Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/224

198 study the mental, scientific, and journalistic characteristics of Pobědonoscev. His activities were extensive, and were concerned with the questions of the day. In addition to learned collections of juristic data, he published legal textbooks (the most important of which was a manual of civil law), and a number of journalistic essays. In 1896 appeared a series of articles under the title of Moskovskii Sbornik (Moscow Collection), in which Pobědonoscev expounded his political and religious creed. The book ran through a number of editions.

The mere title "Moscow Collection" is enough to show anyone who possesses the necessary insight that the author, though he held office in St. Petersburg, felt himself to be a man of Moscow—for to Pobědonoscev, Moscow was the third Rome of true Christianity, the ideal capital of the genuine Russian. Born in Moscow, in Moscow he became professor of civil law and procedure, and as such was appointed juristic tutor to the imperial princes. In 1880, during the Loris-Melikov regime, the tutor of Alexander II was appointed chief procurator of the holy synod, and held this office until 1905.

His official position gave his opinions the great weight which they have possessed in Russia since the time when Alexander III ascended the throne. The liberal or semi-liberal system of Loris-Melikov was replaced by the clericalist system of Pobědonoscev, and notwithstanding 1905 and 1906 this system is still (1913) dominant in St. Petersburg.

Pobědonoscev was and desired to remain the man of Moscow. He sought his intellectual forbears among the Moscow slavophils, and above all among the slavophil Old Russians. It is undeniable that his fundamental philosophical principles remind us of those held by the leaders of the slavophil school, so that we think now of Kirěevskii, now of Konstantin Aksakov, and now again of Samarin and Homjakov; but the images of these notable thinkers pale before those of Pogodin and Katkov, which loom far more plainly behind the pages of the Moskovskii Sbornik. As far as Katkov is concerned, we do not see that writer in his youthful and liberal days, but we discern the counsellor of Alexander III. The assassination of Alexander II brought Katkov and Pobědonoscev into power. In nihilism and revolutionary terrorism, Pobědonoscev found the precise antithesis, as a philosophy of history, to his own fundamental outlook, which was that Old Russian civilisation, as the precise opposite of western civilisation, could alone constitute the