Modernizing Orthodoxy. Russia and the Christian East (1856-1914).Vovchenko

Modernizing Orthodoxy: Russia and the Christian East (1856â€“1914)

Denis Vovchenko

Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 73, Number 2, April 2012, pp.295-317 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania PressDOI: 10.1353/jhi.2012.0018

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Modernizing Orthodoxy: Russia andthe Christian East (1856–1914)

Denis Vovchenko

INTRODUCTION

Why do some ideas end up on the dust heap of history and some do not?Russia’s messianism towards the ‘‘Christian East’’ endured for centuries inlarge measure because of the continued relevance of traditional institutionsand geopolitical interests. But somebody also had to make new bottles forold wine. This article will focus on ‘‘Pan-Slavism’’ and ‘‘Pan-Orthodoxy’’as two visions of a future cultural and political union of Russia and its co-religionist and co-ethnic populations from the Crimean War to the FirstWorld War (1856–1914). Far from being conservative utopias, these theo-ries were modern creations that transformed the traditional meaning of theChristian East as well as the role of religion and ethnicity in the multifac-eted cultural identity in late imperial Russia.

Given its long history, the Russian relationship to Ottoman Christiansis a valuable case study of how modernity, i.e., a secular progressive post-Enlightenment world view, affected established religious ideas and institu-tions. The historical context further increases the significance of Pan-Orthodoxy and Pan-Slavism for this research agenda. They were conceivedas early alternatives to Western liberal modernity in reaction to the Russiandefeat in the Crimean war (1853–56). Many Russian publicists and states-men saw British and French military support for the Ottoman Empire notso much as a result of political calculations but as evidence of Russia’sexclusion from European civilization.

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JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ APRIL 2012

In spite of their broad implications, both Pan-Slavism and especiallyPan-Orthodoxy remain under studied.1 The existing scholarly literatureconsiders the advocates of those visions as conservative, traditionalist, uto-pian, and consequently retrograde and anti-modern on the assumption thatthere can only be one liberal Western model of organizing modern life.2

When analyzed as part of modernity, Pan-Slavism was seen as its distortedand deviant version in the context of the Cold War.3 At the same time, agrowing number of scholars attempted to redefine Russian conservatismas a healthy reaction against wholesale borrowing of foreign models thatadvocated reforms and development based instead on traditional values.4

This article will take that revisionist trend a step further by analyzing Pan-Slavism and Pan-Orthodoxy as modern projects articulating alternatives to‘‘Romano-Germanic Europe.’’ There are three reasons to consider them assuch.

First, far from being nostalgic rediscoveries of the past, all these ideasdeveloped in the spirit of ‘‘the invention of tradition.’’ They cannot be con-sidered as retrograde utopias because there were no historical precedentsfor what they advocated; for example, a Pan-Slav federation or an Eastern

1 Zdenko Zlatar, ‘‘Pan-Slavism: A Review of the Literature,’’ Canadian Review of Studiesin Nationalism 17 (1990): 229; Pan-Orthodoxy is discussed in reference to KonstantinLeontiev’s views. See K. A. Zhukov, Vostochnyi vopros v istoriosofskoi kontseptsii K.N.Leontieva (Saint Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2005); Dale Nelson, Konstantin Leontiev and theOrthodox East (Ph.D. diss.: University of Minnesota, 1977); Stephen Lukashevich, Kons-tantin Leontev, 1831–1891: A Study in Russian ‘‘Heroic Vitalism’’ (New York: PageantPress, 1967).2 Edward Thaden, Conservative Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Seattle: Uni-versity of Washington Press, 1964), 73–207; Andrzei Walicki, The Slavophile Contro-versy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought, trans.Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); Arno Mayer, The Persistenceof the Old Regime (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 299–300; Richard Pipes, Russian Con-servatism and Its Critics: A Study in Political Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univer-sity Press, 2005), 115–53; V. A. Tvardovskaia, ‘‘Tsarstvovanie Aleksandra III,’’ in Russkiikonservatizm XIX stoletia: ideologia i praktika, ed. V. Ia. Grosul (Moscow: Progress-Traditsia, 2000), 276–340.3 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951),225–27; Robert MacMaster, Danilevsky: A Russian Totalitarian Philosopher (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), viii, 5, 13.4 S. N. Pushkin, Istoriosofiia russkogo konservatizma XIX veka (Nizhnii Novgorod:Volgo-Viatskaia Akademiia Gosudarstvennoi Sluzhby, 1998), 249; A. V. Repnikov, Kons-ervativnyie kontseptsii pereustroistva Rossii (Moscow: Academia, 2007), 9; James West,‘‘Neo-Old Believers of Moscow: Religious Revival and Nationalist Myth in Late ImperialRussia,’’ Canadian-American Slavic Studies 26 (1992): 9; Sergei Glebov, ‘‘Granitsy impe-rii i granitsy moderna: antikolonialnaia ritorika i teoriia kulturnykh tipov v evraziistve,’’Ab Imperio 2 (2003): 282; Laura Engelstein, Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illib-eral Path (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 10.

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Vovchenko ✦ Russia and the Christian East

Union centered on Constantinople. According to Eric Hobsbawm, therewas an outpouring of invented traditions as a result of rapid social andpolitical changes in Europe from 1870 to 1914 that ‘‘use history as legitim-ator of action and cement of group cohesion.’’5

In an influential study of just such hastily put together constructs, CarlSchorske explained the fusion of aristocratic posture and modern mass poli-tics by the leaders of Pan-Germanism, anti-Semitism, and Zionism as thecrisis of Enlightenment and liberalism at the turn of the twentieth century.6

In the same contradictory context of fin-de-siecle Europe, Pan-Slavism andPan-Orthodoxy claimed, transformed, and thereby ‘‘modernized’’ the sameChristian Orthodox legacy to give the appearance of historical rootednessto their distinctly new visions of a future political and cultural union ofRussia and its coreligionists and coethnics.

Furthermore, many supporters of Pan-Slavism and Pan-Orthodoxyexplicitly or implicitly drew on the analytical category of cultural historicaltype. That category came from Nikolai Danilevskii’s landmark Russia andEurope, first published in 1869. As an important precursor to Toynbee andSpengler, Danilevskii challenged the universal character of the WesternEuropean civilization. The ‘‘Romano-Germanic cultural historical type’’was one of many and already in decline. Because of their ‘‘strictly scientific’’approach, these views appealed to not only the proponents of Pan-Slavism7

but also of Pan-Orthodoxy who organized their preexisting ideas usingDanilevskii’s concepts.

Finally, both groups were modern in their reliance on politicized eth-nicity to describe the division of population in the Ottoman Empire.8 How-ever, pre-modern religious categories were just as important for them.

5 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1992), 12. Laura Engelstein makes a quick reference to thisconcept without relying on it in her analysis of classical Slavophilism of 1840s, SlavophileEmpire, 102.6 Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books,1981), 116–17.7 Thaden, Conservative Nationalism, 100.8 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread ofNationalism (New York: Verso, 2003), 7–36; Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen:Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,1976); Peter Holquist, ‘‘To Count, To Extract, To Exterminate: Population Statistics andPopulation Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia,’’ in A State of Nations: Empireand Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald Suny and Terry Martin(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 112–13; Austin Lee Jersild, ‘‘Modernity andthe Russian Empire: Russian Ethnographers and Caucasian Mountaineers,’’ NationalitiesPapers 24 (1996): 641.

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Although the few scholarly studies of Pan-Slavism note its ethnocentrism,they still consider that ideology and movement as conservative and reac-tionary.9 While advocates of Pan-Slavism and Pan-Orthodoxy disagreed onmany issues, they all promoted both political nationalism and traditionalinstitutions and the authority of Russian autocracy and the OrthodoxChurch.

