By Lucien J. Frary (Editor) (Author) - Thresholds Into The Orthodox Commonwealth - Essays in Honor of Theofanis G. Stavrou-Slavica Pub (2017)

Thresholds into the Orthodox Commonwealth
Theofanis G. Stavrou
Thresholds into the Orthodox Commonwealth
Essays in Honor of Theofanis G. Stavrou
Edited by
Lucien J. Frary
Bloomington, Indiana, 2017

Each contribution © 2017 by its author. All rights reserved.
Cover design by Christina Walther and Tracey Theriault.
ISBN: 978-089357-468-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Stavrou, Theofanis G., 1934- honouree. | Frary, Lucien J. editor.

Title: Thresholds into the Orthodox commonwealth : essays in honor of
Theophanis G. Stavrou / edited by Lucien Frary.
Description: Bloomington, IN : Slavica, 2016. | Includes bibliographical
references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016057000 | ISBN 9780893574680
Subjects: LCSH: Europe, Eastern--Civilization. | Humanities.
Classification: LCC DJK24 .T49 2017 | DDC 947--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016057000
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Contents
Acknowledgments �� xvii
Prolegomena
John L. Scherer†
In Praise of Ignorance �� 3
Carol Urness
The Travels of Brand and Isband �� 23
Timothy J. Johnson
Theofanis G. Stavrou: Bookman �� 35
Catherine Guisan
Bridge-Building as Humanism and Scholarly Adventure �� 45
Karl F. Morrison
Surviving Exile: Augustine of Hippo’s Version of Psalm 136

(Vulg., KJV 137) �� 51
Eastern Orthodoxy
David Goldfrank
The Evergetian Motif in Russian Monastic Reform �� 71

vi Contents
James Cracraft
The Petrine Church Reform Revisited �� 91
Theophilus C. Prousis
A Russian Pilgrim in Ottoman Jerusalem �� 101
Josef L. Altholz†
Alexander Lycurgus, An Ecumenical Pioneer �� 127
Stephen K. Batalden
The Septuagint Challenge to Russian Old Testament Translation:

Fault Lines in Fin-de-Siècle Russian Religious Culture �� 137
Heather Bailey
Russian Interpretations of Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus �� 147
Aaron N. Michaelson
Between the Cross and the Eagle:

The Russian Orthodox Missionary Society and the
Politics of Religion in Late Imperial Russia �� 157
Kristi A. Groberg
Recreation of Seventeenth-Century Tile Forms on

St. Petersburg’s Temple-Memorial “Savior on the Blood” �� 169
Matthew Lee Miller
Looking East: The American YMCA’s Interaction with

Russian Orthodox Christians, 1900–40 �� 181
Keith P. Dyrud
“Bolshevik Bishops” and the Russian Orthodox Mission in

America: A Question of Church, Politics, and the Law, 1917–52 �� 211
G. William Carlson†
Understanding Evangelical/Fundamentalist Approaches to

“Anti-Communism,” 1953–91: A Critique of Billy Graham’s
Participation in the World Peace Conference, 1982 �� 223
Contents vii
Greece and Cyprus
Achilles Avraamides
Alexander the Great’s Invincibility: Fact and Myth �� 253
J. Kim Munholland
Psichari Father and Son: A Generation at Odds �� 265
Peter Mackridge
George Seferis and the Prophetic Voice �� 281
Donald E. Martin
Translation of George Philippou Pierides, “The Thoughts and

Uncertainties of Good Citizen Anestis Volemenos” �� 293
Van Coufoudakis
The Cyprus Question: International Politics and the Survival

of the Republic of Cyprus �� 307
Evanthis Hatzivassiliou
Economic Reform and the Rise of Political Forces in Early

Post–Civil War Greece: The Case of Karamanlis’s ERE �� 329
Kostas Kazazis†
Using Humor to Cross the Greek Tu/Vous Line:

A Personal Account �� 349
David Connolly
Poetry Translation Reviews Reviewed:

Possible Criteria for Reviewing Poetry Translations �� 355
Russia and Eastern Europe
Thomas S. Noonan†
Khazaria, Kiev, and Constantinople in the

First Half of the Tenth Century �� 369
viii Contents
Michael Bitter
Preparations for Travel to St. Petersburg in

the Eighteenth Century �� 383
Gregory Bruess
Battling Bishops in Catherine II’s Russia �� 393
Lucien J. Frary
Europe’s Bellicose Periphery: Russia and the

Cretan Insurrection of 1841 �� 403
John A. Mazis
The Greek Benevolent Association of Odessa (1871–1917):

A Minority Civic Organization in Late Imperial Russia�� 417
Thomas A. Emmert
Sir Arthur Evans in the Balkans: A Romantic Crusade �� 431
Peter Weisensel
Identifying “the Asian” in Russian Colonial Writing:

Evgenii Markov’s Russia in Central Asia (1901) �� 443
Marjorie W. Bingham
“A Link with Time”: Anna Akhmatova’s Poetry for

History Courses �� 463
Bryn Geffert
Rethinking Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata and Dostoevsky’s

Notes from the Underground �� 473
Elizabeth A. Harry
From Scylla to Charybdis: Discontent with Employment

and Education in the Early Soviet State �� 489
Daniel A. Panshin†
The Russian Student Fund and Its Role in the Diaspora �� 527
Susannah Lockwood Smith
Folk in Soviet Music in the 1930s �� 537

Contents ix
Norma Noonan
“The Soviet Experiment” and Women:

Brief Historical Reflections �� 555
Zdeněk V. David
Back to the Future: A Modern Revival of Sixteenth-Century

Czech Cultural and Political Values �� 561
Kåre Hauge
The Barents Region: History Resurrected in Post-Soviet Europe �� 599
Nick Hayes
BG: Conversations with Boris Grebenshchikov �� 611
John R. Lampe
Rethinking American Perspectives on Southeastern Europe �� 615
Epilegomena
Stanford Lehmberg†
Writings of the Eighteenth-Century Archbishops of Canterbury �� 627
Stanley G. Payne
Carlism and Nationalism �� 641
Tom Clayton
Islands as a State of Mind: Circuitous Reconnaissance �� 657
Pilgrimage, Connection, Community �� 675
Notes on Contributors �� 681

Acknowledgments
The publication of this volume is the result of collaborative commitment, effort,

and care. Warmest thanks go to Slavica Publishers, especially to the managing
editor, Vicki Polansky, for her constant encouragement and painstaking
attention to the manuscript. From its inception, Mr. Soterios Stavrou,
instructor of Modern Greek at the University of Minnesota and the associate
editor of the Modern Greek Studies Yearbook: A Publication of Mediterranean,
Slavic, and Eastern Orthodox Studies, has been the firm, while benevolent,
guiding spirit of our shared Odyssey. All who have worked with Mr. Stavrou
have reason to appreciate his scholarly discernment, editorial acumen, and
unfailing courtesy. He has been the good helmsman with unwearying hand
for the Modern Greek Studies Program at the University of Minnesota and the
many projects that have emanated from its office. In addition, Russell Martin
deserves special recognition for reviewing the project in its early stage. And
heartfelt appreciation is owed the authors for their contributions and for their
patience during the lengthy adventures that eventually brought Thresholds
into the Orthodox Commonwealth safely home and into harbor.
Prolegomena
In Praise of Ignorance
John L. Scherer†
Theo’s office had no window. He had blocked the window with bookshelves, turning
the office into a cave of sorts. The dancing shadows on the walls were his books,
which we, his students, took for reality. The office was filled with posters and photo-
graphs. He reserved a corner of his desk for porcelain, paste, and metal mermaids,
which were part of a larger collection he had accumulated during his travels, or which
had been given him by students and friends. The mermaids linked Theo to the sea, to
Cyprus, and to Greek mythology.
Russian Spirits
Historians and anthropologists assume that people in primitive cultures and societies
simply believed in mermaids, mythical heroes, and legends. One anthropologist has
written that folk tales “are to the natives a statement of a primeval, greater, and more
relevant reality, by which the present life, fates and activities of mankind are deter-
mined.”1 Nineteenth-century Russians had said much the same. The literary critic
Vissarion Belinskii noted that “[b]y the word ‘reality’ is meant all that is—the visible
world and the spiritual world, the world of facts and the world of ideas. Reason in
consciousness and reason in external appearance—in a word, spirit revealing itself to
itself is reality; whereas everything that is particular, everything accidental, every-
thing unreasonable is illusion, the opposite and negation of reality, appearance and
1
Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1948), 79, 86; and Linda J. Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe,
1989), 69. Anthropologists have conceded that primitive societies at least had an internal logic.
I am suggesting that all societies behave ritually and irrationally.
On folk tales, see James Bailey and Tatyana Ivanova, trans., An Anthology of Russian Folk
Epics (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998); Sabine Baring-Gould, Curious Myths of the Middle
Ages, ed. Edward Hardy (New York: Crescent Books, 1987); Joseph Campbell and Charles
Muses, eds., In All Her Names: Explorations of the Feminine in Divinity (San Francisco: Harp-
erSanFrancisco, 1991); Katherine M. Briggs, ed., A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the
English Language, 4 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970–71); and S. V. Maksi-
mov, Literaturnye puteshestviia (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1986), with an index of personal and
mythological names, 391–414.
Thresholds into the Orthodox Commonwealth: Essays in Honor of Theofanis G. Stavrou. Lucien
J. Frary, ed. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2017, 3–22.
4 John L. Scherer
not real being.”2 And in the same vein, Nikolai Stankevich, the founder of a literary
and philosophical circle in Moscow during the 1830s, wrote that “reality in the sense
of immediacy, of external being, is accident. Reality in its truth is reason, spirit.”3
Actually, certain societies, such as prerevolutionary Russia, handled myth and legend
with considerably more practicality and sophistication.
Russia has few tales about mermaids because, for much of its early history, it was
landlocked. It has many legends about female water spirits called rusalki. Rusalki
emerged from rivers and lakes seven weeks after Easter, and lived on land until late
autumn. The water dripping from their hair moistened the earth for spring planting.4
Bereginy, other water sprites, may have been named after bereg (shore), or the verb
berech´ (to protect). Their images were carved on houses and ships in the Volga region.
Rusalka is a word of unknown origin, but tribes that settled along northern rivers,
streams, and lakes near the playgrounds of the rusalki adopted the name. The term
may also have been the origin of Rus´ or “Russia,” although scholars have suggested
many other sources for these words.5 Mermaids or rusalki also influenced architec-
ture in Russia. Majolica mermaids decorated the Z. O. Pertsov House (1905–07),
designed by S. A. Maliutin at Kursovoi pereulok, 1/1, in Moscow.6 The art moderne
sculpture by Anna Semenovna Golubkina above the entrance to the Moscow Arts
Theater (MKhAT) at Prospekt khudozhestvennogo teatra, 3, has been titled Plovets
(The diver), V volnakh (In the waves), and More zhiteiskoe (The inhabited sea, or the
merman).7 Of the 412 old Russian lubki (woodcuts) known to exist, none depicts a
2
V. G. Belinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. N. F. Belćhikov, 13 vols. (Moscow: Iz-
datel´stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1953), 3: 436.
3
N. V. Stankevich, Perepiska Nikolaia Vladimirovicha Stankevicha, 1830–1840, ed. Aleksei
Stankevich (Moscow: A. I. Mamontov, 1914), 486; John L. Scherer, “Belinskij and the Hege-
lian Dialectic,” Slavic and East European Journal 21, 1 (1977): 30–45. Paul Veyne has argued
that Greeks handled myths with cognitive dissonance, both believing in them and not believ-
ing, depending on the occasion. This bit of cleverness seems, however, to avoid answering the
question posed by his monograph: Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the
Constitutive Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 56–57, 86.
4
For more on this, see James Bailey and Tatyana Ivanova, trans., An Anthology of Russian
Folk Epics (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998); and S. V. Maksimov, Literaturnye putesh-
estviia (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1986), with an index of personal and mythological names
(391–414).
5
V. Ia. Propp, Russian Folk Lyrics, trans. and ed. Roberta Reeder (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1992), 6–7, 63. On the derivation of rusalka, refer to D. K. Zelenin, Izbran-
nye trudy: Ocherki russkoi mifologii. Umershie neestestvennoiu smertíu i rusalki (Moscow:
Indrik, 1995), 142–43; and Maks Fasmer [Max Vasmer], Etimologicheskii slovar´ russkogo
iazyka, 4 vols. (Moscow: Progress, 1971), 4: 520.
6
See Moscow News, 11–17 August 1999, 6; and A. V. Ikonnikov, Tysiacha let russkoi arkh-
itektury: Razvitie traditsii (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1990), 341.
7
See M. V. Posokhin et al., eds., Pamiatniki arkhitektury Moskvy: Belyi gorod (Moscow:
Iskusstvo, 1989), 164–65; a carved mermaid appears on 110–11.
In Praise of Ignorance 5
mermaid or water spirit. But they do show flocks of devils, monsters, and birds of par-
adise.8 Carved mermaids from the Volga region also appear on the facade of a house
and on a valëk (a battledore or loom).9 M. D. Karnovskii and I. F. Zubov depicted mer-
maids in engravings dedicated to the Russian victory in the Northern War (1707–09),
and Aleksei Zubov and Piter Pikart also depicted them in “To the Most Sublime Tsar
Union [Which Has Been] Blessed by God” (1715), an engraving of Tsar Peter I and
his wife Ekaterina.10 Charles Cameron included sculptures of mythological subjects
linked to water in a 1780 design for the Cold Baths at Tsarskoe Selo.11 Rusalki also
appeared in Russian music, including Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka’s opera Ruslan and
Liudmila (1842) and Aleksandr Sergeevich Dargomyzhskii’s Rusalka (1856).12 Yev-
genii Lancéray (Lanceré, 1875–1946) drew the two-tailed mermaid featured on the
cover of Zolotoe Runo (The Golden Fleece) in 1906. Ivan Kramskoi painted Rusalki
in 1871, a picture of pale, subdued sprites dressed in white.13 Velimir Khlebnikov, the
self-proclaimed Futurist “President of the Universe” and the “King of Time,” wrote a
“trans-rational” poem in which he used the words “rusalka” and “rusalki.”14 Rusalki
and other spirits served specific functions in Russian culture. Benevolent spirits in-
cluded the rozhanitsa, protector of the household and family; senmurvy, dogs living
8
See especially E. I. Itkina, Russkii risovannyi lubok kontsa XVIII–nachala XX veka (Mos-
cow: Russkaia kniga, 1992).
9
Shown in Christianity and the Arts in Russia, ed. William C. Brumfield and Milos M. Veli-
mirovich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), plate 40 and 41.
10
M. Alekseeva, Graviura petrovskogo vremeni (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1990), 68, 139.
11
Brian Allen and Larissa Dukelskaya, eds., British Art Treasures from Russian Imperial
Collections in the Hermitage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 210.
12
See Malcolm Hamrick Brown, “Native Song and National Consciousness in Nine-
teenth-Century Russian Music,” in Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia, ed. Theo-
fanis George Stavrou (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 57–83, especially 64.
13
T. I. Kurochkina, Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoi (Moscow: Izobrazitelńoe iskusstvo, 1980),
54–55; and John E. Bowlt, The Silver Age: Russian Art of the Early Twentieth Century and the
“World of Art” Group (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1979), 21, 64.
14
Von der Fläche zum Raum: Russland, 1916–24 (Cologne: Galerie Gmurzynska, 1974), 63.
Some readers of Vladimir Nabokov have imagined Lolita as a butterfly. Nabokov was an avid
lepidopterist, and in his novel he described many places he had seen in the United States while
on cross-country moth chases. Nabokov envisaged Lolita as a mermaid. Humbert Humbert
recalled, “She adored brilliant water and was a remarkably smart diver.” Vladimir Nabokov,
Lolita (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1955), 163. When Humbert first saw the nymphet, “a
blue sea-wave swelled under my heart” (41). She reminded him of another love at a “princedom
by the sea” (11, 42). Lolita’s mother, Charlotte Haze, had “wide-set sea-green eyes” (39). At
the beach, Charlotte swam “with dutiful awkwardness (she was a very mediocre mermaid),
but not without a certain solemn pleasure (for was not her merman by her side?)…” (88). On
Vladimir Nabokov the lepidopterist, see John L. Scherer, The Popular Encyclopedia of Russia
and the Soviet Union, 9 diskettes (Minneapolis: J. L. Scherer, 1999–2000), 440–41; and Der
Spiegel, 9 June 1997, 197.
6 John L. Scherer
in trees which caused the spring to come by flapping their wings; and the simartjl, a
hybrid bird and dog that lived in an oak tree at the edge of the world and spread its
wings to create the wind and to distribute seeds.15
Warnings
Spirits, particularly evil spirits, alerted Russian peasants to danger. The vodianoi,
or water sprite, one of two types of rusalki, drowned people. Vodianye resembled
humans, except for their fish tails. Some had claws, a horn on their heads, and, oc-
casionally, even goose legs. Most Russians could not swim, so these spirits made
them cautious around water. Bards and balladists in Kaluga and Smolensk provinces
recounted that a vodianoi tsar lived in a submerged crystal palace, where he danced
to tunes played by musicians. The rooms of the palace were filled with gold from
sunken ships. In Orel province, peasants believed that the vodianoi tsar lived in an
undersea palace made from glass, gold, silver, and precious stones. The kingdom was
illuminated by precious stones brighter than the sun. When the tsar danced, the seas
turned stormy.16
A poludnitsa, which roamed Ukraine, was frequently, but not always, a tall,
beautiful woman clad in white who walked around fields at noon. She would twist
the head of anyone she found working at the hottest time of the day. Sometimes the
poludnitsa lured unsuspecting children into the rye and ate them. The lesson for field
hands was to stay out of the noonday sun, and, for children, not to play in the fields
and orchards.17
15
Alison Hilton, “Piety and Pragmatism: Orthodox Saints and Slavic Nature Spirits in Rus-
sian Peasant Art,” in Brumfield and Velimirovich, Christianity and the Arts in Russia, 55–71.
Konstantin Makovskii’s painting Rusalki appears in Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fan-
tasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986),
261. Dijkstra also commented on rusalki, mermaids, and ondines (94–100, 258–71). Contrary
to Dijkstra’s characterization of West European dryads, Russian rusalki were not passive.
16
E. V. Pomerantseva, Mifologicheskie personazhi v russkom fol´klore (Moscow: Nauka,
1975), 55–56, 61–62. It was said that this sea-tsar never died, but simply changed with the
phases of the moon. See S. V. Maksimov, Kul´ khleba: Nechistaia, nevedomaia i krestnaia sila
(St. Petersburg, 1903; repr., Smolensk: Rusich, 1995), 321. Some Slavs apparently believed that
water was not just dangerous but had purifying and healing effects. L. I. Min´ko, “Magical
Curing (Its Sources and Character and the Causes of Its Prevalence) [Part I],” Soviet Anthro-
pology and Archeology 12, 3 (1973): 3–33, especially 26–29.
17
Felix J. Oinas, Essays on Russian Folklore and Mythology (Columbus, OH: Slavica Pub-
lishers, 1985), 105; and Entsiklopedicheskii slovar´ (St. Petersburg: F. A. Brokgauz and I. A.
Yefron, 1890), 53: 295.
Politics
Evil beings have always been politically useful. During a succession crisis in the late
fifteenth century, rumors circulated that Ivan III’s second wife, Grand Princess Sofía
Paleologos, practiced sorcery. After Vasilii III had banished his first wife, Solomoniia
Saburova, to a convent, gossips claimed she had used magic to keep her husband’s
love. Princess Anna Glinskaia, the grandmother of Ivan the Terrible, was said to have
ripped out human hearts and sprinkled Moscow with the water in which she had
soaked them. The Glinskiis were accused of invoking witchcraft to start the immense
fire in Moscow in 1547. During the Time of Troubles (1598–1613), Tsar Boris Go-
dunov had the rival Romanov family exiled for having seized the throne by sorcery,
and Marina Mniszech, the Polish wife of Godunov’s successor Grishka Otrepév (the
False Dmitrii), was popularly known as “the witch Marinka.”18
Although witch-hunts in Russia did not equal the scope or intensity of those
in Western Europe, 1,452 people testified or confessed during a trial at Belgorod in
1664. The affair had political overtones, since many of the accused were Circassians
and Zaporozhian Cossacks.19
As early as the twelfth century, the Russian Orthodox Church, intent on con-
verting the heathen, forbade the telling of fables. It urged peasants to consult divine
Scriptures on all things.20 Peasants ignored the prohibition, and continued to recount
the stories in order to resist church and state control.21 They continued to tell folk
tales about rusalki who conducted mock funerals that parodied Orthodox Church
rites. Peter was the crocodile, and Baba-Yaga was a fearsome witch in Russian folk
tales. One famous anti-government Old Believer lubok, “How the Mice Buried the
Cat,” showed mice (Russians) reveling in their release from the oppression of the cat
(Peter the Great). Another satirical lubok entitled “The Witch Baba-Yaga Going Off
to Fight the Crocodile” depicted Peter’s wife Ekaterina in Livonian costume riding a
18
Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief, 87–88; Russell Zguta, “Witchcraft Trials in Seventeenth-Cen-
tury Russia,” American Historical Review 82, 5 (1977): 1187–1207, especially 1193; and Zguta,
“The Ordeal by Water (Swimming of Witches) in the East Slavic World,” Slavic Review 36, 2
(1977): 220–30; Zguta, “Witchcraft and Medicine in Pre-Petrine Russia,” Russian Review 37,
4 (1978): 438–48; and Valerie A. Kivelson, “Witchcraft in Russia,” Modern Encyclopedia of
Russian and Soviet History, ed. George N. Rhyne (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International
Press, 1997), 55: 1–4. At one time, it was believed that sorcerers skied through fields by attach-
ing icons to their feet. See Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief, 109. Ivan the Terrible could not sleep
without hearing fables and stories each night. Three blind men recounted tales at the tsar’s
bedside until sleep overtook him. See Y. M. Sokolov, Russian Folklore, trans. Catherine Ruth
Smith (New York: Macmillan Company, 1950), 457.
19
Russell Zguta, “Was There a Witch Craze in Muscovite Russia?” Southern Folklore Quar-
terly 40, 1 (1977): 119–27, especially 121–22.
20
Sokolov, Russian Folklore, 381.
21
Zelenin, Izbrannye trudy, 288.
8 John L. Scherer
pig. Peter had found his wife in a tavern in Livonia.22 Ekaterina made him play the
pipes and dance in “The Witch Baba-Yaga and the Bald Man.” Peter was portrayed
mischievously as “The Cat of Kazan’” in another lubok.23 Resistance to authority
may have been a major reason for the survival of dvoeverie (double-faith) in Russia,
that is, the retention of pagan beliefs by Orthodox Christians.
Instruction
Spirits, legends, and fairy tales taught civic and moral lessons. They explained the
benefits of loyalty, correct behavior, and persistence in the face of obstacles. They
instilled the values of cooperation, and persuaded children that even the smallest or
the meekest could succeed in this world. Folk tales explained how to deal with death,
misfortune, and such complex emotions as jealousy, anger, disappointment, and love.
Folk tales and myths brought clarity to life, and taught courage and self-control. They
did not shield children from reality, but instructed them, in an indirect but concrete
way, how to approach life with purpose and confidence.24
In a moral tale about greed, three brothers fought over a hat, the only thing they
had inherited from their father. The Lapp hero asked them why they were arguing
over something so paltry, and they told him that the hat was magic. Anyone who
wore it would become invisible. The Lapp hero put the hat on, became invisible to the
brothers, and walked away with it. The brothers agreed to cease quarreling, for they
no longer had anything to envy, and lived in harmony as before.25
In other tales, a husband told his Yakut bride to turn left at the fork in the road.
She turned right, of course, and suffered for her defiance. An Armenian girl was
instructed to keep a secret or calamity would follow. She revealed the secret, and the
dire prophecy was fulfilled.26 While women were portrayed negatively in these par-
ticular stories, as disobedient and foolish, children learned to obey.
Spirits of the forests and fields taught people not to destroy the earth. In the
short story “Strashnaia mest´” (A Terrible Vengeance), Nikolai Gogol´ described the
Ukrainian countryside as a living being: “This forest which stands on the hills is not
a forest: these [trees] are the hairs growing on the shaggy head of the old man of the
22
Ian Grey, The Horizon Book of the Arts of Russia (New York: American Heritage Publish-
ing, 1970), 165, 168–69.
23
Thomas Froncek, ed., The Horizon Book of the Arts of Russia (New York: American Heri-
tage Publishing, 1970), 124–25.
24
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 5, 7, 9–11. Refer to Jack Zipes, Happily Ever After: Fairy
Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry (New York: Routledge, 1997), on similar themes.
25
C. Fillingham Coxwell, Siberian and Other Folk-Tales (1925; repr., New York: AMS Press,
1983), 626–30. This story is a variation on the Cap of Hades, which, according to Greek my-
thology, conferred invisibility on the wearer.
26
Ibid., 44–45.
forest.”27 In Smolensk guberniia (province), the leshii, another type of rusalka and
the lord of the forest, concluded agreements with local hunters to protect the birds
and animals.28 Folk wisdom warned that killing a swan doomed a person to an early
death.29 Anyone shooting a swallow, the bird that, according to legend, had removed
the nails from the Cross of Christ, would bring a curse upon his cattle.30 As a result of
a traditional reverence for birches in Russia, felling large trees was forbidden except
for certain spring rites.31 Since the birch was one of the first trees to bloom in the
Russian spring, peasants believed it possessed the elemental forces of nature. They
sometimes decorated a birch tree, cut it, and threw the branches into a rye field to
transfer the tree’s strength to the crop. Girls occasionally bent and staked the top of a
birch tree to the ground, so its power would be transmitted to the earth.32 In any case,
peasants saw themselves as a part of nature, not apart from it, and so protected it.33
The East Slavs did not have a pantheon of gods, but rather venerated nature itself.34
27
N. V. Gogol´, “Strashnaia mest´,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii N. V. Gogolia v desiati
tomakh, 10 vols. (Petrograd: Slovo, 1921), 1: 231.
28
Pomerantseva, Mifologicheskie personazhi, 29.
29
L. M. Kuznetsova and N. F. Lein, eds., Russkie (Moscow: Nauka, 1997), 745. Of course,
Russian peasants still ruined land with the slash-and-burn technique of farming, and scientific
farming certainly has increased yields. The point is that one can employ scientific techniques
and still respect the earth.
30
W. F. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination
in Russia (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 126. On reading this
encyclopedic study, one wonders why rituals, beliefs, and legends proliferated. Although Ryan
does not discuss this question, number and variety may have resulted because the folk beliefs
and rituals did not work, or because peasants constantly demanded new stories to entertain
themselves.
31
Ikonnikov, Tysiacha let, 21.
32
Propp, Russian Folk Lyrics, 63. Robert Graves devoted chapters to the ancient Irish Beth-
Luis-Nion tree alphabet (taking its name from the letters meaning Birch-Rowan-Ash), a relic
of Druidism, in The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (New York: Cre-
ative Age Press, 1948), 23, 137–70, especially 154. He noted that the British once believed that
a child laid in an elderwood cradle would pine away or be pinched black and blue by fairies.
The traditional wood of cradles was birch, which drove off evil spirits (154). In England a
witch could be rendered harmless by snatching away her besom, or broom, and tossing it into
running water, a river or stream. The brooms were made from birch twigs, which ensnared
evil spirits (143).
33
Mircea Eliade spoke about living in a “sacralized cosmos” in The Sacred and the Profane:
The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 17, 162–79.
34
See George P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, 1: Kievan Christianity: The Tenth to
the Thirteenth Centuries (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 3–20, 344–62.
The author and actor Frank McCourt has recalled that as a boy he accompanied his family
to a cemetery in Ireland to bury his two-year-old brother Oliver, who had died suddenly from
pneumonia. Jackdaws were perched on trees and tombstones. McCourt could not bear to think
10 John L. Scherer
Perpetuating these ideas benefited Russia and Ukraine, but did not require actual
belief in spirits, only knowledge of and respect for these legends.
Control
The Koriaks and Chukchis sacrificed their elderly and their dogs to propitiate evil
spirits. Other peoples merely left food in certain places.35 This difference represented
an understanding of sacrifice as an abstract concept, and the lessening of belief. Such
rituals taught abstention, gratitude, and humility.
Kazakhs prayed to specific deities during particular calamities. They made sac-
rifices to jher-ana, an earth spirit, during ice storms, to su-ana, a water god, during
drought, and to various animal spirits when the herds became ill or their numbers
dwindled. Kazakhs believed, or pretended to believe, that animals possessed super-
natural powers, and that sacrificing them could reverse misfortune and postpone
death.36 When misfortune persisted, they must have doubted the powers of their idols.
Kazakhs, at least, understood that they did not control their own destinies, and this
acknowledgement represented heightened awareness and sophistication.
Superstitious Russians and other nationalities avoided calling things by their cor-
rect names. The Cheremis referred to bees as the “little tiny bird.” Estonians called
the bee “a honey bird.” In Siberia, a bear was known as “a bull”; a she-bear, “a cow.”
Siberians spoke of a cow as “the bellower,” and Russians substituted “the spired one”
for a church. Belorussians spoke metaphorically about “the gay one,” “the handrail,”
and “the yoke” when they meant a rainbow.37 A superstitious person does not com-
pletely trust reason, or at least someone else’s reasoning, but this does not mean that
he or she is stupid.
Among pagan Slavs, obscenities also had a ritual function connected to agricul-
tural, marital, and fertility rites.38 Foul language, like prayer, was invoked to escape a
wood demon or house spirit, or the Devil himself. On certain occasions, when prayer
of leaving Oliver with the jackdaws, so he began to pitch rocks at them. His father told him
to stop; they might be someone’s soul. This caution had the opposite effect on young Frank:
“I’d be a man some day, and I’d come back with a bag of rocks, and I’d leave the graveyard
littered with dead jackdaws.” See Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes, audiocassette (New York:
Recorded Books, Inc., 1997), pt. 3.
35
Coxwell, Siberian and Other Folk-Tales, 28.
36
Martha Brill Olcott, The Kazakhs (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1987), 20; and
S. E. Tolybekov, Kochevoe obshchestvo Kazakhov v XVII–nachale XX veka: Politiko-ekono-
micheskii analiz (Alma-Ata: Nauka, 1971), 197.
37
V. P. Anikin, “On the Origin of Riddles,” in The Study of Russian Folklore, ed. Felix J.
Oinas and Stephen Soudakoff (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 25–37.
38
On fertility, see S. A. Tokarev, Religioznye verovaniia vostochnoslavianskikh naro-
dov XIX–nachala XX v. (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1957), 94; and V. K.
Sokolova, Vesenne-letnie kalendarnye obriady russkikh, ukraintsev, belorussov (Moscow:
Nauka, 1979), 220.
would not work, only cursing proved effectual. Both prayers and curses were used
to find buried treasure. The procedure to free a village from an epidemic required
shouting, banging things, and cursing. Pagan Serbs threw a hammer at the heavens
to avert hail, swearing the whole time.39 While these customs continued, the treasure
was never found; the epidemic ran its course; and hail ruined the crops. Obscenities
became part of the language to express fear or frustration rather than to bring about
some miraculous event.
Entertainment
Tales and legends offered entertainment and enchantment. Aleksandr Pushkin de-
scribed a nereid in 1820:
Below the dawn-flushed sky, where the green billow lies

Caressing Tauris’ flank, I saw a Nereid rise.
Breathless for joy I lay, hid in the olive trees,
And watched the demi-goddess riding the rosy seas.
The waters lapped about her swan-white breast and young,
As from her long soft hair the wreaths of foam she wrung.40
Other Romantic writers of the early nineteenth century, such as Vasilii Zhukovskii,
Taras Shevchenko, and Mikhail Lermontov, all reworked ancient tales about rusal-
ki.41
Most of the time, women fared poorly in these tales. Lermontov included an
undina (undine)—a mermaid or water nymph—in his short story “Taman´.” At least
the protagonist took her for one: “Her fingers crunched, but she did not cry out; her
serpent nature withstood this torture.”42 Nikolai Gogol´ described rusalki as pale,
translucent, as if illuminated by the moon. They appeared at twilight, just before the
stars winked on, to laugh and dance, their eyes shining and their green or red hair
39
B. A. Uspenskij, “On the Origin of Russian Obscenities,” in The Semiotics of Russian
Culture, by Ju. M. Lotman and B. A. Uspenskij, ed. Ann Shukman (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan, 1984), 295–300.
40
The Poems, Prose and Plays of Alexander Pushkin, ed. Avrahm Yarmolinsky (New York:
Modern Library, 1964), 53. The translation is by Babette Deutsch. Pushkin’s rusalka combed
her wet hair, waved, nodded, laughed, and cried like a child. See A. S. Pushkin, Pushkin: Pol-
noe sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh, ed. M. A. Tsiavlovskii (Moscow: Academia, 1936),
1: 252, on a domovoi, 260–61, on a rusalka, and 279, on the nereida.
41
Entsiklopedicheskii slovar´ (1890), 53: 295. Shevchenko wrote “Utoplenie” (Drowned).
Zhukovskii’s “Lesnoi Tsar´” (Forest Tsar [i.e., leshii], 1818) was borrowed from a ballad of
the same name by Goethe. See V. Zhukovskii, Stikhotvoreniia (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia,
1974), 167–68, 291.
42
Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time, trans. Vladimir Nabokov (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1958), 65–80, especially 77.
12 John L. Scherer
overflowing their shoulders. They burned for love, and tickled their victims to death.
Ivan Turgenev wrote: “Before him [the carpenter Gavrila] sat a rusalka on a tree
branch, swinging and calling him, dying from laughter.” The carpenter’s encounter
with the rusalka changed his life forever—he was never happy again. Rusalki and
mermaids were beautiful and tempting, but they were also dangerous: fish tails sink
sails. Mermen bore no such stigma.43 In Ukraine, rusalki would normally confront
a young woman on her way to draw water from a river and shout, “Wormwood or
parsley?” “Wormwood”—chernobyl´ or polyn´—was a magical word. If the woman
foolishly answered “parsley,” she would be tickled to death.44
The Russian and Belorussian kikimora, often considered the wife of the domovoi
(a house spirit), smothered its victims with kisses. In one village in the Vologda
region, a kikimora roamed a house all night, stamping its feet, rattling the dishes,
clanking cups, and breaking crockery. Only a dancing bear managed to rid the house
of this apparition.45
Sprites described in Russian literature differed from spirits said to haunt Russian
villages by their extreme beauty or ugliness, and by the depth of their cunning. Writ-
ers, more than local bards, embellished their tales. In his short story “Vii,” Gogol´ ex-
aggerated the beauty of the woman—a stunning young witch with eyelashes as long
as arrows—and the horror of the monster—a bandylegged creature with an iron face,
whose eyelids hung to the ground, and required a whole crowd of devils to raise.46
43
Klaus J. Heinisch, Der Wassermensch: Entwicklungsgeschichte eines Sagenmotivs (Stutt-
gart: Klett-Cotta, 1981). Some fairy tales have become outdated and harmful. Bruno Bet-
telheim has pointed out that Snow White, betrayed by her wicked stepmother, is saved by
males—first by the seven dwarfs, then by a prince. Bettelheim did not reject reason, but felt
that fairy tales helped children deal with a reality without moral ambiguities until they learned
to think abstractly. The fairy tales provided security until a child was ready “to engage in
rational investigations as he grows up.” See Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The
Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 9, 16, 19, 52.
44
Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight, 310.
45
Olga Raevsky-Hughes, “Remizov’s Autobiographical Prose,” in Autobiographical State-
ments in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature, ed. Jane Gary Harris (Princeton, NJ: Princ-
eton University Press, 1990), 61; Maksimov, Kul´ khleba, 292–97; and Kuznetsova and Lein,
eds., Russkie, 756–57.
46
Nikolai Gogol, Mirgorod, trans. David Magarshack (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cu-
dahy, 1962), 187, 198, 217–18; and Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, “Cossacks and Women: Creation
without Reproduction in Gogol’s Cossack Myth,” in Russian Subjects: Empire, Nation, and
the Culture of the Golden Age, ed. Monika Greenleaf and Stephen Moeller-Sally (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 173–89, especially 182–83, 185. Even though Ja-
kob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859) Grimm wrote their fairy tales for adults, some
readers have considered the stories too violent. In the original version of the first tale in their
collection, “The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich,” the petulant princess did not turn the frog into
a prince with a kiss, but hurled it against a wall with all her might. It awoke, groggily, as a
prince. See The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, trans. Jack Zipes (New York:
Bantam Books, 1992), 2–5.
Folk Heroes
Heroes in Russian folklore were often lazy and good-for-nothing. One of the most
popular, Ivanushka the Fool, slept on a warm peasant stove, avoided work, and moved
only to eat, play jacks with the cat, or to blow his nose: “For twelve years he lay in the
ashes; then he got up, and when he shook himself, over two hundred pounds of ashes
fell from his body.”47 Like Russians themselves, who often exhibit bursts of energy,
Ivanushka emerged from his slumber to perform some heroic feat, whereupon he
returned to the warm stove. The story meant that Russians may appear languorous,
but they are still capable of great deeds. In the Russian version of Grimm’s “The Frog
King,” three brothers throw arrows into the air and follow them to find wives. Two
of the brothers marry well, but foolish Ivan cannot locate his arrow and gets lost in
a swamp. Ivan finds and kisses a frog, which turns into a woman who organizes his
life forever after.48
Tsar Nikolai I was often compared to a bogatyr´ or folk warrior in Russian lubki
(popular prints). Various Russian military heroes, such as Aleksandr Suvorov and
Grigorii Potemkin, were depicted with superhuman strength and size, as men capa-
ble of dashing exploits, all taken directly from legends. The tsar appeared in these
woodblock prints with his right arm extended stiffly, sometimes holding a sword,
sometimes merely gesturing toward the distance. Soviet sculptors adopted this pose
in their depiction of Lenin pointing to the glorious future.49
The ethnographer and literary historian P. N. Rybnikov was a civil servant inter-
ested in Russian byliny, which, in the nineteenth century, were thought to be on the
verge of extinction. A bylina was an epic folk song connected to a historical event
that its singers embellished. The songs are believed to have originated around Kiev,
but even before the emergence of the Kievan state in the tenth century. The term was
first used by I. P. Sakharov in the 1830s. Rybnikov recalled that one day in 1860, when
a storm had overtaken him on Lake Onega, he sought refuge on an island. He heard
music coming from a barn, and found peasants singing “Sadko,” a forgotten bylina.
Rybnikov published 224 of these verse tales in four volumes during 1861–67, and is
credited with having rediscovered this art form.50 Here legends were employed to
transfer mythical strength and heroism to contemporary leaders.
47
E. M. Meletinskij, “The ‘Low’ Hero of the Fairy Tale,” in Oinas and Soudakoff, The Study
of Russian Folklore, 235–57, especially 237; and Coxwell, Siberian and Other Folk-Tales, 30.
48
Communication from Elena Korshuk, Belarusian State University, Minsk.
49
Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 1:
From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1995), 313.
50
See Oinas, Essays on Russian Folklore and Mythology, 9–11; V. Ia. Propp, Theory and
History of Folklore, trans. Ariadna Y. Martin and Richard P. Martin, ed. Anatoly Liberman
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 53; and Frank J. Miller, Folklore for Sta-
lin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore of the Stalin Era (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990),
with synopses of pseudo-folklore (noviny) on 111–51.
14 John L. Scherer
The Origins of Folk Tales
Storytellers varied the formulaic folk tales by adapting them to specific localities,
increasing their complexity, and making the tales ever more fantastic. Belorussians
in Chernigov province imagined rusalki were the souls of dead, unbaptized infants
who gamboled in the forests, swung on tree limbs, wove wreaths, and seduced the
unwary.51 In Voronezh province, they were female children who had not been bap-
tized, or girls who had drowned.52 Mermaids in Orenburg province were mute.53 In
Belorussia, grass did not grow where the rusalki had danced, whereas in Russia, the
grass was always greener on this spot.54 The vodianoi resembled an old man in Vlad-
imir province, but a young, naked woman continually combing her hair in Novgorod
province. In Vologda province, a vodianoi looked like a big pike.55 Peasants in the
Khar´kov region of Ukraine believed that rusalki swam in kvas—a beer made from
fermented rye or other breads. Devils swam in both kvas and milk but could not stay
afloat in holy water.56 In Kaluga province, the Devil gave the rusalki their beauty and
eternal youth by boiling them in cauldrons.57 In Riazan´ province, the vodianye were
said to have been the soldiers of the pharaoh who had drowned in pursuit of the Jews
crossing the Black Sea (not the Red Sea).58 In Chuvashiia, people said the souls of
dead children were transformed into birds, most often into cuckoos.59
The domovoi in Smolensk province was usually a bare-headed, gray-bearded
old man in a long white shirt. In Vladimir province, he always dressed in yellow and
never removed his big battered hat. His hair and beard trailed to the ground. He was
forever awkward, and as small as a stump or a block of wood in Penza province. The
domovoi could only be seen on a dark night before the second crowing of the cock,
51
Zelenin, Izbrannye trudy, 310; and Maksimov, Kul´ khleba, 329.
52
53
Sergei Aksakov, Notes on Fishing and Selected Fishing Prose and Poetry, trans. Thomas
P. Hodge (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 176; and Ivanits, Russian Folk
Belief, 75–82, 185–89, on Russian mermaids or rusalki.
54
Zelenin, Izbrannye trudy, 205; Margaret Bridget Betz, “Malevich’s Nymphs: Erotica or
Emblem?” Soviet Union 5, 2 (1978): 204–24, especially 213; and Zelenin, Izbrannye trudy, 191.
55
Maksimov, Kul´ khleba, 319.
56
57
Ibid., 158. This legend, too, draws on Greek mythology. Medea, for example, cooked Ja-
son’s aged father Aison in a cauldron to make him young. See H. J. Rose, A Handbook of Greek
Mythology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1959), 204, 300. The Greeks, of course, had their own
panoply of mermaids, nereids, and dryads.
58
Zelenin, Izbrannye trudy, 301. The peasants of Orël also believed that the vodianye, whom
they called faraony, had drowned in the Black Sea. See Maksimov, Kul´ khleba, 321.
59
and then in the form of a black cat or a sack of grain.60 All of these regions were
within a few hundred kilometers of one another. These variations in folk tales suggest
people found them more entertaining than convincing. If they were meant to describe
reality, the stories would have been more uniform and consistent, and less numerous.
Not just the details, but also the forms of folklore differed from province to prov-
ince. In Kareliia, southerners created moral tales that realistically described village
life. North Karelian tales were more sarcastic and ironic.61 Conditions were tougher
in the north: hard earth and hard work hardened their hearts. Peasants always battled
poverty in tales from Smolensk. A typical farmer clearing his land for wheat “grubs
out the trees, scratches the surface a little, and begins to sow.” Siberian folk tales were
filled with wanderers and wayfarers migrating across this wide expanse.62
Myths
Life should be lived in a mythopoeic sense, incorporating poetic imagination and

mythic structures into one’s own reality. Myths elevate the personal to the universal,
and human experience should, on occasion, be transfigured, that is, lived on a differ-
ent plane, as happens with love, or when people live their daily lives heroically, as do
those who sacrifice for some cause, or for others. Men and women should use myth
and imagination to understand that they are part of history and nature, which go on
and on, and not mere mortals in a diminished world.
At his home near South Hadley, Massachusetts, Joseph Brodsky observed two
pitch-black, brazen crows that alighted in his backyard, or on his porch, or, from time
to time, in his pine grove. The first arrived just after Brodsky’s mother had died, and
the second, a year later, shortly after his father had passed away. “Now they always
show up or flap away together,” he recalled, “and they are too silent for crows.”
Brodsky tried to avoid looking at them, but they reminded him of his parents:
“One is shorter than the other, the way my mother was up to my father’s shoulder.…
Although I can’t make out their age, they seem to be an old couple. On an outing. I
don’t have it in me to shoo them away, nor can I communicate with them in any fash-
ion. I also seem to remember that crows do not migrate. If the origins of mythology
are fear and isolation, I am isolated all right. And I wonder how many things will
remind me of my parents from now on. That is to say, with this sort of visitor, who
needs a good memory?”63
60
Maksimov, Kul´ khleba, 271–72.
61
U. S. Konkka, comp., Karel´skie narodnye skazki (Moscow: Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1963),
47–51.
62
Sokolov, Russian Folklore, 461–62, 465. See pages 459–65 on local variations in these
tales.
63
Joseph Brodsky, “In a Room and a Half,” in Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 468–69, 494–95.
16 John L. Scherer
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Spirits, like angels, were good and bad. The domovoi and related sprites had been
cast out of Heaven. Those who fell to earth into homes were benevolent, guardian
spirits—the dvorovoi (who lived in a courtyard), the vannik (who guarded baths), the
ovinnik (who protected barns), and the chlevnik (who watched over cows). Those who
fell outside the home, in wild places, including the polevik (who protected fields), the
leshii, the vodianoi, the rusalka, and the chertovka (a demon who lived in stills or
stagnant pools of water), were unfriendly toward humans.64
The domovoi, a faithful Russian spirit that slept on, in, or behind the stove, pro-
tected one’s home, and all who lived in it. The name domovoi derived from the Rus-
sian word dom (house). Although this spirit took many forms, it was usually an old
man whose wife, the domikha or domanía, lived under the floorboards. These spirits
were guardians of the hearth, and they had their own favorites in every family that
prospered. When a family moved, it always took an ember from the old stove to the
new one in order to retain the protection of the domovoi. Family members never
referred to this spirit directly, but always as “chelovek” (man), “Ded,” or “Dedu-
shka” (grandfather). Leftovers were set out for the spirits at night. The movement of
a domovoi caused creaks and groans in the house. If someone were brushed by one,
a cold, clammy feeling meant bad luck, whereas a warm, furry feeling resulted in
good fortune. Domovye experienced the human emotions of happiness and sadness.
They did not communicate with adults, only with children and animals.65 If a Russian
loses an object at home, he or she must put candy in a corner of the apartment for the
domovoi. After the object is found, the candy must be thrown away.66
Most spirits, such as the rusalki, were evil and erotic. The lives of peasants were
often difficult and filled with misfortune, so evil spirits predominated. Rusalki were
erotic because they were evil and female. Eroticism represented temptation and was
to be resisted.
64
Carol Rose, Spirits, Fairies, Gnomes, and Goblins: An Encyclopedia of the Little People
(Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 1996), 68, 90, 250–51.
65
Iurii Miroliubov, Slaviano-russkii fol´klor (Munich: Otto Sagner, 1984), 68–87, especially
73. On domovye, vodianye, and rusalki, see Maksimov, Kul´ khleba, 267–334. Boris Kusto-
diev painted The Merchant’s Wife and Brownie (brownie being a domovoi) in 1921–22, and
gave the picture to his friend and fellow artist Konstantin Somov. See Mark Etkind, ed., Bo-
ris Kustodiev: Paintings, Graphic Works, Book Illustrations, Theatrical Designs (New York:
Abrams, 1983), 274 n. 92.
66
Françoise Dehove in Agence France Presse, 18 February 2000.
Social Status
Myths developed a sense of community, through shared rituals, and provided social
status. Legends were society’s glue, reinforcing the social structure.67 It has been
pointed out that the execution of a witch demonstrated group or communal solidar-
ity. The practice excluded the deviant from society, and redefined, or narrowed, the
boundaries of behavior in a virtuous community.68 It has been suggested that myths
are like shoes: “You step into them if they fit. Old shoes, like traditions that are (or
seem) ancient, are usually the ones you feel most comfortable with.”69 And it has been
speculated that any society which did not define and structure itself through rituals
would “collapse into chaos.”70
Persons called witches in Europe—frequently poor, older women—were often
victims of petty feuds and political vendettas, but they were not only victims. Their
supernatural powers afforded these women prominence. They were village physi-
cians and midwives, probably the two most important jobs in rural European society.
They were called upon in times of drought and plague to restore balance in nature,
and during political upheavals to cast spells on the enemies of local rulers. Not all
witches were women, for that matter, but female witches invariably taught males.71
In ancient Greece, women were responsible for the continuity of a community. They
had special duties relating to death and community losses, such as preparing the
body, mourning, and making offerings. They secured the future of the community by
bearing children, an event considered a public rather than a private matter.72 In Rus-
sia, too, women performed the funeral, wedding, and conscription laments.73 Russian
women traditionally acted as the guardians of the community by obtaining food, fuel,
and shelter for their families.74 In 1931 Tuva had 725 shamans, 314 of them women.
67
A. N. Wilson has spoken of “religion’s glue” in A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral (New York:
W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), 277.
68
Christina Larner, Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief, ed. Alan Macfar-
lane (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 45.
69
Richard Buxton, Imaginary Greece: The Contexts of Mythology (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 196.
70
Charles Freeman, The Greek Achievement: The Foundation of the Western World (New
York: Viking, 1999), 131.
71
Barbara G. Walker, The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1983), 1076–91.
72
Buxton, Imaginary Greece, 114–17.
73
Roberta Reeder in Handbook of Russian Literature, ed. Victor Terras (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1985), 242–43.
74
Barbara Alpern Engel, “Transformation versus Tradition,” in Russia’s Women: Accommo-
dation, Resistance, Transf ormation, ed. Barbara Evans Clements, Engel, and Christine D.
Worobec (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 135–47, especially 145.
18 John L. Scherer
The region had been controlled by China until 1944, when it became part of the So-
viet Union.75 It has been pointed out that the ratio of male to female witches in seven-
teenth-century Muscovy was nearly seven to three, and suggested that enserfment in
Russia restricted social movement and the asocial behavior that was associated with
witches in Western Europe.76
Additionally, people who claimed they had seen sprites enhanced their social
standing. They never saw anything resembling a spirit, of course, but an encounter
implied they were in some way favored, and had acquired secret or divine wisdom.
Mirth
Myths shared mirth. The explorer Henry Hudson claimed to have sighted mermaids
near Novaia Zemlia, an island washed by both the Barents and Kara Seas, northeast
of Murmansk. He mentioned spotting a mermaid “as big as one of us, her skin very
white and long hair hanging down behind, of color black. In her going down we saw
her tail which was like the tail of a porpoise, speckled like a mackerel … [but] from
the navel upwards, her back and breasts were like a woman’s.” Georg Steller, who lent
his name to the Steller sea eagle, greenling, jay, sea-lion, eider, and sea-monkey, also
left accounts of mermaids during an expedition to the Bering Straits in 1741.77 Within
thirty years of Steller’s voyage, hunters had killed all of the mermaids or manatees
that he had seen. Steller was the first white man to set foot on Alaska.78 Steller’s ea-
gles on the Kamchatka Peninsula have “brutal yellow beaks,” nine-foot wing spans,
and weigh up to twenty pounds. The gigantic birds sometimes eat so much salmon
they cannot fly.79 The lonely sailors on this voyage surely saw sea cows, walruses,
or whales. For them, mermaids represented an initiation rite. The older seamen, who
75
Colin Thubron, In Siberia (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999), 243–78. Also con-
sult Robert Muchembled, “Satanic Myths and Cultural Reality,” in Early Modern European
Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries, ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1990), 139–60; and Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and
Twentieth-Century Representations (London: Routledge, 1996).
76
See Valerie A. Kivelson, “Through the Prism of Witchcraft: Gender and Social Change in
Seventeenth-Century Muscovy,” in Clements, Engel, and Worobec, Russia’s Women, 74–94,
especially 75, 83–84, 93. Also consult Rose L. Glickman, “The Peasant Woman as Healer,” in
ibid., 148–62, especially 162.
77
John May, Curious Facts (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980), 163; Bol´shaia
Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, 3rd ed. (Moscow: Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, 1974), 16: 586;
and Karl Gröning and Martin Saller, Elephants: A Cultural and Natural History (Cologne:
Könemann, 1998), 18.
78
Thubron, In Siberia, 19–21.
79
See Klaus Nigge, “The Russian Realm of Steller’s Sea-Eagles,” National Geographic 195
(March 1999): 60–71; and Peter Matthiessen, Tigers in the Snow (New York: North Point
Press, 2000), 156.
may once have been taken in themselves, perpetuated the myth to prove they were not
the only fools, and to share the laughter.
Some leshie had hairy legs and hooves. Others lived in big huts in the forest.
They married, walked their dogs, and had children. In one tale from the Novgorod
region, a leshii and his elderly mother even ate kasha (cream-of-wheat) together.80
During the early industrialization of Russia, a vodianoi was described as having a
cast-iron (chugunnyi) nose. A peasant in the story “The Little Old Woman with Five
Cows” had an iron tongue fifty feet long.81 In Siberia, the inhabitants of the nether
regions, such as the black Chebeldei, were made of iron. These unfriendly creatures
had noses eighteen meters long. The son of the chief of the Yakut abaasy was a Cy-
clops with a single eye “like a frozen lake” and seven big iron teeth.82 Few believed
such things, but it was all very funny.
Everyone knew you could save yourself from a leshii by making it laugh. A
fisherman who saw one cried out: “Na eti by nishsha da krasnyë shtanishsha” (This
behind should be dressed in red pants). This is amusing because of the rhyme nishsha
with shtanishsha. Krasnyi means either “clean” (the leshii was always dirty) or “red”
(a festive color).83 Even peasants understood these complicated puns. The leshii, in
this instance anyway, obviously thought it hilarious, because the fisherman lived to
tell the tale.
Prohibitions
Folklore was full of prohibitions, but this was, in general, not a bad thing. True be-
lievers in folklore had a comparatively easy life in prerevolutionary Russia. Finns
living in the Russian Empire thought Friday was the unluckiest day, probably because
the Crucifixion had occurred on a Friday, and Finnish and Russian women refused
to spin, wash clothes, or remove ashes from stoves. Men would not plough. It was
unlucky to use a scissors on Sunday, but a good day to begin a voyage or journey.
Business undertaken on Thursday, Friday, or Sunday invited bad luck.84 Russia had
far more religious holidays than any other country in Western Europe. In 1900 the
number of work days in a Russian factory averaged 264. Factories stood idle for a
full quarter of the year.85 Such beliefs inhibited productivity and wealth, but in the
80
Pomerantseva, Mifologicheskie personazhi, 41.
81
Ibid., 62; and Coxwell, Siberian and Other Folk-Tales, 40.
82
Larousse World Mythology, 438.
83
Communication from Michael Jakobson, University of Toledo; see also Pomerantseva, Mi-
fologicheskie personazhi, 36.
84
Cora Linn Daniels and C. M. Stevans, eds., Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and
the Occult Sciences of the World (1971; reprint, Detroit, MI: Gale Research Co., 1982), 3:
1583–91; and Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight, 381–83.
85
Gary Thurston, The Popular Theatre Movement in Russia, 1862–1919 (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1998), 137; and Theodore H. von Laue, “Russian Labor be-
20 John L. Scherer
Russian economy, peasants usually did not benefit from hard work. These sayings
complicated life, and dealing with complexity, even in the case of peasants, required
a certain sophistication. The sayings also made people careful and cautious rather
than reckless.
Women
Folklore was invoked to control women in society, and often to justify the status quo.
Those women who did not fit male stereotypes were, on occasion, portrayed as tempt-
resses and witches. In the twelfth century, authorities in one district of Russia dealt
with fears of witchcraft by arresting the whole female population.86 And it has been
argued that male physicians used the witchhunt to exclude women from medicine, a
field they had dominated in the preindustrial period.87
Before the October 1917 revolution, the folk art of the lubki frequently presented
women as schemers and liars linked to the Devil. Things improved in this respect,
if in few other ways, after the Bolsheviks had consolidated their power. Aleksandr
Apsit’s poster Internatsional (International, 1918) featured a horrifying female figure
on a pedestal marked “Capital.” She had immense breasts, fangs, wings, a tsarist
crown, and a serpent’s tail. Men with hammers were attacking the monument. It was
the only Bolshevik poster ever to represent capitalism as a woman, and perhaps the
single depiction of a woman as a monster on Soviet posters.88 Few women appeared
in early Soviet posters; the male figure personified the Bolshevik regime. Males mo-
nopolized the revolutionary virtues of militancy and political consciousness, whereas
women were still seen as backward. When women were depicted on Soviet posters,
they were usually in their twenties and linked to children and nature.89
Enlightenment
Myths should instill a sense of limitation in modern man. Reason and science have
often led in the opposite direction—to arrogance and devastation—and one should,
whenever possible, simplify life and destroy less.
The Enlightenment taught that misery, folly, and crime resulted from ignorance
or laziness. The world could be understood by anyone who made the effort. Once a
tween Field and Factory, 1892–1903,” California Slavic Studies 3 (1964): 33–65, especially
53–54.
86
Zguta, “Witchcraft Trials in Seventeenth-Century Russia,” 1189; and Larner, Witchcraft
and Religion, 50, 61–62, 84–85.
87
Larner, Witchcraft and Religion, 149–50.
88
Victoria E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 72, illustration 2.7.
89
Elizabeth Waters, “The Female Form in Soviet Political Iconography, 1917–32,” in Engel,
Clements, and Worobec, Russia’s Women, 225–42, especially 227–28, 232, 234, 237.
person had comprehended the laws that governed nature and society, he or she could
not help pursuing the correct course toward happiness and universal harmony.90 Rea-
son and science would ultimately triumph through education. In the late nineteenth
century, two strangers began a conversation in a railway carriage halfway between
Moscow and St. Petersburg. They discovered they were traveling on the same train,
though one was bound for St. Petersburg and the other for Moscow. The pair could
only marvel at the wonders of science, and continue on their way.91
Reason
There is an African parable which says that without heavenly rain, the water on earth
will dry up. Without heavenly revelation, human reason will dry up.92 Whether or not
a person is religious, one should realize that reason and faith, or science and belief,
are not so very different. Reasoning is, in theory at least, an unbiased method of ar-
riving at truth, but one reasons from assumptions, and assumptions are almost always
unexamined clichés. To be truly useful, reason must consistently predict (prophesy)
the consequences of taking certain actions, but it does not. One usually guesses when
making decisions, that is, accepts assumptions on faith. When people do not make
the same assumptions, reasoning divides rather than unites them, and some people
will never be persuaded of a thing. The old Russian folk hero Durak Duralei refused
to believe in fire. Despite all evidence to the contrary, try as one might, he would not
be convinced. As he was being burned at the stake, Duralei cried out, “It’s so cold!”
Reason as logic, reason as motive, reason as excuse are all inadequate. Reason
as logic insists that if x is y, then z: “If the weather is warm, the crops will prosper.”
Unfortunately, one cannot assume something else will not spoil the crops. The syllo-
gism “A=B, B=C, then A=C” is true only if the major and minor premises are true.93
This method may prove that Socrates is mortal, but reason does not help at all in
90
Isaiah Berlin, “Georges Sorel,” in Essays in Honor of E. H. Carr, ed. C. Abramsky (Ham-
den, CT: Archon Books, 1974), 3–35, especially 7; and Stephen Lessing Baehr, The Paradise
Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Utopian Patterns in Early Secular Russian Literature
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 92. Paul Veyne has written: “Science finds
no truths … it discovers unknown facts that can be interpreted in a thousand ways” (Did the
Greeks Believe in Their Myths? 115).
91
E. B. Lanin, Russian Characteristics (London: Chapman and Hall, 1892), 94.
92
Ernest Hemingway, True at First Light, audiotapes (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999),
pt. 3.
93
Some academics have pointed out that myth is regarded as sacred, whereas science is es-
sentially skeptical. In science, if new evidence does not fit a theory, another theory devel-
ops. Of course, this description idealizes science, a field in which skepticism is reserved for
making minor revisions of old theories. Skepticism rarely challenges fundamental scientific
theory. Both science and myth are characterized by “massive dogmatism.” See Paul Feyera-
bend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (London: Verso, 1978),
296–98.
22 John L. Scherer
making ordinary choices. One can always find reasons to do something, but there is
no assurance that they are the right reasons, or that a person has enough information
to make the correct choice. Reasoning gives people confidence that they understand
and can control events, but they do not. Life is essentially, unavoidably, a leap of faith,
whether one approaches it by way of reason or belief.
Primitive societies did not merely accept folklore, legends, and mythology, but
used them to advantage. People found myth, which is dramatic and emotional, more
persuasive than reason. They might just as well today. Everything a person believes
may be myth anyway, for reason and delusion are identical twins. Those who trust
reason err. It will take a long time to undo this.
One could always argue that reason and faith are two aspects of one being, but this seems
only a clever way to avoid dealing with their differences. On reason and faith and the failure
of reason, see, for example, Karl R. Popper, Truth, Rationality, and the Growth of Scientific
Knowledge (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1979); Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly
City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932); Lev
Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, trans. Bernard Martin (New York: Clarion, 1966); Aldous
Huxley, Science, Liberty and Peace (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946); and A. S. Yes-
enin-Volpin, A Leaf of Spring, trans. George Reavey (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1961).
The Travels of Brand and Isband
Carol Urness
This little story is in honor of Professor Theofanis G. Stavrou, a teacher, an advisor,

and a mentor. As a teacher, he encourages students to look beyond historical facts in
order to understand the culture and soul of Russia; as an advisor, he works relentlessly
to help his students reach their goals; and as a researcher and traveler, he shows a keen
sense of what areas needed attention, gives them prominence through his own work,
and inspires students to emulate him. So it was in a way that I became fascinated with
travel accounts and got the bug to travel. Indeed, travelers have been and continue to
be a principal source in my research, too. And travel accounts to and within Russia
are an important segment of the collection of rare books, maps, and manuscripts in
the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota, where I served as curator
(1991–2001). Like Professor Stavrou, I have been most fortunate in my travels—to
libraries and archives in Belfast, Cambridge, London, Oxford, and Paris for study;
to places like Anchorage, Copenhagen, Esjberg, Halle, Kamchatka, Jamaica, New-
foundland, and Sitka to attend various meetings and conferences; to Moscow, St.
Petersburg, Rostov, Tbilisi, and Alma-Ata for the fun of it.
The little story is about Brand and Isbrand, two travelers who journeyed from
Russia to China in the late seventeenth century. In history, hardly anything is simple.
For example, Isbrand Ides is also Everrard Isbrand, Evert Isbrand, Everhard Isbrand
Ides, Eberhard Isbrand-Ides, and several other variations of the name. In the catalog
of the University of Minnesota Libraries, his works are entered under the form “Ides,
Evert Ysbrandsoon.” In the first edition of the account of his journey, published in
Dutch in 1704, he signs the dedication, “E. Isbrants Ides.” One of my favorite modern
writers, Erich Donnert, gives his full name as Eberhard Isbrand-Ides, shortened to
Isbrand in other parts of his text.1 This can be confusing, since Isbrand’s companions
on the journey from Russia to China included one Adam Brand, who wrote the first
book about their experiences. Thus, the two major characters of our story are Brand
and Isbrand. Catalogers for the books by the latter must have had a good reason for
using the entry “Ides.” On the other hand, the man is cited on the title page as “Am-
bassadeur Isbrand,” and his full name is written as “Herr Eberhard Isbrand” in the
first edition of the book that Brand wrote concerning their journey. Dutch and English
1
Erich Donnert, Russia in the Age of Enlightenment, trans. Alison and Alistair Wightman
(Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1986), 95.
24 Carol Urness
translations appeared the following year, with “Heer Isbrand” the name on the title
page of the former, “Everard Isbrand” on the latter. So these are good reasons to adopt
the usage Isbrand here. Brand was the secretary to the embassy from Russia in the
late seventeenth century to the emperor of China; Isbrand was the ambassador.
The first edition of Brand’s book was in German, published in Hamburg in 1698.
It has three copperplate illustrations, two of them depicting an Ostiack and a Tungus.
The third illustration is a most unflattering portrait of Peter (not yet the Great) in a
copperplate engraving by “I. W. Michael.” It makes him look like a pouting woman.
(See figure 1, opposite.) The English translation of the same year includes the Ostiack
and Tungus illustrations and a new, re-engraved portrait that is much improved. (See
figure 2, p. 26). Perhaps Peter’s visit to Britain at this time led to this revision. The
Dutch translation of the following year has no illustrations at all, though the text is the
same. A French translation was printed in Amsterdam in 1699 as well. It has one map,
which does not include all of Siberia. The northeastern portion of it is not depicted.
The appearance of these three translations so soon after the publication of the original
book indicates the interest that their readers had in the subject of travels in Siberia and
China and, especially, in the potential for trade with China.
According to Brand’s book, Isbrand was a German, “born in the City of Gluck-
stad, in the Dukedom of Holstein.”2 In spite of this statement, and in spite of the
fact that the German first edition cited above describes Brand as a member of the
“Teutscher Nation,” writers on Isbrand continue to confuse his nationality. For exam-
ple, Marshall Poe, in his superb Foreign Descriptions of Muscovy: An Analytic Bib-
liography of Primary and Secondary Sources, lists his name as “Yssbrant Ides” and
notes “Dutch in Russian service.”3 Other authors do the same. Brand writes that the
Russians, “after mature deliberation resolved to send a most splendid Embassy to the
Great Amologdachan (or Emperor of China)” in order to impress him and no doubt
to encourage trade with China. Isbrand was named to lead this embassy (Brand, 2).
Who was taking part in this “mature” deliberating is difficult to know, as Peter (later
the Great) Alekseevich Romanov was twenty years old and more interested in having
a good time than in thinking about politics; his half-brother and co-tsar Ivan Alek-
seevich was “weak-minded,” and his sister, the former regent and tsarevna Sophia
Alekseevna, had been sent to a convent. Peter’s mother Natasha and her advisers
governed Russia at the time.
On 3 March 1692, the embassy visited Ivan Alekseevich, and the ambassador
kissed his hand. On 12 March Isbrand met with Peter Alekseevich, and performed the
same ceremony. Brand writes that “It is very well worth taking notice here, That the
present Czar Peter is a Prince of an excellent good Humour, and a great Favourer of
2
Adam Brand [d. 1713], A journal of an embassy from Their Majesties John and Peter Alex-
owits, emperors of Muscovy, & c. into China; through the provinces of Ustiugha, Siberia,
Dauri, and the great Tartary, to Peking, the capital city of the Chinese empire (London: D.
Brown, 1698), 2. Further references to this work will be given parenthetically in the text citing
author’s name and page number.
3
Marshall Poe, Foreign Descriptions of Muscovy: An Analytic Bibliography of Primary and
Secondary Sources (Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, 1995), 186.
The Travels of Brand and Isband 25
Figure 1. Frontispiece portrait of Peter the Great in Adam Brand, Beschreibung der chi-
nesischen Reise, welche vermittelst einer Zaaris, Besandschaft durch dero Ambassadeur,
Hernn Isbrand anno 1693, 94, und 95, von Moscau uber Gross-Ustiga, Siberien, dauren und
durch die Mongalische Tartarey verrichtet worden, und was sich dabey begeben, aus selbst
erfahrner Nachricht mitgetheilet (Hamburg: Benjamin Schillern, 1698).
26 Carol Urness
Figure 2. Frontispiece portrait of Peter the Great in Adam Brand, A journal of an embassy
from Their Majesties John and Peter Alexowits, emperors of Muscovy, &c. into China,
through the provinces of Ustiugha, Siberia, Dauri, and the great Tartary, to Peking, the cap-
ital city of the Chinese empire: performed by Everard Isbrand, their ambassador in the years
1693, 1694, and 1695 (London: D. Brown, 1698).
the Lutherans, whom he presented with all the Stone Materials which were made use
of in building their new Church, and gave them permission, without the approbation
of the Patriarch, to adorn their Church with a Steeple” (Brand, 6). After this, carrying
rich gifts for the Chinese, the embassy began their long journey toward China on 13
March.
The embassy consisted of twenty-one men, of whom twelve were Germans and
nine were Muscovites. With them they had “a good Chest of Physick, a Physician, and
a good number of Baggage-Waggons to carry our Provisions, Wines, and all other
Necessaries for so great a Journey” (Brand, 3). They traveled on horseback from
Moscow through country that was “extreamly populous” on their route to Vologda,
which was reached on 20 March, and where they waited for the arrival of their bag-
gage. On 21 March a hard frost, “to our great Satisfaction,” made it possible for them
to continue their way on sleds. Without the frost they probably would have been de-
layed for several months (Brand, 10). Brand noted the custom of presenting eggs and
kisses liberally for fourteen days after Easter. Of the kissing he writes, “This Custom
is so general, that if during this time you are invited at a Russian’s House to partake
of their Merriments, and you should not offer to kiss the Ladies there present, (where
it is to be observed that you must take care not to touch them with your hands) you
would be look’d upon as an ill-bred Clown; whereas if you acquit your self hand-
somely in this Point, you are sure to receive a Cup of Aquavitae in return for your
Civility” (Brand, 13). The account continues, with interesting comments, including
a report of a salt works where twenty thousand men were employed in making salt
(Brand, 18). The comments on religion, money, the Siberian peoples and their manner
of living, and travel itself are useful and compelling.
On 1 July they reached Tobolsk, which Brand judged to be some three thousand
miles from Moscow. About the city he writes, “Tobolsko is not only the Capital, but
also the chief Place of Trade of all Siberia. Their Traffick consists most in Furrs, such
as Sables, Ermins, Fox Skins, and such-like” (Brand, 31). The embassy remained in
Tobolsk until 22 July, gathering supplies and making preparations for the next part
of the journey, which, according to Brand, was six thousand miles “for the most part
through a desolate Country, where there is but little Forage and Provision to be met
with” (Brand, 33). Brand writes of using traps, “not unlike our Rat and Mice-Traps,”
for catching sables, and also reports that the people hunt them with the use of sleds
pulled by dogs, which can run more quickly over the snow than horses. They contin-
ued their journey on 22 July, accompanied by twenty “musqueteers to conduct us to
Surgutt” (Brand, 33). They arrived at Surgut on 6 August. Here hunting is different:
sables are shot with arrows, or the hunters start fires under trees where they hide,
“who being suffocated by the Smoak, fall from the Trees, and are soon catch’d. The
Ermins they catch in Traps, and the Foxes they hunt with Dogs” (Brand, 35). And the
quotes could go on and on, for the embassy is still far from its destination, and there
are tales of hunting and fishing, and nearly starving to death during some parts of the
journey, where provisions are scarce. The stories of the Tunguses, their shamans, and
their customs are well worth reading.
The embassy remained an entire month at Irkutsk, having such a good time there
that when they left, “being conducted out of the Town by the Governor and the chief
28 Carol Urness
Inhabitants to the next Village, we spent the whole night there in making good Cheer”
(Brand, 53). About Lake Baikal the author writes, “The Inhabitants have this super-
stitious opinion concerning it, that whoever calls it Oser or a Lake, will scarce pass
it without danger; but those who give it the Title of Mor or Sea, need not fear any
thing” (Brand, 54). To travel through the great desert of the Mongols, “we pack’d our
Baggage upon Camels and Horses, the first carrying about 600 weight, the last about
250” (Brand, 55). They began this part of the journey on 6 April 1693, with a caravan
that is soon swelled to 250 men with hundreds of camels and horses. Anyone who has
ever seen a Western movie will savor the additional comment about the four hundred
wagons “which in the night-time being drawn up in a Circle, enclosed the rest, and
at some distance from thence we placed our Centries, to advertise us of the approach
of our Enemies, if any should appear” (Brand, 56). On the route from Lake Baikal
to Nerchinsk, the embassy visited the small town of Jerewena, where especially fine
black sables were to be found. Hunters sometimes spent three or four months at a
time hunting them. In traveling they made use of “Scates [like short skis], by the help
of which they pass over the Snow with great Agility” (Brand, 57). On 20 May they
arrived at Nerchinsk, “the last Place of Note (unless it be Argun, a small Town eight
days Journey from thence) under the Jurisdiction of the Czar of Muscovy” (Brand,
59). Some six thousand Tunguses lived here, subject to the tsar. Brand reports that
“The Cossacks hereabouts are very Rich, by reason of their Traffick with China,
where they are exempted from paying any Custom” (Brand, 59). And then Brand goes
on to China, which is beyond the scope of our story. In 1695 he returned to Moscow,
on a journey that had taken just six weeks short of three years. His book about this
embassy is in the James Ford Bell Library in the German and English editions of
1698 and the Dutch and French editions of 1699, as well as some later editions. In the
French translation published in Amsterdam in 1699, Brand refers to Isbrand as “Mon-
sieur Evert Isbrand.” This translation has only two illustrations, the first of which is a
frontispiece showing the Russian embassy members bowing before the Chinese em-
peror. The second is a fold-out map based on the map of Nicolaas Witsen (1641–1717),
burgomaster of Amsterdam.
This map is a much-reduced version of Witsen’s large map titled Nieuwe lant-
kaarte van het noorder en ooster deel van Asia en Europa strekkende van Nova Zemla
tot China, published in 1687. Witsen’s research on Siberia continued. After he had
finished and published his map, he wrote the extensive folio book titled Noord en oost
Tartarye, ofte bondigh ontwerp van eenige dier landen, en volken, zo als voormaels
bekent zyn geweest … in de noorder en oosterlykste gedeelten van Asia en Europa,
published in Amsterdam in 1692. Witsen visited Russia once, in 1666, as a member
of a delegation from the Netherlands to promote trade with Russia. At that time the
Witsen family had been trading with Russia for more than fifty years. Witsen col-
lected all the information he could find about Siberia at the time he was in Russia and
later through correspondence. When Peter the Great developed an interest in ships
and the sea, Nicolaas Witsen encouraged that interest. Because Peter wanted a Dutch
frigate for use in the White Sea, Witsen prepared a specially furnished ship, the Holy
Prophecy, that was sailed from Amsterdam to the White Sea for him in 1694. At the
time of Peter’s visit to Amsterdam in 1697, they greeted each other as friends, though
meeting for the first time. During his four-month visit, Peter studied shipbuilding, a
subject about which Witsen had written a book in 1671. Clearly the two had much in
common, though very disparate in age, as Witsen shared many of Peter’s interests.
But what happened to Isbrand’s account of the embassy to China? A book based
on Isbrand’s records of it was published in Amsterdam in 1704, edited by Nicolaas
Witsen. About this text Witsen stated in a letter of 1709 that “[t]he description of
Isbrandts is composed by me, as it was published from papers that were very con-
fusedly written in Hamburgish or Lower Saxon. He was my friend and is now de-
ceased.”4 Without the date of Isbrand’s death it is difficult to know whether the two
men consulted about the text, or if Witsen simply wrote the book based on Isbrand’s
papers. The latter sounds more reasonable. Some internal evidence suggests this, for
instance the content of the “Epistle Dedicatory” signed by Isbrand but bearing the
stamp of Witsen’s interests in Siberia and laudatory opinion of Peter. The writer of it
(whoever he was) notes the “Terrestrial Paradise” that awaits Peter’s attention: “What
Treasures and Minerals, such as Gold, Silver, Copper, Iron, Salt-peter, Sulphur, Salt;
what rich plenty of these and the like do’s [sic] the Earth harbour in her bosom.”5 The
Black Sea is subject to Peter; the Caspian “waits only for the honour of being covered
and adorned with your Majesty’s Naval Force.” Siberian rivers lead to the White
Sea and to the Amoershian or Eastern Sea and are ready for the “Sons of Neptune”
to be sent by Peter (Isbrand, A3r). Isbrand states, “I must say by way of conclusion,
that your Czarish Majesty’s Country is a Land flowing with Milk and Honey; and
surpasses most Countries in the World, in its Riches, in its healthful Air, and in the
fertility of its Soil” (Isbrand, A3v). Peter, in the view of Isbrand, is “a Wonder of the
World, [who] has through his penetrating and accomplish’d Genius, brought up as
a new Light the Invention and Establishment of so many useful Sciences, Arts, and
Handycraft-Trades; by which the Eyes of his Subjects are opened” (Isbrand, A3v).
After the “Epistle Dedicatory” the book comments on the route from Moscow
northeastward by land to Vologda, by river to Totma and Velikii Ustyug, by land to
Kaigorodok, by river to Solikamsk, then by land and river to Tobolsk, the gateway to
Siberia. A fine and noteworthy feature of Isbrand’s account of the journey is the in-
formation given on the people living there and their way of life. Some special features
of areas are noted. For example, grey squirrels that do not change their color winter or
summer live near the city of Tuween. They are not found anywhere else in the Musco-
vite empire. These special squirrels are reserved for the tsar, and anyone selling such
squirrels to merchants is subject to “a great Fine” (Isbrand, 10).
The first leg of the journey was rapid; the embassy arrived at Tobolsk on 1 July
1692. Isbrand gives a rather extensive description of Tobolsk, more detailed than the
commentary in Brand’s book. Isbrand describes the city as being well-fortified, with
4
Johannes Keuning, “Nicolaas Witsen as a Cartographer,” Imago Mundi 11 (1954): 95–110.
5
Evert Ysbrandsoon Ides, The Three Years Land Travels of His Excellency E. Ysbrant Ides
from Mosco to China to which is added a new description of that vast empire written by a
native (London: W. Freeman, J. Walthoe, T. Newborough, J. Nicholson, and R. Parker, 1705),
A3r. Further references to this work will be given parenthetically in the text as “Isbrand” plus
page number.
30 Carol Urness
stone walls and watchtowers. Below the fortified section are houses on the banks of
the Irtysh River near its junction with the Tobol River. Isbrand notes that Tobolsk
was the chief city of Siberia. Food is cheap here, he reports. In addition to numerous
fish from the Irtysh River that are available at very low rates, there is all sorts of wild
game, including elk, deer, rabbits, pheasants, partridges, swans, ducks, geese, and
storks, “all of which are cheaper than Beef” (Isbrand, 11). Besides the soldiers sta-
tioned here, a force of nine thousand soldiers can be gathered, plus several thousand
Tartar horsemen, when the tsar needs troops. A brief history of Tobolsk features Yer-
mak, “a certain robber” that the tsar pardoned for his actions through the influence of
the Stroganov family. The pardon did not make any difference, however, as Yermak
perished “endeavouring to step from one Bark into another, leaped short, and by
reason of his heavy Armour, irrecoverably sunk to the bottom; his Body was carried
away by the force of the Stream and never found” (Isbrand, 12).
Isbrand was able to attend a worship service in a mosque. He begins: “The Floor
was covered with Tapistry, besides which there was no other Ornament.” The short
account is interesting, concluding: “the Priest uttered some words, and afterwards
cried out, Alla, Alla Mahomet, which the whole Assembly roared out after him, three
times successively, prostrating themselves to the Ground: This done, the Priest looked
into both his Hands as tho’ [sic] he designed to read something there, and repeated
Alla, Alla Mahomet: Then he looked first over his Right Shoulder, then over his Left,
which all the People did after him, and so the short Devotion was ended” (Isbrand,
13). Following the service Isbrand was invited to tea with the mufti. The city of To-
bolsk is depicted in a fine engraving. (See figure 3, opposite.)
Isbrand’s journey next took him on the Irtysh, Ob, and Ket Rivers to Surgut,
Narym, and Eniseisk. The comments on the people, the land, and the animals are
fascinating. Isbrand includes an illustration of the light dogsleds used in Siberia. Af-
ter more land and river travel via Irlimsk, the embassy finally arrived in Irkutsk.
After crossing a portion of the Caspian Sea they continued their journey by land and
river to Nerchinsk, at the Chinese border. This place is noted in history as the scene
of a border agreement made between China and Russia in 1689, the earliest treaty
between the two and the finale of Russian southward expansion in eastern Siberia.
Isbrand reports that Nerchinsk is “indifferent strong, provided with several Brass
Guns, and a great Garrison of Daurian Cozacks both Horse and Foot. It is situated
between high Mountains, notwithstanding which it has Champion Ground enough for
the Inhabitants to Graze their Camels, Horses and Cows” (Isbrand, 43). In Nerchinsk,
writes Isbrand, the rhubarb, used by the Chinese as medicine, was “of an extraordi-
nary thickness and length.” It was spring. Isbrand reports that the red and snow-white
peonies “emit an extraordinary fragrant scent” (Isbrand, 43). The illustration that he
provides of the city is reproduced here. (See figure 4, p. 32.)
The embassy remained some weeks in Nerchinsk, preparing to travel the final
portion of the journey, east of the Amur River, where “the great uninhabited Tartar-
ian Wilderness hath its beginning” (Isbrand, 46–47). And once again, we leave the
embassy when the Chinese part of the story begins.
The book by Isbrand is unusual for still another reason. The twenty-nine cop-
perplate engraved illustrations in the 1704 Dutch edition of the book are repeated
The Travels of Brand and Isband
Figure 3. View of Tobolsk in Evert Ysbrants Ides, Driejaarige reize naar China, te lande gedaan door den Moskovischen afgezant
(Amsterdam: François Halma, 1704).
31
32
Carol Urness
Figure 4. View of Nerchinsk in Evert Ysbrants Ides, Driejaarige reize naar China, te lande gedaan door den Moskovischen afgezant
(Amsterdam: François Halma, 1704).
in the 1705 English edition. Not only are they repeated, but they are the same cop-
perplate engravings, with the Dutch text rubbed out from the copperplate and En-
glish titles engraved in their place. Thus, for example, in the plate titled “De groote
Schamagsche water val” that is shown in chapter 7 of the book, the English edition
has “The Schamagschian water-fall.” However, the Dutch edition is more elegant, in
many cases with the illustrations printed within the text. This is more difficult for the
printer, as the book has to go through two different printing processes, one for the text
and the other for the illustrations. In the English edition the copperplate illustrations
were all done separately, not in the text. These books could easily make a nice project
for someone interested in Dutch/English printing, simply in comparing the plates in
the English and Dutch editions.
Copperplate engravings were expensive to produce, so purchasing them from
the Dutch publisher and making the necessary alterations to fit the English edition
made good economic sense. The large map is especially noteworthy in both editions.
It measures about twenty inches high by nearly twenty-seven inches wide. In both
editions this map is identical. The Latin text in the map cartouches is identical. In
fact, it might even be assumed that the map could have been printed in Amsterdam,
except that the paper used for the English edition is lighter than that found in the
Dutch original.
The map is especially important to me, because it portrays the northeastern part
of Siberia, as shown in the reproduction of it (figure 5, p. 34). The Kamchatka penin-
sula is lacking from the map. On the other hand, unlike some other maps dating from
this time, no land blocks a possible voyage from the Ob River around “Swetoi nos
sive Heylige Kaap” in the northeast corner of Siberia. As part of the record of contem-
porary beliefs about the possibility of a Northeast Passage from Europe to the East,
this map is exciting. It is documentary evidence of Witsen’s opinion on this subject
in 1704. His name is on the map, and the text of the cartouche indicates that the map
had been amended according to Witsen. Isbrand had not traveled in this northeastern
part of Siberia, though it is possible that he may have gotten some information about
the area from the Jesuits who were at the Chinese court. In addition to the map, some
text about a potential Northeast Passage is included in the book.
The relevant text in the Isbrand book is as follows: “from Weygats [Novaya Zem-
lya] to the Icy or Holy Cape, the Sea is utterly unnavigable with Ships, and should
a second Christopher Columbus appear, and point out the course of the Heavens,
he could not yet drive away these Mountains of Ice: For God and Nature have so
invincibly fenced the Sea side of Siberia with Ice, that no Ship can come to the River
Jenisea, much less can they come farther Northwards into the Sea” (Isbrand, 93). The
obstacle was not land, as shown on other maps of the time, but ice in the seas of the
north. The text continues with an account of how Russians with kotski (small boats)
sail from Novaya Zemlya to the Ob River, along the coasts. When the weather turns
bad the men take their boats to shore, where they remain until the weather changes.
Brand and Isbrand are not sources usually studied with regard to the geography
of Siberia, since the focus of the books is the embassy to China. The books give inter-
esting commentary on travel through Siberia, about towns and cities, about the peo-
ple who live there and the way they live. The illustrations of Tobolsk and Nerchinsk
34 Carol Urness
Figure 5. Northeastern portion of the large map in Evert Ysbrants Ides, Driejaarige reize
naar China, te lande gedaan door den Moskovischen afgezant. Amsterdam: François Halma
Halma, 1704, edited by Nicolaas Witsen, showing that the Russians knew that no land con-
nection existed between Russia and America.
are outstanding. The illustrations of Siberian peoples and places are fascinating. In
their books, Brand and Isbrand give us not only an excellent account of China, but
also a fine record of their experiences in Siberia. I believe the geographical descrip-
tions and the map in the Isbrand book come from Nicolaas Witsen, who studied Si-
beria for many years and wrote a massive book about it. The Isbrand book provides
important information on the question of the Northeast Passage, a question that has
engaged Europeans for centuries.
Theofanis G. Stavrou: Bookman
Timothy J. Johnson
During the last days of April 1999, the Library of Congress hosted a two-day con-
ference entitled “Strengthening Modern Greek Collections: Building U.S.–Greek
Library Partnerships.” The conference, sponsored by the Council on Library and In-
formation Resources (CLIR) and the Library of Congress, with additional support
by the publisher Chadwyck-Healey and the Embassy of Greece, brought together
twenty-three participants and seven observers from Greece and the United States to
discuss the status of modern Greek collections and to take the first steps towards im-
proving access to modern Greek resources.1 The goal of the conference, according to
John Van Oudenaren, chief of the European Division of the Library of Congress, was
“to identify partners who are willing to work together on projects relating to the pres-
1
The participants included Evridiki Abadjis-Skassis, Library of the Hellenic Parliament;
Beau David Case, head, Western European and Linguistics Collections, Ohio State University
Library; Alexis Dimaras, Greek conference coordinator, The Moraitis School, Athens; Joanna
Demopoulos, deputy director, National Library of Greece; Ifigenia Dionissiadu, chief docu-
mentation research, Benaki Museum; Evangelie Flessas, Harvard University Library; Dimitris
Gondicas, executive director, Program in Hellenic Studies, Princeton University; Joan Grant,
director of collection services, New York University Library; Denise Hibay, assistant chief
librarian for collection development, General Research Division, New York Public Library;
Harold Leich, area specialist, European Division, Library of Congress; Artemis Leontis, ex-
ecutive board secretary, Modern Greek Studies Association, Ohio State University; Deanna
Marcum, president, CLIR; Eutychia Moschouti-Lowenkopf, independent scholar; Nikos Pan-
telakis, archivist, chief of the historical archives, National Bank of Greece; His Excellency
Alexandros Philon, ambassador of Greece; Kathlin Smith, CLIR; Theofanis G. Stavrou, De-
partment of History, University of Minnesota; Karin Trainer, director, Princeton University
Library; Agamemnon Tselikas, director, Center for History and Paleography, National Bank,
Cultural Foundation of Greece; Michael Tzekakis, librarian, University of Crete; John Van
Oudenaren, chief, European Division, Library of Congress; Jean Wellington, head, Classics
Library, University of Cincinnati Library; and Mirsini Zorba, director, National Book Center
of Greece. The observers were Julia Clones, independent consultant; Janet Crayne, associate
librarian, University of Michigan Library; June Pachuta Farris, bibliographer for Slavic and
European Studies, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago; Eileen Lawrence, Council of
Library Resources; Anthony Oddo, team leader, Catalog Department, Sterling Memorial Li-
brary, Yale University; Theresa Papademetriou, Law Library, Library of Congress; and John
Topping, Regional and Cooperative Cataloging Division, Library of Congress.
36 Timothy J. Johnson
ervation, cataloging and dissemination of post-1400 collections in Greek libraries and

to identify ways in which these projects can be used to expand the Greek collections
of American research libraries through microfilm copies or digital access to collec-
tions in Greece.” One of the participants in this conference—reporting on the Basil
Laourdas Modern Greek Collection at the University of Minnesota—was Theofanis
G. Stavrou. His willing and active partnership with other Modern Greek scholars and
librarians at this conference was one of the latest testimonials to an ongoing dedica-
tion in building an active and world-renowned research collection of modern Greek
materials. This brief essay attempts to outline some of the partnerships enjoyed by
Professor Stavrou in the building of the Laourdas Collection and to provide a further
testimonial to this extraordinary and beloved scholar and bookman.
The conference at the Library of Congress came about in large part because
of the earlier success of a gathering of the Western European Specialists Section
(WESS) of the Association of College and Research Libraries at the 1997 annual
meeting of the American Library Association (ALA). Earlier that year, at the ALA
Midwinter meeting, the section had established a “Special Topic Discussion Group.”
This group was charged with providing a forum for thematic and geographical West-
ern European topics not covered by other WESS discussion groups. At the 1997 ALA
annual conference held in San Francisco, the inaugural meeting featured the topic
“Greece and the Greek-Speaking World” and included three speakers: Dr. Peter Hai-
kalis, development officer and selector of Greek, San Francisco State University Li-
brary, who spoke about his experiences as a Fulbright scholar at the University of
Crete Library and as an instructor at a library school in Greece; Dr. Roland Moore, re-
search anthropologist, Prevention Research Center, Berkeley, who spoke about Greek
internet resources; and Beau David Case, assistant professor and librarian, Ohio State
University, who spoke about Greek reference and selection tools, and other resources
for librarians with an interest in Greek, in vernacular and in English translation. Be-
sides these presentations the agenda also called for a brainstorming session for topics
at the following annual conference in Washington, D.C. Interestingly, twenty-three
persons attended—the same number of participants as at the LC conference two years
later—but this roster was limited to North American librarians.2 The University of
2
Those in attendance at the WESS Special Topics Discussion Group included Beau David
Case, Ohio State University Library; Peter Haikalis, San Francisco State University Library;
Roland S. Moore, Prevention Research Center, Berkeley, California; Michael Elmore, Barnard
College Library; Mary Cay Reynolds, Arizona State University Library; Mike Kelley, Uni-
versity of Missouri Library; Nancy Boerner, Indiana University Library; Stephen Lehman,
University of Pennsylvania Library; Mike Olson, Harvard University Library; Darla Rushing,
Loyola University Library; Diana Chlebek, University of Akron Library; Marty Joachim, In-
diana University Library; Frank Immler, Princeton University Library; Janet Coles, Speros
Basil Vryonis Center for the Study of Hellenism; Mariann Tiblin, University of Minnesota
Library; David Lindstrom, Speros Basil Vryonis Center for the Study of Hellenism; Nicholas
Spillos, Edmonton Public Library; Dionysia Sokoloski, University of Maryland; William S.
Moore, Brown University Library; Sharon Bonk, Queens College Library; and Steve Fergu-
son, Princeton University Library.
Theofanis G. Stavrou: Bookman 37
Minnesota was represented by Mariann Tiblin, bibliographer in the Libraries’ Collec-

tion Development and Management team.
Beau David Case, in a handout of the tools and resources mentioned in his pre-
sentation, lists fourteen libraries “with active Greek-language collections.”3 Those
libraries are:
• Cleveland Public Library

