexander II came to the throne, as
in many respects a golden age for Russia. It is not possible, however, to
establish any direct influence on him of any specific writers of that era. He
never referred to Uvarov or any other apologists for Nicholas I as a source of
his ideas. The sources for his specific ideas appear to have been Western
rather than Russian, although sources on his development before 1859 are
lacking. Official Nationality was probably important for Pobedonostsev, but it
is impossible to establish specific influences on him from that era.
The question of
Pobedonostsev’s relationship to the Slavophiles is complex. The Slavophiles’
conception of the Russian narod was
similar to Pobedonostsev’s, although many of the Slavophiles were probably more
guilty of romanticizing the narod
than Pobedonostsev was. Yet Pobedonostsev was no Slavophile. His conception of
Russian history was very different from theirs. He did not seek a return to
Russia’s pre-Petrine past. After all, he spent 25 years in a governmental
position that Peter the Great had created. He did not believe that Peter’s
reforms had broken the moral bond tying the narod
to its tsar like many of the Slavophiles did. His conception of Russian
Orthodoxy did not include the notion of sobornost’
that was so important to such Slavophiles as Khomiakov.[1] Despite his denunciation of
Alexander II and his reforms, the structure of the Russian state in the
nineteenth century was much more acceptable to him than it was to the
Slavophiles. He differed from many of the Slavophiles in temperament too. He
frequently criticized his friend Ivan Aksakov, a noted Slavophile, for his
intemperate attacks on the government. Slavophile thinking was not an important
source of Pobedonostsev’s ideas.
We have seen how Pobedonostsev’s
career in public service and his personality were related in many ways to his
ideology. His life touched upon most of the significant events in the history
of Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century. He first became active
in public affairs during the period of intense discussion and debate about the
most fundamental problems of Russian life that preceded the introduction of the
Great Reforms of the 1860’s. He witnessed the implementation of those reforms
and the period of indecision and doubt that followed them in the 1870’s. He
lived through and commented on the “crisis of autocracy” at the end of that
decade. His critique of the rise of revolutionary terrorism, a critique based
on the fundamental assumptions of his ideology, led him to dismiss the
significant threat it appeared to pose, blaming Russia’s problems not on the
terrorists but on the weakness and vacillation he perceived in the government
and its policies. The ultimate victory of the revolutionaries in Russia has led
modern historians to stress the importance of the revolutionaries for Russia
from the moment they first appeared. In the late 1870’s, however,
Pobedonostsev’s faith in the fundamental loyalty of the narod to the regime was probably not as unrealistic as it might appear.
The peasants most often rejected the revolutionary populists. Pobedonostsev had
great faith that the government could rely on the devotion of the narod.
Pobedonostsev obtained the
institutional base from which he would proceed to work out the consequences of
his ideology when he became Over Procurator of the Holy Synod of the Russian
Orthodox Church in 1880. In 1881 he was able to exercise decisive influence on
the new emperor Alexander III in the events that led to the issuing of the
Manifesto on the Reaffirmation of Autocracy that Pobedonostsev drafted. His
opposition to any continuation of the reform policies of the previous reign was
a direct consequence of his ideology. His success in stopping the adoption of
the so called constitution of Loris-Melikov ended hope for any peaceful
constitutional evolution in Russia and ushered in the era of reaction and
counter-reform that would last until 1905, when the first Russian revolution of
the twentieth century forced the government onto a different course.
Pobedonostsev’s own
contribution to the counter-reforms appeared in the form of four pieces of
legislation issued in 1884 and 1885. The reform of the number of Orthodox
parishes and of their structure and reform of the Church’s schools embodied in these
laws constitute Pobedonostsev’s plan for the Russian Orthodox Church. They too
were a logical consequence of his ideology. He desired to increase the number
of churches and clergy serving the narod.
He wanted those clergy to be priests not highly trained theologians or men
learned in secular disciplines. Their chief duty was only to perform the
Orthodox liturgy completely, beautifully, and often. The Church for
Pobedonostsev was more an institution of the Russian narod that it was the successor to the Patriarchate of
Constantinople that it claimed to be. He meant to bind it more closely than
ever to the masses it was meant to serve.
Of the four measures that made
up Pobedonostsev’s program by far the most important to him was the law on the
parish schools of 1884. Pobedonostsev designed those schools to be the
principal educational institution of the narod.
Their function was to tie education to the Orthodox Church, to provide the
basics of literacy in a manner understandable to the narod while strengthening the attachment of the narod to the Church and to the state.
His success in founding and spreading the parish schools was remarkable. By the
time he left office in 1905 the parish schools provided nearly half of all
popular education in Russia. He had created a huge system of public instruction
that was a major part of the imperial government’s drive to attain universal
literacy, a goal to which Pobedonostsev was wholeheartedly devoted. The parish
schools were Pobedonostsev’s major accomplishment as Over Procurator. They are
the fullest embodiment of his ideology.
That being said, we must not
forget how limited the education those schools provided really was. Many of the
schools existed only in someone’s home and provided only most basic
instruction, if indeed it provided any at all. Most of the parish schools not
located in a home provided only two years of instruction. The most education
any of them offered was only four years. Pobedonostsev was not trying to create
a truly well-educated population. He was trying to create only the most basic
literacy. He tied that literacy to the Russian Orthodox Church, its liturgy,
singing, and doctrines, not to any goal of secular education. The parish
schools were better than nothing, and we must not forget the realities of
Russian life when we evaluate them (that being a statement with which
Pobedonostsev would have whole-heartedly agreed). Still, in 1905 most of the
Russian population was educated to nothing like the levels prevalent in Western
Europe or the United States.