This seeming contradiction is in line with the notion of ‘‘combineddevelopment’’ of both premodern and modern ideas and policies.10 In themost advanced countries today ‘‘traditional and modern elements obvi-ously coexist in a strange and not always recognizable way.’’ Even withoutliberal institutions a society should be considered modern if ideas like ‘‘lib-eration,’’ ‘‘progress,’’ and ‘‘development’’ are important there.11

Thus, Pan-Slavism and Pan-Orthodoxy could be seen as among thefirst conscious and articulate attempts in recent history to decenter both intheory and practice the mainstream Western European modernity anddivest it of its self-proclaimed universal progressivist mission.12 Whilerejecting liberal progress and radical socialist revolutionary ideas, theystressed the need for a positive change. In the argument of their proponents,the Pan-Slav and Pan-Orthodox alternative civilizations were supposed tofree themselves from, and to develop both in opposition and parallel to,their Western counterpart.

This kind of conceptualization of Pan-Slavism and Pan-Orthodoxywould contribute to the debate about an important aspect of the Russiancultural identity, specifically, about whether late imperial Russia wasbecoming a modern European nation or remained a backward Old Regime

9 Hannah Arendt noticed modern racism in Pan-Slavism in The Origins of Totalitarian-ism, 224. Hans Kohn emphasized Pan-Russianism as the essence of Russian Pan-Slavismand its lack of interest in religion after Danilevskii: Pan-Slavism: Its History and Ideology(Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1953), 142, 152.10 Michael David-Fox, ‘‘Multiple Modernities vs. Neo-Traditionalism: On RecentDebates in Russian and Soviet History,’’ Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 54(2006): 537.11 Wolfgang Knoebl, ‘‘Modernization and African Modernities: An Outsider’s View,’’ inAfrican Modernities: Entangled Meanings in Current Debate, ed. Jan-Georg Deutsch,Peter Probst, and Heike Schmidt (Portsmouth: James Currey Ltd., 2002), 170–72.12 The author of the concept of ‘‘multiple modernities,’’ S. N. Eisenstadt, summarizes thestate of research saying that interwar fascism and communism were the first consciousalternatives to Western liberalism that proliferated with post-1945 globalizing trends—Shmuel Eisenstadt, ‘‘Multiple Identities,’’ Daedalus 129, 1 (2000): 11, 24. Partha Chat-terjee pointed to nineteenth-century anti-colonial Hindu nationalism not as ‘‘the vestigeof some premodern religious conception’’ but as ‘‘a modern, rationalist, and historicistidea’’: Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Post-Colonial His-tories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 110.

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monarchy. One school of thought mostly based on the study of Russifica-tion in the formerly Polish lands argues that the Russian Empire followedthe pattern of Western nation-states. They conclude that Orthodox Chris-tianity gave way to language as the main marker of Russian cultural iden-tity among both intellectuals and government bureaucrats.13 At anotherextreme, the argument has it that imperial Russia never developed a mod-ern national identity because religious and dynastic loyalties remaineddominant on the official as well as on the popular level.14

The truth is often somewhere in the middle, as has been recently sug-gested from a different perspective.15 In their efforts to reinvent Russia’straditional relationship to the Christian East, Pan-Slav and Pan-Orthodoxproponents and policy-makers grafted politicized ethnicity onto the old treeof Orthodoxy. Although there were continuous debates between and withinPan-Slavism and Pan-Orthodoxy in response to political troubles in the Bal-kans, both visions remained remarkably consistent through the late 1800sand early 1900s. Their supporters consistently opposed Westernized liberalor revolutionary ideas and remained affiliated with Slavic charitable organi-zations, the Foreign Ministry, monarchist periodicals, and the OrthodoxChurch. The article will analyze the elements of modernity in both theorieschronologically but in separate subsections.

MODERNITY IN PAN-SLAVISM:FROM RELIGIOUS TO ETHNIC AND

CIVILIZATIONAL CONFLICTS

Greek, Slavic, and Arab Christian Orthodox populations were conqueredby the Ottomans after the epic battle of Kosovo in 1389 and the shocking

13 Alexei Miller, The Romanov Empire and Nationalism: Essays in the Methodology ofHistorical Research (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), 57; AndreasRenner, ‘‘Defining a Russian Nation: Mikhail Katkov and the ‘Invention’ of NationalPolitics,’’ Slavonic and East European Review 81 (2004): 674; Theodore Weeks, ‘‘Officialand Popular Nationalism: Imperial Russia, 1863–1914,’’ Nationalismen in Europa:West- und Osteuropa im Vergleich (Goettingen: Wallstein, 2001), 423, 432; Mikhail Dol-bilov, ‘‘Russification and the Bureaucratic Mind in the Russian Empire’s NorthwesternRegion in the 1860s,’’ Kritika 5 (2004): 245–71.14 Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 (Cambridge. Mass.: Har-vard University Press, 1971), 41–42; D. G. Rowley, ‘‘Imperial Versus National Discourse:the Case of Russia,’’ Nations and Nationalism, 6 (2000): 23–42; Vera Tolz, Russia:Inventing the Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 155–81; Ron GrigorSuny, ‘‘Imperiia kak ona est’’: Imperskaia Rossiia, ‘‘natsionalnoie samosoznanie i teoriiaimperii,’’ Ab Imperio 1 (2001): 68–70.15 Olga Maiorova, From the Shadow of Empire: Defining the Russian Nation ThroughCultural Mythology, 1855–1870 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 184;

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capture of Constantinople in 1453. Muscovite and Imperial Russia claimedto be the only remaining independent center of the truest branch of Chris-tianity and the only potential liberator of those less fortunate coreligionistssuffering under the Muslim yoke. In exchange for a generous grant of alms,in 1562 the Patriarchate of Constantinople recognized Ivan the Terrible as‘‘Tsar and Sovereign of all Orthodox Christians east to west all the way tothe Ocean’’ in the bloodline of Roman emperors.16

By the mid-1800s, some educated Russians began to discern variousethnic groups in the previously undifferentiated mass of Ottoman Chris-tians as the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Romanticism politi-cized ethnicity across Europe.17 The Crimean War of 1853–56 was stilljustified as a crusade similar to all earlier Russo-Ottoman wars.18 The Rus-sian defeat by the coalition of the Ottoman Empire, England, France, andPiedmont-Sardinia led to the agonizing reappraisal of Russia’s political andcultural involvement in the Christian East among both policy makers andintellectuals. The obscure ideas of Romantic Russian nationalists movedfrom academic ivory towers into a brave new world of mass politics. ThoseSlavophiles juxtaposed the Orthodoxy-based spiritual wisdom and co-operation of Slavs with the rationalism, materialism, and competition ofWesterners. Pan-Slavism is supposed to be the politicized version of Slavo-philism.19 But the name ‘‘Pan-Slavism’’ was invented in the West by alarm-ist journalists and the Russians themselves tended to prefer the descriptiveterm Slavophilism throughout this time period.