• Harvard University
• Hilandar Research Library, Ohio State University
• Hellenic College/Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology
• Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University
• King’s College London
• New York Public Library
• Ohio State University
• Princeton University
• San Francisco State University
• Speros Basil Vryonis Center for the Study of Hellenism
• University of Cincinnati
• University of Michigan
• University of Minnesota
One question immediately springs to mind: how were these collections developed and
did any of these libraries enjoy the kind of partnership so evident at the University of
Minnesota between the Libraries and the Modern Greek Studies Program? Or, to put
an even finer point on the question, did any of these libraries benefit from the amaz-
ing kind of collecting energy and enthusiasm so evident in the work of Theofanis G.
Stavrou?
Now, it may not be completely fair to make these kinds of institutional compari-
sons, yet I think it is both informative and instructive to look at how other collections
have come into being and search for those “movers and shakers” who made such
collections possible. In the process we may find kindred spirits and continue to build
on the connective bonds begun in San Francisco and strengthened in Washington.
These preliminary researches have now provided us with a core list: the names of
librarians and the institutions with active collections. What is missing is the third leg
of this bibliographic stool: the names of energetic collectors, bibliophiles, and donors.
Donor or collector information is difficult to track down, or, as is the case with
the massive collections found at Harvard, there are any number of donors, collectors,
or curators who have played a role in the shaping of collections over the years.
The narrative history on the European Collection found at the Hoover Institu-
tion at Stanford University offers a connection or two with the Minnesota/Stavrou
3
See Beau David Case and Artemis Leontis, “Report on the Conference at the Library of
Congress, April 29–30, 1999,” accessed 15 September 2016, https://www.loc.gov/rr/european/
GrkColl/caseleon.html.
experience.4 According to information available on the internet, the collection “was

formed in 1995 by the merger of the East/Central European Collection and the West
European Collection. It consists of materials that constitute a large part of the insti-
tution’s overall holdings, and, historically, are integral to the institutional mission of
promoting basic research on political and social issues of the twentieth century.”
The history of the Western European Collection enlightens us further.
At the end of the First World War, Herbert Hoover assigned Ralph H. Lutz, a
young Stanford historian, the task of collecting primary and secondary source
material to document the important political, social and economic changes
taking place in Europe. The emphasis was placed on acquiring govern-
ment documents, periodicals, newspapers, pamphlets, posters, photographs,
ephemera and monographs in the various European languages in the fields
of history, politics and government, economics, and international relations.
Book dealers and purchasing agents were recruited in the various countries
to search for and acquire this specialized material. The publications of the
League of Nations, for example, were received on deposit and formed the
basis for an important international documents collection.
The steady growth of the l920s and 30s was interrupted with the outbreak
of World War II, but the established contacts with the library’s old bookdeal-
ers in Austria, France, Italy and Germany were resumed immediately after
the war. A concentrated collecting effort at that time, in cooperation with the
Library of Congress, resulted in an avalanche of documentation from war
torn countries of Europe, foremost a substantial set of records of the Interna-
tional Military Tribunal. The collapse of the totalitarian governments in Italy
and Germany offered an especially fertile opportunity for gathering books,
periodicals, and archives documenting their history.
Increasing post-World War II interest in the non-Western world led to the
division of the collection, which until then was still undifferentiated by areas,
into various geographic collections. The Central and Western European Col-
lection became a separate but major unit in the new organizational structure.
Collecting efforts continue in response to political and social changes, as
well as technological developments. Videos, microform, oral histories, and
CD-ROMs have now been added to the traditionally collected materials.
To reflect the changed political order in Europe, the collection was orga-
nizationally merged in 1995 with the East/Central European Collection, but
remains a separate collecting unit within the newly named European Collec-
tion.
Agnes F. Peterson was Curator of the West European Collection from 1954
until 1993, when she retired with emerita status. Maciej Siekierski is cur-
4
Hoover Institution, “History of the Collection: East Europe and West Europe,” accessed 15
September 2016, http://www.hoover.org/history-collection-east-europe.
rently Curator of the combined European Collection, with Helen Solanum as

Senior Specialist for Western Europe.5
The East/Central European Collection has an equally interesting history.
The collecting from the area between Germany and Russia began immedi-
ately after World War I. Professor E. D. Adams from the Stanford University
History Department, on Herbert Hoover’s initiative, went to Paris with a team
of specialists to gather documentation on the War and the subsequent Peace
Conference. All conference delegations from East/Central Europe were con-
tacted, including those representing existing states and those with claims for
statehood. Most delegates were cooperative, providing large amounts of ma-
terial that formed the basis of the Hoover War Library, as it was then called.
Particularly detailed documentation was obtained from Poland, Czechoslova-
kia, Romania, and Yugoslavia.
Furthermore, a member of the Adams team, Professor Ralph H. Lutz, vis-
ited Warsaw in September 1919 at the invitation of the Polish delegation, ini-
tiating what was to become a great tradition of Hoover on-site collecting of
library and archival materials in East/Central Europe.
Building on this solid foundation in the years that followed, contacts were
established and strengthened throughout East and Central Europe, often by
persons connected with the American Relief Administration, which Herbert
Hoover directed.
As with Western Europe, collecting activity in East/Central Europe was in-
terrupted by events surrounding World War II. Earlier collecting investments
and contacts paid off after the war, however, as a massive amount of wartime
materials was delivered to the Hoover Institution. Many of these were unique
clandestine publications and items issued by the German occupiers. In other
cases, political and military authorities, in an effort to protect archives from
dispersion, transferred collections under their control to a safe location in the
United States: the Hoover Institution.
More recent collecting efforts have concentrated on current political
ephemera, such as posters, leaflets, newspapers and pamphlets, often pub-
lished secretly; published books and periodicals; and the archival documenta-
tion of the Communist regime and its adversaries, the democratic opposition.
Of particular note was the Hoover Institution’s decision to have its Curator for
Eastern Europe reside in Warsaw during 1991–1993. This greatly enhanced
collecting in the area as he oversaw the acquisition and shipment of several
tons of materials on Poland and Eastern Europe.6
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid.
Several tons of materials ended up at many of the other libraries identified above.
So, armed with this list, the author contacted each library to find out if additional in-
formation was available on donors, collectors, or bookdealers that might have played
a role in the development of these collections.
Predrag Matejic, curator of the Hilandar Research Library at the Ohio State Uni-
versity, provided some insights into the nature of their collections. Although beyond
the scope of modern Greek literature, his comments are nonetheless illuminating as
to what has been done to preserve and make available some of the important medieval
materials that are the precursors of a modern literature.
The Hilandar Research Library is a special collection for the preservation

and access of medieval Slavic (primarily Cyrillic) manuscripts, through mi-
croform. It has collections or portions of collections from 83 repositories in
20 countries.
Whenever we have an opportunity to do (ourselves or support) preservation
microfilming, we attempt to microfilm all manuscript codices in a collection,
regardless of alphabet, language or provenance. Therefore, we do have over
300 manuscripts on microfilm that are Greek, primarily from Hilandar Mon-
astery on Mt. Athos. It is still a major regret of mine that we ran out of film
in 1975 and were not able to complete the microfilming of the Greek manu-
scripts, nor to receive permission to return at a later time to attempt to do this.
Thus, we do have a collection, which also includes an actual Greek manu-
script from the late 17th century that was donated to us. But, this is not an ac-
quisition area to which we focus any special attention.… It may be, however,
that other Greek materials in the OSU Libraries are at least in part the result
of special benefactors, collectors or donors, for which Beau Case would have,
hopefully, the necessary information.7
Mr. Case, thankfully, did have additional information and provided a link to the
University of Michigan. His response also points to a common note found in many
of these messages, i.e., that attention was given to fiction, poetry, and literary studies
and that most of this material was not considered rare at the time of its acquisition. It
is also important to note that continuing interaction with the Greek-American com-
munity is essential to the development and acquisition of additional materials. Like-
wise, while state monies are available, they supply just a portion of the needed budget.
Additional attention must be given to the creation of endowment funds that will allow
for a more robust acquisitions program.
To answer your main question, I can only say that our second hire in Modern
Greek Studies ca. 1985–2000, Vassilis Lambropoulos, who is now at Michi-
gan, donated during his tenure several thousand volumes, mostly fiction and
poetry, and literary studies. None of these materials were rare or bibliophile
editions—simply editions for the circulating stacks.
7
Predrag Matejic, e-mail correspondence with author, 3 January 2001.
Today we have no such special friend, but we do have a new North Amer-
ican donation plan. A new assistant professor, Georgios Anagnostu, has ad-
vertised in the Greek-American press our project to collect Greek Orthodox
church publications. Most parishes in North America publish anniversary
albums or books on history of the parish church or the local Greek commu-
nity, some even have produced videos and CD-ROMs. OSU Library is in the
process of getting the parishes to donate copies of these publications to us;
what we cannot get on donation, we will buy. These materials will become a
kind of special collection for the study of the Greek diaspora. As yet we have
not chosen a home for the materials (such as Rare Books). Most likely we will
house the materials in our Depository Library, with a Rare Books status, so
anyone wanting to use the materials must request through Rare Books and
then use the materials in-house.
Finally, the bulk of our collections today are acquired with state money—
the typical annual allocation from the Head of Collections. This allocation
started very small, but today is probably third largest in North America, be-
hind Princeton and Cincinnati (I think UC has a much larger budget because
of endowments).8
Jean Susorney Wellington of the University of Cincinnati noted the important

financial support of William and Louise Taft Semple and offered additional comment
on this collection.
The collection was the dream of Professor Carl Blegen, the imminent [sic]
pre-classical archaeologist who passed away in 1971. His love of ancient
Greece extended to an equal love of his adopted home. (After his retirement
he lived much of his life in Greece. Both he and his wife are even buried
there.) He convinced Professor William Semple and his wife Louise Taft
Semple to extend their generous financial support for the Dept. of Classics,
its excavations and book collection to include building up a modern Greek
collection.
Carl Blegen personally was responsible for selecting books in Greece and
Turkey and having them sent to the U.S. It is because of his devotion that the
collection has so many jewels—rare 19th and early 20th century serial sets
and monographs. After his death, Professor Peter Topping with the help of the
Modern Greek Curator Eugenia Foster were the selectors. After Mr. Topping
went on to Dumbarton Oaks Eugenia developed the collection; she was the
first professional librarian who worked with that collection. She was espe-
cially interested in Modern Greek literature and she strengthened that part
of collection in particular. Professor Blegen was especially partial to minor
(and apparently ephemeral) contemporary Greek poetry. Unfortunately after
her retirement in 1991 the position of Modern Greek Curator was lost to a
university wide staff cut. The primary selector for that collection is now my
8
Beau David Case, e-mail correspondence with author, 29 December 2000.
assistant Michael Braunlin, a truly remarkable bibliographer with a gift for

foreign languages and bibliography.9
Here, also, we see the importance of the personal touch of the collector and the
necessity of visits to Greece in the selection process. Both the collector’s touch and
the familiarity with the book trade in Greece are echoed in the work of Theofanis
G. Stavrou. One wonders, in the recounting of Blegen’s own work, whether or not
the paths of Stavrou and Blegen crossed during their expeditions to the homeland.
In Wellington’s account we are also reminded of the importance of continuity in the
course of developing a collection. In Cincinnati’s case, the torch was passed from
Blegen to Topping and Foster. We may find ourselves forced to ask: “who will take
the place of Stavrou?” And who will defend the collection if, and when, the library is
forced to make unpopular staff decisions? Thankfully, the staffing configuration at
Minnesota is different enough so that such a cut is improbable. On the positive side,
such a situation points to the dream of having an endowed curator’s position—as may
be the case with Minnesota’s Givens and Holmes Collections—to nurture and care
for the Laourdas Collection.
Wellington ends her accounting by noting the fate of Blegen’s dream for a Mod-
ern Greek Studies program, the changing focus of the collection, the importance of
resource sharing and relationships with other institutions, and other related collec-
tions. Each of these points is worth considering in light of the success of Minnesota’s
program and its relationship with other departments within the university and other
institutions beyond its borders.
The Modern Greek Collection is a bit of an anomaly here at Cincinnati. Un-

fortunately Carl Blegen’s dream to build up a Modern Greek Studies program
at the University never was accomplished, so we have a major collection to
support a nonexistent program. To a certain extent, however, the materials
in that collection also support the research of the Dept. of Classics and we
have continued to buy publications at the same rate as did Eugenia Foster. We
have changed our focus and no longer buy in Modern Greek literature, except
in English translation. That is the very area that Ohio State emphasizes in
purchasing since it does have a major Modern Greek Studies program, which
emphasizes literature. Since they are only 100 miles away and their collection
is easily available via the OhioLINK project that brings books from other
member libraries to UC within 3 days of users requesting them themselves
right from our online catalog, it was not so drastic, as this may sound. Instead
we have used the freed up funds to buy more in depth in the areas that are
used on this campus—history and other social sciences.
We did have several other major gifts in connection with that collection. In
the late 1960s we received a collection of books and pamphlets from Herbert
P. Lansdale, who has [sic] been the Director of Field Operations for AMAG
(the American Mission for Aid to Greece) after World War II. The collection
9
Jean Susorney Wellington, e-mail correspondence with author, 18 January 2001.
was rich especially in US government publications and internal publications

of that office. It also includes a few issues of some World War II and postwar
era Greek newspapers.10
Alison Trott, information specialist in the Humanities at King’s College London,

provided an interesting snapshot into the development of that collection and pointed
to the College Archives as a source for additional information. As in earlier accounts,
we see the importance of the professor/collector and endowment of an academic
chair. The connection with the Anglo-Hellenic League reminds us of the continued
importance of relationships beyond the library’s walls.
Professor Ronald Montagu Burrows (1867–1920), Principal at King’s College

London 1913–1920, played a large part in establishing the Modern Greek Li-
brary. It was called the Burrows Library and had a Burrows Librarian.
Burrows was responsible for establishing the Chair of Modern Greek
at King’s. There is a book about Burrows, Ronald Burrows: A Memoir, by
George Glasgow and also some information about him in a book by Richard
Clogg, Politics and the Academy: Arnold Toynbee and the Koraes Chair. Bur-
rows was also involved in the Anglo-Hellenic League, which explains why so
many Modern Greek books in the Library bear the League’s bookplate.11
Finally, Peter Haikalis at San Francisco State University responded with a brief
observation on the nature of their collections. His note reflects the long-time care and
attention, much more than luck, needed for such an endeavor.
I have been the one over the last 20 years responsible for acquiring library
materials on Greece and Greek Americans for the SFSU Library. I don’t con-
sider myself a collector, bibliophile, etc., and we only purchase items that are
currently published and primarily in English. Although the collection is not
extensive and rather general, visiting faculty, etc., have complemented us on
its currency and comprehensiveness at least for English language materials.
So I guess we have been lucky.12
These institutional sketches, graciously supplied by those who care for these ma-
terials, help us in answering the question of how these collections were developed and
what kind of partnerships helped make it so. They also provide an external mirror
with which to view the bibliographic work of Theofanis G. Stavrou. It is an instruc-
tive view and in it we find kindred spirits and connective bonds. Cincinnati, in the
case of Carl Blegen, benefited from his collecting energy and enthusiasm. Stanford
was the beneficiary of the young historian Lutz and the established historian E. D.
10
Ibid.
11
Alison Trott, e-mail correspondence with author, 9 January 2001.
12
Peter Haikalis, e-mail correspondence with author, 24 January 2001.
Adams, both working on-site in Europe—an established Hoover Institution tradi-

tion—to collect their valuable treasures. Their tireless and longstanding work with
book dealers and purchasing agents, as well as Stanford’s cooperative arrangement
with the Library of Congress, paid extra dividends. Curators and librarians such as
Agnes Peterson, Eugenia Foster, Peter Haikalis, and Beau Case have cared for, de-
scribed, and promoted these collections once they have reached the safe harbor of the
library. Their long-term devotion cannot be ignored. The Greek-American press, the
Greek Orthodox Church, and organizations such as the Anglo-Hellenic League are
indicative of the need for strong community bonds. Interested and able donors such
as the Semples of Cincinnati or Burrows of London point to the need for strong and
growing endowments. The example of resource sharing between Cincinnati and Ohio
State is a call towards strengthening relationships among like-minded institutions.
All of these facets in the bibliographic mirror—energy, enthusiasm, dedication,
care, patience, friendship, and more—can be found in the face, and life, of Theofanis
G. Stavrou. It may be appropriate to end this essay with two excerpts from the corre-
spondence files found in the Department of Special Collections and Rare Books. The
first is dated 15 August 1977 and was sent from Thessaloniki by Stavrou to Austin
McLean, curator.
This is just a brief note to greet you from Thessaloniki and to assure you that
even though I did not manage to see you before I left, Louisa [Laourdas] and
I have been working tirelessly since my arrival in Greece to prepare more
books for shipment. More importantly, we have embarked upon several proj-
ects which will contribute toward the collection’s growth. I feel confident that
with care and persistence we can develop a very special and working collec-
tion. And I am very grateful that the collection is under your supervision. I
was, of course, pleased that the first shipment arrived in good condition.
The second letter is dated 17 July 1978 on letterhead from the Institute for Balkan
Studies in Thessaloniki. It was written by Louisa Laourdas to Austin McLean, in the
midst of earthquakes that had rocked the area since May, and refers to the dedication
of the Laourdas Collection at the University of Minnesota. The delay in writing, un-
der such circumstances, is understandable.
Many, many apologies for delaying to write to you earlier as I meant to. My
thoughts turn ever so often to all of you in Minneapolis. I was very touched
by your efforts and the vivid interest you take of this special collection. The
display of the books was excellent, very artistic, with a lovely touch of inti-
macy.… I feel very grateful to you for organizing that dedication ceremony.
I was amazed you had so many people involved in it, also how well it was
attended. I know too well what a lot of work that meant. Thank you is very
little to say.
We might add, with Louisa Laourdas, that same note of gratitude for all that has been
done by Theofanis G. Stavrou, bookman (and more). Thank you is very little to say.
Bridge-Building as Humanism and Scholarly Adventure
Catherine Guisan
The scholar has many ways to exert an influence: a life well lived may not be the least
of them. Given that my research and teaching interests belong to another discipline, I
confess to having read only a few of the numerous publications that Professor Theo-
fanis G. Stavrou has authored, coauthored, or edited. But I have observed Theo Stav-
rou, the friend and the teacher, build many bridges: between experienced researchers
and academic novices; between religious faith and rational enquiry; between contem-
porary Greece and the United States; between Orthodoxy and other religious world-
views; among descendants of the former Ottoman Empire; and between the private
world of family and the professional world of academia. In the age of globalization
when we are told that the “interconnectedness of people is more extensive and in-
tensive than it has ever been,”1 the art of bridge-building might seem obsolete. But
globalization is shadowed by another process, contradictory and just as powerful: the
turn to fundamental beliefs and organizations of life in order to make sense of one’s
place in a world which dwarfs individuals and their communities alike. I would not
impute to Theofanis Stavrou, with his well-honed sense of proportion and his ability
to laugh at all hubris, the desire to role model some middle ground between globaliza-
tion and parochial rootedness. But I have enjoyed watching him engage in the com-
plicated dance that well-educated, first-generation immigrants to the United States
are fated to perform to do justice to the varied (at times discordant!) intellectual and
emotional forces that shape them; and I have marveled at the richness of such a life.

I first became a student of Theofanis Stavrou and his brother Soterios Stavrou
when I audited their extension course in Modern Greek language. What stands out in
my memory is the seamless cooperation between the two brothers, Soterios stress-
ing grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation, Theo teaching us about Greece as a
civilization and way of life through novels and poetry. The final oral exam consisted
in reciting George Seferis, the Nobel Prize-winning Greek poet’s poem “Άρνηση”
(Denial). I still remember the beautifully elusive last stanza:
1
Daniele Archibugi, David Held, and Martin Köhler, Re-imagining Political Community:
Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 13.
46 Catherine Guisan
With what heart, with what breath,

What desire and what passion
We took our life. A mistake!
And we changed life.2
I never attended the Saturday gatherings which Theofanis and his life companion
Freda Stavrou generously hosted to prepare the University of Minnesota undergradu-
ates embarking on their discovery of modern Greece under the auspices of the SPAN
Program (Student Project for Amity among Nations); but Freda’s magnificent Greek
buffet and the two grandsons dressed as evzones contributed to making the scholarly
Annual Celebration of Modern Greek Letters a celebration of family as well as of
letters.
My acquaintance with Theo Stavrou predates my entrance into a graduate pro-
gram at the University of Minnesota and undoubtedly shapes my view of him as a
bridge-builder. I was then working for an international NGO devoted to peace-mak-
ing and social justice issues and planning an audiovisual program featuring a Greek
Cypriot customs officer, Spyros Stephou, who had worked for better relationships
between Greek and Turkish workers in the port of Famagusta. A friend recommended
that Professor Stavrou be invited as a discussant; this was the beginning of our friend-
ship. Theo and I share Greek roots, deeply set in Ottoman soil. My mother was born
in Istanbul’s prosperous Greek merchant community in 1916, and her father had been
educated at the elite bilingual (Turkish-French) Galatasaray High School, a subject of
great family pride; they left for Switzerland in the early 1920s, and I was raised on a
steady diet of nostalgic memories, where recollection of the leisurely family holiday
spent on the Isle of Halki (Heybeli Ada in Turkish) and of my grandfather’s friendly
business relations with Greeks and Turks alike somehow clashed with the contemp-
tuous remarks dropped by my grandmother about the Turks as uneducated and back-
ward (“they used our hospitals, the best in the city”). Favorite dishes carried strange
names sounding rather more Turkish than Greek: imam baildi (stuffed eggplants so
delicious that the priest—the imam—fainted out of delight), dolmades, keftedes, tza-
tziki; and the coffee served out of a well-worn ibrik (a small coffee pot) to Swiss and
Greek guests alike was baptized “Turkish coffee.” Although my grandfather was a
great admirer of Eleftherios Venizelos, the modernizing Greek leader who pioneered
a rapprochement with Turkey in 1930, my family’s relationship with Turkey remained
ambiguous, a love-hate relationship of sorts.
Later, when I took Theofanis Stavrou’s graduate seminar in Modern Greek
Studies I began, for the first time, to reflect systematically on the place of Greece in
the Ottoman Empire, and on the empire itself. Theofanis insisted on conducting his
graduate seminar in a minuscule office lined with books, probably considering this
cramped space more conducive to lively intellectual exchanges. Under his at once
relaxed and erudite guidance graduate students played a rather complicated puzzle
game, assembling some of the pieces, which make up the history of modern Greece
2
George Seferis, Collected Poems, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1995), 235.
Bridge-Building as Humanism and Scholarly Adventure 47
and its large diaspora. As we discussed the books that each of us had been asked to
review, we became acquainted with the influential Greek intellectuals of Renaissance
Italy, with the Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century, and with the impact of Ottoman rule on Greek Orthodox leadership and on
the masses of the faithful.3 With his customary generosity Professor Stavrou asked
me to revise my review of a French-language book, Christina Koulouri’s Dimen-
sions de l’historicité en Grèce (1834–1914) for inclusion in the Modern Greek Studies
Yearbook.4 This led to a brief (but rather exciting for the inexperienced reviewer!)
exchange of correspondence with Ms. Koulouri. For a graduate student used to the
hierarchical Swiss academic world, it was astonishing to hear her professor extol with
pride the works of his best undergraduate students, works which, according to him,
even colleagues could read with profit.
The Swiss schools that educated me made little mention of the Byzantine Em-
pire and even less of the Ottoman Empire, this “sick man of the East.” Thanks to the
Modern Greek Studies seminar, I encountered the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century
Ottoman Empire in all its might and glory, a sophisticated multilingual, multifaith,
and decentralized system of governance which had, under the millet system, made
the patriarch of Constantinople the ethnarch with both religious and administrative
authority over the Orthodox populations. For the first time I learned to see the Greeks
not only as victims of oppression, but sometimes as powerful and oppressive rulers
themselves. Such were the Mavrogordato princes, who administered Romania on be-
half of the Ottoman Empire for almost two centuries. The Neo-Hellenist humanist
and patriot Koraes, whom one of my ancestors had befriended, became a familiar
name. Thus, I also discovered that the Greek diaspora had long had its intelligentsia.
The Modern Greek Studies Yearbook itself was another cause for surprise. How
could one edit year after year a journal about a country long oppressed, poor and
sparsely populated, which many Greeks evicted from Turkey preferred not to settle in
when they could afford to go to Western Europe? But the editor had a very different
vision: all regions and periods of history impacted by Neo-Hellenism and Orthodoxy
belonged to the sub-field of Modern Greek studies. Theofanis wrote in his preface to
the first Yearbook: “To the extent that it is possible and supportable, the emphasis will
be on connections, that is to say on interrelationships, thematic as well as geographic
and chronological, highlighting the cultural pluralism of the regions where the mod-
ern Greeks moved and had their being, an emphasis to which a variety of disciplines
3
Dean John Geanakoplos, Greek Scholars in Venice: Studies in the Dissemination of Greek
Learning from Byzantium to Western Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1962); Raphael Demos, “The Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment (1750–1821),” Journal of the His-
tory of Ideas 19 (1958): 523–41; Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity: A Study of
the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of
Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968).
4
Catherine Guisan-Dickinson, review of Christina Koulouri, Dimensions idéologiques de
l’historicité en Grèce (1834–1914) (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992), Modern Greek
Studies Yearbook 9 (1993): 508–11.
48 Catherine Guisan
and methods may be called upon to contribute.”5 One could not be more inclusive. I
wondered whether the Yearbook was not a recklessly ambitious enterprise of intel-
lectual Greek take-over (“recuperation,” as the French would say); but I learned how
comparative historical scholarship can renew the understanding of links among peo-
ples long accustomed to treat such links as reasons for hostility rather than for reflec-
tion; the history of the Balkans, a topic of scholarly research rather than an amalgam
of memories ceaselessly rehashed and transmitted from one generation to the next as
so many weapons for future wars, struck me as very exciting, even hopeful. In 1996,
the editor added a subtitle to the Modern Greek Studies Yearbook, which identifies it
most appropriately as a Publication of Mediterranean, Slavic, and Eastern Orthodox
Studies.
For a person of Greek ancestry, the most unbridgeable gap may be with the
Turks. I am the daughter of a woman who never gave up on the dream of a genuine
and lasting rapprochement between the Greek and Turkish people and has maintained
life-long friendships in Istanbul. I share the dream. At their best, all descendants of
the former Ottoman Empire know how to turn an unabashed tragedy into new begin-
nings. In the late 1960s, Theofanis and Soterios Stavrou drew plans, to create on a
piece of family property in Dhiorios, the village where they had grown up, a library
“which was to serve also as a retreat center to energize Greek- and Turkish Cypriot
students and mid-career professionals.”6 The 1974 Turkish invasion of the northern
part of Cyprus put Dhiorios and its books out of reach. As a result, Theofanis started
to spend more time in Greece with his friend and mentor Basil Laourdas, a Byzan-
tinist who had founded the Thessaloniki Institute for Balkan Studies, where Stavrou’s
first book was published.7 After Laourdas’ death, his widow Louise Laourdas offered
his library to Professor Stavrou. Rather than accepting the generous gift, Theofanis
suggested that the Laourdas library be given to the University of Minnesota. This was
the beginning of the Modern Greek Collection, whose more than twenty-thousand
items the Andersen Library now houses. In the 1990s, Professor Stavrou directed
his energy toward yet another task, the founding of the University of Cyprus, which
would “help the political maturation of the island because scholars and their students
will be able to discuss issues not only in terms of personalities, but objectively.”8
He wished for courses to be taught in Greek, English, and Turkish. This has yet to
happen, but in Theo’s mind the University of Cyprus can pursue the intellectual and
unifying mission once carried by the American University of Beirut, where the sons
5
Theofanis G. Stavrou, “Editor’s Note,” Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 1 (1985): x.
6
Conversation of the author with Theofanis Stavrou, April 2001, University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis.
7
Theofanis G. Stavrou, Russian Interests in Palestine 1882–1914: A Study of a Religious and
Educational Enterprise (Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1963).
8
Theofanis Stavrou, Modern Greek Studies Seminar, 2 February 1993.
Bridge-Building as Humanism and Scholarly Adventure 49
and daughters of the Middle Eastern intelligentsia and business elite mingled and
learned.9
As I wrestle with my own call, I take several leaves from Theo’s book of life: a
sense of great expectation for my students; a willingness to cross disciplinary and
cultural boundaries; a commitment to cultivate faith, friendships, and family ties in
spite of the pressures of academic life; and the readiness to rethink the original world-
views that I brought with me to the United States. I am also made aware that outsiders
bring much to the table, which can enrich the American understanding of other parts
of the world. For all this and more, thank you, Theo!
9
Conversation of the author with Theofanis Stavrou, Spring 2000, University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis.
Surviving Exile: Augustine of Hippo’s
Version of Psalm 136 (Vulg., KJV 137)
Karl F. Morrison
Introduction: Exile, Political and Virtual
To speak of exiles is to speak of survivors.1 Exiles have survived a disaster, perhaps

only in the short run. Time will tell whether their strategies and tactics of survival
will carry them through years, or decades, as aliens among peoples whose ways are
not their ways. Community is a basic human need. Aristotle said that anyone who
could live without society must be either a god or a beast—superhuman or subhu-
man.2 He stressed the importance of conscious belonging—the “herd instinct”—as
essential to survival. We do not need Aristotle to know that human beings achieve
fulfillment in community. From everyday experience, we know how thoroughly
disruptions of belonging—for example, by moving house and losing companions—
change the conditions and possibilities of fulfillment, in part because they disturb
the basic relationships on which survival depends. The loss of a spouse or a child,
the souring of a friendship, is enough to thwart a person’s creative imagination, by
disrupting all familiar strategies and tactics of survival. Exile, and even the thought of
exile, moves the catastrophe of uprooted relationships, and the difficulty of imagining
how to survive, to a higher power.
In this essay, my subject is how surviving exile worked on the conscious imag-
ination of Augustine of Hippo (354–430). My theme is that, as a master rhetorician,
the African church father intended to teach his hearers, using his homiletic commen-
1
An early version of this paper was delivered at a conference on the subject, “Exile, Past
and Present: Medieval Topic and Modern Reality” (Claremont Graduate University, 11–13
November 1999). I am grateful to the other participants in the conference, above all to Pro-
fessor Nancy van Deusen, who also organized it, and to Mr. and Mrs. Rafael Chodos for their
encouragement and suggestions for further thought. This paper is part of a wider survey on
the Christian project of self-knowing provisionally entitled Witness: Crises in the Evolution of
Christian Identity: Beyond Seeing, Beyond Art, Beyond Knowing.
2
Aristotle, Politics, 1.2.1253a.
52 K arl F. Morrison
taries on the psalms, as performances of monologue theater.3 In preaching on Psalm

136 (137), he took the task of persuading them that common-sense techniques of so-
cial survival, such as conformity and assimilation, were deadly. By his performance,
he intended to conjure up in the theaters of his hearers’ imaginations scenes from the
drama of salvation. He brought his considerable skill to bear to project them into the
parts they were to play—and in fact were playing—in that cosmic drama. Against
the gospel of conformity, he preached the need to induce deliberately the social death
of exile as a stage in spiritual rebirth. By that means, he urged, Christians could
collaborate with God in shaping the regeneration of the human race. The paradox
that social death was the gate to collective life was plain. Terminal agonies of social
outcasts—by exile and by martyrdom—were as vividly present in his hearers’ minds
as they were in Augustine’s.
I am bound to say, at the outset, that the whole venture of medieval history as
I learned it was the creation of exilic survivors—men and women who immigrated
mainly from Germany. My fascination, which marks this paper, with the interlocking
of theology, literature, social order, and the visual arts comes from them. Though I
did not know him well, I will invoke the name of Gerhart B. Ladner, whose studies
have been a continuing inspiration, and whose work on the literary motive of human
life as alienated wayfaring (homo viator) is somewhere in the intellectual pedigree
of many historians.4 While this was not true of Ladner, it is worth remembering that,
in maturity and later life, many of his fellow exiles refused to speak their native lan-
guages, never wished to return to their original homelands, and, indeed, never told
even their children and grandchildren what they had experienced there. Forgetting
relationships can be an exile’s survival tactic as well as remembering them.

Beginning in the age of the church fathers, Christian thinking about exile was shaped
largely by two antecedents: experiences related in Scripture, and Neoplatonic cos-
mology. Remarkably, early Christian writers did not assimilate to their own circum-
stances a third exilic model, given in Virgil’s Aeneid, which much later entered Dan-
te’s thinking with profound effect.
3
On the importance of rhetorical declamation both as performance and as an instigation to
enactment, see Erik Gunderson, Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the
Roman World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), on the dramatic progression
of crisis, discovery, and enactment of becoming another, including possibly “the one whom
[the speaker] must not be” (129). See as well the effects of bad performance, “chronic restag-
ings of the fallible nature of the performance [which] also signify an insuperable difficulty in
segregating the orator from the possibility of a failure of being” (115), a symbolic effect in the
nature of performance particularly relevant to human intervention in the process of changing
spiritual identities.
4
Gerhart Burian Ladner, “Homo viator: Medieval Ideas on Alienation and Order,” Speculum
42 (1967): 233–59.
Surviving Exile 53
The Hebrew Bible yielded a rich variety of exiles and quasi-exiles: the expulsion
of Adam and Eve from Paradise, the Exodus, and the Babylonian Exile, to mention
three primary examples. The little text of Psalm 136 and Augustine’s more mas-
sive commentary illustrate how varieties of Christian consciousness recognized such
events as these as antecedents, and assimilated them to their own highly idiosyncratic
circumstances.5 To clarify the magnitude of distance between them, I shall begin
with a few remarks about Psalm 136, and then indicate how Augustine assimilated it
into a general ethos of exile and survival.
Psalm 136: Exile by Defeat; Return by Victory
With its nine verses, Psalm 136 is not much longer or shorter than many other psalms.
The compilers of the Book of Psalms were content to leave it unattributed in the great
mass of anonymous hymns. It was written in the aftermath of the Babylonian con-
quest and eventual sack of Jerusalem (BCE 597, 586). The author identified his indi-
vidual experience with the catastrophe of his people. Behind these few verses, there
is a large, collective history, which includes the whole sequence of events through
which the Jews were first set apart as God’s holy people, a royal priesthood, then
united by David into one kingdom with Zion (=Jerusalem) as its capital, and, finally,
drawn to the Temple, the Lord’s footstool and resting place (1 Chron. 28: 2; 2 Chron.
6: 41). The Temple stood as a visible manifestation of God’s name, which is to say,
of his presence and overpowering holiness. Tradition, however, recorded a terrible
warning. At the Temple’s dedication, according to chroniclers, God warned that if the
Jews abandoned their covenant and worshiped other gods, he would reject the Temple
consecrated in his name and make their land and the Temple’s wreckage bywords of
scorn for the Gentiles (2 Chron. 7: 19–22).
The writer of Psalm 136 had seen the desolation of Jerusalem and Temple come
to pass. And yet, he gave no indication of thinking that it was an angry God’s pun-
ishment of Jewish infidelity. (His failure to connect desolation with infidelity stands
in sharp contrast to the burden of Psalm 106: 34–48.) The author of Psalm 136 placed
responsibility for the disaster squarely on the Babylonians, the tormenters who asked
exiles to mock their own sorrow by singing songs of joy, the Lord’s songs, to amuse
the destroyers of Jerusalem. In his mind, the Edomites shared the blame; they had
betrayed their brothers, the Jews, and joined in laying Jerusalem waste.
What are the captives to do? The author counsels repression, fueled by an ardent
craving for revenge. Of all 150 psalms, this is the only cursing hymn. The captives
cannot sing the Lord’s songs in a foreign land for the amusement of their enemies.
Under cover of this silent repression, the author imposes one curse against himself,
a curse of physical disabilities more terrible than death, if he forgets Jerusalem or
allows his desire for any joy to supersede his longing for Jerusalem. He imposes a sec-
5
On the general intellectual structure of connections in which the framing of Christian
identity converged with methods of scriptural interpretation (particularly with reference to
Origen), see John David Dawson, Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 27–37, 149–57, 162–63.
ond curse against the destroyers of Jerusalem, the Babylonians and their henchmen,
the Edomites, who had already plundered and destroyed the holy City once before.
The avenger will be blessed, the psalmist sang, who dashes the infants of Babylon
against a rock.
This text stands on its own. It makes perfect sense without looking for metaphors
or symbolic meaning. The author did not use his harp to expound a riddle.6 Without
riddling symbolism, he presents a single event from a single perspective; he said what
he meant. Some metaphoric value could be read into the word “rock,” in view of the
persistent identification through the psalms of God as “the rock,” or “our rock and
salvation.”7 Still, there is no need to think that the author of the psalm intended any
such metaphorical reading. Infanticide is certainly within the range of possible acts
of revenge called for by Jeremiah when he invoked “vengeance for the Lord; ven-
geance for his Temple”8 and indeed the revenge Ezekiel specifically predicted for the
Edomites.9 The lust for revenge in Psalm 136 is as implacable as that of Oedipus who,
to gain a terrible, annihilating vengeance against his own people, refused to return to
Thebes even in death.
Short as it is, Psalm 136 provides traces of how the author’s consciousness, and
thus his creative imagination, took shape by turning inward. The author imagined
himself speaking as a member of an entire class, defined ethnically and religiously,
the people of the Covenant. He spoke from, to, and for the collective experience of that
people, without any appeal to the goodwill or understanding or pity of outsiders. His
message was esoteric. Thus, the context of his sufferings was also the long, continu-
ing narrative of his people’s dealings with God. It was the context of worship, or cult.
The formation of consciousness moved, perhaps as linearly as does the psalm itself,
within the confines of one people: from the brutal event of exile, to the degradation
the Jerusalemites felt as defeated aliens among their conquerors, to their emotions,
and finally, to curses, intended to guarantee vindication of the Jerusalemites. Tradi-
tional segregation from the Gentiles is evident in every line, segregation so sharp as
to forbid taking wives from among the uncircumcised or giving daughters or sisters
in marriage to the uncircumcised, even in the most fortunate of times. Through the
words of Psalm 136, we see a profoundly introverted imagination.
We are concerned, not only with how the conscious imagination made sense of
exile, but also with how survivors translated their uprootedness into art. The psalm
also offers a hint or two in this regard. By adding to the literature of worship, the
author used art to affirm uprooted relationships and keep them alive. Like the shaping
of the imagination, the creative act of writing a song was molded in an introspective
ethnic identity and experience, particularly in the religious cult of a lost homeland.
Although the chant, the musical setting which completed the composition, is lost, the
6
Cf. Psalm 49: 4.
7
E.g., Psalm 18: 31; 28: 1; 31: 3; 62: 2, 6, 7; 71: 3; 78: 35; 92: 15; 94: 22; 95: 1.
8
Jeremiah 50: 28; 51: 11.
9
Ezekiel 25: 12–17.
Surviving Exile 55
language and genre of the psalm have an apparent simplicity and directness. In fact,
as the author must have known, these come from the stylized refinement of rules of
composition governed and sifted by some collective, critical organ, if only popular
taste, through at least three centuries’ development in Zion.
There is also some implicit evidence of how not only the literature of worship, but
also visual arts, were used to preserve uprooted relationships, though this evidence is
admittedly circumstantial. After all, the Law written by God’s own hand and deliv-
ered to Moses forbade making representational art and, particularly, its use in wor-
ship. Eventually, not long before the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, some Jews found it
possible at least to think of artists painting the history of their religion on walls. But,
much earlier, when Psalm 136 was written, pious Jews still associated figural art with
Gentile idolatry and defilement.10 The cult still required artists to adorn worship, not
to illustrate Scripture.
Still, the psalm gives an indirect allusion to the translation of exile into visual art.
The allusion occurs in the exile’s passionate commitment to remembering Jerusalem,
for cherishing Jerusalem above all else. To remember Jerusalem was to recall the en-
semble of arts which had adorned the vast structure of Solomon’s Temple—immense,
sometimes highly ornamented, architectural elements in bronze; cedar and cypress
paneling clad in gold and carved with botanical figures and cherubim; lavish decora-
tion in precious and semi-precious stones; masterpieces of engraving and weaving;
ceremonial dishes, utensils, and other liturgical furniture in gold and silver. The au-
thor of Psalm 136 and his fellow exiles would have fed their bitter hearts remember-
ing these glories and the music in the Lord’s house, all vanished. The oracles of the
prophet Zechariah witness how, when Cyrus released the Jews from their Babylonian
captivity (BCE 536), the exiles’ passionately loving memories of disrupted relation-
ships engendered Zerubbabel’s reconstruction of the Second Temple.
Psalm 136 resonates with the cry of a people. This is not a song of isolated in-
dividuals, but of one society against another. The cry of a people comes through the
language, both vernacular and learned; through the form, established by tradition;
through the context, a prayer book for congregations, indeed, for the Great Assembly.
The esoteric cry of a people came through critical thinking, as invisible as the poet
himself—the critical judgment of the editors who included it as canonical and those
serving their community as fiduciary trustees of faith and order who retained it. The
author’s own creative imagination is irretrievably submerged in that of his people,
a society conterminous with its religion and having, in Jerusalem, a fixed center of
its cult, and, in the male lineage of the Twelve Tribes, its continuity. The burden of
grief and yearning for revenge in the psalm was to be relived over and over again as
canonical, not embalmed and imitated stylistically as classical.
How did this esoteric cry of survivors sound to one class of outsiders, namely, to
Christians? I turn now to an early and enduringly influential commentary on Psalm
136, that by Augustine of Hippo. As an exercise in imagination, Augustine’s expe-
rience of exile resembles a psychosomatic disorder called Munchausen syndrome.
10
See 4 Maccabees 17: 7; Ezekiel 16: 17, 23: 15–17.
Augustine’s Commentary: Exile by Assimilation; Return by Banishment
By every indication, Psalm 136 was meant to be taken literally. Augustine assimi-
lated the esoteric letter of the psalm to the quite alien spirit of Christian doctrine by
interpreting the words symbolically. It is a sign of how stubbornly Augustine went
about reconciling the incommensurables of what the psalm said and what he wanted
it to say that, even though the psalm consists of nine verses, Augustine’s commentary
runs to fourteen densely packed pages. It is a sign of how thoroughly his meaning
turned the text upside down that he was able to celebrate exile as “noble” (generosa
peregrinatio), by one of the oddest possible role reversals, he was able to take upon
himself, a Gentile, the mantle of the Jewish exile in the psalm and to cast Jews as
among the enemies, the Edomites, cursed by the psalmist as persecutors and de-
stroyers of Jerusalem.11 What idea of relationship allowed him to depart so far from
his text as to rejoice in exile and identify the Jews as the mortal enemies—indeed
classify them with their own mortal enemies, the villains, rather than the victims of
the psalm?
Augustine’s conception of scriptural understanding as a spiritual communion
prepared him for insights quite different from those guiding the authors of the He-
brew Scriptures, he thought, even the prophets of Christ. Divinely inspired as they
were, the authors of Hebrew Scripture saw in truth but from afar what Christ made
present. Moreover, as diversity of understanding abundantly demonstrated, even the
revelations in the Gospels and books of the Apostles were not enough to open the
mysteries of salvation to one and all. For, no less than the initial writing of Scrip-
ture, its correct apprehension was a gift of God and came by inspiration. A sacred
symphonism united authentic human authors and interpreters, for all understood and
wrote in the one spirit of God, like all charisms given to each by measure. Following
the apostle Paul’s teaching, Augustine believed that Christ and the Spirit co-inhered
in the soul. Christ, the Word, Augustine wrote, is also the Living Bread from Heaven
that feeds the minds of believers. When we come together to eat and hear a book of
Scripture, we are going to see the Word, hear the Word, and drink him as surely as an
angel in Heaven does. Thus, in their very bodies and minds, believers had the mind
of Christ, the “Living Word” in the inert written words of Scripture, the Living Word
connecting the triune image of God in their souls with the dynamic of will, mind, and
love that was the Trinity.12
Augustine’s charismatic beliefs about understanding Scripture carried him be-
yond comprehending words on a page and beyond praying for understanding to the
co-inherence of Christ and Spirit in the believer’s heart. The search for God, too
11
Enarratio in Psalmum CXXXVI, chaps. 12, 18, Corpus Christianorum, series latina: 40
(Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1956), 1971, 1975–76.
12
See, for example, Augustine, Sermo 56.4.12–14, 19; Sermo 57.7.7; Jacques-Paul Migne,
Patrologiae Cursus Completus, series latina, vol. 38 (Paris: J. P. Migne, 1846), cols. 383–86,
389–90; De trinitate, 9.7.12; 9.8.13; 15.14.23–15.16.26; 15.17.28–15.18.32, Corpus Christiano-
rum, series latina, 50A (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1968), 303–05, 496–508.
Surviving Exile 57
high for human understanding, led him to seek God indirectly, through the image of
God in himself; for God made humanity in his image and likeness. In the same way,
his search for the mind still active in Scripture made Augustine’s commentary as
much a study in introversion as Psalm 136 itself was. But the very fact that the psalm
belonged to the ethnic legacy of a people not his own put strains on Augustine’s
interpretive project. In his belief that all the Psalms witnessed to Christ and his zeal
to assimilate the letter of the psalm to the spirit of Christian revelation, Augustine
refused to acknowledge that the esoteric people’s cry in the psalm was not meant for
him. His critical techniques did not require him to give much weight to the fact that
he was not a Jew, much less that he was not meditating on the psalm in Hebrew, the
original language of the cry, but rather in a Greek translation, one step removed from
the original, or even in a Latin version of the Greek translation. As bishop and custo-
dian of a religious cult, his object was to extract and mediate spiritual riches hidden
in the psalm. But his inward, charismatic critical method did not require him to notice
that the social function of cult in the theocratic homogeneity of ancient Israel was
very different from that in the open market of religions in the late Roman Empire, and
even among the loose communion of Christians, conterminous neither with society
nor with any community which had one cult center. He bypassed without noticing the
glaring difference that Christians had no cult center such as the pre-Diaspora Jews
had had in Jerusalem, but that, by contrast, Christians and their churches made up a
shifting constellation of centers in a hostile social environment.
Above all, in his commentary, Augustine did not pause to reflect on the incalcu-
lable difference in spiritual interpretation made by Christian belief in immortality.
The Psalms give no hope for life after death. Several psalmists appeal to God to save
their lives out of his own self-interest, since they cannot praise him from the grave.
Unless he intervenes, they will die and be no more. They will be as the beasts that
perish. Indeed, God himself no longer remembers the dead.13 Elsewhere, Augustine
commented on those verses as evidence of how bereft the Jews were of the Spirit of
God and its gifts, how bound they remained to the letter of the Law, which killed, and
alien to the Spirit, which gave life. The idea that Jews were carnal-minded literalists
did enter his commentary on Psalm 136, but this brief reference gives no measure of
the distance between the psalmist’s acceptance of mortality and hope that people of
flesh and blood would return to a city of brick and stone and mortar, and Augustine’s
belief that what was mortal would be changed into immortality and rejoice forever in
a heavenly, spiritual city.
By comparison with the Living Word in them and in his heart, the words of the
psalm were a side issue for him. In interpreting it, he considered what he read less
important than how he read it. The exile of Psalm 136 calls for the restoration of the
old. The exile in Augustine’s commentary calls for the conversion of the old into the
new, uprooting what had been planted, tearing down what had been built, remaking
all things new. The author of Psalm 136 called for restoration; Augustine, for conver-
sion, which required alienation from all possible earthly communities, including most
13
See Psalm 6: 5; 30: 3, 9; 39: 13; 49: 12; 88: 5, 10–12.
gloriously martyrdom, the seal that earthly communities unknowingly set upon the
martyrs’ triumph through apparent rejection and defeat.14
Augustine and Christians generally revered the psalms. They considered the
psalms special revelations about Christ, written or edited by David, the prophet-king,
Jesus’ forebear and prefiguration. Thus, though the psalms were considered the leg-
acy of an old, superseded covenant with God, they formed an essential bond between
the Old Covenant, ratified by God with Abraham, and the New Covenant mediated by
Jesus. Christians regarded the revelations in the psalms as a vindication of Christians
as joint-heirs of God’s grace with the Jews. From the days of apostolic, or Jewish,
Christianity onward, Christian liturgy extensively employed the psalms as symbolic
proof that Christ fulfilled what David foretold. For some, the psalms were the mind of
Christ speaking through the mouth of David.
As a commentator, Augustine’s task was to adapt Psalm 136 to the alien wisdom
of Christian doctrine, including the promise of immortality. His first step was the
most decisive one: the assumption that the text of Scripture had to be interpreted
symbolically, that the meaning of the psalm subverted its text. The text of Psalm 136
is remarkably clear. But the assumption that it encased a hidden treasure, the Living
Word in the written words, enabled Augustine to introduce obscurity as a virtue, and,
indeed, to multiply obscurities. His imagination accepted the obscurity of multiple
perspectives and proportions. Obscurity was a sign that the psalms were “oracles of
God.”
In other works, notably in the Confessions, Augustine distinguished male from
female roles. Yet, his conception of Christian life required him to hold firmly to the
doctrines that gender was a matter of status, not one of kind. As the apostle Paul
wrote: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no
longer male and female: for all of you are one in Jesus Christ” (Gal. 3: 22). Indeed, he
developed pervasive gender ambiguities in reflecting on the soul’s marriage to Christ
and the manliness of virtue, and, with his delight in paradox, he deployed them as he
explored the impenetrable mysteries of salvation through the feminization of holiness
in men’s souls and the virilization in women’s.15
14
See Augustine’s idealization, as bishop, of Cyprian, as discussed by Jonathan Yates, “Au-
gustine’s Appropriation of Cyprian the Martyr-Bishop against the Pelagians,” in More than
a Memory: The Discourse of Martyrdom and the Construction of Christian Identity in the
History of Christianity, ed. Johan Leemans (Leuven: Peeters, 2005), especially 128–32. See
also the perceptive comments by Matthew Keufler, The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender
Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2001), 123–24.
15
Augustine’s contrasts between himself and his mother, Monica, are a particularly striking
example of the distinction he drew between dominant male and subordinate female status. See
Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2000), 17–19, 111–13; and James J. O’Donnell, Augustine: A New Biography (New York:
HarperCollins, 2005), 55–57. See also Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and
Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, Lectures on the History of Religion, new ser., no.
13 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), especially 389–90 (on the predominance of
Surviving Exile 59
Symbolism invited multiple images and perspectives by collapsing linear se-

quences, including that of time. Augustine regarded the psalm as a whole made up
of mutually reflective parts. Therefore, even though his overall strategy took him
through it verse by verse, it also allowed (or required) him to break out of linear se-
quence, combining verses at will to expand interpretive arguments.
In fact, his recombinant method of interpretation enabled him to weave together
passages from Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, illustrations from his own day, and
apocalyptic expectations of the age to come. Babylon’s sack of Jerusalem was of one
piece with revelations in the New Testament and, even more remotely, with events in
Augustine’s place and time.
This free, antihistorical reconfiguration of the text is not surprising. It corre-
sponds exactly with what Augustine said about how his mind worked when he recited
a psalm. The psalm he was reciting was a whole action that passed, piece by piece,
from forethought into memory. The action of the psalm-in-process-of-reading was it-
self part of some greater action, presumably the entire revelation of divine providence
in Scripture as God unfolded it like some great celestial tent or scroll. Similarly, Au-
gustine said, a person’s life was so scattered through various episodes, or times, that
even that person might not be able to see the order in it. And yet, all actions in that life
did make up a whole, and all lives were parts of the whole history of the human race.16
Augustine’s multiple perspectives enabled him to combine linear perspective,
moving in sequence from beginning to end, with a circular one, encompassing all
texts, actions, and ages in one epiphanic present.
Augustine was not an exile in any literal sense of the word; generally speaking,
he lived in settled circumstances. And yet, he chose to banish himself mentally from
the world around him. Symbolism was the door through which he entered an exile of
heart and mind.
If we look to the intellectual underpinnings of his symbolic argument, we shall
see that he imagined himself into exile in two distinct narratives, both completely un-
known to the author of Psalm 136. In both narratives, the relations disrupted by exile
were impersonal. The first was the narrative of transcendence that Augustine learned
from Neoplatonic philosophy.
Augustine’s whole philosophical stance was shaped by a doctrine of exile and
return, which he learned from Neoplatonism. In a natural, and completely imper-
sonal, process, everything came from and returned to the divine, the One. The whole
cosmos consisted of a great chain of perfection, an interrelated whole. It descended in
ordered degrees from the One, each link away from the One being less perfect than
the link before, participating more remotely and thus less fully in the perfection of the
One, just as rays of light become fainter and more mixed with darkness as they move
from their source. What held the chain together was a two-sided dynamic drive. Each
male companions in the narrative of the Confessions), and 359, 394–95, 405–08 (on sexuality
in general). Keufler provides a very rich discussion of how Augustine developed “the paradox
of Christian masculinity.” See The Manly Eunuch, especially 139–42, 231–36.
16
Confessions, 11.28.38–11.29.39, Corpus Christianorum, series latina, 27 (Turnhout, Bel-
gium: Brepols, 1981), 214–15.
link, being good, yearned to communicate itself, to procreate likenesses of itself.

This led, as copying copies generally will, to progressively less perfect copies down
the chain. Each link, being imperfect, desired the perfection it lacked and saw above
it, and each yearned to be what it saw in the higher orders. Each link below the One
therefore procreated downward and yearned upward. This interrelationship is how
they all made up a hierarchic chain of perfection, moved by a constant dynamic of
exile and return.
In the dynamic, impersonal interrelationship of this hierarchy, Augustine found
the basic philosophical framework on which he suspended his theology—his propo-
sitions that all degrees of being and knowing, of beauty, goodness, and truth, came
by participation in God’s perfectly simple, all-encompassing, and self-communicat-
ing perfection. The life in all that live, the reason of all who know, the beauty of all
beautiful things mirrors and derives from God. Knowing himself as an exile in the
Neoplatonic sense gave him a place to belong in the living and inexhaustibly creative
hierarchy of perfection, created and creating.
Augustine also recognized himself as an exile in a second way, grounded in the
Christian theology of grace. As a theologian, he projected himself into a narrative
quite different from the regular, natural rhythm of egress and return in Neoplatonic
cosmology. Here, too, the relations disrupted by exile were impersonal, but the res-
toration of relations was miraculous and deeply personal. From Scripture, Augustine
extracted a drama of crime, punishment, and redemption, in which the whole human
race had been cast out of Paradise and part of it, after a time in the exile of this world,
allowed to return to its celestial homeland.
Augustine bent Psalm 136 to purposes it was not intended to serve when he pro-
jected what the psalmist considered a historical event, the Babylonian Exile, into the
cosmic dimension, God’s plan for the redemption of the world and God’s direct and
personal acts of grace in predestination and deliverance. His conception of exile as
noble was possible because he understood exile as a state of spiritual, rather than ma-
terial, existence, and the whole dynamic of conflict in the psalm as moral (subjective)
rather than formal (objective).
Like the psalmist’s community of captives, Augustine’s community of the pre-
destined was esoteric and segregated. Augustine saw outward enemies on every
hand, Jews among them. As Augustine considered the place of Christians in the
hostile environment of the late Roman Empire, he identified many other open and
concealed subverters of the soul—pagans, scoffers and skeptics, persecutors raging
to kill Christians, kindly indulgent seducers who won believers over to worldly plea-
sures by winsomeness, praise, gentle rebuke, and friendship, and, to be sure, believers
who had already assented to their own ruin, “alien children,” who had defected to
Babylon.
Such people could not understand Christian doctrine. They laughed at Chris-
tians obedient to the gospel, who voluntarily made themselves paupers. Surveying the
rampant licentiousness of sexual and pornographic delights in Roman society, they
could see no good that Jesus had done in the world. They regarded as highly suspect
ascetic calls to empty themselves of worldly desires—desires for such natural goods
as wealth, power, family order and harmony, and loyal friends—and they kept such
Surviving Exile 61
calls at a distance by ridicule and indifference. Such people were sterile, Augustine
wrote, as the willows of Babylon, beyond the limits of Jerusalemite fertility.
However, for Augustine, exile was not primarily a matter of such objective
social relations as these, but of the soul’s own affections. His point of view would
have astonished the psalmist. Correspondingly, the introversion of consciousness in
Augustine’s commentary had to do with subjective danger, danger to the soul. The
Christians’ struggle, he wrote, was not against flesh and blood, but against the powers
of this world’s darkness. The captors in Psalm 136, he wrote, were the Devil and his
angels. The redeemer was Christ.17 Choice between captors and redeemer belonged
to the individual. The Devil and his minions entered hearts because believers made
room for them, departing from love of God and subjecting themselves to lusts of the
flesh.18
The confrontation of Christians with Jews in the context of salvation history was
a visible macrocosm of this ensuing subjective antagonism of the soul against itself.
The psalmist cursed Edomites, the false brethren of the Jews, for the blazing passion
with which they rushed with Babylon to destroy Jerusalem. The Jews themselves
satisfied Augustine’s need for a symbolic equivalent to the Edomites; for, he said, by
rejecting Christ, Jews continued to live according to the flesh, at enmity with those
who lived by the Spirit. They were elder brothers in the Covenant, envying and perse-
cuting the younger brothers, Christians, as Esau (the forefather of the Edomites) had
persecuted Jacob (Israel). But his main point was not that Christians should be wary
of Jews. His main point was that each and every predestined soul should be wary of
itself; for all of them were divided this way. The predestined, too, are first carnal and
later spiritual.19
Because this division was a condition of life for the predestined, the individual
soul was its own worst enemy. According to Augustine, the predestined are amphib-
ians. They live Jekyll and Hyde existences, part Jerusalemite and part Babylonian,
polar twins like Jacob and Esau. Only the individual soul could open or close its heart
to the Babylonian captors, the Devil and his angels. We have not left Babylon, Au-
gustine wrote; we are only on the way out.20 Augustine put the same idea a different
way in the Confessions. He remembered how in his early life he was roiling with his
friends through the streets of Babylon, wallowing in its dung, and Monica had left the
center of Babylon, but still tarried in its outskirts. Then, when the mind gave an order
to the body, the body instantly obeyed; but, when the mind gave an order to itself,
17
Enarratio in Psalmum CXXXVI, chap. 15, Corpus Christianorum, series latina, 40: 1973–
74.
18
Enarratio in Psalmum CXXXVI, chap. 9, Corpus Christianorum, series latina, 40: 1969.
19
Enarratio in Psalmum CXXXVI, chaps. 18–21, Corpus Christianorum, series latina, 40:
1975–77.
20
Enarratio in Psalmum CXXXVI, chaps. 8, 15–16, Corpus Christianorum, series latina, 40:
1969, 1973–74.
it could resist, or refuse, to obey. The mind was torn between conflicting desires, he
wrote, divided against itself.21
Ruthlessly, in the monologue performance of his meditations on Psalm 136, Au-
gustine’s call for vengeance wove through the drama of the heart divided against
itself. We ourselves, he wrote—or at least our bad desires—are the infants of Babylon
to be dashed against the rock. Even if we are born predestined to be citizens of Jeru-
salem, Babylon holds us captive for a while. We learn what our parents teach us—av-
arice, robberies, daily lies, worship of idols and demons, witchcraft. With their tender
souls, what are infants to do except follow in their parents’ footsteps? Conversion is a
turning away from Babylonian captivity, a killing of the soul formed in infancy and
rebirth in newness of life.22 Those who forget Jerusalem are cursed; escape from that
curse comes when the saving Avenger dashes Babylonian children against the rock.
With these savage words, Augustine gives an insight into how he regarded his
own conversion and why he filled book 9 in the Confessions, the book portraying the
months after his conversion, with the deaths of those nearest to him in his old life and,
in fact, made it a monument to the death of the person he had been. But, as he makes
clear in the Confessions and in the commentary on Psalm 136, he expected that only
death would release him from the anguish of his Jekyll-Hyde ambivalences. He had
no idea of integrated personality in this life.
As he characterized the individual soul, Augustine’s imagination moved in the
space of a few lines from deadly rivalry between brothers to violent rejection of pa-
rental ways by children and finally to a form of infanticide equivalent with suicide.
Restoring essential relations in the narratives of transcendence and salvation required
a purging and redirection of basic human affections.
There is a level at which the deeply personal is subsumed into the communal, at
which individuals are seen as members of one body, articulated for the well being of
the whole. At this level, there can seem to be a radical impersonality—if possible, a
passionate impersonality—in Augustine’s religious affections.
According to Augustine, the psalmist sang about crime, punishment, and re-
habilitation, the human race’s falling away from God through sin and its return to
God through redemption by grace. “Exile” was the movement of the predestined, the
people of God, the Body of Christ, through the unredeemed and lost world toward the
moment when their redemption would be consummated, beyond this world, in eternal
life. By sin, the entire human race had been cast out of paradise. In his commentary
on Psalm 136, Augustine applied the term “noble exile” only to the part of the human
race predestined by God for salvation, redeemed by Christ’s blood, and passing now
as aliens through the Babylon of this perishing world to the Jerusalem of everlasting
peace and glory. Augustine called this exile “noble” for the same reason he called the
crime of sin “happy” ( felix culpa). Both, he believed, were esoteric epiphanies and
communications of God’s own being.
21
Confessions, 8.9.21–10.24, Corpus Christianorum, series latina, 27: 126–29.
22
Enarratio in Psalmum CXXXVI, chaps. 21–22, Corpus Christianorum, series latina, 40:
1977–78.
Surviving Exile 63
Augustine insisted that Psalm 136 was a song of the whole church, that, as the
body of Christ, Jerusalem in captivity was one compound soul made up of many
individuals. The safety of each lay in the solidarity of this fellowship and society,
where none could be reached by any tempter or any delight except the good.23 Ethnic
identity made it possible for the voice in the psalm, as written, to belong to any Jew.
Augustine’s interpretation placed conditions on who could claim the voice. We can
be the man who sings this psalm, he wrote, but, to claim the psalmist’s voice, we
must suffer as he suffered, badgered and cajoled to sing the Lord’s song by mockers,
people full of falsehood, extorters of truth—captors who had no idea of what they
were asking the exile, and no capacity for understanding what he said. To claim the
psalmist’s voice, readers must bind themselves with the curse he put upon himself if
he forgot the heavenly Jerusalem, if he became complicit with his captors in his own
spiritual subversion.24
And yet, what advanced this collective security by stages toward its final con-
summation was exactly an inherent individual instability, a division in the soul be-
tween love of happiness in this world, which led to the pains of hell, and love of life
that is truly life in the age to come. The movement of the “noble exile” out of Babylon
and toward Jerusalem was propelled by the Jekyll-Hyde conflict of worldly and heav-
enly desires in countless individual souls, conversions without number, by which the
body of Christ was built up through time, joined and knit together, and advanced
toward its predestined form.
Augustine: Self-Knowing, Impersonal Exile, and Community Arts
The commentary also provides clues as to how Augustine translated exile into art,
and how he thought arts could be used with other survival skills to preserve essential
relationships in his Munchausen-syndrome exile. So far as we can tell, the psalmist
put art in the exiles’ survival kit because it preserved forms of expression from the
vanished homeland—forms of poetry, possibly also visual designs transportable in
handicrafts, “folk art.” According to Augustine, the arts served survival, not because
of their forms, but because of how the mind received them: that is, because of how
the mind works.
The psalmist presented a single image from a single perspective. He sang about
actual exiles from Jerusalem in Babylon. By imposing a symbolic interpretation, Au-
gustine rendered both image and perspective multiple. According to his interpreta-
tion, what the psalm said about exile referred both to the Jews held captive in Baby-
lon and to individual Christians and the entire body of Christ in transit through this
hostile world. What the psalmist called “the songs of Zion” were the language of the
redeemed, a close-knit brotherhood and “civil society.” The song of this world’s love
was an alien, barbarous tongue. Whoever forgot Jerusalem and was restricted to that
23
Enarratio in Psalmum CXXXVI, chaps. 15, 17, Corpus Christianorum, series latina, 40:
1973, 1975.
24
alien language was mute before God, an enemy of Jerusalem.25 Some such distinction
between “barbarous” and “civic” lay behind Augustine’s preference for unadorned,
rhythmic intonation of the psalms, rather than the beautiful melodic settings to which
they were commonly sung, melodies which, as he knew from his own delight in them,
enticed the ears away from sacred words to sensual pleasures.26
At this point, Augustine turned the imagination against itself. Lacking any hope
of personal integration in this life, Augustine could only consider art a monument
and tool of inward division. Like the author of Psalm 136, Augustine conceived of re-
ligious art as a social artifact, belonging to worship. Its cult uses removed it from the
unbeliever. The psalmist could not sing the Lord’s song to amuse his alien tormentors.
Augustine would not expose the mysteries of redemption to those who asked about
them intending only to deform what he said into sinister meanings, to castigate or
mock believers, or to lure them into spiritual ruin. As a social artifact, religious art
existed not to display the ingenuity of the artist, but to enable worship. And yet, its
sensuous delights could defeat their proper object by making art a bridge by which the
soul passed over to ruin from the civic society of Jerusalem into Babylon, instead of
fleeing to safety the other way, from Babylon to the eternal city. The individual soul
was divided between love of Jerusalem and a subversive love of worldly delights. As
a collective work, religious art too was divided between its incentives to devotion and
its subversive pleasures. Augustine found a mysterious kinship between sensuality
and piety, seductive and dangerous to those who loved the world, traps for the un-
wary, and for those rescued by God incentives to sigh after God himself, the beauty
of all beautiful things.27 This tug-of-war between sensual and pious desires, the polar
twins of Jekyll and Hyde (or Jacob and Esau) which provoked Augustine’s fascinated
dread of beautiful chant, was exactly what made Augustine a puzzle to himself, sick
and in need of healing.
Augustine’s commentary on Psalm 136 gives some idea of how, in his conscious
imagination, he came to know himself as an exile. Throughout, Augustine charac-
terized the psalm, and his commentary on it, not as personal works of isolated indi-
viduals, but as artifacts of community. He addressed his audience, his “brothers,” as
co-readers of the psalm with him. He urged them to enact the psalm together along
the lines of moral reform his interpretation followed, to move beyond captivity to
happiness and at the end to triumph with their King.28
In this life, even souls predestined for redemption were still susceptible to the ru-
inous allurements of the world. The soul’s creative imagination was torn between the
enticements of Babylon and the treasures of heaven. Thus, it was self-subversive, con-
stantly on guard against itself. But the delights of religious art—the beauties of music
or painting—could kindle piety as well as undercut it. Knowing this ambivalence
25
Enarratio in Psalmum CXXXVI, chap. 17, Corpus Christianorum, series latina, 40: 1974–
75.
26
Confessions, 10.33.50, Corpus Christianorum, series latina, 27: 181–82.
27
Confessions, 10.33.49–34.53, Corpus Christianorum, series latina, 27: 181–84.
28
Surviving Exile 65
as a condition of exile, the soul imposed upon itself and its imaginative creations a
terrible curse, an annihilating revenge, if it forgot Jerusalem. Among the predestined,
an impersonal, ruthless self-subversion was the method of human creativity and the
essence of regeneration.
Summary: Inverse Models of Self-Knowing
The author of Psalm 136 and Augustine had the same question in mind: “Who am I?”
Psalm 136 and Augustine’s commentary were unintentional answers to the Delphic
command: “Know thyself.” Both conspicuously avoided the open, all-embracing an-
swer in Terence’s sentence: “I am a human being, and I think nothing human alien
to me” (Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto). Who they were depended on
who God was and on the relation between human society and God through cult. Cult
was exclusive. For both, therefore, the greater part of the world was alien, and the
line between those bound to them by religious devotion and the immense hostility
encircling them was decisive.
They saw plainly that exile was a study in uprooted relationships. For them both,
the primary relationship was to their homeland, the patria. Augustine aimed at con-
version, the remaking of all things new, instead of at recovery of the old. Unlike the
author of the psalm, Augustine did not think of the patria as a place. Still, both of
them realized that belonging to the homeland was their primary relationship, and that
other relationships depended on it. Love for it surpassed all other loves, and love for
the homeland, surviving in exile for the sake of the homeland, was the scale by which
any other relationship was permitted or forbidden. The psalmist’s verse against the
Edomites, those brothers who proved to be false in their violation of Jerusalem, and
Augustine’s censures against a variety of insiders who betrayed Jerusalem and caused
others to be unfaithful point toward the fact that they knew themselves as members of
a society defined by a common devotion.
The revenge motif emphasizes the central importance of social solidarity. As-
similationists in the exile community—presumably including some who married
outside the community—had crossed the border into the alien world, and fell under
the exiles’ license to hate outsiders. The greatest fear of each writer is that he too
will grow weak in his primary commitment. The author of the psalm cursed himself
with afflictions worse than death if that should happen. Augustine’s savage portrayal
of conversion as the soul’s vengeance against its own illicit delights and desires is
laden with suspicion, self-judgment, and hatred. There were no isolated individuals.
Identity for both exiles was social identity. Individual survival and group survival
were two sides of the same coin. The general category, which Terence called “human
being,” was exactly what the author of the psalm and Augustine most wished to be
alien to themselves if it weakened their corporate survival.
It was a noble and glorious act to cultivate a maladaptive social spirituality, in-
deed, to flee from the world and embrace the world’s worst sentences against its out-
casts: exile and death. For death in such a cause brought the crown of martyrdom,
and self-inflicted death in inner struggles of the self against itself was essential to the
process of spiritual regeneration.
Coda
A distinguished artist participating in the conference at which I first presented these

ideas gave an extraordinary witness to the contrast between the isolation of the indi-
vidual in Western European culture and social solidarity. Born and raised in Japan,
she transplanted herself to the United States. Art and the affirmation of her individu-
ality came together in the experience of assimilation. She wrote,
I was a child in Japan during World War II, and my early memories are of …
the grandiosity of rampant tribalism and totalitarianism. After the War, even
though Japan proclaimed itself a democracy, I remained keenly aware of its
innate, deep-seated hostility towards individuality. To this day … individu-
ality in Japan is still considered dangerous and a blasphemy of one’s tribe.…
All the works I have created here [in the United States] over the last thirty
years are documents of victorious battles in my struggle to become myself.29
In Augustine’s elaborate commentary on the psalmist’s lament over exile, we

find some anticipations, at least, of the human alienation from humanity, from self,
and from other human beings which Ladner found, full-blown, in the late Middle
Ages, and experienced himself remotely applied in the twentieth century.30
Augustine’s general ideas about art as preserving essential relations in the Baby-
lonian Exile of this world did not last forever. They rested on an ensemble of assump-
tions about religion and art which eventually split apart. Ultimately, they centered
around what was a great void for human understanding, the void of divine being from
which all things came, the emptiness of mystery in which Augustine found the pro-
totype of the image of God with which humanity was stamped at the Creation.31 We
know what happened to these assumptions.
1. Because of his Neoplatonist philosophy, Augustine assumed the inter-

connectedness of everything that was. The entire cosmos was a gradual
self-communication of God. Scientific advances, especially in astronomy
and physics, and finally in Darwinian biology—removed this metaphysi-
cal foundation. Even before Darwin, Laplace was able to refer to God as
a hypothesis for which he had no need.
29
Junko Chodos, Junko Chodos: Centripetal Artist (N.p.: Junko Chodos, 1998), 4. See also
Rafael Chodos, Why On Earth Does God Have To Paint? Centripetal Art (Malibu, CA: Giot-
tomultimedia, 2009), 88.
30
Ladner, “Homo viator: Medieval Ideas on Alienation and Order,” 256.
31
See Paul van Geest, The Incomprehensibility of God: Augustine as a Negative Theologian
(Leuven: Peeters, 2011), especially 21–41, 62–65.
Surviving Exile 67
2. Augustine’s theology and his symbolic method of interpretation de-

