The Icon and the Axe

These two figures helped define the unresolved and often unacknowledged conflict of political ideas within the thought of the populist age: between irrational adherence to authoritarian tradition and rationalistic insistence on a direct transformation of society. Pobedonostsev, the lawyer and lay head of the Church Synod, was the symbol and author of Alexander Ill's program of reaction. Tolstoy, the novelist turned barefoot religious teacher, was the enduring symbol and example of anarchistic populist protest. However bitterly they were opposed to one another, each was in a sense true to the populist age in which he was nurtured. For each of them was uniquely willing in the succeeding age of small deeds and great compromises to sacrifice his personal happiness and well-being to the ideal in which he believed. The ideal of each was, moreover, that of a totally renovated Christian society rather than of partial improvement through practical economic or political reforms.

Their paths first crossed in 1881, when Pobedonostsev withheld from Alexander III Tolstoy's letter urging clemency for the assassins of the Tsar's father. "As wax before the fire, every revolutionary struggle will melt away before the man-tsar who fulfills the law of Christ," Tolstoy wrote; but Pobedonostsev correctly retorted that "our Christ is not your Christ."4 They met again in 1899, when Tolstoy included in his last novel Resurrection a thinly veiled caricature of Pobedonostsev. The latter responded in 1902 by excommunicating Tolstoy, whose followers countered with the defiant statement that "your anathemas will far more surely open to us the doors of the Kingdom of Heaven than could your prayers."

Like Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, Pobedonostsev favored theocratic rule through mystery and authority. He was opposed to all freedom of expression and favored the systematic subordination of sectarian and minority cultures to a monolithic Russian Orthodox culture. Access to pernicious foreign ideas was to be confined to an intellectual elite; but otherwise education was to be limited to catechistic indoctrination in Russian traditions and moral values.

In some respects Pobedonostsev's social doctrine resembles the theory of "freezing up Russia to avoid rotting" contemporaneously being advanced by Constantine Leont'ev. He detested the tendency toward uniformity in "the Europe of railroads and banks … of increasing material indulgence, and prosaic dreams about the common good."5 Reminiscent of Nietzsche is his aesthetic antagonism to bourgeois mediocrity, which amplifies a sentiment already found in Herzen as well as Pisemsky and other anti-nihilist novelists of the populist era:

Is it not dreadful and humiliating to think that Moses went up upon Sinai, the Greeks built their lovely temples, the Romans waged their Punic Wars, Alexander, that handsome genius in a plumed helmet, fought his battles, apostles preached, martyrs suffered, poets sang, artists painted, knights shone at tournaments-only that some French, German or Russian bourgeois garbed in unsightly and absurd clothes should enjoy life "individually" or "collectively" on the ruins of all this vanished splendor?0

There will be no beauty in life without inequality and violence. To pluck the rose, man must be willing to pierce his fingers on the thorns. Even before the outbreak of the first Balkan War in the mid-seventies Leont'ev insisted that "liberal nihilism" has produced such "decrepitude of mind and heart" that what is needed for rejuvenation may well be "a whole period of external wars analogous to the Thirty Years' War or at least to the epoch of Napoleon I."7

For aristocratic and aesthetic reasons, Leont'ev rebelled at all reforms, proposing a total return to the ritual and discipline of Byzantine rale. He died as a monk in the monastery of the Holy Trinity, bemoaning the end of the age of poetry and human variety. Pobedonostsev, on the contrary, was a thoroughly prosaic lay figure, whose ideal was the gray efficiency and uniformity of the modern organization man. He was the prophet of duty, work, and order-shifting his bishops around periodically to prevent any distracting local attachments from impeding the smooth functioning of the ecclesiastical machine. He was unemotional, even cynical, about his methods. But they were generally effective and earn him a deserved place as one of the builders of the centralized bureaucratic state. Like the modern totalitarian regimes which his own rule often seems to anticipate, he has a low view of human nature and insists that regimes based on a more optimistic reading of the masses will collapse. "The state must show in itself a living faith. The popular mind is suspicious and may not be seduced … by compromise,"8 he insists in criticizing advocates of constitutional processes for Russia. Any efforts to transplant democratic institutions to Russia will merely lead to revolution.