Most Pan-Slavs saw the future of Russia and its many ethnicities in afederation led by the Russian Tsar. In contrast, liberal Pan-Slavs and laterNeo-Slavs envisioned a much looser cooperative structure based on equalityof all Slavic nations and even that only after constitutional reforms in Rus-sia proper.20 However, the representatives of this trend always perceived

Mara Kozelsky, Christianizing Crimea: Shaping Sacred Space in the Russian Empire andBeyond (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010), 9, 151.16 Nikolai Kapterev, Kharakter otnoshenii Rossii k Pravoslavnomu Vostoku v XVI i XVIIstoletiakh (Sergiev Posad: Izd. MSElova, 1914), 26–29.17 Peter Sugar, ‘‘The Southern Slav Image of Russia in the Nineteenth Century,’’ Journalof Central European Affairs 21 (1959): 45; Irina Dostian, Russkaia obshestvennaia mysli balkanskie narody (Moscow: Nauka, 1980).18 Orlando Figes, The Crimean War: A History (New York: Henry Holt, 2010), 1–22.19 Benedict Sumner, ‘‘Russia and Pan-Slavism in the Eighteen Seventies,’’ Transactions ofthe Royal Historical Society 18 (1935): 26.20 A. N. Pypin, Panslavizm v proshlom I nastoiashem (Moscow: Kolos, 1913), 55–56;orig. in Vestnik Evropy, 1878, no 9–12; Paul Vysny, Neoslavism and the Czechs, 1898–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 55. For a discussion of the differ-ences among Pan-Slavs, see Ada Dialla, E Rosia apenanti sta Valkania. Ideologia kaipolitike sto devtero miso tou 19ou aiona (Athens: Alexandria, 2009), 130–32.

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themselves to be an embattled minority and were unable to influence thefeelings, attitudes, and rhetoric of paternalistic superiority over all otherSlavs prevalent among most Russians.21

Even more marginal and unsuccessful were revolutionaries like Alex-ander Herzen and Mikhail Bakunin who sought to overthrow the power ofkings, landlords, and capitalists to usher in the brave new world of anar-chistic socialism in Slavic lands and beyond.22 They were understandablyconfined to penal colonies in Siberia or small emigre circles abroad. Insteadof undermining the government, mainstream Pan-Slavs sought to influenceits policies. They often criticized it for inertia, timidity, and the willingnessto play by the rules of European ‘‘Great Power’’ diplomacy, which led toproblems with censorship and police sanctions including temporary or per-manent suppression of their periodicals and organizations.23

The Greek-Bulgarian Church Question was one of the sources of dis-agreement between Pan-Slav proponents and Russian diplomats. The for-mer demanded unconditional support for Slavic brothers but the lattercould not suddenly change the Russian self-image and the centuries-longpolicy of protection of all Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire.The Bulgarian church movement organized around 1858 and aimed atachieving independence from the ethnically Greek leadership of the Patri-archate of Constantinople. In the theocratic Islamic structure, church inde-pendence meant cultural and legal autonomy because the Ottoman Empirerecognized religious rather than ethnic minorities.24

Agitation around the Greek-Bulgarian Church Question affected notjust Russian foreign policy but also helped create a Pan-Slav movementinside Russia. In the Russian press nationalist activists in the Bulgariancommunity in Russia and Constantinople demonized the Greeks generallyand the Patriarchate of Constantinople specifically. Their goal was to winbacking for the ‘‘Slavic cause’’ from Russian public opinion and possiblyfrom Russian policymakers. Ultimately, the anti-Greek campaign aimed atforcing the Russians to transition from a pre-modern religious world viewto one characterized primarily by the clash of different nations.25

21 Barbara Jelavich, Russia’s Balkan Entanglements, 1806–1914 (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1991), 208–9.22 V. Ia. Grosul, Revolutsionnaia Rossiia i Balkany (1874–1883) (Moscow: Nauka,1980), 10–12.23 Michael Boro Petrovich, The Emergence of Russian Panslavism, 1856–1870 (Westport,Conn.: Greenwood Publishers, 1985 [1956]), 104–28.24 Zina Markova, ‘‘Rusia i bulgarskiat tserkovno-natsionalnyi vopros, 1856–1864,’’Godishnik Sofiiskogo Universiteta, Istoricheskii Fakultet 79 (1980): 167–262.25 S. A. Nikitin, ‘‘Natsionalnoie dvizhenie na Balkanakh v 60e gody XIX veka v osves-henii sovremennoi russkoi periodicheskoi pechati’’ in Ocherki po istorii iuzhnykh slavian

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Raiko Zhinzifov, a Bulgarian student in Moscow and one of the cam-paign’s most prominent activists, asked in the Den’ newspaper, ‘‘Wouldyou really say that only because the Greeks are Orthodox one can’t callthem oppressors [of the Slavs] on the par with the Germans and theTurks?’’26 Den’ (1861–65) was the first explicitly Pan-Slav publication withconsiderable success in educated Russian society; it had 4,000 subscribersand a circulation of 7,000 copies by 1862.27

The Russian Pan-Slavs assumed the flattering role of elder brothers ofall victimized Slavs rather than of all Orthodox Christians.28 In contrast tothe purely ethnocentric logic of the Bulgarian nationalists, Russian Pan-Slavs, most notably Nikolai Danilevskii, attempted to strike an uneasy bal-ance between this modern way of dividing populations and their continuedbelief in Russia’s Orthodox mission. Danilevskii developed the ‘‘scientific’’category of cultural-historical type. This methodology allowed him toreconceptualize and thus to modernize the relationship between Russia andthe Christian East. The tribute to this age-old tradition is clear from theinclusion of all Orthodox Ottoman populations in addition to CatholicSlavs and Hungarians in the newly invented Slav-dominated anti-Westerncivilization. Its bright future would be secure in a Russian-led federationwith the capital in Constantinople but without any special role for thePatriarchate of that city or for Greek historical rights there.29

Danilevskii was suspicious of the Greeks who, in pursuit of their nar-row nationalist agendas, allegedly betrayed the interests of Orthodoxy. Hesaw this treason most clearly in the Greek-Bulgarian Church Question.He condemned the Patriarchate of Constantinople for falling short of itsecumenical supranational mission and becoming an instrument of the Hel-lenization of Bulgarians and other southern Slavs. The greatest danger toSlavdom produced by this policy was not so much interethnic rivalry butrather the golden opportunity for Western proselytism. The Jesuits, Dani-levskii warned, would inevitably take advantage of the Orthodox familyfeud because ‘‘from time immemorial Catholic intrigues targeted Bulgariaand caused the quarrel leading to the separation of the Churches.’’30 Thus,

i russko-balkanskikh sviazei v 50–70e gody XIX veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1970), 183–203.26 Den 3 (October 28, 1861): 13–14.27 A. G. Dementiev, A. V. Zapadov, M. S. Cherepakhov, Russkaia periodicheskaia pechat(1702–1894) (Moscow: Political Literature Publishers, 1959), 414.28 Petrovich, Emergence of Russian Pan-Slavism, 77.29 N. Ia. Danilevskii, Rossia i Evropa (Moscow: Kniga, 1991 [1869]), 374–75.30 N. Ia. Danilevskii, ‘‘Konstantinopol’’ in Gore pobediteliam. Politicheskie statii (Mos-cow: Alir, 1998), 101–2. Originally published in Russkii Mir 308 and 309 (November 11and 12, 1877).

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ethnic and religious categories were at least equally important for a Pan-Slav modernity that was supposed to develop side by side with, but freefrom domination of, ‘‘Romanic-Germanic Europe.’’

To save the Slavs from succumbing to the Greeks, to the Turks, or toCatholic proselytizing, Russia needed to intervene decisively and bestow onthe Bulgarians the gift of first church and then state autonomy under Rus-sian tutelage. In this spirit, Mikhail Volkov, a regular contributor to Den,’wrote in 1865 that, ‘‘the [Bulgarian] Slavs will either establish their ownnational church with their own Patriarch or will go Catholic.’’31 Similarly,Danilevskii feared that unless brought into a closer union with Russia, theSlavs in general and their intelligentsia in particular were in danger of ‘‘los-ing their Slavic character’’ via ‘‘either religious or political or civilizationalseduction’’ by the West.32 Without Russia’s lead, its coreligionists or coeth-nics had no hope of advancement in the right direction.

Such ideas affected individual Russian policy-makers such as NikolaiIgnatiev, Russian Ambassador to Constantinople from 1864 to 1877.33

Religion was even more important for them because they had to deal withrealities on the ground. Ignatiev worked hard to bring together Bulgariannationalists, the Patriarchate, and the Ottoman government. In February1870, the Bulgarian Church was established by the Sultan’s decree butwithout the consent of the Patriarchate.34 Despite Russian efforts to recon-cile the parties, they proved unable to reach a compromise mostly on theissue of jurisdictional and territorial delimitation of mixed Greek-Bulgarianareas. This deadlock led to the Local Council of Ottoman Christian Ortho-dox churches in September 1872. The Council proclaimed Bulgarianchurch movement leaders and those affiliated with them schismatics forbringing phyletismos or ethnonational divisions into the Church.

Ignatiev saw this decision as a hypocritical act of extreme Greeknationalism but instead of finalizing the separation between Greeks andSlavs, he worked hard to have Ottoman Greek prelates call another churchcouncil to lift the Schism. In addition to appealing to Orthodox solidarity,he used financial pressure to move them in that direction. To ‘‘renovate thestructure of the Greek Church,’’ the Russian Foreign Ministry needed to

31 Mikhail Volkov, ‘‘Ob otnoshenii Rossii k Ottomanskoi Porte,’’ Den 6 (February 6,1865): 134.32 N. Ia. Danilevskii, Rossia i Evropa, 319–20, 358.33 V. M. Khevrolina, Rossiiskii diplomat graf Nikolai Pavlovich Ignatiev (Moscow: Rus-sian Academy of Sciences, 2004), 256, 304.34 Russian Imperial Foreign Policy Archive (AVPRI), f. 161/3, op. 233, part 3, pp.1409ob–1410, Ignatiev to Gorchakov, 9/21 September 1870

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sequestrate its income in Russia because it was foolish ‘‘to fund the verypeople who are denigrating Russia, heaping abuse on all Slavs, and causinggrave damage to Orthodoxy.’’35

In 1875–76, Pan-Slav agitation grew in response to the brutal Ottomansuppression of Christian Slav uprisings in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Bul-garia, and the defeat of Montenegro and Serbia who sided with the rebels.Pan-Slav publications and organizations managed to inspire many socialgroups to donate vast sums of money and send over 2,000 volunteers toSerbia. They also contributed to the Russian government’s decision todeclare war on the Ottoman Empire in a struggle that lasted from 1877 to1878.36 The war was fought for ‘‘faith and Slavs,’’ but religious motivationsseemed more prominent both at the time and in the historical memory ofthe events.37

Despite or because of enormous sacrifice of blood and treasure, Rus-sian victory led not to the harmonious union of liberated Bulgarians andtheir Russian saviors but rather to mutual resentment, recriminations, andgrowing tensions because of Russian attitudes and policies of paternalisticsuperiority, which were central to Pan-Slavism and inherited from the tradi-tional attitudes to the Christian East.38 The growing tension finally led tothe break between the Bulgarian Principality and Russia, which took placein 1886 as a result of the 1885 unification of the majority Bulgarian auton-omous Ottoman province of Eastern Rumelia with Bulgaria proper againstthe wishes of the Russian government. For much of the Russian readingpublic, it was the culmination of the series of acts of Bulgarian betrayaland ingratitude. Even narrow circles of true believers in Pan-Slavism wereaffected and eagerly followed a debate in the official publication of the StPetersburg Slavic Benevolent Society.

In the summer of 1885, one of the most prolific of the Russian Pan-Slav writers, General Alexander Kireev, denounced the influence of RomanCatholic propaganda and Western parliamentarianism as major impedi-ments to Slavic unity in Bulgaria and elsewhere.39 In the following summer,

35 AVPRI, f. 161/3, op. 233, part 3, pp. 1982–1982ob, Ignatiev to Stremoukhov, Novem-ber 1872.36 Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-vard University Press, 1997), 371.37 Denis Vovchenko, ‘‘Gendering Irredentism? Self and Other in Russian Pan-Orthodoxyand Pan-Slavism (1856–1885),’’ Ethnic and Racial Studies, 34 (2011): 248–74.38 Cyril Black, The Establishment of Constitutional Government in Bulgaria (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1943), 142–48.39 Izvestiia Sankt-Peterburgskogo Slavianskogo Blagotvoritelnogo Obshestva 5–6 (1885):258–64.

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the editor published a letter from ‘‘a Western Slav’’ criticizing Kireev andRussian Pan-Slavs generally for their obsession with Orthodoxy, whichstood in the way of cultural and political rapprochement towards a Slavicfederation.40

In his reply, Kireev identified the views of his Western Slavic counter-part as ‘‘Romano-Germanic’’ and alien to his own ‘‘Greco-Russian’’ princi-ples and stressed that ‘‘first, we are the sons of the Orthodox Church, andthen, we are Russians and Slavs.’’41 Although he insisted that in a futureunion there would be no pressure to renounce historic traditions, in hisprivate correspondence (in French) with Nikolai Ignatiev he argued thatRussian Pan-Slavs should continue secretly to strive to achieve the goal ofconverting all Slavs to Orthodoxy.42 All this strange mixing of religion andethnicity illustrates the contradictions of ‘‘combined development’’ of mod-ern and pre-modern categories in the Russian cultural identity.

Like Danilevskii, Kireev’s view of Orthodoxy was not static or back-ward looking. He saw it as a key aspect of the invented anti-Western civili-zation. A strong sense of embarrassment vis-a-vis ‘‘Romano-Germanic’’Europe explains Kireev’s advocacy of the reconciliation of all sides of theGreek-Bulgarian Church Question in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Tomend the disgraceful schism, Kireev consistently promoted the initiative ofthe ethnically Greek Patriarch of Constantinople Gregory VI—the callingof an Ecumenical Council of the Orthodox Church. According to Kireev,around 1870 ‘‘the idea of the Patriarch was enthusiastically accepted byalmost all Orthodox autocephalous churches; it found great support inRussia as well even among those outside the church hierarchy and onlypetty concerns about political complications stood in the way of the benev-olent initiatives of the wise Patriarch.’’ If successful in that project, theOrthodox world would be able to unite against the continued onslaught ofthe Roman Pope and the whole West behind him.43

In the early 1900s, Sergei Sharapov similarly continued to disseminateDanilevskii’s vision in Russian educated society, setting an agenda for Rus-sian foreign policy in the Balkans. He advocated the building of a Russian-centered political and cultural union including both coreligionists and

40 Ibid., 7–8 (1886): 291–97.41 Ibid., 297–307.42 State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), f. 730, op. 1, d. 3126, p. 44 (Septem-ber 10).43 A. A. Kireev, ‘‘O sozyve Vselenskogo Sobora,’’ originally published in 1888, Sochinenia(St. Petersburg: Suvorin, 1912), 1: 390–91.

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coethnics to develop a modern Slavic civilization separate from the West.44

This renewed confidence in the Russian mission among the Slavs and in theChristian East was badly shaken by the events of the Balkan Wars of1912–13 when local Christian nation-states defeated the Ottoman Empirebut could not agree on the spoils of their victory. The resulting internecinewar led to another heated debate about the place of Pan-Slavism andOrthodoxy in Russian cultural identity.