pended on his assumption that Scripture revealed God’s truth, albeit in
a hidden, encoded way. Advances in philology, especially in historical
criticism of the Bible, allowed Scripture no presumptions of truth beyond
those of any other text. Were the gospels, four anonymous tracts which
do not hang together, frauds perpetrated by unscrupulous, sectarian dis-
sidents? Were their stories about Jesus tissues of popular superstition?
There was no need to multiply obscurities to save the phenomenon of rev-
elation. By removing the presumption of unitary truth in Scripture, phi-
lologists disallowed symbolic analysis of Scripture as any way to truth,
and hardly more than a vain and arbitrary diversion.
3. Augustine’s Neoplatonism and theology made him an idealist, a believer
in eternal absolutes. Augustine assumed that salvation came by tran-
scending finitude, and indeed the human condition itself, and partici-
pating in the infinity of God, the absolute of absolutes. The growth of
historical criticism dispensed with universal absolutes and raised up the
isolated particularity of the individual. Individual events and lives were
equally unique, unrepeatable, and incommunicable. Historical criticism
abandoned idealism in favor of nominalism, and thereby set aside any
hope of transcendence such as Augustine thought he experienced.
4. Augustine’s assumptions about art also fell out of currency. He assumed
that religious art (including scriptural interpretation) expressed a social
consciousness. And yet, from the Renaissance onward, what is called
“the history of art in fact deals with the history of artists.”32 Nominalism
has moved the impulse of expression from a collective consciousness
to the psychology, unconscious or subconscious, of the individual artist.
The singularity of the autonomous self stands against the mere utility of
social relations. The artist defines what art is.
5. Finally, Augustine also assumed that religious art moved the deeply par-
adoxical ambiguity of human desires, either enticing the soul by sen-
sual delights to plunge into the swirling, devouring waters of Babylon,
or drawing it by spiritual harmonies more fully into fellowship with the
heavenly City. His concern was with the paradoxes of introspection, with
how the soul observes and weighs the feelings in its own heart. With
classicism, the focus changed from the observer to the observed, from
paradoxes of introspection to ironies of illusionist representation. With
classicism, the focus fell on style, on the work of art as a material object.
The purpose of stylistic analysis was to establish models and degrees
of technical proficiency, rather than to go beyond material things to the
Wisdom by which all things that we can know are made.33
32
Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans.
Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), xxi.
33
Cf. Confessions, 9.10.24, Corpus Christianorum, series latina, 27: 147–48.
A little while ago, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I visited Eisen-
stadt, near Vienna. A great palace of the Esterhazy family is in Eisenstadt, and I went
there to hear some music by one of the servants of the Esterhazy princes, Franz Josef
Hayden. I heard wonderful music in the Esterhazy palace, including The Creation.
Until the Revolution of 1848 relieved them of the duty, the Esterhazy princes
were protectors of the Jews in their lands. The ghetto in Eisenstadt was about one
hundred yards up the hill from the Esterhazy palace. It stood there, relatively hidden,
an example of exile—in the form of the Diaspora—as a way of life crossing many
generations and enveloping whole communities. Even under Esterhazy protection,
the Jews of Eisenstadt were in exile, century after century. The liberal reforms of the
nineteenth century gave them the same civil rights as any other subjects of the Aus-
tro-Hungarian Empire. Some died defending the empire in World War I. But, in 1938,
the Jews of Eisenstadt found that they were exiles in their own country again. They
were all deported by October 1938.
Their synagogue survived, undamaged. The Burgomeister of Eisenstadt was able
to give it protection that he could not give its congregation. It is still there, in the Aus-
trian Jewish Museum, a witness to one point at which exile intersects with creativity.
Of course, it stands in sharp contrast with the opulent creativities that found a home
in the palace, beyond the iron chain that marked the border of the ghetto.
Exile, or at least the legacy of exile, was in the art of the palace too, in fact in
Hayden’s Creation. The Creation ends on a happy note, before sin and expulsion.
And yet, everyone knew the story. The Archangel Uriel strikes a tone ominous for
what is to follow when he celebrates Adam and Eve with conditions: “O happy pair,
happy evermore, / if mad illusions do not seduce you / into wanting more than you
have / and knowing more than you should.” Even as Hayden was conducting the first
performance of The Creation, the Christian connection between art and exile was
beginning to take on new, and greatly altered, forms of life in the minds of two men.
The first was Goethe, who made exile the price of creativity in his recasting of the
Faust legend. The second was Hegel, whose new mythology of human inventiveness
transformed exile as a condition of creativity into something recognizably similar:
the work of art as self-alienation of the artist. But, for Hegel, art itself had slipped
away by becoming a thing of the past.34
34
G. W. F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. Bernard Bosanquet (Harmond-
sworth, UK: Penguin, 1993), 13.
Eastern Orthodoxy
The Evergetian Motif in Russian Monastic Reform
David Goldfrank
For most of us, Basil of Caesarea and Theodore the Studite are the church fathers who
come to mind, when we think of Greek coenobitic rules and reform. And rightly so, as
they are doubly celebrated due to their theological writings and public roles in defense
of Orthodoxy, the one during the first century of christological controversy, the other
during the epoch of Iconoclasm. Who ever heard of Timothy of Evergetis? Very few
nonspecialists in the Byzantine Church—that is, until recent scholarship, capped by a
special conference in Queens College, Belfast, and by the Dumbarton Oaks typikon
translation project, placed him at the center of monastic reform in the eleventh cen-
tury and revealed his lasting influence. The paragraphs which follow examine first
Byzantine and Balkan Evergetism and then the Russian side to this story.
The context of the specific Evergetian movement is difficult to ascertain, but
seems to have lain in part in the maturing of Studite-inspired monastic reform, which
was still very much alive in the eleventh century.1 The legacy of Theodore the Studite
(d. 829) within coenobiticism included his emphasis upon the liturgy (he introduced to
Byzantium the liturgical typikon ascribed to Sabas of Jerusalem), the sacralization of
the communal meal, and organized, supervised, productive labor.2 This legacy heav-
ily influenced the monastic legislation attributed to Athanasius of Mt. Athos (pro-
duced between 963 and 1020)3 and inspired Symeon the New Theologian (949–1032),
1
See Dirk Krasmüller, “The Monastic Communities of Stoudios and St. Mamas in the Sec-
ond Half of the Tenth Century,” in The Theotokos Evergetis and Eleventh-Century Byzantine
Monasticism, ed. Margaret Mullett and Anthony Kirby, Byzantine Texts and Translations 6.1
(Belfast: Queens University of Belfast, 1994), 67–68.
2
Timothy Miller, trans. and ed., Theodore Studites: Testament of Theodore the Studite for
the Monastery of St. John Stoudios in Constantinople, and Stoudios: Rule of the Monastery of
St. John Stoudios in Constantinople, in Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents: A Com-
plete Translation of the Surviving Founders’ Typika and Testaments [hereafter BMFD], ed.
John Thomas and Angela Constantinides Hero, with the assistance of Giles Constable, 5 vols.
(Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2000), at http://www.doaks.org/resources/publications/
doaks-online-publications/byzantine-monastic-foundation-documents, 1.2–3: 67–83 and 84–119
respectively. See also Krasmüller, “Monastic Communities,” 71–72.
3
George Dennis, trans. and ed., Ath. Rule: Rule of Athanasios the Athonite for the Lavra Mon-
astery (963/1020), Ath. Typikon, Typikon of Athanasios the Athonite for the Lavra Monastery
72 David Goldfrank
who started as a Studite monk and in his own writings combined strict coenobiticism
and mystical contemplation.4 In 1034 Patriarch Alexios Studites (1025–43) founded a
Dormition monastery in Constantinople, which he structured with a modified version
of at least the liturgical parts of Studite Rule.5 It is this “Studite Rule” which Feodosii
Pecherskii apparently introduced in Kiev in the 1060s. It partially survives only in
Slavonic translation in a Novgorodian manuscript from 1136.6
As for the Evergetian reform, we are not certain precisely where outside the walls
of Constantinople the Theotokos Evergetis (Benefactress) Cloister was located, but
we do know its key works.7 The wealthy founder Paul Evergetinos (d. 1054), who
started the monastery in 1048 or 1049 as a small collective of cells, compiled a “mas-
sive ascetic florilegium, the Evergetinon, which enjoyed a wide circulation in the
Byzantine world, surviving in no less than forty manuscripts today.”8 He also “as-
sembled a collection of monastic catacheses, that is, discursive sermons, utilizing
the works of Maximos the Confessor, Pseudo-Makarios, Evagrios Pontikos, Mark the
Hermit, and the Great Catecheses of Theodore Studite.”9 With these two compendia,
which might have been the result of collective authorship, Paul put his disciples and
colleagues at large on notice that the ascetic, coenobitic, and mystical traditions of
monasticism were compatible and should be combined and followed.10 It was left
to Paul’s successor Timothy (d. after 1067) to refound the monastery as a bona fide
cloister and to codify Evergetine practices.11 Emphasizing liturgical aspects of mo-
(973–75), and Ath. Testament: Testament of Athanasios the Athonite for the Lavra Monastery
(after 993), in Thomas and Hero, BMFD, 1.11: 205–31, 13: 245–70, and 14: 271–80 respectively.
4
Symeon the New Theologian (Neotheologus, Novus Theologus, Junior), The Discourses,
preface by Basil Krivochéine, introduction by George Maloney, trans. C. J. di Catanzaro (New
York: Paulist, 1980). See also Krasmüller, “Monastic Communities,” 68, 73–74.
5
Miller, Stoudios: Rule, 88.
6
Paul Hollingsworth, trans. and ed., The Hagiography of Kievan Rus´ (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press for the Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University, 1992), 2:
53–54, 139; and David M. Petras, The Typikon of Patriarch Alexis the Studite: Novgorod-St.
Sophia 1136 (Cleveland, OH: Star Printing, 1991).
7
Lyn Rodley, “The Monastery of the Theotokos Evergetis, Constantinople: Where It Was and
What It Looked Like,” in Mullett and Kirby, The Theotokos Evergetis, 17–29.
8
Robert Jordan, trans. and ed., Evergetis: Typikon for the Monastery of the Mother of God
Evergetis, in Thomas and Hero, Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents, 454–506, here
454. The Evergetinon has been published seven times in Greek between 1783 and 1983.
9
Ibid. An English translation of both of these works is expected in the near future from the
Belfast (Queens College) Evergetis project.
10
Jordan also notes that Paul’s florilegium was followed and may have been inspired by those
of the monastic reformers Nikon of the Black Mountain and John of Antioch. It should be
added here that Nikon’s were very influential in Russia.
11
Jordan, Evergetis, 455.
The Evergetian Motif in Russian Monastic Reform 73
nasticism more than labor in his coenobitic typikon, Timothy introduced some novel
provisions: equality of food and clothing, co-governance of at least a few elite broth-
ers with the superior, prohibition of personal servants, and regular confession to the
superior.12 Later provisions in this rule also called for periodic reading of the rule to
the brotherhood13 and restricted entrance donations, and at the same time stipulated
institutional charity14 and commemorations.15
In keeping with the its typikon, Evergetis was neither a center of organized
crafts, as Stoudios once was, nor a locus of contemplation, as Symeon the New Theo-
logian might desire, but rather a liturgically oriented community, whose monks were
as likely to be administering property as creating wealth through labor other than the
performance of rites. In the absence of evidence or arguments to the contrary, I would
hypothesize that Timothy’s novel stipulations were designed to boost individual and
community morale at the same time, while also assuring that the individual monks
kept to their vows and the cloister’s standards. Lacking memoir literature of partic-
ipants or sophisticated observers, we are at risk when we try to weigh the various
aspects of the Evergetian monk’s life, but I would also venture that in most aspects of
his existence, he could operate – inside the bounds of his vows, regulations, and drive
for salvation—with more confidence and (in normal, secular terms) self-respect than
monks subject to blatant material inequalities and powerlessness relative to tyranni-
cal leadership.16
A simple comparison of texts shows that the Evergetian reform impulse, which we
have no reason to assume originated in just this one monastery, caught on quickly.17
12
Cf. ibid., 459–61. The Diatyposis attributed to Athanasios of Mt. Athos noted the “ancient
tradition and precept of the holy fathers that the brothers ought to lay before the superior their
thoughts and hidden deeds.” See Dennis, Ath. Rule, 33: 228.
13
Article 43: this provision seems to have originated with the Diatyposis attributed to Atha-
nasios of Mt. Athos, which also ended with “regular reading of the rule.” See Dennis, Ath.
Rule 37: 228.
14
Article 37–38. Limits to entry gifts were not new, and other contemporary monasteries also
legislated charity. See Jordan, Evergetis, 505.
15
Article 35–36. Ludwig Steindorff credited the Evergetis rule for its key role in the rise of
Byzantine monastic commemorations. See Steindorff, Memoria in Altrussland: Untersuchun-
gen zu den formen christlicher Totensorge, Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der östlichen
Europa 38 (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1994), 122–23.
16
A. P. Kazhdan emphasized the control aspects of the Evergetian reform, while John Thomas
has indicated both the urge for common property and equality and the hindrances at the time.
See Alexander P. Kazhdan, “Vizantiiskii monastyr´ XI–XII vv. kak sotsialńaia gruppa,” Vi-
zantiiskii vremennik 31 (1971): 54–48; and John Philip Thomas, “The Documentary Evidence
from the Byzantine Monastic Typika from the History of the Evergetine Monastic Reform,” in
Mullett and Kirby, The Theotokos Evergetis, 247–54.
17
Thomas, “Documentary Evidence,” 247–54.
74 David Goldfrank
Composed in stages from 1059–67 to 1098–1118,18 the Evergetis typikon, in precise

wording as well as spirit, influenced those of Theotokos Kecharitomene (1110–16)—a
convent founded by Empress Irena Komnena;19 St. John Phoberos (1113–44)—an
independent cloister near Constantinople founded by a certain John;20 Theotokos Ko-
somosteira (1152)—a Thracian foundation of Irena’s son, the sebastokrator Isaac;21
St. Mamas (1158)—an ancient Constantinopolitan cloister with a new typikon by the
imperial monastic steward Athanasios Philanthropenos;22 Theotokos ton Heliou Bo-
mon (Altar of the Sun) or ton Elegon (1162)—an old monastery near Bursa, revived
under the imperial courtier Nikiphoros Mystikos;23 and Theotokos in Machairas in
Cyprus (1210)—an old abbey revived by Neilos, who later was its protector-bishop of
Tamasia,24 as well as Christ Philanthropos (ca. 1307)—a convent founded by the de-
spoina Irina Choumnaia Palaiologa in Constantinople,25 and John Prodromos of Mt.
Menoikeion in northeastern Greece (1332)—written by Bishop Joachim of Zichna,
the patron-owner of this family foundation.26 Internal evidence indicates that other
such typika, now lost, also existed.27 Evergetian principles, moreover, did not require
18
Jordan, Evergetis, 465–67.
19
Robert Jordan, trans. and ed., Kecharitomene: Typikon of Empress Irina Doukaina Kom-
nene (Comnena) for the Convent of the Mother of God Kecharitomene in Constantinople, in
Thomas and Hero, BMFD, 2.27: 649–719.
20
Robert Jordan, trans. and ed., Phoberos: Rule of John for the Monastery of John the Fore-
runner in Phoberos, in Thomas and Hero, BMFD, 2:30: 872–949.
21
Nancy Patterson-Ševčenko, trans. and ed., Kosomoteira: Typikom of the sebastokrator
Isaac Komnenos for the Monastery of the Mother of God Kosmosoteira near Bera, in Thomas
and Hero, BMFD, 2.29: 782–858.
22
Anastasius Bandy, trans. and ed., Mamas: Typikon of Athanasios Philanthropenos for the
Monastery of St. Mamas in Constantinople, in Thomas and Hero, BMFD, 3.32: 973–1042.
23
Anastasius Bandy, trans. and ed., Helious Bomon: Typikon of Nikephoros Mystikos for the
Monastery of the Mother of God ton Heliou Bomon or Elegmon, in Thomas and Hero, BMFD,
3.33: 1042–91.
24
Anastasius Bandy, trans. and ed., Machairas: Rule of Neilos, bishop of Tamasia for the
Monastery of the Mother of God in Machairas in Cyprus, in Thomas and Hero, BMFD, 3.34:
1107–22.
25
Alice-Mary Talbot, trans. and ed., Philanthropos: Typikon of Irina Choumnaina Palaiolo-
gina for the Convent of Christ Philanthropos in Constantinople, in Thomas and Hero, BMFD,
4.47: 1383–88.
26
Timothy Miller, trans. and ed., Menoikeion: Typikon of Joachim, metropolitan of Zichna
for the Monastery of St. John the Forerunner on Mount Menoikeion, in Thomas and Hero,
BMFD, 4.58: 1579–1612. Thomas also showed how Evergetine reform principles evolved and
were somewhat compromised by social differentiation, patronage, and landholding (“Docu-
mentary Evidence,” 257–73).
27
See the charts in BMFD, 990, 1121, 1717–23.
an Evergetian text to prevail. For example, the typikon of Michael VIII’s widow The-
odora Palaiologina for the Convent of Lips in Constantinople around 1294–1301 lim-
ited the superior’s personal discretion, enjoined “equality of privileges” for the nuns
regardless of entrance gifts, and stipulated regular public reading of the rule.28 The
project of a general coenobitic rule by Patriarch Athanasios I (r. 1289–93, 1303–09)
included equality of food and the regular reading of the rule.29
Evergetian influence was not restricted to Greece, but operated in the Balkans,
notably among the Serbs. St. Sava Nemanja (1175–1225), the Serbian prince-renova-
tor of Hilandar Monastery on Mt. Athos and founding archbishop of his native land’s
autocephalous church, had especially close ties to Theotokos Evergetis in Constanti-
nople.30 To regulate Hilandar, he gave a rule, which is closer to the original than any
other surviving typikon of the Evergetian tradition.31
Comparison between the two is instructive:32
Everg 1: Introduction to Rule

Savva 1: Biography of Savva up to Hilandar
Everg 2: Brief Biography of Founder Paul
Savva 2: How Simeon with Savva’s Help Renovated Hilandar
Everg 3: Timothy’s Succession
Savva 3: Savva’s Succession
Everg / Savva 4–13: Same or Close
4–8: Offices, Communion, Confession, Fast Services, Vigils
9–11: Refectory, Fast Diets, Feasts
12: Free and Self-governing Status
13: Selection of Superior and Oikonomos (Steward)
Everg 14–16/Savva 14, 16: Removal of Bad Steward, Confession, Obedience
to Superior
Savva 15: Selection of Ecclesiarch
Everg 17–25/Savva 17–27: Same or Close
28
Alice-Mary Talbot, trans. and ed., Lips: Typikon of Theodora Palaiologina for the Convent
of Lips in Constantinople (1294–1301), in Thomas and Hero, BMFD, 3.39: 1267–70.
29
Timothy Miller, trans. and ed., Athanasios I: Rule of Patriarch Athanasios I (1303–05), arts.
4, 6, in Thomas and Hero, Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents, 1501–02.
30
Jordan, Evergetis, 457.
31
Sava, archbishop of Serbia, “Tipik hilandarski,” Spomenik, ed. Bishop Dimitrij (Srpska
Kra∫evska Akademija) 31, 29 (1898): 37–69; and L. Mirkovich, trans. (to modern Serbo-Croa-
tian) and ed., Hilandarski tipik Svetoga Save (Belgrade: Drž. Štamp. Kralj Jugoslavije, 1935).
Jules Pargoire, “Constantinople: Le monastère de l’Evergetis,” Echos d’Orient 10 (1907): 262–
63, viewed the Hilandar typikon as a modified translation of Evergetis.
32
Timothy Miller provides a breakdown, article by article, of the influence of the Everge-
tian Rule on its eight “children and grandchildren” noted above, corresponding here to notes
19–26, and also its possible antecedents. See Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents,
501–06.
76 David Goldfrank
17–18/17–20: on the Superior

19/21: Inalienability of Sacred Objects
20/22: Bookkeeping Requirements
21/23: Discipline of Idle Talkers
22/24: No Secret Eating, Possessions, Communications with the Outside;
Expulsion for Theft
23/25: No Fixed Number of Monks
24/26: No Personal Servants
25/27: Communal Wardrobe
Everg 26: Equality of Food and Drink
Everg 27: Superior Visits Cells Every Month
Everg 28: On Baths
Everg 29: On Installation of Officials
Savva 28: On Disciplining the Lax in Church; Ecclesiarch’s Authority; Readings in
the Refectory
Savva 29: No Individual Cooking in Cells
Everg, Savva 30–38: Same or Close
30: The Treasurers
31: Refectarian, Disciplinarian
32: Tenure of Office of Officials
33: Exhortation to All Officials
34: Qualifications of Property Administrators
35–36: Commemorations—Founder, Brothers, Benefactors
37: Tonsuring, Novitiate, Entrance Gifts
38: Daily Charity, the Hospice
Everg, end 38–39: Exclusion of Women; Creation of Other Usual Offices
Everg 40–42, Savva 39–41: Same or Close
40/39: Exhortation to Preserve the Typikon (Rule)
41/40: Care of Sick Monks
42/41: Additional Exhortation
Savva 42: Savva’s Special kellion at Karyes
Everg, Savva 43: Regular Public Reading of the Rule
Some of the differences between the two typika are trivial. The offices of the
two establishments were slightly different, and they had somewhat different provi-
sions for supervision and discipline. The exclusion of women from all of Mt. Athos
rendered such a provision for Hilandar superfluous, while satellite kellia (hermitages)
were a common Athonite feature. Permitting bathing, apparently, was, at least for a
typikon, an Evergetian innovation, and all but one of its eight Byzantine progeny also
allowed it, but Hilandar did not.33 Hilandar’s additional stricture against cooking in
cells may have reflected fear of kellion practices spreading to the coenobium. The
33
BMFD, 504.
most important Hilandar omission is the absence of the provision for equality in food
and clothing, but it would be rash to draw any conclusion concerning why.34
Hilandar was one of the two great centers of the transmission of the Second
Byzantino-South Slavic influence to Russia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centu-
ries, the other being Constantinople itself. The question arises, therefore, whether the
Evergetian tradition, along with liturgical, theological, contemplative, and specifi-
cally neo-hesychastic works, reached Russia with this new wave of translations.35 To
my knowledge, the major proponent of neo-hesychastic prayer, Gregory of Sinai (ca.
1265–1346), who after coming to Athos left and established his own multinational
community in Thrace near Bulgaria, did not write anything approaching a rule.36
Rather, what is considered the hesychastic or neo-hesychastic movement or phenom-
enon in late Byzantium touched many aspects of religion and culture, and any specific
connection to coenobiticism is difficult to ascertain. On the other hand, the introduc-
tion or reintroduction of coenobitic monasticism to Russia (the Rus´ North), maybe
34
Three hypothetical possibilities are: that individuality was simply too strongly established
at Athos at this time; and/or that the clan-based Serbian society of ca. 1200, with its relatively
low level of education, was not ready to approach any abstract notion of material equality; or,
to the contrary, that rough equality in material goods in a well-ordered coenobium, as in the
early sixteenth century, was simply assumed. See N. B. Sinitsyna, “Poslanie Maksima Greka
Vasiliiu III ob ustroistve afonskikh monastyrei (1518–1519 gg.),” Vizantiiskii vremennik 26
(1965): 132.
35
See Fairy von Lilienfeld, Nil Sorskij und Seine Schriften: Die Krise der Tradition im Rus-
sland Ivans III (Berlin: Evangelische Verlaganstalt, 1963), 77 n. 127, concerning the direct
ties with Constantinople and the acquisition of Slavonic translations of the liturgical typicon,
some sermons of John Chrysostom, and hesychastic-oriented works of Maxim the Confes-
sor, Symeon the New Theologian, and Isaac the Syrian. A slew of Slavic translations were
made at Athos, including the all-important Pseudo-Dionisii Aereopagite (1371), and service
books (1392). V. Ikonnikov, Opyt issledovaniia o kul´turnom znachenii Vizantii v russkoi is-
torii (Kiev: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1869; repr., The Hague: Mouton, 1970), 60; and A. S.
Arkhangel´skii, Nil Sorskii i Vassian Patrikeev, chap. 1, “Prepodbnyi Nil Sorskii,” Pamiatniki
drevnei pismennosti 25 (St. Petersburg: I. Voshchinskii, 1982; repr., Russian Reprint Series,
no. 20, The Hague: European Printing, 1966), 20–21. See also G. A. Ilínskii, “Znachenie
Afona v istorii slavianskoi pis´mennosti,” Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia,
no. 11 (1908): 1–41; I. Diuchev, “Tsentry vizantiisko-slavianskogo obshcheniia i sotrudnich-
estva,” Trudy Otdela drevnerusskoi literatury [hereafter TODRL] 19 (1963): 107–29; and John
Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia: A Study of Byzantine-Russian Relations in the
Fourteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 119–44.
36
Gregory’s Praecepta ad hesychastas PG 150:1335–46. Surviving Hilandar manuscripts
with works by Gregory include two from the 1390s, one on interior prayer, the other some of
his liturgical canons, and one from the 1430s on the monk’s “struggle,” and another from the
1400s on silence. Predrag Matejic and Hannah Thomas, Catalog, Manuscripts on Microform
of the Hilandar Research Library (The Ohio State Library), 2 vols. (Columbus, OH: The Re-
source Center for Medieval Slavic Studies, 1992), 1: 415, 476, 547, 555 (HM.SMS.227, 342,
456, 464).
78 David Goldfrank
in the 1360s,37 was part and parcel of the Second Byzantino-South Slavic influence
and came just before the start of intensive Russian interest in hesychastic literature.38
In what I see as the first phase, from the 1350s or 1360s into the 1420s, the
Evergetian influence is murky. As for its origins with Sergii of Radonezh (ca.
1314/1319/1322–92), we learn from his vita that he was enjoined with financial aid
(pominky) to convert his small monastery into a coenobium by Ecumenical Patriarch
Philotheos (r. 1354–55, 1364–76), supported by Metropolitan Aleksii of Moscow (r.
1354–78). The vita tells us that this entailed establishing full, communal property and
the naming of several officials: the cellarer (in Russia, the functional equivalent of
the Byzantine oikonomos), the baker, and the ward of the sick.39 The attentiveness to
monastic charity at this early stage is characteristically Evergetian.40 As for the date
that Sergii introduced the common, we only have evidence that he helped Aleksii es-
tablish Moscow’s Chudov Monastery in 1365 as a coenobium.41 At any rate, Sergii’s
disciples and several generations of their acolytes proceeded to found most of central
37
On the pre-Sergii northern monasteries, from Pskov to Riazan´, Vladimir to Velikii Ustiug,
see I. Iu. Budovnits, Monastyri na Rusi i bor´ba s nimi krestian (Moscow: Nauka, 1966),
46–76. Of Novgorod’s old monasteries, only Iurév, founded in the eleventh century, was orig-
inally a coenobium. The sources indicate no Byzantine coenobitic influence on Sava Neman-
ja’s Novgorodian contemporary, Dobrynia/Andrei Iadreikovich, who visited Constantinople
in 1200, described Theotokos Evergetis in his travelogue, and became a monk in the local
Khutynskii Transfiguration Monastery (founded 1192) and then archbishop of Novgorod.
Tver´’s leading Otroch Monastery (founded 1265) had clergy and treasurer-stewards (kliuch-
niki), but no clear markings of a coenobium. See Akty sobrannye v bibliotekakh i arkhivakh
Rossiiskoi imperii Arkheograficheskoi ekspeditsiei Akademii nauk [hereafter AAE], 4 vols.
(St. Petersburg: Tip. 2. Otd. Sobstvennoi E.I.B. kantseliarii, 1836), 1.5: 2–3. The unreliable
Tatishchev claims that “Archimandrite” Ioann of Moscow’s (recently founded) Petrovksii (or
Vysokopetrovskii) Monastery, who accompanied Metropolitan Aleksii’s would-be successor
Mitaj to Constantinople in 1378, was “Moscow’s first coenobiarch.” See V. N. Tatishchev,
Istoriia rossiiskaia v semi tomakh (Istoriia rossiiiskaia s samykh drevneishikh vremen), ed. S.
N. Valk and M. N. Tikhomirov (Moscow: Nauka, 1962–68), 5: 134.
38
Gelian M. Prokhorov, “Keleinaia isikhastskaia literatura (Ioann Lestvichnik, Avva Doro-
fei, Isaak Sirin, Simeon Novyi Bogoslov, Grigorii Sinait) v biblioteke Troitse-Sergievoi lavry
s XIV po XVII v.,” TODRL 28 (1974): 317–24.
39
Ludolf Müller, Die Legenden des Heiligen Sergij von Radonež, reprint of N. S. Tikhon-
ravov, Drevniaia zhitiia prepodobnogo Sergiia Radonezhskogo, 2 pts. (Moscow: n.p., 1892),
with separate introduction and bibliography, Slavische Propylaien, no. 17 (Munich: Wilhelm
Fink, 1967), 43–46.
40
Jordan notes that the Evergetian interest in philanthropy was not novel but was not general
either. See Evergetis, BMFD, 465.
41
Polnoe sobranie russkikh letopisei [hereafter, PSRL] (St. Petersburg: Arkheograficheskaia
komissiia, Nauka, Arkheograficheskii tsentr, 1843–), 8: 28; and Goldfrank, The Monastic Rule
of Iosif Volotskiy, rev. ed., trans., ed., and intro. David M. Goldfrank, Cistercian Studies 36
(Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2000), 236–37.
and northern Russia’s major coenobia,42 and his Trinity Lavra became and still is
Russia’s most prestigious monastic establishment.
The role of the ecumenical patriarch, this time Neilos (1380–88), was crucial
for Russia’s first surviving coenobitic rule. The author, Bishop Dionisii of Suzdal´
(r. 1374–85), writing in 1382 in the form of a statutory missive with patriarchal au-
thority to Pskov’s eminent Snetogorsk Monastery, demanded the restoration of the
(thirteenth-century) founder’s alleged order. Dionisii’s regulations required commu-
nal eating without individual demands on the cellarer, and the exclusive use of the
monastery’s storeroom for obtaining clothing and rejection of fine European materi-
als, but not the specific Evergetian stricture on equality.43 Thirteen years later (1395),
Dionisii’s former rival, the Bulgarian-born, ex-Athonite Metropolitan Kiprian (r. in
Moscow, 1389–1408),44 rescinded Dionisii’s rule as out of his jurisdiction. This ruling
was confirmed again in 1418, by the Greek-born Metropolitan Fotii (r. 1410–31), who
nevertheless insisted that the traditional patristic coenobitic principles held for the
monastery.45
Snetogorsk in Pskov was not part of Sergii’s network. Kirillov in Beloozero,
founded in 1397, was. We know of the purported rule of the founder Kirill (d. 1427)
from his vita, composed by the Serbian immigrant and ex-Athonite, Pakhomii Lo-
gofet. The fragmentary regulations therein, somewhat in keeping with the ustav po
42
Seen from the economic standpoint, Budovnits, Monastyri na Rusi, 112–258; from the
traditional standpoint, inter alia, George Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1946–66), 2: 246–64; and Fennell, A History of the Russian
Church to 1448 (London: Longman, 1995), 205–07. More detailed recent analyses include
Pierre Gonneau, La maison de Sainte Trinité: Un grand monastère russe du Moyen-Age tar-
dif (1345–1533) (Paris: Klincksieck, 1992); Gonneau, “The Trinity-Sergius Brotherhood in
State and Society,” in Moskovskaia Rus´ (1359–1584): Kul´tura i istoricheskoe samosoznanie
= Culture and Identity in Muscovy, 1359–1584, ed. G. D. Lenhoff and A. M. Kleimola (Mos-
cow: ITZ-Garant, 1997), 116–45; Gonneau, “Los troublions au monastère (bezchinniki mona-
styrskie): Indiscipline et partage du pouvoir à la Trinité Sainte-Serge au XVe siècle,” Revue
des études slaves 63 (1991): 195–206; and David B. Miller, “Donors to the Trinity-Sergius
Monastery as a Community of Venerators: Origins, 1360s–1462,” in Lenhoff and Kleimola,
Moskovskaia Rus´, 450–74.
43
Akty istoricheskie sobrannye i izdannye Arkheograficheskoi komissiei, 5 vols. [hereafter,
AI] (St. Petersburg: Tip. 2. Otd. Sobstvennoi E.I.B. kantseliarii, 1841–42), 1.5: 7–9; Russkaia
istoricheskaia biblioteka, 39 vols. (St. Petersburg: V. I. Golovina, 1872–1927), 6: 205–10; Ger-
man translation in Lilienfeld, Nil Sorskij, 277–90.
44
Dimitri Obolensky, “A Philhormaios Anthropos: Metropolitan Cyprian of Kiev and All
Russia (1375–1406),” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 32 (1978): 81–82. We are certain only that
Kiprian visited Athos.
45
AI 1.10: 19; 26: 52–55. David B. Miller, “The Velikie Minei Cheti and the Stepennaia Kniga
of Metropolitan Makarii and the Origins of Russian National Consciousness,” Forschungen
zur osteuropäischen Geschichte 26 (1979): 290; and Lilienfeld, Nil Sorskij, 290–95. Fotii fur-
ther noted that the founder had not written a rule.
80 David Goldfrank
starchestvu (cell rule typikon),46 outline behavior in the church refectory and cells;
the table regulation and strict adherence to common meals and common property,
with treasury issue of simple clothing and receipt of profits of handicrafts; serious at-
tentiveness to community labor; abbatial control over correspondence and individual
ascetic regimens; and a real innovation—the prohibition of intoxicating beverages.47
The few hortatory clips indicate that sermonizing accompanied these regulations.48
The Kirillov fragments have a hesychastic moment in the insistence that there be no
disturbance of the time dedicated to prayer (molitvovati) after the main meal, but
nothing particularly Evergetian, unless the use of dokhia or ksenodakhia for the de-
pository was an allusion to a functioning hospice.49 On the other hand, Kirillov ended
up with the reputation in the 1470s as the only Russian monastery which maintained
the common life,50 and around 1550 one of the two which observed equality among
the monks.51
Kirill may never have composed a formal rule at all—what we have being in-
stead the invention of Pakhomii around 1460, which is the start of what I see as the
second phase of Russian coenobitic reform. This period, stretching from the 1460s
into the early 1500s, was the most dynamic and creative time of Muscovite monastic
legislation, when not only two outstanding coenobiarchs, Evfrosin of Pskov (d. 1479)
and Iosif Volotskii (1439/40–1515), articulated the communal life in fresh ways, but
also Russia’s “great elder” Nil Sorskii (1433–1508) taught hesychasm by means of his
example and his original, spiritual Typikon (ustav). Nil’s brief Tradition (predanie)
or rule, composed for his kelliotic hermitage, which was a filial of Kirillov, hearkens
back in part to the coenobite Nikon of the Black Mountain (1025–1100s), one of Timo-
46
A sixteenth-century Kirillov starchestvo (gerontikon) contains, besides the Kirillov cell
rule (also those of the Nil Sorskii Hermitage and Iosifov), regulations for the communal as-
pects of the monastery, including several of the stipulations noted by Pakhomii: Kniga glago-
laema Starchestvo. See M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin State Public Library, St. Petersburg, Kirill-
ov-Belozerskii Collection, Codex No. 721/1198, 5–7.
47
V. Iablonskii, Pakhomii Serb i ego agiograficheskie pisaniia: Biograficheskii i bibliogra-
ficheski-literaturnyi ocherk (St. Petersburg, 1908; reprint of the appendix, Munich: Eidos,
1963), prilozhenie, 22–24.
48
See below, n. 100.
49
Perhaps the early fourteenth-century (extra-Evergetian) Byzantine prohibition of drinking
parties, itself prefigured in Evergetis and his family of typika, can be seen as a foreshadowing
of the stricter Russian provision. See Evergetis 9: 480; Athanasios I 4: 1501 (no sworn associa-
tions or drinking parties); Kellibara II: Typikon of Andronikos I Palaiologos for the Monastery
of St. Demetrios-Killibara in Constantinople (1315?–28) 3 (no drinking bouts), trans. and ed.
George Dennis, BMFD, 1508.
50
Savva Chernyi, “Zhitie i prebyvanie v krattse prepodobnogo ottsa nashego igumena Io-
sifa, grada Volokolamskogo,” Velikie Minei chetii, sobrannye vserossiiskim Mitropolitom Ma-
kariem (St. Petersburg: Arkheograficheskaia kommissiia, 1868–1917), 462–65.
51
G. Z. Kuntsevich, Chelobitnia inokov Tsariu Ivanu Vasilévichu (Petrograd: Tip. M. A.
Aleksandrova, 1916).
thy of Evergetis’s younger contemporaries. Nil’s Tradition junctures with Evergetis in

requiring that the hungry be fed, but more with the Athonite than the Evergetian leg-
acy in demanding confession to one’s superior.52 Otherwise, neither Nil’s Tradition
nor the derivative, brief Testament (zavet) of his disciple, the coenobiarch Innokentii
Okhlebinin (d. 1491), lies within the Evergetian tradition.53 Like Kirill, however, In-
nokentii forbade intoxicating beverages.
A sense that the Evergetian reform tradition was having some impact on Russia
by 1461 is evident in the thirty-chapter typikon Rule which Evfrosin of Pskov com-
posed for his rural Elizarov Monastery around that year.54 Somewhat derivative of
Bishop Dionisii’s statutory missive, Evfrosin’s rule is the strictest of the entire period.
It has numerous junctures with Timothy’s rule, such as the brief story of the founding
of the cloister in the beginning, demands that it be independent, discussion of the
qualities required of the abbot and of the oikonomos, a provision allowing the sick to
bathe,55 protection of the monastery’s property, institutional charity, and no require-
ment of an entry offering or grant of privileges to those who make one freely. It would
also seem as if Evfrosin implicitly intends some of the other, even more specifically
Evergetian stipulations – at least material equality in light of the common table and
wardrobe, as well as shared governance and prohibition of personal servants. If so,
then Evfrosin can be considered the closest Russian embodiment of Evergetian tradi-
tions. His Eliazarov Monastery, it should be noted, was the home of the elder Filofei,
who around 1523–24, according to the best recent scholarship, articulated the famous,
and often misinterpreted “Third Rome” doctrine.56
52
Nil’s hermitage rule (Tradition) and spiritual Typikon are found in Nila Sorskogo Predanie
i Ustav, ed. M. C. Borovkova-Maikova, Pamiatniki drevnei pis´mennosti i iskusstva 179 (St.
Petersburg: Tip. M. A. Aleksandrova, 1912); German trans. in Lilienfeld, Nil Sorskij und Seine
Schriften, 193–255; French trans. in Saint Nil Sorsky (1433–1508): La Vie, les écrits, le skite
d’un starets de Trans-Volga, trans. and ed. Sr. Sophia M. Jacamon, OSB, Spiritualité et vie
monastique 32 (Bégrolles-en-Mauges: Abbaye de Bellefontaine, 1980). For the dependence of
Nil’s Predanie upon Nikon, see the foreword to Taktikon … Nikon Chernogortsa (Pochaev,
1795), 7–11; Borovkova-Maikova, Nila Sorskogo Predanie i Ustav, 1–5. Since Nil and the
hermitage superior in general were not priests, this kind of confession was of a different sort
from what Timothy demanded.
53
For Innokentii’s testament, see Arkhangel´skii, Nil Sorskii i Vassian Patrikeev I, prilozhe-
nie, 14–16.
54
M. Serebrianskii, Ocherki po istorii monastyrskoi zhizni v Pskovskoi zemle (Moscow: Iz-
datel´stvo Imperatorskogo Obshchestva istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh pri Moskovskom uni-
versitete, 1908), 508–26; German trans. in Lilienfeld, Nil Sorskij, 295–313.
55
Evergetis and most of its progeny also allowed the healthy to bathe a few times a year, while
Evfrosin would not.
56
A. L. Gol´dberg, “Tri ‘poslaniia’ Filofeia: Opyt tekstologicheskogo analiza,” TODRL 37
(1976): 139–49; N. V. Sinitsyna, Tretii Rim: Istoki i evoliutsiia russkoi srednevekovoi kont-
septsii (Moscow: Indrik, 1998); and Donald Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross Cul-
82 David Goldfrank
With Iosif Volotskii, the Evergetian reform tradition finally found a nearly full
Russian expression. Iosif, as has been understood for over a century, was masterful
at incorporating in his own way the works of his authorities, and we find that his full-
blown testamentary rule is dependent upon writings by, attributed to, about, or in the
Desert Fathers, Basil of Caesarea, John Chrysostom, John Climacus, the liturgical
Sabaite or Jerusalem Typikon, Theodore Studite, Athanasius of Athos, Symeon the
New Theologian, and Nikon of the Black Mountain.57 A source for many of Iosif’s
other sources, Nikon of the Black Mountain is especially important for our analysis,
because his works combined the florilegia model of Paul Evergetinos and the stricter
typikon tradition, which Timothy adopted.58 Hence one could argue that from the
literary or rhetorical standpoint, Evergetis, or at least the movement it represented,
influenced Iosif via the mediation of Nikon.
Iosif’s Extended Rule has numerous junctures with Timothy’s, especially re-
garding the refectory, but also includes all of the specifically Evergetian principles—
material equality, regular confession, public reading of the rule (in an accessible,
abbreviated form),59 prohibition of personal servants, and cogovernance—as well
as such characteristic ones as concern for the quality of officials, protection of the
monastery’s property, memorial services, and institutional charity.60 In fact, the only
Evergetian principles not covered by Iosif at all are the specifics of enrollment and
tural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, 1304–1589 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), 219–43.
57
˜David Goldfrank, ed. and trans., The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky, rev. ed., Cistercian
Studies, no. 36 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2000), 61–70. The revised edition
differs significantly in commentary, notes, bibliography, and in having the full text of Iosif’s
Brief Rule. One could add as well the example and traditions of the Kirillov Monastery as Iosif
experienced them.
58
Nikon’s Pandekty is an extensive sixty-three-chapter florilegium and compilation of canon
law and moralia; his forty-chapter Taktikon is a combination of typika, missives, and flori-
legium-sermons; Nikon of the Black Mountain (Nikon ho Mauroeites; Nicon Monachus, of
Raithos Monastery on the Black Mountain near Antioch), Pandekty … Nikona Chernogortsa
(Church Slavic trans., Spaso-Prilutskii pod Vologdoi, 1670; repr., Pochaev, 1795), Table of
Contents in PG 106: 1359–82; Taktikon … Nikona Chernogortsa (Church Slavic trans., Po-
chaev, 1795); original Greek, to Discourse 4: Taktikon Nikona Chernogortsa, ed. V. N. Be-
neshevich (Petrograd: Tip. V. Kirshbauma, 1917); trans. of Discourses 1–2, Robert Allison,
BMFD, 377–439.
59
Slovo XII more or less repeats the stipulations of the first nine discourses, without the ser-
mons, condensed to fifty-three regulations. Iosif also created a model individualized mini-rule
in the form of a missive to an incoming monk. See Ia. S. Luré and A. A. Zimin, Poslaniia
Iosifa Volotskogo (Moscow: Nauka, 1959), 286–88.
60
See Goldfrank, Rule … Iosif, II.6–7, 10–12; I.II.15, 18; IV.2; IX.8–9; XII.9, 12; XIII.i.22;
XIII.ii.5, 9; XIII.ix.2, 6; XIV.14. These and such subsequent notations refer to the division of
chapters or discourses into sections by the editor.
the novitiate, bathing, inspection of cells, property management, and investiture of

officials, and these are virtually implied.61
Iosif’s Rule also has several interesting post-Evergetis features, representing log-
ical developments of Timothy’s principles. One of them, found in the typikon of an
original first-generation Evergetian, the Rule of John of Phoberos, allows for the su-
perior to sanction deviations from the sumptuary regimen in the direction of stricter
asceticism62 —something inherent, I would argue, in the foregrounding of the ex-
ample of the extreme ascetics in the florilegia. Iosif regularized such regimens with
three ustroeniia (orders). This measure, curiously, was similar, but the reverse of what
Timothy’s contemporary, the more lenient soldier-coenobiarch, Gregory Pakourianos
(d. 1086), whose typikon (1083) also enjoined equality of foods, but established three
orders, with the more prestigious monks obtaining the higher clothing allowances.63
In the middle of the twelfth century, another Evergetian typikon, that of Athanasios
Philanthropenos for St. Mamas, added “especially after compline” to the original’s
strictures against monks’ gathering for idle talk.64 Iosif’s rule, unlike any this his-
torian has seen, devoted an entire if brief chapter to silence after compline,65 but
his theme is foreshadowed by the early fourteenth-century Evergetian testament-rule
of Joachim of Zichna for Prodromos-Menoikeion.66 Early in the thirteenth century,
Bishop Neilos of Tamasia adapted the monastic penitential attributed to Basil of Cae-
sarea for a dozen or so transgressions,67 as did his textually non-Evergetian Cypriot
61
Iosif discusses how in the first, building stage of his monastery, he and his companions would
accept almost anyone (XIII.52). His checking on monks who miss liturgies (XIII.i.10–11) and
the formula, “if they seize drinks in somebody’s cell” (XIV.26, also XIII.v.10) assumes some
inspections. His injunctions to officials not to speculate (III.22), and his mention of the stew-
ards, bailiffs, and supervisors of stables, mills, tailors, brewery, and villages (IX.12, XIII.v.13,
XIII.ix.3, 9–13), as well as his concern for the synodikon and memorial services (XIII.i.22),
assumes property management. On the other hand, his supervised trips outside the cloister for
refreshing or to the nearby pond for drawing water and washing clothing (XIII.v.3, 11) may
imply a general prohibition of bathing.
62
Phoberos 5, BMFD, 889; and Goldfrank, Rule … Iosif, II.28.
63
Pakourianos: Typikon of Gregory Pakourianos for the Monastery of the Mother of God
Petritzonitissa Baãkovo, BMFD, 507–08, 9: 535. Founded as a Georgian-Armenian monastery
south of Philippopolis (Plovdiv), this cloister was solidly Bulgarian and culturally active by
the mid-fourteenth century and could have influenced Russia via Metropolitan Kiprian (r.
1375–89 in Lithuanian Rus´; 1382, 1389–1408 in all Rus´). The surviving sixteenth-century
copy of the typikon is in both Georgian and Greek.
64
Mamas 35: 1018; it was repeated in 1332 the Evergetian Menoikeion 17: 1602.
65
Goldfrank, Rule … Iosif, VIB/IV.
66
Menoikeion 22: 1606–07.
67
Machairas 121–34: 1157–58.
84 David Goldfrank
contemporary, Neophytos.68 Iosif’s rule ends with a much more extensive and sys-
tematic list of penances, which was derived from both Basil and Theodore Studite.69
One of the most important post-Evergetian elaborations that Iosif applied con-
cerned commemorations. Irina Doukaina Komnena’s first-generation Evergetian typ-
ikon contains a mini-commemorative synodikon for nuns and benefactors.70 Athana-
sios Philanthopenos adapted his own more modest memorial provision from Irina’s.71
Neilos of Tamasia repeated the original Evergetis stipulations, preceded by a place
for the list of property donors to be commemorated.72 Iosif, like Neilos, stipulates the
commemorations only briefly, but referred to his separate Synodikon.73 This was no
happenstance, since Iosif’s monastery was a pioneering institution in rationalizing
Russian commemoration practices in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.74
Given the central role of memorial services in the spiritual, material, and charitable
life of monasteries, it should come as no surprise that Byzantine rules outside of the
Evergetian tradition also had such provisions. Two examples are the Testament of
Neilos to the small John Prodromos Monastery on Mt. Athos75 or the Testament of
Patriarch Matthew I (r. 1397-1410) for John Charsianeites Monastery of Theotokos
Nea Peribleptos in Constantinople (1407).76 But the most extensive of all the pub-
lished Byzantine treatments of commemorations was that of the imperial niece, The-
odora Synadene for the Convent of Theotokos Bebaia Elpis (1327–35), with appended
68
Neophytos, Testamentary Rule of Neophytos of Cyprus for the Hermitage of the Holy Cross
near Ktima in Cyprus [1214], trans. and ed. Catia Galatariotou, BMFD, 1367–68. On the ba-
sis of content, however, John Thomas considers Neophytos Evergetian (“Documentary Evi-
dence,” 273).
69
Goldfrank, Iosif … Rule, Slovo XIV, in nine sections, which correspond almost exactly
to his Slovo XII—his “Rule in Brief,” a modified epitome of the provisions of his first nine
discourses.
70
Kecharitome 70–71: 699–702; also see Steindorff, Memoria, 125–26.
71
Mamas 39–40: 1020–22.
72
Machairas 155–57: 1163; also see, 22–25: 1131. The list on the manuscript, which is the
hegemon’s autograph, is empty.
73
Goldfrank, Rule … Iosif, XIII.i.22, 277.
74
Steindorff, Memoria, 164–236; also “Commemorations and Administrative Techniques in
Muscovite Monasteries,” Russian History/Histoire russe 22, 4 (1995): 433–54.
75
Prodromos: Testament of Neilo, for the Monastery of St. John the Forerunner (Prodromos)
on Mount Athos (1330–31) 9, trans. and ed. Stephen Reinert, BMFD, 1392–93.
76
Charsianeites: Testament of Patriarch Matthew I for the Monastery of Charsianeites Dedi-
cated to the Mother of God Nea Peribleptos (1407) C 13, 15, trans. and ed. Alice-Mary Talbot,
BMFD, 1659–60.
details of major donations and earmarked services.77 This might be an example of a

hypothetical Byzantine prototype for Russian commemoration books, while a more
direct ancestor could be the Serbian pomenici.78 Russia’s connections to Athos and
specifically to Hilandar may have been important in this regard.
Some coenobitic principles not specific to Evergetis, but found in Iosif’s rule,
evolved in late Byzantium outside of the Evergetian family of typika. Makarios
Chumnos of Thessalonike urged moderation and gradualism in training novices (be-
fore 1374).79 The model typikon of Emperor Manuel II (r. 1391–1425) to the Athonite
monasteries allowed for personal possessions with the permission of the superior, a
practical deviation from the strictest coenobitic traditions,80 but one which Iosifov
monks early on considered a customary right regarding books and icons.81 The great-
est of such developments is found in Theodora of Synadene’s typikon, where she
insisted that nothing be overlooked in safeguarding the service order and elaborated
extensively on confession and the superior’s responsibilities.82
An additional post-Evergetian development in non-Evergetian rules was the mo-
nastic council, which institutionalized cogovernance. Manuel II’s model typikon for
Athos stipulated that fifteen bouleutai (councilors), along with preeminent attached
monks residing outside the cloister, select the superior.83 This was surely representa-
77
Bebaia Elpis: Typikon of Theodora/Theodule Synadene for the Convent of the Mother of
God Bebaia Elpis in Constantinople [1327–35] XXII, appendix, trans. and ed. Alice-Mary
Talbot, BMFD, 1555–68; cf. Steindorff, Memoria, 128.
78
Steindorff, Memoria, 132–35; see also Stojan Novakoviç, “Srpski pomenici XV–XVIII
veka,” Glasnik srpskog učenog društva 42 (1875): 1–152; “Pshinski pomenik,” Spomenik 29
(1895): 1–20.
79
Chumnos, Rule and Testament of Makarios Chumnos for the Nea Mone of the Mother of
God in Thessalonike (shortly before 1314) 9, trans. and ed. Alice-Mary Talbot, BMFD, 1448;
see also, Goldfrank, Rule … Iosif, XIII.52.
80
Manuel II: Typikon of Manuel II Palaiologos for the Monasteries of Mount Athos [1406] 2,
trans. and ed. George Dennis, BMFD, 1618–19; cf. Goldfrank, Rule … Iosif, III.21, but also V B,
which earlier rejected any ownership whatsoever in a classical fashion.
81
V. O. Zhmakin, Mitropolit Daniil i ego sochineniia (Moscow: Obshchestvo istorii i drev-
nostei rossiiskikh, 1881); repr., Chteniia v Imperatorskom Obshchestve istorii i drevnostei
rossiiskikh (Moscow: Moskovskii universitet, 1846–81), 1881, 1.2, prilozheniia, 19: 55–57.
82
Bebaia Elpis IV, VI, VIII–IX, XX: 1531–33, 1537–41, 1553–54; cf. Goldfrank, Rule … Io-
sif, I: 19, IV, XI. As Iosif did later, she also made unattributed use of John Chrysostom in her
sermonizing on the community church services.
83
Manuel II: Typikon of Manuel II Palaiologos for the Monasteries of Mount Athos 3, trans.
and ed. George Dennis, BMFD, 1619. See also Sinitsyna, “Poslanie Maksima Greka,” 132.
How the Athonite monastic council arose, and whether it may have been connected to the
separate status of elite choir monks lies outside the purview of this study. Of the known choir
nuns, those of Bebaia Elpis (VIII) seem only to have chanted, while twelve of those of the
imperial Lips Convent in the capital would accompany the new superior to the emperor for her
ordination. See Lips: Typikon of Theodora Palaiologina for the Convent of Lips in Constanti-
86 David Goldfrank
tive of the model for the fifteen major Kirillov brothers, whose temporary departure
from the monastery in 1483–84 forced a change of leadership,84 and for the (twelve)
sobornye startsy (council brothers),85 who figured so heavily in Iosif’s rule.86 Even
here, such an arrangement, “as a seal to the testament,” and its justification is found in
the Evergetian Joachim of Zichna’s appointment of four model brothers to be advisors
and co-judges with the superior of the monastery’s officials.87
It could hardly have been an accident that Iosifov, the Russian monastery which
had by far the most extensive rule and innovative administrative thinking in the
early sixteenth century, was also the most successful culturally, ideologically, and
politically towards the end of the founder’s life and for the next half century. Iosi-
fov trainees dominated the episcopacy, curbed rival reformers and dissenters, helped
forge imperial ritual, ideology, and expansion policies, and even created the dominant
grand narrative of Russian history.88 As for the developed Evergetian aspects of the
Iosifov rule, sumptuary egalitarianism must have been good for morale as well as
reputation, the reading of the abbreviated rule and regular confession useful for char-
acter development as well as control, focus on the administrative elite excellent for
training bishops, and systematized commemorations a boon for finances.
If the second phase of Muscovite coenobitic reform saw Evfrosin expand on the
legacy of Bishop Dionisii, and Iosif on that of Kirill of Beloozero, the third phase,
from roughly 1515–60, carried on from the second. Soon after the learned Maksim
Grek arrived from Athos (Vatopedi) in 1517, he composed a missive to Grand Prince
Vasilii III outlining Athonite coenobitic practices and emphasized three character-
istically Evergetine traits, which combine what a fusion of Evfrosin’s and Iosif’s
rules would yield: material equality, cogovernance, and avoidance of required entry
nople (1294–1301) 7, trans. and ed. Alice-Mary Talbot, BMFD, 1267. Fifteen of the thirty-six
brothers of the Kellibara Monastery were choir monks. See Kellibara I: Typikon of Michael
VIII Palaiologos for the Monastery of St. Demetrios of Palaiologoi-Kellibara in Constantino-
ple (1282) 17–18, trans. and ed. George Dennis, BMFD, 1250–52.
84
Ia. S. Luré, Ideologicheskaia bor´ba v russkoi publitsistike kontsa XV–nachala XVI veka
(Moscow: Nauka, 1960), 57.
85
Sobor means both a major church (katholikon) and a council/synod/assembly.
86
XIII–XIV (including the “Traditions”) over a third of Iosif’s Extended Rule is directed
specifically to the “council elders and monastery officials.” Inspired by the exile of the Kirillov
elders, but modeling on the Apostles and information from the vitae of Theodore Studite and
Athanasios of Athos, Iosif fetishized the number twelve for his council (X.16, XIII.42–47).
87
Menoikeion 22.1607–08; cf. Goldfrank, Rule … Iosif, XIII.12–14, 44, 46; 256 n. 19 missed
the analogy to Joachim.
88
A. A. Zimin, I. S. Peresvetov i ego sovremenniki (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo Akademii nauk
SSSR, 1958), 71–108; Krupnaia feodalńaia votchina i sotsialńo-politicheskaia bor´ba v
Rossii (konets XV–XVI v.) (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), 233–80; B. M. Kloss, Nikonovskii svod
i russkie letopisi XVI–XVII vekov (Moscow: Nauka, 1980), 55–133; and D. S. Likhachev et
al., Knizhnye tsentry drevnei Rusi: Iosifo-Volokolamskii monastyr´ (Leningrad: Nauka, 1991),
3–15.
gifts.89 Indeed, Evfrosin’s and Iosif’s rules were recognized officially as models, by
the enterprising Makarii (b. 1481/1482), who was trained in the same monastery as
Iosif had been. As archbishop of Novgorod (1526–42) and metropolitan of Moscow
(1543–63), Makarii organized the compilation and promulgation of the Great Me-
nologium, which added some native works to the vast translated corpus and included
both Evfrosin’s and Iosif’s rules.90
Iosif’s rule also inspired some of the fresh coenobitic legislation of this period,
but it is here that the analogy with Evergetis ends. For if Timothy’s typikon was
the start of a Byzantine tradition that was later expanded, Iosif’s was the Russian
summit: no subsequent rule was nearly so extensive or elaborate. To my knowledge,
five or six rules or their equivalents survive from this period, two created by found-
ers, the other four by prelates. One of the latter, a metropolitan’s formula, may stem
from about 1500.91 Two others are Makarii’s rule for Novgorod’s small Dukhov (Holy
Spirit) Monastery, issued during 1526–30, in the early years of his archepiscopa-
cy,92 and the missive-rule to St. Nicholas in Volosovo near Vladimir by Metropoli-
tan Daniil (r. 1521–39).93 The two founders’ testamentary rules came from outlying
provinces: Kornilii Komel´skii’s more extensive one of 1535 from the dense Vologda
forests,94 and Gerasim Boldinskii’s of 1543 from near Dorogobuzh along the water-
shed route between Smolensk and central Russia.95 Finally, the Stoglav or Hundred
Chapters Synod of 1551 in Moscow under Makarii, now the metropolitan, issued
some coenobitic ordinances.96 All four of these figures were linked to Iosif in some
way or other. Makarii (1481/82–1563) came from Pafnutiev Monastery, where Iosif
had been trained; so did the mentor of Gerasim (1489–1554), Daniil of Pereiaslavl
(ca. 1460–1540).97 Metropolitan Daniil (d. 1547) had been Iosif’s successor abbot
and active in the Iosifov scriptorium. Kornilii (1455–1535) commenced his career in
Kirillov (which Iosif had personally visited before he founded his monastery), served
89
Sinitsyna, “Poslanie Maksima Greka,” 232–35. Maksim also emphasized the Sabaite-Je-
rusalem liturgical typikon, labor, and the officials, which hearken back to the pre-Evergetian
Studite-Athonite traditions.
90
Miller, “Velikie Minei Cheti,” 268–313, especially 289.
91
AAE I, no. 381, 482–84.
92
AI 1, 531–34 (no. 292). In 1528, Makarii forced a coenobitic reform on a slew of Novgoro-
dian cloisters. See PSRL 6: 284–85.
93
Zhmakin, Daniil, supplement XII, 39–44.
94
“Kornilii Komel´skii, II. Ustav ili pravila,” ed. Amvrosii, bishop of Saratov and Penza, in
Istoriia Rossiiskoi ierarkhii, 5 vols. (Moscow: Sinod, 1807–22), 4 (1812): 661–704.
95
E. V. Krushelńitskaia, “Zaveshchanie-ustav Gerasima Boldinskogo,” TODRL 48 (1983):
264–70.
96
E. B. Emchenko, ed, Stoglav: Issledovanie i tekst (Moscow: Indrik, 2000), 49–50: 328–38,
52: 339–43.
97
Budovnits, Monastyri, 336–37, 342, 347.
88 David Goldfrank
as an assistant to Iosif’s political and ideological ally with the church, Archbishop
Gennadii of Novgorod (r. 1484–1504), and spent time near another of Iosif’s favor-
ite model cloisters, the Tver´-Savvateev Hermitage.98 Kornilii’s rule and the Stoglav
stipulations are somewhat textually dependent upon Iosif’s, Kornilii’s also upon Nil
Sorskii’s regulatory Tradition.99
The common, developed Evergetian feature of all of these regulatory pieces is
the cogoverning council or its equivalent,100 along with the general coenobitic in-
sistence on communal property and the common table. None of them have regular
confession to the superior (or his designee)101 or public reading of the rule, the latter,
evidently, not catching on in Russia. Gerasim’s and Kornilii’s rules and Stoglav, on
the other hand, stipulate equality, which indicates that this Kirillov-Evergetian mea-
sure not only attracted reforming founders, but also by midcentury had captured the
attention of the official church. Gerasim, Kornilii, and Stoglav also prohibited strong
drinks, as did several other coenobiarchs,102 pursuing a peculiar, national mode of re-
form, based on the practical reasoning, right or wrong, that Russians could not drink
in moderation.103
98
Ibid., 280–82; and Goldfrank, Rule … Iosif, X.27–28.
99
Taktikon … Nikona Chernogortsa, foreword, 7–11; Nila Sorskogo Predanie i Ustav, 1–4;
Kornilii Komel´skii II, 662–65; see above n. 52. Kamilii, however, made an interesting change
from Nikon’s text, which Nil had reproduced. Where Nikon and Nil claim that “not wishing to
be superior, I sent away many who came to me,” Kornilii wrote, “not wishing to be superior, I
accepted all who came to me.”
100
Kornilii has “model” (voobrazhennye) brothers, and his vita relates that during an ex-
tended absence he entrusted his cloister to twelve monks. Gerasim has Iosif’s twelve council
elders. Dukhov only had twelve monks, of whom two or three were supposed to be council
brothers.
101
However, Daniil or his scribe-collaborator Foma Shmoilov did insist on regular confession
in a sermon in an unofficial fourteen-slovo treatise on monastic life, Volokolamsk Sbornik (no.
526) (structurally, a companion to Iosif’s Extended Rule, with an elaboration on the inner as-
pects of the monk’s life and discussion of several issues, such as the novitiate, not discussed by
Iosif). For a description, see Zhmakin, Daniil, 750–51; and Ieromonakh Iosif, Opis´ rukopisei
perenesennykh iz biblioteki Iosifova monastyria v biblioteku Moskovskoi dukhovnoi Akademii
(Moscow: Obshchestvo istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh, 1882; also in Chteniia, no. 3 [1883]),
177–78; for Foma Shmuilov, see Kloss, Nikonovskii svod, 81–82. The absence of such a basic
Orthodox Christian obligation as confession may be explained as its having been understood.
102
Makarii’s coenobitic reform affected the foundation of Aleksandr Svirskii (1448–1533),
near Lake Onega, whose brief testament, textually based on Kirill’s, prohibited strong drinks.
The vita of his junior contemporary from the north, Antonii Siiskii (d. 1556), repeats the frag-
ments of Kirill’s rule, from Pakhomii. See AI 1.135: 195–96; Budovnits, Monastyri, 322–29,
270–77.
103
Pakhomii’s rendition of Kirill’s stipulation indicates part of the basic text that Iosif used:
“He banned from the monastery mead, all other intoxicating beverages, and thus with this
typikon cut off the serpent’s head of drunkenness.” Iosif’s sermon, possibly taken from John
Gerasim himself founded four coenobia, and five of Kornilii’s disciples estab-
lished their own communal abbeys.104 The Stoglav synod, however, represented the
last textual chapter of this coenobitic reform movement, whose base had chiefly been
monasteries with wider cultural, theological, and political significance, from the time
of the learned Cappodocian father Basil of Caesarea, through the anti-Iconoclastic
Theodore Studite, the florilegia-compiling Theotokos Evergetis, multinational and
autonomous Athos, its Russian quasi-imitator Kirillov, and militantly super-Ortho-
dox Iosifov. The exceptions in Stoglav, allowing European wines and other comforts
to visitors to shrines and elite retirees using cloisters as retirement homes,105 are
indicative of the practical considerations that compromise ideal strict standards any-
where at any time. Like Gerasim, Stoglav allowed the well-off certain liberties, while
it protected equality for everyone else.
In the second half of the sixteenth century, the center of Russian culture shifted
dynamically to the court and the capital, and in the seventeenth century Western-in-
fluenced learning became decisive.106 In the fight of a few of the cloisters for tradi-
tions and the autonomy to preserve them, ritual was the chief religious issue. The
last Evergetian principle to make a stand in Russia was thus monastic independence
under the cogovernance of the superior and council brothers, and with the support of
not only monks, but also affiliated laity. When, in 1676, after eight years of lackadai-
sical siege and futile negotiations, the Solovki rebellion was crushed by the modest
government military force, snuck through a secret entrance in the fortress-cloister
walls by a turncoat, the Evergetian motif in Russian coenobitic reform had, to all
intents and purposes, played itself out. The older, liturgically oriented impulse of the
Sabaite-Studite reform still remained potent in Russian, not only within the monas-
teries, but also among the laity, and more so schismatics. Such an orientation, despite
all kinds of specific changes in verbal and musical modality, remained a hallmark of
the Russian Church and is again today having a revival. That, however, is an alto-
gether different story.
Chrysostom, and repeated in Stoglav, includes: “let him who would be free … abhor drunk-
enness and thus cut off the serpent’s head and crush his entire body.” See Pakhomii Serb,
prilozhenie 24; Goldfrank, Rule … Iosif, IX B.5/VII.5; Stoglav, 52: 174–77.
104
Budovnits, Monastyri, 293–306, 345–46.
105
Stoglav, 52: 178.
106
See Paul Bushkovitch’s interesting comments on the waning of monastic prestige and the
eventual rise of the sermon in elite Russian life after the middle of the sixteenth century in
Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992).
The Petrine Church Reform Revisited
James Cracraft
In the fall of 1996 Theofanis Stavrou, our most worthy honorand, arranged for me
to speak in two quite different forums at the University of Minnesota. The first was
a gathering of the History Department to hear a talk about research in progress, the
second, an audience assembled to hear the second annual James W. Cunningham
Memorial Lecture on Eastern Orthodoxy and Culture. For both occasions Profes-
sor Stavrou suggested that I somehow address this question about Peter the Great’s
church reform in Russia, on which I had published a book some twenty-five years
before:1 did the reform look any different now, with the passage of time and in the
light of my continuing research, than it did back then, when the book was published?
It was somewhat troubling to discover that I did have something to say, or admit, on
the subject, and I remain grateful to Theo for irresistibly (as usual!) urging me on.
In the world of the 1960s, when that book was researched and written, the
churches were manifestly in decline and religion was on the wane, nowhere more so,
as it also seemed at the time, than in Russia, where the brutal imposition of Commu-
nist rule had only sharpened and hastened the process. That process, which in 1971 I
dubbed “secularization” and viewed as a universal movement in modern history, was
in Russia irresistibly set in motion, I further posited, by the church reform of Peter
the Great. Indeed,
of all the achievements of Peter’s reign his church reform constituted the most
decisive break with the past. The abolition of the patriarchate, an institution of
great prestige and economic, social, and political importance—an institution
that potentially was, therefore, a focus of opposition to the ever more exigent,
impersonal, secularized, absolute state—destroyed the age-old autonomy of
the Russian Church and left the emperor with no possible rival for his sub-
jects’ loyalty. It left them with no independent court of appeal, no alternative
source of justice, no hope of escape from the tsar’s power. The simultaneous
creation of the Holy Synod, a governing committee of the tsar’s appointees,
provided the means whereby the administrative apparatus of the church was
incorporated in, indeed swallowed up by, the much larger bureaucracy of the
1
James Cracraft, The Church Reform of Peter the Great (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1971).
92 James Cracraft
state, a virtual absorption of the church by the state which for all intents and
purposes was completed by the time of Peter’s death.
And this state-church regime imposed by Peter, which prevailed in Russia until 1918,
worked to the severe detriment, I said or implied in my book, of both church and
people.2
That was then. In the world of the mid-1990s, as I struggled to respond to Pro-
fessor Stavrou’s question, Communist rule in Russia had collapsed, an event that
was accompanied and even in part precipitated by a revival of the Russian Orthodox
Church, which in 1988 had rather grandly celebrated its one-thousandth anniversary
and was again claiming a special place in society.3 Elsewhere in the once-Communist
lands, most notably in Poland and East Germany, the churches had obviously played a
major part in ending Communist rule. Was history reversing itself? Or was my earlier
assertion of inevitable secularization in the modern world, an assertion that was am-
ply supported by Marxist and other modernization theories,4 somewhat overdrawn?
And if Peter’s church reform did not in fact inaugurate the long-term secularization
of Russian society, what was its larger historical significance?
In my informal remarks to the group of historians and more, in my published
Cunningham lecture,5 I suggested that if my account of the Petrine church reform
was still factually sound (and confirmed as such by the leading Russian historian of
the period, E. V. Anisimov), there certainly was room for debate about the reform’s
longer-term consequences. Here I would like to expand on those remarks, and in this
way offer some small tribute to a scholar who has done so much over the last four
decades to promote Greek, Russian, and Orthodox studies in this country and abroad.
I might begin by emphasizing the distinction that needs to be drawn between the
larger psycho-cultural phenomenon of religion and the specifically institutional real-
ity of the church. Ninian Smart, a leading historian of religion in the modern world,
decisively refutes the “thesis of increasing secularization” and proposes that we ap-
proach the subject by looking at religion’s seven different “aspects or dimensions”:
the practical and ritual; the experiential and emotional; the narrative or mythic; the
doctrinal and philosophical; the ethical and legal; the social and institutional; and
2
Ibid., vii–viii, 306–07.
3
See also Michael Bourdeaux, Gorbachev, Glasnost and the Gospel (London: Hodder &
Stoughton, 1990); Nicolai N. Petro, ed., Christianity and Russian Culture in Soviet Society
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990); Niels C. Nielsen, ed., Christianity after Communism:
Social, Political, and Cultural Struggle in Russia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994); Jane
Ellis, The Russian Orthodox Church: Triumphalism and Defensiveness (London: Macmillan,
1996); and K. Kääriäinen, Religion in Russia after the Collapse of Communism (Lewiston,
ME: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998).
4
E.g., David Martin, A General Theory of Secularization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978).
5
James Cracraft, “Church and Revolution in Russia,” Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 12/13
(1996–97): 21–34.
The Petrine Church Reform Revisited 93
the material (buildings, works of visual art, holy books, etc.).6 We notice at once the
relatively low level, or confined space, that the “social and institutional” dimensions
of religion along with the “material” occupy in this deliberately capacious scheme;
for often it is not, as Professor Smart has found, the organized church–“the formal
officials of a religion”–who “turn out to be the most important persons in a tradition”
but instead “charismatic or sacred personages … saintly people, gurus, mystics and
prophets,” or “revolutionaries [who] set religion on new courses.”7 In the case before
us, it was the institutional church of Russia that Peter I “reformed” by replacing the
office of patriarch with a clerical board or “Holy Governing Synod,” not Russian
Orthodoxy as such; and he did so, I would now also emphasize, at least partly for
religious reasons.
This much is attested by a close reading of the working draft of the Ecclesiastical
Regulation (Dukhovnyi reglament) of 1721, the principal legislative act embodying
Peter’s church reform.8 The draft was written at his behest by Bishop Feofan Proko-
povich, the learned Ukrainian divine whose formative years in Kiev and abroad, in
Poland, Rome, and various of the German lands, I have discussed elsewhere, also at
Professor Stavrou’s urging.9 Peter went over Prokopovich’s draft on 11 February 1720,
annotating or amending it at various points, whereupon a final draft was prepared for
the formal approval later that month of a group of senators and senior clergy called
to St. Petersburg for this purpose. There can be no doubt that the immediate aim of
the Ecclesiastical Regulation and related documents, as duly promulgated in January
1721, was to extend the collegial principle of administration, which Peter was busily
applying to the whole of his central government, to the administration of the church,
and thereby to complete his bureaucratization of the Russian state along contempo-
rary European (Swedish, German, cameralist) lines. Nor can there be any doubt that
in so doing Peter was deliberately asserting a new notion—new in Russia—of mo-
narchical absolutism, one that was also contemporary European in inspiration (Swe-
den again, Prussia, France) and one that Prokopovich had helped him define in these
very same documents as well as in other published texts. But the explicit goal of this
6
See Ninian Smart, The World’s Religions: Old Traditions and Modern Transformations
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 12–21; and further, Smart, Dimensions of the
Sacred: The Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996),
267–73, for his critique of secularization theory.
7
Smart, The World’s Religions, 19.
8
P. V. Verkhovskoi, Uchrezhdenie Dukhovnoi Kollegii i Dukhovnyi reglament, 2 vols. (Ros-
tov-on-Don: Tip. V. F. Kirshbauma, 1916). See vol. 2, Materialy, pt. 1, nos. 1–4 (3–105), for
Verkhovskoi’s critical edition of the Dukhovnyi reglament and closely related documents
based on the original manuscripts.
9
James Cracraft, “Feofan Prokopovich and the Kiev Academy,” in Russian Orthodoxy under
the Old Regime, ed. Robert L. Nichols and Theofanis G. Stavrou (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1978), 44–64. See also, for Prokopovich’s entire career, Cracraft, “Feofan
Prokopovich,” in The Eighteenth Century in Russia, ed. J. G. Garrard (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1973), 75–105.
94 James Cracraft
bureaucratic revolution was to make the state a more efficient instrument of the mon-
arch’s will as he worked to promote the “common good,” another imported notion that
was largely secular in content, to be sure, yet bore moral and religious overtones that
we should not arbitrarily ignore. It also deserves noting, with respect to the church
itself, that most of Peter’s thirty-five or so marks on the draft of the Ecclesiastical
Regulation or emendations to its text affirmed with all his imperious force the impor-
tance of proper religious and especially moral instruction for both clergy and people
as well as the necessity of maintaining tight clerical discipline, the latter to include
the prompt removal from office of incompetent bishops. The picture thus painted by
Peter and his chief clerical collaborator is of a church and especially a clergy badly in
need not of a doctrinal or liturgical reformation, but of a moral and spiritual rebirth.
And who now can say for sure which of these two readily identifiable motives here,
the political or the religious (or moral), was more important—more basic—in Peter’s
decision to “reform” (ispravit´: improve, correct) the Russian church—an institution,
as he explained in his Manifesto announcing the reform, for whose welfare he felt
personally responsible before God. I fear that practically all historians who have stud-
ied the matter, myself and Anisimov included,10 have emphasized the political motive
to the virtual exclusion of the religious, apparently on the assumption that religion
was not really important to Peter. But is the assumption warranted?
This is not the place for a detailed description and analysis of Peter the Great’s re-
ligious beliefs. Suffice it to say that my own earlier effort in this regard, encapsulated
in the attribution to him of a “simple soldier’s faith,”11 I now think quite inadequate
to the task: only a part of the story, at best. Nor do most other such attempts by histo-
rians seem any more successful. For instance, A. V. Kartashev, the last procurator of
the Holy Synod (1917) who later became a professor of church history at the Russian
Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris, characterized the “personal religiousness”
(religioznost´) of the synod’s founder as traditional in style, the “style [stil´] of tradi-
tional church piety.” In his view, Peter’s
sensible positive mind did not lead him into a deadly deism; [he] preserved in
his heart an image of the living biblical God.… Peter sincerely expressed in
words his vivid sense of Providence and the will of God permeating human
affairs.… A utilitarian, practical attitude to the role of religion in matters of
state was natural to him, unquestionably; but this did not exclude in him a
deep and lively understanding of religion.… Though intolerant of ignorant
cultish superstition, Peter himself loved the beauty of the services, often read
the Scriptures with enthusiasm, and took an interest in the details of church
10
Reference is to my Church Reform, passim, and to E. V. Anisimov, Vremia petrovskikh
reform (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1989), 7–14, 330–51. Anisimov’s book has been published in an
abridged English translation by John T. Alexander, The Reforms of Peter the Great: Progress
through Coercion in Russia (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993).
11
Cracraft, Church Reform, 22.
ritual. He was too intelligent and talented for the fashionable rationalism he
found congenial to distort his completely Orthodox religiousness.12
But this view of Peter’s religious beliefs, somewhat revisionist at the time and founded,
it seems, mainly on the testimony of Petrine loyalists, has not been widely shared by
historians. Thus, in his lengthy introduction to a large collection of contemporary ob-
servations, reminiscences, and anecdotes about Peter, to cite another approach, E. V.
Anisimov asks whether the great tsar-reformer was religious at all, noting that “most
investigators have not come to a definitive answer to this question—so contradictory
is the surviving evidence.” On the one hand, as Anisimov rightly says, a whole series
of Petrine initiatives, “above all the reform of the church, leading to its complete sub-
ordination to state power,” gave rise to Peter’s “undying reputation among the popular
masses as the ‘tobacco atheist,’ the ‘antichrist.’” Yet on reading Peter’s “thousands of
surviving letters,” on the other hand, Anisimov is struck, as anyone must be, by their
“testimony to an indubitable religious sentiment.” So
I think [Anisimov rather abruptly concludes] that on the whole the tsar was
not overly involved with God. He drew on a series of principles which rec-
onciled his faith with reason. He thought that it made no sense to starve sol-
diers on campaign by not giving them meat on fastdays—they needed their
strength for a victory for Russia, which also meant for Orthodoxy. It’s well
known how suspiciously Peter looked on all miracles, relics, and such like.13
We notice, in moving on, the sharp contrast, if not contradiction, between these two
interpretations of the evidence regarding Peter’s religious beliefs, a disparity which
reflects, perhaps, their authors’ own divergent views of religion more than it does
Peter’s.
Still another answer to the question before us has been offered by a leading Brit-
ish student of the Petrine period, L. R. Lewitter, whose tack is evident in the title of
his relevant essay, “Peter the Great’s Attitude towards Religion: From Traditional
Piety to Rational Theology.”14 Professor Lewitter finds that in maturity Peter was “an
objective sympathizer with the spirit of Protestantism” rather than a “crypto-Prot-
estant” (as has often been alleged by Orthodox critics).15 This was the “spirit” an-
12
A. V. Kartashev, Ocherki po istorii russkoi tserkvi (Paris: YMCA Press, 1959; repr., Mos-
cow: Terra, 1992–93), 2: 320–32.
13
E. V. Anisimov, “Tsar´-reformator,” in Petr Velikii: Vospominaniia, dnevnikovye zapisi,
anekdoty, ed. B. V. Ananích et al. (Moscow: Vneshsigma, 1993), 21–22.
14
In Roger P. Bartlett et al., eds., Russia and the World of the Eighteenth Century (Columbus,
OH: Slavica, 1986), 62–77.
15
Most famously, by Father Georges Florovsky, in his Ways of Russian Theology, trans. Rob-
ert L. Nichols, 2 vols. (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1979, 1987), vol. 1, chap. 4 (esp. 114–30);
originally published as G. Florovskii, Puti russkogo bogosloviia (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1937;
repr., Paris: YMCA-Press, 1981).
96 James Cracraft
imating society in the countries which “furnished him with models for his work of
modernization and reform—Holland, Sweden and Denmark”: England and Prussia
should be added. But more than this “Protestant component,” Lewitter proposes, “Pe-
ter’s private creed included another essential or possibly overriding factor,” namely,
his belief, as recorded by Peter himself in one of his notebooks, that (Lewitter’s trans-
lation) “reasoned judgement [rassuzhdenie] is above all virtues, for any virtue with-
out reason is hollow.”16 This “maxim” of Peter’s later years, Lewitter continues, is
a “fitting motto to a whole chain of acts, decisions and intentions,” including the
church reform. Peter’s mature “conception of salvation was an individual one,” and
rested in “the belief in justification by faith alone,” wherefore he “died, as he may for
many years have lived, a justified sinner.” It was also “consistent with this inward-
ness that, as far as he himself was concerned, he should have regarded the Church
of which he was the de facto head not as a vehicle for salvation but as a convenient
instrument of control, through catechization, of the private and public conduct of is
subjects.” Lewitter’s formulations are considerably more attentive to the documents
than any other known to me,17 and are particularly sensitive to what Peter himself
actually wrote about religion in connection with his church reform, or otherwise. His
approach needs to be further explored and documented.
This has been one direction, in fact, of my own continuing research. A Pietist-like
view of sin and salvation, one which sought to supplement or even replace the em-
phasis on institutions, rites, and dogma in orthodox Christianity (to include Russian
Orthodoxy) by concentrating on the “practice of piety,” the latter as rooted in inner
spiritual experience, had by his later years come to form the core of Peter’s religious
beliefs and hence, in his eyes, to justify if not to necessitate his church reform—a
reform which, as indicated above, went well beyond the institution of new adminis-
trative arrangements. This austere, moralistic, Providential, scrupulously scriptural,
internalized kind of Christianity, at once mystical and “enlightened,” or rational,
had flowered in Peter’s time especially in northern Europe, the Europe in which he
had traveled extensively in 1697–98 and again in 1716–17 (a total of nearly three
years), on both tours invariably stopping to visit local churches and talk with local
divines. It was the Europe, too, from which many of his senior officers and assistants
had come, including Vice Admiral Cornelius Cruys, General James Bruce, Doctors
Nicholas Bidloo, Robert Erskine, and Laurens Blumentrost, and Herr Heinrich Fick,
who jointly and severally helped him to found the Russian navy, a modern army and
16
Lewitter, “Peter’s Attitude towards Religion,” 72; Lewitter does not cite his source here,
but obviously is quoting from a note by Peter: “Vyshe vsekh dobrodetelei razsuzhdenie, ibo
vsiakaia dobradetel bez razuma—pusta,” as printed in Zakonodatelńye akty Petra I [hereaf-
ter ZAP], ed. N. A. Voskresenskii (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1945), no. 211 (p. 151), from the
original in Peter’s own hand.
17
This includes the complex, cultural-historical interpretation, emphasizing Baroque af-
finities, offered by Reinhard Wittram, “Peters des Grossen Verhältnis zur Religion und den
Kirchen: Glaube, Vernunft, Leidenschaft,” Historische Zeitschrift 173 (1952): 261–96; also
Wittram, Peter I, Czar und Kaiser: Zur Geschichte Peters des Grossen in seiner Zeit (Göttin-
gen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964), 2: 170–81.
medical service, the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, and the collegial system
of central government of which the Holy Synod (originally called the Ecclesiastical
College) formed an integral part. Two additional traits distinguished this spreading
Pietism from other mystical and reformist trends in Reformation and Counter-Refor-
mation Europe, to quote the late Leonard Krieger, namely, “individualism and activ-
ism: pietists were individualistic in that they regarded the religious experience as es-
sentially personal, and they were activist in their encouragement of good social works
as the only authentic expressions of piety.”18 By the time he returned from his second
major tour of Europe, I would now argue, Peter had been thoroughly influenced by
a generic form of Pietism, one marked by a strongly Providential outlook and set of
public moral values that nowise required him to renounce the institutional church of
his fathers—no more than it had required its adherents elsewhere in Christendom to
renounce the Reformed, Lutheran, Anglican, or Roman Catholic Churches in which
they had been reared.
This was the Peter who vigorously affirmed the ambitious educational provisions
of the Ecclesiastical Regulation of 1721, which envisioned the foundation of a school
for sons of clergy in every diocese and an advanced ecclesiastical academy in St.
Petersburg. This was the Peter who pushed for an up-to-date translation of the Bible,
which had only once before been printed in Russia, back in 1663, a Moscow edition
of the Ruthenian (Ostrikh) Bible of 1581; in February 1724 he ordered the Synod to
proceed with the printing of this “newly corrected Bible” [novoispravlennaia bibliia],
though for one reason or another that was not done until 1751, in the reign of his
daughter, Empress Elizabeth.19 And this was the Peter who in a letter to the synod of
19 April 1724, the last year of his life, wrote:
Most Holy Synod. I have long urged in conversation, and now [do so] in writ-
ing, that brief precepts be composed for people (since we have very few edu-
cated preachers); also a book wherein would be explained what is unchanging
divine law, what are counsels, what patristic traditions, and what intermediate
things, and what is done only for rite and ritual, and what is unchanged and
what has changed according to time and chance, so that they can know what
sort of importance each has. On the first [the precepts], it seems to me that …
in them should be explained what is the straight path of salvation, and espe-
cially Faith, Hope, and Charity (for about the first and the last they know very
little, and that incorrectly [ne priamo], while about the middle one they have
18
L. Krieger, Kings and Philosophers, 1689–1789 (New York: Norton, 1970), 149; and see
now, for the religious background, James D. Tracy, Europe’s Reformations, 1450–1650 (New
York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). On Pietism, the subject of a large literature, see the Oxford
Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1286,
with full bibliography; and for its role in contemporary Prussian state-building, for example,
Richard L. Gawthrop, Pietism and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Prussia (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993).
19
ZAP, no. 193 (pp. 142–43); and further, M. I. Rizhskii, Istoriia perevodov Biblii v Rossii
(Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1978), 116–20.
98 James Cracraft
not heard, since they put all their hope in church singing, fasts, prostrations,
and such like, and in building churches, candles, and incense); and about the
suffering of Christ they believe that it was only for a single original sin, and
that they will be saved by their own works, such as those just mentioned.20
By the end of his life, arguably, Peter himself had come to believe in the doctrine
of salvation by faith alone, as Professor Lewitter suggested. It was an individualis-
tic creed by any reckoning and one that discounted “church singing, fasts, prostra-
tions, and such like,” precisely the traditional forms of Russian Orthodox piety, in
favor of the leading of an upright moral life. Such a life meant, for the mass of his
subjects, essentially one of duty and obedience to higher authority, ultimately the
tsar’s; for the tsar himself, as a “Christian monarch,” a phrase he repeatedly used, it
meant total submission to the will of God, which was to be discerned in the course
of events, along with acceptance of the responsibility actively to guide his subjects
on the “straight path of salvation,” another favorite phrase. Indeed, this was the mes-
sage conveyed unmistakably in the catechism that was composed at Peter’s urging by
Feofan Prokopovich and first printed at St. Petersburg in 1720, after which it was so
frequently reprinted as to become, very possibly, the most widely distributed book in
eighteenth-century Russia.21
It was a Pietist kind of Orthodoxy that in significant measure motivated Peter’s
church reform, in sum; and some of the longer-term outcomes of that reform, partic-
ularly of its educational provisions, were surely as beneficial for both church and so-
ciety in Russia as others—those usually highlighted by us secular historians—were
detrimental.22 At the very least, this possibility might serve as a hypothesis guiding
future research in the still under-studied field of Russian Orthodoxy in the imperial
or synodal period. Equally important, we might more profitably approach the subject
by looking at all seven of Orthodoxy’s aspects following the scheme outlined earlier
in this essay by Ninian Smart, not just at the institutional or social dimensions on
which historians, even church historians, have so far tended to concentrate.23 And
when this much has been done, we can reasonably predict, the legacy of the Petrine
church reform in Russia will be seen in positive as well as negative terms—as a cru-
cial step, for one thing, in the europeanization (or modernization) of Russian religious
culture. The Petrine reform, in still other words, infused Russian Orthodoxy—and by
extension, Russian society, especially educated society—with a moral seriousness, an
attention to duty and a social conscience, that was not there before.
20
ZAP, no. 195 (pp. 143–44); original in Peter’s hand.
21
Cracraft, Church Reform, 276–87; and further, Cracraft, “Feofan Prokopovich: A Bibliog-
raphy of His Works,” Oxford Slavonic Papers, n.s. 8 (1975), 26–27 (no. 123).
22
For a conspicuous example of the detrimental view, see the well-known work by Richard
Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Scribner, 1974), chap. 9: “The Church as
Servant of the State,” which draws on my Church Reform.
23
E.g., Gregory L. Freeze, The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform,
Counter-Reform (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).
The other main point of this essay, which can be stated briefly, concerns the new
or better perspective on Peter’s church reform and the ensuing synodal regime in
Russia that has been afforded us by the further passage of time. For the collapse of
Communist rule in Russia has entailed an intensified scrutiny by scholars of various
aspects of the history of that rule, a scrutiny that has of course been facilitated by the
relatively freer access to state and party archives that has ensued. This newly invigo-
rated research, in combination perhaps with the declining force of secularization the-
ory, has focused increasing attention on the fate of religion and the church in Soviet
Russia, among other previously neglected topics. I cite some of the published results
of this research in my Cunningham Memorial Lecture, the better to understand the
Russian (rather than “Marxist”) roots of the devastation that befell the Russian Or-
thodox Church in 1917 and the virulence of the successive anti-church campaigns.24
But a larger concern of the lecture was to highlight the contrasts (rather than alleged
continuities) between the anti-church regime established in Russia under Lenin and
Stalin and the state-church regime established by Peter. The contrasts—in declared
intention, methods of implementation, concrete results—are indeed stark, and alone
negate the contention, I suggested in my lecture and would repeat here, that the
Petrine reform was somehow ultimately responsible for what happened to the church
in Russia, and to countless religious believers, after 1917.25 Peter, clearly, sought by
his reform to strengthen the Russian Church as a moral and educational institution,
and this mainly by curbing the clergy’s involvement in financial, political, and other
“unseemly” affairs and by drastically improving their training. The Communists, by
contrast, sought to destroy the church by any and all means, this as a prerequisite for
the eradication of religion in Russia and the establishment of a socialist utopia. The
tragic folly of their program becomes clearer the more its history is dispassionately
uncovered and exposed to the light of a new day.
It was certainly plausible for church reformers in Russia in 1917 to indict the syn-
odal administration for its excessive dependence on the reactionary and thoroughly
discredited government of Nicholas II, which had made it an obstacle to, rather than
24
In addition to works cited in Cracraft, “Church and Revolution,” 34 nn. 20, 23, see Gedr
Shtrikker, ed., Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov´ v sovetskoe vremia (1917–1991): Materialy i
dokumenty po istorii otnoshenii mezhdu gosudarstvom i tserkovíu, 2 vols. (Moscow: PRO-
PILEI, 1995); M. V. Shkarovskii, Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov´ i sovetskoe gosudarstvo v
1943–1964 godakh: Ot “peremiriia” k novoi voine (St. Petersburg: DEAN+ADIA-M, 1995);
Shkarovskii, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov´ pri Staline i Khrushcheve (Moscow: Graal´,
1999); Glennys Young, Power and the Sacred in Revolutionary Russia: Religious Activists in
the Village (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); and N. N. Pokrovskii
and S. G. Petrov, eds., Arkhivy Kremlia: Politbiuro i tserkov´, 1922–1925, 2 vols. (Moscow:
Rosspen, 1997–98).
25
The contention is conspicuously advanced, as noted in my Cunningham lecture, by the
historians P. N. Miliukov and E. V. Anisimov, the latter in the work cited above (n. 10).
100 James Cracraft
an instrument of, ecclesiastical and religious renewal.26 But that is a far cry from
similarly condemning the synodal regime of the entire imperial period, from its
foundation in 1721 to its demise in 1917–18. And the mistake of so doing, I would
urge in conclusion, will be obvious when its full record is compared with that of the
anti-church regime of the whole Soviet period, now being documented by the new
research. Indeed, it will be seen as a mistake comparable to, and perhaps derived
from, that of confusing early modern political absolutism with twentieth-century to-
talitarianism, which surely are as different, on close comparison, as water and wine.27
My sincere thanks again to Professor Stavrou for urging me to pursue these ques-
tions, though I cannot assume, fine scholar that he is, and judicious colleague, that he
will approve of how I have done so: Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas!
26
See also Catherine Evtuhov, “The Church in the Russian Revolution: Arguments for and
against Restoring the Patriarchate at the Church Council of 1917–1918,” Slavic Review 50, 3
(1991): 497–511.
27
A point vigorously argued by G. Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, trans.
David McLintock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), chap. 15.
A Russian Pilgrim in Ottoman Jerusalem
Introduction
The prospects of travel, trade, and religious pilgrimage in the Levant fascinated gen-
erations of Russia’s men and women from the twelfth to the early twentieth century.
In particular, the storied sacred sites of Jerusalem attracted the curiosity of myriad
Russian travelers: monks and priests, merchants and diplomats, writers and artists,
scholars and tourists.1 Dmitrii V. Dashkov (1784–1839) etched his name in the annals
of these visitors with a brief sojourn in Ottoman Palestine in 1820, and his travelogue,
rendered here in English, merits attention as a document that offers eyewitness testi-
mony, firsthand observation, and telling detail. These qualities make the narrative a
likely choice to be included in a projected collection of resources on tsarist Russia’s
relations with the Ottoman Near East, a compendium that assembles select archival,
manuscript, and published sources and presents them in an accessible format for stu-
dents and scholars alike.2
1
For the extensive travel literature on Palestine, see Theofanis G. Stavrou and Peter R. Wei-
sensel, Russian Travelers to the Christian East from the Twelfth to the Twentieth Centuries
(Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, 1986). For the larger story of Imperial Russia’s activities
in Palestine, see Theofanis G. Stavrou, Russian Interests in Palestine: A Study of Religious
and Educational Enterprise (Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1963); Derek Hop-
wood, The Russian Presence in Syria and Palestine, 1843–1914: Church and Politics in the
Near East (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); and Stephen K. Batalden and Michael D. Palma,
“Orthodox Pilgrimage and Russian Landholding in Jerusalem: The British Colonial Record,”
in Seeking God: The Recovery of Religious Identity in Orthodox Russia, Ukraine, and Geor-
gia, ed. Batalden (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993), 251–63. See also the
publication by Nikolai N. Lisovoi, Russkoe dukhovnoe i politicheskoe prisutstvie v Sviatoi
Zemle i na Blizhnem Vostoke v XIX–nachale XX v. (Moscow: Indrik, 2006).
2
A resource aide, drawing upon Russian records and reports, would sharpen our view of
various aspects of imperial Russia’s involvement in the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions
and in the wider Eastern Question. Worthy models to emulate are the useful compendia of
sources on Ottoman Greece by neohellenist Richard Clogg, ed., The Movement for Greek
Independence, 1770–1821: A Collection of Documents (London: Macmillan, 1976); and on
Ottoman Turkey by Middle East scholar Charles Issawi, ed., The Economic History of Turkey,
1800–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). See also the two-volume collection
102 Theophilus C. Prousis
An enlightened state official with a literary flair, Dashkov served a six-year

term as diplomatic adviser and secretary at the Russian Embassy in Istanbul from
1817 to 1822. Envoy Grigorii A. Stroganov (1770–1857) assigned Dashkov to inspect
consulates in the Levant as part of the embassy’s effort to upgrade the conduct and
competence of Russian consular staff.3 The expedition entailed a stop in Palestine,
where, as part of his itinerary, the inspector had to gather concrete information on
the seemingly endless “monks’ quarrel,” the dispute between Eastern Orthodox, Ro-
man Catholic, and other Christian sects over the right to control various holy places
in Jerusalem, most notably the legendary tomb of Christ in the Church of the Holy
Sepulcher. Dashkov’s unpublished correspondence with Stroganov and the consuls
deals with the investigation of consular offices; but his published descriptions of the
excursion, appearing in the almanac Northern Flowers edited by poet and critic An-
ton A. Del´vig (1798–1831), relate impressions and observations of Mount Athos, the
Topkapi Library, and Jerusalem.4
For three weeks, in August and September 1820, Dashkov toured fabled sites
in and around the Holy City: Mount Zion, Bethlehem, Gethsemane, the Mount of
Olives, the Jordan River, and the Dead Sea. With keen perception, lyricism, and er-
udition, his chronicle evokes some of the sights, sounds, and struggles of arguably
the world’s most contested “battlegrounds of memory.”5 Dashkov combines vignettes
of resources edited by Nikolai N. Lisovoi, Rossiia v Sviatoi Zemle: Dokumenty i materialy

(Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2000).
3
On Dashkov’s inspection of consulates, as well as his sundry writings and memoranda on
Near Eastern affairs, see my book, Russian-Ottoman Relations in the Levant: The Dashkov
Archive, Minnesota Mediterranean and East European Monographs, no. 10 (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota, 2002), largely based on Dashkov’s personal fond in the Russian
State Historical Archive, St. Petersburg. This publication includes my translations of selected
passages from Dashkov’s Palestine report (106–12). Excerpts can also be found in my “The
Holy Places: A Russian Travel Perspective,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49, 3 (2005):
271–96; “Landscape of the Levant: A Russian View,” Chronos 10 (2004): 49–67; and “Ro-
manticism and Russian Travel Literature: Dashkov’s Tour of Ottoman Palestine,” Canadian
American Slavic Studies 38, 4 (2004): 431–42.
4
Dashkov published the following pieces in Northern Flowers (Severnye tsvety): “Afonskaia
gora: Otryvok iz puteshestviia po Gretsii v 1820 godu” (1825): 119–61, with descriptions of
the monasteries on Mount Athos, the fount of Orthodox spirituality; “Izvestiia o grecheskikh
i latinskikh rukopisiakh v seral´skoi biblioteke” (1825): 162–65, and “Eshche neskol´ko slov o
seral´skoi biblioteke” (1826): 283–96, on Latin and Greek manuscripts in the Topkapi Library,
Istanbul; and “Russkie poklonniki v Ierusalime: Otryvok iz puteshestviia po Gretsii i Pales-
tine v 1820 godu” (1826): 214–83, reprinted as a supplement to Russkii arkhiv (1881): 203–69.
On Del´vig’s literary journal, see John Mersereau, Jr., Baron Delvig’s “Northern Flowers,”
1825–1832: Literary Almanac of the Pushkin Pleiad (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1967).
5
Amos Elon, Jerusalem: Battlegrounds of Memory (New York: Kodansha America, 1995);
and Thomas A. Idinopulos, Jerusalem: A History of the Holiest City as Seen Through the
Struggles of Jews, Christians, and Muslims (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1994). Also useful is the
A Russian Pilgrim in Ottoman Jerusalem 103
of the natural landscape with geographic, topographical, and historical particulars

on the prominent landmarks. Citing Old and New Testaments, Virgil and Petrarch,
Tasso and Milton, Gibbon and Chateaubriand, as well as previous Russian pilgrims,
the work displays a sharp eye for detail, an aesthetic sensibility, and vivid descriptive
power. His passages resonate with some of the defining qualities of Romanticism,
such as fascination with the “exotic” and the “picturesque” and reverence for the
power, mystery, and primitive beauty of nature. The account echoes conventional
images and prevalent biases in European travel writing on the Ottoman Empire, as
Dashkov paints an overly negative picture of the “oriental other.” He accents episodes
of oppression, extortion, and related abuses of power by regional administrative offi-
cials, in this case Palestine’s chief authority, the pasha of Damascus and Acre.6 In sec-
tions on the holy places, the author voices harsh criticism of the internecine squabble
between Christian communities over worship and custodial rights. Deep-seated re-
sentment, malice, and bitterness, shared by all sides in this rivalry, offer little hope of
forbearance or reconciliation between Latins, Greeks, and other feuding sects. Lastly,
the inspector provides specific data on Russia’s pilgrims—their itinerary, expenses,
accommodation, and worship at different sites.
Excerpts from Dashkov’s report have been published in an anthology of Russian
travel literature on the holy lands in the first half of the nineteenth century.7 I have
worked from the Dashkov passages in this edition, endeavoring to render the narra-
tive into clear idiomatic English without altering its meaning or essence. Though I
have changed Dashkov’s sentence structure and syntax in some spots to make the
composition more readable, I have generally remained faithful to the author’s writing
style, including such particulars as his use of capital letters, colons, semicolons, and
exclamation marks. Any material in parenthesis is part of Dashkov’s original text; I
collection of travel excerpts in Francis E. Peters, Jerusalem: The Holy City in the Eyes of
Chroniclers, Visitors, Pilgrims, and Prophets from the Days of Abraham to the Beginnings of
Modern Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
6
For a good introduction to the perceptions of European travelers on the Ottoman Empire in
the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Allan Cunningham, “The Sick Man and the
British Physician,” in Eastern Questions in the Nineteenth Century: Collected Essays (Lon-
don: Frank Cass, 1993), 72–107. Also useful on traditional European attitudes towards Mus-
lims in general and Ottoman Turks in particular are Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York:
Vintage Books, 1979); and Norman Daniel, Islam, Europe and Empire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1966). Dashkov’s account of Palestine belongs to the larger story of Europe’s
renewed fascination for Jerusalem and the holy places in the nineteenth century. See Yehoshua
Ben-Arieh, The Rediscovery of the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century (Jerusalem: Magnes
Press, Hebrew University, 1979); and Naomi Shepherd, The Zealous Intruders: The Western
Rediscovery of Palestine (London: William Collins Sons, 1987).
7
K. Urguzova et al., Sviatye mesta v blizi i izdali: Putevye zametki russkikh pisatelei i poloviny
XIX veka (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura, RAN and Shkola-Press, 1995), 17-36, 289-300.
This noteworthy anthology, with explanatory notes and a helpful introduction, contains pas-
sages from the Near Eastern travels of Osip I. Senkovskii, Andrei N. Muravév, Avraam S.
Norov, and Petr A. Viazemskii.
have added brackets for my own emendations, translations of foreign terms, and brief
explications. The occasional ellipsis denotes a word or phrase I considered extrane-
ous, Dashkov’s scholarly references which I have inserted in the notes, or an ellipsis
in the excerpts published in the anthology. I have retained Dashkov’s notes, either
summarizing or translating his comments, and have added some notes of my own for
supplemental information or relevant sources on a particular topic.
All dates are in the Old Style Julian calendar, which in the nineteenth century
lagged twelve days behind the New Style Gregorian calendar. I have translated geo-
graphic place names in the form employed by Dashkov, for instance Smyrna instead
of modern-day Izmir, and Constantinople instead of Istanbul. Clarification is needed
on Dashkov’s usage of the term “Turks.” Frequently, he is referring to Ottoman Mus-
lims, both Turks and Arabs; yet in some cases he differentiates between the two
groups, as when he mentions Arab Muslims of Jerusalem or Bedouin Arab tribes
of Palestine. More confusion reigns when he cites “Greeks,” “Greek religion,” or
“Greek church.” The official Ottoman designation for Orthodox Christian subjects,
Millet-i Rum, or Greek millet, encompassed all Orthodox believers in the sultan’s
domain, including Serbs, Romanians, Bulgars, Vlachs, Albanians, and Arabs, as well
as Greeks.8 Since Greeks or Hellenized Orthodox often controlled the patriarchates,
coffers, and administrative offices of the church’s ecclesiastical hierarchy until the
latter part of the nineteenth century, it was quite common for travelers and schol-
ars to use “Greek faith” or “Greek church” to signify the Eastern Orthodox church
in Ottoman-ruled lands. Thus, for Dashkov, “Greek religion” and “Greek church”
are usually synonymous with the Eastern Orthodox faith and church in the Ottoman
Empire, while “Greeks” often refers to Ottoman Orthodox Christians. To complicate
matters, in addition to “Greeks,” Dashkov identifies various other Eastern Orthodox
sects or churches—Syrians, Georgians, Abyssinians, Maronites, Armenians—with
competing claims to the holy places.
Dmitrii V. Dashkov: “Russkie poklonniki v Ierusalime: Otryvok iz puteshestviia

po Gretsii i Palestine v 1820 godu” (“Russian Pilgrims in Jerusalem: An Excerpt
from a Journey to Greece and Palestine in 1820”)
Anyone who has never been at sea cannot readily fathom that a beautiful summer day
can sometimes seem more unbearable than bad weather in winter. Yet we discovered
this firsthand during the tedious crossing from Rhodes to Jaffa. A calm sea caught
us unawares in view of the fortress of Castel-Rosso, on the coast of Karamania, and
for five whole days we could not move from this spot.9 Our eyes wearied from the
monotony in every aspect of nature: from morning till evening the sea gleamed like
8
Richard Clogg, “The Greek Millet in the Ottoman Empire,” in Christians and Jews in the
Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, ed. Benjamin Braude and Bernard
Lewis, 2 vols. (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982), 1: 185–202.
9
Castel-Rosso, or Kastelorizon, is the Italian name for a small Greek island off the coast
of Turkey. Karamania, the coastal area of south central Turkey, is named after the town of
Karaman.
a looking-glass, while the sky was cloudless. The intolerable heat and stuffiness in
the cabin, the sweltering intense heat on the deck (where melting tar bubbled on the
ropes and planks), [and] the mournful tap of sails on the masts aroused despondency
in us and made us regret the storms we had contended with in these very same places
en route from Egypt to the Morea.… Like those times when, after a storm of pas-
sions, in moral slumber and with disgust for whatever had previously captivated us,
we regret the profound misfortunes that have shaken our existence but elevated the
soul!… Eventually, a slight breeze helped us enter the pier at Castel-Rosso, where
with difficulty we stocked up with fetid water. The fortress is built on a small precipi-
tous island, looking as if it has been torn from the mainland, and the inhabitants must
procure requisite foodstuffs from afar.
We continued to idle for more than a day opposite the southern promontory of
Cyprus (Cao Gatte), waiting for a fair wind.10 A powerful sea current pulled the
ship westward and carried us away from [our] desired destination. The Syrian coast
did not come into view until 20 August [1820]: first, the summit of Mount Carmel
appeared to the left; then, directly in front of us, the whitish seacoast of Caesarea;
and to the right the range of lofty mountains near Jerusalem. With intensity and avid
curiosity we gazed upon this land, so consequential in the history of mankind, rich in
wonders and in monumental events, cradle of the Christian faith; the land where the
legends of the Old and New Testaments live, where every hill, every thicket, every
ruin resonate with deeds of the Prophets and of celebrated heroes.
The entire area, from Sur (ancient Tyre) to Gaza, is extremely dangerous for
vessels during the stormy season; and Greek sailors, excluding daring islanders from
Hydra, Psara, and Spetsae, were on the whole inexperienced seafarers outside the
Archipelago at that time. Fortunately, our karavokyris (captain of the ship), a native
of Skiathos, had already brought worshipers to Jaffa on several occasions and, with
firm knowledge of these parts, pledged to steer the ship to the roadstead even at night.
He kept his word and at daybreak dropped anchor one or two versts from town.11
We made it to shore with him in a small boat, maneuvering carefully between huge
boulders against which the waves crashed with a roar, and went to rest at the Greek
metochion [monastic living quarters or cloister], where the abbot received us with
hospitality. With his help, we dispatched to the episcopal deputies in Jerusalem the
certificate, from Most Blessed Patriarch Polykarp,12 informing them of our visit.
Jaffa (ancient Joppa) was once a focal point of trade between Palestine, Egypt,
and adjacent islands. Today, under the negligent and rapacious rule of the Turks, the
10
Cao Gatte, or Cape of Cats, lies near the Monastery of St. Nicholas. According to medieval
legend, monks relied on cats to attack the many snakes of the region.
11
One verst is the equivalent of around 3,500 feet.
12
This explanatory note by Dashkov gives the full title of the patriarch of Jerusalem: “Most
Blessed and Most Holy Father and Patriarch of the Holy City of Jerusalem and of all Palestine,
Syria, Arabia beyond the Jordan River, Galilean Canaan, and Holy Zion.” When the patriarch
of Jerusalem transferred his residence to Istanbul, church affairs in Jerusalem were handled
by two episcopal deputies.
wharf is covered with sand and comes to life only during the passage of pilgrims. The
town is built with terraces, almost all hewn from stone, with a deep moat and a wall
that abuts the sea on both sides; the streets are narrow, while the houses are unsightly
and look as if they have been crushed by the flat roofs. Yet the outskirts, on the road
to Jerusalem, are attractive: from the very [town] gates extend the large gardens and
vineyards praised by all travelers.
We found the inhabitants [of Jaffa] in a state of confusion and fear. Abdullah, the
new pasha of Damascus and Acre (Jaffa is under his jurisdiction), having disregarded
the important services rendered to him by a Jew named Chaim, ordered this unfor-
tunate soul killed and his corpse thrown into the sea: all religious believers, Greeks
as well as Muslims, regretted the undeserved execution of a person who had been a
benefactor to them.13 At the same time, a detachment of troops suddenly encircled the
town of Safed, populated by Jews, and forcibly collected from them a tribute payment
equivalent to a ten-year tax levy. Turks and foreign merchants did not escape abuse;
European consuls, persons of little significance and timid, did not dare resist, and all
authorities trembled before the new ruler, whose unlawful absolute power and rage
threatened Palestine with a second Ahmet Cezzar Pasha.14 But for us these circum-
stances were propitious. The mütesellim (deputy governor) of Jaffa, afraid to cause
complaints, swiftly took measures to protect us from any sort of disturbance all the
way to Jerusalem and sternly prohibited Arab sheiks from demanding the customary
kafaro, or road dues, which Russian subjects have been released [from paying] by
Article Eight of the Treaty of Kutchuk-Kainardji.15
13
Dashkov elaborates this incident in his footnote: “Chaim enjoyed the trust of the previous
pashas, Cezzar and Suleiman; but having angered the former on one occasion, he lost his ears
and nose. One of the European consuls advised [Chaim], in a friendly conversation, to leave
for any Christian state, where his acquired wealth (the spoils of his murder!) would have pro-
vided him with the means to end his days in plenty and in peace.… Stinginess did not keep
[Chaim] in a land where the property and life of each person are in constant danger, but force
of habit, blind faith in destiny, and a certain innate indifference, [all of which] comprise a
distinctive feature in the character of eastern [Near Eastern] peoples.” Shepherd (The Zealous
Intruders, 20) mentions that Cezzar (Djezzar) Pasha disfigured and mutilated the face of the
Jewish banker Chaim (Haim) Farhi.
14
The arbitrariness and cruelty of Abdullah (Abdallah), pasha of Damascus and Acre from
1819 to 1831, reminded Dashkov of the former governor of Ottoman Syria, Ahmet Cezzar Pa-
sha (d. 1804), who brutally suppressed local risings, extended his personal rule over much of
Palestine, and defended Acre against Napoleonic forces in 1799. On Ahmet Cezzar (Djezzar)
Pasha, the “butcher of Acre,” see Stanford J. Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Mod-
ern Turkey, 1: Empire of the Gazis: The Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Empire, 1280–1808
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 253, 268–70; and Ben-Arieh, The Rediscov-
ery of the Holy Land, 26–31. On the extensive powers of local warlords in Ottoman Syria,
such as Abdullah Pasha, see Thomas Philipp, Acre: The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian City,
1730–1831 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
15
This landmark treaty (1774), following the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74, granted Russia
wide-ranging commercial, diplomatic, and religious rights in the Ottoman Empire, including
freedom of passage for Russian pilgrims to Jerusalem. Article Eight stipulated that “no …
Having procured, for a moderate price, the necessary horses and camels, we left
Jaffa before evening on 22 August, accompanied by an official from the mütesellim
and by monastic dragomans [interpreters], and rode past the lovely Sharon Valley
to Ramleh (ancient Arimathea): we spent several hours there, waiting for the moon
to appear above the horizon.16 From [Ramleh] the plain rises imperceptibly to the
base of the Judean mountains, barren and inhabited by sparsely populated tribes of
rapacious Arabs. Entering a gorge, we saw another aspect of nature: wild places, with
almost no signs of human activity, where ruins traced with shrubbery appear here and
there on the hills, like graves from ancient times. The road, rocky and difficult, now
winds along steep grades, now descends to deep hollows on the bottom of parched
streams. This look of a wilderness, quite vividly and accurately portrayed by Cha-
teaubriand …, imbues the soul with melancholy: there, the whistling wind and the
piercing bark of jackals muffle the clamor of escorts and the clatter of horses’ hoofs.17
Upon arrival in a poor Arab village, about fifteen versts from Jerusalem, we were
stopped by order of Sheik Abu Ghush, the terror of pilgrims, with an urgent request
to call on him for a rest.18 We found him in a small courtyard, sitting in the shade on
contribution, duty, or other tax shall be exacted from those pilgrims and travelers by any one
whomsoever, either at Jerusalem or elsewhere, or on the road.… During their sojourn in the
Ottoman Empire, they shall not suffer the least wrong or injury; but, on the contrary, shall
be under the strictest protection of the laws. Quoted in Jacob C. Hurewitz, ed., The Middle
East and North Africa in World Politics: A Documentary Record, 1: European Expansion,
1535–1914, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 95.
16
The Sharon or Saron Valley, a plain along the coast of Palestine from Mount Carmel to
Jaffa, is known for the “Rose of Sharon” and for its fertility in biblical times. Ramleh (Ramla
today), supposedly the birthplace of Joseph of Arimathea, the disciple who provided the tomb
for Christ’s body after the crucifixion, became a prominent Islamic center after the Muslim
conquest and served as the Arab capital of Palestine before the First Crusade.
17
On numerous occasions in his narrative, Dashkov acknowledges the influence of the roman-
ticized Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1811) by François René Chateaubriand (1768–1848),
citing passages from this hugely successful and widely read work, which appeared in twelve
editions from 1811 to 1814. Ironically, Chateaubriand visited Jerusalem for only four days
during his two-week tour of Palestine in 1806; yet his vivid but disparaging remarks on the re-
gion’s barren landscape, poverty, misery, and lawlessness, as well as his bias against Muslims,
echoed in the travel writings of countless European tourists and pilgrims, including Dashkov.
For more on Chateaubriand’s highly subjective account of the Holy City, see Said, Oriental-
ism, 169–79; Peters, Jerusalem, 545–46, 560–64, 578–83; and Elon, Jerusalem, 131–34.
18
With the breakdown of Ottoman ruling institutions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, administrative control over Palestine and Syria was endangered by unruly Bedouin
tribes who disrupted trade and pilgrimage caravans in the region. To thwart these disorders,
the Ottoman government selected various families and tribes to safeguard these routes. The
tribe headed by Abu Ghush was assigned to police the pilgrimage road from Jaffa to Jerusa-
lem, an appointment abused by the sheik to squeeze excessive tolls and dues from Christian
worshipers. See Kamil J. Asali, “Jerusalem under the Ottomans, 1516–1831 AD,” in Jerusalem
in History: 3000 BC to the Present Day, ed. Asali, rev. ed. (London: Kegan Paul International,
1997), 200–27, especially 208–09; and Peters, Jerusalem, 543–45.
bast mats and surrounded by elders of his tribe. They all received us very warmly.
Abu Ghush boasted of his acquaintance with the English queen, the spouse of George
IV, and with the eminent Sidney Smith, displayed the gifts he had received from them
with the obvious intention of arousing our own generosity and, treating us amicably,
set out to accompany the caravan beyond the village.19 He sat on a splendid horse and
rode it with remarkable agility; while descending the Terebinth Valley, he rushed at
full tilt down the precipitous slope, not reeling in the saddle and ceaselessly urging
on the horse with wide and sharp spurs.20 Bidding farewell, he promised to visit us in
al-Quds, vowed never to harass Russian travelers, and asked us to put in a kind word
for him with the dreaded pasha of Damascus and Acre.21
It is impossible to imagine anything more desolate than the environs of Jerusa-
lem: mountains, precipices, ravines without greenery, nearly treeless, everywhere
blanketed with round stones; it appeared as if a shower of stones had fallen from the
sky upon this ungodly land. Around midday, exhausted by the intense heat, we as-
cended a height and saw before us a line of crenellated walls and towers, surrounded
by neither settlements nor scattered huts and looking as if they were stirring slightly
in the middle of the desert. Upon first glance at these ancient ramparts—the city of
David, Herod, and Godfrey of Bouillon—thousands of recollections, one more vivid
than another, one more holy than another, press against the heart.22 Let cold-hearted
minds deride the raptures of worshipers! Here, at the foot of Zion, everyone is a
Christian, everyone a believer, who has but retained an ardent heart and a love for the
majestic!
Notified in advance from Jaffa, Greek monks met us at the western gate (Bab al-
Khalil), welcoming us on behalf of the second episcopal deputy, Procopius (the chief
deputy, the archbishop of Arabian Petra, was visiting his diocese at that time), and
took us to the monastic house set aside for us near the patriarchate and the Church
19
Sir Sidney Smith (1764–1840) was the English admiral who successfully defended the for-
tress of Acre from Napoleon’s army in 1799. Dashkov’s footnote mentions that Smith gave
Sheik Abu Ghush an offprint inscribed with Arabic quotations from the Koran in praise of
Christians and their zeal for prayer.
20
The Terebinth is the valley where David gathered stones for his sling before the battle with
Goliath.
21
Dashkov’s explanatory note correctly states that Muslims considered Jerusalem a holy city,
ranked with Mecca and Medina as the most important sacred centers of the Islamic faith.
Muslims call Jerusalem al-Quds (The Holy One), Bait al-Maqdis (City of the Sanctuary), or
Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary).
22
David, the second king of Israel and Judah after Saul, captured the fortress of Zion and
supposedly wrote the Psalms. Herod the Great was king of Judea (37–4 BC) during the time of
Christ, while his son Herod Antipas ruled Galilee from 4 BC to 39 AD Godfrey of Bouillon,
leader of the First Crusade, conquered Jerusalem in 1099 and became the first Latin ruler of
the Holy City and defender of the Lord’s Tomb.
of the Resurrection [Church of the Holy Sepulcher].23 They provided us with the
greatest possible aid and comfort in this hospitable refuge, and in absolute freedom
we devoted ourselves to worshiping sacred places and to seeing every noteworthy site
in and around the city.
I will not begin to relate what has already been described countless times by
erudite and perceptive travelers, about which so many have argued and continue to
argue, expounding differently the tales of the ancients. Every pace in the new [city
of] Jerusalem is measured; but the extent of the old city is still subject to question,
and the whereabouts of some spots, mentioned in the Old Testament and the Gospels,
have not been satisfactorily determined. We know that the new city encompasses only
a portion of the former [city], destroyed by Titus in 71 AD [the destruction actually
occurred in 70 AD]. Flavius Josephus … asserts that the circumference of the walls
comprised thirty-three stadia [somewhat more than 6.5 miles]; today it contains, ac-
cording to the testimony of Maundrell, only 4,630 standard paces, or around three
versts.24 Some critics, trying to reconcile on-site observations with the text of the
Jewish historian, reduce the dimensions of his stadia; others simply accuse him of in-
accuracy and exaggeration—though experience has proven that one should never be
so quick to criticize ancient writers and that the most recent exact surveys have often
corroborated their information, which had seemed like fables to us. The inquisitive
can get an idea of the debates, upon which are based the various opinions of scholars
on the location of Mount Zion, Golgotha, and related sites, having read the essay by
d’Anville … and the article by Ritter.25 … Chateaubriand accepts the authority of the
23
Petra, an early center of Christianity today located in Jordan, is renowned for its pictur-
esque ancient tombs carved in the pink rock. Known to Roman Catholics as the Church of the
Holy Sepulcher, and to Eastern Orthodox as the Church of the Resurrection, this central shrine
of Christianity comprises a cavernous complex of chapels, altars, and passageways commem-
orating the places of Christ’s crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. See Charles Coüasnon, The
Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (London: Oxford University Press, 1974); and
Peters, Jerusalem, 133–37, 203–06, 311–14, 437–42, 566–67, 572–79. Recent descriptions of
this foremost Christian shrine include Martin Biddle, The Tomb of Christ (Gloucestershire,
UK: Sutton, 1999); and Martin Biddle et al., The Church of the Holy Sepulchre (New York:
Rizzoli, 2000).
24
Dashkov refers to two of the most reliable sources on the topography and circumference of
Jerusalem: The Jewish War, by Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (37–100 AD), and A Jour-
ney from Aleppo to Jerusalem, at Easter, A.D. 1697 (1703), by Henry Maundrell (1665–1701),
chaplain of the Aleppo factory of the English Levant Company. For more on these works,
see Peters, Jerusalem, 42–43, 67–72, 77–89, 516–24. A standard pace, covered by a step or a
stride, is generally estimated at around three feet, in contrast to the Roman or geometric pace,
which measures about five feet.
25
Dashkov cites the scholarly writings of French geographer and cartographer Jean-Baptiste
Bourguignon d’Anville (1697–1782) (Dissertation sur l’étendue de l’ancienne Jérusalem et de
son temple, 1747) and of German geographer Karl Ritter (1779–1859) (Einleitung zur allge-
meinen vergleichenden Geographie, 1817–18).
former in everything.26 Eschewing pointless repetitions, I shall offer Russian readers

some personal observations on the current state of the major places of worship and on
the life of our compatriots [Russian pilgrims] in Jerusalem.
The foremost sacred place for Christians, the Lord’s Tomb, is located within
the walls of the vast Church of the Resurrection, founded by St. Helen around 326.
In vain were doubts raised about the authenticity of this monument: a great many
compelling proofs attest that Christians, in the course of the first three centuries [of
the faith], preserved accurate knowledge about the site of the Savior’s suffering and
burial. [The early Christians], in the words of Gibbon, “marked the scene of every
memorable event, in accordance with indisputable legend.”27 A fire in October 1807
[the fire actually occurred in September 1808] destroyed nearly half the church. The
Tomb remained unharmed; but the cedar dome of the church, engulfed in flame,
fell on the stone cast aside [by an angel] at the resurrection and smashed it to bits;
the Greek Katholikon (chapel) and the adjoining side-altars burned down. Western
Europe, which once shed rivers of blood for the possession of this sanctuary, in-
differently looked upon its ruins. Some of the Greeks, in servitude and oppression,
collected nearly seven million lev28 (more than 4.5 million rubles), purchased the
Porte’s permission for the price of gold, and restored the entire edifice on its former
foundations, under the supervision of a mere kalfa, or apprentice. Old men, children,
and women toiled with zeal, and many to this day take comfort in the memory that
they hauled earth during the construction of the church. These offerings, along with
other favorable circumstances, gained for our coreligionists the right to celebrate the
divine liturgy at the Holy Sepulcher: a right confirmed by the hatti-sherif [edict] of
Sultan Mahmud II [r. 1808–39], but still disputed by the Catholics.
26
Though he praises Chateaubriand’s depiction of Palestine, he rebukes the French writer’s
highly personalized and melancholic portrait of Greece: “In general, the information of Cha-
teaubriand on present-day Jerusalem is as exact and accurate as his notes on Greece are in-
correct and superficial.” Said and Peters (see above, n. 17) have argued that the same criticism
applies to Chateaubriand’s work on Jerusalem.
27
Instead of identifying the source of this statement by acclaimed English historian Edward
Gibbon (1737–94), Dashkov directs his readers to the writings of d’Anville and Chateaubriand
for particulars on the holy places.
28
Dashkov’s use of lev (lion) refers to an Ottoman coin in Palestine called esedi (with the lion)
or esedi gurush. The Levant did not have a common or standardized currency for business
transactions in the early nineteenth century; Ottoman gold and silver coins circulated along
with money from Austria, Spain, Venice, France, Holland, and Britain. On the confusing ar-
ray of Levantine currencies, see Issawi, The Economic History of Turkey, 326–29; and Şevket
Pamuk, “Evolution of the Ottoman Monetary System, 1326–1914,” in An Economic and Social
History of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Halil Inalcik and Donald Quataert (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1994), 947–80. After much diplomatic and financial negotiation, the
Sublime Porte authorized Greek Christians to restore the church, supposedly after payment of
a bribe of nearly 2.5 million rubles, almost twice the cost of the rebuilding itself. On the fire
and the reconstruction of the church, see Elon, Jerusalem, 69–70; and Idinopulos, Jerusalem,
190.
Upon entering the church, a worshiper with indignation sees a Turkish guard
greedily sizing up the arrivals for collecting the fixed tax. His superior, as a sign of
respect, often walks in front of them even to the altar, points out the holy sites with
a chibouk [tobacco pipe with long stem], or disperses the throngs of people with a
lash!… About forty steps from the doors, in the middle of the majestic rotunda, an
edicule (kouvouklion) [baldachin or canopied altar] of yellowish marble is raised over
the Tomb of Christ and faces eastward: inside [the edicule] one at first comes across
the chapel of the Angel and then the narrow grotto where, according to ancient cus-
tom, the body [of Christ] was placed on a large stone, in the very mound that is illu-
minated and covered today by a marble slab. Thirty-six icon-lamps, from the cupola
opening above, burn over it day and night. The offertory is performed on this imper-
ishable sacrificial altar; and at the start of the liturgy, the vessels are brought to the
chapel, where part of the stone cast aside by the Angel serves as a communion table.
The walls of the edicule, outside and inside, are adorned with fabrics: the occasion for
many quarrels between the various denominations!
At every step in this church, a believer finds traces of the magnificent act of re-
demption. Here, Christ was shackled and bound to the pillar;29 here, he appeared after
the resurrection to Mary Magdalene and (if one is to believe legend) to the grieving
Holy Mother; here, his cross was discovered. There, the stone of unction, on which
his body was anointed with fragrances and wrapped in a shroud; the chapels of the
mocking (impropere), of the division of the raiment, of the good thief, of Centurion
Longinus;30 [and] the tombs of Joseph [of Arimathea] and Nicodemus. Overhead, at
Golgotha, two small communion tables signify where they nailed Christ to the tree
[cross] and where it was raised. Below, the descent tothe cave, in which Empress
Helen found the cross, excavating the blocked up foot of the hill.… In vain did Em-
peror Hadrian [r. 117–38 A.D.], during the time of persecution, try to appropriate
these sites for idolatry, erecting a statue of Venus at Golgotha and [a statue] of Jupiter
over the Lord’s Tomb. These idols did not consign the sacred objects of worship to
oblivion, but all the more preserved their remembrance until the arrival in Jerusalem
of the pious empress, who secured the mark of the Christian faith on the ruins of
paganism.
Compact houses and an edifice that belongs to the Greek monastery press upon
the outer walls of the church. The church previously had two entrances; one, however,
on the northern side, has been walled up: only the southern gates, known as the holy
doors, remain. [Designated] Turks keep the keys and unlock the doors only in the
presence of the mütevelli (overseer), appointed by the pasha of Damascus and Acre,
29
Dashkov offers this information in his footnote: “A fragment of the pillar is kept in the
Franciscan monks’ chapel, behind an iron grille, in such a way so that worshipers are not able
to kiss it but can only touch it with the tip of a walking-stick. The Catholics, in explaining
this much resented precaution, claim that the Greeks have repeatedly tried to steal this sacred
object. The Greek clergy, for their part, accuse [the Catholics] of similar attempts, and even
they shelter, behind a grille under an altar, part of the pillar which soldiers [used] to bind and
to scourge the Savior.”
30
These side-chapels commemorate subjects and events associated with the crucifixion.
and of the dragomans for the Greek, Catholic, and Armenian religious communities.
Inhabitants of the city and worshipers of all denominations then proceed to make
the rounds of the various chapels without any restriction, but they are not allowed to
conduct services in portions that belong to other faiths. Several [pilgrims], obtaining
permission from the religious authorities, spend some time inside the church with
monks and priests who take turns, and together with them receive victuals through
small openings in the doors and in the vault over the main Greek altar.
And we, too, spent several days, for me unforgettable, in this holy solitude. All of
the surroundings awakened ineffable feelings in my soul. Often, in the dead of night,
when monks accustomed to this spectacle slept peacefully in cells, I stood, leaning
on a pillar, in the middle of the spacious church. Cupolas, galleries, and the entire
Greek Katholikon, all the way to the altar, were shrouded in darkness; but the sacred
monuments appeared as if enveloped by rows of inextinguishable icon-lamps and re-
sembled shining oases in a dark thicket. The ancient past was resurrected in my imag-
ination: the sufferings of the Righteous One; the source of life, emanating from here,
when the inscribed tablets of Moses [Mosaic law] gave way to the New Testament; the
triumph of the Crusaders, genuflecting before the magnificent tomb delivered by their
swords; and the crowning of the hero-leader with a diadem of thorn. I looked at the
grave of Godfrey, and Tasso’s inspired canto rang in my ear.31 Toward morning these
reveries were cut short by the ringing of a church bell in the wooden belfry; priests
and deacons flickered by like phantoms, with burning censers in their hands; chants
from the gathered worshipers blended with the sound of organs; and praise to God
rose up in different languages, with different rites, but in a single church.…
All the places of worship are divided among the Greeks, the Catholics, and the
[Monophysite] Armenians. The Copts have only one altar, affixed to the edicule over
the Tomb; and the Syrians (Nestorians), the Georgians, the Abyssinians, and the Ma-
ronites … have been removed by force from the church, or have voluntarily conceded
their rights to other [religious] communities.32 Each [denomination] adorns its prop-
erty as it desires; but in those areas jointly controlled by two sects, the number of
icons and icon-lamps has been set once and for all with the consent of the Turks. The
sequence of services and rites has likewise been determined at great length by special
regulations—and ever since then an immediate cause for discord among Jerusalem’s
Christians has ceased. Mutual vexations still linger in hearts, and gold brought for the
31
Dashkov alludes to Tasso’s sixteenth-century epic Jerusalem Delivered, which exalted the
heroic feats of Godfrey of Bouillon, leader of the First Crusade. As for the controversy re-
garding the Greeks’ alleged destruction of Crusader crypts in the Church of the Resurrection
during its reconstruction after the 1808 fire, Dashkov weighs in: “The Greeks are mistakenly
accused of damaging the tombs over the graves of Godfrey and his brother [and heir] Baldwin,
erected in the period of Latin rule. Fire destroyed these monuments; but their sites are marked
by brick mounds, and the Catholics themselves have always had the authority to restore the old
tombs and inscriptions.”
32
For more on the varied Christian sects of Ottoman Jerusalem, as well as Ottoman rule in
Palestine, see the essays in Braude and Lewis, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire,
vol. 2.
decoration of the church is still squandered in Acre, Damascus, and Tsargrad [Con-
stantinople] in order to harm rivals. At least the heads of the clergy, not passing up a
chance to accuse each other of daily insults, try not to let monks take part in public
and sordid quarrels, which formerly happened at the Holy Sepulcher, to the sorrow
of coreligionists.
The malice originates in the deep-rooted resentment of each denomination to-
ward another and in the desire to exert exclusive control over the places where the
blood of the Savior was shed for everyone. Ever since the division of the Roman
church from the church in Constantinople, a spirit of meekness and love has rarely
governed their relations. In the eyes of the Crusaders, the Greeks were almost worse
than the worshipers of Mohammad; in the eyes of the Greeks, the Catholics did not
have the right to be called Christian.33 The spite inherited by [Catholics and Greeks]
has not subsided even today, particularly in numerous seaside towns and on islands,
subject to the Porte, where some of the inhabitants have embraced Roman [Catholic]
doctrines. A Catholic who converts to Orthodoxy is subjected to a second baptism by
the Greeks. On the other hand, a Catholic who has married an Orthodox woman must
be divorced from her: this is what European clergy, born in the land of enlightenment
and tolerance, preached in Smyrna in 1817! “Of such wrath are the gods?”34
As for the Holy Sepulcher, both sides base their claims on official documents of
various caliphs and sultans, from Umar [caliph, 634–44] to Mahmud II. The Greeks
want equality, but the Catholics—dominance, contending that this sacred spot is their
property and that its custody belongs solely to them. Until the renovation of the “great
church” (i megali ekklisia, as the Greeks call the Church of the Resurrection), the
Catholics did not permit the Orthodox to conduct services at the edicule and, even
after the hatti-sherif issued in 1815, attempted to retrieve their lost advantages by
utilizing the influence of their envoys at the Porte. A shortage of money and a dispute
that broke out with the Armenians over the Church of the Nativity [in Bethlehem]
compelled them to leave the Greeks in peace and to comply with the given situation.
By virtue of this [arrangement], the Greeks and the Catholics take turns washing and
sweeping the edicule and the stone of unction; they have an equal number of icons,
icon-lamps, and candlesticks and an equal right to decorate the walls with coverings.
33
Dashkov remarks in his note: “When present-day Greeks speak about Christians, they al-
ways mean themselves or Russians; Catholics are called Latins, Franks, or simply Westerners
(οι Δυτικοί).” Dashkov gleaned additional material on sectarian disputes over the holy places
from the travelogue by English chaplain Maundrell (see above, n. 24), who voiced amazement
at the intensity of these squabbles. Peters, Jerusalem, 516–24, with excerpts from Maundrell,
one of Dashkov’s sources on Jerusalem. For more information on this sectarian strife, see also
Victoria Clark, Holy Fire: The Battle for Christ’s Tomb (London: Macmillan, 2005).
34
Dashkov’s text cites the original Latin from Virgil’s Aeneid (1.11): “Tantaene animis cae-
lestibus irae?” (Is there so much anger in the minds of the gods?). The line refers to battles
among the gods and to the gods’ treatment of Aeneas during and after the Trojan War. Two
recent studies of the Crimean War cover the sectarian quarrels over the holy sites: Trevor
Royle, Crimea: The Great Crimean War, 1854–1856 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000);
and Orlando Figes, The Crimean War: A History (New York: Henry Holt, 2010).
The Armenians are deprived of most of these privileges: they have only an icon above
the doors and several icon-lamps. In all religious rites, they occupy third place.
The four-cornered stone columns, encircling the edicule, and the upper and lower
galleries are also apportioned among the denominations. The southern part of Gol-
gotha belongs to the Catholics, while the Greeks have obtained from the Georgians
the northern portion, where the cross was raised. As for the site of its discovery, the
grotto itself, narrow and permeated with dampness, it is still in dispute among [the
sects]. The former [the Catholics] do not allow other denominations to arrange icon-
lamps here, while the latter [the Greeks] complain about the deliberate damage to
marble slabs placed there by the Orthodox.35
But, censuring justifiably these feuds, we maintain that the mode of eastern
[Ottoman] judicial proceedings contributes a great deal to their continuation. The
verdicts of kadis [Muslim judges] are based almost always on the testimonies of wit-
nesses, especially of Muslims: and that is why each litigant tries to win over to his
side the church guards and Jerusalem’s notables.36 To convince them that a law is
beyond question, custom and long standing are essential; in the eyes of the Turks,
both are more important than lifeless official documents. For example (according
to their notions), the edicule is controlled by whichever [denomination] sweeps and
decorates it: knowing this, each [sect] is afraid to yield to a rival and resists adamantly
the smallest change. Moreover, the pashas, mütesellims [deputy governors], and kadis
constantly nourish hostility among the Christians for their own interests. Today pro-
tecting certain [groups], tomorrow they promise others staunch intercession and re-
joice in the rise of complaints and denunciations. In 1819, the pasha of Damascus,
the chief authority over Jerusalem, allowed the Armenians, for sixty thousand lev,
to cut a doorway near their altar in the Bethlehem church, to the great annoyance
of the Catholics: and the latter were offered a chance, for a lower price, to rescind
the granted permission. They did not pay [the pasha] the requested fee—and so the
door remained open. During the next year, setting up camp outside the walls of the
city with a caravan headed for Mecca, he exacted from the Armenians another thirty
thousand lev and for a second time proposed to the Catholics the very same condi-
tions.… If it is true that laws and governments shape the morality of people every-
35
Dashkov chose to omit many details about the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, asserting that
these facts, while indispensable for anyone who wanted an exact picture of the shrine, “would
be tedious and obscure” in his narrative. But he anticipated that readers’ curiosity “will soon
be satisfied with the publication of the exquisite and complete plan of the great church, made
on site by academician Vorobév.” The painter Maksim N. Vorobév (1787–1855), appointed
professor at Russia’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1823, accompanied Dashkov on his trip to Jeru-
salem. Dashkov extolled the artistic talents of his travel companion, reporting that Vorobév’s
drawings would include particulars on the main religious denominations in the church, their
icons and icon-lamps, and related matters.
36
“Notables” refers to the leading and most influential families in Jerusalem. On local elites,
not just in Jerusalem but in other parts of the Ottoman Levant, see Donald Quataert, The
Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 46–50, 62–64,
101–07.
where, then an impartial observer must look to the spirit of Turkish rule to find fault
for the vices he condemns.
It is hard to calculate the cost to Jerusalem’s Christians for the sham tolerance of
the Porte and for the indulgence of local authorities. Based on information we gath-
ered, the Greeks spent around fifty thousand lev on presents in the course of only a
single month, August 1820. We should add to this [sum] basic expenses for church
building, for the [Jerusalem] patriarchate, and for similar purposes—and we affirm
that rumors of secret monastic riches, supposedly increasing every year through lav-
ish offerings, are just as mythical as the tale of Abulkazem’s inexhaustible treasury
in Arabian stories.37 On the contrary, at the time of our visit, monks of all denomina-
tions were reduced to extremity. The Catholics, seldom encountering Latin pilgrims
and receiving very meager assistance from Rome, unexpectedly lost [income from]
the large estates in Spain seized by the cortes [representative assemblies]. The Greeks
were barely able to pay their debts and to support themselves with the revenues from
lands and monasteries, outside Palestine, that belong to the Holy Sepulcher and with
the offerings from Orthodox worshipers. Even the Armenians, the wealthiest of all
Eastern Christians, were nearly ruined after the misfortune which befell their core-
ligionist sarafs (bankers) in Constantinople in 1819, some of whom were executed
while others were sentenced to captivity by edict of the sultan.
We shall return to our report. Several ruins to the southeast of the great church
denote the road of suffering (via dolorosa)38 along which the Savior trod from the
Pretorium to Golgotha: citing testimony of the holy fathers and other writers, one
finds there the houses of Pilate and of the pious woman Veronica, the dwelling of
the evil rich man, the place where the Holy Mother met her Son carrying the cross,
[and] the gate of judgment which sentenced criminals to death outside the city walls.
But ancient legends are incomplete regarding [the Way of the Cross]: they need to be
augmented by tales from mirhadjis (guides) and by the imagination of worshipers.
We thus mention the houses of high priests Annas and Caiaphas, of SS. Joachim and
Anne, the prison of Apostle Peter, and so on. Time, the myriad captivities of Jerusa-
lem, and the oppressive Muslim yoke have erased nearly all traces of these secondary
monuments of Christianity.
On the site where, according to general opinion, the Apostle James was sen-
tenced to death, there stands a magnificent cloister, owned in turn by the Georgians,
37
According to Dashkov, at least one recent travelogue on Greece repeated the unfounded
and unconfirmed story that the Greek monastery near the Church of the Holy Sepulcher con-
tained an undisclosed amount of wealth in a secret treasury, coveted by sultans, who had yet to
discover its exact whereabouts. Based on his own investigations, Dashkov adamantly refutes
these rumors, declaring that the monastery’s treasury consisted only of pilgrims’ offerings
and other church revenues: “In the monastery’s sacristy, we saw silver chandeliers, crucifixes,
Gospels, and gold-embroidered vestments, for the most part of Russian craftsmanship; but it is
surpassed in wealth by many of the sacristies on Mount Athos.”
38
The Way of the Cross traced the path or last steps of Christ across Jerusalem, from his trial
by Pontius Pilate to his execution, burial, and resurrection. See Peters, Jerusalem, 155–56,
501–03.
the Greeks, and the Armenians. The last [of these sects] (so they say) seized it by force
during the patriarchate of Paisios. Today [this monastery] is under the authority of a
separate Armenian patriarch, who is subject neither to the [catholicus-patriarch] of
Echmiadzin nor to the [patriarch] of Constantinople.39 Only through offerings have
the Greeks been able to retain possession of their major monastery, for them all the
more important because of its proximity to the Church of the Resurrection. The epis-
copal deputies reside here, and pilgrims are welcomed during the initial days of [their]
arrival: small churches and cells are scattered about, in no particular order, amid open
vestibules and passageways; and nearby are granaries for feeding the many monks
and Orthodox Arabs.40
The Catholic convent of the Franks is controlled by the Franciscan Order. Its
abbot is officially recognized as the guardian of the Holy Sepulcher [on behalf of the
Catholics] and usually replaced every three years.41
Of the ancient edifices within the walls [of Jerusalem], the curiosity of travelers
is especially drawn to the fortified bastion, supposedly the home of David, and to
the renowned mosque of Umar. The former, according to the opinion of d’Anville, is
situated on the same spot where the Citadel of the king-psalmist [David], and subse-
quently the Psephinus Tower, once stood and where, at sunrise, one could see all the
way to the borders of Arabia, to the sea, and to the furthest edge of the land of Judea.42
… The view from the present-day stronghold encompasses all of the environs: in
between and beyond the tops of the nearby stony hills another mountain range rises
up, just as barren, on which the remains of old towers and fallen minarets are visible.
The mosque [Dome of the Rock] was built on Mount Moriah, separated from
Zion by a deep hollow—on the very foundations of the Temple of Solomon, restored
by Zerubbabel [in 520 BC] and ultimately destroyed by Titus. Ruins enveloped this
site during the persecution of the Apostolic church, and also during its triumph.
When [Caliph] Umar captured Jerusalem and sought a place to begin construction
of his mosque, Greek patriarch Sophronios [634–38], fearing the loss of the Lord’s
39
When Paisios, patriarch of Jerusalem from 1646 to 1660, visited Moscow in 1649, the
Armenian clergy succeeded in obtaining the sultan’s permission to acquire the cloister. The
“separate Armenian patriarch” refers to the bishop of the Armenian community in Jerusalem,
whose title was raised to patriarch by the middle of the eighteenth century. The town of Ech-
miadzin, capital of the ancient Christian kingdom of Armenia, continued to serve as the center
of the Armenian church and the place of residence of the catholicus-patriarch.
40
Dashkov writes that in addition to the monastic house attached to the Orthodox patriarch-
ate of Jerusalem, the Greeks owned several other monasteries and nunneries in the Holy City.
The most noteworthy, he recounts, were “John the Baptist, for the beauty of its church and en-
tire structure; St. Nicholas, where there is a school for Arabs; [and] St. George, with a hospital
and an alms-house for elderly men.”
41
In 1342, Pope Clement VI named the Franciscan Order the official caretaker of the holy
places for Roman Catholics. On the Franciscans in the Holy City, see Peters, Jerusalem, 369–
70, 498–501, 506–09, 556–61, 580–84; and Idinopulos, Jerusalem, 186–89.
42
In addition to d’Anville, Dashkov cites The Jewish War by Flavius Josephus.
Tomb, pointed the conqueror to Moriah. Caliph al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik [r. 705–15]
completed the structure, a masterpiece of art, resembling (says Chateaubriand) a tent
pitched in the middle of the desert. Christians are strictly forbidden to enter: any at-
tempt would expose a European to great danger, and a Turkish subject—to certain ex-
ecution, unless he converts. In the year before our arrival [1819], an unfortunate Greek
[went] there, disguised as a prominent official of the pasha of Damascus; but later he
paid for this with his life, since he did not want to save himself by apostatizing.43
The southern part of Mount Zion, formerly within the walls, today lies outside
the city. The Last Supper took place there; the tombs of David and Solomon are also
there, in a mosque, where the Turks do not allow believers of different faiths. On the
same hill lies the cemetery for Jerusalem’s Christians of all denominations (pilgrims
are buried in Potter’s Field), while at the foot of the slope, spouting from stone, is the
pool of Siloam, evoked by the poet of Paradise Lost when summoning the celestial
Muse:
… if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flow’d
Fast by the oracle of God.44
The Valley of Jehoshaphat, covered in ruins, separates the Mount of Olives,

shaded in places with olive trees, from Zion and Moriah. A turbid stream, supposedly
the brook of Kedron, flows in the middle of the valley during rainy season; but it dries
up altogether in summer and fall. The masterly pen of Chateaubriand vividly depicted
this thicket where, according to the prophet Joel, at some point the entire human race
will be assembled for judgment:
The stones in the cemetery of the Jews are piled up, like a heap of fragments,
at the base of the settlement of Siloam; it is difficult to distinguish the huts
themselves from the graves that surround them. Three ancient monuments
tower above this field of destruction, the tombs of Zechariah, Jehoshaphat,
and Absalom. Before one’s eyes lies sad Jerusalem, over which the slightest
smoke is not visible [and] from which not a sound is heard; gazing at the des-
olation of the mountains, where there is no living creature, and at all those
43
One of the most sacred shrines in Islam, the Dome of the Rock or Qubbal al-Sakh, com-
memorating the prophet Muhammad’s ascent to heaven, was built during the caliphate of Abd
al-Malik (685–704), the father and predecessor of al-Walid. Dashkov remarks that Catholic
pilgrims, such as Archbishop William of Tyre (1099–1187), historian and chronicler of the
Crusades, recorded their observations of this famed mosque. These impressions “have been
corroborated for us by information provided by our janissary, purposely sent [to the mosque]
at prayer time. He saw the stone (sacred for Muslims), from which Muhammad mounted [the
winged steed] al-Buraq in preparation for his flight to heaven, and the two small pillars which
allegedly crush sinners who walk through them.” See Elon, Jerusalem, 213–24; and Idinopu-
los, Jerusalem, 224–35, for a brief discussion of al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock.
44
Dashkov’s text includes these English lines from John Milton.
graves in disorder, broken, smashed to bits, ajar, one might think that the
sound of a trumpet has already resounded, calling to judgment, and that the
dead are ready to rise from the valley.45
The site of the Lord’s ascension is thought to be on the middle summit of the
Mount of Olives. The remains of a splendid church, erected in the time of Constantine
[d. 337], have been turned into a mosque. [This prompts] an observation that from
time immemorial Muslims have appropriated for themselves all the heights around
the city. They believe that during the final days of the world, the wild [warrior tribes]
Gog and Magog will besiege the prophet Jesus Christ in Jerusalem and occupy the
adjacent mountains: from [the summits] they will fling shafts that strike the heads of
the impudent, staining them with blood.
Returning from [the Mount of Olives] to the gates of Gethsemane and descending
the valley all the way to the brook of Kedron, worshipers with zeal visit the Tomb of
the Holy Mother, located in a grotto. The Orthodox and the Armenians celebrate the
liturgy at this shrine; the Catholics do not have this right. When the enmity among
Christians of the East ceases, the first pledge of mutual tolerance and peace will be
their equal participation in a service at this sacred place, revered by all the sects.…
A detailed account of Jerusalem’s famous sites can be found in every travelogue,
from the fourth century … to the present.46 All the information is similar, and recent
travelers repeat what was said before, most likely unintentionally. Relying on them,
I shall add a few words about the location of the Savior’s birth, respected even by
Muslims.
The road to Bethlehem lies due south past Mount Zion and the Greek Monastery
of Elijah the Prophet. In the valleys one comes across sown fields and vineyards;
traces of age-old industriousness are visible on the stony hills, notched with terraces
for the planting of vines and fig trees.
The large [Church of the Nativity] in Bethlehem, built in a cruciform shape, was
once quite splendid; four rows of marble pillars of rare beauty are still intact at the
altar. [The church] belongs to the Greeks and the Armenians. Latin monks in vain
request a portion of it for themselves, since it is impossible to consider an ordinary
45
This is my translation of Dashkov’s Russian rendition of Chateaubriand’s evocative
vignette.
46
Dashkov’s narrative cites the earliest extant travelogue on the holy places, the account by
the Pilgrim from Bordeaux who visited Palestine in the year 333, Itinerarium a Burdigala
Hierusalem. Dashkov’s footnote makes reference to the Greek-language Proskynitarion, pub-
lished in Vienna in 1787, on prayer rituals and places of worship in Jerusalem, and to several
Russian accounts. “Of the works by Russian pilgrims, worthy of attention are the descriptions
by Vasilii Barskii, who worshiped at the Holy Sepulcher in 1726 and 1729; by ieromonakh
[monk] Meletii, 1793–94; and by the serf of Count Sheremetev, Kir Bronnikov, 1820–21, note-
worthy because of his [social] rank and because of the dangers he was exposed to on the return
voyage to the fatherland at the start of the Greek war.” For bibliographical material on the
travelogues of Barskii, Meletii, and Bronnikov, see Stavrou and Weisensel, Russian Travelers
to the Christian East, 70–73, 129–30, 171.
shrine as a common place of worship, such as the Lord’s Tomb or Golgotha. Along the
sides of the main altar, two staircases lead to the Holy Nativity; there, on the eastern
wall, marked by a silver star, where the Christ Child was born, a communion table is
set up for the Orthodox and the Armenians to celebrate the mass. The manger stood
nearby, in a spacious hollow, where today there is a Catholic altar. The entire grotto
is lined with precious marble and illuminated by icon-lamps, with each denomination
having its own fixed number.
Bethlehem’s Arabs have partially converted to the Christian faith; but this has not
mollified their harsh customs. They make a good bit of money, fashioning from bone
and mother-of-pearl the rosaries and crosses that are bought up by devout visitors.
In general, the arrival of worshipers in Jerusalem coincides with the harvest sea-
son for local inhabitants. Only this animates a land, for a long time now not flowing
with milk and honey, where agriculture is in decline and there is no industry, where
the population has fallen victim to robbery and to all sorts of violence, where, even-
tually, according to the words of Chateaubriand, “each village dies off annually hut
by hut and family by family, and soon only a cemetery marks the site of a previous
settlement.”
The Greeks and the Armenians visit the holy places more than [other denom-
inations]. The zeal of the former is worthy of special amazement; the faith, having
preserved their existence as a nation, has been a major consolation for them in servi-
tude. They gathered from everywhere, without distinction of gender and age; fathers
of families brought to Palestine the fruit of many years’ hard work, leaving children
in need; old men, fortified by desire (like the aged worshiper in the beautiful sonnet
by Petrarch: “An old man white as snow set out on the road”),47 dragged themselves
along on crutches to the tomb of the being, whose presence they hoped to receive in
heaven. Many, having kept their vow, devoted the remainder of life to religious wor-
ship in church. The number of Orthodox pilgrims, before 1821, sometimes reached
about three thousand—among them were around two hundred Russians.
Our embassy [in Istanbul] did its utmost to afford the greatest possible assistance
and protection to our compatriots in Ottoman domains. [Russian pilgrims] usually
embarked from Odessa in late August and upon arrival in Constantinople stayed [in a
specially designated spot] out of doors, where they were not subjected to the plague or
to insults from the Turkish mob; the poor received monetary help. The envoy notified
the patriarch of the Holy City about [the pilgrims’] accommodation, free of charge,
on a ship that departed every year in early September with worshipers; in addition to
passports, [the envoy] issued to them firmans (edicts of the sultan) that exempted Rus-
sian subjects from any tax during the journey and at the Church [of the Resurrection],
where other Christians are required to pay around twenty-four lev [apiece] for entry.
In Jaffa, received as guests in the Greek metochion [monastic residence or cloister],
they were pleased with everything, provided customarily at the monastery’s expense:
for this [hospitality] they left the abbot a small donation.
47
In his text, Dashkov quotes the Italian line from the Petrarch sonnet: “Movesi il vecchierel
canuto e bianco.”
Many trekked on foot from [Jaffa], while the wealthy and the infirm were able to
rent saddle-horses for a low price.48 On reaching Jerusalem, they spent the first few
days at the patriarchate and gave contributions to the church treasury, however much
they wanted; but those who desired to enter the names of their relatives in a remem-
brance book for eternal prayer for the dead paid fifty lev or more for each [name],
depending on their means. They then selected for themselves cells in various cloisters
for the entire winter. Rent and food, the most moderate, cost from one hundred fifty
to two hundred lev.
In anticipation of Lent, pilgrims visited the closest places of worship, in Beth-
lehem, Bethany, Nazareth, and other towns. Some even traveled to Mount Sinai, via
Gaza and Suez.
The throng of people in Jerusalem grows with the approach of Easter. Armenians
and Asiatic Greeks gather in droves from Karamania, Syria, and Egypt; Georgians
are also with them. The entire city comes to life, especially on Holy Saturday, when
the holy fire makes its appearance.49 After the holy days, the mütesellim and a de-
tachment of troops accompany the worshipers to Jericho and the Jordan River; and
shortly afterwards they return to their native land via the route they came. Passage
from Jaffa to Constantinople, on a good ship and with necessary provisions, costs
around a hundred lev.
Adding to this estimate another one hundred eighty or two hundred lev for offer-
ings to various monasteries and churches during the entire stay in Palestine, for the
rental of horses, and for other small items, we deduce that the essential expenses for
our pilgrims did not exceed five hundred rubles. But many of them arrived without
any money whatsoever and had to attend to monks or seek alms near the gates of the
patriarchate, where they are never denied food. For donations to these needy pilgrims,
48
In his footnote, Dashkov specifies distances between key points along the pilgrimage trail:
“From Jaffa to Jerusalem it is thought to be around sixty versts (twelve hours [by horse]). From
Jerusalem to Jericho not more than twenty versts; and from [Jericho] to the Jordan River about
fifteen versts.”
49
In a lengthy footnote on the miraculous appearance of the holy fire over the Tomb of Christ,
Dashkov refers readers to the works of Russian pilgrims and travelers who had witnessed this
sacred event. Drawing on their experiences and observations, he then offers his own sum-
mary: “With the mütesellim [deputy governor] and the Armenian clergy in attendance, all the
candles and icon-lamps in the church are extinguished—except for those in the Catholic sec-
tion. The Greek hierarch enters the kouvouklion [edicule] alone and with a cotton wick gathers
the light that, resembling beads of sweat, arises on the marble slab of the Holy Sepulcher.
Others relate that it appears in the form of a bright nonflammable flame and that one can place
it by hand in a vessel without getting burned. Ieromonakh Meletii writes that the light shines
on the lid of the tomb like small scattered beads of color that turn red when they run together.
The Catholics are not at all willing to believe this phenomenon. Be that as it may, the hierarch
carries the burning tapers from the grotto to the chapel of the Angel and places them in two
small openings: on one side for the Armenians, on the other for the Orthodox, from whom
the fire overflows the church like a river (according to Meletii), to the accompaniment of loud
exclamations: ‘There is no faith, but the Christian faith!’” For more on the holy fire, see Elon,
Jerusalem, 70–71, 209–13; and Peters, Jerusalem, 261–67, 523–24, 571–78.
and also for their supervision, a special official with the rank of vice-consul has been
dispatched to Jaffa.… The events of 1821 have impeded the success of this endeavor
[pilgrimage to Jerusalem] and made the voyage to the Holy Sepulcher difficult for
Russians.50
Jews, no less than Christians, are eager to visit the land of their ancestors, though
they know in advance what oppression awaits them there. They pay dearly for per-
mission to enter Jerusalem and still more dearly for a plot of land in the Valley of
Jehoshaphat for a future grave. Their sufferings and poverty do not arouse pity in
anyone; they are held in equal disdain by Greeks, Arabs, and Turks. Among the ruins
of their capital, amid recollections of ancient independence and glory, this unfortu-
nate people with amazing submissiveness bears unending insults even from children.
Our acquaintance, Sheik Abu Ghush, not understanding how Jews could be subjects
of the Muscovite padishah [sultan], said, “I am glad to welcome in my land thousands
of Russian worshipers, but my heart bursts with exasperation when a single chifut
(zhid) [Jew] arrives duty-free.…” Held in such disparagement, [Jewish visitors] con-
sole themselves with the view of Zion and with the steadfast hope for a King-Savior!
The permanent residents of Jerusalem are thought to be around thirteen thou-
sand, of whom the large part are Arabs who believe in the Muslim faith;51 among
them, however, are some Christians. These persons, on the whole, are quite poor and
live on alms from Greek and Catholic monasteries.
All of the town administration is in the hands of the Turks. We noted above that
Jerusalem is under the jurisdiction of the pasha of Damascus [and Acre]; the duty
from pilgrims for access to the Holy Sepulcher belongs to the pasha … [but] is col-
lected by his mütevelli.52 This odd arrangement is highly detrimental to European
monks, since it exposes them to a double oppression and undermines the entreaty of
consuls who reside in Acre and Jaffa. The mütesellim is appointed from Damascus,
and the mullah (supreme judge) directly from Constantinople: the latter enjoys great
respect.
50
The outbreak of the Greek War of Independence against the sultan strained Russo-Ottoman
diplomatic relations, disrupted Russia’s trade in the Black Sea and Levant, and greatly reduced
the numbers of Russian pilgrims making the journey to Palestine during the ensuing conflict
in the 1820s. On the larger issue of Russia and the Greek rebellion, including the friction in
Russo-Ottoman relations, see my Russian Society and the Greek Revolution (DeKalb: North-
ern Illinois University Press, 1994).
51
Dashkov claims in his note that it was impossible to verify the accuracy of this estimate,
because “in all of Turkey there are neither birth records nor a poll-tax census.” Asali (“Jerusa-
lem under the Ottomans,” 220 n. 18) and Peters (Jerusalem, 564–65) cite a population figure
of twelve thousand for Jerusalem in 1806; thus, Dashkov’s approximation of thirteen thousand
in 1820 may very well be correct.
52
Dashkov clarifies this statement in his footnote: “We were told that the pasha [of Damas-
cus] and Acre receives these revenues in his capacity as guardian of the central mosque in the
town of Ramleh, which is under his direct authority, and that the land near the Church of the
Resurrection belongs to [the mosque].”
Before leaving this memorable land, we wanted to see the Jordan River and the
Dead Sea. We knew that in summer predatory Arabs migrate with their flocks from
the river to the mountaintops and that the road is less dangerous than in spring. We
were also assured of this by the esteemed archbishop of Petra, who had recently re-
turned from his diocese, but he advised that we request escorts from the Turkish
authorities. Everything was arranged as we wished.
On 7 September, we were met by several persons from the mütesellim’s guard,
including his chief of police, all on magnificent horses. [Also accompanying us] were
a monastic dragoman and two sheiks from the Arab tribes that had migrated beyond
the Jordan River. Waiting until the intense midday heat had passed, we set out on the
road near Gethsemane, on the right-hand side of the Mount of Olives; in the evening
we stopped to rest at a well outside an abandoned caravanserai. Here, three or four
months before our arrival, a young Englishman, who had no one with him except
a manservant and a janissary, had been robbed. Defending himself stubbornly, he
wounded one of the brigands with a saber and as punishment received the exact same
wound from them: an example of justice, worthy of these primitive sons of nature
[dikie syny prirody]! From there we traveled across slopes and ravines to a large plain
surrounding Jericho, and by midnight we reached the pitiful remains of this once
renowned town.
The local aga [title for a minor military or administrative official] amicably or-
dered us to his residence—a tower, where peasants with their herds seek shelter from
rapacious forays. [Our] supper and lodging were on the overhead landing under the
open sky. At dawn everything around us came to life: the escorts hastened to saddle
the horses, while we marveled at the lovely views from our lofty bedroom. Trees and
shrubs turned green in the valley, [and] wild boars roamed cultivated fields all the
way to huts. On the other side of the Jordan River, a large forest cast dark shadows;
and directly in front of us, between two rows of mountains, the Dead Sea brilliantly
reflected the rays of the rising sun. Legends of sacred antiquity framed a picture of
rural life. A majestic Arab, a descendant of Ishmael, half-naked, with a long gun
across the shoulders, drove goats and sheep to pasture near the stream made famous
by the miracle of the prophet Elijah; others dug garden beds, perhaps at the spot
where Rahab’s house stood and where the Levites carried the Ark of the Covenant
during the destruction of Jericho.… While leaving the town, we came across women
walking with earthenware pitchers on their heads to fetch water, [wearing] dark blue,
loose-fitting garments, and with veils folded back; our approach did not alarm them.
One word, hadji (pilgrim), satisfied the curiosity of everyone and put an end to any
questions.
The broad plain separating the Jericho oasis from the Jordan River resembles
the bottom of a sea forsaken by the waves; tamarinds, which ordinarily grow along
brooks, and prickly blackthorn can be seen here and there near sandy knolls. A great
many monasteries and skity (eremitoria graciosa) [pious hermitages] were located
in this wilderness during the days of Christian rule; traces of them are barely visible
today. The site of the Savior’s baptism, according to the Greeks, is five or six versts
from the ruins of the cloister of St. Gerasimos:53 upon reaching it, we descended a
precipitous bank, with reeds and small shrubs scattered below, and waded to the op-
posite, more sloped shore.
The upper reaches of the Jordan lie at the foot of the wooded Hermon and An-
ti-Lebanon mountains: from there the river courses southward in a straight line,
passes through Lake Tiberias (Gennesaret), and, like a chain, connects it to the Dead
Sea. In summer this celebrated river is no wider than ten sazhens [around 21 meters]54
and of medium depth, but it flows with remarkable swiftness along the stony bottom;
when the snows of Lebanon begin to melt, it runs twice as fast. We bathed in [the
river] and then, following custom, filled our chotry (flat traveling utensils) with some
of its turbid but pleasant water.55 Worshipers who are not satisfied with this [ritual]
also soak sheets here and are then supposed to use them as a burial shroud.
The brooks flowing into the Jordan for the most part dry up in the hot weather;
the surrounding sands are completely parched. [The river’s] estuary is marked on the
surface of the Dead Sea by a long streak—as if the waters, sacred from earliest times,
petrify when they join the accursed waves of the lake that inundated Sodom and Go-
morrah. In the past people thought that [the river] continued its course underground
and merged with the Nile in Egypt or the Pharro [Euphrates] in Syria.56 … But along
with other proof refuting this opinion, we know from the evidence of eyewitnesses
that the Dead Sea rises and falls depending on the rise and fall of the Jordan.
The river bends to the left not far from the estuary, and only the tops of shrubs
reveal its direction; we set out straight ahead, without any road, along shifting sand
snow-white from its coat of salt. The heat was unbearable. The sun glowed in the
impenetrable scorching sky as at sunset. On one side, the range of Arabian moun-
tains—a steep wall without distinct peaks, without teeth and ridges—extends along
the lake like an immeasurable border. On the other, by the magical play of nature, the
chalky hills display pitched tents, small fortresses, and towers adorned with cornices.
Everything here is unlike any other place on earth. Even in the plains of the Sahara,
the proximity of water changes the aspect of nature: moisture penetrates the desic-
cated gravel and blankets it with green grass; the putrid air becomes pure; living crea-
tures find refuge in palm groves; and the barren desert is transformed into a flowering
oasis—the image of paradise. On the contrary, the environs of the Dead Sea are des-
olate and deprived of any vestiges of life: no coolness or freshness; no wild animals,
birds, or plants; shriveled trees, uprooted along the bank, washed ashore by a wave
53
St. Gerasimos, a fifth-century hermit, founded a monastery near the Jordan River; attacked
on many occasions by Bedouin tribes, the cloister was finally abandoned in the sixteenth
century.
54
A sazhen is the equivalent of around 2.133 meters.
55
According to Dashkov, “this water did not taste salty, as Chateaubriand reports, though
we were at the Jordan River at roughly the same time of the year. Lying nearly still, the water
becomes completely limpid and a darkish silt covers the bottom of [our] utensils.”
56
Pharro is most likely a corruption of al-Furat, Arabic for Euphrates. Dashkov draws his
information from the research of German geographer Ritter (see above, n. 25).
from the eastern edge or perhaps by the Jordan during a flood. The water is clear, but
saturated with bitter salts. It is difficult to believe what Pococke57 and Chateaubriand
heard from a monk and from some Bethlehem Arabs, that fish abound in [the sea]: the
guides told us that even those approaching by chance from the river die immediately.
The Dead Sea (in Arabic Bahr al-Lut, or the Sea of Lot) extends nearly seven-
ty-five versts in length and about twenty versts in width; Seetzen surmises that its
circumference can be traversed in a five-day journey.58 This most recent traveler,
and as far back as Abbot Daniil who visited the Monastery of St. Sabas,59 collected
fairly elaborate information on [the sea’s] southern tip, partly confirmed for us by
inhabitants of Jerusalem who had traveled to Petra. It indeed terminates in a narrow
bay, which in summer can be crossed by wading up to the knee. The strange sight of
salt clumps, discarded by the lake, of course gave cause for the oft-repeated story of
worshipers having seen the pillar [that had once been] Lot’s wife. As for the famous
fruit of Sodom, no one agrees with the opinion of Chateaubriand. The blackened,
bitter seeds from the small lemons he found do not resemble ashes, and on the whole
his account does not correspond with our notion of the deceptive apple, ripe on the
outside, rotten inside—like the joys of the world, remarks one traveler.
We spent the night again in Jericho and on the next day returned to Jerusalem
along a new route, by way of the Monastery of St. Sabas. A deep ravine known as
the Valley of Sorrow extends all the way from the stream of Kedron to the Dead Sea:
along [the ravine’s] parched bottom we approached the cloister, built with terraces on
a terrifying steep slope, and climbed upward, quaking involuntarily at each turn. The
entire structure is enveloped by high walls and looks more like a fortified castle than a
sanctuary for peaceful monks. Following the abbot along steps carved into the stone,
we venerated the relics of the holy fathers, persecuted by infidels, and the tomb of St.
Sabas; we saw the cave of this devout toiler and the date palm tree he himself had
planted. At the highest point stand two four-cornered turrets used by the monks as
watchtowers. The neighboring hills are hollowed out with a great many caves where
nearly ten thousand anchorites once lived.
[The monks] also showed us the opening, from which they distribute bread daily
to Arabs who have migrated not far from here. A long time ago (so they maintain),
57
English orientalist and traveler Richard Pococke (1704–65) visited the Near East in 1734–
40 and published Description of the East (1743–45).
58
German traveler Ulrich Seetzen (1767–1811) toured Palestine in 1806, the same year as
Chateaubriand. Excerpts from Seetzen are in Peters, Jerusalem, 544–45, 550–56, 564–72,
581–82.
59
Abbot Daniil visited many of the holy sites in Palestine in the early twelfth century and
authored the earliest extant Russian pilgrimage account of Jerusalem. Daniil spent over a year
at the monastery founded by St. Sabas (439–532), a charismatic hermit and one of the most
influential figures in the development of monasticism in Palestine. On Daniil and St. Sabas,
see Stavrou and Weisensel, Russian Travelers to the Christian East, 1–5; Peters, Jerusalem,
162–63, 263–67, 313–14; and Joseph Patrich, Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism: A
Comparative Study in Eastern Monasticism, Fourth to Seventh Centuries (Washington, DC:
Dumbarton Oaks, 1995).
Greek emperors assigned this tribe to the monastery for service, which explains
why they received food from it: nowadays, however, they demand it with threats,
as though it were tribute that belongs to them; mothers bring newborn infants to the
opening and take leftovers for them. In the event of a quarrel with the monks, these
half-primitive Muslims [poludikie musul´mane] lay siege to [the monastery] and cut
off communication with Jerusalem.
While visiting the monasteries of Palestine, we did not forget to examine their
libraries—although the lack of success of our investigations on Mount Athos gave us
little hope for here. The patriarchate has some manuscripts: but all are prayer-books,
Lives of the Fathers, and works of the church fathers. Official documents, relating to
the customs of the Greeks, were sent to Constantinople a long time ago; other records
we saw are interesting only because they supplement the sad picture of abuses en-
dured by the Christians of Jerusalem.
On 14 September, the day of the Exaltation of the Cross, we venerated for the last
time the Lord’s Tomb and all the sacred objects in the great church. The archbishop of
Gethsemane celebrated the liturgy at Golgotha; later a ceremonial procession began
from the Greek Katholikon to the grotto of St. Helen. The hierarch held upright the
silver Crucifix that contained part of the Life-giving tree [cross]; behind him the pro-
cession carried banners, crosses, icons; people covered the steps of the staircases with
green branches and flowers. During the service the symbol of salvation was thrice
raised at the very place of its discovery.
On the same day, we bid farewell to the gracious episcopal deputies and, hiring
escorts from the mütesellim for the journey to Acre, left the Holy City.…
Alexander Lycurgus: An Ecumenical Pioneer
Josef L. Altholz†
In 1837 the Patriarch of Constantinople did not know what an archbishop of Can-
terbury was, and could not understand it even when he was told.1 This epitomizes
the relationship of Anglicanism and Orthodoxy at that time: lack of contact,2 lack of
knowledge, lack of understanding. This was about to change. The inspiration for the
change came from within the Church of England, specifically the Tractarian move-
ment and its High Church or Anglo-Catholic successors. Their ecclesiology, centered
on the doctrine of the apostolic succession of bishops, gave rise to a “branch theory”
of the Church Catholic, with three episcopally-governed branches, Anglican, Ro-
man Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox. Although the original Tractarians themselves
showed little interest in the Orthodox churches,3 they would inspire a movement for
intercommunion or reunion.
Much of the story of this movement reads as a series of eager overtures from
Anglicans meeting with cool responses from the Orthodox. It began with an extreme
and eccentric Tractarian, William Palmer of Magdalen College, Oxford, who went to
Russia in the early 1840s seeking to be admitted to Orthodox communion while re-
maining in the Anglican Church; the Holy Synod took this seriously enough to enter
into lengthy discussions before denying his request.4 Palmer entered into an extensive
1
Henry R. T. Brandreth, “The Church of England and the Orthodox Churches in the Nine-
teenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Anglican Initiatives in Christian Unity: Lectures Deliv-
ered in Lambeth Palace Library, 1966, ed. E. G. W. Bill (London: S.P.C.K., 1967), 19–39.
2
In 1815 the points of contact were chaplaincies maintained by the British Embassy in St.
Petersburg, the Russia Company in Kronstadt, and the Levant Company at Constantinople
(Pera), Smyrna, and Aleppo. In that year the British Crown acquired the Ionian Islands, where
there was a Greek Orthodox population. The independence of Greece brought a chaplain there.
On the Orthodox side, the Russian embassy had a chaplain with the rank of archpriest, and
there was a growing Greek colony in London with a church.
3
John Henry Newman visited the Ionian Greek churches on his Mediterranean tour in 1832–
33, but was unimpressed. See The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, 3: New Bear-
ings, January 1832 to June 1833 (London: T. Nelson, 1979), 180–81.
4
I am indebted to my student Anne Fredrickson, whose honors thesis was “The Anglican
Crisis of Identity: The Case of William Palmer, 1811–1879” (University of Minnesota, 2000).
128 Josef L. Altholz
correspondence with the Pan-Slavist and lay theologian A. S. Khomiakov, evoking

from him a profound statement of the fundamental position of Orthodoxy.5 A more
serious student of Orthodoxy was John Mason Neale, who wrote voluminously on
the history and liturgiology of the Eastern churches.6 In 1864 there was founded the
Eastern Churches Association to enlighten Englishmen about the Orthodox and the
Eastern churches about Anglicanism, and some of its members traveled to the Near
East to make contact with Orthodox clergy.7 A committee of the Convocation of the
Church of England met from 1863 to consider the question of intercommunion with
the Orthodox; and there was an occasional stately correspondence between the arch-
bishop of Canterbury and the patriarchs.8
Some of these efforts sought personal intercommunion, in practice the right of
Anglicans traveling in Orthodox countries to receive Orthodox communion; others
sought actual reunion between the two communions. They obtained neither, but in
the process they discovered the difficulties in the way of a favorable result. Many of
these were specific doctrines or practices on which the Orthodox insisted but which
Anglicans could not accept. The invariable objection concerned the credal doctrine
of the Procession of the Holy Spirit, whether from the Father alone, as in the words
of the original Nicene Creed on which the Orthodox insisted, or from the Father “and
the Son” (Filioque), which the Western Church (and consequently the Anglicans) had
added. There were numerous other points, but these varied and might admit of allow-
ability under the Orthodox concept of “economy”; the Filioque always remained an
Orthodox objection.
Palmer pursued his quest for intercommunion with the Orthodox until 1855, when he con-
verted to Rome.
5
W. J. Birkbeck, Russia and the Eastern Church during the Last Fifty Years (London: Riv-
ington, Percival, 1895; repr., 1969) contains the correspondence and Khomiakov’s Essay on
the Unity of the Church, itself reprinted several times.
6
The most relevant study is Leon Litvack, John Mason Neale and the Quest for Sobornost
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Neale was more than a pioneer of reunion: he was a student
of church architecture and a liturgiologist and writer of hymns, including some translations of
Greek hymns included in the Anglican hymn book Hymns Ancient and Modern.
7
The E.C.A. published a useful series of Occasional Papers. There were two other societies
with ecumenical interests: the Anglo-Continental Society, Low rather than High Church, in-
terested primarily in foreign Protestants; and the Association for the Promotion of the Unity
of Christendom, extremely High Church, based on the branch theory but interested mainly in
the Roman Catholics.
8
In 1841 Archbishop Howley wrote to reassure the patriarchs that the new Anglo-Prussian
bishopric in Jerusalem would not proselytize among the Orthodox. In 1867 Archbishop Logley
sent the patriarchs the encyclical of the first Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops. In 1869
Archbishop Tait communicated the desire of convocation for discussions on intercommunion.
The patriarchs’ 1870 replies intertwine these earlier contacts with the visit of Alexander Ly-
curgus.
Alexander Lycurgus 129
But behind these formal points of difference lay a more fundamental (and less
easily understood) problem, in the very concept of Orthodoxy. The Orthodox had
maintained their faith unchanged from the first seven Ecumenical Councils notwith-
standing the pressures of heretical emperors and Muslim conquerors; they were in
fact orthodox and conscious of it. This was behind their objection to the Filioque:
they literally would not add a word to the creed defined at the first council and con-
firmed by others. They knew that Orthodoxy was the true Church, and that there was
only one true Church. This concept of the essential unity of the Church had been
elaborated by Khomiakov under the Slavonic term sobornost. If the Church is one,
there cannot be branches; this annihilated the branch theory, although High Angli-
cans could not accept this. Reunion required that Anglicans accept the principles of
Orthodoxy; individual intercommunion might be negotiable, though unlikely. But
Anglicans persisted in the quest for both.
Statements of the Orthodox position were almost invariably responses to Angli-
can initiatives; the Orthodox almost never initiated feelers of their own. Some Or-
thodox students were sent to German universities, the most advanced of their time,
where they learned about Lutheran or Reformed Protestantism; they had no means of
learning the peculiar place of Anglicanism in the non-Roman Western spectrum. To
this there was one exception, and not a helpful one. A Greek professor of theology,
Nicholas Damalas, spent three years in London and published a book in 1867 on the
relations of the Anglican Church to the Orthodox, advancing a theological red herring
by claiming that a statement in the Thirty-nine Articles that the ancient patriarch-
ates had erred was an insuperable objection to union.9 More helpful was the Russian
chaplain in London, Archpriest Eugène Popoff, who assisted the Convocation com-
mittee on intercommunion.10 And an emissary of the Eastern Churches Association
obtained a statement from a Greek bishop sympathetic to the project of reunion.11
9
Nicholas Zernov, Orthodox Encounter: The Christian East and the Ecumenical Movement
(London: J. Clarke, 1961), 144. The nineteenth article (Zernov says the twenty-first) has the
incidental remark that “the Churches of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch have erred.” The
Thirty-nine Articles are the official confessional statement of Anglicanism, but binding only
on the clergy. Damalas’s argument was not followed up until it resurfaced around the turn of
the century, again to disappear. The Russians had presented to Palmer forty-four errors in the
Thirty-nine Articles; he agreed that they were errors but denied that they were found in the
Articles.
10
Noted in The Report on the Resolutions of the Bonn Conference of 1875, by the Committee
on Inter-communion with the Orthodox Eastern Churches (London: Oxford, 1876), 11. The
spelling of Popoff’s name was his own.
11
George Williams, ed., Occasional Paper of the Eastern Churches Association. No. IV. A
Letter from the Most Reverend Gregory of Byzantium, Metropolitan of Chios, on the Project
of Union between the Anglican and the Orthodox Church of the East (London: Batty Bros.,
1867). Gregory found that Anglicans agreed with the Orthodox “much more than Romanism
or Protestantism” (9). Williams also met with patriarchs who suggested the appointment of
delegates to confer on intercommunion.
So matters stood when Alexander Lycurgus appeared on the scene. Born in 1827,
he was initially educated at Athens. Clearly destined for higher things in the church,
he was sent to Germany, where he studied from 1851 to 1858 at several universities.
He thus came to know continental Protestantism but not Anglicanism. He returned
to become a professor of theology at Athens, being ordained priest in 1862. In 1866
he was chosen archbishop of Syros and Tenos in the Cyclades. In 1869 Lycurgus was
selected by the synod of the autonomous Church of Greece to visit England. The oc-
casion was the consecration of a new church in Liverpool, with visits to the existing
congregations in London and Manchester. Lycurgus seems to have been chosen for
his general knowledge of the West, based on his studies in Germany; the synod made
no reference to contacts with the Church of England. It was his own idea to use the
occasion to learn about the Anglican Church with a view to reunion.12
The Greek Synod must have informed the patriarch of Constantinople about the
planned visit, because it became known to the English through the chaplain at Con-
stantinople, C. G. Curtis, who was also a corresponding secretary of the Anglo-Conti-
nental Society. The society, which was chiefly interested in continental Protestantism,
did contact Lycurgus during his visit and presented him with books about Angli-
canism.13 But it was the High Church Eastern Churches Association which “made
the most of the occasion.”14 It arranged for Archbishop A. C. Tait of Canterbury to
designate one of its most active members, Rev. George Williams, as the official guide
for Lycurgus in an extensive tour of the Church of England, with visits to many rep-
resentative clergy and eminent laity.
Lycurgus arrived in Liverpool on 22 December 1868; he duly consecrated the
church and visited the Manchester and London Greek communities. But almost from
the first his tour was taken over by Williams in a manner which both surprised and
pleased the archbishop. He was put through a round of interviews, meetings, and
dinners. He was especially impressed by being invited to dinner at the house of the
prime minister, W. E. Gladstone, himself a High Church reunionist, with whom he
later corresponded. He was presented to Queen Victoria. He received doctorates from
both Oxford and Cambridge. He toured Westminster Abbey with Dean Stanley as
his guide. He met several bishops, most notably Christopher Wordsworth of Lincoln,
who gave him an honored place at a service which he attended. He addressed both the
Eastern Churches Association and the very High Church Association for the Promo-
tion of the Unity of Christendom.
The theological high point of Lycurgus’s visit came on 4 February 1870, with a
conference at Ely at the palace of the bishop, Harold Browne, an eminent theologian
and a patron of the Anglo-Continental Society. Among the Anglicans were the sec-
retary of the society, Frederick Meyrick, who took notes, Williams, who translated,
12
Biographical details are from F[rances] M. F. Skene, The Life of Alexander Lycurgus, Arch-
bishop of the Cyclades (London: Rivingtons, 1877). Skene’s informant was Lycurgus’s niece,
with whom he corresponded extensively.
13
Ibid.
14
Brandreth, “The Church of England and the Orthodox Churches,” 33.
and H. P. Liddon, who represented the leading figure of the High Church party, E.
B. Pusey. There was a full and frank discussion of all points of difference. Lycurgus
went further than any previous Orthodox discussant (and nearly any later one) in
conceding that these differences—except for the Filioque—presented no necessary
bar to unity. Even transubstantiation, which the Russians had told Palmer was as es-
sential an issue as the Filioque, was to Lycurgus “not authoritatively settled.”15 The
only point on which he insisted was rejection of the Filioque. “It is an essential point.
… there cannot be unity without identity of creed.”16
The spirit in which Lycurgus dealt with these issues was shown in his interview
with Archbishop Tait, which had been postponed due to Tait’s illness. Lycurgus “ex-
pressed himself so far satisfied with what he had heard from the other representatives
of the Anglican Church,—especially the Bishops of Ely and Lincoln—on other points
of controversy, that it was unnecessary to re-open those questions.” When Tait (who
was not as enthusiastic for reunion as some others) asked him why the Orthodox
insisted on rebaptizing (by trine immersion) those who had been baptized by the An-
glican mode of “affusion” or sprinkling, Lycurgus “admitted its validity as conveying
the Grace of Regeneration” but considered it so irregular as to justify repetition.17
Lycurgus’s visit to England was a breakthrough in Anglican-Orthodox relations.
To the English, it revealed a church indubitably catholic which differed on a few es-
sential points but which had the great merit of not being Roman Catholic (this was the
year in which Papal Infallibility became dogma). Lycurgus was able to present Ortho-
doxy in a manner to which Anglicans could respond favorably. For his part, Lycurgus
was overwhelmed by the enthusiastic welcome he had received. In a report which he
prepared for the patriarch of Constantinople, whom he visited on his way home, he
stated that the English people had manifested “towards our Eastern Orthodox Church
extraordinary, and to me unexpected, feelings of honour and respect.” The Anglican
Church had “developed a particular feeling of sympathy and love for our Orthodox
Church.” He recognized the key role of the High Church in this development. What
he had learned from visiting England was something he had not known in Germany:
“in this, the Anglican Church, there existed an Ecclesiastical Order, totally different
from the other Protestant Sects, and in conformity with the Primitive Church.” There
was a strong desire at least for “a friendly approximation” (he cited Gladstone in fa-
vor of this), which would consist in “the recognition by each Church of the other as a
Christian community … and in the exhibition, from time to time, of proofs of mutual
love, by intercommunication between the Bishops of both Churches, and by the grant
15
George Williams, ed., Occasional Paper of the Eastern Churches Association No. XIV. A
Collection of Documents relating chiefly to the visit of Alexander Archbishop of Syros and
Tenos to England in 1870 (London: Batty Bros., 1872), 20. The report of the conference was
prepared by Meyrick, a moderate Evangelical and anti-Roman controversialist.
16
Ibid., 16. But Pusey, to whom Liddon reported, was “crushed” by the rejection of the Filio-
que: “it would take from me my conception of God” (ibid., 24).
17
Ibid., 4–5.
of certain simple privileges to the members.”18 (The latter referred not to communion
but to baptism and burial.)
The patriarch of Constantinople was impressed by the warmth of the welcome
which Lycurgus had received in England. Replying in the summer of 1870 to a let-
ter which Tait had sent him in 1869, the patriarch thanked the archbishop for the
kindness with which Lycurgus had been received. The letter also conceded to Tait a
privilege which he had requested, that Anglicans dying while traveling in the East
might receive an Orthodox Christian burial. This interburial turned out to be the
nearest that the two churches ever came to intercommunion. It is tempting to attribute
this to Lycurgus’s visit and report, but it was a matter which had to be negotiated
among the several patriarchates and churches even while Lycurgus was in England.
Nevertheless, Patriarch Gregory used language which William Palmer would have
appreciated: “we are as branches growing together of the one tree planted of heaven.”
Other patriarchs, and the Greek Synod, in writing to Tait about the privilege of burial,
also thanked him for English kindness to Lycurgus.19 Lycurgus earned the personal
approval of the patriarch of Constantinople, who was to involve him as a consultant
in 1873 in the condemnation of the separatist Bulgarian Church.20
Lycurgus might never have participated in further efforts at reunion but for an-
other event which was happening at the time of his visit to England: the first Vatican
Council, which in 1870 defined the dogma of Papal Infallibility. Both the archbishop
of Canterbury and the patriarchs protested against the council and its dogma, drawing
attention to the similarities of their two communions. More immediately important
was a reaction among German (and some other Continental) Roman Catholics, who
refused to accept the new dogma, under the leadership of the church historian Ignaz
von Döllinger, who was excommunicated in 1871. Many of the dissidents formed
themselves into what they called the Old Catholic Church, obtaining a bishop in
1873.21 Though few in numbers, the Old Catholics found themselves in an excellent
position to bridge the Anglican and Orthodox communions, sharing their common
episcopacy, adherence to the early councils and rejection of Roman innovations.
Döllinger, who independently of the issue of Infallibility had an interest in re-
union, proceeded to take advantage of this bridge position to raise the issue of church
18
This report was printed in Greek and English and republished in the Williams Collection of
Documents. I quote from a copy in Lambeth Palace Library bound in Lambeth Conferences,
vol. 170.
19
This correspondence is in Lambeth Palace Library, Lambeth Conferences, vol. 170. Tait
had reluctantly included the request for burial when pressed by the committee of convocation
on intercommunion. Greeks in England already had reciprocity, for any baptized Christian
may be buried by the Anglican Church, a function of its being a national church.
20
Skene, Life, 113–17.
21
Döllinger did not himself join the Old Catholic Church which he had helped to form, re-
garding himself as a Roman Catholic priest who had been unjustly excommunicated. But he
had moral authority among the Old Catholics, and his prestige and individual status gave him
freedom of action in the matter of reunion.
reunion from a new perspective, much larger than the tentative Anglican-Orthodox
discussions of intercommunion. He gave a series of lectures on reunion in 1872 which,
when published in translation, gave international circulation to the cause of reunion.
He then called an international conference on reunion to meet at Bonn in 1874 under
his presidency. This may be regarded as the beginning of what would in the twentieth
century be called the ecumenical movement, and it has been described as “the first
type of Faith and Order Conference” in Christian history.22 The largest contingent
was Anglican, both British and American Episcopalians; there were Old Catholics
and other Germans and Europeans. The Orthodox were represented by an obscure
Greek professor and four Russians, the most prominent of whom was Dr. Janyschev,
head of the St. Petersburg theological seminary.
The conference promptly agreed on the principle of accepting the councils of
the undivided Church of the first six centuries. But that immediately raised the ques-
tion of the Nicene Creed and the Filioque. On this the Russians were adamant, and
they had to agree to disagree. But agreement, or at least acceptance that disagree-
ments were no bar to intercommunion, was reached on an astonishing number of
other points among the episcopalian churches, Anglican, Old Catholic, and Eastern
Orthodox. The only other insoluble question at that time was the invocation of saints.
Döllinger planned a second Bonn Conference for 12–14 August 1875. He issued
an open invitation, but he wrote privately to the theologians at Constantinople well
in advance. It was this that brought Alexander Lycurgus to the conference, no doubt
at the suggestion of the patriarch or his advisors, though all participants stressed
that they were there solely as private individuals. He was one of two bishops (the
other was Rumanian) in a more diverse Orthodox contingent, though Janyschev (not
a bishop) seems to have taken the lead among them.23 The Anglican delegates were
more numerous but theologically weaker and mostly unable to participate in discus-
sions conducted in German, which the Easterners understood. The result was that the
discussions focused on the concerns of the Orthodox, chiefly the Filioque, on which
Döllinger was willing to accommodate them in the interest of reunion.
Döllinger and the Westerners conceded, as they had in 1874, that the Filioque
had been “irregularly” introduced into the Nicene Creed and ought not to be there.
However, he had to deal with the fact that the doctrine of the Double Procession of
the Holy Spirit expressed by the words “and the Son” was established in the beliefs of
the Western churches and would not go away; he would have to minimize the differ-
ences of East and West on the subject so that the Orthodox would be able to tolerate
the Western faith. He found a brilliant solution in a theological tour de force. He was
able to show that St. John of Damascus, the last of the Greek Fathers of the Church,
had made statements which, while denying that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the
22
Owen Chadwick, “Döllinger and Reunion,” in Christian Authority: Essays in Honour of
Henry Chadwick, ed. G. R. Evans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 316. The article provides
the basis for this discussion of the 1874 conference.
23
Chadwick does not note Lycurgus, mentioning only “Greeks from the Aegean” (ibid., 329).
He notes the Romanian bishop only because of his long-windedness.
Son, conceded to the Son a role in the manifestation of the Spirit.24 The Easterners,
for whom St. John’s work was the principal textbook, could not resist this solution,
which was embodied in the Resolutions passed by the conference:25
We accept the teaching of St. John Damascene on the Holy Ghost, as it is ex-
pressed in the following paragraphs, in the sense of the teaching of the ancient
undivided Church.
1. The Holy Ghost issues out of the Father, as the Beginning, the Cause, the
Source of the Godhead.
2. The Holy Ghost does not issue out of the Son, because there is in the
Godhead but one Beginning, one Cause, through which all that is in the
Godhead is produced.
3. The Holy Ghost issues out of the Father through the Son.
4. The Holy Ghost is the Image of the Son, who is the Image of the Father,
issuing out of the Father and resting in the Son as His revealing power.
5. The Holy Ghost is the personal production out of the Father, belonging to
the Son, but not out of the Son, because He is the spirit of the mouth of
God declarative of the Word.
6. The Holy Ghost forms the link between the Father and the Son, and is
linked to the Father by the Son.
Agreement to this resolution was the closest anyone has ever come to resolving
the question of the Filioque; it was a potentially decisive breakthrough. It could have
paved the way to intercommunion, because the Orthodox dropped their other objec-
tions.26 Lycurgus agreed to the resolution and was cautiously optimistic.27 He began
his return journey while drafting his report to the patriarch of Constantinople.
And then—nothing. The Bonn Resolutions were never followed up. Indeed, di-
rect discussions ceased for a decade between Anglicans and Orthodox, and the move-
ment for intercommunion came to a standstill at least until the 1890s.
We know why Döllinger, who had intended to call another Bonn Conference
in 1876, did not do so. His personal position came under attack by J. J. Overbeck, a
former Roman Catholic priest converted first to Anglicanism and then to Orthodoxy,
24
St. John of Damascus (or Damascenus; ca. 675–749) is canonized by both East and West.
Some consider his theology of the Holy Spirit to be weak.
25
Report on the Resolutions of the Bonn Conference, 9–10.
26
Invocation of saints was not discussed (perhaps because the issue had been raised by An-
glicans only), and the question of apostolic succession of Anglican bishops had been laid to
rest by Döllinger in 1874.
27
Lycurgus denied “that the existence of the Spirit depends also on the Son,” as did all the Or-
thodox. But “finally Dr. Döllinger proposed as a compromise that the dogma of the Procession
of the Holy Ghost was to be accepted in all essential points, as John of Damascus explained it.
The proposal was accepted by everyone.… I hope the plan will not prove illusory” (Lycurgus
to Gladstone, 3 September 1875, in Skene, Life, 152–53).
who did not want Orthodox-Anglican intercommunion but sought to supplant the
Anglican Church by a Western Orthodox Church.28 And the Old Catholic Church lost
its initial momentum and became irrelevant when German Catholics rallied to their
bishops who were being persecuted by Bismarck’s government in the Kulturkampf.
We know why the Church of England did not follow through. The Bonn Reso-
lutions were reviewed by Convocation’s Committee on Inter-Communion; St. John
Damascene’s propositions were found to be acceptable or at least allowable; and a
favorable report was submitted to Convocation in 1876, supported by speeches by
bishops Browne and Wordsworth. But Convocation was engaged in discussions of
revision of the Book of Common Prayer, a subject which Anglican clergy can debate
interminably (and did until 1928). The report was never considered; it was quietly
shelved when an explosion by Pusey in favor of the Filioque showed that the issue
might be divisive.29 The Eastern Churches Association, which might have pushed the
matter, had gone out of business under the mistaken impression that the American
Episcopal Church would be more productive.
We think we know why the Russians did not follow through. The Eastern Ques-
tion erupted in 1876, shaking Russians out of their previous sympathy with the West.
Meanwhile, Overbeck’s alternative of a Western Orthodox Church received some
official favor.30
Nobody has even asked why the Greek Churches did not follow through with the
Bonn Resolutions. The chief reason was a personal event little noticed at the time.
While still on his return journey, Alexander Lycurgus, whose health had been precar-
ious, died.31 There is no evidence that his report, which may not have been completed,
was ever presented to the patriarch of Constantinople.
With the death of Alexander Lycurgus, there was no longer a significant pro-
ponent of intercommunion among the Greek Orthodox. He had been an ecumenical
pioneer, but without results. His two appearances on the scene, however promising at
the time, proved to be isolated incidents.
28
Chadwick, “Döllinger and Reunion,” 329, 331.
29
Pusey was indignant at the rejection of the Filioque, which he thought to have been the
original Western form of the Nicene Creed and held even by some Eastern fathers. E. B. Pusey,
On the Clause “And the Son,” in regard to the Eastern Church and the Bonn Conference (Lon-
don: J. Parker, 1876).
30
See Zernov, Orthodox Encounter, 145–46. The chaplain Popoff, who had cooperated with
the committee on intercommunion, died in 1875, and was replaced by Eugene Smirnoff, who
sympathized with Overbeck. Overbeck’s scheme was not dropped until 1884.
31
For details, see Skene, Life, 127–38.
The Septuagint Challenge to Russian Old Testament Translation:
Fault Lines in Fin-de-Siècle Russian Religious Culture
Stephen K. Batalden
The earliest Greek version of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, is generally attributed
to the Jewish community of third-century BCE Alexandria. That Alexandrian Jewish
community, probably having lost their knowledge of Hebrew, arranged for translation
of the Hebrew Bible into Greek for use in the synagogues. The translation’s title de-
rived from the great sanhedrin of seventy-two members; thus, the text of the seventy,
or “Septuagint.” After being rendered into the Hellenistic Greek of the Alexandrian
Attic dialect, the Septuagint was corrected by the Patristic writer Origen and became
an authoritative version of the Old Testament in the early church, despite exclusion
of certain noncanonical or deuterocanonical Septuagint books from the early biblical
canon. The Septuagint became the basic authority behind the Old Testament of the
Eastern Church, even though Western translations, including Jerome’s Vulgate and
the early modern English editions, would draw directly upon the Hebrew Masoretic
tradition. Until the post–World War II discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, extant Sep-
tuagint editions predated most existing Hebrew manuscripts, and thus the Septuagint
also served to illumine Hebrew textology. Despite its occasional misreading of the
Hebrew original, its frequently inserted glosses, and its paraphrastic character, the
Septuagint has retained its value for modern biblical criticism, not least of all because
most of the New Testament quotations from the Old Testament were drawn from a
Septuagint base text.1
Because of its function as the base text for much, though not all, of the Slavonic
Old Testament, the Septuagint has carried a special authority within the Russian Or-
thodox Church. Yet, despite this traditional authority of the Septuagint for Slavonic
textology, modern Russian biblical translation in the nineteenth century came to ac-
cept the Hebrew Masoretic text as its base. That acceptance led to one of the most
contentious issues involving the modern Russian Bible. By the end of the nineteenth
century, following final publication of an authorized Russian synodal edition (sinod-
alńyi perevod) of the Old Testament, the issue of the Septuagint and its subordination
to the Hebrew Masoretic text in modern Russian Bible translation came to reflect a
1
See Emanuel Tov, The Text-Critical Use of the Septuagint in Biblical Research (Jerusalem:
Simor, 1981); and Ernst Würthwein, The Text of the Old Testament: An Introduction to the
Biblica Hebraica, trans. Erroll F. Rhodes, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994).
138 Stephen K. Batalden
much deeper division, or fault line, running through the center of official Russian
religious culture.
The decision to use the ancient Hebrew text in modern Russian biblical transla-
tion was affected by two critical developments in Russian biblical textology of the
nineteenth century. First, Russian biblical textology was directly impacted by West-
ern scholarship, which by the nineteenth century uniformly accepted the Hebrew
text as the authentic original text of the Old Testament. On the eve of the Russian
Bible Society era (1812–26) the Commission on Ecclesiastical Schools brought to St.
Petersburg and its Theological Academy two leading European Hebraists, Ignatius
Fessler and Jean de Horn. These two orientalists became popular lecturers; Fessler
would later be discharged in connection with charges of freemasonry.2 Nevertheless,
by 1816, when a leading Scottish Hebraist, Ebenezer Henderson (1784–1858), was
sent to Petersburg by the British and Foreign Bible Society to assist with the work of
the Russian Bible Society’s Translations Subcommittee, he found Russian church-
men already well grounded in the study of Hebrew.3 Conforming to the British and
Foreign Bible Society’s commitment to use of the Hebrew original in Old Testament
translation, the Russian Bible Society specifically acknowledged the authority of the
Hebrew text in the preface to its first Russian Psalter.4 The Hebrew text was also
employed in preparation of the Russian Octateuch (the first eight books of the Old
Testament, printed and left unbound in sheets at the time of the 1826 closure of the
Bible Society).
2
On Fessler and freemasonry, see A. N. Pypin, Issledovaniia i statí po epokhe Aleksandra
I, 3: Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii pri Aleksandre I (Petrograd: Izdatel´stvo “OGNI,”
1918), 318–25; and S. Tr., “Ignatii Avrelii Fessler,” Russkii biograficheskii slovar´ (St. Peters-
burg: Izdatel´stvo Imperatorskogo Russkogo Istoricheskogo Obshchestva, 1901), 59–60. On
his career in Russia, see Jean de Horn, Mémoire sur ma carrière civile et militaire en Russie
(London, 1843).
3
On Henderson’s work in Russia, see his Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia; includ-
ing a tour in the Crimea, and the passage of the Caucasus: With observations on the state
of the Rabbinical and Karaite Jews, and the Mohammedan and pagan tribes, inhabiting the
southern provinces of the Russian empire (London: J. Nisbet, 1826). For his evaluation of the
young Russian Hebraist Gerasim Petrovich Pavskii as that “liberal and enlightened clergy-
man,” see Henderson to Bishop Frederick Münter, 20 September 1822, “Ny Kgl. Samling,” fol.
1698, Royal Library of Copenhagen.
4
The first edition of the Russian Bible Society’s Psalter was published in 1822, Kniga Kh-
valenii ili Psaltir´ na rossiiskom iazyke (St. Petersburg: Nikolai Grech´). It contained a preface,
“K khristoliubivomu chitateliu” (i–xi), signed by Metropolitan Serafim of Novgorod and St.
Petersburg, Archbishop Filaret of Moscow, and Archbishop Simeon of Iaroslav. The preface
noted the use of the Hebrew “original” alongside the Greek Septuagint, which it acknowledged
as the textual base for the Slavonic Psalter. Examples are provided of cases in which the trans-
lation gave precedence to the Hebrew for purposes of clarity. Although not included in this
first edition of the Russian Psalter, Psalm 151, which is found only in the Septuagint, is printed
in all subsequent editions of the Bible Society’s Russian Psalter.
The Septuagint Challenge to Russian Old Testament Translation 139
The Western Hebraic scholarship of Fessler, von Horn, and Henderson would
have been viewed simply as alien and external interventions had not Russia’s own
Hebraists achieved international prominence in the decades following closure of the
Russian Bible Society. The rise of Hebraic studies in Russia, which paralleled the
development of oriental studies more broadly in the nineteenth century, served to
reinforce the use of the Hebrew Masoretic text in modern Russian biblical transla-
tion. In the distinguished line of nineteenth-century Russian Hebraists, the names of
four Petersburg scholars stand out: Gerasim Petrovich Pavskii, Vasilii Andreevich
Levison, Daniil Avramovich Khvol´son, and Ivan Gavriilovich Troitskii, all of them
instructors at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy. Gerasim Petrovich Pavskii
completed the first full translation of the Russian Old Testament in an edition litho-
graphed for use in his Hebrew courses at the St. Petersburg Academy in the 1830s.
The underground circulation of that Russian Old Testament ultimately generated in
the 1840s a broad-ranging investigation, the Pavskii Affair (delo Pavskogo), lead-
ing to the seizure and burning of 300 of the 490 lithographed copies of the Pavskii
translation.5 Nevertheless, when Old Testament translation resumed in the 1850s, the
Pavskii text (textus primus) of the Russian Old Testament, and the Hebrew textology
it employed, served as an important point of departure for the work of Daniil Kh-
vol´son, the distinguished orientalist and translator who, with Metropolitan Filaret
(Drozdov) and Pavel Savvaitov, is most closely associated with the preparation of the
final Synodal edition (sinodalńyi perevod) of the Russian Old Testament (1861–75).
In their appeal to Hebraic textological traditions of the West, Russian Old Testa-
ment translators were sheltered by Russia’s most prominent prelate of the nineteenth
century, Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow. The attack against Russian Old Testament
textology was enjoined at the time of the renewal of Russian biblical translation in
the 1850s. At that time, the ecumenical question was raised over how such a transla-
tion would affect the relationship between the Russian Church and other Orthodox
peoples of the Russian Empire and the wider Orthodox East. Initially, Metropolitan
Filaret of Kiev posed the issue in such a way as to question the textological principles
of Filaret Drozdov. The Kievan prelate, seeking to discredit earlier Russian Old Tes-
tament translations that had used a Hebrew Masoretic textual base, argued that Rus-
sian translation based upon the Hebrew Bible parted with the Orthodox textological
tradition of the Slavonic Bible, grounded as it was upon the Greek Septuagint. But,
that argument was quickly expanded to note that the ecumenical patriarch had ear-
lier anathematized any comparable effort to render the Holy Scriptures into modern
Greek. By engaging in modern Russian biblical translation, the Russian Church in the
eyes of the Kievan prelate would be condoning the kind of activity that was elsewhere
spurned within the Orthodox family. With respect to Orthodox Slavs, the argument
was made that modern translation would effectively separate Russia from Slavic peo-
5
On the Pavskii Affair, see S. K. Batalden, “Gerasim Pavskii’s Clandestine Old Testament:
The Politics of Nineteenth-Century Russian Biblical Translation,” Church History 57 (1988):
486–98.
ples (Ukrainians, Belarusians, Bulgarians, and others) who were joined to Russia
through their common Slavonic and Greek biblical and Greek liturgical tradition.6
This opposition from Kiev met with a firm response from Metropolitan Filaret
Drozdov of Moscow. On the matter of the Greek Septuagint, Metropolitan Filaret was
as much opposed to the canonization of the Greek Septuagint as he was to the earlier
attempt to canonize the Slavonic Bible. For the Moscow prelate, the Septuagint was
an important textual base for the Old Testament, but it did not stand alone in that re-
spect. Filaret Drozdov’s credibility on this issue of Old Testament textology was well
known from his work, O dogmaticheskom dostoinstve i okhranitelńom upotreblenii
grecheskogo sedmidesiati tolkovnikov i slavenskogo perevodov sviashchennogo
pisaniia (On the Dogmatic Merit and Preservative Utility of the Greek Septuagint
and Slavonic Translation of Holy Scripture).7 Rather, Metropolitan Filaret argued that
the Greek Septuagint did have a special place in the Eastern Church. But, since the
Septuagint was itself a translation—the oldest extant translation from the Hebrew—
the Hebrew textual tradition also needed to be embraced. For good or for ill, Filaret
Drozdov’s effort to accommodate both textual traditions came to be reflected in the
sinodalńyi perevod by that characteristic use of variant Septuagint readings foot-
noted throughout the pages of the Russian Old Testament. In the years that followed
publication of the Synodal Russian Old Testament in the 1870s, the continuing dis-
cussion of Hebrew and Septuagint textology constituted one small part of a sharply
conflicted debate within late nineteenth-century Russian religious culture.
By raising the wider issue of the Russian Church’s relation to the ecumenical pa-
triarchate, the Kievan metropolitan also posed issues of a more transparently political
character. What the archival record reveals is the straightforward clarity and candor
of Filaret Drozdov’s responses. The distinguished Moscow metropolitan was known
for his principled independence on matters involving Russian ties with the Orthodox
East, often defending the Constantinople patriarchate’s position on such matters as
Bulgarian Church autocephaly, despite strong pan-Slavic sentiment in Russia sup-
porting the Bulgars. Yet, on the issue of modern Russian biblical translation, Filaret
6
The position of the Kievan Metropolitan Filaret (Amfiteatrov) is identified in I. A. Chis-
tovich, Istoriia perevoda Biblii na russkii iazyk, 2d ed. (St. Petersburg: Tip. M. M. Stasiulev-
icha, 1899), 270–71. The conflict between the two prelates, Metropolitan Filaret of Kiev and
Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow, is amply documented in the secondary literature. In addi-
tion to the standard Chistovich history, see also Serdechnyi privet: Sbornik statei, izdannykh
S.-Peterburgskoi dukhovnoi akademiei v pamiat´ piatidesiatiletiia sviatitel´skogo sluzheniia
vysokopreosviashchenneishego Isidora Mitropolita Novgorodskogo, S.-Peterburgskogo i Fin-
liandskogo (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia F. Eleonskogo, 1884). For the manuscript record of the
exchange between the two prelates, see “Sbornik statei o raznykh predmetakh,” Rukopisnyi
otdel, Rossiiskaia natsionalńaia biblioteka (RORNB) f. S.-Peterburgskaia dukhovnaia aka-
demiia, d. #A.I.80, 381 ll.
7
This treatise of Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov), originally prepared for the debate over can-
onization of the Slavonic Bible and Greek Septuagint in 1845, was subsequently published
in Pribavleniia k tvoreniiam sviatykh ottsov v russkom perevode 32 (1858): 2nd pagination,
452–84.
of Moscow saw no need to secure the approval of the ecumenical patriarchate, whose
opposition to demotic translation was well known. The metropolitan noted that, even
as the ecumenical patriarch was not consulted on Russian translations of the Greek
church fathers, so also no prior consultation was called for in the case of biblical
translation. Acutely aware of the degenerated condition of the ecumenical patriarch-
ate, Filaret argued that the Greek hierarchy did not have the necessary information
on which to base a judgment regarding Russian biblical translation. Concluding his
response on the issue, Filaret argued that the Constantinople patriarchate was depen-
dent upon an unbelieving government (the Ottoman Empire) that could depose it at
will, and that therefore the Greek hierarchy lacked the full church freedom necessary
to judge the issue of Russian biblical translation.8 Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow
firmly believed that the issue of modern Russian biblical translation was not a matter
for Constantinople to decide.
The controversy over the Russian Old Testament and its employment of the He-
brew Masoretic text did not diminish following Metropolitan Filaret’s death and the
ensuing publication of the full Synodal Russian Bible in 1875. Despite the authority
of the Moscow metropolitan and the achievements of Russian Hebraists of the nine-
teenth century—a tradition of Hebraic studies that would continue in the work of Ivan
Troitskii and Pavel Konstantinovich Kokovtsev (1861–1942) well into the twentieth
century—the Russian Old Testament generated a decidedly mixed reaction. It is in
this reaction to the Russian Old Testament and the defense of the Greek Septuagint
that we find the real fault lines in official religious culture of fin-de-siècle Russia.
Immediately following the 1875 publication of the Russian Old Testament, the is-
sue was enjoined by one of the most ardent defenders of the Greek Septuagint, Bishop
Feofan (Govorov) of Vladimir. Writing in the pages of Dushepoleznoe chtenie, Feofan
maintained that the Septuagint was the only acceptable ancient Orthodox text, having
been translated flawlessly from the original Hebrew Masoretic text.9 Responding to
the problem of obscure passages in the Slavonic and Septuagint editions of the Old
Testament, the bishop argued that the obscurities were present in the original text and
merely confirmed that God’s divine intent is often beyond the understanding of mere
mortals. What is notable also in Bishop Feofan’s writing is an explicitly anti-Semitic
line of argumentation that would resurface in the critiques of many, though not all,
defenders of Septuagint and Slavonic textology. His argument, which was highly du-
bious then, and altogether unsustainable in the post–Dead Sea Scrolls era, was that
there had been intentional Jewish corruption of post-Septuagint redactions of the
8
Moscow Metropolitan Filaret’s response on this issue of the Greek patriarchate is missing
from the Chistovich history but can be found in “Konfidentsialńaia zametka o raznoglasii
vzgliadov dvukh mitropolitov Filaretov … o perevode Sv. Pisaniia,” ROGPB f. S.-Peterburg-
skaia dukhovnaia akademiia, d. #A.I.80, ll. 111–111ob.
9
Feofan (Govorov), “Po povodu izdaniia sviashchennykh knig vetkhogo zaveta v russkom
perevode,” Dushepoleznoe chtenie, no. 11 (1875): 42–352. See also the discussion of Bishop
Feofan’s position in Arthur Christian Repp, “In Search of an Orthodox Way: The Development
of Biblical Studies in Late Imperial Russia” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Chicago,
1999), 137–39.
Hebrew Masoretic text in order thereby to expunge the more explicit references to
Christ in the Old Testament prophetic books found in the Slavonic text. While the
charges of Bishop Feofan were immediately and convincingly refuted by one of Ger-
asim Pavskii’s own former seminary students, Pavel Ivanovich Gorskii-Platonov, the
issue of anti-Semitism had become a central weapon in the debate over the Russian
Old Testament.10
This anti-Semitic theme in Russian biblical text criticism—a consistent agenda
throughout the remainder of the imperial period and continuing through the twentieth
century—increasingly blinded the more conservative nationalist side of official Rus-
sian religious culture, creating a fissure between official nationalist religious culture
and those scholars, lay and clerical, who appealed to a more open Orthodox tradition.
In this critical divide, the issue of the Septuagint became a crucial litmus test.
To understand how it was that the Russian Old Testament came to divide Russian
Orthodox religious culture in the last half of the nineteenth century, it is necessary to
review the painful background to this division, set as that was in the highly controver-
sial issue of blood libel, specifically the “Saratov Affair.”11 In the 1850s, concurrent
with the reopening of modern Russian biblical translation, the three most prominent
St. Petersburg Hebraists and Russian Old Testament translators—Pavskii, Levison,
and Khvol´son—came to share joint membership on a special commission convened
in 1855 to investigate the allegation in Saratov that Jews had sacrificed Christian
blood for ritual religious purposes. In the lengthy investigation that ensued, the three
Hebraists came to the defense of Russian Jewry, fearlessly challenging the prejudicial
charges levied against the local Jews of Saratov.
The charge was blood libel—namely, that Jewish residents of Saratov had mur-
dered two Christian children in the winter of 1852–53 for the purposes of ritual use
of Christian blood in Jewish observances. The Ministry of Internal Affairs’ mis-
handling of the Saratov investigation eventually led to wildly irrational charges of
wholesale kidnapping of boys. In the end, the Saratov prisons and police department
jails were unable to hold all those arrested in the affair, with the result that private
premises were rented for the incarceration of local residents. Incapable of containing
the investigation, the ministry closed its proceedings in November 1853. In 1854, a
special judicial commission was established in St. Petersburg under the presidency of
Aleksandr Karlovich Giers to investigate the guilt or innocence of those charged in
Saratov. One part of that judicial investigation required investigation “whether there
10
P. I. Gorskii-Platonov, “Neskol´ko slov o staté preosviashchennogo episkopa Feofana: Po
povodu izdaniia sviashchennykh knig vetkhogo zaveta v russkom perevode,” Pravoslavnoe
obozrenie 3, 11 (1875): 506–07.
11
S. K. Batalden, “Nineteenth-Century Russian Old Testament Translation and the Jewish
Question,” in Kirchen im Kontext unterschiedlicher Kulturen: Auf dem Weg ins dritte Jahr-
tausend, ed. Kaarl Christian Felmy and Fairy von Lilienfeld et al. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 1991), 577–87.
were any secret dogmas of Jews that might explain their use of Christian blood.”12 To
investigate this matter of potential secret dogmas, Giers appointed a “special com-
mission” composed of Khvol´son, Pavskii, Levison, and one of Pavskii’s former stu-
dents, Fedor Sidonskii. In short, in 1855, on the eve of the reopening of modern Rus-
sian biblical translation, the major architects of the modern Russian Old Testament
were chosen for their expertise in Hebraic studies in order to determine “whether in
books or manuscripts anything could be found relating to the Jewish use of Christian
blood for religious purposes.”
The special commission determined, of course, that there was no documentary
or other evidence whatsoever in the Hebrew tradition for the use of Christian blood
in Jewish ritual. Although the Saratov affair ended disgracefully with Tsar Alexander
II’s support of the 22–2 majority in the State Council to maintain two of the falsely
charged Jews under arrest, one of the more positive outcomes of this special com-
mission of Hebraists was Daniil Khvol´son’s landmark study O nekotorykh sredneve-
kovykh obvineniiakh protiv evreev (Concerning some Medieval Accusations against
Jews). Published in three subsequent Russian editions, as well as in German, the Kh-
vol´son work became the most authoritative published challenge to blood libel of the
nineteenth century.13 As Ronald Hsia has noted for Germany, so also in this instance
modern Hebraic and Old Testament scholarship ultimately spearheaded the challenge
to blood libel and anti-Semitism.14
In the years that followed, Khvol´son and the architects of modern Russian bib-
lical translation would confront outspoken opposition from those whose defense of
the Septuagint text frequently veiled deeper anti-Semitic sentiments. Among those,
none was more ad hominem in his charges than the historian Nikolai Kostomarov
(1817–85), who charged Khvol´son with “partiality toward Jews,” while renewing
charges of Jewish use of Christian blood in ritual ceremonies. Khvol´son responded:
Mr. Kostomarov alludes to my “patriotism” and speaks about my “partiality

toward Jews.” Yes, I admit that I nourish an empathy for Jews … and I think
that it is far more honest to defend those of my fellow race and my former
religion from erroneous accusations than to slander them with various fabri-
cations and with false representation of the most innocent facts. To be sure,
12
For the specific charge given the judicial commission, see Iu. Gessen, “Saratovskoe delo,”
Evreiskaia entsiklopediia (St. Petersburg: Izdatel´stvo Obshchestva dlia nauchnykh evreiskikh
izdanii i Izdatel´stvo Brokgauz-Efron, 1914), 14: 2–8; also Gessen’s work Istoriia evreev v
Rossii (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia L. Ia. Ganzburga, 1914); and P. Ia. Levenson, “Eshche o
saratovskom dele,” Voskhod, no. 4 (1881): 163–78.
13
D. A. Khvol´son, O nekotorykh srednevekovykh obvineniiakh protiv evreev: Istoricheskoe
issledovanie po istochnikam (St. Petersburg: n.p., 1861). See also an expanded 1880 edition
published in St. Petersburg (Tipografiia Tsederbauma i Gol´denbliuma). The German edition
was published by J. Kauffmann Press in Frankfurt in 1901, Die Blutanklage und sonstige mit-
tel-alterliche Beschuldigungen der Juden: Eine historische Untersuchung nach den Quellen.
14
R. Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
a defender of Jews cannot count upon the approbation of the majority who
invariably throw in their lot with the slanderers of Judaism. But why does an
honest man need such approbation? I hold true to my conscience in struggling
for justice and for truth.15
The forceful message of Daniil Khvol´son and his fellow Old Testament translators
effectively challenged prevailing nineteenth-century superstitions directed against
Russian Jewry, and put racially motivated anti-Semitic superstitions on the defen-
sive.16 In their reasoned appeal for understanding across racial, ethnic, and religious
lines, these Orthodox scholars offered a profoundly ecumenical witness across the
divide of fin-de-siècle Russian religious culture.
In rare instances this divide within official Russian religious culture has yielded
open-minded Russian biblical scholars whose critical textological insights were nev-
ertheless combined with transparently exclusionary language with respect to Russian
Jewry. This was the case of Nikolai Nikanorovich Glubokovskii, who published in
1911, the year of Khvol´son’s death, a Holy Synod tract opposing Jewish use of Chris-
tian names.17
While the Septuagint occasionally became a foil for anti-Semitic polemic in the
contested debate over Russian Old Testament textology, there was another, quite dif-
ferent context in which Septuagint studies became a part of the development of inde-
pendent historico-critical biblical textology in fin-de-siècle Russia. The foundation
for this more serious scholarly study of the Septuagint was of course the discoveries
of the German biblical critic and paleographer Konstantin von Tischendorf (1815–74)
at St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai. First in 1844, and then returning to
Mount Sinai at Russian governmental expense in 1859, von Tischendorf unearthed
and provided for the Russians separate parts of what would ultimately become the
famous Codex Sinaiticus, the fourth-century AD Greek text of the Bible, including
the earliest extant text of the Septuagint or Greek Old Testament. The magnificent
facsimile edition of the Codex Sinaiticus published in St. Petersburg in 1869 served to
stimulate serious scholarly study of the Septuagint, not only in Russia but throughout
the world.
15
D. A. Khvol´son, “Prilozhenie III: Otvet na zamechanie N. I. Kostomarova,” in Upotrebli-
aiut-li evrei khristianskuiu krov´? 3rd ed. (Kiev: Tipografiia Gubernskogo pravleniia, 1912),
77.
16
Although Khvol´son’s impact was felt on several different levels, perhaps the most sen-
sational immediate impact of his position was the extraordinaary apology of Ippolit Liuto-
stanskii, a converted Catholic priest and student at the Moscow Theological Academy. Per-
suaded of the error of his own position, Liutostanskii issued in 1882 a remarkable defense
of the Jews, entitled Sovremennyi vzgliad na evreiskii vopros, wherein he recants his former
writings on the subject. See “Liutostanskii, Ippolit,” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar´, 18: 265.
17
N. N. Glubokovskii, Po voprosu o prave evreev imenovat´sia khristianskimi imenami (St.
Petersburg: Sinodalńaia tipografiia, 1911). I am indebted to the Repp dissertation for unearth-
ing this Glubokovskii work (“In Search of an Orthodox Way,” 207).
By the close of the nineteenth century, two Russian translation projects came to
be tied to this study of the Septuagint. The first featured the Russian prelate and Near
East traveler who figured prominently in Russia’s acquisition of the Codex Sinaiticus,
Bishop Porfirii (Uspenskii, 1804–85). Although published posthumously by the Holy
Synod only in 1893, Porfirii Uspenskii’s translation of the Psalter was the first Rus-
sian edition ever to be translated exclusively from the Septuagint.18 Its publication by
the synod reflected the open-ended debate that continued over Old Testament transla-
tion following publication of the sinodalńyi perevod of the 1870s.
Even more influential in that regard was the translation and critical scholarship
of Pavel Aleksandrovich Iungerov (1856–1921). Unlike other biblical textologists who
tended to center around St. Petersburg, Iungerov was a product of the Kazan´ Theolog-
ical Academy, where he taught from the end of the 1870s. His landmark two-volume
study of the Old Testament followed the basic outlines suggested by Metropolitan
Filaret of Moscow—namely, that the Septuagint could at times serve as a corrective,
but that the appropriate source for Old Testament translation was that used in Rus-
sian biblical translation, the Hebrew Masoretic original.19 Iungerov was sensitive,
however, to the dogmatic interpretive importance of the Septuagint, and focused his
energies particularly on the importance of the aprocrypha or non-canonical books for
which the Septuagint remained the only source. Subjected to criticism from his col-
league at the Kazan´ Academy, M. I. Bogoslovskii, a strident advocate of the Septua-
gint, Iungerov launched in 1907 an ambitious project to translate the entire Septuagint
into modern Russian.20 By the time of Bogoslovskii’s death, the two scholars had
completed translation of the prophetic and non-canonical books, as well as Genesis
and Proverbs.21 In short, even Septuagint studies, which had all too frequently been
used as a weapon of Orthodox “tradition” to denigrate Hebrew textology generally,
18
Psaltir´ v russkom perevode s grecheskogo Ep. Porfiriia (St. Petersburg: Sinodalńaia
Tipografiia, 1893), 242 pp. See the edition in the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg,
RNB #18.267.5.40.
19
P. A. Iungerov, Obshchee istoriko-kriticheskoe vvedenie v sviashchennye vetkhozavetnye
knigi (Kazan´: Tsentralńaia tipografiia, 1902), and Chastnoe istoriko-kriticheskoe vvedenie v
sviashchennye vetkhozavetnye knigi (Kazan´: Tsentralńaia tipografiia, 1907).
20
For the critique by Mikhail Ivanovich Bogoslovskii, see “Otzyv prof. M. I. Bogoslovskogo
o sochinenii ordinarn. Professora P. A. Iungerova, pod zaglaviem: ‘Obshchee istoriko-kri-
ticheskoe vvedenie v sviashchennye vetkhozavetnye knigi,’ rekomendovannom na premiiu
pokoinogo preosviashen. mitropolita Moskovskogo Makariia,” Pravoslavnyi sobesednik 3, 9
(1907): 3–4. Iungerov credits Bogoslovskii with the inspiration for their joint project to trans-
late the Septuagint. See P. Iungerov, “Professor Mikhail Ivanovich Bogoslovskii,” in Pamiati
professora Mikhaila Ivanovicha Bogoslovskogo (Kazan´: Tsentralńaia tipografiia, 1916), 8–9.
The Septuagint/Hebrew Masoretic debate between Bogoslovski and Iungerov is well treated
in Repp, “In Search of an Orthodox Way,” 203–07.
21
This is confirmed in Repp (“In Search of an Orthodox Way,” 207), who relies upon N.
N. Glubokovskii’s Russkaia bogoslovskaia nauka v ee istoricheskom razvitii i noveishem
sostoianii (Warsaw: Sinodalńaia tipografiia, 1928), 29.
became elevated onto the plane of modern historical critical text studies in the years
immediately prior to the Russian Revolution.
What is remarkable in the history of the modern Russian Bible is how, by the
beginning of the twentieth century, the fault line running through Russian Old Testa-
ment studies—a line dividing adherents of the Hebrew Masoretic text from strident
defenders of the Greek Septuagint—had begun to be subsumed within a much larger
debate over historical text criticism and the place of Orthodox tradition in that debate.
Russian nationalists in their defense of the Septuagint clung to a patriotic textology
(otechestvennaia tekstologiia). But, the advent of modern text criticism posed unique
problems for modern Russian religious culture, and left a divided landscape on the
eve of the Russian Revolution. Within the academies and the professoriate, the effort
to defend the traditions of the Orthodox Church increasingly needed to be adjusted to
take into account modern methods of biblical text studies. But there remained large
segments in the Russian church where an exclusivist vision of Orthodox tradition,
including at times explicitly anti-Semitic formulations, still held sway. For most of
the seventy-five years of Soviet rule, that defining fault line within Russian religious
culture was camouflaged by the crude manipulations of state authorities bent on de-
stroying the religious culture itself. Today, even as debates swirl around ecumenism
within Russian religious culture, the issue of authority in Russian religious culture
continues to be arbitrated in part through the ongoing, and still largely unresolved,
conflict over sacred texts and modern biblical criticism.22
22
For one of the more interesting summary statements of this problem from an Orthodox
perspective, see the essay published by the martyred Father Aleksandr Men´, “K istorii russkoi
pravoslavnoi bibleistiki,” Bogoslovskie trudy 28 (1987): 272–89.
Russian Interpretations of Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus
Heather Bailey
Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus (Life of Jesus, 1863), dealing with the historical Jesus, the
“central theological problem of the nineteenth century,”1 caused a tremendous uproar
throughout Europe. Yet the significance of the first popular biography of Jesus Christ
has not been fully appreciated. Upon publication the book was almost immediately
translated into over a dozen languages, including Russian, and the French edition ran
into thirteen printings in the first two years along with fifteen printings of a popular
version that appeared in 1864.2 Renan treated his subject as authentically historical,
and portrayed the Jesus of history as merely human, though the perfect ideal. Jesus’s
great contribution to humanity was his consciousness of God as father. For Renan, Je-
sus’s God-consciousness is the true essence of Christianity. When Renan’s book first
appeared, summarizing “in a single book the result of the whole process of German
For a fuller treatment of this subject, see Heather Bailey, Orthodoxy, Modernity, and Authen-
ticity: The Reception of Ernest Renan’s “Life of Jesus” in Russia (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, 2008). This article is based on the author’s doctoral dissertation, “Ernest
Renan’s ‘Life of Jesus’ and the Orthodox Struggle against the De-Christianization of Christ
in Russia” (University of Minnesota, 2001). Research for this study was supported in part by
the Regional Scholar Exchange Program, which is funded by the Bureau of Educational and
Cultural Affairs of the United States Information Agency (USIA), under the authority of the
Fulbright-Hays Act of 1961 as amended, and administered by the American Council for In-
ternational Education: ACTR/ACCELS. The opinions expressed herein are the author’s own
and do not necessarily express the views of either USIA or the American Councils. Additional
financial support was provided by a Doctoral Dissertation Special Grant from the University
of Minnesota Graduate School, as well as by a grant from the McMillan Research Travel Fund.
All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.
1
Theodore Ziolkowski, Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1972), 36. Thousands of lives of Jesus were published in Europe during the nine-
teenth century. See Peter Fuller, Images of God: The Consolations of Lost Illusions (London:
Chatto and Windus, 1985), 299.
2
Ziolkowski, Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus, 37. The first Russian edition of Life of Jesus
was translated by I. Monakov and published in Dresden in 1864.
148 Heather Bailey
criticism”3 for middle-class readers, his treatment shocked the broad reading public.
As Sergei Bulgakov, one of Russia’s Marxist-turned-Orthodox religious philosophers
put it, with his “merry, rollicking skepticism” and “aesthetic-religious garnish,” Re-
nan substituted a cheap novel for the Gospel.4
Life of Jesus made deep inroads in Russian society between 1863 and 1917. Pro-
hibition of the work by the Ecclesiastic Censorship Committee contributed to the suc-
cess and popularity of the book, as was pointed out by everyone from literary figures
such as Evgeniia Tur and Dostoevsky to concerned representatives of the Russian
Orthodox Church. As Dostoevsky put it:
Every banned idea immediately, as soon as it is banned, is placed on a ped-

estal by the very fact that it is forbidden. If Strauss and Renan had not been
banned, for example, who would know about them in our country? Every
banned idea is like that very petrol that they poured over the floors and the
offices of the Tuillerie and set fire to before the conflagration.5
In many respects, Life of Jesus divided Russian public opinion between those
who supported the traditional dogmatic teaching of the Orthodox Church and those
who opposed the church, whether on religious, philosophical, or political grounds.
Yet when it came to the question of the work’s significance, there was considerable
agreement among Renan’s antagonists and defenders alike. They understood Renan
primarily as a religious thinker whose central contribution was separating religious
consciousness from dogmatic constraints and the established church. The arguments
between Renan’s antagonists and defenders were primarily about the merits of his
brand of spirituality.
In Life of Jesus, Renan combines a positivist approach to history with philo-
sophic idealism. He writes, for example:
Tainted by a coarse materialism, and aspiring to the impossible, that is to

say, to found universal happiness upon political and economic measures, the
“socialist” attempts of our time will remain unfruitful until they take as their
3
Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from
Reimarus to Wrede, trans. W. Montgomery, with an introduction by James M. Robinson (New
York: Macmillan, 1968), 181.
4
S. N. Bulgakov, Khristianskii sotsializm (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1991), 70. Bulgakov was one
of several Russian radical intellectuals to abandon Marxism and materialism in favor of Or-
thodoxy and idealism in the first decade of the 1900s. He became a priest in 1918 and devoted
himself to the study of theology.
5
Fedor Dostoevskii, “Zapiski k Dnevniku pisatelia 1878 g. iz rabochikh tetradei 1875–1877,”
in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh [henceforth PSS] (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–
90), 24: 95. Dostoevsky goes on to lament the fact that people do not want to admit that ban-
ning an idea has an effect opposite of that intended.
Russian Interpretations of Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus 149
rule the true spirit of Jesus, I mean absolute idealism—the principle that, in
order to possess the world, we must renounce it.6
This approach alienated Renan from strict materialists; little was written about Re-
nan by the radical intelligentsia of the 1860s and 1870s, who took a rather dismis-
sive attitude towards Renan’s idealism. Due to Renan’s synthesis of positivism and
idealism, critics sometimes asserted that Renan failed to satisfy anyone. “It turned
out that by his account about the earthly life of Jesus Renan did not satisfy anyone:
neither believers nor unbelievers, Catholics nor Protestants, positivists nor atheists,
freethinkers nor deists.”7 Renan’s synthesis of positivism and idealism, however, did
satisfy many who wanted to hold onto both a sense of religious feeling and the basic
scientific assumptions of modernity. It represented an alternative to traditional dogma
and to mere materialism. As one writer put it in his introduction to the Life of Jesus:
It is possible to be excommunicated from the church without being excom-

municated from the deep necessity of faith and the desire to plant it in others.
Renan belongs to those people, who, in the materialist currents of the last
century raised the wave of the ideal and of interests of the spirit.8
As a synthesizer, Renan tried to avoid any one-sided, exclusive point of view. His
relativism drew criticism from some quarters and praise from others.
As one of those who regarded Renan’s fence-sitting as a deficiency, Nikolai Stra-
khov observes that Renan’s significant characteristic is not that he embraces any one
philosophical or religious system, but that he embraces them all, denying objectivity
in philosophy and religion.
Renan does not deny either philosophy or religion, or the spiritual world;
but he acknowledges them in such a way that nothing comes of this recog-
nition—neither a definite religion, nor a definite philosophy, nor a definite
conception about the spiritual world: everything definite is denied, as a par-
ticular, inadequate form, in which, under the influence of place and time, the
general foundation is reflected. Beyond that, all religions, all philosophies, all
historical forms of belief in the spiritual world are recognized as equals.…
From such a state of thought it comes about that a man respects every belief,
but he himself has none.9
6
Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus, with an introduction by John Haynes Holmes (New York:
Modern Library, 1955), 271–72.
7
V. V. Chuiko, “Ernest Renan,” in Renan, ed. Chuiko, Evropeiskie pisateli i mysliteli (St.
Petersburg: Izd. knigoprodavtsa V. Gubinskogo, 1886), 2.
8
A. N. Veselovskii, “Predislovie,” in Zhizn´ Iisusa, by E. Renan, trans. A. S. Usova, ed. Ve-
selovskii (St. Petersburg: Tip. t-va Narodnaia pol´za, 1906), xvi.
9
Nikolai Strakhov, “Renan,” in Bor´ba s zapadom v nashei literature, ed. C. H. van Schoo-
neveld, Slavistic Printings and Reprintings (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), 1: 242.
150 Heather Bailey
In an 1885 article that first appeared in Rus´ called “Historians without Principles
(Notes about Renan and Taine),” Strakhov suggests that Renan, who devoted so much
of his career to writing about religion, understands the importance of religion, unlike
the ordinary freethinker. Ultimately, however, Renan’s history of Christianity is un-
successful because Renan was too self-confident and did not recognize the loftiness
of his subject.10 Strakhov recognizes Renan as a person with remarkable insights
into religious impulses of the human spirit, and calls Life of Jesus his most important
work. “Undoubtedly in Renan was significant spirituality, and in that is contained the
main secret of his importance and success.”11
While Strakhov recognized Renan as characterized by religious feeling, the
French academic’s spirituality subordinated too much to aesthetic considerations and
lacked the moral seriousness that Strakhov believed characteristic of both the Protes-
tant and Slavic temperaments.
Echoing Strakhov, Prince S. N. Trubetskoi thinks Renan fails to understand the
very essence of religion. In fact, the significance of Renan is that he really abolished
the religion in religion: “that abolition of religion in religion itself—in Christ, the
prophets, apostles, and martyrs, which appears to us the most crude error of Re-
nan, gave his works their totally special significance.”12 For Trubetskoi, Renanism
is defined as the application of an aesthetic measure to philosophy, morality, history,
religion, and the state.13 By subordinating his discussion of Christ and religion to
aesthetic considerations, Renan failed to create an integral image either of Christ or
religion.
Pointing to Renan’s profound spirituality, another critic contested Trubetskoi’s
claim that Renan subordinated everything to aesthetic interests. He replies “it seems
here that the Russian philosopher was led into temptation by the peculiar, whimsical,
and capricious voice of Renan.”14 Aesthetics for Renan was not just prettiness and
pleasure, not the “voluptuous savoring” that Trubetskoi accuses him of, but some-
thing organic—vitality and truth itself.
10
Nikolai Strakhov, “Istoriki bez printsipov (Zametki ob Renane i Tene),” in Bor´ba s zapa-
dom, 1: 320–46.
11
Nikolai Strakhov, “Neskol´ko slov ob Renane,” in Bor´ba s zapadom, 3: 41–42. Renan’s
sense of religious feeling as a fundamental characteristic of his work was pointed out already
in the 1870s in A. Kozlov’s review of Dialogues et fragments philosophiques that appeared
in Universitetskie izvestiia (March 1877): 53–60. As so many other critics, Kozlov points out
that however much one may disagree with Renan it is impossible not to give him credit for
his inimitable ability to reproduce the religious moods that characterized the epoch of early
Christianity.
12
S. N. Trubetskoi, “Renan i ego filosofiia,” Russkaia mysl´, no. 3 (1898): 92.
13
Ibid., 109.
14
P. M. Bitsilli, “Predislovie k knige E. Renana Filosofskie dialogi,” Literaturnoe obozrenie,
no. 3/4 (1993): 87. Reprinted from Ernest Renan, Filosofskie dialogi (Odessa: B. K. Fuks,
1919).
Everything that is living is a symbol of Truth—incomprehensible in itself—

and furthermore, all symbols are equivalent. The great destroyer of “church”
truth, Renan fights in the name of equality of symbols. On what basis does
one of the symbols demand for itself exclusive right to represent Truth? How,
with our mind—limited by the boundaries of the finite—can we attribute to
our ideas the identity of the Ideal? So strong is the religious sense of life in
this “denier,” that he refuses to bend his knee before any one altar, as for him
every corner of the universe is an altar on which tireless and eternal service
happens to the future deity.… the former theologian rejected all historical
religions because he recognized the relative trueness of each. For Renan there
is no difference between the “religious,” the “divine” and the “secular”—he
perceives everything from the point of view of religion. The world is divine,
because deification is found in the tireless process. The great task which was
laid on the universe is to create God, and in this sense, and only in this sense,
is it possible to say that there is a God.15
Similarly, in an article in the well-known Problemy idealizma (Problems of Ide-

alism, 1902), Sergei Ol´denburg argues that Renan’s approach to Christianity reflects
a healthy idealism and spirituality; he praises Renan for his application of science
to the Christian religion, while not in the spirit of positivism.16 Ol´denburg heralded
Renan as a champion of freedom of thought, cleansing and reviving religious feeling
from theological dogmatism, thereby refining it, since “religion in our day cannot
stand apart from sincere refinement and from intellectual progress.”17 He argues that
Renan understood the true scientific spirit, which does not destroy or abolish Chris-
tianity, but places it in the boundaries of a definite time and culture. He then invokes
Renan in support of his argument that “Indians, Jews, and Europeans are all spokes-
men of that same eternal truth: ‘Believe according to what you know, and allow ev-
eryone to believe according to what he knows.’”18
Yet, it is notable that those critics who praised Renan’s relativism with respect to-
wards religion nonetheless recognized that Renan’s spirituality did not only challenge
traditional Christian dogma, but the new scientific dogmas of the second half of the
nineteenth century. According to Owen Chadwick, the new dogma that was taking
15
Ibid., 87–88.
16
Sergei F. Ol´denburg, “Renan, kak pobornik svobody mysli,” in Problemy idealizma:
Sbornik statei, ed. P. I. Novgorodtsev (Moscow: Moskovskoe Psikhologicheskoe Obshchestvo,
1902). Problemy idealizma is one of two well-known compilations of essays that expressed the
religious awakening—characterized by the ideological transition from materialism to ideal-
ism—among Russian intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century. The other collection of
essays is Vekhi (1909). As a group, those intellectuals who abandoned materialism in favor of
religious worldviews came to be known as God-seekers (bogoiskateli).
17
Ibid., 493.
18
Ibid., 503.
152 Heather Bailey
root in Europe in the 1860s was the view that “Science has disproved Religion.”19
Renan recognized the historical importance of religion during an era when it was be-
lieved that science had permanently displaced religion. Thus, some of Renan’s critics
viewed Renan as a skeptic not in the realm of religion, but in the realm of science. As
one author put it: “Everything that Renan wrote and everything that he said clearly
proves that he was simultaneously in the realm of science a skeptic, in the realm of
religion a believing deist, and in everything else a cheerful idealist.”20 He continues
with the observation that it is possible to disagree with Renan’s denial of Catholic
dogmas and to contest his combination of positivism and religious spirit without call-
ing him an atheist and blasphemer.
In a word, if in the last years an awakening of religious feelings began to be

noticed in France, religious questions came into fashion, and the so-called
neo-Christian school even arose, then the French owe all this to the one cler-
ics cursed as the devil incarnate and Antichrist.21
Among ecclesiastic writers and religious philosophers, Renan’s Life of Jesus was
sometimes regarded as a godless, atheistic book. Dostoevsky, for example, said the
work was full of unbelief.22 Yet, several Orthodox writers also recognized Renan’s
spirituality as an important characteristic of the work, only they critiqued his spiritu-
ality and the God-consciousness that he, like other Western biblical critics attributed
to Jesus, as a substitute for the authentic Christianity of the Gospel and Orthodox
Church. Some felt that Life of Jesus was actively contributing to a crisis of faith
in prerevolutionary Russian society, while others thought the book was an excellent
expression of the fact that European society had already lost faith in genuine Christi-
anity and was seeking to fill the void.
Whereas S. N. Trubetskoi defined Renanism as the subordination of philosophy,
morality, history, and religion to aesthetic considerations, some representatives of the
Russian Orthodox Church used the term to refer to Renan’s new substitute religion.23
As expressed in the first major Orthodox rebuttal of Renan written by a French con-
vert to Orthodoxy: “Don’t call your religion Christianity, for it has nothing in com-
mon with Christ; call it Renanism—that’s its real name.”24
19
Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century: The
Gifford Lectures in the University of Edinburgh for 1973–4 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1975), 180.
20
V.T., “Zhizneradostnyi skeptik,” Istoricheskii vestnik 50 (November 1892): 501–16, here
506.
21
Ibid., 507.
22
Dostoevsky, Dnevnik pisatelia (1873), in PSS, 21: 10–11.
23
Trubetskoi, “Renan i ego filosofiia,” 86–121.
24
Vladimir Gete [Réné François Guettée], Oproverzhenie na vydumanuiu “Zhizn´ Iisusa”
sochineniia Ernesta Renana,” s troistvennoi tochki zreniia bibleiskoi ekzegetiki, istoricheskii
One reviewer notes that Renan offers his readers a thinned-out Christianity that
amounts to an idolatrous worship of humanism, culture, progress, and civilization.
Dogma is replaced with skepticism, while affirmation is replaced by denial. Skep-
ticism is a state of indifference; there are merely possibilities, and each individual
chooses which possibilities to believe in, according to his own tastes. Thus, it re-
mained possible for Renan to see himself under the rubric of “Christian,” while re-
jecting the church.25
The view that Life of Jesus offered a cheap substitute in place of authentic Chris-
tianity, representing the unhealthy spiritual condition of Europe, was widely shared.
As Father Tikhon Alekseevich Donetskii described it, the work was a reflection of the
spiritual and moral condition of nineteenth-century Europe in general, and of France
in particular: belief in progress instead of the living God, admiration of positive phi-
losophy and self-sufficiency without consciousness of sin and without the thirst for
redemption. Life of Jesus, he argues, was more about nineteenth-century France than
about the history of Christ and the Jews, and could only satisfy those who had never
read the Gospels, or who had never really thought about Christ. Renan’s Life of Jesus
offered a substitute religion to those who, like Renan, lost the Christ of the Gospels
but still yearned for His image and had not abandoned religious questions altogether.
Donetskii pointed out that Christ’s teaching itself could not be divorced from His di-
vinity, since His teaching was to believe in Him and love God. While acknowledging
that the book could have a positive influence, possibly igniting the first spark of reli-
gious feeling in a person previously cold to religious questions, it was also destructive
by substituting the light of God with a “god” fabricated by Renan through which, as
for Smerdiakov, everything is permissible.26 As a pastoral figure, he does not advise
people not to read Life of Jesus, but to read it only after familiarizing themselves with
the Gospels and to consult the guidance of learned Orthodox clergy on the Gospels.
kritiki i filosofii, trans. K. Timkomskii (St. Petersburg: Tip. I. I. Glazunova, 1864–66), 376.
The second French edition of Guettée’s work appeared in Russian translation under the title E.
Renan pred sudom nauki, ili oproverzhenie izvestnogo sochinenia E. Renana “Zhizn´ Iisusa,”
osnovannoe na vyvodakh iz Biblii i rassmatrivaemoe s tochek zreniia istoricheskoi kritiki i
filosofii, trans. L. A. Feigin (Moscow: Izd. I. A. Morozova, 1889). It contains supplementary
materials: Iu. Shikoppa, “Sed´maia beseda o litse Iisusa Khrista,” trans. I.Z.; and “Dosto-
vernost´ evangel´skikh skazanii: Lektsiia chitannaia v kembridzhskom universitete doktorom
bogosloviia V. Farrarom,” trans. Matveev.
25
N.G., Mysli o prochtenii knigi Renana Ernesta “Zhizn´ Iisusa” (Pochaev: Tipografiia Po-
chaevo-Uspenskoi Lavry, 1906).
26
“Everything is permissible” is an obvious reference to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Kara-
mazov. Ivan Karamazov, a Western-style rationalist inclined towards atheism, nonetheless
recognizes that if there is no God and no immortality, everything is permissible. Smerdiakov,
possibly the illegitimate son of Fedor Karamazov, took Ivan’s ideas to heart and murdered
Fedor, then later committed suicide.
154 Heather Bailey
With the proper preparation, there will be no doubt in the reader’s mind which Christ
is purer, higher, and holier: the Christ of the Gospels, or the Christ of Renan.27
In his study Jesus Christ in the Understanding of Renan and Harnack, V. P. Vi-
nogradov calls the substitution of a false, fabricated image of Christ for the real image
of the Savior of the world the most terrible and grievous danger that ever threatened
Christianity—a matter of life or death for Christianity. In particular, the books of Re-
nan and Harnack are singled out as a threat to authentic gospel Christianity in Russia.
Vinogradov observes that every age has its struggle between light and darkness, good
and evil, truth and falsehood, and that in the current age the struggle centers around
the person and life of Jesus Christ.28
Renan’s spirituality was praised from one side for its rejection of any one-sided
worldview, whether that of church dogma or blind faith in science and material-
ism. It was criticized by the defenders of dogma for substituting sentimentality and
God-consciousness in place of humanity’s redemption from sin and genuine, intimate
communion between humanity and God. Yet Renan’s antagonists and defenders alike
recognized that Renan had reawakened interest in religious questions in a materialist
era when science was regarded as supreme. This prerevolutionary critique of Renan
holds true for the Soviet era as well.
A century after Life of Jesus first appeared, Soviet society experienced an ideo-
logical reexamination and reaction against materialism. Interest in Renan, suppressed
after the Bolsheviks secured power and adopted as the official party line the position
that Jesus was not a historical person, began to surface once again. Renan’s treatment
of Jesus as historical, and having a transcendence as the ideal man, became a novelty.
One expression of the changing atmosphere was the publication of Mikhail Bulga-
kov’s novel The Master and Margarita, written between 1928 and 1940; because
the novel satirizes Soviet society and explores metaphysical themes, it was not pub-
lished until 1966–67. Bulgakov weaves a life of Pontius Pilate into the novel, the main
sources of which were Renan’s Life of Jesus and F. W. Farrar’s Life of Christ (1874).
At the other end of the spectrum, two Orthodox priests, Dmitrii Dudko and Alek-
sandr Men´, in an effort to engage Russian society in exploration of religious ques-
tions, suggested that Renan’s Life of Jesus could be read in connection with the idea
that Jesus Christ was a historical figure. They believed Renan’s biography could fos-
ter interest in Christ and religious questions, though they added the caveats that belief
in the Godman required faith and that the true source for knowledge about Christ was
27
T. A. Donetskii, Publichnoe chtenie o renanovskoi “Zhizni Iisusa” (Novocherkassk: Chast-
naia Donskaia Tipografiia, 1909). Donetskii recommends the apologetic works of Mikhail and
B. I. Gladkov to the reader. See Arkhimandrit Mikhail [Matvei Ivanovich Luzhin], Evangelie
meshchan: Renan i ego Iisus (St. Petersburg: Tipo-litografiia M. P. Frolovoi, 1906); Arkhi-
mandrit Mikhail, “O evangeliiakh i evangel´skoi istorii: Po povodu knigi E. Renana Zhizn´
Iisusa,” Pribavleniia k izdaniiu tvorenii sviatykh ottsev v russkom perevode 23 (1864): 28–98,
109–205, 411–82, 503–634; and B. I. Gladkov, Tolkovanie Evangeliia, 3d ed. (St. Petersburg:
Izdanie avtora, 1909).
28
V. Vinogradov, Iisus Khristos v ponimanii Renana i Garnaka (Sergiev Posad: Tipografiia
Sv.-Tr. Sergievoi Lavry, 1908).
the Gospel.29 Tracing the debate about the historicity of Jesus Christ in Soviet society,
Dudko observed that the official Soviet line of the 1920s and 1930s—that the person
of Jesus was pure fabrication—had become unfashionable by the 1960s, when belief
in the historical Jesus was considered “progressive.”30
Renewed interest in the person of Jesus Christ in general and Renan’s Life of
Jesus in particular is verified by the reprinting of well over one million copies of Life
of Jesus in 1990 and 1991 in Russia and the CIS.31 The Life of Jesus was voted one of
the fifty best books of 1991 by readers of Knizhnoe obozrenie (The Book Review).32
The work’s popularity can be explained, in part, by the fact that it has provided many
readers with their first exposure to Jesus as an actual historical person.
In conclusion, among his prerevolutionary antagonists and defenders, there was a
general consensus that Renan was not primarily a materialist, but a religious thinker.
His overall significance lay in his spirituality, and in both prerevolutionary and Soviet
Russia, Renan’s regard for religious feeling freed from dogmatic constraints repre-
sented an alternative to the established orthodoxies: Orthodox dogma on the one hand
and the dogmas of empiricism and materialism on the other.
29
See Alexander Men, Son of Man, trans. Samuel Brown (Torrance, CA: Oakwood Publi-
cations, 1998), first published as Syn chelovecheskii in Brussels in 1968 under Men´’s pseud-
onym, Andrei Bogoliubov; Men´, “Posleslovie,” in Zhizn´ Iisusa (Moscow: Slovo, 1990). This
edition of Life of Jesus is a reprint of the translation by E. Sviatlovskii (St. Petersburg: Piroz-
hkov, 1906); and Father Dmitrii Dudko, Our Hope, trans. Paul D. Garrett, with a foreword by
John Meyendorff (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1977).
30
Dudko, Our Hope, 37.
31
This statistic is based on data published in Knizhnoe obozrenie for 1990–92 as well as on
information from the card catalog and various editions at the Russian State Library in Moscow.
32
Knizhnoe obozrenie, 21 August 1992, 8. On the popularity of Life of Jesus in the early
1990s, see also M. P. Odeskii and M. L. Spivak, “Zhizn´ Iisusa: Istoricheskie metamorfozy,”
Literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 3/4 (1993): 99. The Life of Jesus has been reprinted in Russia as
recently as 2007.
Between the Cross and the Eagle: The Russian Orthodox
Missionary Society and the Politics of Religion
in Late Imperial Russia
Aaron N. Michaelson
This essay is part of a larger project which seeks, through the prism of a little-known
enterprise—the Russian Orthodox Missionary Society (1870–1917)—to reconsider
two commonly held views or assumptions regarding an aspect of late imperial Rus-
sia. The first assumption is that the Russian Orthodox Church was not involved in
aggressive or successful missionary institutions; the second is that such activities, if
any, were both ineffectual and, given the nature of church-state relations, determined
by crude calculations of state policy.
In fact, the Russian Orthodox Missionary Society1 reflected the fluid confes-
sional and national landscape of imperial Russia. Missionary guidelines, commentar-
ies, correspondence, and debate reveal the society’s attitude toward the religious-na-
tional controversy in late imperial missions.2
In the far corners of the empire, Russian missionaries faced geographic, climatic,
ethnographic, and linguistic difficulties. Many languages encountered had never
been systematically studied, while some, spoken for centuries in an austere environ-
ment, lacked terms necessary to translate Orthodox material in a vivid and meaning-
ful manner. Just as often, established religions were present. Missionary enterprise
required more workers, churches, schools, and money.3 The Orthodox Missionary
Society provided personnel and training, distributed funds, and facilitated translation
1
The Missionary Society functioned, according to its ustav (charter), as the primary Russian
Orthodox missionary service to non-Russians, including Muslims, Buddhists, and pagans, in
the eastern part of the Russian Empire. On a few rare occasions it was involved in the conver-
sion of Jews but was not active in the west among Catholics or Lutherans, nor among schismat-
ics and sects. The society’s mission was defined by the terms inorodcheskaia (non-Russian),
vneshniaia (external, outside the internal, vnutrenniaia, sphere associated with Orthodoxy
which would have included schismatics), and inostrannaia (foreign).
2
The most useful discussion of the term russification, its context, evolution, and meaning, is
found in Edward C. Thaden, ed., Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland, 1855–1914
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 7–9.
3
E. K. Smirnov, Ocherk istoricheskogo razvitiia i sovremennogo sostoianiia russkoi pravo-
slavnoi missii (St. Petersburg: Sinodalńaia tipografiia, 1904), 68.
158 A aron N. Michaelson
and publication of religious books. Over the long term, the society made a consider-
able impact. The liberalization measures enacted in 1904 and 1905 forced the society
to redouble its proselytizing efforts.4 Progress was interrupted by revolution, but the
endeavor continued with further Russian Orthodox missionary successes in the Far
East. Bringing Orthodoxy to the far parts of the empire was no simple task. Nor was
it without controversy.
At times the Orthodox Missionary Society worked alongside ordinary clergy,
performing special missionary functions, while in some places society missions were
the sole representatives of Russian Orthodoxy. Consideration of the typical parish
duties of Orthodox priests gives us a useful perspective on the society’s work.5 The
clergy’s service in the Russian Orthodox Church could be divided into four catego-
ries, according to hieromonakh Dionisii, a scholar active in the study of Orthodox
missions around the turn of the century. The categories were the rural parish (sel´skii
prikhod), non-Orthodox or non-Russian service (inovercheskii or inorodcheskii
deiatel´), urban (gorodskoi deiatel´) service, and teaching the faith in schools (za-
konouchitel´stvo).6 The work of the Russian Orthodox Missionary Society concerned,
in order of prominence, the second, first, and fourth categories, but missionerstvo in
the broader sense, anti-Schismatic and anti-sectarian missions, as well as fundrais-
ing, concerned all four.
The society faced considerable challenges in an empire shaken by secularization.
As Dmitrii Govorov noted in his commentary, a lack of public interest in church af-
fairs hurt missionary work.7 As the concept of religious freedom had gained credence
in progressive circles late in the eighteenth century, methods of repression, coercion,
or deception in missionary enterprise were condemned. As a result, Russian mission-
aries exercised considerable caution, and promoted conversion with painstaking care,
4
The “laws of 1905” often discussed in sources on missions include the Law on Religious
Toleration of 17 April 1905, freedoms granted in the Bulygin Manifesto publicized 6 August
1905, and the October Manifesto (17 October 1905). The Orthodox faith’s official status was
weakened. The first law was officially publicized as “Ob ukreplenii nachal veroterpimosti”;
it outlawed any sanction against apostatizers, and was mainly oriented toward sects and Old
Belief. Although no firm rulings emerged on Islam or Lamaism, the Committee of Ministers
would work out such questions and believers of those faiths would benefit from some liberal-
ization and limited government support included in the 17 April act. Polnoe sobranie zakonov
Rossiiskoi Imperii (St. Petersburg: V tipografii II otdeleniia sobstvennoi E.I.V. kantseliarii,
1882–1916), 25: 257–62.
5
The work of Gregory Freeze has been the only English-language scholarly investigation
of this phenomenon. Gregory L. Freeze, Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth
Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), and The Parish Clergy in Nine-
teenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1983).
6
Dionisii (ieromonakh), Idealy pravoslavno-russkogo inorodcheskogo missionerstva (Ka-
zan´: Tipo-litografiia Imperatorskogo universiteta, 1901), 187.
7
Dmitrii Govorov (protoierei), Zadachi missionerstva, vyzyvaemye potrebnostiami nashego
vremeni (Kiev: Rukovodstvo dlia sel´skikh-pastyrei, 1909), 20.
Between the Cross and the Eagle 159
because such an approach was in tune with the Gospel, experience in the field, and
progressive thought of the time.8 The Missionary Society was genuinely concerned
with these issues.
Secularization had gradually alienated the Russian intelligentsia from the Ortho-
dox establishment as well. Nikolai Lipskii, a missioner-intelligent, wrote that he faced
pressure from two sides. As the intelligentsia had largely turned away from the tradi-
tional faith, he no longer felt welcome in their circles. At the same time, in his work as
a missionary, he faced pressure from the higher ecclesiastical administration, whose
rigid rules discouraged flexibility and creativity.9 Such a conflict was a key to the
distance between the missionary effort and a changing, secularizing society.10 In the
end, the Missionary Society, an independent organization, could not close the yawing
gap between the progressive intelligentsia and a deeply conservative administration.
Key Missionary Society figures and their contributions elucidate the true content
and thrust of late imperial Russian Orthodox missionary activity. Innokentii Venia-
minov was a central figure not only in the Missionary Society’s Moscow operation but
also in the development of the Orthodox evangelizing enterprise in Siberia and North
America, where he had served. Veniaminov’s guidelines for missionaries would have
a strong influence throughout the period of the society’s operation and served as a
fundamental document in inorodcheskoe missionerstvo. The guidelines indicate the
mixture of motives, national and spiritual, although nationalistic elements are far
weaker than among conservative-nationalist publicists who would comment on mis-
sionary enterprise in the decades to come.
Innokentii wrote in his nastavlenie or instruction to missionaries, that even as
early as 1771, according to a synod ukaz, “a missionary should not consider his duty
the rapid accomplishment of baptisms,” but should try to achieve his goals by patient
Christian teaching, because baptism by any other means was “an abuse of one of the
most central rites of the Christian faith.”11
By Innokentii’s method, the missionary must employ prayer, modesty, serenity,
thoughtfulness, and, of course, love. The missionary should use sermons and preach
wherever possible, to as many people as possible. If one does not know the language
8
Govorov argues that such missionary methods developed in the century after the Enlighten-
ment had taken hold in Russia (ibid., 1).
9
N. I. Lipskii, Psikhologicheskie dannye v voprose o missionerskoi taktike (Khar´kov: Vera
i Razum, 1910), 11–12.
10
This conflict is perhaps an echo of the dilemma and controversy in which Vladimir Solovév
was so deeply involved. Not only Lipskii, but also Archmonk Dionisii were left in the ideo-
logical gap between conservative-nationalist and liberal positions. See Greg Gaut, “Can a
Christian Be a Nationalist? Vladimir Solovév’s Critique of Nationalism,” Slavic Review 57,
1 (1998): 79–80.
11
Innokentii (Veniaminov), Nastavlenie sviashchenniku naznachaemomu dlia obrash-
cheniia inovernykh i rukovodstvovaniia obrashchennykh v khristianskuiu veru, sostavlennoe
vysoko-preosviashchennym Moskovskim mitropolitom Innokentiem pred vstupleniem ego na
Kamchatskuiu kafedru (Irkutsk: Tipografiia N. N. Sinitsina, 1880), 1–3.
of the audience, an interpreter must be chosen carefully. Innokentii recommended

that the missionary preach to the heart, from the heart, in order to counteract the
insatiable curiosity of the mind. The teaching should be directed at the appropriate
level, which often meant an elementary one. The missionary should begin with Gen-
esis and the story of creation, tell about the Commandments and their consequences;
he should convince the listener of humanity’s sinful nature and then reveal Christ’s
saving message, continuing with the Gospels and Apostles. Only after listeners have
understood this material can the missionary ask if they would consider joining the
“believers of Christ.” The missionary should always speak clearly and concisely.
“The whole teaching of Jesus Christ is grounded in the pure, unselfish love, toward
him and all people, which we believers possess.”12
The missionary must then explain the conditions of Baptism, its meaning, and
how a Christian should live. These conditions include: renouncing any other faith,
abandoning shamanism completely, committing no acts which would conflict with
Christianity, confession of sins, and fulfilling that which the baptized’s new law and
church require. Only with God’s help, through the Holy Spirit and prayer, can all this
be achieved; not by human will alone.13
Innokentii advised the missionary to be sensitive about pagan marriages, even
those to close relatives, which took place before Orthodox baptism. Such relation-
ships represent no barrier to proselytizing work, and the missionary should not inter-
fere in the family bonds created by them. The missionary should offer no gifts, only
crosses. Gifts to prospective converts serve the wrong purpose, and the missionary
must ensure that the desire to accept Orthodox baptism is genuine. The baptismal
service should be performed in a building or tent, but can be done in the open air if
necessary. The place of the baptism should be marked with crosses so that believers
can make return visits. The fundamentals of the teaching must be covered slowly
and carefully to prevent difficulties later. The missionary must not employ any false
miracles or revelations; what smacked of trickery could be severely punished, Inno-
kentii warned. “Unusual occurrences” in a missionary’s work must be investigated
before being employed in preaching, and then only after consultation with the local
ecclesiastical authorities. The missionary can never use coercion, threats, presents,
promises, or flattery, and must act with apostolic sincerity.14
Practical allowances, though, were made for local conditions. Fasts could be ob-
served as best as climate and available food allow; sometimes a change in the food or
just the time of meals would have to suffice. One could avoid eating in the morning
hours. Fasting should be quite strict especially when Easter approaches. Non-Russian
converts should attend church frequently, but the missionary should not insist on the
same regularity of attendance as in European Russia. A reminder to pray is a useful
substitute. Orthodox marriages, however, must be performed as strictly as in Russia
(this in regard to close relatives especially).
12
Ibid., 3–8.
13
Ibid., 8–10.
14
Ibid., 13–14.
In terms of native culture, the missionary should not deny non-Russians any of
their old customs which do not conflict with Christianity, and should explain that such
customs are still allowed. The missionary should let non-Russians listen to the whole
liturgy if they so desire, even though the Liturgy of the Faithful (Liturgiia vernykh)
may seem questionable. After all, the ambassadors of St. Vladimir were allowed to
do so in Constantinople though they were pagans.15
But Russian missionaries represented more than just the Orthodox Church. In-
nokentii recommended that the missionary tell the audience of the supremacy and
beneficial nature of the Russian government, without declaring oneself a government
agent or even an authoritative figure. Instead, the missionary should appear as a sim-
ple, virtuous traveler. The missionary should never show distaste for non-Russian
habits or lifestyle, and should always be ready to assist non-Russians with deed and
advice. The missionary should answer questions gently and reasonably, employing
each as an opportunity to teach as well as learn. He should treat the unbaptized just
as well as the baptized; good will is evidence of good intentions. One should preach
against polygamy gently and reasonably, and should demand no offerings, but should
take them if given. The missionary should not force non-Russians to work for the
mission after baptism, but if they wish to assist in some way, pay them justly. Again,
the missionary should never accept gifts or be occupied with trade. Missionary visits
to non-Russians should not interfere with vital activities such as fishing or hunting,
nor should one burden private companies too heavily either with requests of transport
facilities or other material goods.16
Innokentii insisted that the missionary learn the language of local non-Russian
populations, at least in order to understand them, and should know their customs as
well as their pagan faith. He reiterates that customs not harmful to the Christian faith
mean a great deal to non-Russians, and respect for them contributes to missionary
success. The missionary must avoid legal or property squabbles, and should defend
himself physically only in extreme danger, keeping in mind that great blessing comes
to those who suffer in the name of Jesus Christ.17
These instructions were reminiscent of the ustav of the Missionary Society, also
formulated by Innokentii, which laid the foundation of the society’s central organiza-
tion. In short, Innokentii’s ideas on the conduct of missionary work in the field served
as a foundation of Orthodox missions.
Like Veniaminov, Makarii Glukharev was predominantly concerned with the
firmness of the converts’ faith. Founder of the Altai mission, Glukharev arrived in
Biisk okrug in 1830, where he constructed three missionary stany (bases or stations),
began studying the local languages, and eventually created vital missionary transla-
15
Ibid., 11–13.
16
Ibid., 14–16.
17
Ibid., 18–19.
tions. In keeping with the focus on soundness of faith, Glukharev converted a modest
number (675 persons) during his career in Altai.18
How fully the average missionary in the field absorbed the ideals of the elite
missionaries is difficult to surmise. Penza province (guberniia) missionary Vasilii
Kamenskii provides several insights into the operation of local missions. His writings
also reflect the degree to which the ideas of Innokentii Veniaminov and the Mission-
ary Society were employed outside the academies and consistories.
Kamenskii’s instructions and recommendations bear a strong similarity to those
of Innokentii Veniaminov. Like Innokentii, Kamenskii recommended that the mis-
sionary not promise himself too much; the missionary should rely on God, seeking
strength and peace in prayer. The missionary must learn the language needed for his
appointed parish, in this case Tatar and Arabic. Kamenskii’s image of the missionary
as apostle and strannik also corresponds directly to Innokentii’s writings.19
The Missionary Society employed not only administrative tools but linguistic
and pedagogical ones in the effort to convert non-Russians to the Orthodox faith. Mis-
sions, as a central part of their work, produced religious translations and administered
Orthodox schools. Orthodox translations and missionary schools were also key issues
in the religious-national debate. After the passing in 1891 of N. I. Il´minskii, who
was not only a member of the Translating Commission in Kazan´, but the most active
organizer of missionary schools in the Russian Empire, countless primary schools
and other ecclesiastical institutions perpetuated Il´minskii’s method of non-Russian
parochial education.20 His systems of translation and primary education remained in
use, and controversial, in the decades after his death.
A. M. Pozdneev, in the journal of the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment, voiced
criticisms of Il´minskii’s system of vernacular translation in 1895. Pozdneev, a scholar
in Eastern languages, insisted that knowledge of literary non-Russian languages was
vital for precise rendering of text. He felt that the vernacular lacked the flexibility and
depth of the literary language, even though that literary lexicon may have been closely
connected with a non-Christian faith. In fact, Pozdneev thought that the purely reli-
gious goals of Il´minskii’s time were no longer central issues. This debate indicates
once again a rift in worldviews, as well as a divide between established academic
procedure, characterized by a secular and literary approach, and the missionary focus
on the language of everyday communication.21
18
Mikhail Iakovlevich Glukharev (1792–1847). Trained in the Smolensk seminary and St. Pe-
tersburg Ecclesiastical Academy, he became a monk in 1819. See Entsiklopedicheskii slovar´
(St. Petersburg: F. A. Brokgauz i I. A. Efron, 1890–1904), 18: 35.
19
Vasilii Kamenskii, Na sluzhbe missii: Deiatelńost´ inorodcheskogo missionera sredi tatar
(Penza: Gubernskaia tipografiia, 1913), 16–24.
20
Otchet Pravoslavnogo Missionerskogo Obshchestva za 1891 g. (Moscow: Sinodalńaia
tipografiia, 1892), 36–37.
21
K. Kharlamovich, O missionerskikh perevodakh na inorodcheskie iazyki: Pis´mo arkhi-
mandrita Vladimira, nachalńika Altaiskoi missii, k Irkutskomu arkhiepiskopu Veniaminu
(Kazan´: Tipografiia Imperatorskogo universiteta, 1904), 3–4.
Pozdneev elicited a response from Archimandrite Vladimir22 of the Altai mis-

sion. Although Vladimir felt that translations were vital to missions, they need not be
produced in great quantity or in every dialect. One translation reasonably accessible
to several related ethnic groups was a feasible alternative. As for the alphabet, Vlad-
imir supported use of a Cyrillic script but was not opposed to the use of Mongolian
script where that would be more suitable to readers. Pozdneev had noted that Russian
translations of Orthodox works done in prior decades in Mongolian script were still
circulating in Mongolia. Vladimir nonetheless insisted on Cyrillic script, so useful
for learning Russian later. Pozdneev’s recommended Mongolian script was unrealis-
tic for Russian missionaries, Vladimir argued. Missionary training was already com-
plex enough.23
Archbishop Veniamin of Irkutsk, it turns out, adopted the literary translation
system used earlier in the Irkutsk mission by Nil´, that which Pozdneev had advo-
cated. Veniamin adapted Nil´’s translations into local dialects after the synod had
granted missions that right in 1883. Unfortunately, some of the finished product was
unintelligible to local Buryats. Il´minskii felt that Veniamin was a great historian, but
lacked linguistic skills. As Il´minskii put it, “he [Veniamin] always vacillated among
various translations, academic and vernacular, literary and popular, and to this time,
in Irkutsk missions, translation has not been given a solid, fundamental foundation,
nor necessary development.”24 Il´minskii was certain of his views. Veniamin, and
others, in light of local conditions, and under a variety of pressures, continued to
experiment. The impact of translations, both as an orthodoxifying and russifying
instrument, was blunted by controversy and disorganization.
But schools clearly influenced hundreds of thousands if not millions of non-Rus-
sians. For example, the society’s local committee in Ufa supported forty-five schools
in 1904. Its non-Russian schools were said to have outpaced their Russian counter-
parts in singing. Some classes learned the entire liturgy in their native languages.25
In many cases, the devotion of recent non-Russian converts was reported to be ex-
emplary.
To the dismay of those who valued missions primarily as instruments of russi-
fication, after the Manifesto on Religious Tolerance (Manifest o veroterpimosti) of
17 April 1905, attendance at Orthodox services was no longer, even in the letter of
22
Vladimir (Filaret Sin´kovskii), a leader in the Kirgiz and Altai missions, was named bishop
of Biisk (1891), bishop of Vladikavkaz (1893), and bishop of Kishinev and Khotin (1904). He
was also the author of many missionary translations. See Entsiklopedicheskii slovar´, 1 (do-
polnitelńyi): 439.
23
Kharlamovich, O missionerskikh perevodakh, 5–7.
24
Ibid., 10–11. Il´minskii’s comment appears in a letter to Konstantin Pobedonostsev. Pis´ma
N. I. Il´minskogo k K. P. Pobedonostsevu (Kazan´: Tipografiia Imperatorskogo universiteta,
1895), 186.
25
Eight others received support from the synod, a local brotherhood, and a monastery. All
fifty-three schools had 1,838 pupils. “Otchet PMO za 1904 g.,” Pravoslavnyi blagovestnik, no.
19 (1905): 80–83.
the law, mandatory, and many perceived that this would weaken Orthodox missions,
at least in the short term.26 Others saw it as an opportunity for Orthodoxy to adapt
to fair competition with other Christian and non-Christian faiths. Nikolai Lipskii,
among many, blamed the April 1905 manifesto for increased numbers turning away
from Orthodoxy in subsequent years.27
Five years later, in the wake of the Kazan´ missionary congress, the religious-na-
tional debate continued. A Father Grigorév wrote that Russians must treat non-Rus-
sians in a loving, friendly manner, not haughtily, otherwise they could be driven to
separatism. Too often, though, just the opposite was done. Even in the Baltics, where
institutions prior to uniformization or institutional russification were superior to Rus-
sian ones, the plan to construct a Russian clone was fulfilled. One can say, in the end,
that positions on the role of language in missions, schooling, or society in general
were determined by priorities. If Russian nationalism came first, missions and their
schools must work in Russian as soon and as much as possible. If Orthodoxy came
first, the language used could be a non-Russian one, and the general approach was
more gradual.
Even after the Kazan´ and Irkutsk congresses, the following questions remained:
What should missions’ prime objectives be? How should they be administered and
funded? And, finally, how could they achieve greater success? The points raised in
the debate often reflected broad political and intellectual divisions, within and outside
the Missionary Society.
Conservative-nationalist figures saw many possibilities, usually of a political or
social nature, in the work of missions. Such an idea must have been with Russian
missionaries well before the existence of the Missionary Society. One such thinker
(initials V.A.I.) felt that missions, if they could resolve the age-old problems of in-
overie (other faiths) and raskol (schism), would achieve a great triumph for the state.28
The state for its part should provide the missions with material support, while leaving
their operation to the church.29 The author argued for the independence of missions
because of his belief that Russian liberalism differed from classical English liberal-
ism in its absence of religious feeling. Given its secular prejudices, the Russian liberal
press gave little positive publicity to church or faith. It would be best, he asserted,
to remove completely the struggle with inoverie and raskol from the state’s hands,
where a preponderance of such liberal thinking weakened the effort.30 Conversion
required considerable effort, more than liberal circles would allow for.
Often pagans acknowledged the superiority of Christianity but continued to re-
sist baptism. They often feared they would not be treated like Russians even after
26
Govorov, Zadachi missionerstva, 11–13.
27
Lipskii, Psikhologicheskie dannye, 5.
28
V.A.I., Obiazannost´ russkogo gosudarstva po obrashcheniiu raskolńikov i inovertsev k
pravoslavnoi russkoi tserkvi (Irkutsk: N. N. Sinitsyn, 1882), 5.
29
Ibid., 9.
30
Ibid., 1.
conversion because they lacked Russian traits; lived in iurty (animal-hide huts) in-
stead of izby (traditional Russian peasant dwelling; often of hewn-log construction);
spoke Russian poorly; and were unable to plow the land. The author insisted that what
inorodtsy awaited most fervently was the tsar’s order for them to convert.31 That was
this conservative-nationalist’s most ardent wish, but was not necessarily what mis-
sionaries desired. Judging by the statements and activities of Russian missionaries, a
more purely ecclesiastical formula was also widespread.
Popular perception of “Russianness” caused some complications for missions
as well. Referring to Russians, “V.A.I.” maintains that “no inorodets will respect a
people that does not respect itself.” The Russian sense of nation was closely tied to
Orthodoxy’s perceived prestige and attractiveness for inorodtsy.32 Special govern-
ment benefits given to baptized inorodtsy should be ended, because their status often
surpassed that of their Russian neighbors which made complete obrusenie (russifi-
cation) a step down for them. Instead the author supports the sort of russification or
uniformization which was underway in the Baltics.33 The author “V.A.I.” made no
attempt to disguise his views; he attacked the whole idea of tolerance of faiths, such
as reconversion to Judaism of Jews who had become Christians; he attacked the 1861
guidelines for converting non-Orthodox to Orthodoxy and the 1858 law protecting
schismatics. The author awaited the reunification of Russian national feeling with
national faith.34
Another conservative-nationalist commentator, V. Malakhov, expressed the be-
lief in Russian nationality as portrayed in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. Mal-
akhov held the term narod-bogonosets35 especially dear, and tied Dostoevskii’s Diary
of a Writer to the theory of a Third Rome, while believing that popular illusion could
turn into fact.36 He asserted that Finnic peoples had disappeared into the Russian
narod, and that greater missionary effort would resolve the Far Eastern question in
Russia’s favor.37 Such is a sample of the hopes, or delusions, prevalent among conser-
vative-nationalist figures in the debate on Orthodox missions.
Ordinary citizens, too, participated in the debate over missions. One of several
peasants to do so, Aktash Andronnik Stefanov of Menzelinskii district (uezd), sent
his greetings and congratulations to the Orthodox Missionary Society on the soci-
ety’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Stefanov wished the organization further success in its
31
Ibid., 2–4.
32
Ibid., 10.
33
Ibid., 13.
34
Ibid., 15.
35
Literally, “people-bearer-of-God.”
36
V. Malakhov, Russkaia pravoslavnaia missiia v ee proshlom i nastoiashchem (Pochaev:
Tipografiia pochaevo-uspenskoi lavry, 1907), 1–2.
37
Ibid., 3, 10–11.
endeavor which was, as he wrote, so important for the “holy church and dear father-
land.”38 In his perception, faith and state were closely bound.
In response to the conservative-nationalists, missionary archmonk Dionisii
wrote that missionary work cannot be political in its essence. Foreign policy should
be the job of diplomats, not churchmen; it was a sad reality that the situation was
otherwise.39 Dionisii felt that missions must not focus too strongly on cultural russifi-
cation either. A one-sided Russian cultural influence was harmful; instead, missions
must be predominantly religious and moral.40 It was perhaps this perception, that
politics and secular culture played too large a role in the external missions, which
kept many clerics outside the Orthodox Missionary Society. Nationalism, by the same
token, Dionisii argued, had no place in missionary work.41 Dionisii’s definition of
the missionary’s task was the narrowest and most ecclesiastical and echoed best the
sentiments of Veniaminov and Glukharev.
The synod’s Missionary Convocation, meeting in April 1912, chimed in on the
debate over the role of missions, reaffirming Il´minskii’s system of primary educa-
tion for non-Russians. In a lengthy discussion, the convocation supported the gradual
introduction of Russian, employment of non-Russian teachers, etc., concluding that
Il´minskii’s system facilitates an internal, psychological convergence (sblizhenie) of
non-Russians with Russians; “from the root, not the summit.”42 The synod would
renew this support on several occasions.
During World War I, the political significance of the missions grew. Evstafii Vo-
ronets, writing in Pravoslavnyi blagovestnik, emphasized the importance of missions
in the russification of various nationalities, indicating that Nicholas I had refused
to include laws recognizing Lamaism in his Svod zakonov.43 The wartime attitude
seems an exception to the ecclesiastical formulation prevalent among missionaries
since 1870. Like other vital institutional issues, the question of missionary goals re-
mained unanswered as the revolution approached.
Some observers claimed that Russian Orthodox missions were merely a cover for
russification. Russian culture was enmeshed in Orthodox missions, but missionaries
did not view russification of non-Russians as their chief task. Both Il´minskii and
Veniaminov (as well as their missionary successors) were primarily concerned with
faith and did not wish to tamper with non-Russian culture or language. What did not
contradict Orthodox teaching did not merit interference or prohibition. Missionaries
were far more concerned with the devoutness of their non-Russian flock. Teaching
38
“Otchet PMO za 1895 g.,” Pravoslavnyi blagovestnik, no. 13 (1896): 6.
39
Dionisii, Idealy, 8.
40
Ibid., 13, 15.
41
Ibid., 28.
42
RGIA f. 796, op. 445, 1808–1918, l. 120.
43
“Prosveshchenie Sibiri khristianstvom i vliianie nemetskogo zasilía na blagovestnichestvo
v Sibiri,” Pravoslavnyi blagovestnik, no. 2 (1915): 72–105. The “German influence” in Siberia
was negligible.
in Il´minskii-type schools was conducted in non-Russian languages, namely so that

pupils would more fully understand the principles of the Orthodox faith. The same
was true of direct missionary work. Use of the native language, for example, ensured
that non-Russians understood the step of baptism. In either case this was a lesson
learned from long experience, some of it recent, as not all missionaries followed the
guidelines given the difficult conditions under which they operated.
If one examines the Missionary Society and Russian missionaries in the broad
terms of Uvarov’s tripartite ideology (Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality), it is clear
that appeals to the person and authority of the tsar were prominent, both in mission-
ary approaches and non-Russian responses, while an appeal to Russian nationalism
was at best weakly tied to missionary Orthodoxy.44 In one interesting episode, mis-
sionaries in Viatka eparchate employed three thousand copies of the tsar’s rescript of
1900 to convince pagans to accept Orthodox baptism. Nicholas’s words were: “May
God fortify the faithful, embrace those who waver, reunite those torn away, and bless
the Russian state so firmly rooted in the unshakable truth of Orthodoxy.”45
But the reality of the effort varied. For instance, many non-Russians became Or-
thodox, but never learned Russian; there was no such requirement. Others, such as the
Mordvins, became linguistically russified, and merged into the Russian population.
This is not unlike the case of Altai and Baikal pagans; some became Lamaists without
learning Buryat, others did both. Lamaist Buryats and Orthodox Russians vied for
the hearts and minds of the Baikal region’s indigenous people.
In general, smaller ethnic groups like the Mordvins and Yasak Voguls converted
to Orthodoxy and became linguistically russified, while larger ethnic groups, which
were more self-contained communities, converted but retained their language. In
overseas missions, like those in Korea and Japan, clearly the religious presence was
one which pleased the Russian government, but Great Russian chauvinism would
hardly attract converts there. Of Uvarov’s troika, Orthodoxy was far superior in the
eyes of Russian missionaries and the Missionary Society, though fervent nationalists,
hoped it could serve as a means to other ends.
Instead of russification, the Missionary Society’s activity can be interpreted as a
strategic countermove against the spread of secularization from the Slavic population
of the empire to non-Russians. By planting the Orthodox seed among non-Russians,
the society sought to deflect the momentum of social change. In general, the Mis-
sionary Society and its affiliated missions exhibited a dual image: a more staunchly
nationalist one employed in appeals and publications directed toward the Russian
audience of potential contributors; and a much more purely religious one presented to
non-Russians in written materials or through personal work in the far-flung provinces
of the empire. But the essence of its productive work was Orthodox. A missionary
who followed guidelines would find that it was possible to do the work of the Ortho-
44
See Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825–1855
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), especially pt. 3.
45
“Da podkrepit Gospod´ veruiushchikh, da uderzhit kolebliushchikhsia, da vossoedinit ot-
torgnuvshikhsia i blagoslovit Rossiiskuiu derzhavu, prochno pokoiushchuiusia na nezyblemoi
istine pravoslaviia,” “Otchet PMO za 1900 g.,” Pravoslavnyi blagovestnik, no. 15 (1901): 59.
dox mission and respect liberal norms. Those liberal norms, expressed in the legis-
lation on religious tolerance enacted by 1905, were a part of the culture in which the
society operated.
Recreation of Seventeenth-Century Tile Forms on
St. Petersburg’s Temple-Memorial “Savior on the Blood”
Kristi A. Groberg
The architect Al´fred Parland stated plainly that his plan for the Temple of the
Resurrection of the Savior “on the Blood” (Spas na Krovi), a temple-memorial
(khram-pamiat´) built on the site of Tsar Alexander II’s 1881 assassination, followed
the form taken by seventeenth-century Russian ecclesiastical buildings.1 Construction
took place between 1883 and 1907, creating a visual anachronism on the “necklace
of the classical ensemble” of old central St. Petersburg along the Catherine Canal.2
Parland’s employers were Tsar Alexander III and a building commission under the
direction of the tsar’s infamous brother Grand Duke Vladimir Aleksandrovich, and
later Tsar Nicholas II. To carry out the project, Parland solicited Russian artists and
master craftsmen, most of them connected to the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts as
educators, graduates, or students. He employed Russian firms, workshops, and manu
factories, especially those with the designation “Purveyors to the Imperial Court.”
Whenever possible he used materials native to Russia.
Parland’s rationale for a seventeenth-century focus was the tsar’s insistence that
the temple reflect the hyper-nationalism that marked his reign and that of his son.
Results of the initial design competition failed to impress the tsar, who rejected all
entries in March 1882. He claimed that none captured the spirit of Russian architecture
and ordered a second competition, with the theme “Russian Renaissance,” to pro
duce a tribute “in the seventeenth-century Russian manner,” with an emphasis on
the churches of Iaroslavl´.3 He commanded that designs encompass variants of the
pre-Petrine architecture of sixteenth-century imperial votive churches such as the
Decapitation of St. John the Baptist at Diakovo and the Intercession of the Virgin
I wish to thank William Brumfield, Michael Flier, Shirley Glade, Karen Kettering, and Ann
Kleimola for reading this manuscript and for their thoughtful insights.
1
Al´fred A. Parland, “Khram Voskreseniia Khristova,” Zodchii, no. 35 (1907): 375; and
Parland, Otchet o sooruzhenii Khrama Voskreseniia Khristova (St. Petersburg: Komissiia po
sooruzheniiu Khrama, 1907), 2.
2
Boris M. Kirikov, “Pamiatniki ‘russkogo stilia,’” Leningradskaia panorama 10 (1983): 33.
3
Memorandum of 19 March 1882, in Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA)
f. 1282, op. 3, d. 585, l. 21, and f. 1293, op. 114, d. 35, l. 1.
170 Kristi A. Groberg
on the Moat (St. Basil), imperial churches in Moscow and Iaroslavl´, other elabo
rate brick churches of the seventeenth century (e.g., those in Rostov the Great), and
those of the mid–nineteenth-century Byzantine Revival brought about by the archi
tect Konstantin Ton.4 Following much palace intrigue, the tsar selected an entry by
Archimandrite Ignatii (Ivan Malyshev), who was not an architect and whose de
sign likely was prepared by Parland.5 Parland submitted a separate design entitled
“Antiquity” (“Starina”), based on the Church of the Decapitation of St. John the
Baptist at Diakovo. In the end, he was named official architect to the project.6 Further,
he was classified as the “author” (avtor)—an architect/artist competent enough to
prepare the overall decorative program of a church as well as oversee its execution.7
He was a graduate of—and an academician and later professor of architecture at—
the Academy, where he specialized in Greco-Roman architecture; a member of the
Ministry of the Interior’s Technical Committee, which supervised the construction of
ecclesiastical buildings throughout the empire; and he taught technical and aquarelle
drawing at the Shtiglits Central College of Technical Drawing, where the plans for
the temple and its exterior and interior appointments were drawn.8 Parland developed
a cross-in-square, tri-apsidal, pentacupolar plan with an asymmetrical composition
typical of seventeenth-century Iaroslavl´ churches.9 This plan was reworked until
finalized by the tsar on 1 May 1887—a few years after construction began. The ele
vations reveal a traditional eight-on-four (vos´merik na chetverike) composition, in
which a central octahedron tent-tower (shater), flanked by four smaller towers on
drums, rises above the central cube; still smaller towers surmount the central apse
and each of the two side apses. Each of the nine towers is finished with an onion-dome
4
Al´fred A. Parland, Khram Voskreseniia Khristova, sooruzhennyi na meste smertelńogo
poraneniia v Bozhe pochivshego Imperatora Aleksandra II na Ekaterininskom kanale v S.-Pe-
terburge (St. Petersburg: Tovarishchestvo R. Golike i A. Vil´borg, 1907), 3.
5
See Michael S. Flier, “At Daggers Drawn: The Competition for the Church of the Savior on
the Blood,” in For SK: In Celebration of the Life and Career of Simon Karlinsky, ed. Flier and
Robert P. Hughes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 95–115.
6
Parland, Khram Voskreseniia Khristova, 16–17. In his monograph, Parland does not mention
Archimandrite Ignatii.
7
This convention dates to 1669, when Tsar Alexei confirmed the Gramota of the Three Pa-
triarchs, which so classified church architects and artists. See Viktor N. Lazarev, Russkaia
srednevekovaia zhivopis´ (Moscow: Nauka, 1970), 7–12. On the use of avtor by Russian archi-
tects, a Roman imperial convention, see Kristi Groberg and Letta Christianson, “Keywords:
Author,” SHERA Bulletin 6, 2 (2001).
8
A biographical sketch of Parland’s work at the Academy is located in RGIA f. 789, op. 6,
d. 109. See also Heinrich Heidebrecht, “Der Beitrag deutscher Architekten zur Bildung des
‘Russischen’ Stils im 19. Jahrhundert,” Architectura 30, 2 (2000): 189–201.
9
Plan located in RGIA f. 513, op. 102, d. 9715a.
Recreation of Seventeenth-Century Tile Forms 171
cupola (lukovitsa).10 The influence of St. Basil, with its red brick, white limestone,
and multicolored ceramic tile ornamentation, as well as its original chapels “on the
blood,” is evident, and was something that Parland had in mind,11 if for no other
reason than, as William Brumfield has written, it represented the epitome of “the
extravagance of Muscovite imagination” so dear to the tsar’s heart.12
Parland’s plan was calculated to meet criteria that included a modified martyrium,
the tsar’s thematic ideal, the allotted budget, the limitations of the available property,
and the staggering weight of the structure, which had to be built on watery ground. In
addition, Parland had to adhere to an 1848 building code, legislated by Tsar Nicholas
I via Konstantin Ton, which dictated acceptable styles of architecture in central St.
Petersburg.13 Tremendous financial resources were amassed for the project; its esti-
mated cost was 3.6 million silver rubles, but the actual cost was over a million rubles
more.14 Monies were amassed from generous donations made by wealthy merchants,
social and religious organizations, and the extended imperial family, as well as mea-
ger donations from the poverty-stricken general public. Most of the funds were spent
to introduce and apply new technologies, manufacture high-quality materials, and
purchase the finest decorative appointments.15 While details were negotiated, Parland
studied ancient Russian monuments, assembled his cast of artists and artisan workers,
acquired necessary supplies, and oversaw the initial construction. He had no choice
but to draw from a remarkable and sometimes curious variety of sources to create a
temple that would reflect, or at least echo, seventeenth-century churches.
Parland applied a formula of reddish-brown brick building, white stone trim,
and ceramic tile ornamentation, to which he added enough ceramic, glass, and stone
tesserae to create a church which can claim an astonishing amount of mosaic work:
519 square meters on the exterior and 7,065 on the interior. Red brick trimmed in
white stone was a convention of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Moscow Style
church architecture, and that of Iaroslavl´, which added decorative tin-glazed majol-
ica tiles in the traditional colors of blue, green, white, and yellow to the formula.16
Parland also tapped into a revival of the use of brick in Russian architecture that
10
Elevations located in Tsentralńyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga f. 506, op. 1,
d. 246, ll. 5–10.
11
Parland, Khram Voskreseniia Khristova, 3.
12
William C. Brumfield, Landmarks of Russian Architecture (Amsterdam: Gordon and
Breach, 1997), 95.
13
James H. Bater, St. Petersburg: Industrialization and Change (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
14
Georgii P. Butikov, “Muzei-pamiatnik ‘Spas na krovi,’” in Muzei “Isaakievskii sobor”
(Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1991), 157, 169.
15
Iurii V. Trubinov, Khram Voskreseniia Khristova (Spas na Krovi) (St. Petersburg: Beloe i
chernoe, 1997), 34.
16
William C. Brumfield, “Photographic Documentation of Seventeenth-Century Architec-
tural Monuments in Yaroslavl,” Visual Resources 11, 2 (1995): 135–65.
began in the 1860s. This was the so-called Brick Style (kirpichnyi stil´), an eclectic
“style” popularized by the architects Viktor Gartman and Ivan Ropet in their quest
to recover Old Russian decorative details.17 Known to its antagonists as Ropetovsh-
china, its main purpose was the creation of functional buildings whose surfaces were
enlivened with colorful glazed bricks and/or ceramic tiles. Known in Europe as the
Ziegelbau Movement, it utilized premanufactured glazed bricks for housing projects,
public buildings, and large churches. A practical vogue, it provided for cheap, sturdy,
and virtually maintenance-free buildings. In Russia, the addition of decorative tiles
allowed for highly attractive color combinations that recalled earlier national forms.
It had special resonance in St. Petersburg after 1870, when two of its proponents,
the architects Viktor Shreter and Ieronim Kitner, demonstrated its effective use with
especially decorative patterns and colors.18 And, it fit under the hard-to-define and
highly eclectic rubric Russian Style (Russkii stil´ or Style Russe).19
Architects such as Parland, who took seriously the return to seventeenth-century
decorative elements, turned for inspiration to art historian Vladimir Stasov’s 1872
album Samples of Russian Ornamentation. Stasov claimed contemporary Russian
architecture and the decorative arts were well served by nationalistic designs which
mimicked traditional embroidery patterns and motifs from ancient manuscripts.20
Nikolai Sultanov, the Holy Synod’s resident expert on church architecture, countered
that the application of folk motifs to brickwork constituted indiscriminate transfer-
ences from one medium to another. He considered these “salient features” of the
vogue for Russian kitsch in architecture and sarcastically referred to them as “marble
hand-woven towels and brick embroideries.”21 Nonetheless, Sultanov gave a speech
in 1882 in which he argued on behalf of the Russian Style’s practical use of brick as
one means to convey “the national ethos.”22 Parland, however, had to please the tsar
and not his critical colleagues. He adhered to efforts to restore cultural integrity by
17
Evgeniia I. Kirichenko, Russkaia arkhitektura 1830–1910-x godov (Moscow: Iskusstvo,
1978), 159–69; and Kirichenko, “Arkhitekt I. P. Ropet,” Arkhitekturnoe nasledstvo 20 (1972):
85–93.
18
Ieronim S. Kitner, “Kirpichnaia arkhitektura,” Zodchii, no. 6 (1882): 84. Both Shreter and
Kitner submitted designs to the competition for the temple.
19
The difficulties of defining this style are made abundantly clear in Evgeniia I. Kirichenko,
Russkii stil´: Poiski vyrazheniia natsionalńoi samobytnosti. Narodnost´ i natsionalńost´.
Traditsiii drevnerusskogo i narodnogo iskusstva i russkom iskusstve xviii–xx veka (Moscow:
Izd-vo AST, 1997), especially 183–99; and Evgenia Kirichenko, “The Russian Style 1850–
1900,” in Russian Design and the Fine Arts, 1750–1917, comp. Mikhail Anikst (New York:
Abrams, 1991), 91–133.
20
Vladimir V. Stasov, Obraztsy russkogo ornamenta (Moscow: Obshchestvo pooshchreniia
khudozhnikov, 1872), no pagination.
21
Nikolai V. Sultanov, “Vozrozhdenie russkogo iskusstva,” Zodchii, no. 2 (1881): 11.
22
Nikolai V. Sultanov, “Odna iz zadach stroitelńogo uchilishcha,” Zodchii, no. 5 (1882): 71;
also noted (with examples), in Sultanov, Opisanie novoi pridvornoi tserkvi (St. Petersburg:
Oblik, 1905).
reviving folk art forms and assimilating them into “high culture.” There was a po-
litical edge to this approach, in that it was most fully expressed in the architectural
patronage of the imperial government.23 And Tsar Alexander III was nothing if not a
patron of the Russian arts.24
In the spring of 1884, construction on the temple began. It took three years to
drain a section of the Catherine Canal, create a coffer dam and caisson (in the manner
of a deep lighthouse support system), and pour the foundation. Parland insisted the
canal be filled with water when the project was complete, so the temple would be re-
flected in the water in the manner of many seventeenth-century churches.25 Property
around the site was cleared to build workshops, workers’ barracks, and storage for
construction supplies; a rail line was laid to a materials depot at the edge of the Field
of Mars adjacent to the Neva River. Fantastic new equipment, such as steam-powered
pile drivers, and experimental construction methods drew enormous crowds to the
construction site.
Atop the foundation, walls were constructed of high-quality horizontal red-
brown and yellow brick commissioned and purchased from Pirogranit, the largest
brick factory in Russia, and Nadezhda, a lesser-known manufactory. Hundreds of
thousands of bricks were stored on site. As the brick was laid by stonemasons, dec-
orative insets were added; these alone comprised ten metric tons of multicolored ce-
ramic-glazed bricks imported from the Zigersdorff Factory in German Silesia. Bricks
glazed in blue, green, and yellow were set in symmetrical patterns to add color, tex-
ture, and symbolic motifs to the walls; many were molded in unusual shapes. A total
of 331,389 bricks were imported at a cost of 57,542 rubles and 38 kopeks.26
Once the structural shell of the temple was in place, the brick façade was reveted
as well as further decorated with red granite quarried in Norway, grey granite from
nearby quarries, and limestone27 provided by the Estonian stonecutters’ firm of Kos
23
Vladimir G. Lisovskii, Natsionalńye traditsii v russkoi arkhitekture kontsa XIX–nachala
XX veka (Leningrad: Obshchestvo Znanie, 1988), 118.
24
See John O. Norman, “Alexander III as Patron of the Arts,” in New Perspectives on Russian
and Soviet Artistic Culture, ed. Norman (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 25–40.
25
26
V. V. Antonov and A. V. Kobak, Sviatyni Sankt-Peterburga: Istoriko-tserkovnaia entsiklo-
pediia, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg: Izdatel´stvo Chernysheva, 1994–96), 1: 102; and L. V. Shmel-
ling, “Neskol´ko tsifr iz otcheta po sooruzheniiu khrama vo imia Voskreseniia Khristova,”
Zodchii, no. 49 (1907): 49. Shmelling’s original documentation on the cost of building the tem-
ple is in his unpublished manuscript, “Otchet po sooruzheniiu khrama vo imia Voskreseniia
Khristova na meste smertelńogo raneniia Imperatora Aleksandra II” (St. Petersburg, 1907),
located in RGIA f. 1293, op. 103 (1907), d. 106.
27
Known as Estonian Limestone or Estland Marble, it is a grey-white dolomite that is soft and
easily carved, but hardens when exposed to the elements.
& Diurr.28 In the seventeenth-century manner, the white stone was applied to the
belts, cornices, decorative gables (kokoshniki), window frames (nalichniki), and door
casings, to provide contrast to the red brick and accent the temple’s architectural
components.29 Other decorative details in white stone were cut, worked, and applied
by the Petersburg stonecutting workshop of A. E. Blagodarev.30 Total cost for the
exterior included 945,536 rubles and 8 kopeks for the stone and the labor of the stone-
masons, 75,215 rubles and 39 kopeks for the masonry on the brick walls and arches,
227,862 rubles and 14 kopeks for the cutting, finishing, and application of limestone,
and 38,724 rubles and 69 kopeks for the remaining stonework.31 This, while it is not
technically ceramic work, is a vital component of the seventeenth-century image that
Parland strove to emulate.
Many of the decorative elements created with ceramic were not integral to the ac-
tual structure of the temple. A striking wealth of ornament was attached for the sheer
saturation characteristic of the seventeenth-century churches so admired by the tsar,
who was involved in every phase of planning and construction. These included such
pieces as the patterned majolica tile insets for the recessed squares (shirinki) which
accentuate the verticality of the building. These large tiles were molded in high-relief
floral patterns, glazed in light colors, and fired in Kholui at the ceramics firm owned
by the icon painter N. N. Kharlamov. Delicate faceting as well as archivolts for the
large drum under the central tent-tower were specially ordered from St. Petersburg’s
Imperial Porcelain Factory—Purveyors to His Highness the Tsar of Glass, Porcelain,
China, and Stoneware. Into the large south, east, and north façade pediments, the
four porch pediments, the face of the bell-tower, and the tympanae of the exterior
kokoshniki, highly symbolic icons and designs in mosaic were set. These included
the patron saints of the imperial family and the coats of arms of the great cities and
provinces of Russia. The mosaic work on the exterior of the temple was completed in
1907, just in time for consecration, at a cost of 809,952 rubles and 85 kopeks.32
The interior of the temple was, with the exception of fine stone and metalwork,
completely covered in mosaic compositions created with ceramic and glass tesserae.
Surfaces included the ceiling, vaults, cupola interiors, walls, pillars, and pilasters.
This was a bold and exceptionally expensive undertaking. Parland made the decision
to forego the more typical, traditional use of frescoes for interior decoration. Here
28
Vladimir Rudnev, “I masterstvo, i vdokhnovené,” S.-Peterburgskaia panorama 5 (1993):
26; and Boris M. Kirikov, “Khram Voskreseniia Khristova (k istorii ‘russkogo stilia’ v Peter-
burge),” in Nevskii arkhiv: Istoriko-kraevedcheskii sbornik, ed. A. I. Dobkin and A. V. Kobak
(Moscow: Atheneum-Feniks, 1993), 225. Precious and semiprecious stone for the interior ap-
pointments was cut and installed by the Imperial Lapidary Workshops at Petergof, Ekaterin-
burg, and Kolyvan.
29
30
Rudnev, “I masterstvo, i vdokhnovené,” 26.
31
Shmelling, “Neskol´ko tsifr,” 49.
32
Ibid.
he deviated dramatically from the return to seventeenth-century forms and argued

for the unusual use of mosaics by demonstrating their practicality and longevity, and
he pointed to some very early prototypes to prove it. It was to surpass in size and
grandiosity the mosaic surface areas of the imperially inspired mosaic work in the
Byzantine churches of Hagia Sophia (532–37) in Constantinople, San Vitale (547) in
Ravenna, St. Mikhail of the Golden Domes (1108) in Kiev, and San Marco (ca. 1200)
in Venice—all referred to by Parland in his monograph.33 In each of these churches,
the mosaics only covered sections of the walls and ceiling, while at the temple Parland
called for 7,065 square meters of mosaic, interrupted only by stone iconostases, icon
frames, steps, and a Roman-style floor.34 The iconographical program was prepared
by Vasilii Uspenskii, a specialist in Byzantine iconography. Parland corresponded
with dozens of famous painters of religious subjects in his efforts to add their tal-
ents to the project. He was extremely successful in that thirty-three artists, including
Mikhail Nesterov and Viktor Vasnetsov, agreed to contribute designs for the mosa-
ics. The resulting gallery of Old Testament prophets, church fathers, Orthodox saints
and martyrs, seraphim, cherubim, archangels, angels, and animals consisted of 277
different named figures and 68 additional biblical and evangelical themes in 308 sep-
arate compositions.35
The Building Commission announced a contest in 1895 for the manufacture and
application of mosaics to each individual artist’s specifications. Competitive orders
were accepted from both Russian and foreign firms, including the Mosaic Department
of the Academy, the Frolov Firm of Master Mosaicists in Petersburg, the Kharlamov
Firm of Kholui, Antonio Salviati & Co. of Venice (makers of Murano glass tesserae
with gold leaf inserts), and Fritz Puhl & August Wagner of Berlin (makers of glass
tesserae with silver leaf inserts). The commission preferred the first order to come
in, that of the Frolov firm, well known for its mosaic work on churches, public build-
ings, and funerary monuments. Frolov drew up the overall plan for applying mosaic
to the interior walls, although Parland had the final say in the event questions arose.
The actual tesserae were small ceramic cubes (.25 vershoks cubed) created, glazed,
and fired by the Kharlamov firm of Kholui.36 Frolov defined them as “molecules” in
the same way that today we might think of them as pixels on a grid. Samples of each
color—developed by Sergei Petukhov, the chemist for the Mosaic Department of the
Academy—were placed in the archives of the Academy.37 The Frolovs were in charge
of creating the mosaics (some of which were assembled at their Petersburg studio
and others in the temple) from the tesserae, installing them, and sealing the compo-
33
Parland, Khram Voskreseniia Khristova, 5; and Parland, “Khram Voskreseniia Khristova,”
377.
34
Anonymous, “Khram Voskreseniia Khristova,” Niva 36 (1907): 596.
35
Trubinov, Khram Voskreseniia Khristova, 37–38.
36
Boris M. Kirikov and Vladimir A. Frolov, “Iz Istorii russkoi i sovetskoi mozaiki,” in Khu-
dozhnik i gorod, ed. Marina L. Terekhovich (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1988), 299.
37
Ibid., 294 n. 42.
sitions with jewelers’ enamel.38 The exceptions were the mosaics for the iconostasis,
completed in the Mosaic Department of the Academy, four icons for the side apses
executed by Puhl & Wagner in Berlin, and a few pieces created by Antonio Salviati
& Co. in Venice. The non-Russian firms likely were solicited because the younger
Frolov brothers had gone to Venice to learn the reverse Venetian technique of mosaic
composition and to Puhl & Wagner in Berlin to work with the masters there; both
firms specialized in the creation of glass tesserae (smalti), inset with gold and silver
leaf, and set at an angle in the Byzantine manner to reflect light. This technique was
new to Russia and completely unlike that taught at and favored by the Academy and
the Imperial Lapidary Workshops. The project continued from the execution of car-
toons in 1896 until 1907 and caused years of delay in the completion of the temple.
The total cost for the creation of the monumental cartoons and frames for the mosaics
was 204,585 rubles, and the mosaics themselves totaled well over 100,000 rubles.39
The roofs of the porches, the main tent-tower, and apse roofs were covered in
blue, green, yellow, and white ceramic tiles manufactured in seventy-four different
shapes. The four tiled cupolas were executed in bright, clear colors and patterns in-
set with religious symbols. The multidimensional tiles on the large cupola were all
polychrome majolica in separate, distinct colors. They were fired in various sizes and
shapes—pyramids, squares, and braids—and created in molds curved to the exact
shape of the cupolas. The work of molding, firing, and glazing these unusual tiles
was done by the Moscow jewelers’ firm of A. M. Postnikov, selected because it had
developed a permanent enamel glaze with which to seal the ceramic tiles against the
elements. The involved process began with an iron framework that formed the basic
cupola; the frame was covered with copper sheeting and a thin layer of encaustic,
into which the ceramic tiles were set. To seal them, the lightweight, frost-resistant,
water-repellent enamel sealant was applied over the tiles. The total area of roofing
protected by ceramic tile was approximately one thousand square meters.
So, now we face the question of the seventeenth-century precedent and whether
or not Parland accomplished his goal. Architectural tiles (izrazets) were not new to
Russia in the seventeenth century; in fact, the large-scale manufacture and distri-
bution of glazed bricks and tiles was documented as early as the fifteenth century.
Potteries were located near clay deposits, and whenever possible near the larger towns
or monasteries which made use of the ceramic forms on their architecture.40 By this
time, tile was an important alternative to expensive stone facing. Used in combination
with brick, bands of unglazed terra cotta tiles were white-washed to mimic the carved
white stone on earlier churches in Novgorod and Suzdal.41 The sixteenth century
introduced green-glazed tiles, and other enamel colors were introduced in the sev-
38
See the excerpts of Frolov’s memoirs published in ibid., 285–86.
39
Boris M. Kirikov and Vladimir A. Frolov, “Nemerknushchie kraski mozaiki,” Stroitel´stvo
i arkhitektura Leningrada 10 (1978): 40.
40
Alison Hilton, “Materials and Forms,” in Russian Folk Art (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1995), 115.
41
I. I. Sergeenko, Russkii izrazets (Moscow: MGOMZ, 1982), 1–5.
enteenth century and prolifically applied to church architecture. New techniques to

create tin-glazed majolica, faience, and porcelain were developed late in the century
at a time when architectural tiles were produced by both simple and technologically
complex procedures and reflected folk traditions as well as urban fashion. Multi-
colored tiles were favored, featuring large floral motifs, framing devices from early
manuscripts, scenes from folk tales and peasant life, and even images adapted from
Classical, European, and Oriental sources.42
Parland looked, under the watchful eye of Tsar Alexander III and Tsar Nicholas
II, to Tsar Alexei, whose long and peaceful reign (1645–76) stimulated a prolifera-
tion of brick churches decorated in bright polychrome tiles. Despite their ornamental
effusiveness, the designs achieved an unusual degree of stability in a plan known
as the “ship”—a central cube, topped by five cupolas, and attached to a bell-tower
surmounted by a tent-tower. This was the so-called Moscow Style of architecture to
which Parland turned in part for inspiration in his design for the temple, which essen-
tially was a pentacupolar church fused to a bell-tower like a ship church. An irregular
plan with exceedingly intricate ornamentation appears in the Church of the Trinity in
Nikitniki (1628–53), which was completed during Alexei’s reign. The national recov-
ery called for by the nineteenth-century Russian Style looked to this church, which
demonstrated the economic basis of ornamentalism: the rise of wealthy merchants.43
Constructed in an urban Moscow setting, it was created by the tsar’s artisans. Against
the red brick façade with its carved white limestone trim were set the ornamental de-
vices of seventeenth-century Moscow: deeply recessed square panels; multiple tiers
of corbelled gables sculpted with perspective arches; cornices of colored tile; pen-
dants (girki) in the entrance arches; attached columns, pilasters, and arcading on the
cupola drums; and arches of every conceivable sort.
Despite Patriarch Nikon’s insistence that after 1652 all church architecture return
to the Byzantine form of a cube topped by three or five domes, the preoccupation with
highly ornamented brick churches continued. In fact, Nikon’s plan to build his mon-
astery of the New Jerusalem at Istra west of Moscow in 1654 stimulated the use of tile
making for architectural purposes. He sent for the best tile makers from manufacto-
ries in Rostov, Moscow, and other cities to decorate the Church of the Resurrection.44
After exiling Nikon in 1658, Tsar Alexei called the masters of architectural tile mak-
ing to the Kremlin Armory Chamber, and their work made Moscow the center of tile
production. The technique of tile enameling (tsenina) became popular. Tiles molded
in high relief decorated the façades of many brick churches and public buildings.
42
Hilton, “Materials and Forms,” 116.
43
Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2
vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 1: 383.
44
I. Grabar´ and S. Toporov, “Arkhitekturnye sokrovishcha Novogo Ierusalima,” in Pami-
atniki iskusstva razrushennye nemetskimi zakhavatchikami v SSSR, ed. Grabar´ (Moscow:
Izdatel´stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1948), 175–76.
From Moscow, the new fashion spread through the major cities, especially Rostov the
Great and Iarolslavl´.45
The Church of the Trinity at Ostankino (1678–83) demonstrates the character of
brick itself as a decorative surface. Bricks of various sizes, shapes, and colors were
laid in a variety of patterns, some of them even molded for a particular course as tiles
would be at Savior on the Blood. Carved limestone provided both structural detail
and window treatments, and the addition of gilded and painted cupolas brought this
polychromatic structure to such a degree of pictorial richness that Parland’s contem-
porary Andrei Aplaksin adjectivized any highly decorative Russian Style church—
such as Parland’s temple—as Ostankovshchina.46
The same “attitude toward brick”47 —intensively worked to produce the utmost
variety of color, shape, and play of light and shade over wall surfaces—was char-
acteristic of the large group of seventeenth-century churches in Iaroslavl´ to which
Parland referred as among his prototypes for the temple.48 These simple cubes of
brick, built to the vocabulary of earlier Russian architecture, had as their most unique
attribute an abundance of decorative brickwork and ceramic tile. Despite the variety
of brick churches in Moscow in the final decades of the seventeenth-century, the apo-
gee of traditional forms of church architecture occurred in Iaroslavl´, a burgeoning
trade center on the Volga River. These richly decorated churches were built under the
patronage of wealthy merchants, city districts, and trade associations—all of which
tried to out-do one another until Iaroslavl´ began to decline with the rise of St. Peters-
burg. Large and ingeniously decorated, they returned to the earlier sixteenth-century
tri-apsidal plan, flanked by chapels and a gallery with porches on three sides. Ar-
chitects were obliged to accept Nikon’s injunction against the use of more than five
domes, but in many cases they retained the pyramidal or octahedron tent-roof on their
bell towers, which became a feature of Iaroslavl´ church architecture.
Toward the end of the seventeenth century, Rostov the Great, also on the Volga
River—and another source of inspiration for Parland—became the site of the last
and largest building projects of medieval Muscovy. Its patron was Metropolitan Iona,
close to Tsar Alexei but the holder of an eparchate rich in funds, craftsmen, and la-
borers. Between 1670 and 1690, stonemasons erected several large urban churches
in Rostov; components borrowed from them by Parland include saturated ceramic
ornamentation on both building and cupolas. Entire church and monastery complexes
were meant to be viewed from the water—another idea Parland insisted upon for Spas
na Krovi.
45
James Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Architecture (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994), 71.
46
Andrei P. Aplaksin, “Russkoe tserkovnoe iskusstvo i ego sovremennye zadachi,” Zodchii,
no. 3 (1911): 24.
47
George Heard Hamilton, The Art and Architecture of Russia (New York: Penguin Books,
1975), 210.
48
By the end of the nineteenth century, these ideas had been fully co-opted to
the degree that not only the Russian Style, but the use of Russian artists and materi-
als, was considered a given—especially with regard to the construction of churches
under the patronage of the imperial family. The idea of ornamental church art and
architecture as representative of the national ethos was supported by the architect
Vladimir Shervud in 1895, when he expressed a conviction that the “spiritual idea
in architecture” best reflected Russianness.49 The few Russian Style churches built
in St. Petersburg were often the most outrageously russianized as a counterattack on
the Western values which had created the city; many were built on canal quays so
that they would become prominent features of the skyline and disrupt the Classical
architectural ensemble of the city.50
Parland wrote that he wanted the temple’s design to “have no Western influ-
ence.”51 And in keeping with his understanding of eclecticism, he backed his decision
to incorporate a variety of prototypes, design styles, and personal artistic styles in
order to present a “treasure house of national ornament.”52 This was completely in
keeping with the Russian Style, which was marked by an increasing accentuation or
exaggeration of the prototype, a kind of optical enlargement in which the divisions
between parts of a church were blurred by excessive ornamentation. The end result is
a hybrid church like Savior on the Blood.
49
Vladimir O. Shervud, Opyt issledovaniia zakonov iskusstva: Zhivopis´, skul´ptura, arkh-
itektura i ornamentika (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1895), 128–29.
50
Kirichenko and Anikst, Russian Design and the Fine Arts, 1759–1917, 72.
51
52
Ibid., 6.
Looking East: The American YMCA’s Interaction with
Russian Orthodox Christians, 1900–40
Matthew Lee Miller
The American branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association (the YMCA, or the
Y) entered Russia in 1900 and developed a variety of educational, religious, and ath-
letic programs—the primary goal was to support the intellectual, spiritual, and phys-
ical development of young men. YMCA leaders began their work by establishing
a public gymnasium, organizing Bible study groups, and providing direction to a
Christian student movement. During World War I, many Y workers organized assis-
tance for soldiers and prisoners of war. After the emigration of a number of Russians
to western Europe, they assisted the new Russian Student Christian Movement, the
YMCA Press, and the St. Sergius Theological Academy in Paris. During these years,
Y leaders, such as Paul B. Anderson and Donald Lowrie, developed partnerships with
a number of outstanding Orthodox leaders, including Sergei Bulgakov, Nikolai Berdi-
aev, and Georges Florovsky. In this way, the YMCA contributed to the preservation,
enrichment, and expansion of Eastern Orthodox faith and culture. Especially through
its support of the émigré student movement, publishing house, and theological acad-
emy, the YMCA played a major role in preserving an important part of prerevolu-
tionary Russian culture in western Europe during the Soviet period. The American
Protestant YMCA contributed to the enrichment of Russian Orthodox Christianity by
making significant financial contributions, advising administrative development, en-
couraging flexibility on theological and ministry issues, setting an example of practi-
cal service to people, and developing a strong network of global relationships. These
contributions combined to form a catalyst for the expansion of Eastern Orthodoxy
and its influence throughout Europe, the United States, and beyond.
The relationship of the YMCA with Orthodox leaders provides a rare example
of fruitful interconfessional cooperation between Protestant and Orthodox Christians
and an extraordinary period of interaction between American and Russian cultures.
This essay focuses on the shifting outlook of the YMCA on Orthodoxy—the Y did
not begin its work as a champion of Eastern churches. More specifically, over the
years, the association’s approach shifted from resigned toleration to pragmatic sup-
port to limited support to enthusiastic support.1
1
For discussion of the social, political, and religious context of the YMCA, see two works by
the author: The American YMCA and Russian Culture: The Preservation and Expansion of
182 Matthew Lee Miller
Contact between evangelical Protestants and Eastern Orthodox gradually in-

creased during the nineteenth century through the westward emigration of Orthodox
believers from eastern Europe and the European outreach of American and British
missionaries. This essay examines scholarly views on Orthodoxy and Orthodox-Prot-
estant relations, discusses the varying perceptions of English-speaking evangelicals
toward the Eastern churches during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and
provides a survey of secondary and primary sources which shed light on the issue.
In addition, the essay illustrates the connection between these perceptions and the
descriptions of Eastern Orthodoxy contained in the historical, political, travel, and
theological literature of this period. This background provides context for the focus
of this essay, the shifting outlook of the YMCA on Orthodoxy.
Scholarly Perspectives on Orthodoxy
A brief reflection on the academic study of Russian Orthodoxy highlights the signif-
icance of the YMCA’s approach to the Eastern churches. Thirty years ago, few histo-
rians paid any attention to the dominant faith of the Russian people. In 1985, Gregory
Freeze, a leading American scholar on the history of Russian Orthodoxy, commented:
“The history of the Russian Orthodox Church, especially in the modern imperial
period (1700–1917), has been a woefully neglected field of scholarly research.” For-
tunately, during the last twenty-five years, the situation has been improving, with
regular publication of research on many aspects of Orthodoxy.2 In 2003, Valerie A.
Kivelson and Robert H. Greene wrote that after “seventy years of neglect, the study
of Russian religious life has entered an exciting period of growth in the decade since
the fall of the Soviet Union.” They explain:
Orthodox Christianity, 1900–1940 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013) and “The Amer-
ican YMCA and Russian Politics: Critics and Supporters of Socialism, 1900–1940,” in New
Perspectives on Russian-American Relations, ed. William Benton Whisenhunt and Norman
E. Saul (New York: Routledge, 2015). These works analyze the influence of the activities of
the YMCA on Russians during the late imperial and early Soviet periods. This research is
based on the YMCA’s archival records, observations found in Moscow and Paris archives, and
memoirs of both Russian and American participants.
2
Gregory L. Freeze, “Handmaiden of the State? The Church in Imperial Russia Reconsid-
ered,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36, 1 (1985): 82. A few examples of this new research
on the recent history of Russian Orthodoxy are Paul W. Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy:
Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia’s Volga-Kama Region, 1827–1905
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Chris J. Chulos, Converging Worlds: Religion
and Community in Peasant Russia, 1861–1917 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press,
2003); Jennifer Jean Wynot, Keeping the Faith: Russian Orthodox Monasticism in the Soviet
Union, 1917–1939 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004); Jennifer Hedda, His
Kingdom Come: Orthodox Pastorship and Social Activism in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 2008); and Laurie Manchester, Holy Fathers, Secular
Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb: Northern
Illinois University Press, 2008).
Looking East 183
By fortuitous coincidence, the transformation of the political climate of Rus-

sia since 1991 coincided with shifts in the intellectual currents in Western
scholarship, where renewed interest in cultural anthropology has driven a
rush of work on religious life and culture.3
Textbook descriptions usually presented a rigid system of dogma and ritual which
has operated as a closed system. Recent work, however, has looked at the interplay
of Orthodoxy with local and national historical trends as well as at the individual
desires of laity and clergy. Historians are examining the church not simply as an or-
ganization, but as a participant in the wider culture of Russia. More recently, Freeze
has observed:
Only in the last decade has Russian Orthodoxy finally become a major focus
of research. If nothing else, that research has posed a challenge to antireli-
gious assumptions and encouraged historians to give more attention to the
role of the church and religion—in politics, social relations, and culture.4
A leading trend among scholars in this field is a focus on popular religion, the lived
experience of Orthodox believers, rather than on episcopal politics and church-state
relations. As one scholar summarizes, “we also need more studies of popular religion
in the years before the revolution in order to substantiate statements about change
in the early Soviet period.”5 The experiences of Orthodox office workers, students,
and émigrés are considered in detail in this study of the YMCA. In spite of this
historiographical progress, very little scholarly attention has been paid to one of the
church’s leading concerns from the 1870s to 1917—the spread of the Baptist and
Evangelical Christian movements in the Russian Empire. Two recent exceptions are
the monographs by Heather Coleman and Sergei Zhuk.6 One reason for this limitation
in American historiography may lie within the tradition of church history developed
3
Valerie A. Kivelson and Robert H. Greene, eds., Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice un-
der the Tsars (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 1.
4
Gregory L. Freeze, “Recent Scholarship on Russian Orthodoxy: A Critique,” Kritika: Ex-
plorations in Russian and Eurasian History 2, 2 (2001): 269.
5
Heather J. Coleman, “Atheism versus Secularization? Religion in Soviet Russia, 1917–1961,”
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, 3 (2000): 557–58.
6
Heather J. Coleman, Russian Baptists and Spiritual Revolution, 1905–1929 (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2005); and Sergei I. Zhuk, Russia’s Lost Reformation: Peasants,
Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830–1917 (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). Another recent study on Orthodox-Protestant contacts
is Arkhimandrit Avgustin (Nikitin), Metodizm i Pravoslavie (St. Petersburg: Svetoch, 2001).
This volume contains an overview of contacts between American Protestants and Russian
Orthodox, with a focus on Methodists, and highlights of the YMCA’s work with Russians
on pages 149–51 and 157–66. See also Karina Ann Ham, “Interplay between Orthodoxy and
Protestantism in Russia, 1905–1995” (Ph.D. diss., Fuller Theological Seminary, 1998).
within the Russian Orthodox Church. As Gregory Freeze has noted, scholars have
often shown disregard of non-Orthodox groups and simply labeled them as heretical
or schismatic.7
Many lay observers before and after 1900 noted the rapid growth of Russian
Protestantism and saw it as a reaction to the postreform social changes and the short-
comings of the state church. The majority of bishops, however, simply assumed that
Protestantism was treasonous and a threat to society. At this time, Konstantin Pobe-
donostsev was ober-procurator of the Holy Synod, the lay state official who super-
vised the Russian Orthodox Church. He “was firmly convinced that society could be
kept together only by a single authority (the autocracy) and a single faith.” State and
church officials developed a two-pronged approach to these heterodox Russians: state
repression and church education. The state would attempt to hinder Protestant lead-
ers, and the church would increase popular and clerical religious education.8
The YMCA entered Russia at a time when the Russian Orthodox Church was
engaging more actively with social issues and philanthropy. Since 1860, clergy and
lay leaders had been moving the church into new programs of charity and popular re-
ligious education; the center of this trend was St. Petersburg. Jennifer Hedda summa-
rizes her research on this topic by arguing that by 1900, “the local church had become
a vigorous institution that played a prominent role in the city’s public life.” St. Peters-
burg clergy were motivated primarily by their evaluation of growing social problems
as an ethical challenge to the church. “They did not see poverty, intemperance and
class tension as social problems that could be eliminated by legislating higher wages
or providing better municipal services. They saw them as moral ills.” Their approach
could not be described as overly optimistic or utopian, since
The church did not teach that poverty could be eliminated or that the mate-
rial differences between the fortunate and the unfortunate could be erased.
Rather, it taught that people should not allow such material distinctions to
divide them from each other or to alienate them from God.9
St. Petersburg’s largest voluntary association was the Society for the Dissemina-
tion of Moral-Religious Enlightenment in the Spirit of the Orthodox Church. The cat-
alyst for the formation of this program had been the popularity of meetings led by the
British evangelist Lord Radstock and his Russian friend Colonel Pashkov for the cap-
ital’s social elite in the 1870s. These meetings included discussions of the Bible, hymn
7
Freeze, “Recent Scholarship,” 276.
8
A. Iu. Polunov, “The State and Religious Heterodoxy in Russia (from 1880 to the Beginning
of the 1890s),” Russian Studies in History 39, 4 (2001): 54–58.
9
Jennifer Hedda, “Good Shepherds: The St. Petersburg Pastorate and the Emergence of So-
cial Activism in the Russian Orthodox Church, 1855–1917” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University,
1998), iii, 215, 220. For discussion of a number of fundamental issues concerning the Orthodox
Church during this period, see Robert L. Nichols and Theofanis George Stavrou, eds., Russian
Orthodoxy under the Old Regime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978).
Looking East 185
singing, and informal prayer. They did not promote direct opposition to the Russian
church, but Radstock’s informal ministry appealed to many among the nobility who
were unsatisfied with their worship experiences in the state church.10 Hedda remarks,
“Seeing how effective Radstock’s methods were, this concerned group of clergymen
and laymen decided to adopt his methods for their own purposes.” She also notes the
significant role played by this society in the development of civil society in St. Peters-
burg, as it encouraged voluntarism and civic responsibility.11 Simon Dixon’s research
on the growing social awareness of clergy comes to similar conclusions and empha-
sizes the role played by Orthodoxy’s competitors in sparking new forms of activity
within the state church.12 This essay will show how a number of clergy studied and
utilized the YMCA’s programs and ideas—since the Y and social Orthodoxy shared
a number of basic convictions.
Protestant Perceptions of Orthodoxy
As the YMCA entered Russia and began its interaction with society and the state
church, all was not business as usual. For Y secretaries, gaining even a basic grasp
on the spectrum of responses to church concerns was no simple matter. As Vera
Shevzov’s groundbreaking monograph points out, the Russian Orthodox Church faced
a variety of external and internal challenges to its own self-understanding. Marxists
and other atheists challenged the church on political and philosophical grounds, while
competing factions within the church attempted to shape its values.13 She compares
this period to the Protestant Reformation and the Second Vatican Council:
True, the “evolution” or brewing “revolution” (depending on one’s interpreta-

tion of those debates) in Russian Orthodoxy never had the chance to become
10
See Mark Myers McCarthy, “Religious Conflict and Social Order in Nineteenth-Century
Russia: Orthodoxy and the Protestant Challenge, 1812–1905” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre
Dame, 2004); and Sharyl Corrado, “The Philosophy of Ministry of Colonel Vasiliy Pashkov”
(Master’s thesis, Wheaton College, 2000).
11
Hedda, “Good Shepherds,” 250–53, 217.
12
Simon Dixon, “The Church’s Social Role in St. Petersburg, 1880–1914,” in Church, Nation
and State in Russia and Ukraine, ed. Geoffrey A. Hosking (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1991), 168, 175. See also Dixon, “The Orthodox Church and the Workers of St. Petersburg
1880–1914,” in European Religion in the Age of Great Cities, 1830–1930, ed. Hugh McLeod
(New York: Routledge, 1995), 119–41. For a discussion on the cross-cultural expansion of
Orthodoxy, see James J. Stamoolis, Eastern Orthodox Mission Theology Today (Minneapolis:
Light and Life Publishing Company, 1986).
13
Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 258.
a comparable definitive “event,” largely on account of the political aftermath

of the 1917 revolutions.14
During the 1920s, YMCA leader E. T. Colton described what he saw as the three
major American Protestant responses to the Russian Orthodox Church: proselytiza-
tion, condemnation, and support. According to Colton, the first group included Bap-
tists and Methodists. The second group was made up of left-wing Protestants, such
as Anna Louise Strong and Harry Ward, who condoned Soviet measures to demolish
an outdated church so that a new one could replace it. The third group, Anglicans,
Episcopalians, and YMCA members, was attempting to support the more liberal and
progressive wing of the Orthodox Church.15
An extensive review of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Protestant
literature on Eastern Orthodoxy suggests that Protestant views on Eastern Chris-
tianity have often been linked to views on Roman Catholicism and Islam. Those
Protestants who had been sympathetic to Catholics and desirous of reforms had also
been open to the Orthodox churches. Those with a strict anti-Catholic approach usu-
ally presented a very negative view of the Eastern bodies. A number of writers were
pragmatically guided by their strong desire to see Christianity advance in the Muslim
world. Some advocated assisting the Eastern churches in evangelizing Muslims. Oth-
ers suggested it would be better to avoid relationships with these clergy in order not
to offend adherents to Islam.
American Protestants formed a variety of opinions as they became more aware of
Orthodoxy. The speakers at a 1918 conference discussing the evangelization of Rus-
sia demonstrated one very negative position. At this Chicago assembly, one speaker
referred to the Russian church as a “condemned ecclesiasticism.” Another speaker ex-
plained that in this tradition “there is little room for intellectual worship” because of
the “gorgeous display, semi-barbaric pomp, and endless changes of sacerdotal dress,
crossings, genuflections.” Other American Protestants chose a divergent position—a
romanticized admiration with a “veneration bordering upon enthusiasm and exuber-
ance.”16 These opinions, ranging on a continuum from disdain to veneration, were
primarily based on superficial impressions, for Protestants and Orthodox had lived
separate lives since the Reformation. Few American and British Protestants had made
a serious attempt to understand the heart and mind of Eastern believers.
Evangelical and Orthodox Christians shared a number of common foundational
elements but lived in different worlds. Their common theological heritage included
the authority of the divinely inspired scriptures and a common understanding of
14
Vera Shevzov, “Icons, Miracles, and the Ecclesial Identity of Laity in Late Imperial Rus-
sian Orthodoxy,” Church History 69, 3 (2000): 610.
15
Letter from E. T. Colton to F. W. Ramsey, 16 July 1926, 3, Russia, Colton E. T., Reports,
Addresses, and Papers, volume 2, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota
Libraries, Minneapolis [hereafter KFYA].
16
Jesse W. Brooks, ed., Good News for Russia (Chicago: Bible Institute Colportage Associa-
tion, 1918), 75, 156, 211.
Looking East 187
the Trinity and Christ defined by the councils of Nicaea (325 AD) and Chalcedon
(451 AD). Protestants and Orthodox experienced a variety of contacts since the six-
teenth-century Reformation. Philip Melancthon, the German reformer, initiated the
first formal contact in 1559, when he sent a copy of the Augsburg Confession to Pa-
triarch Joasaph of Constantinople. More than twenty years later, Joasaph’s successor
responded, condemning central aspects of the Confession’s explanation of justifica-
tion and biblical interpretation.17 However, seventy years later, the new Ecumenical
Patriarch, Cyril Lucaris, published a confession which included teachings adapted
from the writings of John Calvin. The entire Orthodox Church rejected this confes-
sion—several councils of the church hierarchy condemned Lucaris’s views.18
In the following years, Anglo-Catholic theologians of the Church of England and
the Russian Orthodox Church initiated an ongoing dialogue which continued into
the twentieth century.19 After World War I, friendly contacts between Orthodox and
Anglicans increased steadily. Both sides expressed a desire for Christian oneness and
mutual respect. Of course, the motivations for these meetings were not only religious
in nature. Russian church leaders in Europe were experiencing life after disestablish-
ment; the Ecumenical Patriarchate found itself within a newly secular Turkish state,
so support from the Church of England became desirable. Orthodox and Anglican
history also played a role in forming new ties. A number of Anglo-Catholic and Or-
thodox leaders felt an extra measure of Christian brotherhood. Both communities
argued that they represented authentic apostolic Christianity. Their common mutual
opposition to certain positions of the Roman bishop and their belief that the Roman
Catholic Church had created the existing schisms led some Orthodox and Anglicans
to see existing differences between their communions as more apparent than real.20
The growing strength of Roman Catholicism in Britain, and its attractiveness to
younger Anglo-Catholics, was a great concern to the older generation of high church
Anglicans. Some of these elders saw the possibility of Orthodox recognition of Angli-
can clergy as a counterweight to the growing popularity of the Roman Church. During
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a variety of Protestant mission organizations
conducted ministry with Russians, Greeks, Cypriots, Bulgarians, and other tradition-
ally Orthodox ethnic groups. Missionaries, representing a variety of denominations,
expressed a range of views on the nature and condition of the churches. The British
and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), an interdenominational Christian organization
founded in 1804, coordinated the translation and distribution of the Bible throughout
17
P. D. Steeves, “The Orthodox Tradition,” in Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, ed. Walter
A. Elwell (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1984), 807.
18
Carnegie S. Calian, Icon and Pulpit: The Protestant-Orthodox Encounter (Philadelphia,
PA: Westminster Press, 1968), 22–23.
19
Josef L. Altholz, “Anglican-Orthodox Relations in the Nineteenth Century,” Modern Greek
Studies Yearbook 18–19 (2002–03): 1–14.
20
Bryn Geffert, Eastern Orthodox and Anglicans: Diplomacy, Theology, and the Politics of
Interwar Ecumenism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 3–4.
the world.21 The BFBS quickly expanded its work to many regions, including Russia.
The Russian Bible Society was organized in 1812 with the support of Alexander I,
who maintained friendly contacts with evangelicals. The Russian organization’s work
led to increasing involvement with the church hierarchy, and soon thereafter several
priests served as members of the society’s leadership council. Initially, the Bible so-
ciety was quite successful in distributing the Scriptures widely. The society’s efforts
led to the translation of the Bible into modern Russian, as well as other significant mi-
nority languages within the empire. The society began its work with the hesitant sup-
port of the established church, but many clergy grew to resent its growing influence.
Eventually, many began to view the society as a subversive organization, and in 1826
Nicholas I declared that it must cease operation. The service of the BFBS with the
Russian Bible Society was significant, since it stands as a unique case in the history
of Russian Christianity of sustained cooperation between the Orthodox hierarchy and
the clergy of non-Orthodox Christian churches.22
The establishment of Methodism in Russia began in the late nineteenth cen-
tury, primarily through the work of American missionary George Albert Simons.23
In 1908 Simons began his ministry in St. Petersburg. He ministered through evan-
gelism, publishing, and social service until his departure in 1918. By 1928 the de-
nomination claimed 2,300 adherents. Apparently, Methodist missionaries worked in
Russia without any significant communication with the Orthodox Church. Simons
viewed Orthodoxy negatively, yet he chose to speak carefully about the church in
order not to provoke opposition.24
Historian David Foglesong has described the work and views of a number of
Protestant missionaries, especially Methodists and Adventists. He argues that these
workers shared a number of views regarding Russian Orthodoxy; for example, they
assumed that the Russian people were only “superficially Christianised.” Also, they
believed that they were justified in conducting missionary work in a traditionally
Orthodox nation due to the limitations of the church’s missionary efforts and the im-
mense size of the country. Foglesong presents additional information on Methodist
21
Judith Cohen Zacek, “The Russian Bible Society and the Russian Orthodox Church,”
Church History 25 (December 1966): 413. For additional insight on the Bible Society, see
James Urry, “John Melville and the Mennonites: A British Evangelist in South Russia, 1837–
ca. 1875,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 54, 4 (1980): 305–22. For a Soviet perspective on this
project, see Andrei Rostovtsev, “‘Britanskoe Bibleiskoe Obshchestvo’ i rasprostranenie Biblii:
Torgovlia ‘dukhovnoi sivukhoi’ v Rossii,” Bezbozhnik, no. 24 (December 1927): 5–9.
22
Zacek, “The Russian Bible Society,” 414–16, 436–37.
23
Mark Elliott, “Methodism in Russia and the Soviet Union,” in Modern Encyclopedia of
Russian and Soviet History, ed. Joseph L. Wieczynski (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic Interna-
tional Press, 1981), 22:15–18. For an analysis of similarities and differences in Orthodox and
Methodist religion, see S. T. Kimbrough, Jr., ed., Orthodox and Wesleyan Spirituality (Crest-
wood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002).
24
John Dunstan, “George A. Simons and the Khristianski Pobornik: A Neglected Source on
St. Petersburg Methodism,” Methodist History 19 (1980): 24–25, 40, 38.
Looking East 189
missionary George Simons, who wrote to his supervisors, “The Russo Greek Church
does not preach. Hers is a religion of male singing, ritual and image-worship. Like
other branches of paganized Christianity, she offers a stone to those who are hunger-
ing for the Bread of Life.”25 American Congregational and Episcopal missionaries
worked actively among Greeks in independent Greece and the Ottoman Empire and
expressed different perceptions of the Orthodox churches. Pliny Fisk, one of the first
Congregational workers, sharply criticized the established Greek church: “for though
nominal Christians, they [the Greeks] pay an idolatrous regard to pictures, holy places
and saints. Their clergy are ignorant in the extreme.” The Episcopal missionaries
expressed a more positive evaluation. They wrote of how an understanding of Jesus
Christ had been passed down from the apostolic Greek churches through years of
tradition. The Episcopalians claimed that problems, such as “errors of doctrine” and
“clerical ignorance,” were due to conditions of oppression under the Ottoman Empire.
Therefore, they did not attempt to organize their own churches in Greece but focused
on publications and the education of children.26 Congregationalists attempted to in-
vigorate Greek churches in various ways, including education of children and distri-
bution of Bibles. While carrying out these plans, they criticized local traditions, such
as monasteries and the special attention accorded to Mary. They hoped that a focus
on individual repentance would be more appealing to Greeks than ceremonies.27 In
Cyprus, the attitudes of Congregational missionaries appeared to have been simi-
lar to the views held by their colleagues in independent Greece, but these workers
were more restrained in their public criticism to avoid conflict. For this reason they
attempted to build relationships with local priests. The stated goal was to reform the
religious life of the island. The root motivation in their ministry seems to have been to
increase the intellectual understanding of the Bible: they believed that biblical knowl-
edge had been obscured on the island by clerical ignorance and superstitious rituals.
Missionaries organized schools to raise the level of literacy and attempted to recruit
local priests to distribute Bibles in the villages.28
The interdenominational British and Foreign Bible Society, Methodists, Con-
gregationalists, and Episcopalians, all ministered actively within predominantly
Orthodox countries. The Bible society chose to serve alongside the Orthodox in a
25
David S. Foglesong, “Redeeming Russia? American Missionaries and Tsarist Russia,
1886–1917,” Religion, State and Society 25, 4 (1997): 355–56.
26
Theodore Saloutos, “American Missionaries in Greece: 1820–1869,” Church History 24
(1955): 155, 164–65.
27
Joseph L. Grabill, Protestant Diplomacy and the Near East: Missionary Influence on
American Policy, 1810–1927 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 8. See also
P. E. Shaw, American Contacts with the Eastern Churches, 1820–1870 (Chicago: American
Society of Church History, 1937).
28
Terry Tollefson, “American Missionary Schools for Cyprus (1834–1842): A Case Study
in Cultural Differences,” Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 10–11 (1994–95): 37, 50. See also
John O. Iatrides, “Missionary Educators and the Asia Minor Disaster: Anatolia College’s
Move to Greece,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 4, 2 (1986): 143–57.
way which assisted a wide variety of Russians, while the Methodists chose to serve
through independent outreach. Congregationalists and Episcopalians both attempted
to facilitate reform, but the Congregationalists were far more critical of weaknesses
and distinctive practices. These encounters serve as points of comparison to the in-
teraction between the YMCA and Orthodox believers. This wide variety of reactions
to Eastern churches suggests that denominational membership played a key role in
determining a missionary’s perception. Baptists and Methodists usually denounced
the Orthodox faith and conducted their ministry independently of the established
churches. Congregationalists frequently criticized certain aspects of Eastern Chris-
tianity, but expressed sympathy for the difficult conditions faced by the churches
in Europe. Often missionaries from this denomination described the goal as “refor-
mation” of the established church. Episcopalians and Anglicans typically expressed
admiration more frequently than criticism. These workers often attempted to provide
ministry support. In addition, interdenominational alliances also tended to express
sympathy and aimed at a ministry of reformation. In general, staff members of de-
nominations which included more traditional forms of ritual in their worship were
more accepting of Orthodoxy than those from denominations which rejected tradi-
tional forms for a simpler sermon-centered worship. Russian Orthodox leaders also
encountered Protestants in the Middle East, as both groups worked to set up schools
in Palestine and Syria. While American Christians worked to expand their service
in Russia through the YMCA and other organizations, Russian Christians actively
supported educational development abroad through the Orthodox Palestine Society.
Cross-cultural philanthropy did not simply operate as a one-way phenomenon.29
Missionary perceptions of the Eastern churches developed under the influence of
American attitudes toward Orthodox immigrants. Negative perceptions in the United
States and in Europe seem to have been mutually dependent. Relatively few publica-
tions written in English during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries examine Or-
thodoxy in depth. Several of these books presented a sympathetic description, but the
negative evaluation provided by Edward Gibbon’s influential Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire overshadowed the other viewpoints in the minds of nineteenth-cen-
tury Americans. During this century, many Americans feared the immigration of
non-Protestants, such as Catholics, Jews—and the Orthodox. Different social values,
financial practices, religious traditions, and ethnic heritages seemed to threaten ac-
cepted understandings of the American “way of life.”30
A key factor shaping missionaries’ understandings of Eastern Christianity was
the information presented in books available in the United States and Great Britain.
One could assume that travel and ministry accounts were popular reading choices for
missionaries, especially before their departure for service. The Story of Moscow, Wirt
29
Theofanis George Stavrou, Russian Interests in Palestine, 1882–1914: A Study of Religious
and Educational Enterprise (Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1963), especially
62–63.
30
Peter Carl Haskell, “American Civil Religion and the Greek Immigration: Religious Con-
frontation before the First World War,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 18, 4 (1974): 167,
180–81, 173.
Looking East 191
Gerrare’s travel account published in 1903, provided a description of the practices,

beliefs, and landmarks of Russian Orthodox Christianity. One uncommon feature of
the book was the warning that foreigners need to be careful when making observa-
tions of the Russian church. He wrote:
For many, who are quite ignorant of its tenets and practice, the Eastern Church
has an irresistible fascination; the danger is that these, on a first acquaintance
will over-praise such details as they may appreciate and too hastily condemn
others they may not rightly comprehend.31
John Bookwalter described his travels in the Russian Empire in Siberia and Central
Asia (1899). He paid special attention to the role of icons in prerevolutionary Russia
and used this theme to illustrate his claim that “the strongest trait of the Russian’s
character is his intense religious sentiment.”32 A. McCaig published a very different
view in his book, Grace Astounding in Bolshevik Russia. McCaig served as principal
of Spurgeon’s College in London, a study center for conservative European Baptists.
During a visit to Riga, he met Cornelius Martens, who told of his recent ministry
in Russia. McCaig then collected and edited the accounts of Martens. One chapter,
“Victory over Priestly Opposition,” included a dramatic story of how an Orthodox
priest came with a group of followers to disturb one of Martens’s preaching services.
His friends told him to flee “to save his life as they had intended to kill him.”33
During this period, key Protestant textbooks of systematic theology and church
history included little information on Eastern Orthodoxy. This may have contributed
to the assumption that distinctive Eastern theological positions and historical realities
did not deserve serious consideration. A. H. Strong’s popular three-volume set, Sys-
tematic Theology (1909), did not comment on any theological positions of Orthodoxy
after the Middle Ages. George Fisher’s History of the Christian Church (1897) and
Williston Walker’s A History of the Christian Church (1918) also virtually ignored
developments in Eastern Christianity after the medieval era. These were, for the most
part, well-researched textbooks written by respected professors at Yale University.
One exception to this trend was the English translation of the standard German text-
book Church History, by J. H. Kurtz (1890), which commented extensively on de-
velopments in Greece and other countries. Many Protestant Christian leaders of this
period adopted a negative view of Orthodoxy, due to the evaluation of Adolf Harnack,
the influential German theologian and church historian. Harnack’s writings included
an “uncompromising condemnation of the Eastern Churches as relics of the syncre-
tistic cults of late classical antiquity coated by a thin Christian veneer.”34
31
Wirt Gerrare, The Story of Moscow (London: J. M. Dent and Co., 1903), 173.
32
John W. Bookwalter, Siberia and Central Asia (Springfield, OH: n.p., 1899), 242.
33
A. McCaig, Grace Astounding in Bolshevik Russia: A Record of the Lord’s Dealings with
Brother Cornelius Martens (London: Russian Missionary Society, 1920), 99.
34
Heinrich A. Stammler, “Russian Orthodoxy in Recent Protestant Church History and The-
ology,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 23, 3–4 (1979): 208.
YMCA Perceptions on Orthodoxy
The YMCA’s efforts in Russia and Greece were unusual examples of cooperation
between American Protestants and Orthodox Christians. In 1875, few association
members would have dreamed that fifty years later their organization would be pub-
lishing works of Eastern Orthodox theology. At that time, almost all YMCA members
belonged to evangelical churches and accepted a traditional form of Protestant theol-
ogy. Few of these men knew Orthodox believers or studied the history of the Eastern
Church. The position of the American YMCA regarding the Eastern faith shifted sig-
nificantly from 1900 to 1940; the attitudes of its leaders and secretaries ranged widely
across a spectrum from dismissal to praise over these years. It is simply not possible
to identify one YMCA stance on Orthodoxy at any one time.
However, basic steps in the shift in the prevailing position may be identified
among this diversity of views—the following section provides a number of illustra-
tions. From 1900 to 1918, the leaders of the YMCA’s Mayak ministry for urban men
in St. Petersburg and Petrograd expressed and demonstrated resigned toleration of
Orthodoxy—its doctrine, practices, and leaders. Mayak leaders functioned with state
approval, so they maintained polite relations with the church in order to safeguard
freedom for their activity. Though they encouraged and supported young Orthodox
believers, they hoped for a day when they would be able to teach evangelical Protes-
tant belief and behavior without restrictions. They resented the necessity of leaving
all Bible teaching to state church priests and doubted the salvation of many clergy.
They were, however, able to operate without serious opposition from the hierarchy.
This attitude was similar to that held by the British and Foreign Bible Society. In
the early nineteenth century, the Bible society chose to cooperate with the Orthodox
Church in order to serve larger numbers of Russians. During the same period, the
Russian Student Christian Movement (RSCM) usually operated without formal state
approval, so it was not required to rely on clergy for religious programs. The Ameri-
cans working with the RSCM welcomed the participation and leadership of Orthodox
students but promoted an interconfessional approach which attempted to emphasize
the common beliefs shared by all Christians and avoid religious controversy. In this
way the American Protestant leaders offered pragmatic support for Orthodox believ-
ers but did not encourage them to share the distinctives of their heritage with those of
other backgrounds.
For a variety of reasons the leaders of the YMCA became more intentional and
enthusiastic in their support of the Orthodox Church during the challenging years of
world war, revolutions, and civil war. These leaders encouraged Y secretaries to back
the ministry of clergy. However, the stated position of the YMCA for work in Russia
did not exclude support for other non-Orthodox confessions: this period’s philosophy
was one of limited support for Orthodox believers. After the revolution, the YMCA
Russian work leaders in Europe eventually adopted a position of enthusiastic support:
they even avoided supporting Russian Protestant ventures. This YMCA policy of
a confessional approach was unusual and did not develop without challenges from
some secretaries. By 1940, however, the Y had moved from resigned toleration to
Looking East 193
enthusiastic support of Russian Orthodoxy. Yet there was always a vocal minority
ready to criticize the church and the YMCA’s support of its leadership. The YMCA’s
growing support of Orthodoxy occurred as many of its secretaries abandoned several
Protestant distinctives, such as the primacy of scripture over reason and tradition and
justification by faith alone. Paradoxically, as the general Y organization in the United
States moved away from the doctrines of traditional Protestantism, the Russian work
staff became more supportive of Eastern Orthodox churches which held on to far
more traditional doctrines.
John R. Mott led the way for the YMCA with his sympathies for the Eastern
churches and his desire to support and expand their ministry. Shortly before the open-
ing of YMCA work in Russia, Mott met Archbishop Nikolai, the Russian missionary
who had established Japan’s Orthodox Church. Meeting this hierarch challenged his
perception of a corrupt and servile church. Mott “saw that one Orthodox missionary
had established a large church even in a hostile country.”35 His enthusiasm grew as a
result of his meetings with church leaders during his participation in the Root Mis-
sion of 1917. He sensed a mood of renewal and optimism. His public comments and
writings frequently emphasized his enthusiastic evaluation.
The first YMCA field worker to live and work in Russia was Franklin Gaylord,
who was often critical of the traditional faith in his letters and reports. After eight
years of work with the Mayak he wrote:
There is great difficulty in securing Christian men as voluntary workers. Or-

thodox Russian Christianity is a low grade of Christianity and to find men of
real spiritual development is next to impossible.
He reported that the prominent religion was of little consequence in everyday life:
[T]he Russian priests and the Russian people generally, are formally most
religious. In fact, there is a shocking lack of Christianity in all of Russian so-
ciety. The great need of Russia as indeed of every country is men of character
and of all round Christian development.
He was especially frustrated by the limitations placed by its official charter on the
religious work of the Mayak:
Although its work is largely preventive at the present time there is hope that
with increasing religious liberty in Russia, the Society will become more and
more similar to the American Young Men’s Christian Association on which,
as far as possible, it has been modeled.36
35
Paul B. Anderson, “A Study of Orthodoxy and the YMCA,” booklet printed in Geneva by
the World Alliance of Young Men’s Christian Associations, 1963, 15, Pamphlets on Ortho-
doxy, YMCA of the USA, Anderson, Paul B, 1, KFYA.
36
Franklin Gaylord, “Extracts from Report for the Year 1908 of the Society for the Moral,
Intellectual and Physical Development of Young Men in St Petersburg Russia,” 10–11. Corre-
Gaylord attempted to work with priests who could connect with young people and
communicate well but was frequently disappointed by what he sensed as lack of spir-
itual fervor and Bible teaching ability: “Among the thousands of priests in this city,
some must be true Christians.”37 Gaylord’s assistant, Erich Moraller, shared his neg-
ative views and hoped for wider opportunities in the future:
We hope the time is not far distant when the name of Christian with its full
meaning will dawn upon the whole nation. That all men may know Christ,
as personal Saviour, and God in life and deed. As yet He is to them a far off
inaccessible Being.38
The Y men who worked among university students held similar critical attitudes.
In his 1914 annual report Philip A. Swartz gave an extended summary of his views:
“The Orthodox Church is utterly inadequate for the new conditions to say nothing
about its failure in meeting the spiritual demands of former years.” His evaluation
was entirely negative and repeated the common criticisms of lack of biblical knowl-
edge, entanglement with the state, popular superstition, clerical greed, and immoral
leadership.39
The attitude of most secretaries became more positive as the Russian work ex-
panded after 1914. Mott’s influence continued, especially after he became acquainted
with the future Patriarch Tikhon during the Root Mission thanks to Charles R. Crane,
a wealthy American philanthropist who was especially concerned with Russia and
had financed Tikhon’s New York cathedral choir. After 1917 the entire Y program had
the blessing of Patriarch Tikhon. Ethan T. Colton, senior secretary for the Russian
work beginning in 1918, developed relationships of trust with the Orthodox hierarchy.
In the years to follow Tikhon passed instructions to Metropolitan Evlogii in Berlin
via Colton. However, Colton states that from 1917 to 1921 the YMCA received a
mixed reaction from Russian Orthodox clergy: “We found perhaps half friendly, the
others aloof.”40
In 1920 William Banton, a YMCA leader for the Russian program who was
based in New York, wrote a letter that expressed the policy of limited support for Or-
spondence and Reports, 1903–1910, Russian Work Restricted, Correspondence and Reports,
1903–1917, KFYA.
37
Letter from Franklin Gaylord to John R. Mott, 11 March 1912, 1, Correspondence and Re-
ports, 1911–1912, Russian Work Restricted, Correspondence and Reports, 1903–1917, KFYA.
38
[Erich Moraller], “Report of the Physical Department and the Department of Bible Study in
the Society “Miyak,” (an alternate spelling of Mayak) [1910], 4, Russian Work, James Stokes
Society including Saint Petersburg, KFYA.
39
Philip A. Swartz, “Annual Report of Philip A. Swartz,” [30 September 1914], 5–6, Corre-
spondence and Reports, 1913–1914, Russian Work Restricted, Correspondence and Reports,
1903–1917, KFYA.
40
[E. T. Colton], “The Russian Work Sequences with their Church Relations,” no date, 2–3,
YMCA Relationships (1920–1925), 2, Russian Church, KFYA.
Looking East 195
thodoxy which had evolved to that point. Banton described Orthodoxy as “fundamen-
tally sound” and believed that its weaknesses were rooted in years of state control.
He then expressed his opinion that the Association could function in an Orthodox
context: “As far as having to first evangelize the Russian nation before we plant the
seed of an indigenous Association movement I do not believe that this is necessary or
desirable.” Banton concluded his statement by describing his desire for the YMCA to
work with the Orthodox Church—and other Christian churches in Russia:
The official attitude of the Association in connection with the Orthodox

Church is one of cooperation, but we do not limit ourselves to supporting this
Christian body alone but desire to equally serve all Christian bodies existing
in Russia.41
His letter expressed appreciation for the context of the Russian church, but listed a
number of typical Protestant criticisms; the spirit seems to be sincere but not whole-
hearted. The approach was positive and interconfessional.
Rev. Frederic Charles Meredith played a key role in educating YMCA secretaries
about the history and beliefs of Orthodoxy and encouraging them to develop positive
relations with clergy and lay people alike. He stopped short of full endorsement, how-
ever. His booklet, The Young Men’s Christian Association and the Russian Orthodox
Church,42 was used as a staff training tool. Meredith had served as rector of the
American Episcopal Church in Mayebashi, Japan, before his time of YMCA service
in Siberia. He wrote that the senior national secretary of the YMCA in Russia, G.
S. Phelps, saw that the youth of Russia could best be served in cooperation with the
Russian Orthodox Church, since it was “the determining religious influence of the
country.” This view was not shared by all the secretaries. In general the Association
workers who began to work in Siberia in 1918 were “ignorant” of Orthodoxy—and
the church was ignorant of the YMCA. Meredith had been working among American
troops at Spasskoe, when Phelps asked him to take up the assignment of studying
Orthodoxy and helping the YMCA develop a relationship with the Russian church.
Meredith had been studying Orthodoxy for some time and was familiar with devel-
opments in the relationship between Anglicans and Orthodox. Meredith set out with
a five-step program for his assignment: 1) study the Russian church by meeting with
clergy and attending worship services; 2) explain the YMCA to the clergy and lay
people of the church; 3) explain the doctrine and worship of the church to YMCA
41
Letter from Wm. Walter Banton to Oliver J. Frederickson, 3 December 1920, 1, Correspon-
dence and Reports, 1920, Russian Work Restricted, Correspondence and Reports, 1918–1921,
KFYA.
42
Frederic Charles Meredith, The Young Men’s Christian Association and the Russian Or-
thodox Church (New York: The International Committee of Young Men’s Christian Associa-
tions, 1921), Russian Work, Restricted, Pamphlets, KFYA.
workers; 4) survey the religious conditions of cities and the influences of the church;
and 5) survey the conditions of student life and the influences of Orthodoxy.43
He began his study in 1919 with a meeting with Bishop Anatolii in Tomsk, who
was familiar with the Y from time spent in the United States. The bishop welcomed
Meredith warmly and provided many suggestions for his program of study. Meredith
described the worship services he attended with great enthusiasm. He also explained
his understanding of a controversy surrounding the Y triangle:
The apex of the triangle in many Russian Orthodox church decorations, and
especially in representations and pictures of God the Father, points upward;
therefore to many the red triangle, pointing downward instead of upward,
seemed to be a popular “devil sign” or a Jewish emblem.
Bishop Anatolii said that Meredith “should take part in church services as soon as I
had acquired certain [Russian language] proficiency.” The services seemed to create
the deepest enthusiasm for Meredith, and he was overwhelmed by “the splendor of
Russian worship.”44
After his survey trip, Meredith gave a message to Y secretaries in Vladivostok on
the history and doctrine of Orthodoxy. He emphasized that knowledge of the church
depended on attending worship services. He “insisted that the duty of every secre-
tary working in Russia is to do so.” The booklet closed with general observations
and plans for the YMCA. He presented the doctrinal conservatism of the church in a
positive way:
The Russian Orthodox Church has never given one uncertain sound with ref-
erence to the center and core of Christianity, the divine Son of God, Jesus
Christ, and when the treasures of the Church are really unlocked to Western
minds, her progress in the understanding of the Christ will be made manifest.
He noted that the Russian Orthodox Church needs to gain a better understanding of
Protestantism and needs to continue with its reforms. The conclusion was not entirely
positive:
The Church has alienated thousands and her sins of omission and commission
hang around her neck as did the albatross around the neck of the Ancient
Mariner. However, as has been said, “the Church is indestructible and its
influence inextinguishable in Russia. It can be made an agency to reach mil-
lions for good, who can in no other way be reached. It needs sympathy and it
needs aid.”45
43
Ibid., 3–4.
44
Ibid., 8, 10, 13, 30.
45
Ibid., 41–45, 49, 52.
Looking East 197
He commented that he felt sympathy for Russia’s other Christian confessions, such as
the Old Believers and “various sects.” However, he did not believe that these groups
would be able to provide a unifying faith for the Russian people. He suggested that
Russian Protestants may use words that are similar to those of American Protestants,
but there is only a “superficial resemblance” between these groups. He desired to
serve and assist the Russian Orthodox Church and based his views on adopted po-
sitions of the YMCA on serving the local church. He agreed with the general orders
issued by the leadership of the YMCA in Russia to support the Orthodox Church. He
made these recommendations to the YMCA in Russia: 1) study and attend Orthodox
worship services; 2) compile a handbook on Russian church history; 3) cooperate with
local clergy in planning programs; 4) place icons in Y buildings and host Orthodox
prayer services; and 5) distribute information on the YMCA to clergy and laypeople.
We can be of great help to the Russian Orthodox Church. The Russian Or-
thodox Church can be of great help to us. With mutual respect and hearty
cooperation, each in its own sphere can do much for “Poor Russia.”46
Colton continued to work within Soviet Russia from 1922 to 1925 with the Amer-
ican Relief Administration. During this time, he was able to observe the work of
American Methodists, Lutherans, Baptists, and Mennonites in Russia. The Methodist
and Baptist workers were supporting the work of starting new churches, while the
Lutheran and Mennonite workers were supporting relief efforts.47 He realized that
at this time the Orthodox Church was facing stiffer opposition from the government
than the “Sectarians,” which included the Baptists and Evangelical Christians. This
situation doubtlessly deepened his sympathy for the Orthodox. He believed that the
Soviet government was sympathetic to sectarians, since they had been persecuted
during the period when revolutionaries had been opposed by the tsarist government.
Also, he believed that the government was favoring the sectarians in order to help
weaken the Orthodox Church.48
In 1922 Colton became involved in the church’s resistance to the Soviet govern-
ment’s demand to turn over religious valuables as a contribution to famine relief.
The patriarch and synod authorized a committee to obtain help from Colton: they re-
quested that he contact the leadership of the American Relief Administration (ARA).
The church hoped to turn over the valuables as security for a loan from the United
States which could then be directed to provide additional state famine relief. In this
way the church planned to protect its valuables from destruction. Colton spoke per-
sonally with Colonel Haskell, who expressed sympathy for the plight of the church
but refused to go through with this plan for three reasons. First, the plan would be
seen as a political move in violation of the ARA’s charter for Russia. Second, reliable
46
Ibid., 53, 56–60.
47
E. T. Colton, “Contacts with the Russian Church, January to April 1922,” 3–5, Russian
Orthodox Church, Russian Work, Restricted, Ethan T. Colton Collection, KFYA.
48
Ibid., 2.
bankers would not accept the valuables as security. Third, limitations of transporta-
tion would mean that the funds could not actually get more food to those in need.49
In the 1920s Colton also found himself involved in the efforts of the modernizing
pro-government “Living Church” wing of Orthodoxy to secure support from Amer-
ican Methodists.50 Colton was a Methodist and sharply opposed to this movement,
which he identified as schismatic; the catalyst for Methodist support of this group was
a former YMCA secretary, Julius Hecker, who had an uncanny ability to draw the Y
into controversy. Hecker was a prolific and engaging radical writer and an outspoken
opponent of traditional Orthodoxy, which he saw as devoid of moral power or cre-
ative thinking. In one article he argued that “the Russian, indeed, is pious, although
his piety has little to do with his moral standards.”51 In another work he added that
“religion had little to do with shaping the moral code and practices of the Russian
people.”52 He showed little awareness and even less appreciation for the intellectual
ferment of the prerevolutionary period:
There exists some scholarship to perpetuate the traditional theology and

guard against heretics who might undermine the Orthodox faith, but for orig-
inal thinking there is neither need nor place in the Orthodox Church.53
In a 1924 article he barely disguised his glee over the Soviet attack on the church;
Hecker believed that “the Russian Church hierarchy is reaping its own harvest,” since
it had supported the suppression of both non-Orthodox groups and revolutionaries.
He hoped that in the future Russia would adopt “a synthesis of the personal element
emphasized in the Gospels with the social element emphasized by communism.”54
49
Ibid., 5–6. See Bertrand M. Patenaude, The Big Show in Bololand: The American Re-
lief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2002), 654–62. The church’s proposal to Colton is not included in Patenaude’s account.
Colton’s report sheds additional light on the rumors surrounding the ARA and the Russian
Orthodox Church; many Russians at the time believed that the church’s treasures were being
taken to pay for the ARA food aid.
50
For recent research on the Living Church, see Edward E. Roslof, Red Priests: Renovation-
ism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Revolution, 1905–1946 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2002); Scott Kenworthy, “Russian Reformation? The Program for Religious Renovation in the
Orthodox Church, 1922–1925,” Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 16–17 (2000–01): 89–130;
and S. T. Kimbrough, Jr., “The Living Church Conflict in the Russian Orthodox Church and
the Involvement of the Methodist Episcopal Church,” Methodist History 40, 2 (2002): 105–18.
51
Julius F. Hecker, “The Religious Characteristics of the Russian Soul,” Methodist Review
103, 6 (1920): 898.
52
Julius F. Hecker, Religion and Communism: A Study of Religion and Atheism in Soviet
Russia (London: Chapman and Hall, 1933), 33.
53
Ibid., 29.
54
Julius F. Hecker, “The Russian Church under the Soviets,” Methodist Review 107, 4 (1924):
554–55.
Looking East 199
Hecker became a counselor and promoter for the Living Church and an advisor
for Aleksandr Ivanovich Vvedenskii, one of its most prominent leaders. Colton de-
scribed Hecker’s efforts with a mixture of sympathy and disappointment: “He wants
the social program of the Government to succeed, because he believes it has the same
goal as Christianity, and therefore that the Church should be in alignment with the
Government.”55 Hecker arranged for the American Methodist bishop John L. Neulsen
to meet in Moscow with Living Church leaders, who invited support and assistance
from the American Methodists. Neulsen was very critical of the old regime and very
enthusiastic about the Living Church and their plans to modernize the Russian Or-
thodox Church.56
When he learned of the plans of Hecker and these Methodist leaders, Colton inter-
vened and provided information against the Living Church to prevent the relationship
from developing further. He did not care to see his own denomination “undergird the
schismatic ‘Living Church’ and capture it for something like Methodism.”57 Colton
also advised the Federal Council of Churches in developing its policy of non-recogni-
tion toward the Living Church.58 He steadfastly supported the patriarchal church and
refused to back any competing factions. Colton’s 1925 essay “The Russian Orthodox
Church—A Spiritual Liability or Asset?” challenged the view held by Hecker that
the persecution of the church was a just reward and a welcome development. Colton
wrote that many of the common charges of clerical immorality and abuse of power
are acknowledged by informed and loyal believers. However, he called on his readers
to remember the more worthy leaders who are suffering persecution:
The secular authorities are undertaking on a national scale to teach childhood

to deny God. Is it good economy of the Kingdom under these circumstances
to defame the lovers of Christ and cheer on the assault?59
Colton’s personal views and the ministry experiences already described are
clearly embedded in the policy statement “The Position of the Y.M.C.A. in Regard
to Church Bodies in Russia,” which clarified the stance of the organization on two
positions that generated controversy: interconfessional ministry (which was contro-
versial in Russia) and support of the patriarchal church (which was controversial in
55
[E. T. Colton], “The Religious Situation in Russia,” 1 November 1923, 8–9, The Religious
Situation in Russia, Russian Work, Restricted, Pamphlets, KFYA.
56
“Soviet Russia: Address of Bishop Neulsen to Annual Meeting, Board of Foreign Mis-
sions,” [1922], 1–4, YMCA Relationships (1920–25) 1, Russian Church, KFYA. See also Kim-
brough, “The Living Church.”
57
[Colton], “Russian Work Sequences,” 6.
58
Ethan T. Colton, Forty Years with Russians (New York: Association Press, 1940), 155–56.
59
E. T. Colton, “The Russian Orthodox Church—A Spiritual Liability or Asset?” 1 January
1925, manuscript, 5, Russia, Colton E. T., Reports, Addresses, and Papers, 2 vols., KFYA.
This was later published as “Is the Russian Church Christian?” in The Christian Century, 7
May 1925, 602–04.
the United States). He acknowledged that it would be difficult to cooperate with every
Christian group which wished to cooperate. Many Russian Orthodox leaders would
be troubled by YMCA support of US Protestants who sponsored evangelism in Rus-
sia. On the other hand, many conservative Protestants would oppose assisting the
Russian church, “which they will regard as having lost its witness and laden with not
only formalism but superstition.”60
Donald A. Lowrie, a YMCA secretary who served among émigrés in the 1920s
and 1930s made serious efforts to understand the worldviews and perspectives of Or-
thodox believers and attempted to integrate his insights in his work. He summarized
some of his ideas in “A Method of Bible Study for Orthodox Groups.” Lowrie wrote
on encouraging group Bible study among these believers, who were often hesitant
to discuss a selection unless a priest was leading. Lowrie pointed out that the hes-
itancy was rooted in respect for the Bible and a fear of heresy. He suggested using
the writings of the church fathers, such as John Chrysostom, to guide the selection
of discussion questions. Chrysostom was noted for his insights into the problems of
everyday life.61
In 1925 the American YMCA amended its constitution on the issue of member-
ship requirements. Now anyone who believed in the “divinity” (a term used in differ-
ent ways by different groups) of Jesus Christ could be an active voting member. So,
Catholics and Orthodox could become members. However, “90% of the directing or
managing committees and all delegates to Association national or international leg-
islative gatherings must be members of Protestant Evangelical Churches.”62 During
the 1920s, as the YMCA began working among Orthodox émigrés, they found them-
selves in a new environment. Criticism of the YMCA grew among the most conserva-
tive elements of the Orthodox hierarchy. Also, the church became increasingly popu-
lar among young people searching for spiritual roots. Y secretaries found themselves
moving toward an exclusive support of Orthodoxy with programs built on a con-
fessional, rather than interconfessional, basis. In one document, they defended their
work in Russia: “In no case was it the intent of responsible Association leaders to
subvert Russian Christian teachings. Simply their agents were too little informed.”63
The move toward supporting confessional Orthodox programs, such as the émigré
60
E. T. Colton, “The Position of the Y.M.C.A. in Regard to Church Bodies in Russia,” no date,
Russian Orthodox Church, Russian Work, Restricted, Ethan T. Colton Collection, KFYA. A
similar view is advocated by Y secretary Ralph W. Hollinger in his paper, “What American
Protestant Churches Can Do for Russia,” 15 April 1920, Correspondence and Reports, 1920,
Russian Work Restricted, Correspondence and Reports, 1918–1921, KFYA.
61
“A Method of Bible Study for Orthodox Groups (Prague),” [1925], 1–2, 1925, Russian
Work—Europe, Restricted, Correspondence and Reports, 1920–29, Annual Reports, 1920–
29, KFYA.
62
[Paul B. Anderson], “Fundamentals of the Young Men’s Christian Association,” unpub-
lished draft, 1929, 23, Paul B. Anderson Papers, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Archives [hereafter PBAP].
63
Ibid., 40.
Looking East 201
RSCM, the YMCA Press, and the St. Sergius Theological Academy, raised pointed
questions from some leaders and secretaries. One view was expressed in “Survey of
North American YMCA Service to Russians in Europe,” a detailed review of over
250 pages which surveyed the work through the 1920s. In the foreword the (unnamed)
reviewer questioned the wisdom of exclusively supporting the Orthodox Church. This
document expressed doubt that this church would ever “exert a controlling influence.”
It went on to suggest that the program may be rooted in “the inevitable result of
homesickness.”64
The survey, however, went on to explain the basis of the adopted policy of only
supporting Orthodox programs: “Other historical denominations are of a foreign or-
igin and until now were unable to become an integral part of Russian culture.”65 The
experience and study of Paul B. Anderson, a consistent supporter of confessional
ministry, were key factors in the development of this position. He outlined past and
current issues which had separated the Y and the church in a 1926 three-page outline,
“The YMCA and the Russian Orthodox Church.” Anderson addressed some of the
conflicts that had developed between the YMCA and the more conservative elements
of the church in exile. He grouped the issues under seven headings: 1) misconceptions
regarding the YMCA; 2) weaknesses in Orthodoxy; 3) hostile attitude toward YMCA
by authoritative bodies; 4) weaknesses in the YMCA; 5) fundamental differences,
Protestant and Orthodox; 6) conservatism vs. liberalism in both Orthodox and Prot-
estant communities; and 7) questions related to political and social theory. Each head-
ing contained a variety of fundamental and peripheral matters which had contributed
to the conflicts. For example, Anderson included the misconceptions of some Ortho-
dox that the YMCA was a Masonic organization, that it had ulterior motives, and that
it “has lost its faith in Christ as Savior and God.” Under Orthodox weaknesses, he
listed jealousy of the responses of youth to the Y’s programs because the churches
did not have such activities. He also included “pride of age”—disliking anything
that was new. One of the Y’s weaknesses listed was “Insistence on the ‘minimalism’
of ideas on which all members might agree, rather than ‘maximalism’ which would
allow each confessional group to bring its religious fullness.” From the beginning
of the Russian work, the YMCA preferred that participants downplay confessional
and denominational distinctives—this was the position of minimalism. Eventually,
Orthodox participants argued that they should be able to express their Orthodox con-
victions fully within the Y movement—this was the position of maximalism. Also in-
cluded were “Secretaries’ ignorance of Orthodoxy” and “Use of money creates mush-
64
[International Survey Committee], “Survey of North American YMCA Service to Rus-
sians in Europe” [1930], ii, Russia, International Survey—1930, Roumania, Russia, South Af-
rica, Box 12, KFYA.
65
Ibid., 14–15. There is some irony in the fact that YMCA leaders consistently described
Russian Protestantism as “foreign.” The first Baptist and Evangelical Christian churches in
the Russian Empire were not organized by foreigners. There certainly was influence from
Germany and Great Britain, but it was likely not more than the influence of the Byzantine
Empire on Kievan Rus´ in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Russian Protestants did translate
some Protestant hymns, just as the Kievan church used liturgical texts translated from Greek.
room growth, not on firm spiritual basis.” Under fundamental differences, Anderson
wrote, “Protestantism a developing doctrine. Orthodoxy rests on dogma.” In general,
Anderson attempted to consider every possible angle for understanding the clashes,
rather than seeing them as simple black and white problems. It is significant that he
frequently challenged the YMCA’s previous actions, but never its theological shift.66
Anderson’s support for the Orthodox Church led him to avoid support of even
the largest Russian Protestant church movements, the Baptists and Evangelical Chris-
tians, since he believed they were guilty of proselytization, the active recruiting of
a person from one religious group to another. He was reluctant to offer support for
Ivan Prokhanov, the key leader of the Evangelical Christians.67 Anderson seemed to
equate any Protestant evangelism in Russia with proselytization, which is a prob-
lematic conclusion for a nation with a history of an established state church. He did
not address in his books and articles how this view coexisted with his frequent calls
for full religious freedom. Donald Lowrie’s book The Light of Russia provided read-
ers with an introduction to Orthodox life and faith but also offered insight into the
evolving position of the YMCA. He positively reviewed the unique role played by the
church since the earliest days of Kievan Rus´.68
In spite of his enthusiastic support for the Russian church, Lowrie believed that
the Y could make a significant contribution. Like other Y men, he never stated that
the church was without weaknesses: they remained Protestants and believed that their
heritage had something to offer. He hoped to see a greater emphasis on Scripture:
Perhaps a new emphasis upon the study of the Bible is another step which
Russian Christianity could take in its reorganization, using the gospel not
simply in a devotional or inspirational sense, but as a source of method for
making Christian every phase of daily life, social as well as personal.
Lowrie believed that programs such as the theological institute could inspire change
with “a new type of clergy, retaining all the good of the old order and still alive with
the broader ideals and a higher cultural standard” so “the Church will again occupy
its proper place as guiding the nation’s moral and religious life.” He summarized his
conviction in this way:
66
“The YMCA and the Russian Orthodox Church,” 27 November 1926, 1–3, 1925, Russian
Work—Europe, Restricted, Correspondence and Reports, 1920–29, Annual Reports, 1920–
29, KFYA. A general work by Anderson on Orthodoxy is his article “The Eastern Orthodox
Church in a Time of Transition,” published in “Over There with the Churches of Christ,” Bul-
letin 15, 1936 (New York: Central Bureau for Relief of the Evangelical Churches of Europe),
7–13, Pamphlets in English, Russian Work, Restricted, Pamphlets, KFYA, PBAP.
67
Letter from Paul B. Anderson to E. T. Colton, 14 February 1933, ROTA, 1930–33, Russian
Work—Europe, Restricted, Russian Orthodox Theological Academy, Russian Student Chris-
tian Movement, Russian Student Fund, KFYA.
68
Donald A. Lowrie, The Light of Russia: An Introduction to the Russian Church (Prague:
YMCA Press, 1923), 126, 190–91.
Looking East 203
If religion consists solely in beautiful worship, adherence to ancient belief and

custom, reverence for holiness in every age, and a sincere desire to spread
the name of Jesus Christ, Protestants have nothing to teach Russia: but if it
means, beside all this, a growing activity in the service of mankind, a keen
appreciation of the needs of modern life, and a desire to educate its youth to
minister to the needy of the future, perhaps Protestantism has its message for
Russian Christianity.
Lowrie believed that American Protestants must work with the supply lines rather
than take a spot on the front lines: “The Orthodox Church wishes every aid other
Christian bodies can give it, but its preaching must be done by Russians if it is to
appeal to the Russian mind.”69 This conviction motivated the YMCA staff as they
worked behind the scenes to facilitate the work of Russian believers. Ethan Colton
summed up the relationship between the two groups after 1917 in this way:
The two groups were Eastern and Western, Orthodox and Protestant, sacer-
dotal and evangelical, trying to find basis and method for a common program.
In both groups were men with scant knowledge and appreciation of the spir-
itual value in the doctrines, worship, and observances of the others. A few
stayed so. Such had to be relegated. The uninformed but willing ones learned.
The clumsy acquired skill.70
Many Russian Orthodox believers genuinely appreciated the generous financial

support and program assistance provided by the YMCA. Patriarch Tikhon issued
this endorsement of the YMCA on 10 May 1918: “[W]e give to those carrying out
this good work our prayerful blessing, asking the Lord to help them in the successful
fulfillment of this task.”71 Metropolitan Evlogii explained why the YMCA and the
World Student Christian Federation had his blessing: “[N]o other foreign organiza-
tions had helped, more thoughtfully and respectfully, Russian youth on its way back
to the Church and the Church itself.”72 However, many Orthodox leaders vehemently
opposed the association as a subversive sub-Christian organization aiming for their
destruction; others received aid while holding unspoken suspicions of this American
venture. The most common accusation was that the YMCA was Masonic, while oth-
ers feared that the YMCA was a Jewish scheme, a demonic movement, or a program
of insincere Protestant proselytization.
Freemasonry appeared in Russia in the eighteenth century as an international
organization promoting “brotherhood,” love of one’s neighbor, and the equality of
69
Ibid., 196–97, 232.
70
Colton, Forty Years, 151.
71
Vestnik khristianskogo soiuza molodykh liudei, Vladivostok, 17 August 1919, First year of
publication, Number 1, 4, Lighthouse Herald, Russian Work, Restricted, Periodicals, KFYA.
72
Letter from G. G. Kullmann to E. T. Colton, 28 July 1926, 1, YMCA Relations (1926–),
Russian Church, KFYA.
all men. Masons emphasized a general belief in God rather than the specific beliefs
of any one religious group, such as the Orthodox Church. Historian James Billington
describes Masonry as a “supra-confessional deist church.”73 The movement did not
openly oppose the Orthodox Church and included Russian priests in its activities, but
some Masons demonstrated more loyalty to Masonry than Orthodoxy. Catherine II
prohibited Masonic activity in 1792; Alexander I reversed this position but banned it
again in 1822.74 In 1900 many elements of Russian church and state continued to op-
pose the ideas of Masonry. The apparent similarities of belief, rather than documented
organizational ties, led to suspicion of the YMCA being Masonic during its first years
in Russia. As a result, American Masons were not allowed to serve as Mayak staff
members.75 From 1900 to 1940 a number of Russians accused the Y of being a Ma-
sonic organization; these charges usually came from more conservative Orthodox
leaders. As émigré leader Nikolai Zernov later wrote, many clergymen argued that
the YMCA was simply a wing of the Freemason movement. Therefore, the goal of the
Y was to undermine the traditional theology of Orthodoxy and destroy the church.
According to these critics, any believers who participated in the work of the associ-
ation were considered to be “dupes” or agents paid by the YMCA.76 Charges against
the Y were especially intense and public during the mid-1920s, when the YMCA and
the émigré church were developing closer ties. As Zernov pointed out, one frequent
criticism was directed at the view held by many secretaries about Jesus Christ, that
he was only an exemplary human rather than being fully God and fully man. As one
critical report charged, the YMCA presents “Jesus Christ not as our God and Savior,
but only as a great teacher.” This report cited a book by Hecker on the YMCA and
two other books published in Russian translation by the YMCA: Social Principles
73
James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture
(New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 245; for his description of Masonry in Russia, see 242–52.
For two recent studies of freemasonry in Russia and America, see Douglas Smith, Working
the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in Eighteenth-Century Russia (DeKalb: North-
ern Illinois University Press, 1999); and Lynn Dumenil, “Religion and Freemasonry in Late
Nineteenth-Century America,” in Freemasonry on Both Sides of the Atlantic: Essays Con-
cerning the Craft in the British Isles, Europe, the United States, and Mexico, ed. R. William
Weisberger, Wallace McLeod, and S. Brent Morris (New York: Columbia University Press,
2002), 605–20.
74
Zacek, “The Russian Bible Society,” 412.
75
D. E. Davis, “YMCA Russian Work: An Interview with Dr. Paul B. Anderson, September
9, 1971,” 62, Interview with Paul B. Anderson, Russian Work, Restricted, General, Personal
Accounts, KFYA. Anderson also comments on this page, “Of course, during the war it didn’t
make any difference.”
76
Nicolas Zernov, “The Eastern Churches and the Ecumenical Movement in the Twentieth
Century,” in A History of the Ecumenical Movement: 1517–1948, 2nd ed., ed. Ruth Rouse and
Stephen Charles Neill (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1967), 670. Two
examples of such accusations, written in the 1930s, were recently reprinted: V. Ivanov, Pravo-
slavnyi mir i masonstvo (1935; repr., Moscow: Trim, 1993); and V. F. Ivanov, Russkaia intel-
ligentsiia i masonstvo: Ot Petra Pervogo do nashikh dnei, reprint (Moscow: Moskva, 1997).
Looking East 205
of Christ by Walter Rauschenbusch, and The Manhood of the Master by Harry Em-
erson Fosdick. The report compared comments from Masonic handbooks to YMCA
principles and concluded: “The similarity between these two ideologies—that of the
Masons and that of the YMCA is very evident.” He quoted V. V. Zenkovskii, an Or-
thodox leader associated with the organization, to prove his point; according to this
report, Zenkovskii had written, “We must forget the proud thought that God’s Spirit
can only be found among us. When I was among Christians of other denominations
I still felt myself to be in a Church.”77 This view would have been scandalous among
the most conservative Orthodox.
Conservative Russians often used the word “masonic” to describe a person or
organization which displayed the essence of Masonry (anti-dogma, rationalist, etc.).
They usually were not referring to membership in a Masonic lodge. In a sense, the
YMCA work in Russia was not Masonic, in that no evidence has been seen which
links the work of the YMCA and Masonic lodges in Russia. No evidence has been
found which identifies which secretaries were Masons: an obituary for Louis P. Pen-
ningroth (1888–1973) notes that he was a member of a Masonic lodge, but this mem-
bership could have begun after his wartime service. However, one could argue that
the Y was masonic, since it promoted several of the general principles of Masonry.
In the United States these Orthodox conservatives might have called the Y “mod-
ernist” or “liberal,” but the fundamentalist-modernist controversy had not developed
in Russia, so they used the word “Masons,” the nearest word in their vocabulary. Of
course, a lack of documentary evidence does not prove that a connection did not exist.
Documents on the YMCA in Poland reveal clear evidence of links between Masonic
lodges and YMCA leadership. These ties may have been known to the Y’s opponents
in Russia, especially due to the close political and cultural connections between these
two cultures.
The YMCA was also charged with participation in a “Judeo-Masonic” conspir-
acy: according to this theory, Jews had taken over the Masons in the past to de-
stroy Orthodoxy, so now the YMCA had been snared by Jewish leaders. Critics often
pointed at the Jewish interpreters hired by the Y.78 During the early years of the Rus-
sian ministry, YMCA secretary uniforms and other equipment often featured a logo
which included an inverted triangle. Some Russians believed this to be a sign of the
devil, since the point was directed down rather than up.79
Many clergy were simply convinced that the YMCA was intent on converting
Russians to Protestant belief, in spite of assurances to the contrary. As one report
77
Vladimir Vostokoff and N. S. Batiushkin, “Report Handed Over May 18/31, 1925 to the
Episcopal Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church in Foreign Countries by the Former Mem-
bers of the Church Administration Abroad,” 5, 1–2, 7, 9, ROTA 1923–29, Russian Work—Eu-
rope, Restricted, Russian Orthodox Theological Academy, Russian Student Christian Move-
ment, Russian Student Fund, KFYA.
78
Davis, “YMCA Russian Work: An Interview with Dr. Paul B. Anderson,” 62.
79
R. J. Reitzel, “Brief Report on YMCA Work for Russians,” Irkutsk, 18 December 1919, [3],
Siberia 2, Russian Work, Restricted, North Russia: Archangel, Murmansk, Siberia, KFYA.
suggested, “The tendency of this work is evidently Protestant. Cooperation with the
Orthodox church is only tolerated.”80 As Zernov described the process,
The fact that these international bodies [the YMCA, the Young Women’s
Christian Association, and the World Student Christian Fellowship] publicly
denied any intention of proselytism, and conducted their work in the spirit
of respect for Eastern traditions, only increased the apprehensions of con-
servative-minded Christians who suspected some particularly sinister and
secret designs behind the friendliness displayed by the Western leaders of the
movements.81
This view of the YMCA was popularized as newspaper and other periodical ar-
ticles commented on the Y with varying tones of anger and caution. This first exam-
ple, published in 1925 in Novoe vremia, a paper for monarchist Russian émigrés in
Belgrade, confidently demonstrated that the organization was an idealist group of
capitalist Americans under the control of Jews and Masons—with proof contained in
the fraudulent “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”:
As is known, well-organized Semitism seeks to get into its hands the entire
spiritual life of Christian peoples. How this should take place is described
in the so-called “Zion Protocols.” … Semitism endeavors to gather into its
hands organizations which influence the spiritual life of European Christian
peoples. Thus Masonry became a simple tool in Jewish hands. It may be that
other organizations, having nothing in common with Semitism, will fall into
its grasp. Even the Y.M.C.A. has not resisted this fate.82
A second example, published in a 1927 issue of the organ of the RSCM, provides
a more moderate, but no less intense, criticism of the YMCA. The author, Archbishop
Mefodii, recommended that the association be cautiously evaluated on a case-by-case
basis—with the final decision about any relationship left to church authorities. The
editor introduced the archbishop’s statement with this comment:
In the passionate atmosphere of our church disagreement, voices attract to

themselves special attention from the general public by accusing their op-
ponents of Masonry and secret heresies. Especially popular among us are
references to the allegedly Masonic character of the YMCA.
80
Vostokoff and Batiushkin, “Report,” 3.
81
Zernov, “The Eastern Churches,” 670.
82
A. Pogodin, “Unexpected Unpleasantness,” Novoe vremia, 3 April 1925, no. 1179, trans-
lation in archive, 2, Corr. And Reports 1925–49, Russian Work, Restricted, Publications,
YMCA Press in Paris, KFYA.
Looking East 207
The archbishop wrote that the association was obviously sincere in its service to
Christ and its support of Orthodox youth. However, he also urged caution in receiv-
ing gifts from this organization: “The Association helps the Orthodox with one hand,
but with the other helps the enemies of Orthodoxy; that which the right hand does is
destroyed by the left hand.”83
The fullest and most direct American YMCA response to all these criticisms is
contained in Osnovy khristianskago soiuza molodykh liudei (The Fundamentals of
the Young Men’s Christian Association), a 107-page booklet which gave a general
overview of history and policy and commented on the history of the Russian ministry
up to 1929. It included significant self-criticism, which is rare for most works pub-
lished by the YMCA on its service among Russians. The booklet stated that secretar-
ies made cultural misjudgments during their wartime service:
It is understandable that in these conditions more than a few mistakes were

made, particularly in relation to the Orthodox Church. The Association regrets
these mistakes and is ready to confess that for which it is actually responsible.
The book discussed the rumors and misunderstandings which developed after the
war. The author acknowledged that the organization did not have enough qualified
people to achieve its plans for serving soldiers and prisoners of war. Due to a per-
ceived urgent demand for staff members, the association accepted people who did
not possess the necessary cultural and language skills. The Y also employed workers
who had been assigned by Russian military leaders—these workers did not reflect the
values of the YMCA. The author emphasized that the Y took full responsibility for
these choices. He addressed the Y’s publication of books written by American liberal
Christian authors and stressed that leaders did not and do not agree with all the ideas
in these books, which reflected the philosophical debates in America at that time. The
booklet stated,
A particular theology of the Young Men’s Christian Association does not ex-
ist. There only exist the theologies of the churches and confessions of the
Association members—Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Orthodox.84
Informal discussions between YMCA leaders and Orthodox leaders from sev-
eral countries led to three formal consultations held between 1928 and 1933. John
Mott presided over these sessions, held in Sofia, Bulgaria; Kephissia, Greece; and
Bucharest, Romania. At the 1928 consultation, participants adopted an “Understand-
ing between Representatives of the Orthodox Churches and the World’s Committee
of the Y.M.C.A.” According to this document, in predominantly Orthodox nations the
83
Arkhiepiskop Mefodii, “Soiuz Y.M.C.A.,” Vestnik russkogo studencheskogo khristiansk-
ogo dvizheniia, June 1927, no. 6, second year of publication, 11–13.
84
[YMCA], Osnovy khristianskogo soiuza molodykh liudei (Paris: YMCA Press, 1929),
57–61.
YMCA was to organize its services in consultation with church leaders. This state-
ment discouraged and condemned proselytism. Also, in Orthodox groups, Y leaders
were to teach the Bible only in “full harmony with Orthodox doctrine.”85
After the 1928 consultation, international YMCA leader W. A. Visser ’T Hooft
compiled his “Remarks on the Present Situation of the Orthodox Churches in the
Balkan Area.” This essay summarized the status of the Eastern churches and then
discussed a wide range of issues related to the Y’s work in Greece and other Bal-
kan nations. Sections included: “Background,” “Signs of Vitality,” “Youth,” “The
Y.M.C.A. in Orthodox Countries,” “Relations Between the Orthodox Churches,” and
“Orthodoxy and Western Christianity.” Visser ’T Hooft demonstrated his knowl-
edge of historical context when summarizing the effects of Ottoman domination and
Greek nationalism. In addressing the conservativism of the Eastern churches, he also
pointed out areas of relative openness and the significance of the Orthodox “renais-
sance” of the early twentieth century. He discussed the personalities of the Orthodox
hierarchs, whom he knew personally. When addressing two acknowledged problems
of the era, clergy preparation and preaching, he demonstrated a thorough knowledge
of the issues and pointed out progress being made. He showed an understanding of the
internal life of the Greek church by describing two movements, the Zoe Brotherhood
and the Orthodox Youth Movement. Visser ’T Hooft also provided an open descrip-
tion of the struggle faced within the YMCA as it considered how to adjust to working
in Orthodox countries. In the closing sections of the document on Orthodox-Protes-
tant relations he displayed his attempt to see controversial issues from the point of
view of the Orthodox, the believers he was attempting to serve. Visser ’T Hooft ended
the essay with a summary of the YMCA’s vision for their work in the Balkans:
The question now asked of the Protestant world is whether it is willing to

enter in a true fellowship with Orthodoxy—based on mutual respect and un-
derstanding— and whether it will help the Orthodox world to express its own
God-given mission in a fuller way. If such would become the attitude of Prot-
estantism one may not only hope for new fruits in the lives of the Orthodox
nations, but also for a great quickening of the Western church by the old, re-
born churches of the East.86
The three consultations led to the publication of the Objectives, Principles, and Pro-
gramme of Y.M.C.A’s in Orthodox Countries, which summarized and clarified the
policies adopted in 1928.87 This 1933 document reflected the shift of the association’s
85
D. A. Davis, “Understanding Between Representatives of the Orthodox Churches and the
World’s Committee of the Y.M.C.A.,” unpublished report, 1928, World’s Committee—World’s
Committee and the Orthodox Church, KFYA.
86
W. A. Visser ’T Hooft, “Remarks on the Present Situation of the Orthodox Churches in the
Balkan Area,” 1929, 15, Visser ’T Hooft Association Papers, May 1929, KFYA.
87
Objectives, Principles, and Programme of Y.M.C.A’s in Orthodox Countries (Geneva:
World’s Committee of Y.M.C.A.s, 1933), 16–17, PBAP.
Looking East 209
approach to Orthodoxy: from resigned toleration to pragmatic support to limited

support to enthusiastic support. From 1900 to 1940 many Y secretaries developed
a sympathetic and supportive approach to the Orthodox Church as they developed
relationships, worked in partnership, studied culture and theology, and experienced
the complex realities of the early twentieth century.
“Bolshevik Bishops” and the Russian Orthodox Mission in
America: A Question of Church, Politics, and the Law, 1917–52
Keith P. Dyrud
In 1952, at the height of (Joseph) McCarthyism, when any hint of “left leaning”
sympathies was considered treasonous, the United States Supreme Court reversed
a New York Court of Appeals decision and ruled that St. Nicholas Cathedral in New
York City was owned by the appointed representatives of the patriarch of Moscow, as
opposed to the Russian Orthodox Church in America (the Metropolia). The Metropo-
lia was the successor to the Russian Orthodox Mission in North America. This ruling
came in spite of allegations that the patriarch’s appointed representatives had close
ties to the “Bolshevik” government in Moscow. The Court argued that the Russian
Orthodox Church was a hierarchical church and, therefore, that the hierarchical au-
thority, the patriarch, had control of church property.1 That decision ignored the con-
tinuity in membership and leadership that had existed in the Russian Orthodox Mis-
sion and its successor, the Metropolia, from the founding of the mission until 1952,
when the court made the final decision on the ownership of the church property.
The Russian Orthodox Mission
In the last decade of the eighteenth century, Russia had expanded into North America
by way of Alaska. That expansion into Alaska was not a particularly significant event.
Alaska, on the North American continent, was a logical extension of the Siberian ex-
ploration. The motive for the Alaska settlements was primarily economic. The private
company that settled there was intent on harvesting furs.2
Even though the original expansion into Alaska was economic, concerned reli-
gious leaders in Russia convinced the tsar to require the Alaskan company to chris-
tianize the local populations. There is some evidence that the fur company was not
interested in such intrusion into their domain, so they implemented that instruction
1
Myles C. Stenshoel, Religious Liberty: A Constitutional Quest (Minneapolis: Self-pub-
lished, c. 1999), 8–9.
2
For more on this, see Hector Chevigny, Russian America: The Great Alaskan Venture, 1741–
1867 (London: The Cresset Press, 1965); and Constance J. Tarasar, ed., Orthodox America,
1794–1976 (Syosset, NY: Orthodox Church in America, 1975).
212 Keith P. Dyrud
very sluggishly. After several failures to reach Alaska, the first missionaries were
finally able to reach Kodiak Island in 1794, where they established a hermitage. In
1824 a young priest, Father John Veniaminov-Popov arrived in Alaska. He learned
the native languages, translated Russian religious books into Aluet, and published his
ethnographic studies on the Aluets. Father John later became Metropolitan Innocent
of Moscow. He worked vigorously to establish a mission among the Aleuts and Indi-
ans. In 1834 he was transferred from Unalaska to New Archangel (Sitka). His wife
died in 1839, so he accepted tonsure as a monk in 1840, and in December of that year
he was consecrated Bishop of Kamchatka, the Kuriles and Aleutians. Thus began the
Russian mission in Alaska, and the developments which eventually led to the argu-
ment about ownership of St. Nicholas Cathedral in New York.
Alaska was sold to the United States in 1867. Russian negotiators of the Alaskan
treaty were very conscious of the complications the sale would have for the Russian
Church in Alaska. They also knew how cruel Americans were to their native popula-
tions. The treaty allowed any Russian citizens, including baptized natives, to move to
Russian territory. But the treaty also required the United States to treat the “civilized”
natives properly. “Civilized” presumably meant baptized members of the Russian Or-
thodox Mission. Furthermore, the Russian Orthodox Church was to remain in Alaska
as a church now under American jurisdiction. In addition, Russia was to be allowed to
protect the interests of that church. The treaty allowed the Orthodox bishop to report
problems to St. Petersburg. The tsarist government could then complain to Washing-
ton if there were problems in the relationship between the Orthodox Church and the
American governing authorities.3
The American governor general of Alaska, General Davis, did not have any re-
gard for the Orthodox Church, and the church’s numerous complaints to Washington
were, unfortunately, ignored. As a result of the extreme mistreatment by General
Davis, the Orthodox bishop moved his cathedral from Sitka to San Francisco.
While the Russian Orthodox Church came to the United States via the purchase
of Alaska, the greatest expansion of the Russian Orthodox Church in America was
not a result of the Alaskan mission but of the conversion to Russian Orthodoxy of
tens of thousands of Eastern Rite immigrants who had been subjects of the Austrian
Empire. This conversion took place in the United States after 1890. The Austrian
subjects were the Ruthenians or Rusyns. Their homeland was in Galicia, an Austrian
province, and in Ruthenia, a sub-Carpathian area in Northeastern Hungary. These
Rusyns had come to the United States for economic reasons. While in the United
States, they wished to establish their church. Their church was known as a “Uniate”
Church. Sometimes it was called a “Greek Catholic” Church. In the sixteenth century,
the church had been an Eastern Orthodox Church, but domination by Roman-
3
Chevigny, Russian America, 223–44.
“Bolshevik Bishops” and the Russian Orthodox Mission in America 213
oriented governments led to compromises, creating a Roman Church of the Eastern

or “Greek” rite.4
When thousands of those Rusyns migrated to the United States, they wished to
establish that Uniate Church in the United States. Unfortunately, the American Cath-
olic Church was determined that the Latin rite would be the only Catholic Church in
the United States. The Rusyns responded by building their own churches and calling
pastors directly from their home dioceses. Thus, their legal status with Rome was
ambiguous.
The American bishops led by Archbishop John Ireland of Saint Paul, Minnesota
felt so strongly that they did not want the Eastern rite to be established in the United
States that they were willing to lose the members of that rite who refused to adopt the
Latin rite. The American bishops’ meeting in Chicago in 1893 concluded: “the sooner
this point of discipline is abolished…, the better for religion, because the possible loss
of a few souls of the Greek rite bears no proportion to the blessings resulting from
uniformity of discipline.”5
The Rusyns responded to the intransigence of the Catholic bishops by convert-
ing to Russian Orthodoxy, learning Russian, subscribing to Russian newspapers, and
praying for the well-being of the tsar while they were residing in the United States.
This massive conversion created a new Russian Orthodox Church in North Amer-
ica and raised new questions about the relationship between the Russian Orthodox
Church and the state.6 Actually, the question was twofold: What was the relationship
between the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Mission in the United States,
and what was the relationship between the Russian Orthodox Mission in the United
States and its host state?
This study will focus on the latter question, which can be phrased, how did the
Russian Orthodox Mission adapt to the sociopolitical environment in the United
States? In Eurasia, the Russian ideal for this adaptation has been labeled “sympho-
nia,” implying harmony. Certainly, that harmony has never been achieved, but the
Russian Church has always expected to have some kind of relationship with the sec-
ular state—even Lenin’s atheistic state. In Eurasia, at least, the church did not accept
the American concept of “separation of church and state.”7
The Russian Orthodox Mission’s American experience ministering to the
Rusyns demonstrated a remarkable ability to adapt to the American environment. In
4
For more on this, see Keith P. Dyrud, The Quest for the Rusyn Soul: The Politics of Religion
and Culture in Eastern Europe and in America, 1890–World War I (Philadelphia: The Balch
Institute Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1992).
5
Gerald P. Fogarty, “The American Hierarchy and Oriental Rite Catholics, 1890–1907,” Re-
cords of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 85 (1974): 18.
6
See Dyrud, The Quest for the Rusyn Soul.
7
See James W. Cunningham, The Gates of Hell: The Great Sobor of the Russian Orthodox
Church, 1917–1918, Minnesota Mediterranean and East European Monographs 9 (Minneap-
olis: University of Minnesota, Modern Greek Studies, 2002), especially chap. 7, “The Chal-
lenge of Symphonia.”
214 Keith P. Dyrud
their home environments both the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church could
count on state coercion to enforce conformity. Among other benefits, to state the issue
crassly, the state enforced the collection of funds to support the church. The European
missions lacked that coercive power in the United States.
In the United States, the Catholic Church adapted by attempting, with some suc-
cess, to use its spiritual powers in a coercive manner. It could enforce conformity by
placing “interdicts” on wayward parishes and by excommunicating wayward indi-
viduals. The cost of this less than perfect coercion was the “loss of a few souls.” In
other words, the loss of a few souls was the price the Catholic Church paid to establish
a centralized church authority in the United States while not being an “established”
church. The Catholic Church also reinforced the powers of spiritual coercion by epis-
copal ownership of property. If the congregation resisted the orders of the bishop, the
bishop could order the church closed.8
The Russian Orthodox Mission, on the other hand, had no automatic immigrant
membership that carried over from the old country. If it wished to expand among the
Rusyn Uniates, the Mission needed to attract its members. Thus, the Russian Ortho-
dox Mission began to build its American Church based on the voluntary association
of its members. That voluntary association was the cornerstone of American denom-
inationalism. Lacking the coercive power of state support, the Russian Mission was
left with only positive means of influence. It is little wonder that about one-third of
the Rusyns joined the Russian Orthodox Mission.9
To meet the needs of the Rusyn immigrants who converted to Russian Ortho-
doxy, official Russian interests built a cathedral in New York. This cathedral, St.
Nicholas Cathedral, was built with money donated by the tsar, by voluntary donations
in churches back in Russia, by contributions from the Holy Synod, and by some do-
nations from members in the United States.
Normally, the church organization would own the cathedral. St. Nicholas Cathe-
dral was not owned by the North American Mission, but by two trustees. The two
trustees were owners by virtue of their offices: the Russian ambassador to the United
States and the Russian consul general in New York. Under normal conditions such
ownership would not be a problem, but that ownership and many other issues of lead-
ership were called into question as a result of the Russian Revolution.
The Effects of the Russian Revolution
The original Russian Church Sobor, called in 1917 in Moscow, caused no questions of
leadership. That sobor elected Tikhon to be the new patriarch of the Russian Church.
8
See Fogarty, “The American Hierarchy and Oriental Rite Catholics.”
9
Dyrud, The Quest for the Rusyn Soul, especially chap. 3, “The Influence of the Russian
Orthodox Church on the Cultural Consciousness of the Rusyns in America.”
Tikhon had been an archbishop of the North American Mission, so he would have
been a responsive leader on issues dealing with the mission.10
The crisis of church leadership occurred with the Bolshevik Revolution and the
establishment of a competing church leadership identified as the “Living Church” or
the “Renovated” Church. The Living Church dissolved in less than a decade so its in-
fluence on the church in Russia was limited, but its existence left a long-term impact
on the Russian Orthodox Church in the United States.11
In 1917, when the Kerensky government authorized the long-planned church
sobor, the archbishop of the American mission, Evdokim, left for Russia to partic-
ipate in that sobor. He left the American mission in the hands of Bishop Alexander
of the Canadian diocese. When it appeared that Evdokim would stay in Russia for
an extended time, Evdokim allegedly sent Bishop Alexander a telegram extending
his temporary authority as head of the Orthodox mission. Alexander’s authority was
immediately challenged in a New York court by a priest named John Kedrovsky.
Kedrovsky charged that Bishop Alexander of Canada had been unlawfully appointed
temporary bishop of the United States. He argued that, while Bishop Evdokim had
been delayed in the Soviet Union, he was still the lawful bishop of North America and
Bishop Alexander had no telegram extending his authority.12
While Kedrovsky’s challenge to Alexander’s authority was working its way
through the courts, events in Russia continued to unfold. Apparently, the Bolshe-
vik government, which succeeded the Kerensky government, had encouraged the
development of the “Living” or “Renovated” Orthodox Church. In 1923 this Living
Church temporarily wrested control of the church from the patriarch long enough to
hold a “sobor” which ousted Tikhon as patriarch and, among other actions, elected
John Kedrovsky, who participated in that sobor, archbishop of the North American
Mission.13
When he came back to the United States Bishop Kedrovsky attempted to lay
claim to St. Nicholas Orthodox Cathedral in New York. He physically walked into
the cathedral, claimed it as his, and after a few hours was ejected with enough force
that he could claim that he did not leave voluntarily. On the basis of his ejection,
he brought suit against Archbishop Platon Rojdestvensky (the spelling is from court
documents).14
The trial court upheld Platon’s possession of the cathedral, but on 27 Novem-
ber 1925 an appellate court reversed that decision and favored Kedrovsky, because
10
See Cunningham, The Gates of Hell, especially chap. 5, “Establishing the Patriarchate in
the Shadow of the Revolution.”
11
Dimitry Pospielovsky, The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982, 2 vols.
(Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984), 60–65 and 285–89.
12
Kedroff v. St. Nicholas Cathedral of Russian Orthodox Church in North America, 96 NE
2d 60 (1951).
13
Pospielovsky, The Russian Church, 56–65.
14
Kedrovsky v. Rojdesvensky, 204 NYS 442 (1924).
216 Keith P. Dyrud
he could demonstrate that he had been appointed by the mother church in Moscow.
Throughout years of appeals, the New York Court of Appeals consistently supported
the Kedrovsky challenge.15
To face such challenges, the Russian Orthodox Mission reconstituted itself as a
temporarily autocephalous church at a church sobor held in Detroit in 1924 (generally
called the Metropolia). That sobor elected Platon as its archbishop. The New York
appeals court did not accept the authority of the Detroit sobor, and it did not accept
the legality or authenticity of an oral message delivered from Patriarch Tikhon to the
North American Mission. That message had been personally received and delivered
by a representative of the YMCA and had verbally appointed Platon to the North
American Metropolitan Diocese. The New York appeals court consistently accepted
the authenticity of the Living Church Sobor of 1923.
John Kedrovsky took possession of the cathedral and kept it until he died in 1934.
His oldest son, Nicholas,16 continued his residency at the cathedral until he too died
in 1944. At that time, Kedrovsky’s second son, known in the court documents as John
Kedrov or Kedroff, took possession of St. Nicholas Cathedral.17 That history is only
part of the story, and from the perspective of church-state relations, it is certainly the
lesser part of the story.
Legislation and Litigation
When it became apparent that the New York courts were willing to support John
Kedrovsky’s argument that he was the lawful representative of the Moscow Church,
the Russian Orthodox Mission (Metropolia) went to the New York legislature. In
1925, the legislature amended the Religious Corporations Law of New York to spe-
cifically identify the Russian Orthodox Mission (Metropolia), not Kedrovsky, as the
legal owner of all Russian Orthodox property in the State of New York.18
Thus, the Russian Orthodox Church in the United States developed a relationship
with the state—New York State—that was akin to its familiar role in tsarist Russia.
The “Russian Church in America,” as the New York law identified it, was created and
protected by the New York legislature. It is ironic that the very church that was so
successful in the United States because it recognized that it could only be successful
if it conformed to the emerging American ideal of a “voluntary association” should
seek the legislated protection of the state to legally exclude its competitor, the church
represented by Kedrovsky.
The courts did not accept that legislated settlement, however, at least not until
1950, when the cold war anti-Communist environment clarified their thinking. Re-
peatedly, the New York courts sidestepped the constitutional question concerning the
15
Kedrovsky v. Archbishop, 212 NYS 273.
16
Kedroff, 96 NE 2d 64. In one court document the son was identified as Michael J. Kedroff
(Kedroff et al. v. St. Nicholas Cathedral, 77 NYS 2d 336).
17
Kedroff, 96 NE 2d 64.
18
Id. at 68.
legislature’s authority to resolve a legal dispute between competing churches. The

courts consistently suggested that the legislature could not have intended to specif-
ically identify the Russian Church in America as the only Russian Church in New
York and therefore entitled to all Russian Orthodox Church property. The courts ar-
gued that the legislative intent was that the law
is applicable only to Russian Orthodox Churches which might thereafter be

organized or which, having theretofore been incorporated, should thereafter
be reincorporated, but it is not intended to accomplish a transfer of property
of all Russian Orthodox Churches in the United States to the use of the newly
recognized independent “Russian Church in America.”19
Actually, the New York legislature intended to do exactly the opposite of what
the courts insisted they intended. So, the legislature found it necessary to amend the
Religious Corporations Law two times after originally defining the Russian Church
in America. They amended the original 1925 definition in 1945 and again in 1948 to
overcome every possible misinterpretation of its intent.20
As late as January 1950, the New York court system was still supporting the
Kedrovsky-Kedroff position. The Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Depart-
ment noted that the original 1925 ruling in favor of Kedrovsky may have been based
on inaccurate knowledge of the canonical status of that Living Church Sobor in 1923.
The court agreed that the sobor evidently was not canonical, and so Kedrovsky’s
original appointment may not have been properly defended by the New York court;
but in 1950, they argued, they were not dealing with that issue.
The issue before the court in 1950 depended on whether or not Patriarch Aleksii
of Moscow was the recognized leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. Both parties
to the dispute agreed that Aleksii was the recognized leader of the Moscow Patri-
archate. Both parties recognized that Aleksii had appointed Archbishop Benjamin
Fedchenkoff to be the bishop of North America. Thus, the appellate court majority
ruled, it had no choice but to allow Archbishop Benjamin and his co-defendant, John
Kedroff, to remain in St. Nicholas Cathedral.
The majority rejected the “iron curtain” argument, suggesting:
Whether these church heads are truly religious men trying to keep the faith
alive and to serve the religious needs of their people of Russia to the best of
their ability or whether they are willing and servile tools of an anti-religious
government is not to be decided by this court adversely to the contentions of
the parties on any theory that we may take judicial notice of actual conditions
behind the “iron curtain” in Russia today. Such matters are not so notorious
as to be subject to the rule of judicial notice.21
19
Kedroff et al., 77 NYS 2d 334 (1951).
20
Kedroff et al. v. St. Nicholas Cathedral, 344 US 94, 97 (1953).
21
Kedroff et al. v. St. Nicholas Cathedral, 94 NYS 2d 461–62.
218 Keith P. Dyrud
The jurists who dissented from that opinion made an interesting historical observa-
tion. They suggested that
the Russian Orthodox Church itself was formed by breaking away from the
patriarch of Constantinople, after he became subject to the “infidels”—to a
lesser degree, however, than in Russia today—upon the fall of Constantino-
ple to the Turks at the end of the Middle Ages in 1453. This, says a leading
historian (Adeney, p. 392), had the immediate consequence of gaining eccle-
siastical independence for the Russian Church, resulting in the election of the
Metropolitan of Moscow by a council of Russian bishops instead of being
appointed by the patriarch of Constantinople.22
Those dissenting judges concluded that “the Legislature has acted within the histor-
ical pattern of the Orthodox Eastern Church in accordance with which the church in
Russia itself was established.”23
The Cold War Enlightenment
In December 1950 the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, for the
first time agreed to reverse its pro-Moscow position. The appeals court majority con-
cluded:
By our decision, we are not intruding unlawfully into the internal affairs of
a religious body, but rather refusing to sanction such intrusion by an atheistic
foreign government, so far as it affects property within our jurisdiction.24
In supporting the majority, Judge Froessel wrote:
As I view the controversy, we have the rather unusual situation of a foreign

government, which all of us agree is grossly antireligious, assuming domi-
nation and control over The Russian Orthodox Church, leaving that church
fettered, helpless, and restrained of its freedom.25
In that argument the court implied but never proved, or sought evidence to prove, that
the Moscow Patriarchate was controlled by the Soviet government.
Actually, however, the appeals court did not wish to depend entirely on that ar-
gument. The court formally decided to accept the legislative revision of the Religious
22
Id. at 481.
23
Id. at 482.
24
Kedroff, 96 NE 2d 75.
25
Id. at 74.
Corporations Law as the legal basis for rejecting the Moscow Patriarchate’s control
over the Russian Orthodox Church in North America. They wrote:
If there were any doubt as to the proper determination of the case along com-
mon-law lines, it has been completely eliminated by the Legislature. In April
of 1945, L. 1945, ch. 693, the Governor signed a bill adding a new article 5-C
to the Religious Corporations Law consisting of four sections, two of which,
sections 105 and 107, are presently material. In 1948, L. 1948, ch. 711, import-
ant amendments were made to these sections.… [T]he Legislature defined the
“Russian Church in America” … and carefully traced its origin.26
That legislative history specifically identified the Russian Church in America (the
Metropolia) as the church body that had held a “convention (sobor) in Detroit, Michi-
gan on or about or between April 2nd to 4th, 1924.”27
It is difficult for a law to get more specific than that, and the court finally ac-
cepted the legislature’s authority to establish a specific church body to the exclu-
sion of another church body. It is important to note that the court did not appeal to
the Constitution but made “the proper determination of the case along common-law
lines.” The dissenters to the majority position maintained the previously consistent
legal argument:
We confidently assert that there is nothing in the statute itself to suggest such
a legislative coup, that there is much to show that such was not the legislative
purpose, and that the statute, if so intended or so construed, is plainly uncon-
stitutional.28
The Supreme Court
The dissenters proved to be legally correct. John Kedroff and Archbishop Benjamin
Fedchenkoff appealed that decision to the United States Supreme Court. In 1952, the
Supreme Court heard arguments on the constitutional question. Actually, the Court
heard arguments twice. After the first arguments, which were not focused purely on
the constitutional issue, the Court requested argument based solely on the right of the
state legislature to legislate ownership. The Court suspected that there were two legal
problems with the legislative action. First was the question of the legislature violating
the First Amendment to the Constitution regarding separation of church and state,
and second was the problem of the legislature attempting to usurp the Court’s role by
legislating a settlement to a property dispute between two parties.
26
Id. at 69.
27
Id.
28
Id. at 78.
220 Keith P. Dyrud
The Supreme Court reversed the decree of the New York Court of Appeals. In so
doing, the Supreme Court also analyzed the argument that the Moscow Patriarchate
may be under the influence of a foreign power. The Court’s logic was interesting.
The Court ruled that hierarchical churches needed to be ruled by the highest
authority of that church. In the case of the Russian Orthodox Church, that authority
was the Moscow Patriarchate. It was of no consequence to the American courts that
the patriarchate was controlled by the Soviet government. The First Amendment right
to free speech required that the church be allowed to function as it wished even if it
should be expressing the views of a foreign power.29
The Supreme Court also ruled that the New York law was unconstitutional be-
cause
by fiat it displaces one church administrator with another. It passes the control
of matters strictly ecclesiastical from one church authority to another. It thus
intrudes for the benefit of one segment of a church the power of the state into
the forbidden area of religious freedom contrary to the principles of the First
Amendment.30
Finally, the Supreme Court suggested that the legislature was improperly usurp-
ing the role of the courts.
Ours is a government which by the “law of its being” allows no statute, state
or national, that prohibits the free exercise of religion. There are occasions
when civil courts must draw lines between the responsibilities of church and
state for the disposition or use of property. Even in those cases when the prop-
erty right follows as an incident from decisions of the church custom or law
on ecclesiastical issues, the church rule controls. This under our Constitution
necessarily follows in order that there may be free exercise of religion.31
In that statement, the Supreme Court indicated how emphatically church and state
were to be separated. It noted, however, that “there are occasions when civil courts
must draw lines.” Only the courts, not the legislature, might gingerly cross that line,
and when they do, they must apply the rules of the church, not state law, to the dispute.
29
Kedroff et al., 344 US 118–19. That specific argument is difficult to follow because it is
phrased as a rejection of the argument accepted in American Communications Asso. C. I. O. v.
Douds, 339 US 382, in which the Supreme Court agreed that Congress could intervene in out-
lawing a union that may be controlled by a foreign power. The Court suggested that the union
was in a position to interfere with commerce. In the case of the Russian Orthodox Church, in
contrast, the issue was not commerce but freedom of speech. Thus, the legislature could not
intervene even if the church were controlled by a foreign power.
30
Kedroff et al., 344 US 119.
31
Id. at 120–21.
Conclusions
It seems that in this case, for some reason, the carefully established and argued princi-
ple of the separation of church and state, and the application of the principle of apply-
ing church law, not state law, to the resolution of disputes that reach the courts, failed.
The history of the North American Mission of the Russian Orthodox Church does
seem to identify a recognizable “church body.” That body of the church was headed
by Archbishop Platon. It was the church body that met in Detroit in 1924.
That American (Russian) Orthodox Church was not represented by John
Kedrovsky. Perhaps the dissenting judges quoted above were correct when they noted
that it was a tradition of the Eastern Church, specifically in the example provided by
the Russian Church, that the new national church body breaks away from the mother
church in a manner that is contrary to church law.
The Supreme Court gave several indications that their view of the churches in the
United States was a very limited view. The New York Court of Appeals and the US
Supreme Court noted that both sides agreed that there were no doctrinal differences
between them. Apparently, that issue was significant. Second, the Supreme Court
compared this case with a labor union case it had decided a few years earlier.32 In
the labor union case, the Court ruled that unions with leaders who were influenced
by communism could not enjoy the protections of the National Labor Relations Act.
In that case, the Court argued that First Amendment rights could be abridged.
The Court concluded, “legitimate attempts to protect the public, not from the remote
possible effects of noxious ideologies, but from present excesses of direct, active con-
duct, are not presumptively bad because they interfere with and, in some of its mani-
festations, restrain the exercise of First Amendment rights.”33
That exercise of state authority did not, however, extend to church leadership,
presumably because churches could only promote “the remote possible effects of
noxious ideologies.” Foreign leadership of a church may well have been used for
propaganda purposes and the foreign government may well have been anti-Ameri-
can, but the First Amendment protected such foreign activity. The Court felt that the
heart of labor activity was the power of the strike, and thus it might be necessary to
“restrain the exercise of [their] First Amendment rights.” But the Court also felt that
the heart of the church is doctrine (even if the doctrine represents possible “noxious
ideologies”), thus the state could not regulate it.
The development of denominationalism in the United States may well have cre-
ated American churches that are identified as doctrinal and for whom weekly as-
sembly to discuss doctrine or ideas is the core of the church. But the Rusyns’ church
(the Eastern European immigrants that made up a majority of the Russian Orthodox
Church in America) was not just doctrine and ideas. Their church was the center of
their community. It was a social and cultural institution. It was an “ethnic” institu-
tion, and as such it was “created” in America to serve the needs of the immigrant
32
Douds, 344 US 119.
33
Id. at 120–21.
222 Keith P. Dyrud
community. It was an American, not a Russian institution. The Rusyns had never
been Russian citizens and they had not identified themselves as Russians until they
came to the United States and adopted the Russian Orthodox Church as their church.
The Supreme Court did not consider that the Russian Orthodox Mission was an
American institution created to serve the needs of American immigrants. Its ruling,
based on the hierarchical principle of the Russian Orthodox Church, never acknowl-
edged the existence of the functional dimension to an American religious institution,
nor did the ruling recognize that the Metropolia, not Kedrovsky, represented a conti-
nuity of the Russian Orthodox Church in America from before the Russian Revolu-
tion to the present.
Understanding Evangelical/Fundamentalist Approaches to
“Anti-Communism,” 1953–91: A Critique of Billy Graham’s
Participation in the World Peace Conference, 1982
G. William Carlson†
Introduction
The Evangelical/Fundamentalist Protestant communities in the United States, like

all religious communities, were forced to respond to the challenge of Communism in
the post-World War II period. The spread of Communism into such areas as Eastern
Europe, China, Cuba, and Southeast Asia presented several challenges, including the
need to interact effectively with their religious counterparts who faced persecution
and significant legal restraints in Communist countries, develop ideological under-
pinnings for exploring effective theological and ideological interpretations of Marx-
ian-Communism, and respond to the issues facing American foreign policy during
the Cold War. These three areas were the focus of the Evangelical/Fundamentalist
church communities as they interpreted the activities of such mainstream Evangelical
organizations’ actions as the Baptist World Alliance and Billy Graham Evangelistic
Organization. They were parachurch groups who made significant efforts to relate to
the experiences of Russian Baptists from 1953 to 1991.
One of the features of this interaction is the rise of the theme of “anti-Com-
munism” as a model which fostered significant religious and political debate within
the Evangelical/Fundamentalist community. Three major approaches sought support
from various religious organizations. The first was the Fundamentalist far right, who
developed a strong “anti-Communist” motif attached to a Communist conspiracy
theory of world and national events. Many of the themes of this group were also ad-
opted and articulated in the 1980s by the New Evangelical Right.
A second option was entitled traditionalist conservative Evangelical anti-Com-
munism. It paralleled and often supported the mainstream Western foreign policy
commitments of containment as illustrated in the rise of NATO and the implementa-
tion of the Marshall Plan. This group endorsed a consensus Cold War foreign policy
which will be more moderate in its understanding of American religious politics and
a willingness to accept diverse points of view on national policy in areas such as civil
rights, social welfare, and economic development.
224 G. William Carlson
A third viewpoint was entitled the Evangelical anti-anti-Communism perspec-

tive. It would be articulated by a variety of Evangelical theologians and political ac-
tivists. Although they were committed to anti-Communist ideological beliefs and
believed that Communism was a major challenge to the Christian community, they
argued for a more broad-based understanding of the reasons for Communist expan-
sion, believed that social and economic justice issues were a major component of
Western internal policy, and accepted the necessity of selective negotiations with
Communist countries to reduce world tension. They tended to believe that other is-
sues such as poverty, world peace, and human rights may be more important in under-
standing American foreign policy options and that anti-Communism was not always
a very helpful image in understanding many of the international problems at work in
the world. Very few of these individuals went so far as to endorse the revisionism of
the secular left and therefore maintained a reluctance to challenge the mainstream
norms of American life and culture.
Stalin’s death in 1953 began a new era for American responses to the Commu-
nist world and particularly the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union under Khrushchev
went through a selective de-Stalinization effort and expanded direct contacts with
the outside world. It meant the restoration of the authoritarian, one-party state, exten-
sive travels abroad by the Soviet political leadership and preliminary discussions of
possible arms control agreements, and increasing contacts between religious leaders
from the Soviet Union and their counterparts in the Western world. The Soviet Union
increased its foreign policy range to include greater influence in the Mediterranean
and in Third World areas such as India and Cuba. However, it also exhibited a firm
commitment to silence dissent and maintain Communist single-party states in East-
ern Europe (which it claimed was its rightful sphere of influence after World War II)
and experienced its first major crises concerning Soviet hegemony in the Communist
world in China and Yugoslavia.
Khrushchev, although somewhat tolerant of diverse scientific and cultural ex-
pression, was unwilling to relax political pressures on religious organizations. He
developed an extreme antireligion agenda. By 1964 more than “half the churches of
both Orthodox and the Baptists had been closed and the number of Orthodox clergy
had been reduced by two thirds.”1 There was a special attempt to harass and perse-
cute members of the unregistered churches and strengthen the laws governing the
practices of the registered church communities. Khrushchev’s policy also included an
expansion of antireligious materials and scientific atheism programs.
Khrushchev’s ouster from power in 1964 allowed for an emergence of a more
conservative authoritarian, Communist leadership team that would remain in polit-
ical power until Brezhnev’s death in 1982. This era can be entitled the rise of the
“conservative gerontocracy” or the era of “bureaucratic conservatism.” Internally
this meant the development of the “dacha” culture, the centralization of major politi-
cal and economic policy decisions, increased repression of intellectual, cultural, and
religious dissent, and efforts at Russification of the non-Russian national areas. The
1
Walter Sawatsky, Soviet Evangelicals since World War II (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press,
1981), 131–32.
Evangelical /Fundamentalist Approaches to “Anti-Communism,” 1953–91 225
foreign policy of Brezhnev achieved the development of a global influence, the rise
and fall of detente, expansionist activity in Afghanistan, and the crushing of substan-
tive dissent movements in Czechoslovakia and Poland. It was buttressed by a massive
expansion of the military-industrial complex.
The Brezhnev era continued to adopt a rather brutal approach to religious is-
sues. The end result was the continued split in many religious communities over is-
sues such as acquiescence to intrusive Soviet law or the development of alternative,
non-registered church communities. The protests included the rise of the refusenik
movement within the Jewish community, Orthodox dissent in Solzhenitzyn’s Letter
to Patriarch Pimen and religious expressions of Gleb Yakunin and Dmitri Dudko,
and rise of the dissident Reform Baptists under the leadership of Georgi Vins and
Gennadi Kriuchkov.2
The rise of Gorbachev ushered in a new era in Soviet religious history, one that
was defined by the terms glasnost and perestroika. Critical for the content of this
paper is his attempt to lessen external tensions with the Western world in order to
provide time and funds to explore ways to increase Soviet economic development,
provide for a greater latitude of freedom of religious belief and intellectual debate
within the guidelines of acceptable ideological parameters, and expand contact with
the Western world through personal travels and effective use of modern vehicles of
political communication.
The celebration of the millennium of Christianity in the Soviet Union and the
emergence of the citizen peace and human rights movements, especially in Eastern
Europe (including some members of the Evangelical community), provided some new
trends in Soviet-American religious interrelationships that had an impact on the use
of the “anti-Communism” motif in understanding American foreign policy. The fall
of Communism in late 1991 brought a whole new set of relationships between Russian
religious organizations and their counterparts in the West. This is outside the param-
eters of this essay. However, the impact of the Russian religious church leaders under
Communism did have an impact on post-Communism religious politics. Who are the
legitimate religious leaders? How does one develop outreach ministries? What are
the legitimate and helpful influences of Western religious groups in the development
of Russian church life? What role should the Orthodox Church play in the post-Com-
munist period? Should it resume a preferential status? These were partially answered
in the new constraints on religious practices found in the 1997 Law of Religious
Association.3
2
Ibid., 227–33.
3
For a general discussion of current issues facing religious denominations in Russia, see John
Witte Jr. and Michael Bourdeaux, Proselytism and Orthodoxy in Russia: The New War for
Souls (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999). For an understanding of the 1997 New Religious
Laws, read the following articles: Mark Elliott, “New Restrictive Law on Religion,” East-West
Church and Ministry Report 5, 3 (1997): 1–2; Lauren B. Homer, “Human Rights Lawyer Crit-
icizes New Russian Religion Law,” East-West Church and Ministry Report 5, 3 (1997): 2–3;
Mark Elliott and Sharyl Corrado, “The 1997 Russian Law on Religion: The Demographics of
Discrimination,” East-West Church and Ministry Report 7, 1 (1999): 1–3; Mark Elliott, “The
Fundamentalist Far-Right “Anti-Communism”
When one explores the “anti-Communism” motif within the American Fundamen-
talist/Evangelical community there is a need to analyze the roots of its rise and in-
fluence and the major actors that help shape an understanding of its relevance to
American foreign policy.4 One of the major groups involved in the creation of the
“anti-Communism” motif is that of the Fundamentalist far right community, who
after World War II helped to set some of the political agenda issues for the larger con-
servative religious constituencies in American life. This community was represented
in the post-1953 period by such religious leaders as Carl McIntire, Edgar Bundy of the
Church League of America, John R. Rice, editor of the Sword of the Lord, Dr. Bob
Jones, Billy James Hargis, and Dr. Fred Schwartz, president and founder of Christian
Anti-Communism Crusade.5
These religious activists united a Fundamentalist theology with far right politics
and were influential in forming religious political debates on foreign policy issues in
the Evangelical communities until the mid-1960s. After that they became increas-
ingly strident and politically isolated. To a great degree, the mainstream conservative
Evangelical communities launched other agendas and tired of the religious politics
fostered by the Fundamentalist far right. The moderate conservative Evangelicals
began to focus on more pluralistic Evangelistic activities, created targeted parachurch
organizations, and developed more inclusive religious organizations. These include
Church in Russia: Between the Law and Administrative Practice,” East-West Church and
Ministry Report 8, 1 (2000): 1–3; Nikolas K. Gvosdev, “Religious Freedom: Russian Consti-
tutional Principles—Historical and Contemporary,” Brigham Young University Law Review,
no. 2 (2001): 511–36; and Marat S. Shterin and James T. Richardson, “Local Laws Restricting
Religion in Russia: Precursors of Russia’s New National Law,” Journal of Church and State
40, 2 (1998): 319–41.
4
For an excellent analysis of some of the religious influences on the development of the “an-
ti-Communist” theme in American religious politics, see Kenneth D. Wald, “The Religious
Dimension of American Anti-Communism,” Journal of Church and State 36, 3 (1994): 483–
506. For a secular historical analysis of the role of “anti-Communism” in American history,
see James V. Compton, Anti-Communism in American Life since the Second World War (St.
Charles, MO: Forum Press, 1973).
5
For a good discussion of the politics of the Fundamentalist far right, one could explore the
following resources: Gary K. Clabaugh, Thunder on the Right: The Protestant Fundamen-
talists (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1974); Erling Jorstad, The Politics of Doomsday (Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 1970); Richard V. Pierard, “Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Right,”
in Protest and Politics: Christianity and Contemporary Affairs, ed. Robert G. Clouse, Robert
D. Linder, and Pierard (Greenwood, SC: The Attic Press, 1968), 39–66; and Richard V. Pie-
rard, The Unequal Yoke: Evangelical Christianity and Political Conservatism (Philadelphia:
J. B. Lippincott, 1970).
World Vision, Young Life, Campus Crusade, Billy Graham Association, National As-
sociation of Evangelicals, and such periodicals as Christianity Today and Eternity.6
The Fundamentalist far right agenda included a belief in a Communist conspiracy
of American history and politics, particularly since World War II; a commitment to a
full-blown individualism in social, economic, and political relationships; a generally
negative, pessimistic tone about the ability of America to wake up and confront the
expanding Communist influence in the world; and an intense hostility to those who
did not adopt the major points of their totalistic world view. These planks resulted in
a political platform which included the need to develop a “pure” Christian testimony,
to facilitate cooperation among only the theologically correct Christian churches,
to project a stand against any form of religious modernism or political pluralism,
to expose the Communist infiltration of American church life, and to oppose every
economic and social system alien to the Fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible.
In practical terms this meant that the Fundamentalist far right leadership op-
posed such “socialist” giveaways as SALT I and SALT II, the Panama Canal Treaty,
the participation of the United States in such Communist-dominated institutions as
the United Nations, American trade with the Soviet Union, and recognition of the
People’s Republic of China. In internal American politics they opposed the welfare
state programs, the Civil Rights movement, and the progressive income tax. They
believe that the Supreme Court led a movement to de-Christianize American society
through the removal of prayer and Bible reading in the American public school sys-
tem. Each of these trends are part of an American capitulation to the ever-expanding
Communist conspiracy seeking to weaken America’s religious and economic com-
mitment to freedom.
Billy James Hargis emphasized this theme in his book Why I Fight for a Chris-
tian America:
I’m afraid most still do not recognize the severity of the threat to democracy
in America or of the potential stifling of Christianity’s outreaches. That’s be-
cause most look on the threat of Communism as being just another political
system. That’s where they are wrong. It is a religion and its author isn’t holy.
It was created by Satan to enslave the world.
America is a Christian country. The men and women who braved an un-
charted wilderness to carve out this Republic were rich in faith. With a Bible
under one arm and a musket under the other, they were willing to fight for
their faith and freedom as well as talk about it.…
Communism has come along with insistence that America no longer look
toward God, but instead to political government. Communism, through its
associates—liberalism, progressivism, socialism and modernism, is creating
6
For an understanding of the split between Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, see George
Marsden, “From Fundamentalism to Evangelicalism: A Historical Analysis,” in The Evangel-
icals: What They Believe, Who They Are, Where They Are Changing, ed. David F. Wells and
John D. Woodbridge (New York: Abingdon Press, 1975), 122–42; and Mark A. Noll, American
Evangelical Christianity: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 7–108.
class warfare within America, fomenting hatred, stirring up various so-called

