Tolstoy

The other main challenge to the Russian Orthodox Church came from religious dissenters. In order to dissuade the peasantry from being drawn to the Old Believers, who had been identified with popular rebellion by the authorities ever since the schism of the 1660s, clergy were exhorted in the 1880s to make their services as sumptuous as possible.¹¹² Most threatening of all to the Church and government, however, were the many newer sects which grew rapidly in popularity in the nineteenth century. The Old Believers, and to a lesser extent sects such as the Khlysty and the Skoptsy at least subscribed essentially to the same faith – their differences were over details of ritual. The so-called ‘rational’ sectarian faiths, however, dispensed fundamentally with religious ritual, along with priests, churches, icons and all other paraphernalia. Their adherents preached a Christian doctrine of love, equality and freedom which did not recognise governmental authority. On the one hand there were the descendants of German colonists known as ‘Stundists’, whose economic enterprise, teetotalism and devotion to personal Bible reading in the vernacular began to attract large numbers of Russian peasants in the nineteenth century, while on the other there were the indigenous dukhobors and the Molokans.

Tolstoy’s spiritual rebellion, then, did not arise in a vacuum, and should be seen in this important socio-religious context. Unceasing expansion had made Russia an enormous multi-ethnic empire, and by the time of the 1897 Missionary Congress thirty per cent of its population were Muslim, Jewish or belonged to other faiths. Nevertheless, only the Orthodox Church was allowed to engage in missionary activities within the borders of the empire. The first two Missionary Congresses, held in Moscow in 1887 and 1891, had mostly focused on ways to corral the Old Believers into coming back into the fold of Orthodoxy, but the third, held in Kazan, had focused on countering the influence in Russia of sects and Bible-based Protestant and Evangelist denominations. These, it found, were on the increase, despite missionary work and government initiatives. Metropolitan Melety of Ryazan won support at the Congress with his proposal that sectarians should be deported to special camps in the Siberian tundra. He also proposed that their property should be confiscated, and their children removed.¹¹³ Only fear of widespread protests from Baptists abroad apparently prevented Nicholas II from making this official policy. Confident that the peasantry would never follow political revolutionaries, he was far more worried about evangelical Christians and figures like Tolstoy. The liberal newspaper Russian Gazette reported that the 200 bishops, priests and ecclesiastical figures at the 1897 Missionary Congress had classified Tolstoyanism as a sect like any other:

The Congress placed the religious-moral views of Count Lev Tolstoy amongst the new sectarian faiths, asserting that his followers made up a ‘fully formed sect’. Asserting also that this sect fully conformed to the definition of sects which were ‘particularly dangerous to the Church and the state’, the Congress resolved to ask the Holy Synod to propose to the government that the law established with regard to ‘particularly dangerous’ sects be applied to its adherents.¹¹⁴

Tolstoyanism was seen as all the more pernicious for its potential to appeal simultaneously to the educated elite and the peasantry, and the influence of Tolstoy’s ideas on Pyotr Verigin and the dukhobors shows the reality of this threat.

Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who had become Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod in 1880, a post which he held for twenty-five years, regarded Tolstoy as his arch-enemy. Tolstoy had first antagonised him by asking him to pass on the letter he wrote in 1881 to Alexander III, in which he asked for clemency for his father’s assassins. Convinced from the time of reading that letter (which he had refused to pass on), that Tolstoy was intent on bringing down the government, Pobedonostsev had led a vigorous campaign to silence his opponent. This had resulted in Tolstoy’s religious teachings being regularly denounced by Church figures, and the constant, and often intrusive, surveillance of his private life (even the Yasnaya Polyana priest was obliged to send reports to the Bishop of Tula).¹¹⁵ The ambitious son of a Moscow priest, who rose to become a professor of law before occupying the post of Procurator, Pobedonostsev was devoted to his duty. The wonderfully named Hermann von Samson-Himmelstierna provides a vivid thumbnail portrait of him in the history of Alexander III’s reign which he published in 1893: