Pobedonostsev, Konstantin

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POBEDONOSTSEV, KONSTANTIN (1827–1907), procurator of the Holy Governing Synod of the Russian Orthodox church. Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev was the last procurator effectively to control the administration of the church according to the stipulations of the Ecclesiastical Regulation of Peter the Great. Although this regulation remained on the statute books until the collapse of the tsarist regime in 1917, the upheavals of 1905–1906 in the church and the government necessitated adaptation in its application during the final decade of the old order.

Pobedonostsev served as procurator from 1880 to 1905, during which time he oversaw a major restructuring of ecclesiastical education and an impressive expansion of the parish school system. His purpose was twofold: to provide basic education to the Russian masses as they emerged from the shadow of serfdom and to ensure that that education firmly supported the tsarist political system. Within the seminaries and theological academies under his control he both raised the general level of education and tried to maintain control of its content. Unintentionally, he stimulated a major controversy over reform in the church and spent the later years of his career attempting to contain and stifle this controversy.

Among the forceful personalities Pobedonostsev dealt with in the controversy over church reform were Antonii Vadkovskii, metropolitan of Saint Petersburg (1898–1912), Sergei Witte, chairman of the Committee of Ministers (1903–1905) and prime minister (1905–1906), and Antonii Khrapovitskii, bishop and archbishop of Volhynia (1902–1914). The bishops were determined reformers, seeking to free the church from the bondage of the Ecclesiastical Regulation. During debates in the Committee of Ministers on proposed changes in legislation affecting non-Orthodox religious groups in the Russian empire, Witte was persuaded by Vadkovskii and others that termination of the Petrine regulation and restoration of autonomy of administration (possibly reviving the patriarchate of Moscow) were essential for good government of the church.

Pobedonostsev attempted to halt the momentum for reform and abolition of the Petrine system by having Tsar Nicholas II transfer deliberation of the question from the Committee of Ministers to the synod itself, where the procurator's agents would be able to control the debate. Vadkovskii, Khrapovitskii, and their allies outmaneuvered the synodal bureaucracy, however, and the synod itself declared for reform. As a result of the synod's decision, the procurator ordered the polling of all the bishops of the church in the hope that they would be opposed to a sobor (council) of the church and to the restoration of the patriarchate. But when the bishops had completed their replies, the overwhelming majority were found to favor a sobor and a sweeping reform.

During the months that the poll was being taken, Russia was wracked by violence and revolution. From the turmoil came the October Manifesto (1905), which granted a limited constitutional government. Pobedonostsev resigned as procurator, protesting against the manifesto, against Witte's having been appointed prime minister, and against the tsar's promise to summon an all-Russian sobor. He died within two years, convinced that his work of twenty-five years as procurator was being destroyed and that both the Russian church and the Russian state were doomed to collapse. He had been unyielding in his opposition to parliamentary forms of government, believing that they were the cause of the decadence of the West and that their introduction into Russia in any form would lead to corruption and disintegration.

Pobedonostsev's voluminous writings reflect his training as a lawyer. Among them are Lectures on Civil Judicial Procedures (Moscow, 1863), History of the Orthodox Church until the Schism of the Churches (Saint Petersburg, 1896), Historical Juridical Acts of the Epoch of Transition of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Moscow, 1887), Course of Civil Law, 3 vols. (Saint Petersburg, 1868–1880), The Questions of Life (Moscow, 1904), Annual Report of the Over-Procurator of the Holy Synod concerning the Administration of the Orthodox Church (Saint Petersburg, 1881–1909), and a number of articles published in journals during his public career.

The definitive biography of Pobedonostsev in English is Robert F. Byrnes's Pobedonostsev: His Life and Thought (Bloomington, Ind., 1968). In German it is Gerhard Simon's Konstantin Petrovic Pobedonoscev und die Kirchenpolitik des Heiligen Synod, 1880–1905 (Göttingen, 1969). Other useful books are John S. Curtiss's Church and State in Russia: The Last Years of the Empire, 1900–1917 (1940; reprint, New York, 1965), Igor Smolitsch's Geschichte der russischen Kirche, 1700–1917 (Leiden, 1964), Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, edited by Robert Nichols and Theofanis Stavrou (Minneapolis, 1978), and my Vanquished Hope: The Church in Russia on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1981).