In 1913, one of the leaders of the Russian National Union MikhailMenshikov argued that ‘‘Russia had long been free of any obligationsbefore coreligionist nations’’ and that the sentimental and irrelevant ‘‘chit-chat’’ of the Slavophiles had cost the Russian people too much blood andsweat in many Russo-Ottoman wars. General Parensov, the then Chairmanof the St. Petersburg Slavic Benevolent Society, countered Menshikov witha series of articles in the same Novoiie Vremia newspaper—one of the mostpopular monarchist dailies. Pan-Slav publicist Alexander Bashmakov usedthis discussion as an opportunity to bring Pan-Slav messianism up to datewith modern times.45 He chose Slavianskiie Izvestiia—another official pub-lication of the St Petersburg Slavic Benevolent Society. It did not enjoy themass circulation of Novoiie Vremia but had permanent correspondents inall Slavic lands and set the tone among Russian Pan-Slavs.46

On the one hand, Bashmakov denounced Menshikov’s views, ‘‘Outsidethe Slavic idea, there is no Russian nationalism, just like there can be noSlavic idea rejecting Russian nationalism’’ (emphasis in the original). Thelast point was clearly directed against the dangers of pro-Western AustrianSlavism—the movement for equality and potential dominance of Slavs inthe Habsburg Monarchy in explicit opposition to a future Russian-sponsored federation. On the other hand, Bashmakov believed that Russian‘‘Slavophiles’’ needed to revise their teaching to address that challenge. Spe-cifically, he urged them to de-emphasize their inherent Christian Orthodoxmessianism made obsolete by the Bulgarian Church Question and the gen-eral triumph of secular nationalism. ‘‘Who is closer to us—an OrthodoxGreek hateful of all things Slavic, a heterodox Slav (Czech or Croat), or,finally, a Slav with a religious feeling weakened under the influence of thespirit of our time?’’ Naturally, ‘‘our own Slavic brother’’ should be moreimportant than ‘‘an ethnically alien Orthodox’’ (pravoslavnyi inorodets).47

44 S. F. Sharapov, Blizhaisshie zadachi Rossii na Balkanakh (Moscow: publisher, 1909).45 A. A. Bashmakov, ‘‘Est’ li slavianofilstvo ‘sentimentalnaia boltovnia,’ chuzhdaia rus-skomu narodu? (Otvet M. O. Menshikovu),’’ Slavianskiie Izvestiia 40 (August 18, 1913):556–57.46 A. G. Dementiev, et al., Russkaia periodicheskaia pechat (1702–1894), 696.47 Slavianskiie Izvestiia 40 (August 18, 1913): 557–59.

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Bashmakov provoked a debate among the members of the St. Peters-burg Slavic Benevolent Society as he presented his views at several sessionsin the fall and winter of 1913–14. But veteran Pan-Slavs remained true tothe combined development of modernity and tradition. According to PavelSmerdynskii, the Secretary of the St. Petersburg Slavic Benevolent Society,‘‘after Alexei Dmitrievskii and Ivan Palmov, the members of the Council,had clarified the original significance of Orthodoxy in the relations of Rus-sia to the Orthodox East and in the life of Slavdom, the presenter no longerinsisted on his understanding of the practical reformulation of Slavophil-ism.’’48 There were only 255 active members of the Society but theyincluded important intellectuals and government officials. They wereinstrumental in the Russian decision to protect Orthodox Serbia from Aus-trian and German aggression, which contributed to the escalation of theBalkan conflict into the First World War.49

Thus, from the late 1800s all the way to the First World War, main-stream Pan-Slavism consistently attempted to modernize Orthodoxy byrelying on ethnicity but without renouncing Russia’s messianic role in theChristian East. It continued to contribute to the Russian cultural identityby creating the superior Russian self-image against the background of pow-erless fellow Slavs. Only a cultural and political union with Russia wouldenable the Slavs to preserve their identity and develop a separate civilizationagainst the encroachments of Greeks, Turks, and the West.

MODERNITY IN PAN-ORTHODOXY:INVENTING BYZANTINISM TO CONQUER

CONSTANTINOPLE

Although professing their unswerving allegiance to the traditions of theRussian relationship to the Christian East, adherents to Pan-Orthodoxy infact transformed that legacy in their debate with the Pan-Slavs. On the onehand, they continued to view Russia’s coreligionists as helpless victims tobe liberated from the Muslim yoke by powerful Russians. On the otherhand, the Pan-Orthodox modernized that traditional vision in the com-bined development of ethnic and religious categories and the invention of

48 Manuscript Division of the Russian State Library (OR RGB), f. 278–1–10, P. P. Smer-dynskii to E. V. Pigarev, St. Petersburg, May 30, 1914, pp. 6–6ob.49 Zdenko Zlatar, ‘‘For the Sake of Slavdom: St. Petersburg Slavic Benevolent Society—ACollective Portrait of 1913,’’ East European Quarterly 38 (2004): 261–96.

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the Byzantine civilization based on Nikolai Danilevskii’s ‘‘scientific’’ cate-gory of cultural-historical type.

The Pan-Orthodox adopted but redefined the ethnocentric terms of thePan-Slav discourse that had singled out the Greeks from the previouslyundifferentiated mass of victimized Ottoman Christians to recast them aspowerful and devious oppressors of the Balkan Slavs. The Pan-Orthodoxaccepted this drastic change of the Greek image but insisted on the positiveimpact of this newly discovered Greek political and cultural prowess.

In his letter to the Foreign Minister Gorchakov and the RussianAmbassador to Constantinople Butenev (1858–60), Over-Procurator of theHoly Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church Count Alexander Tolstoycharacterized the anti-Patriarchate pro-Bulgarian Pan-Slav articles in theRussian press as ‘‘the product of the suggestions of Western propaganda.’’50

Furthermore, in response to the protests of the Patriarchate of Constantino-ple, Tolstoy made censorship of all church-related publications more rigor-ous and assigned to his trusted subordinate Tertii Filippov (1825–99) thetask of vindicating the honor of the Patriarch, who had been attacked byBulgarian nationalists and their Russian supporters (specifically, the 1858articles of Christo Daskalov and Alexander Rachinskii).51 In a series of arti-cles in the main Russian daily Moskovskie Vedomosti in August 1858,Filippov did not ignore ethnicity politicized by the Pan-Slavs but attemptedto defuse it.52

In contrast to the rather vague but intense messianism of the Pan-Slavs,Count Alexander Tolstoy and Filippov had a clear idea of how to promotethe Russian mission in the Christian East—by continuing to support theestablished institution of the Patriarchate of Constantinople and other‘‘Eastern churches.’’ Thus, according to Filippov, the Russians should takethat interest to heart and be completely impartial to ‘‘our ethnic affinity[plemennoie rodstvo] with the Bulgarian people or special natural advan-tages and significance of the Greeks in the history of the Church.’’ But ulti-mately the message of Filippov (and of the Holy Synod in 1858) was notreassuring to the Bulgarians.

50 AVPRI, f. 161/3, op. 233 (1850), part I, (Tolstoy to Gorchakov (cc: Butenev), June 191858), 237–38.51 ‘‘D.’’ [Rachinskii, A.V.], ‘‘Turetskie dela,’’ Russkii Vestnik 13, 2 (1858): 245–65.‘‘D.’’ [Daskalov, Christo], ‘‘Vozrozhdenie bolgar ili reaktsia v Evropeiskoi Turtsii,’’ Rus-skaia Beseda vol. 2, 10 (1858): 1–64.52 T. I. Filippov, ‘‘Otvet G-nu D.,’’ Moskovskie Vedomosti 93 (August 5, 1858): 865; 94(August 7, 1858): 874; 95 (August 9, 1858): 886; 96 (August 12, 1858): 894; 97 (August14, 1858): 904.