Pobedonostsev’s long career in
state service ended amid the turmoil of the revolution of 1905. His
participation in the events of that year was limited to questions involving the
Church, and those efforts had their effect. His letters to Nicholas II in the
spring of 1905 were no doubt largely responsible for the tsar’s decision not to
call the general council of the Church that many were demanding both inside and
outside the Church. His argument in those letters is a perfect illustration of
his ideology in action, appealing to historical precedent and the desires of
the narod as authority for his
position and for state action (or in this case inaction).
Pobedonostsev’s personality
was as complex and many-sided as was his career in public service. He was not a
notably friendly or sociable man. He preferred a life of seclusion and study to
a life in the public spotlight. He preferred books to people and resented the
numerous intrusions into his privacy that were inevitable given his high
position in the government. He was very nearly humorless. It is difficult to
imagine him laughing and joking with friends. He took life much too seriously
for that. He was almost continually depressed, morose, and gloomy. He was in
all probability an unpleasant man to be around for any length of time, not that
others finding his company unpleasant would have bothered him much.
There was, however, another
considerably less well-known aspect of his personality. There is no doubt that
he was a devoutly religious man in his own way. He loved the Russian Orthodox
Church will all his heart, or at least he loved its beautiful and powerful
liturgy. In the Church he found a spiritual and emotional release that helped
him survive the depression and morbidity that characterized so much of his
life. In his statements on the Church service there is a joy and an elevation
of spirit found nowhere else in his writings. In his relationship with the
Church he was capable of a great sentimentality that could become maudlin and
saccharine. The sincerity of his feelings cannot however be questioned, and his
love of the Church and its liturgy had important consequences for his policies
as Over Procurator. We see it, for example, in his frequently expressed desire
to teach people church singing. I doubt that he ever said he wanted to teach
people church theology.
Was Pobedonostsev’s faith in
the Russian narod justified? Was the narod in fact what he said it was? There
is little doubt that for most of the period we have been discussing most Russians
by far were loyal subjects of the tsar and at least nominally members of the
Russian Orthodox Church. They could hardly have been otherwise given the
traditions of Russian life and the resistance to change that has always
characterized peasant societies. Still, despite his awareness of many of the
vices of the narod his view of it
turns out to have been an idealization. He saw in it strength, faith, and
virtue. He saw it as the force in which autocracy and Orthodoxy were grounded
and made secure. Yet the Russian narod turned
out not to be quite so loyal to Orthodoxy and autocracy as Pobedonostsev
thought it was. By 1905 unrest had become so widespread that the government had
to give sweeping concessions to stop the erosion of public confidence in the
government. By 1917, only 10 years after Pobedonostsev’s death, virtually no
support for the autocracy remained at all, and the last Russian tsar fell from
power almost without resistance. Pobedonostsev’s beloved narod did nothing to preserve autocracy. Under the Soviet
government the Russian Orthodox Church was reduced almost to a caricature of
its former self. It supported a government that oppressed it, and it retained
only a tenuous hold on a small portion of the Russian population. Unlike the
autocracy, the Russia Orthodox Church didn’t die under Communism. It has had a
resurgence of sorts to a place of some prominence in Russian life since the
fall of the Soviet Union. Orthodox priests bless Russian rockets as they take
astronauts into space, something that certainly would not have happened under
the Communists. President Vladimir Putin uses the Orthodox Church, perhaps
quite cynically, for his own purposes. Yet it cannot be said that the Russian narod defended the Church with the vigor
Pobedonostsev would have expected. In the end the narod as a source of strength for an unaltered autocracy and an
unchanging Orthodoxy turned out to be a mirage. Pobedonostsev’s fall from power
in 1905 corresponded with the first act of the great drama that was so to
transform, for better and for much worse, the Russia he loved and defended.
In the
end Pobedonostsev appears as a tragic figure. He spent his life defending a
system that was doomed to failure. His devotion to that system, to the
autocracy and the Russian Orthodox Church, together with his romanticized image
of the narod kept him from seeing how
weak Russia really was. He may have put his faith in God, but he also put it in
a population that wasn’t what he thought it was. He fought to preserve that
which could not be preserved. He was a true conservative, and in his commitment
to keeping what could not be kept his dream of unending stability went the way
of all conservative dreams, into the dustbin of history. Konstantin Petrovich,
you are indeed a fascinating character. I wish you had seen the reality of your
nation and her people more clearly than you did. If imperial Russia had tried
in earnest to modernize, to democratize, and to deal in truly constructive ways
with her manifold problems perhaps her future would have been different. Perhaps
the horrors of Soviet Communism could have been avoided. Pobedonostsev was one
of the figures who kept Russia from being different. We can only wish that it
had been otherwise.
[1] Sobornost’ means something like
“communality.” It is based on the Russian ecclesiastical word sobor, which means “council” (and can
also mean cathedral). It refers to a desire for the different parts of society
to work together as if they were meeting regularly in a council.