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In Filippov’s line of argument, the cause of Orthodoxy in the OttomanEmpire depended on the continued leadership of the Greeks. OrthodoxChristianity was created, preserved, and propagated almost exclusively bythe Greeks. The Slavs themselves, such as Bulgarians and Russians, adoptedthe true faith from the Greeks. Unlike other Christian Orthodox ethnicities(plemena), the Greeks preserved their education ‘‘in the four centuries ofthe Turkish yoke.’’ This unique resilience had enabled the Greeks ‘‘to con-tinue to repulse the cunning encroachments of Rome to obtain possessionof the East under the pretext of achieving unity of the Church.’’ This superi-ority notwithstanding, the Patriarchate was true to its supranational roleand had ten Bulgarian bishops both in its Greek and Bulgarian dioceses in1858.53

When Count Alexander Tolstoy left his office in 1861, the Holy Synodbegan to follow the line of caution and non-intervention into the BulgarianChurch Question from 1861 to 1880. In 1873, the official annual reportof Over-Procurator Dmitrii Tolstoy painted a self-righteous picture of therelations between the Russian Church and Orthodox Churches of ‘‘theEast.’’ The deadlock in the Greek-Bulgarian Question meant ‘‘a diminutionof the Apostolic spirit among some of our Eastern coreligionists.’’ Through-out that crisis, the Russian Church remained ‘‘the protectress of the highestinterests of Orthodoxy.’’

The overall message of the report was to put the blame for the Bulgar-ian Schism on the influence of extreme Greek nationalism over the Patri-archate. Still, the Russian Church claimed the traditional messianic Pan-Orthodox rather than the Pan-Slav role. In a highly patronizing tone, theHoly Synod reaffirmed its commitment to providing material assistance toEastern churches and ‘‘furthering the spread of Orthodox enlightenmentamong them’’ regardless of nationality (plemia) as a counterweight to West-ern proselytizing efforts.54

Even without high government circles behind him, Filippov continuedto defend the Eastern churches in the press when the majority of Russianeducated society was leaning in the Pan-Slav direction regarding the Bulgar-ian Church Question.55 Filippov had to make clear the relative weight of

53 T. I. Filippov, ‘‘Otvet G-nu D.’’, Moskovskie Vedomosti 93 (August 5, 1858): 865–66.54 Ibid., 222.55 T. I. Filippov, ‘‘Vselenskii Patriarch Grigorii VI i greko-bolgarskaia raspria,’’ ZhurnalMinisterstva Narodnogo Prosveshenia 2 (1870): 245–301; 3 (1871): 1–54; ‘‘Resheniegreko-bolgarskogo voprosa,’’ Russkii Vestnik 87 (1870): 648–720; ‘‘Opredelenie Kostan-tinopolskogo sobora po voprosu o bolgarskom ekzarkhate,’’ Grazhdanin 23 (October 9,1872): 161–64; 24 (October 15, 1872): 194–97; 26 (October 30, 1872): 252–53; 27(November 6, 1872): 289–94.

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ethnic and religious components as he defended and explained to the Rus-sian public the validity of the Schism adopted by the Local Council of allOttoman Orthodox churches in Constantinople in September 1872. Estab-lishing the pattern for his followers, he defined the Bulgarian heresy of phy-letismos as the sacrifice of the interests of the Church in favor of those ofthe nation (narodnost) by one of the members of supranational OrthodoxChristianity. Furthermore, Filippov denounced Bulgarian nationalist lead-ers as Westernized and lacking in faith. He charged them with ‘‘shame-lessly’’ accepting their church from the Sultan in violation of the idea ofchurch independence of the state. This act also went against canon law,which demanded the approval of the higher ecclesiastical authority, i.e., thePatriarchate of Constantinople.

He also referred to renowned Pan-Orthodox figures such as OttomanGreek poet and scholar Ioannis Tantalidis and the former Patriarch Greg-ory VI, present at the 1872 Council, to prove that the latter could not beignored as allegedly composed only of Greek nationalists. Filippov sup-ported Gregory VI’s earlier call for a bigger and a truly Ecumenical Councilto remedy the Bulgarian Schism and thus to restore Pan-Orthodox unity.56

This article appeared in the new anti-liberal newspaper Grazhdanin, whichenjoyed limited success among the nobility and clergy in the 1870s. Itwould continue to publish Pan-Orthodox articles even after becoming oneof the main monarchist and nationalist publications. Grazhdanin achievedthis prominence from the 1880s onward because its owner and editor,Prince Vladimir Mesherskii, enjoyed friendship with Alexander III andNicholas II.57

Filippov and his supporters also saw the Ecumenical Council as theonly way to restore some freedom and dignity to the Russian Church,which had been reduced to the status of a government agency by Peter theGreat in the early 1700s. The first gathering of all Orthodox representativessince 787 would ‘‘bring us back to the true church life, of which we weredeprived for a long time, to restoring to us the salutary principle of counsel[sovet], to resurrecting in us the otherwise completely frozen sense of ourecumenical union with co-religionist nations [narod].’’ Filippov attemptedto convince his long-time friend and mentor Pan-Slav Professor Mikhail

56 T. I. Filippov, ‘‘Opredelenie Kostantinopolskogo sobora po voprosu o bolgarskomekzarkhate,’’ Grazhdanin 27 (November 6, 1872): 289–94.57 K. F. Shatsillo, ‘‘Konservatizm na rubezhe XIX–XX vekov,’’ in Russkii konservatizmXIX stoletia: ideologia i praktika, ed. V. Ia. Grosul (Moscow: Progress-Traditsia, 2000),390.

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Pogodin that the awakening of the Church from ‘‘its lethargy’’ was the onlyhope for ‘‘a future of Russia and the Slavic world.’’

Filippov consciously envisioned a Pan-Orthodox modernity developingparallel to Western civilization. In his mind, the Church was ‘‘our onlysalvation and the only claim to fame before the rest of humanity. We willhave to borrow everything else from others but we could share with moreadvanced nations the light of the truth preserved by the Church. Even ifthis does not happen, for ourselves it is the source of life, renewal, andenlightenment.’’58 Pan-Orthodox views on the reform of the RussianChurch through an ecumenical council echoed the growing opposition tostate control among many Russian bishops and agitation for the restorationof the Moscow Patriarchate as a symbol of church autonomy.59

Filippov’s ideas continued to spread in Russian educated societybecause he remained part of the Pan-Slav mainstream both in the 1870sand throughout his life. Writing after the proclamation of the BulgarianSchism of September 1872, Filippov’s Pan-Slav adversaries did not doubtthe strength of his influence, which tended to subvert the unity of the Pan-Slav camp. Thus, a certain ‘‘Orthodox Russian’’ exposed Filippov in achurch periodical as ‘‘a literary figure who came out of the Slavophile cir-cle’’ and was covering up ‘‘with the Slavophile banner the Grecophile tend-encies opposed to Slavic interests.’’ The Slavophiles allegedly became morewilling to compromise their principles. Some of them went so far as topraise ‘‘the articles full of Grecophile biases.’’ Those articles were welcomedin the publications ‘‘sympathetic and seemingly affiliated with the Slavoph-ile trend.’’ To crown it all, Filippov solemnly read one of those articles onMay 11 at the special session of the St. Petersburg Slavic Benevolent Societyin commemoration of SS Cyril and Methodius, the Illuminators of theSlavs.60

At another special session commemorating late Slavic studies scholarA. F. Gilferding, Filippov implied that his views were not marginal butpart and parcel of the teaching of the early Slavophiles, who were first andforemost ‘‘true Christian believers, the sons of the Orthodox Church,’’then, ‘‘they were true children of their people [naroda] and supporters of

58 Russian State Archive for Literature and Arts (RGALI), f. 373, op. 1, d. 361, pp. 30ob–31ob (T.I. Filippov to M. P. Pogodin, August 25, 1870).59 John Basil, Church and State in Late Imperial Russia: Critics of the Synodal Systemof Church Government (Minneapolis: Minnesota Mediterranean and Eastern EuropeanMonographs, 2005), 7–33.60 Pravoslavnyi russkii, ‘‘Eshio o greco-bolgarskom voprose,’’ Pravoslavnoie ObozrenieII, 12 (1871): 627.

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its independent development,’’ and ‘‘finally, the Slavophiles, in accordancewith their name, at the time were the only representatives of those sympa-thies towards our coethnic [soplemennym] Slavic peoples, which [sympa-thies] are one of the most essential obligations of any politically educatedRussian.’’61

Among the supporters of Filippov’s ideas in the mainstream Pan-Slavsociety, only a few participated in the press debate on the Bulgarian ChurchQuestion and more broadly on Russia’s relationship to the Christian Eastin the 1870s. Intellectually, Filippov’s publications emboldened Fedor Kur-ganov, Professor of the Kazan Theological Academy, to support what hesaw as the Pan-Orthodox cause of the Patriarchate of Constantinople in thepress debate after the Schism of 1872.62 However, it would be KonstantinLeontiev who, directly inspired by Filippov,63 would develop the defense ofthe Patriarchate in the Bulgarian Church Question into a coherent vision ofa separate non-Western civilization.

In his landmark Byzantinism and Slavdom, Leontiev drew on Danilev-skii’s methodology to develop a separate Byzantine cultural-historical type.As he saw it in 1875, any future union of the Slavs and Greeks with Russiawould be based on the twin pillars of Russian autocracy and the OrthodoxChurch embodied in the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. Likehis Pan-Slav counterparts, Leontiev perpetuated the perception of Slavs aspowerless to enhance the Russian self-image. According to Leontiev’s for-mula, ‘‘For their existence, the Slavs need the might of Russia. The powerof Russia needs Byzantinism.’’ He saw Byzantinism as ‘‘the only secureanchor of our preservation [okhranenie] not only for Russia but for allSlavs.’’ In contrast, Pan-Slavism should be rejected as another variation ofmodern Western liberal bourgeois parochial nationalism—without thestructure and discipline of Byzantinism, the Slavs are ‘‘an inorganic mass,easily split into pieces, easily merging into republican Europe.’’64

61 T. I. Filippov, ‘‘V pamiat A. F. Gilferdinga’’ in Slavianofilstvo: pro et contra. Tvorches-tvo i deiatelnost slavianofilov v otsenke russkikh myslitelei i issledovatelei, eds. D. K.Burlakov, A. V. Fateev (St. Petersburg: Russian Christian Academy for Humanities publi-cations, 2006), 393–94.62 F. A. Kurganov, ‘‘Istoricheskii ocherk greco-bolgarskoi raspri,’’ Pravoslavnyi Sobesed-nik 1, 1 (1873): 13–94; 1, 2 (1873): 187–260; 2, 5 (1873): 3–70; 2, 6 (1873): 175–202;2, 7 (1873): 283–336; 2, 10 (1873): 107–57; 2, 11 (1873): 325–83.63 RGALI, f. 2980, op.1, d. 1023, l. 2 (K. N. Leontiev to T. I. Filippov, Moscow, January8, 1876).64 K. N. Leontiev, ‘‘Vizantizm i Slavianstvo,’’ in Vostok, Rossia, Slavianstvo: filosofskaiai politicheskaia publitsistika, dukhovnaia proza (1872–1891) (Moscow: Respublika,1996), 116.

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Leontiev’s Byzantinism was not a pre-modern or traditionalist princi-ple but rather a prime example of the invention of tradition. Clearly, Byzan-tinism was not looking to some halcyon past but rather was drawing on themodern scientific methodology of cultural-historical types to create a newnon-Western civilization. Achieving that goal would lead to unprecedentedchanges in Russia’s domestic structures, external borders, and its relation-ship to the Christian East. After the conquest of Constantinople by Russia,the ‘‘Great Eastern Union’’ would bring together most of the Near Eastcentered on the Tsar and the greatly strengthened centralized and ‘‘trulyecumenical’’ Patriarchate. The heads of all Orthodox churches would electthe Patriarch of Constantinople. He would preside over the permanentCouncil of their representatives and wield significant political power.65

The influence of the Pan-Orthodox line in educated society grew afterthe break between Russia and ‘‘ungrateful’’ Bulgaria in 1885–86. All thisseemed to confirm Leontiev’s prophecies about unreliable and pro-WesternSlavs.66 A good example is Petr Matveev’s disillusionment with the Slavs,which coincided with the renewed emphasis on the authority of the Churchand its strength vis-a-vis the state. In 1881–82, with his degree in law, Mat-veev was an editor of the Proceedings of the Imperial Geographic Society,in which he contributed essays on popular legal customs. Before the breakbetween Russia and Bulgaria, Petr Matveev was a Russian Justice Depart-ment advisor to the administration of Eastern Rumelia. In his study of thelegal status of that autonomous province, written before the break betweenRussia and Bulgaria, Matveev appeared as an unabashed Pan-Slav. Herejoiced in the rapid Bulgarization of Eastern Rumelia. ‘‘The Greek andTurkish plaster crumbled’’ as the opportunistic local elites hastened toreclaim their Bulgarian identity. Its essential part was the devotion to Russiaand admiration of ‘‘Russian generals and soldiers—benefactors of the Bul-garian people.’’67

In 1887, very much like Leontiev, Matveev lamented the lack of any‘‘historically developed classes of population.’’ With no ‘‘ranks and orders[soslovie],’’ the Bulgarian people allegedly had no ‘‘memories of indepen-dent historical life—ties to the past were broken without trace.’’ That lackof social stratification and traditions explained the ‘‘extreme passivity, not

65 RGALI, f. 2980, op. 1, d.1023, ll. 79–80 and ibid., d. 1025, ll. 107–108 (Leontiev toFilippov, March 29, 1891).66 P. Sergievskii [I. I. Kristi], ‘‘Chto poseesh, to i pozhnesh (po povodu novoi knigiK.Leontieva),’’ Grazhdanin 82 (October 17, 1885): 12–13.67 Petr Matveev, Organicheskii statut Vostochnoi Rumelii. Istoricheskaia stranitsa iz deia-telnosti nashei diplomatii na Balkanskom poluostrove (Moscow, 1886), 95, 98.

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to say, herd instinct’’ of the Bulgarian people. As a result, ‘‘bold adventur-ers’’ from among the Westernized Bulgarian intelligentsia seized power.68

Nor did the Bulgarian clergy develop into ‘‘a body of national aspirationsand desires’’ to oppose ‘‘the most religiously indifferent intelligentsia inEurope.’’ The Bulgarian clergy was supposedly so weak as to be unable toresist the encroachments of Catholic and Protestant propaganda in Bulgariaproper. The root of the evil, according to Matveev, was in the uncanonicalstanding of the Bulgarian Church and its break from the Patriarchate ofConstantinople, ‘‘accompanied by the decline in religious faith and spiritualauthority in the Bulgarian people.’’69 Thus, moving away from Pan-Slavism,Matveev advocated the combined development of mutually reinforcing reli-gious and national facets of cultural identity in opposition to both Westernsecular and religious influences.

Some key diplomats shared those ideas and helped to implement them,for example, in the opening of the Russian Archaeological Institute in Con-stantinople in 1895. Ambassador in Constantinople Alexander Nelidov(1882–96) was one of the main sponsors of that project. He joined forceswith Filippov, who could now pull many strings in his new capacity as theState Financial Comptroller from 1889 to his death in 1899. The project’sgoal was to reclaim and modernize the shared Byzantine legacy connectingRussia to the Christian East. According to Nelidov, the Institute was sup-posed to encourage ‘‘the study of the history of Eastern Christian learningand the establishment of a firm scientific fulcrum for our co-religionistOrthodox world to resist Western cultural pressure unhampered by any-thing especially in science.’’70

In the early 1900s, the Pan-Orthodox felt they were gaining ground.Continued squabbles between Greeks, Serbs, and Bulgarians illustrated thedisruptive effects of Western nationalism in the Christian East and exposedagain Slavic unity as a myth. In the most popular dailies, they actively pro-moted Leontiev’s ideas of Byzantinism, Russian-led Eastern Orthodox orByzantine-Slavic Union, and eventual centralization of all national Ortho-dox churches under the Patriarchate of Constantinople.71 That project

68 Petr Matveev, Bolgaria posle Berlinskogo kongressa. Istoricheskii ocherk (St Peters-burg, 1887), ix.69 Ibid., x. See also Petr Matveev, ‘‘Bolgarskii raskol,’’ Russkii Vestnik 10 (1889): pagenumbers?; ‘‘Neskolko slov o Bolgarii i bolgarakh,’’ Russkii Vestnik 240 (1895): 306–7.70 GARF, f.1099–1–2252, p. 9 (Nelidov to Filippov, January 11, 1890).71 I. Fudel, ‘‘Sudba K. N. Leontieva,’’ Moskovskie Vedomosti 261 (November 12, 1910):6; ‘‘Vostochnyi Vopros (pamiati K. Leontieva),’’ Moskovskie Vedomosti 260 (November12, 1911): 2; A., Burnakin, ‘‘Tsargrad i Vseslavianstvo (prorochestva K. Leontieva),’’Novoie Vremia (November 2, 1911): 32.

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seemed to be getting off the ground during the First Balkan War of 1912—‘‘the long-awaited coalition struggle of Slavs and Greeks against the Mus-lim enemies of Christ’s Cross.’’72 But it proved to be a false start when theformer allies turned on each other in the Second Balkan War of 1913 andthe First World War.

But even in this disillusionment there was a consolation for the Pan-Orthodox. Western nationalism, of which Pan-Slavism was seen as an inte-gral part, was the main reason for ethnic conflicts among coreligionists. Asa result, ‘‘without the Cross or any ideas’’ the ‘‘last Crusade’’ to be turnedinto ‘‘a usual bloody Balkan mess [kasha].’’ Russia needed to seize theopportunity presented by the First World War to overcome Western-inspired ‘‘nationalist parochialism [uzost’]’’ and ‘‘ethnic selfishness [plem-ennoi egoism].’’ Following Leontiev’s ‘‘Slavic-Byzantine system’’ wouldmake it possible ‘‘to create a new Eastern Orthodox culture as a counter-weight to Romano-Germanic Europe.’’ This new civilization would be builtafter the liberation of Constantinople and the destruction of ‘‘Mohammed-anism.’’ As a result, led by the Ecumenical Patriarch, Orthodoxy wouldnaturally rise to reconcile Russia’s coreligionists within a federation and tostop ‘‘at the gates of Constantinople the onslaught of Jewish materialism,the ideas of equalizing prosperity, and international mixing.’’73

Similarly, S. A. Askoldov reaffirmed Leontiev’s Pan-Orthodox dictumabout the unreliability of Balkan Slavs when Bulgaria joined the CentralPowers against Russia and its allies. For him, this act was one of the manysigns of the crisis of Russian Pan-Slavism, which ‘‘in a certain sense died,’’and of the need to promote Byzantinism.74 These views were supported byArchbishop Antonii (Khrapovitskii)—the most influential Russian prelatein early 1900s. He shared his own vision of the fruits of Russian victory ata special meeting of the Russian Holy Synod in 1916.

If the First World War became a crusade for the liberation of the Chris-tian East, it was hoped that it could lead to the development of non-WesternPan-Orthodox civilization. It would emerge after Russia reconciled Greeksand Slavs, strengthened the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and made extensiveterritorial annexations in the Ottoman Empire. Secure from disruptiveWestern influences, the Russians would overcome their class differences inChristian equality expressed in the pilgrimage to and common veneration

72 I. I. Sokolov, Pravoslavnyi Grecheskii Vostok (St. Petersburg, 1913), 2: 1.73 A. Burnakin, O sudbakh slavianofilstva (Petrograd, 1916), 11–14.74 S. A. Askoldov, ‘‘Otzvuki slavianofilstva v god voiny’’ (orig in Russkaia Mysl 3 [1916]:1–5), in Slavianofilstvo: Pro et Contra: Tvorchestvo i deiatelnost russkikh myslitelei iissledovatelei, 785.

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of the Life-Giving Sepulcher, when ‘‘even our aristocratic ladies and gentle-men would gradually forget Carlsbads and Parises and would get to knowJerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth.’’75 The Russian government did notplan to dominate the Holy Land but obtained the recognition of its Frenchand English allies of its right to annex Constantinople, the Straits, andnortheastern Turkey in case of victory in the Great War.76

To sum up, before and after Leontiev’s Byzantinism, Pan-Orthodoxytransformed Russia’s traditional relationship to the Christian East byincreasingly relying on ethnic categories while combating what they saw asthe Western trend of putting nation and ethnicity above religion. In theirvision of Russian cultural identity, the ethnic Slavic component would notbe rejected but rather subordinated to Orthodoxy. After Leontiev came upwith his theory of the Byzantine cultural-historical type, the Pan-Orthodoxviews received a modern ‘‘scientific’’ foundation from which to advocateunprecedented changes in Russia’s domestic and international environ-ment. Their influence grew in Russian educated society at the expense ofPan-Slavism after Russia’s break with Bulgaria in the mid-1880s. The Pan-Orthodox felt vindicated in their critique of Western-inspired ethnocen-trism in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars and during the First World War.

CONCLUSION

This article has argued that Pan-Slavism and Pan-Orthodoxy should beconsidered as modern rather than as conservative, retrograde, and tradi-tionalist constructs. This kind of analysis should help transcend the dichot-omy between pre-modern religious and modern ethnic elements in thescholarly debates about cultural identity in late imperial Russia. Thus, Pan-Slavism, far from being a carbon copy of pure ethnonationalism, like Pan-Orthodoxy combined the development of both ethnic and religious catego-ries. Both opposing camps saw the populations of the Christian Eastthrough the modern prism of politicized ethnicity but neither wanted toassign Russia’s messianic role there to the dustbin of history. Both visionsof the political and cultural union of Russia, its coethnics, and coreligionistswere not relics of the past but rather brand new products of modern scien-tific thinking.

75 Pisma Blazhenneishego Mitropolita Antonia (Khrapovitskogo) (Jordanville, Holy Trin-ity Monastery Saint Job of Pochaev Typography, 1988), 54–55.76 Theofanis Stavrou, Russian Interests in Palestine (1882–1914): A Study of Religiousand Educational Enterprise (Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1963), 201.

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While enhancing the Russian self-image and identity against the back-ground of powerless coethnics and coreligionists, the proponents of bothvisions contributed to the making of cultural identity in late imperial Rus-sia. Since all non-Russian Orthodox Christians or Slavs were under foreignpolitical or cultural domination, their potential for development was onlypossible through Russian help and intervention. Only Russian initiative andaction were able to develop their existing shared cultural legacy into a sepa-rate non-Western civilization based on the Pan-Slav and Pan-Orthodox the-ories.

This kind of conceptualization of Pan-Slavism and Pan-Orthodoxyalso contributes to the discussion of how and when alternatives to Westernliberal modernity began to be formulated consciously. The time frame onwhich this article focused suggests that the broader context of fin-de-siecleEurope of the late 1800s and early 1900s with its proliferation of seeminglyconservative projects should be further researched along those lines.

Northeastern State University.

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Modernizing Orthodoxy. Russia and the Christian East (1856-1914).Vovchenko

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