“social crises,” destroying love of country, perverting morals of young and
old. It is casting aside beloved traditions, banning the Bible from American
schools and in general reducing the proud and free American citizenry to an
insignificant, helpless pawn of a giant governmental system.7
Throughout the Cold War era, Carl McIntire protested any American church in-
volvement with registered Russian church leaders. He believed they were KGB clergy
and part of the Communist effort to undermine Christian America and spread Com-
munist power. McIntire especially challenged the activities of the Baptist World Al-
liance and its supportive denominations, which often hosted Russian Baptist leaders
and traveled to visit Russian Baptist churches. He stated:
If peaceful coexistence with godless Communism is possible, then the Bible

is a mistake and Christ should never have died to reconcile us to God. We
could have peacefully coexisted with our sins. May I say to the preachers,
we have reached our last battle line of defense. If this line cannot be held,
the floodgate of Communism will overflow this country, with hundreds and
thousands of Russians serving on commissions, coming for exchanges, and
using what they think is best in the destruction of the USA. There must be
no discharge, no retreat, no surrender to the forces of Communism and to the
powers that will impose peaceful coexistence, with the militant atheists who
lead Russia.8
In the 1950s Dr. Frederick C. Schwarz organized the Christian Anti-Communism

Crusade and authored a widely distributed book entitled You Can Trust the Commu-
nists to Be Communists. He set up conferences and organized successful lecture cir-
cuits to spread the message. His essential anti-Communism motif went as follows:
The Communists believe that they are at war with us. This conviction will
never be changed in the slightest degree by any action of the Free World. If,
tomorrow, the leaders of the Free Nations were to accede to every demand
made by the Communist leaders, if they were to neutralize every Strategic
Air Command base, if they were to grant the demands on Germany, if they
were to neutralize Formosa, if they were to recognize Red China and ad-
mit it to the United Nations, if the United States were to withdraw every
7
Billy James Hargis, Why I Fight for a Christian America (Nashville: Thomas A. Nelson,
1974), 154–55.
8
Carl McIntire, “Christians Challenge Nixon Concerning Peaceful Coexistence,” Christian
Beacon, June 1972, 2. For a history of the interaction between the Baptist World Alliance and
Carl McIntire on the relationships with Soviet Baptists, see G. William Carlson, “Russian
Protestants and American Evangelicals since the Death of Stalin: Patterns of Interaction and
Response” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1986); and Carlson, “An Old Problem …
Renewed in the 1980s,” The Standard, February 1984, 46, 48.
serviceman and weapon within the borders of the continental United States,
the Communists would merely believe they had won massive victories in the
class war. A step toward our final conquest and destruction would have been
taken. We must either recognize this and defend against it or ignore it and be
destroyed. We have no other choice.9
In the late 1970s and early 1980s the emergence of the new Evangelical right rein-
vigorated the more strident “anti-Communism” motif within the Evangelical/Funda-
mentalist community and made it a major plank in their foreign policy analysis. This
movement is best represented by such individuals as Rev. Jerry Falwell, Rev. Tim
LaHaye, and Rev. Pat Robertson, and expressed in such organizations as the Moral
Majority and the Christian Coalition. It was successful because it linked together
segments of the Fundamentalist religious community, the effective use of television
ministries, and a willingness to organize with non-Fundamentalist religious organi-
zations and join forces with a right-wing conservative political organization to create
a powerful ideological interest group which shaped conservative religious points of
view about foreign policy concerns.
The Evangelical new right was concerned about the moral decay evidenced in
American life and strongly believed that secular humanism was the major ideology
undermining American commitments to its former Judeo-Christian heritage. The
end result is the demise of American influence in the world, the likelihood of the
end times, the need for alternative institutions to teach children and adults the truths
of the Christian faith, and the need to take a prophetic role in opposition to the im-
moral laws passed by the liberal government and sanctioned by the Supreme Court.
The organizations are intensively politically active and start with the assumption that
America’s wealth, prosperity, and power are a result of the Christian character found
in the origins and institutions of American society. The nation’s continued blessing is
dependent upon its faithfulness to God.
In foreign policy issues, the new Evangelical right argued that Communism is the
most blatant form of secular humanism and is Satan’s way of undermining American
life and culture. Therefore, they generally opposed detente, the Panama Canal Treaty,
the recognition of the People’s Republic of China, and the recent arms control agree-
ments. They endorsed the Strategic Defense system as a necessary part of the pro-
tection of American society from Communism and believed in the doctrine “peace
through strength.” These ideas were well expressed in Tim LaHaye’s monograph The
Battle for the Mind. In it he wrote:
And that brings us to the important subject of patriotism, or old-fashioned

love for one’s country. All committed humanists are one-worlders first and
Americans second.…
Do you believe that “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel?” Do
your elected officials? If they are humanists, they do. And that is one of the
9
Fred Schwartz, You Can Trust the Communists to Be Communists (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1962).
chief reasons our politicians have turned the most powerful country in the
world after World War II into a neutralized state: they are more interested in
world socialism than in America.
That is why humanist positions permitted Russia to conquer the satellite
countries of Europe and turn them into socialist prisons. That is why we were
not permitted to win in Korea and Vietnam and why they voted to give away
the Panama Canal. That is why Russia was allowed to turn Cuba into an
armed camp with a submarine base, stationing at least 3,000 Russian troops,
and who knows what else, there?
No humanist is qualified to hold any governmental office in America—
United States Senator, Congressman, cabinet member, State Department em-
ployee, or any other position that requires him to think in the best interest of
America. He is a socialist one-worlder first, an American second.
The giveaway of the Panama Canal is a prime example of whose team is
number one in the hearts of American humanist politicians. America lost
on that deal, but socialist and Communist countries all gained.… I am not
saying that anyone who voted for the giveaway to the Communist govern-
ment of Panama is an evil person. I am asserting that the issue stands as an
example of the humanist philosophy functioning in the political sphere. Their
first allegiance is to a socialist one-world view, then to America. Such politi-
cians can be counted on to vote the same way on other issues: the continuing
persecution of Rhodesia; permitting Cuban troops to enslave various African
countries such as Angola; breaking off relations with Taiwan; or increasing
United States appropriation to the UN.10
In an interview with Pat Robertson during his candidacy for the Republican en-
dorsement for president he was asked to explain his position on American involve-
ment in Central America. He stated:
The consolidation of totalitarian control over the Nicaraguan people is in

progress. There are promising efforts, however, to resist this process: the con-
tras are willing to sacrifice their lives in their struggle against communist
slavery. We should support this quest for freedom in Nicaragua, because it is
consistent with our principles.
We must support that quest because it is in the strategic interest of the
United States to have communist expansionism brought to an end in Central
America. Furthermore, we must interdict the introduction of offensive weap-
ons into the region.11
Robertson’s view of the Soviet Union was based on a rejection of the policy of con-
tainment. The only “intelligent policy for the United States is the total elimination of
10
Tim LaHaye, Battle for the Mind (Old Tappan, NJ: Revell, 1983), 77–78.
11
Pat Robertson, “Pat Robertson on the Issues,” Eternity, February 1987, 19.
communism.”12 He combined his critique of Soviet Communism with a strong apoc-

alyptic vision of the future, a future in which the Soviet Union would seek to expand
throughout the world and lead an attack on Israel. He wrote in 1977 that the Soviet
power grasp will be “God’s opportunity to rescue Israel and destroy the pretension of
atheistic communism.”13
Jerry Falwell was asked to isolate the major motifs of his Christian political
agenda. Although it seemed that most issues dealt with internal American policy
issues such as abortion, pornography, and school prayer, he was also interested in
establishing a strong anti-Communism theme:
However, the debates over school prayer, abortion, and homosexuality are not
as important as one issue that has recently loomed before us. If our country is
militarily overshadowed by the Soviet Union, I believe that we will not have
the opportunity for free and open debate about these or any other issues for
long.
Presently, the United States is inferior to the Soviet Union in its military
buildup. We have been inferior for many years, and have cut back on defense
programs while the Soviets have steadily increased their nuclear arsenal. I,
for one, am not willing to sit back and wait for the Soviets either to propose
nuclear blackmail or destroy us in a rain of nuclear warheads. I am not for
war. But I am not a pacifist. I will do all I can to preserve my country’s free-
dom.
I believe that America was raised up of God in this time for the purpose
of world evangelization. I believe that America is a nation under God, the
only nation on earth so constituted. And I believe that it is every Christian’s
responsibility to take an active part in the effort to restore America’s great-
ness.14
A second group of people who supported the Fundamentalist anti-Communism

image and emphasized its benefit in understanding American foreign policy was the
Evangelical/Fundamentalist émigré community. Two major figures were popular in
the Fundamentalist far-right community and also in the larger conservative religious
world: Rev. Paul Voronaeff and Rev. Richard Wurmbrand.
Rev. Paul Voronaeff’s father was born in Russia in 1886, emigrated to the United
States, and pastored the first Russian Pentecostal Church in New York in 1919. He
returned to Odessa in 1920 and began the development of a major work in that city. In
1936 he was arrested and sent to Siberia, where he most likely died. Paul Voronaeff
12
Mark Toulouse, “Pat Robertson: Apocalyptic Theology and American Foreign Policy,”
Journal of Church and State 31, 1 (1989): 91.
13
Ibid., 91–92.
14
Jerry Falwell, “A Bystander—How Not to be One,” Christian Life, October 1983, 22–26.
joined Rev. McIntire in the mid-1960s and was a major commentator on Soviet reli-
gious politics, particularly those between the registered and unregistered church.15
Voronaeff’s comments in the Christian Beacon summarized and interpreted the
status of Christianity in the Soviet Union as it emerged in the Soviet press, and ana-
lyzed the role and value of American-Soviet clergy exchanges and the relationship of
these exchanges to Soviet foreign policy interests. He argued that the registered So-
viet clergy were towing the Soviet line. They were engaged in propagating a Commu-
nist conspiracy. Any American clergy associated with these Soviet religious leaders
is likely to be compromised and supportive of the Communist attempt to undermine
American life and politics. The true Christian position was one that supported the
Fundamentalist, far-right anti-Communism effort and separated itself from any com-
promised institutions.16
Richard Wurmbrand was for fourteen years a Lutheran minister in Romania. He
was also a teacher of Old Testament history at a seminary in Bucharest before the
Communist takeover in Romania. In 1948 he was arrested by the authorities and sen-
tenced to prison, where he served three years in solitary confinement. From 1948 to
1964 he was in and out of Romanian prisons. In 1965 Lutheran Churches in Norway
paid Communist authorities ten thousand dollars for the release of Rev. Wurmbrand
to the West. In 1967 he founded an organization entitled Jesus to the Communist
World, Inc., which was “dedicated to helping thousands of Christians who face perse-
cution in Communist held countries.” The nonprofit agency sent “physical and spiri-
tual aid to persons in the non-free world by way of secret couriers, balloons and radio
broadcasts spoken in 28 different languages.”17
Wurmbrand’s testimony before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in
May 1966 helped to launch his religious/political career in American religious poli-
tics. His books, such as Tortured for Christ, were popular reading in many churches
and the basis from which many Fundamentalist/Evangelical Christians looked at
American foreign policy. At an antiwar protest during the Vietnam era he told the
demonstrators that “you will be forced to fight Communism here in your own country
one day unless you stop it now in Vietnam.”18
Although Rev. Wurmbrand understood the dangers of a policy solely based on
anti-Communism, he still supported a strong anti-Communism emphasis in Ameri-
can foreign policy. He wrote that “I don’t believe in what is usually called anti-Com-
munism, and I refused to join any anti-Communist organization, but neither do I be-
15
Steve Durasoff, The Russian Protestants: Evangelicals in the Soviet Union, 1944–1964
(Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1969).
16
Paul Voronaeff, “The Communist-Run Baptists of Russia,” Christian Beacon, 3 July 1980,
1, 4.
17
Richard Wurmbrand: A Biographical Sketch (Glendale, CA: Jesus to the Communist
World, n.d.), 1, 2.
18
Jon Reid Kennedy, “Rumanian Refugee Pastor Backs US Viet Position,” Christian Beacon,
12 May 1966, 4.
lieve in compromising with Communism in the religious or in the political sphere.”19

He concluded that every “bridge towards Communism will make it easier for the
Reds to cross rivers and oceans to destroy freedom.”20 Christians ought to be on the
side of the underground Church and associate with groups that understand the nature
of the Communist menace and make no compromises with Communist political sys-
tems. He chastised the American West for its unwillingness to follow through on their
commitment to stop the spread of Communism in Cuba and Vietnam.
Wurmbrand argued that any linkage with the registered church was dangerous.
He wrote:
Christians are on the side of the people oppressed by the Communists. Their
duty is to help them and their churches by providing them with Bibles and
Christian literature, by broadcasting to them the Gospel, by sending relief to
the innumerable families of Christian martyrs.
Christians are on the side of the Underground Church in Communist coun-
tries, not on the side of official church leaders there, who have become stooges
of the Communists. The Communists are anti-man, something similar to
what anti-matter is in the physical realm. If anybody makes friendship with
them and obeys them now, what will be his attitude when the Anti-Christ will
appear.21
Rev. Wurmbrand, early in his émigré status, expressed discontent with the lead-
ership of the mainstream Evangelical/Fundamentalist conservative which did not link
themselves to the Fundamentalist far-right tradition. This was evidenced during his
attempt to appear at the World Congress of Evangelism in 1966 when selective clergy
from Eastern Europe were allowed to participate.22 Wurmbrand concluded that if reli-
gious leaders come from registered churches from behind the Iron Curtain, they must
be men who were in the clutches of the Secret Police. From these Iron Curtain clergy
the attendees of the World Congress of Evangelism would never get in touch with the
real churches of Eastern Europe. The Western church would also be hampered in its
ability to say anything significant against the cruel anti-Christian tyranny of Com-
munism.23 The development of a needed commitment to an anti-Communism motif
therefore necessitated disassociation with the registered clergy of Eastern Europe and
the Soviet Union and firm interaction with the suffering church. This was an issue on
which there could be no compromise.
19
Richard Wurmbrand, If That Were Christ, Would You Give Him Your Blanket (Waco, TX:
Word, 1970), 89.
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid., 89–90.
22
“Wurmbrand’s Letter Deplores Stand of World Congress on Evangelism,” Christian Bea-
con, 8 December 1966, 1, 8.
23
Ibid.
Several other émigrés also played a role in shaping the anti-Communism motif.
They include Peter Popoff of the ministry entitled Evangelism to Communist Lands,
Peter Deyneka, who founded the Slavic Gospel Association, and more recently Georgi
Vins, who was part of the International Representation for the Council of Evangelical
Baptist Churches in the Soviet Union, Inc.24 However, they most often associated
themselves with a more mainstream traditionalist conservative anti-Communism.
Moderate Traditionalist Conservative Anti-Communism
A second model of analysis for the anti-Communism motif emerged from the main-
stream conservative Evangelicals who were most frequently part of the National As-
sociation of Evangelicals and Baptist World Alliance. Most frequently this position
was found in such periodicals as Christianity Today, Moody Monthly, United Evan-
gelical Action, and Eternity. Early in the 1950s many Evangelical journals, especially
United Evangelical Action of the National Association of Evangelicals, allowed the
Fundamentalist far-right community to define the anti-Communist agenda. Such in-
cluded columns by John Noble and J. B. Matthews.25 When asked about the benefits
of Khrushchev’s visit to the United States in 1959, John Noble was concerned about
the impression his visit left in the minds of Christians in the United States. He wrote:
The impression that Khrushchev left in the hearts of many is that he is at the
worst a man worth talking to and at the best a man with whom we should try
to negotiate. History, however, does not justify the impression. He did not bat
an eye as he took the lives of millions to get control in the Ukraine. The blood
that flowed while he tightened his grip on Hungry caused him no sleepless
nights. Nor did it rock his conscience to shoot down and enslave American
boys in order to display his power and authority.
But our impression was that he is a “man with a heart.” And what was Mr.
Khrushchev’s impression of American and American people? No one really
knows, but whatever, it was he said that it had not changed his opinion—or,
we might add, his plans.…
Destruction is the inevitable result if we are not willing to obey the Word
of God. America is in danger! We have to take a stand for Christ or Commu-
nism. God will not tolerate an “in between” compromise.26
24
For information on these groups, one could read Haralan Popov, Tortured for His Faith
(Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1970); Norman Rohrer and Peter Deyneka, Jr., Peter Dyna-
mite (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1975); and Georgi Vins, Testament from Prison (Elgin, IL:
David C. Cook, 1975).
25
Periodically John Noble wrote an editorial column entitled “John Noble Slave IE241 An-
swers Your Questions about Communism” during the years 1959–61. See J. B. Matthews,
“The World Council and Communism,” United Evangelical Action, August 1954, 3–5, 8.
26
John Noble, “John Noble Slave IE241 Answers Your Questions About Communism,”
United Evangelical Action, November 1959, 11.
John Noble is best known for his book I Was a Slave in Russia which won the
Freedom Book Award of 1959 from the American Heritage Committee. Even James
Deforest Murch tended to reflect the more strident anti-Communism theme as he an-
alyzed the presence of Eastern European clergy and the National Council of Churches
meeting in Evanston in 1954.
However, this drift toward a Fundamentalist far-right vision of anti-Communism
was put aside for a more subtle and complex one. Traditional mainstream Evangeli-
cal conservatives generally tried to disassociate themselves from the Fundamentalist
image and style. There was a strong belief in the dangers of Communism, but they
were not willing to endorse the conspiratorial analysis, particularly as it might refer
to differences of opinion within the religious community.
However, the use of anti-Communism as a technique for an understanding of
American foreign and internal policy concerns was a dominant reality in the writing
of many of individuals in this model. They were influenced by such missionaries and
political leaders as Walter Judd and such United Nations leaders as Charles Malik.27
Editorial comments were skeptical about, but not always in total opposition to, the
benefits of talks between leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States, opposed
to the recognition of Red China, supported efforts to discourage major trade rela-
tionships between the United States and the Soviet Union, and largely argued that a
major problem in today’s world is the spread of Communism, a threat that the Amer-
ican public needed to recognize and respond to with great concern. In an editorial
in Christianity Today the author expressed some concern about the talks between
Eisenhower and Khrushchev:
Criticisms of Mr. Eisenhower’s venturesome invitation are tart and many.

Does he not confer personal dignity upon “the butcher of the Kremlin, sym-
bol of political tyranny? Did not even Jesus speak of Herod, that ancient pup-
pet of iniquity, as “the fox?” Will not Khrushchev’s visit widen the slobbering
sentimentality for the Soviet among men who stress peace more than justice?
The President bears the duty of guarding the exchange from conferring
prestige on a power philosophy of naked naturalism and on the foes of free-
dom and Christianity. If Mr. Eisenhower can employ persuasion with a pre-
mier accustomed to renouncing persuasion for force; if he can promote the
conversion of one who dismisses the fixed moral principles as sheer preju-
dices; if he can reflect the spirit of good will America preaches to the nations;
if he can let men of violence know our high faith in a holy God charting
the destinies of nations, and our firm devotion to true freedom much will be
gained.28
27
Walter Judd, “World Issues and the Christian,” Christianity Today, 23 June 1958, 6–8.
28
“Eisenhower, Khrushchev Talks Shadowed by a Red Moon,” Christianity Today, 28 Sep-
tember 1959, 22.
In the early 1960s the National Association of Evangelicals circulated a manu-

script written by Thomas A. Kay of Wheaton College entitled The Christian Answer
to Communism.29 In it he presented a moderate anti-Communism motif, a motif that
would dominate most of the writings in Christianity Today. He concluded with the
idea that “Communism is a well-established power in the world today. Because it has
designs on the world—including us—we cannot ignore it.” The initial success was
largely due to its claim to provide the answer to economic and material needs. The
fact that this is a false claim is not important at this point, for “millions believe it is
true.”30 It is in light of this that “Christians must act—or we lose by default.” Kay’s
range of actions included foreign policy which assumed the reality of Soviet impe-
rialism; a foreign aid program that lessened the attractiveness of Communism and
responded to the most serious problems of poverty; diplomatic negotiations with the
Soviet Union, when possible, from a position of military and diplomatic strength; and
commitment to an effective ideological war with Communist totalitarianism for the
hearts and minds of the free world.
A significant part of the mainstream conservative agenda was a need to challenge
trends in the United States which would make Americans less committed to the an-
ti-Communism themes. Such included the dangerous expansion of the welfare state,
the secularization of the public education system, the declining morality expressed
in the entertainment community, and the lessening of America’s commitment to its
Judeo-Christian heritage.
Mainstream Evangelical “Anti-Anti-Communism”
The final group of individuals entering the debate might be entitled the anti-an-
ti-Communism activists, who took the anti-Communism motif and challenged its
relevance as the major thrust in the development of a Christian response to American
foreign policy. There is a risk in using this title since it had dangerous political and
theological implications for mainstream Evangelical conservatives during the 1950s.
It could imply that these individuals were theological liberals who had been soft in
their recognition of the dangers of Communism both within the United States and
the larger global community.31 However, this is not true. Although this viewpoint is
not explicitly found in the literature it can be drafted to explain the viewpoints of the
authors under discussion.
The individuals expressing this anti-anti-Communism motif were substantively
opposed to Communism and were willing to adopt Christian realism approaches to
29
Thomas A. Kay, The Christian Answer to Communism (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan,
1961). For a broader understanding of the role of the magazine Christianity Today in the life of
mainstream Evangelicalism, see Mark G. Toulouse, “Christianity Today and American Public
Life: A Case Study,” Journal of Church and State 35, 2 (1993): 241–84.
30
Kay, The Christian Answer to Communism, 88–89.
31
James Deforest Murch, “Anti-Anti-Communism in the Churches,” United Evangelical Ac-
tion, December 1953, 12–13.
Soviet advances. However, they tended to challenge the value of the anti-Communism
motif for four major reasons: they found it debilitating to efforts designed to maxi-
mize the opportunities of interlinkages between Western Evangelicals/Fundamental-
ists and their colleagues in the registered churches of the Soviet Union once the chan-
nels of communication had opened up after the death of Stalin; they concluded that
anti-Communism was not helpful in the development of approaches to areas where
the threat of Communism is likely; they believed that it underemphasized the possi-
bility of change inside the Soviet Union and made the West incapable of responding
to those changes because of potential ideological blinders; and they believed that the
strident anti-Communism of the Fundamentalist far right made for paranoid internal
American religious politics and kept the American government blindly committed to
unwise interventionism and military weapons system development.
One of the early supporters of this idea was Charles Wells, who was the car-
toonist for the Watchman-Examiner, an interdenominational Baptist journal. In his
editorial explanations of his cartoons he attempted to define four essential themes:
Christians need to understand the differences between Christianity and Commu-
nism; Communist tyranny and religious freedom are incompatible with each other;
despite persecution, Christians in the Soviet Union and other Communist lands are
continuing to thrive; and Christians need to support policies against Communism
which neither mimic Communist ideology and practice nor depend too heavily on an
anti-Communism image or militaristic programming.32
To support these ideas he added some practical implications: although Commu-
nism is built on an anti-God philosophy, Christians in the capitalist world need to be
certain that they do not fall prey to a godless Capitalism; Communism will sooner or
later come to the recognition that individuals and communities cannot live without
some transcendent value system and that Christianity, as one of those value systems,
is fundamentally unconquerable; Christians in the West need to extend their hand of
friendship to their brethren in the Soviet and Eastern European countries; and it is
possible that Christians behind the Iron Curtain can teach Christians in the West what
it means to be alive in Christ. Wells wrote:
Prime Minister Winston Churchill coined the phrase, “The Iron Curtain”
to mark the impenetrable line of separation between Soviet Russia and her
satellite nations and the nations associated in ideals and principles with the
United States. This Iron Curtain permits no free intercourse; yet it can be
transcended by forces that no barrier can shut out. A great host of Christians
in Russia are not atheistic communists. The communists could neither liqui-
date nor destroy them.… Americans are seldom told about this phase of life
in Russia. Here is encouragement to prayer, an appeal for patience and sym-
pathy, friendliness, and love. No barrier can forever be impenetrable to these
powerful spiritual forces. When brotherly love, faith, fellowship, and above
all, prayer, become effective, they eventually will melt away even the iron
32
Charles Wells, “The Long Shadow,” Missions, April 1954, 3.
curtain. Instead of the prospect of war there will be global harmony, world
friendliness, and true peace.33
Wells applauded the meeting between Khrushchev and Eisenhower and was en-
couraged by the move to implement a policy of cooperation and exploration of mu-
tual need. He argued that the stopping of the possibility of military arms escalation
superseded the anti-Communism image as the proper basis for interaction. He wrote:
A few months ago, there was little hope of peace. A thousand insoluble prob-
lems bore down upon us—the darkness, the atom bombs and guns crowded
close. Then out of desperation, men tried another war. Even the Russians
realized that there was only one path open—that of good will. Fortunately,
the United States had leadership that was quick to forget the threats, the fears,
the angry words, and arose to meet the new friendliness with sincere good
will.… If the good will continues, solutions will soon appear, for good will
creates the atmosphere of compromise and agreement. The United States,
as well as Russia, has made mistakes. Our intolerance has caused bitterness
in the world, while Russia’s cruelty has caused hatred. So there is room for
both sides to move closer into the light. If we can now discover that good will
springs from God’s will, we can be secure.34
John Bradbury, editor of Watchman-Examiner, an American Baptist journal, de-

veloped this theme further and more directly. He stated that “people should not be so
obsessed by the fear of Communism that they see nothing else.”35 He supported the
idea that the penalty for allowing our judgment to be controlled by the fear of Com-
munism was that we may find ourselves defending injustice against the human cry
for justice, and tyranny against the cry of freedom. Bradbury concluded that Com-
munism was “not the author of the revolution of our time. It is one of the movements
which exploits it. The revolutionary movement of our time has deeper roots and a
wider meaning than Communism understands.”36
Many of the supporters of this anti-anti-Communism position found themselves
the recipients of the Fundamentalist far-right protest movement. This was especially
true for those who were associated with the Baptist World Alliance and Menno-
nite Central Committee. After the death of Stalin in 1953 leaders of the registered
churches inside the Soviet Union were allowed to travel abroad and associate with
their counterparts in the Western world. For the Protestant community this basically
meant that organizations such as the Baptist World Alliance and the Mennonite Cen-
tral Committee were able to include leaders of the churches in the Soviet Union in
33
Charles Wells, “Across the Iron Curtain,” Missions, October 1947, 450.
34
Charles Wells, ‘The Power of Good Will,” Missions, January 1956, 4.
35
John W. Bradbury, “A Needed Warning,” Watchman-Examiner, 26 January 1961, 65.
36
Ibid.
their organizations. One interpretation of this trend was given by Dr. Erik Ruden and
Dr. Gordon Lahrson in a short history of the Baptist church communities in Eastern
and Western Europe which was distributed by the Baptist World Alliance.37 They
argued four ideas: it was necessary to distinguish between Communism as an ideol-
ogy and socialism as a political/economic system; the current situation in the Soviet
Union for the Protestant churches needed to be understood within the larger context
of Russian church history; the interrelationship of Western Fundamentalist/Evangel-
ical churches with their counterparts in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe could
best be enhanced through existing legal channels, working with the registered church
leadership; and the antireligious climate could change for the better and the Western
church ought to play a role in enhancing that possibility.
A last illustration of this model of understanding the anti-Communism image
is that of Paul Geren, whose address to the San Francisco Convention of Southern
Baptists was given wide distribution.38 After a discussion of the tyrannical nature of
Communism in the Soviet Union and a discussion of its origin, he asked what was
the best approach to its reality in the Western world. He suggested four major ideas:
the struggle against the threat of Communism may last for generations; to insist that
there is a global Communist conspiracy in every movement for change is imprudent;
many of the reasons for the advance of Communism in the world and its likely success
in the future are a result of our inability to take seriously issues of human need and
non-Communist tyranny in the world; and it is dangerous for Christians to be driven
by an anti-Communism position.
Two passages well illustrate his thinking on these issues:
To insist that there is a Communist in every pew, behind every birch tree
and in every government office, and that we are, in fact, already taken over
by communism is not a prudent concern for communism, but a frantic and
frenzied fear. This is to hand the victory to Chairman Khrushchev, to concede
that he will bury us, that our grandchildren will live under socialism and that
communism will win the peaceful war in the economic realm. Let the com-
munists be enchanted by their own atheistic version of predestination, but let
us not be taken in by it.…
What can Christians do about Communism? There is an action which in-
cludes all the others. We are commissioned to go into all the world to preach,
to teach, to baptize, to minister to human need in the name of Christ, not in
the name of anti-Communism. The Christian gospel is our concern and, if we
seek it first and faithfully, our opposition to communism will be well cared
for.39
37
Erik Ruden and Gordon R. Lahrson, An Outline of Baptist Life on the European Continent
(n.p.: American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, 1963).
38
Paul Geren, “Crisis of Communism,” Watchman-Examiner, 23, 30 August 1962, 612–13.
39
Ibid., 613.
Critique: Billy Graham’s Participation in the World Peace Conference
In May 1982 Rev. Billy Graham traveled to the Soviet Union to participate in the
World Conference of Religious Workers for Saving the Sacred Gift of Life from Nu-
clear Catastrophe. In the late 1970s and early 1980s Billy Graham modified his ear-
lier commitments to a traditional conservative anti-Communism motif and began
to explore the need for religious leaders on both sides of the Iron Curtain to take a
leadership role in lessening the Cold War weapons escalation process. While he was
in the Soviet Union he addressed a controlled crowd at the Moscow Baptist Church,
engaged in conversations with Georgi Arbatov, member of the Central Committee
of the Communist Party and director of the Soviet Institute of the United States and
Canada, addressed the Peace Conference, and visited the Siberian Pentecostals in the
US embassy.40
Graham became convinced of the horror of nuclear war and expressed concern
that if national and religious leaders continue to support the current nuclear buildup,
it could lead to dire consequences. Rev. Graham did not argue a unilateral disarma-
ment position nor did he outline a position that exhibited an anti-American rhetoric.
He wanted to express his desire for a negotiated reduction and eventual elimination
of nuclear armaments within a secure verification process. Graham also hoped to
develop a process for future preaching missions in the Soviet Union, expressed his
concern for religious freedom issues to major Soviet officials, and continued the pro-
cess of interaction with registered church religious leaders.41
As early as the 1950s Billy Graham expressed an interest in preaching the gospel
of Jesus Christ behind the Iron Curtain. This was enhanced by his visit to Red Square
in 1959. One of the major figures in the development of relationships between the
Billy Graham Association and Communist bloc churches was Alexander Haraszti.
Haraszti was a Hungarian Baptist who translated Graham’s bestseller Peace with God
into Hungarian, subtitling it Lessons in Homiletics for Students of Theology, and used
it in his Baptist seminary classes in Budapest. He emigrated to the United States in
1956 and began to affiliate with the Billy Graham Association. By 1972 Haraszti used
his contacts in Hungary to help facilitate Billy Graham’s trip to Hungary and Poland
in 1977 and 1978, respectively. Martin writes:
40
Tom Minnery, “Graham in the Soviet Union,” Christianity Today, 18 June 1982, 42–43,
48–49, 51, 52, 54–55, 59. The best historical analysis of Graham’s 1982 trip to the Soviet Union
is found in William Martin, A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story (New York: Wil-
liam Morrow, 1991), 475–529. Other useful sources include Billy Graham, Just As I Am: The
Autobiography of Billy Graham (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 499–527; John Pollock, To
All Nations: The Billy Graham Story (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985), 150–62; and Jay
Walker, Billy Graham: A Life in Word and Deed (New York: Avon Books, 1998), 65–94. For a
general analysis of Billy Graham’s ministry, see Russ Busby, Billy Graham: God’s Ambassa-
dor (Minneapolis: Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, 1999).
41
Kenneth Kantzer, “Graham in Moscow: What Did He Really Say?” Christianity Today, 18
June 1982, 10–12.
At his first public appearance, hundreds who had packed into the city’s largest
Baptist church heard him acknowledge that the anti-Communism message he
had preached was out of date. He had come to Hungary with “an open heart
and an open mind,” he declared. “I want to learn about your nation, I want
to learn about your churches, I want to learn about your Christian dedication
and sense of responsibility within your own social structure. But most of all,
I want both of us to learn together from the Word of God.”42
Patriarch Pimen’s announcement in the summer of 1981 concerning the conven-

ing of a World Peace Conference became the focal point in early discussions of a pos-
sible Graham trip to the Soviet Union. Haraszti at first declared that Graham would
have no part in this obviously Communist Party–sponsored event. However, Russian
Baptist leader Aleksei Bychkov suggested that the Orthodox Church’s sponsorship
was “entirely sincere” and that the Baptist Churches had contributed to the financing
of the conference. Haraszti contacted Orthodox leaders to see if they would offer an
invitation that Graham could accept.43 Graham would give a major address at the
conference and would agreed to make “no statements criticizing Soviet foreign policy
or religious or social conditions in the Soviet Union.”44
Several political leaders including Vice President George Bush and Ambassador
to Russia Arthur Hartman encouraged Graham not to attend. Graham responded that
only if President Reagan had told him not to go would he rescind his acceptance of the
invitation. He attended the session not as a delegate but as an invited observer. Former
president Nixon told Graham, “there is a great risk, but I believe that for the sake of
the message you preach, the risk is worth it.” For Graham, refusal to attend would
likely limit any further hope for a public ministry in the Soviet Union.45
Graham claimed that the reason he wished to attend the meeting was to speak
about his growing concern for the danger of nuclear weapons and a need to find ways
to avoid a nuclear war. He coded his discussion in the use of the term “SALT 10.” He
was neither a pacifist nor a supporter of unilateral disarmament.
I had started speaking out against nuclear weapons and calling for the elimi-
nation of all weapons of mass destruction, whether chemical or nuclear, but it
was never in the press. So I decided the only way I could make my statement
known was to accept the invitation to come to the peace conference in Mos-
cow.46
42
Martin, A Prophet with Honor, 485.
43
Ibid., 495.
44
Ibid., 496.
45
Pollock, To All Nations, 153.
46
Graham’s address was given from a biblical perspective. He argued that God is
the Lord of history and that “lasting peace will only come when the Kingdom of God
prevails … the deepest problems of the human race are spiritual. They are rooted in
man’s refusal to seek God’s way for his life. The problem is the human heart, which
God alone can change.”47 He developed the need to endorse a commitment to reli-
gious freedom as it is found in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human
Rights and Helsinki Accords. He urged all members of the conference to rededicate
themselves to be “peacemakers in God’s world.”48
During his stay in the Soviet Union Graham shared a list of more than 150 pris-
oners for the work of the Gospel with Soviet authorities in private conversation. He
took off his earphones when a delegate from the Middle East began to lambaste the
United States on nuclear weapons issues, thereby encouraging Soviet officials to stop
that type of rhetoric in future addresses. Above all he demanded to have a pastoral
visit with the Siberian Seven, Pentecostal Christians wanting to emigrate from the
Soviet Union who had taken refuge in the American embassy. There is reason to
believe that Graham’s presence in the Soviet Union and his quiet advocacy on be-
half of religious freedom enhanced the process of their ultimate emigration in 1983.
One Billy Graham official stated that the “Soviet church leaders informed him that
Graham’s influence had been decisive but acknowledged that other groups had also
claimed an influence.”49
It is clear that Graham’s experiences in 1982 laid the basis for future Evangelistic
trips to the Soviet Union. He developed a twelve-day preaching mission in Septem-
ber 1984 and later in August 1991 and October 1992. When challenged concerning
his Peace Conference appearance, Graham made two assertions. First, he faithfully
preached the gospel of Jesus Christ in an atheistic state. There “wasn’t a single person
whom I talked to, whether in the government or in the church, that I didn’t present my
beliefs in the Bible as the word of God and Jesus as my personal savior.”50 Second, he
challenged the “irrational fear” that it was impossible for Americans to have cordial
and sincere relations with Soviet leaders.” He argued that “they are not all alike any
more than we’re all alike,” and that such “outmoded stereotypes constitute a barrier
to peace.”51
This event provoked an interesting dialogue with major groups of Evangelical/
Fundamentalist leaders. These responses were derived from the major models that
they developed to explore the anti-Communism motif. The two questions that they
raised were: Should Graham have gone to Moscow? and Did he betray his cause by
things he said or omitted saying while he was there?52
47
Pollock, To All Nations, 157.
48
Ibid.
49
50
Walker, Billy Graham, 73.
51
52
Kantzer, “Graham in Moscow,” 10.
The American Fundamentalist far right responded quite negatively to both the
visit and Graham’s communications. Rev. Carl McIntire expressed extreme disgust at
participation in the “Communist Peace Offensive” which he believed was the major
intent of the Peace Conference in Moscow. He argued:
Never before in the history of the United States has this country been so
treated to the Communist design as is now apparent in the peace-nuclear
freeze movement. The churches are claiming credit for it. They should credit
Stalin who started the World Peace Council. The latest impetus given to their
deceptive peace was promoted by the Communists’ Peace Conference of
World Religions, May 10–14, which Billy Graham endorsed with his pleas to
the Soviets to work hard and obey their government.53
McIntire took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times and stated
that the Moscow Peace Conference was part of the Soviet peace offensive designed
to undermine the political and military strength of the West, that the leaders of the
registered churches in the Soviet Union were KGB clergy, that these clergy had in-
filtrated and used such organizations as the Baptist World Alliance for Communist
purposes, and that the freeze movement was inspired by the Communists to endorse
their foreign policy interests.54 He concluded that Christians needed to advance a
strong anti-Communist message or it would be too late for America.
Dr. Bob Jones also expressed great displeasure at Graham’s trip to the Soviet
Union. He continued expressing his concern for Graham’s association with leaders
of the ecumenical movement, especially his consultations with Pope John <<Paul?>>
II. He wrote:
It is most significant that Billy Graham, in trying to wiggle out of the predic-
ament be got himself into by his statements that be saw no religious perse-
cution in Russia, excused himself for attending their “peace conference” on
the basis that Southern Baptist leaders and “liberal” Protestants, to whom he
referred by name, were there. He also mentioned that the Vatican had advised
him to attend the conference. This surely must be the first time in history
that a Baptist evangelist has sought advice from the Holy See as to where
he should go to preach. If Dr. Graham’s statement is true, however, and he
did seek Rome’s advice, it is not surprising that he received the advice that
he did. Indeed there is nothing surprising about the whole affair, including
Billy’s willingness to promote the Communist line and defend the Soviets.
He has been headed in that direction for more than 30 years. One cannot laud
the World Council of Churches, seek the support and friendship of its lead-
ers, and speak for its sessions as Graham has done for the last two or three
53
“Communist Peace Offensive Garners Wide Church Support in U.S.,” Christian Beacon,
10 June 1982, 1.
54
“You Cannot Trust the Devil,” reprinted in Christian Beacon, 10 June 1982, 1.
decades without becoming tainted with the socialist and Communist aims of
the World Council of Churches. Since the present pope seems to be heading
the same direction as the apostate Council of Churches, perhaps we should
not be surprised that Billy, following the advice of the Vatican, put himself in
a place where he, gullible as he has always been, becomes a mouthpiece for
the Soviet line.55
One of the most strident critiques of Dr. Graham’s trip came from the Church
League of America. They argued that Graham’s trip and address gave “aid and com-
fort to the worldwide Communist conspiracy” and was derived from Graham’s failure
to preach the true Christian gospel. It was time that the followers of the evangelist
wake up and distance themselves from his ministry and join those groups which are
truly involved in understanding and promoting the necessary anti-Communist mes-
sage. The editorialist stated that whether it was defending Hollywood movie stars, at-
tending presidential cocktail parties on Sunday evenings while church services were
on, or changing his mind about Communism and the whole leftist ecumenical church
movement, “Billy Graham has gone deeper and deeper in his own compromises and
dragged a lot of his fans along with him.”56
One of the most scathing denunciations of Graham came from the Fundamental-
ist émigré community. Pastor Richard Wurmbrand wrote an editorial on the trip in
the newsletter for the organization Jesus to the Communist World. Wurmbrand had
been closely associated with the Fundamentalist far-right movement and argued the
Communist conspiracy thesis and the need for the church to challenge it with a sepa-
ratist anti-Communism motif. He wrote:
Thirty U.S.A. church leaders went to MOSCOW to curtsy to Russia’s peace

initiatives. Their names and what they said are not worth mentioning. When
MOSCOW says “Peace,” it means expropriating another country like AF-
GHANISTAN and killing people by the hundreds of thousands.
A Christian should not participate in such charades nor lend his name to
such deceptions. One item, however, deserves explanation.
BILLY GRAHAM took time to meet with DOBRYNIN, Soviet ambas-
sador to the U.S. and member of the Central Committee of the Communist
Party, an organization GRAHAM once called “THE DEVIL’S MILITIA.
How GRAHAM has changed. After the visit he said, “Dobrynin and I be-
came friends.”
Is he in truth the friend of the killers of the Afghans, the oppressors of
POLAND, the men who retain in their foul dungeons Billy’s own colleagues,
the Baptist pastors BATURIN, RUMATCHIK, MINIAKOV, BOIKO, and
SKORNIAKOV?…
55
Bob Jones, “Editorial,” Faith for the Family 10, 7 (September 1982): 2, 23.
56
“Billy Graham’s Moscow Performance,” News and Views, July/August 1982, 1–2.
Billy Graham fears God. How then can he claim as a friend the murderer of
millions of innocents? Would DOBRYNIN have become his friend if GRA-
HAM had asked, as was his duty, for the immediate release of his imprisoned
fellow-believers?
…We love OUR enemies, but not the enemies of God. We must be uncom-
promising in His defense. We cannot sip tea with the torturers of the body of
Christ.57
Several other members of the émigré leadership community were not quite so
damning of Dr. Graham’s trip. They were exponents of the more mainstream an-
ti-Communism viewpoint. Although they were convinced that he made some serious
mistakes, they were not about to chastise him severely. President of the Slavic Gospel
Association Peter Deyneka, Jr., who argued that Billy Graham truly was a man of
God, was concerned that the evangelist did not adequately respond to the needs of the
persecuted church. This might lead to a misconception of the needs of the religious
communities in the Soviet Union and lessen the ability of groups such as the Slavic
Gospel Association to respond to those needs.58
Paul Popov, leader of an organization entitled Evangelism to Communist Lands,
expressed his response in a “Commentary” in the official magazine. He set the tone
of the commentary when he stated that “we have always had respect for Billy Graham
as God anoints him and he puts his life into fulfilling the Great Commission. But he
has deliberately allowed himself to be used by the world’s most effective propaganda
machine.”59 Popov concluded that this was a “serious corruption of Christian princi-
ples which will set back any respect for the cause of Christianity in the Third World or
other developing countries vulnerable to Marxist ideology.”60 Popov went out of his
way to emphasize the popularity and respect that believers in the Soviet Union had for
the life and ministry of Billy Graham. Graham’s serious mistakes such as preaching
on the principle of submission to government and his proclamation of religious lib-
erty in the Soviet Union were a “serious slap in the face of the Persecuted Church in
the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Great harm bas been done, and I pray that God
will redeem a serious mistake.”61 Rev. Graham could have addressed the problem of
religious liberty more effectively. If he did intend to do such it was a mistake to go to
the religious and political three-ring circus which has been “exploited successfully by
the communist government.”62
Rev. Billy Graham has for most of his career been a leader in the mainstream
conservative Evangelical community. Although he has a strong history of promoting
57
Richard Wurmbrand, “Billy Graham’s Friends,” The Voice of Martyrs, July 1982, 3.
58
“The Church in the Soviet Union Today,” Sparks, July/September 1982, 3, 4.
59
Paul Popov, “Graham Visit to Moscow: Backfire for Liberty,” Door of Hope, June 1982, 2.
60
Ibid.
61
Ibid.
62
Ibid.
an anti-Communism motif in his early ministry, he has modified its implications in

the past ten years. Part of this is a result of his ability and desire to carry out his min-
istry in various Communist nations and because he strongly believes that there may
be more important messages for Evangelicals to proclaim. Such might be the threat
of nuclear weapons, and the need for Christians to respond to racial injustice and an-
alyze the danger of secularism and hedonism in American society.63
Kenneth Kantzer, in a editorial about Graham’s trip to the Soviet Union, states
that he believed that Graham did not go naively or blindly. Graham is quoted as
saying that he “knew there were risks involved in this mission.” He knew he risked
being misunderstood and even exploited but he “considered the risk worth taking.”
According to Kantzer, Graham wanted to “preach the gospel publicly at the nuclear
conference, at the Orthodox cathedral, at the Baptist church, and privately to Soviet
political officials”; “plead the case for religious freedom in private meetings with high
Soviet officials”; “warn of the tragic consequences of nuclear buildup and the arma-
ment truce”; and “be permitted eventually to hold preaching missions in large cities
throughout the Soviet Union.”64
Kantzer spent much time attempting to rebuke Graham’s critics of using misin-
formation about his trip to advance their own agendas. He was pleased that Graham
was not silent about political and religious freedom, that he was able to preach the
gospel in environments which need the message, and that his nuclear weapons posi-
tion was not out of the mainstream of American politics. He believed that more could
be accomplished by quiet diplomacy than through openly denouncing the Soviet gov-
ernment. He believed that God could use his message in ways that are not predictable.
He concluded:
Finally, those of us who believe the gospel of Jesus Christ is the dynamite of
God, able to blast away sin and the sinful structures of an unjust society, may
indeed regret any slips and the unfortunate infelicities of unplanned sponta-
neous comments. But we rejoice at the opportunity to preach the gospel—ac-
tual and potential—with the hope that the power of the gospel can change the
hearts of men, as well as the evil structures of even a Communist society.65
He defended Graham’s nuclear weapons position by suggesting that he “never ad-

vocated a U.S. retreat before Russian aggression.” He instead “warned of the awful
consequences of the nuclear arms race and called for mutual, negotiated, verifiable
disarmament.”66 According to Kantzer, although Graham dropped his commitment
to a strident anti-Communism motif, this did not mean that he was either a dupe of
the Communist movement or an underestimator of the authoritarian structures within
63
Billy Graham, “An Agenda for the 1980s,” Christianity Today, 4 January 1980, 23–27.
64
Kantzer, “Graham in Moscow,” 10–11.
65
Kantzer, “Graham in Moscow,” 12.
66
Ibid.
Soviet society. In a most public way, he “called the nations of the world to justice and
freedom. He did so in a manner that all understood to be a rebuke of Soviet failures
in this regard.”67
Another model of approaching the Graham trip among Evangelicals was made
by leaders in the Mennonite Central Committee and more radical Evangelical leaders
such as Jim Wallis. These individuals believed that the Soviet Union was capable of
changing, that contacts with Soviet religious clergy might help to promote change,
that Graham’s concern about nuclear weapons needed to be made clear, and that much
of the criticism of Graham’s visit was made by people who were irrationally driven by
the strident anti-Communist motif. Many of these individuals were spokespersons for
the anti-anti-Communism motif. They believed that the motif was no longer helpful,
even if it might have had some value in the era of Stalin.
One of the leaders of the movement was Dr. Frank Epp, a leader in the Mennonite
community who suggested that from “where I sit, Moscow was also Graham’s finest
hour.”68 Dr. Epp was familiar with the problems of religious persecution in the Soviet
Union, as two of his uncles died in Soviet labor camps and a first cousin had just
completed a prison term for involvement in the underground religious press. He felt
that Graham’s presence was a significant one, for the Soviet leadership was forced to
endorse powerful appeals based on religious values. Therefore, “religion in the Soviet
Union can no longer mean merely belief or liturgy; it is so profoundly ethical and
social, hence also political.”69 He concluded that “the church in the USSR has started
an irreversible redefinition of religious, perhaps even an ideological reformation. It
was religion’s finest hour, an altar call that will be heard in history for many years to
come.”70
For Epp, Graham’s trip to the Moscow Peace Conference was also important for
what it communicated to the American religious community. For those first-strike,
limited-nuclear-war rearmers of America, stated Epp, religion too has been redefined,
and at long last the much misrepresented separation-of-church-and-state doctrine can
no longer mean that Evangelists don’t call nations to repentance.”71 Graham also pro-
vided a rejection of all those Evangelicals who had been influenced by Lindsey’s Late
Great Planet Earth and accepted the idea that the kingdom of God “can appear only
after a nuclear war and the second coming.”72 Epp stated that Graham had three con-
versions: when he became a child of God; when he became a racial integrationist; and
when he became a nuclear abolitionist.
Similar ideas were addressed by John H. Redekop, editor of the Mennonite Breth-
ren Herald. He wrote:
67
Ibid.
68
Frank Epp, “Billy Graham and the Moscow Conference,” The Mennonite, 8 June 1982, 282.
69
Ibid.
70
Ibid.
71
Ibid.
72
Ibid.
Despite the exploitation of the visit, Graham deserves to be highly com-

mended for his venture. At a time when many evangelists seem totally obliv-
ious to the mind-boggling nuclear threat, Graham has at last committed his
great prestige to doing something about it. More “peace power” to him. Years
ago he seemed almost to be a perennial chaplain to the U.S. military estab-
lishment; now he has moved beyond that role. Finally he is stressing the full
dimensions of the Gospel of Peace. Those of us who belong to the peace
churches should now be encouraging and supporting him.73
One of the strongest statements of the Evangelical “anti-anti-Communist” posi-

tion was Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine. Wallis complemented Graham
for two significant departures from “Billy Graham’s characteristic political neutrality
and accommodation.” First was his commitment to racial integration. He would not
allow ethnic discrimination at any of his crusades. Second was his opposition to the
nuclear arms race and his deep commitment to being a “peacemaker after the manner
of his Lord.”74 Wallis commented that “to go to Moscow, to try to build some bridges,
and to preach the gospel of peace clearly offended the practitioners of another reli-
gion, that of anti-Communism.” He concluded that “zealous anti-Communism of the
Reagan administration and its allies on the Christian Right is a false religion, and
should never be equated with biblical Christian faith.”75
Wallis was pleased that Graham had attended the Moscow Peace Conference.
The mistakes that Graham might have made in his interaction with the American
press were exploited by the Fundamentalist anti-Communism spokespersons and
their allies in order to continue their long-standing diatribe against Graham. They
were angry that Graham even considered going to Moscow. However, Wallis, while
normally not a big fan of Graham’s politics, particularly his overly close association
with American presidents, complemented Graham on his Moscow experience. He
wrote:
Billy Graham is no communist, but he is no longer the anti-communist he was

in 1954 when he said, “Either communists must die or Christianity must die.”
His religion is less American now than before, and therefore more biblical.
Billy Graham is now trying to be a peacemaker. For that he is to be praised.
In the perilous nuclear situation, one can only hope that more Christians
might see his change of heart and heed his example.76
73
John H. Redekop, “Graham in Moscow,” Mennonite Brethren Herald, 4 June 1982, 9.
74
Jim Wallis, “Beleaguered Billy,” Sojourners, July–August 1982, 5.
75
Ibid.
76
Ibid., 5, 6.
Conclusion
The development of the “anti-Communism” motif has been an influential image in the
development of Evangelical/Fundamentalist approaches to American foreign policy.
First, it was a major issue in internal Fundamentalist/Evangelical American religious
politics in the post–World War II era until the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe by 1991. The Fundamentalist far right and to some extent the new
Evangelical right have used the anti-Communism motif as a political test for religious
authenticity for those who may not support its importance. They have challenged the
integrity of persons in the mainstream conservative anti-Communism movement and
the anti-anti-Communism group for the sacrifice of truth and their participation in the
spread of the Communist message. This has been done through attacking people such
as Graham, members of the Baptist World Alliance, and President Carter in the press,
picketing events which they believe illustrate a compromised status, and attempting
to raid mainstream organizations and recruit members who accept their vision of the
Evangelical/Fundamentalist response to Communism in the world.
Second, there has been a recent reflection on the influence of Fundamentalist
“anti-Communism” and its impact on the ability of “saner” voices to develop a le-
gitimate and more effective voice against Communism. The irresponsible actions
of some of the Fundamentalist anti-Communists and such allies in the secular world
as Senator Joe McCarthy made it difficult to sustain a legitimate, more moderate
anti-Communist perspective. Diana Trilling, in a recent essay reflecting on the pol-
itics of the 1950s and 1960s, suggested that “McCarthyism had a lasting effect in
polarizing the intellectuals of this country and in entrenching anti-anti-Communism
as the position of choice among people of political good will.… It was Joe McCarthy
who took anti-Communism out of the realm of respectable discourse and created for
people of liberal impulse an automatic association between any voiced opposition to
Communism and reaction.”77
Third, “anti-Communism” has tended to set the parameters within which many
religious conservatives understood American foreign policy. Its use as a substantive
priority tended to define the bases of other agenda items including such things as
arms control, Third World poverty, crises in missions, and understanding and devel-
oping approaches toward religious communities within Communist countries. For a
long period of time, the issue of the Communist menace has been the driving force
in the development of a response not only to America’s foreign policy but also to
America’s internal politics.
Fourth, Fundamentalist far-right anti-Communism commitments made it diffi-
cult for that community not only to evaluate activities such as Billy Graham’s trip
to Moscow in 1982 but also to understand and endorse the reform movements of
Gorbachev. While more mainstream anti-Communism leaders were willing to work
with Gorbachev and honor his changes, the Fundamentalist movement frequently
challenged his legitimacy. Even Gorbachev’s support of the millennium celebration
77
Diana Trilling, Newsweek, 11 January 1993, 32.
was seen as a strategy to capture the Western churches and give them a further, com-
promising Communist orientation.
Fifth, Billy Graham should be honored for his efforts to preach the gospel behind
the Iron Curtain. Jesus’ command to preach the gospel in all areas of the world did
not exclude the Communist world from participation. Graham was able to strike the
proper balance between working with the legal structures and registered churches
and bearing witness to the cause of Jesus Christ. He argued that he believed that the
propaganda “of the gospel of Christ is far stronger than any other propaganda in the
world.”78 It provided not only an effective forum for articulating his nuclear weapons
concerns, it also allowed him to effectively provide a base for future Evangelistic
efforts in Communist societies.
Finally, it would be interesting to explore whether this model of analysis might
be applicable to American foreign policy responses to other Communist nations such
as the People’s Republic of China and Southeast Asia, and whether it is applicable
toward an understanding of the diversity of Evangelical/Fundamentalist responses to
such contemporary issues as social change in South Africa, the threat of Communism
in Central America and in particular Nicaragua, and the recent political changes in
the People’s Republic of China.
78
Greece and Cyprus
Alexander the Great’s Invincibility: Fact and Myth
Achilles Avraamides
A comparison of the Macedonian territorial, economic, and population resources at

the start of Alexander’s expedition against the Persians with those of the Persian Em-
pire shows the Macedonians at a very serious disadvantage. Alexander’s decision to
undertake such an expedition justifiably leads one to evaluate him as a rash, inexperi-
enced, and immature youth who, in order to satisfy his adventurous drives, was will-
ing to risk the fortunes of his kingdom. It is difficult to think of Alexander as a mature
statesman who could deal with the complexities and tedium of administrative detail.
It is easier to judge Alexander, as many have frequently done, to have been a gifted
general who succeeded in defeating a superpower but who showed no interest in the
administration of his newly acquired empire. This essay will try to adduce evidence
that Alexander demonstrated maturity and sound judgment in the conduct of his cam-
paigns that went beyond the actual military leadership in battles. The support for this
position is to be found not in any newly discovered evidence but in a reexamination
of his actions, which suggest a calculated use of public self-promotion and presenta-
tion of an image of himself that took seriously many nonmilitary aspects, such as the
historical background of the people he encountered and their cultural values. For lack
of a better term, we shall call such actions propaganda.
That Alexander used propaganda will come as no surprise to historians of the
ancient Near East. Many successful conquerors and rulers of the past, such as the
Assyrian kings or Cyrus the Persian, used propaganda very effectively. Alexander
was not an exception. In fact, as we shall see, he was exceptionally gifted in this area.
Though Alexander’s use of propaganda has not been completely ignored by other his-
torians, scholarship on Alexander has not focused much attention on this subject and
its implications.1 A careful examination of the ancient sources on Alexander’s career
1
For an illustration of the use of propaganda by Near Eastern rulers, one of the most effective
manipulators of propaganda was Cyrus the Great, who, two hundred years before Alexander,
accomplished almost comparable conquests. Cyrus used propagandistic claims to soften Bab-
ylonian resistance against him before he tried to capture the city of Babylon, whose fortifi-
cations appeared to be almost impregnable. “Cyrus Cylinder,” in Ancient Near Eastern Texts
Relating to the Old Testament, ed. J. B. Prichard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1955), 315–16.
254 Achilles Avraamides
reveals many incidents which have obvious propaganda intentions.2 Limitations of

space do not permit an exhaustive list, but a discussion of a few representative pro-
motional actions will illustrate how well he used propaganda and to what purpose:
mainly to strengthen his position and weaken or even demoralize the opposition. He
accomplished this by having himself compared or contrasted favorably with the great
historical or legendary figures of the past, by undermining the will of potential ene-
mies to oppose him, and by influencing the people he conquered to accept his rule as
being in their best interest and in harmony with their tradition.
A good example presents itself very early in his career. According to Herodotus,
Darius crossed the Danube in 512 against the Scythians but had to retreat in defeat,
and was never able to return to the Danube.3 At the very beginning of his reign, Al-
exander turned against these northern people, crossed the Danube, and, taking them
by surprise, dealt them a crushing defeat. He thus kept them out of Macedonia for
2
Numerous “histories” of Alexander were written, beginning with the first years of his expe-
dition and multiplying soon after his death. Some of these were written by eyewitnesses, such
as Cleitarchus, Ptolemy, Aristoboulos, and Callisthenes. All of our extant sources, though,
are much later, dating from the middle of the first century BC, nearly three centuries after the
death of Alexander, to the middle of the second century AD. In chronological order of publi-
cation, these ancient studies are: (1) Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, vol. 8, bk. 17, trans.
C. Bradford Welles, Loeb Classical Library 422 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1963) dates from the mid-first century BC and presents Alexander in a favorable light; (2)
Quintus Curtius Rufus, History of Alexander, 2 vols., 10 bks., Loeb Classical Library 368–369
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946) was written in Latin, c. mid-first century
AD, with a preference for a negative Alexander tradition; (3) Plutarch, Life of Alexander, Loeb
Classical Library 47 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928) dates from the early
second century AD and presents a very favorable image of Alexander; (4) Justin, the author
of an abbreviated history which appears to be an abridgement of an earlier work, the original
of which is now lost, by Pompeius Trogus, History of the World, of which books 11 and 12
deal with Alexander, often negatively; and (5) Flavius Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander, 2 vols.,
Loeb Classical Library 236 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929–33) is from
the mid-second century AD and, though openly favorable toward Alexander, it is generally
considered to be one of our best sources on the military aspect, Bosworth notwithstanding.
Thanks to modern literary criticism, it is now possible to move from these later classical works
back to their sources, which often were the published memoirs of eyewitnesses or were based
on the official diaries of Alexander’s secretaries. These works have been organized together by
Felix Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, parts 2b and 2d (Berlin: Weidmann,
1927–30). They also appear in English translation in C. A. Robinson, Jr., The History of Alex-
ander the Great, vol. 1, Brown University Studies 16 (Providence, RI: Brown University Press,
1953). For a critical analysis in English of the early histories of Alexander, see Lionel Pearson,
The Lost Histories of Alexander the Great, American Philological Association Monographs 20
(New York: American Philological Association, 1960). For some of the later, especially medie-
val, romances on Alexander which at times preserve reliable tradition, see the study of D. J. A.
Ross, Alexander Historiatus: A Guide to Medieval Illustrated Alexander Literature, Warburg
Institute Surveys 1 (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1963).
3
Herodotus 4.136ff.
Alexander the Great’s Invincibility 255
the next fifty years.4 This was a necessary and wise military action called for by the
political realities in Greece and his anticipated long absence. It was, at the same time,
a campaign that could not but call attention to a comparison with that of Darius the
Great. It was a historical lesson that a greater conqueror than the great Darius was
now on the march, especially since Alexander’s campaign was against the empire of
that same Darius, who had failed in a similar campaign.
The siege and capture of Tyre belongs to the same category, a practical necessity
of the campaign. After the battle of Issus it was necessary for Alexander to reduce
to submission all the coastal cities of the Mediterranean before pursuing the fleeing
Darius III. The sea was controlled by the Phoenician fleet, and the Greeks could not
be trusted. Sparta was in open opposition against Alexander. Only the island city of
Tyre, among the Phoenician cities, secure in what its rulers believed to be its impreg-
nable defense, refused to submit to him. The Tyrians’ confidence rested on the city’s
successful defense against many would-be conquerors in its past history.5 It took Al-
exander seven valuable months to capture the city, but the final result was worth the
effort.6 The successful capture of Tyre heightened Alexander’s already considerable
military reputation. Its propaganda value can be seen from the fact that between Tyre
and Egypt only one city, Gaza, dared to offer any resistance. The capture of Gaza
within only two months served to make the claims of his invincibility even more
credible.7
Egypt wisely considered resistance to be useless and saved Alexander the trouble
of another battle, welcoming him instead as liberator and honoring him as pharaoh.
Alexander’s behavior in Egypt appears to have been carefully calculated to show
himself in a very favorable light and especially in contrast to the scandalous be-
havior of Cambyses, the Persian king who conquered Egypt, that is, the Cambyses
that Alexander knew from Herodotus. Alexander presented himself as a liberator of
Egypt from the Persians, rather than as a conqueror. He did not deprecate the religious
traditions and superstitions of Egypt, instead he sacrificed to the Apis bull, and he
rebuilt the Egyptian temples, especially the Serapeum.8 His behavior was carefully
4
Arrian 1.3.5–6.
5
R. Campell Thompson, “The New Babylonian Empire,” in Cambridge Ancient History, ed.
J. B. Bury, S. A. Cook, and F. E. Adcock (Cambridge: The University Press, 1929), 3: 214. H.
W. F. Saggs, The Greatness That Was Babylon (New York: Hawthorne Books, 1962), 192–93,
claims that, in the end, Tyre was taken by Nebuchadnezzar.
6
Arrian 2.17; Curtius 4.3; Plutarch 25.1. If we disregard the propaganda value, the siege of
Tyre does not make any sense. Then Ian Worthington would be right in saying that “the siege
of Tyre in 332 lasted several months, cost the king a fortune in money and manpower and
yet achieved little.” See Worthington, Alexander the Great: Man and God (London: Pearson
Longman, 2004), 208.
7
Arrian 2.26; Diodorus 17.48; Curtius 4.5; Plutarch 25.3.
8
Arrian 3.1–5; Diodorus 17.49; Justin 11.1; Curtius 4.7; Plutarch 26.2. For pictorial represen-
tation of Alexander as a pharaoh, see Andrew Stewart, Faces of Power: Alexander’s Images
and Hellenistic Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Figure 54 shows
orchestrated to contrast him quite favorably to the Persian rulers in many spheres.
One of the most widely discussed actions of Alexander in Egypt was his journey to
the temple of Ammon at the Oasis of Siwah. This had no obvious strategic value,
and was filled with dangers, but taking great risks was a characteristic of Alexander.
These risky actions transformed a difficult and apparently unnecessary expedition
into a means of elevating Alexander above other leaders and especially the first Per-
sian conqueror of Egypt, Cambyses, who, according to Herodotus, had led an army
of fifty thousand men through the Libyan desert with its destination the temple of
Ammon at the Oasis of Siwah. He probably had other intentions than visiting the
oracle. The expedition was a fiasco. Thousands of his soldiers died on the way, and
their bodies remained buried in the desert of Egypt.9 Alexander journeyed to the
same oasis, not as an invader but as an Egyptian pharaoh10 and pilgrim to this highly
respected ancient oracle to consult it on a number of issues. At the temple, Alexander
was received as the son of Zeus-Ammon, and the news of this recognition quickly
reached Greece.11 The recognition of his divinity and his successful expedition were
just what Alexander wanted. Now, he could match the Egyptian pharaohs as a ruler
of Egypt. Before he left Egypt he placed the defense of the frontier districts under the
control of Greeks and Macedonians, but he left two Egyptians in charge of the civil
administration of Egypt. The stigma of the conquest was moderated by these actions,
though the armed garrison kept Egypt secure for Alexander.
This expedition to the temple of Ammon served many purposes not only for the
present but also for the future, and perhaps even in reinterpreting past events. It pro-
vided Alexander with the required respected authority for claims of divinity which
soon found expression in sculpture and numismatic portraiture. His superiority over
the early Cambyses, and thus over all Persian rulers, could receive easy credit imme-
diately. His claim to divinity and universal rule would be satirized by the Athenians
Alexander twice as a pharaoh on the exterior east wall of the Shrine of the Bark in the temple
of Ammon, Mut, and Khorsu at Luxor. Once (on the left) he stands before Ammon Khanutef
and in the other (on the right) Mentu introduces Alexander to Ammon.
9
Herodotus 3.26. A recent archaeological exploration in western Egypt has uncovered nu-
merous skeletons of dead soldiers, corroborating Herodotus’s information.
10
Ernst Badian, The Deification of Alexander the Great: Protocol of the Twenty-First Collo-
quy, 7 March 1976 (Berkeley: The Center for Hermeneutical Studies in Hellenistic and Mod-
ern Culture, 1976). A variety of opinions and discussions by various scholars is presented
on the nature and meaning of this expedition, particularly as it relates to Alexander’s “deifi-
cation.” Badian subsequently revised some of these views, and his revisions appear in “The
Deification of Alexander the Great,” in Ancient Macedonian Studies in Honor of Charles F.
Edson (Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1981), 27–71.
11
This is the testimony of Arrian 3.3.2, 4–5, but some of our sources have both question and
answer, though obviously embellished. Diodorus 17.51 provides a long dialogue between Al-
exander and the priest of Ammon. See also Justin 11.11; Curtius 4.7; Plutarch 27.3.
behind his back and by the Macedonians more openly.12 It was, however, a useful
claim for his new subjects in Egypt and in other Near Eastern countries who had a
long tradition of connecting their rulers to the gods. This successful encounter with
Ammon may also have been the motivation for going back to previous events and
reinterpreting them to support the new claims. For example, when two years earlier
Alexander was about to cross a coastal road in Pamphylia, southwestern Anatolia,
the road was covered by the sea. This was the result of the tide being in while the
southern wind was blowing. Suddenly, though, the wind shifted, and the road was
uncovered for Alexander to pass. His diviners immediately interpreted this as a good
omen from the gods. It was probably after the visit to the temple of Ammon that his
historian and panegyrist, Callisthenes, publicized the miraculous interpretation of
this event as a recognition of Alexander’s divinity by the sea itself, “so that in with-
drawing it might somehow seem to make obeisance to him.”13
Such exaggerations did not come from Alexander’s publicists without his ap-
proval or even instigation. He showed a real flair for propaganda and the dramatic.
There are occasions which appear to have no other purpose than propaganda and
which give the distinct impression of being his own spontaneous acts. For example,
we know of his love for Homer and especially the Iliad.14 The encouragement by his
mother to believe that he was a descendant of Achilles probably cultivated in him a
12
Demosthenes said of Alexander’s claims to be the son of Zeus, “[Let] Alexander be the son
of Zeus and of Poseidon too if he wishes.” Quoted by Eugene N. Borza, in Ulrich Wilcken,
Alexander The Great, trans. G. C. Richards (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), 213 n. 342.
The Macedonians’ objections to Alexander’s divinity were in line with their rejection of his
adoption of Persian habits in governmental ceremonies and the introduction of Persians into
his army.
13
Artists presented Alexander as a divine being, without any protest on his part. Many of
the representations are easily accessible in some of the recent studies on Alexander, such as
the popular but sound study by Peter Green, Alexander The Great (New York: Praeger Publi-
cations, 1970; rev. ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); and Robin Lane Fox,
The Search for Alexander (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980). Though Fox’s text is disappointing,
the illustrations are good, numerous, well chosen, and beautifully presented. On coins, Alex-
ander appears as Zeus-Ammon (Green, Alexander, 75; Fox, Search, 201); as Heracles (Green,
Alexander, 158); and as the god Ammon, conqueror of India (Fox, Search, 207). The sculp-
ture created by Lysippus, Alexander’s favorite artist, carefully cultivated the presentation of
Alexander as a divine being in the best artistic style. Perhaps the best example is the famous
“Azara Herm” in Egypt, which is a Roman copy of Lysippus’s original (Green, Alexander,
174). Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, no. 124 f. 31. The Callisthenes pas-
sage is translated by Robinson, History of Alexander, 1: 69. Plutarch 17.4 quotes Alexander’s
contemporary, poet of the New Comedy Menander, as alluding to this event in jest: “How
Alexander-like, indeed this; and if I seek someone, Spontaneous he’ll present himself: and if I
clearly must Pass through some place by sea, this will open to my steps.”
14
According to Curtius 1.11, “He so venerated Homer that he was called amator Homeri.…
He always carried with him a copy of the poet’s works in the recension of Aristotle, called the
‘Iliad of the Casket’ and placed it under his pillow when he slept.” Cf. also Plutarch 8.2 and
26.1.
sincere conviction that he was a second Achilles and his friend Hephaestion a second
Patroklos. Thus, he could continue the familiar theme of the conflict of the West
against the East, of Greek against Barbarian. It was in harmony with his heroic an-
cestry. It is not surprising, then, to find Alexander promoting the claim that a modern
Achilles was now reenacting the invasion of Asia. Some of our sources inform us
that, as he approached Asia Minor, Alexander, from the ship, hurled his spear onto the
Asian coast, jumped down in full armor, and cried out that he received Asia from the
gods won by his spear.15 The following spring at Gordium, Alexander continued the
theme of this symbolism with the loosening, or, more likely, cutting of the Gordian
knot.16
Having left behind him a defeated but resentful Greece, he did his utmost to gain
as much good will with the Greeks as possible. He presented himself as an heir and
champion of Greek culture, religion, and historical pride. In that role, even before
he left Greece, he moderated the decision to destroy Thebes by saving the house of
Pindar and the temples of the city. He made it look as though the decision for the de-
struction of the city and slaughter of numerous Thebans was the decision of his Greek
allies.17 On his campaigns he promoted the impression that his respect for Greek civi-
lization was so genuine as to exact punishment from the Persians for invading Greece
and burning Athens. The burning of Persepolis in the winter of 331/30, intentional
or unintentional, was promoted and accepted as revenge for the burning of Athens
in 480. The sending of the statues of Harmodius and Aristogeiton from Susa back to
Athens must have pleased many Athenians.
Alexander’s love for propaganda extended beyond international relations and
embraced the appeal to his own soldiers, whose admiration he continually fed with
many gestures and symbolic acts that endeared him to them while at the same time
causing them to magnify him in their minds as much larger than life. This can be seen
in his behavior after the battle of Granicus, when Alexander honored the twenty-five
dead companions with statues by Lysippus, permanent exemptions of their families
from taxation, honorable burial of the dead, Macedonian as well as Persian, and visits
to the wounded. He helped out with their medical needs and, above all, lent a very
interested ear to their stories, even encouraging them to magnify their accomplish-
ments.18 In the desert of Gedrosia, he further promoted identification with his soldiers
15
Diodorus 17.17; Arrian 1.12.1; Justin 11.5.
16
Arrian 2.3.1–8; Plutarch 18.1–2; Curtius 3.1.14–18.
17
Arrian 1.7.1–9; Diodorus 17.8.12–14; Plutarch 11.4–13.
18
Arrian 3.8.10–12; Diodorus 17.70.1–72; Plutarch 37.1–38; Curtius 5.6.1–7. One should asso-
ciate with this the sending back of the statues of Harmodius and Aristogeiton (Arrian 2.16.7),
the statues of the honored Athenian tyrannicides of the sixth century whom Xerxes carried
away in 480 BC to Susa. He also sent money to rebuild Plataea, the heroic small city that stood
alone with Athens in 490 against the Persians at the battle of Marathon. The city was destroyed
by the Spartans and Thebans in the early years of the Peloponnesian War. Alexander, with one
gesture, championed Athenian Hellenism and condemned Sparta, the one city that refused to
recognize him as hegemon. A. B. Bosworth, A Historical Commentary on Arrian’s History Of
by sharing the hardships of his foot soldiers rather than choosing the comfort of being
carried by either horse or chariot. In this same desert, when, after a long and severe
absence of water during the march, someone brought him a little bit of water, Alex-
ander, rather than satisfying his thirst while his soldiers had nothing to drink, poured
it out.19 To his soldiers, he always tried to show himself to be one of them, especially
in times of crisis, and carefully took advantage of every opportunity to make this
obvious.20
But, most frequently, Alexander directed his propaganda for political and mili-
tary purposes, especially to undermine opposition. His many military successes gave
him ample opportunity to do so. Each victory was treated as the result of his supreme
generalship and the invincibility of his armies. The odds against which he fought
were exaggerated considerably, inflating the numbers of the Persian armies and ca-
sualties.21 There can be no doubt that many looked at such numbers with skepticism.
The numbers, however, kept growing, together with the legend of Alexander. Nev-
ertheless, the long record of uninterrupted success made the doubters of the details
unable to find many followers. It was manifest that this general led his army for
thousands of miles through Persian territory with uninterrupted success. That made
any exaggeration quite believable, and the effect of such exaggeration was the demor-
alization of the enemy, which either surrendered or put up a less effective resistance.
The uncontested surrender of Egypt after the battle of Issus and the capture of Tyre
and Gaza was repeated by the surrender of Babylon after the victory over Darius at
Gaugamela.
Alexander used propaganda also for the control of the people who became his
subjects. Ancient history provides many illustrations of arrogant rulers who treated
Alexander (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), F1: 126, itemizes the rather considerable exemp-
tions involved in Alexander’s gesture to the families of the dead at Granicus.
19
Arrian 1.16.4–6; see also Diodorus 17.21.6; Plutarch 16.8, Arrian 6.26.3, “and at this action
the whole army was so much heartened that you would have said that each and every man had
drunk that water which Alexander thus poured out” (Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander, 2: 185).
20
Arrian 6.26.
21
The numbers for both Alexander’s forces and those of the Persians are impossible to esti-
mate. The sources exaggerate the numbers of Persian soldiers and their dead in battle to an un-
believable level: 600,000 at Issus and 1,000,000 at Gaugamela. Alexander’s army is very ably
calculated by Donald W. Engels, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian
Army (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) to a grand total of 48,100 at Granicus,
about the same at Issus, and a little bigger at Gaugamela (see appendix 5, tables 4 and 5, pp.
146–48). For the disproportionately higher number of Persians vs. Alexander, see Diodorus
17.19.4; Justin 11.6; Arrian 1.16, 2.8–11; Curtius 3.9–11; Plutarch 20.5. The last three give huge
numbers for Persian losses: Arrian 3.8.6, 2.15.6; Curtius 4.12.12–13, 16.26; Diodorus 17.61.
That the losses of the defeated were disproportionately greater than those of the victors is cred-
ible, but not the actual figures, and in accordance with ancient warfare. The inflated numbers,
though, show that there was intentional exaggeration. The more sober Oxyrinchus Papyrus
1798 gives the losses as 1,200 for Alexander and 53,000 for the Persians. See, Η Ιστορία του
Ελληνικού Έθνους (History of the Greek Nation) (Athens: Ekdotike Athenon, 1973), 4: 123.
their subjects with disdain or kept them under control with calculated terrorism.22
The Assyrians were a prime example, but the reputation of the Persians among the
Greeks was not much better. Alexander, in spite of his youth and the indoctrination
he received from Aristotle against all Easterners, showed a great sensitivity toward
the traditions and values of his new subjects. He became well informed about local
issues and history and successfully presented himself in sympathy with his subjects’
traditions.23 He noted the diversity of the people under his control, their different
traditions, institutions, and attitudes, and appealed to them with sympathetic under-
standing. Until his return from India, he tried to adapt his rule to all of these diver-
sities rather than to force all onto a common level. He remained to the Macedonians
a king, to the Corinthian League of Greek city-states a president (hegemon), to the
Egyptians a divine pharaoh, to the Persians the king of kings, and so on. On a more
immediate appeal, though, Alexander presented himself as the restorer of traditional
and popular values. To the Lydians he restored their traditional pre-Persian laws.24
To the Ionian Greeks he proclaimed political liberty, supporting the replacement of
pro-Persian oligarchies or tyrannies with democracies.25
The same awareness characterized his relations with both subjects and masters
of the Persian Empire. After his final major victory over Darius, at Gaugamela, Alex-
ander could have captured the major capitals of the Persian Empire by use of naked
force. Yet, when he approached Babylon, the first of the imperial administrative cen-
ters, he did not attack it like an invader. In a manner reminiscent of Cyrus the Great
in 539 BC, Alexander proclaimed liberty to the Babylonians.26 He accepted their
traditional and religious practices for the coronation of the king by the Babylonian
god Marduk. Just as he associated himself in Egypt with the nearly three-thousand-
year-old pharaonic tradition, so also he associated himself with the nearly two-thou-
22
Cambyses’s behavior in Egypt is presented by Herodotus as that of the proverbial bull in
a china shop (Herodotus 2.14–33), and especially his alleged sacrilegious killing of the Apis
bull. For a discussion of other evidence concerning Cambyses, see W. W. How and J. Wells,
A Commentary On Herodotus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928), 1: 260. More recently, Ar-
taxerxes III (Ochus) in 343, after supressing an Egyptian revolt, also killed the Apis bull. See
Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, no. 690 f. 21.
23
Alexander had a big following of selected scholars traveling with him and collecting in-
formation. Much of the information was also sent back to Greece and especially to Aristotle’s
Lyceum. Arrian (4.10.11) shows a debate of these scholars.
24
Arrian 1.17.4.
25
Alexander’s dealings with the Greeks were never uniform. He treated different Greek cities
in different ways, and the same city, such as Athens, differently at different times, as his for-
tunes changed. A careful study is that of Victor Ehrenberg, Alexander and the Greeks (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1938). See also Ernst Badian, “Alexander the Great and the Greeks of Asia,” in An-
cient Societies and Institutions: Studies Presented to Victor Ehrenberg on his 75th Birthday,
ed. Badian (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), 37–69.
26
J. B. Prichard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955), 315–16.
sand-year-old Babylonian tradition.27 Alexander presented himself as a divine repre-

sentative to restore the claims of the Babylonian religion and kingship. He also left
the satrap Mazaeus, a Babylonian who fought impressively on the side of Darius a
few months earlier, as the civil administrator of the Babylonian satrapy. The military
garrison, though, he left in the hands of a Macedonian.28 He did not disrupt the Per-
sian imperial organization into satrapies and generally kept the Persian satraps as the
civil administrators, with Macedonian military watch. He left kings in their places
with royal titles, such as the king of Taxila and the Indian Porus.29
Without wasting any time, Alexander moved quickly and took effective posses-
sion of all the other capitals of the Persian Empire, Susa, Persepolis, Pasargadae, and,
finally, of the Median capital Ecbatana, where the fleeing Darius spent the winter of
331/30. The defeat of the Persian Empire was complete, both by victory on the bat-
tlefield and by the capture of the administrative centers. Two tasks only remained:
the elimination of Darius and the actual occupation of inner Iran. Alexander pursued
both goals simultaneously by chasing Darius into inner Iran. Bessus, Darius’s lieu-
tenant, who, thinking that by leaving Darius’s corpse for Alexander, he would stop the
Macedonian’s relentless pursuit and even earn his gratitude, killed his king. Bessus
fatally miscalculated, for Alexander immediately saw the propaganda possibilities of
this event. He sent the body of Darius to Persepolis to receive honorable burial, while
he, from this moment on, presented himself as the legitimate heir to the Achaemenid
throne.30 He made it his public responsibility to avenge the treasonous assassination
of his predecessor and, at the same time, to take effective control of eastern Iran.
The death of Darius and Alexander’s assumption of the authority to establish or-
der and justice in the empire was a turning point in the self-image of Alexander. From
this moment on, he presented himself not as a conquering Macedonian but as the Per-
sian king, the Great King, who set himself the task of suppressing rebels and consol-
idating his empire.31 Bessus turned out to be an unworthy opponent, but his capture
27
Arrian 3.16. Bosworth correctly identifies the temple of Belus with the ancient Esagila but
denies that Xerxes destroyed it (Historical Commentary, 314). Whether Xerxes destroyed it
or not, the Babylonians viewed him and many of his successors with strong opposition. Cf.
A. T. Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948),
236–37. See also Diodorus 17.64; Curtius 5.1; Plutarch 35.1.
28
Robin Lane Fox, Alexander the Great: A Biography (London: Penguin, 1973), 227, sug-
gests that there was a collusion between Mazeus and Parmenio, and that Mazeus probably
held back at the battle of Gaugamela, as he was the commander on the Persian right, opposite
Parmenio. Then, he surrendered Babylon willingly, and his reward was to continue to be a
satrap under Alexander, as he was under Darius. There is no evidence to support this, but it is
an intriguing possibility.
29
Claude Mossé, Alexander: Destiny and Myth, translated from the French by Janet Lloyd
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 70.
30
Arrian 3.22; Diodorus 17.73.3; Justin 11.15.16; Pliny Natural History 36.132.
31
Diodorus 18.77.4–7. Alexander assumed the title “King of Kings,” Persian attire, the royal
diadem, and a harem of concubines, as many as the days of the year.
and cruel execution as a traitor and rebel brought into the Persian resistance a gifted
leader, Spitamenes, who, from the death of Bessus in 330 to the winter of 328/27, gave
Alexander more trouble than any other opponent. Alexander treated Spitamenes and
all other opponents as rebels to be subdued and punished.32
Having built an empire through military conquest, it was Alexander’s intention,
to the end of his life, on the one hand, to govern effectively what he had already con-
quered and, on the other, to continue to expand it. On his return from India, Alexan-
der chose not to return by the same route that he took on his way there but instead to
explore and conquer new areas by going down the Indus River, traversing new land
and sea. Before he left India, though, he made the customary sacrifices to the gods,
but in this case there was added to the ceremony a propagandistic touch, a psycho-
logical weapon against the natives. He had his men erect twelve enormous altars to
the twelve Olympians, expanded the circumference of the camp, enclosed with deep
trenches and high walls, and left many artifacts, such as huge beds, military arms for
men of gigantic size, and horse troughs and bits of bridle for abnormally large horses.
As Plutarch observed, “his idea in this was to make a camp of heroic proportions and
to leave to the natives evidence of men of huge stature, displaying the strength of
giants.”33
When we direct our attention to Alexander’s use of propaganda, we are able to
go beyond the traditional image of Alexander and see this man, who was indisputably
competent and interested in military activities, to have had also competent adminis-
trative potential. His appeal to the great variety of people with whom he had to deal
shows a sensitivity to different cultures, historical traditions, and institutions. He
dealt with subtle diplomacy and showed such respect as to win widespread support.
His actions were not those of an impulsive young man whose success went to his
head, but rather of a crafty statesman who had somehow grasped the complexity of
his world and approached its different problems with the tact of a mature statesman.
This is not an attempt to deny that Alexander was a complex person. One can find
many illustrations of the impulsive youth who, on occasion, went to extremes.34 What
we have stressed here is this other side of a shrewd, calculating man. This is the aspect
32
Ptolemy, as quoted by Arrian 3.30.5; additions and variations of Bessus’s execution appear
in Diodorus 17.83.9; Curtius 7.5; Justin 12.5.11. After two years of desperate opposition, Spit-
amenes met his death at the hands of his Bactrian and Sogdianian allies, who hoped thus to
satisfy Alexander and stop his pursuit (Arrian 4.17.7). Alexander treated rebels very severely.
He had Philotas killed because of treason and ordered the secret execution of Philotas’s father,
the old loyal Parmenio, because he might turn against him. See E. Badian, “The Death of Par-
menio,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 91 (1960):
324–38. When Callisthenes opposed Alexander’s policies, he paid with his life. See Truesdell
S. Brown, “Callisthenes and Alexander,” American Journal of Philology 70 (1949): 225–48.
When Alexander returned from India, he was merciless in his punishment of unfaithful lieu-
tenants (Ernst Badian, “Harpalus,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 81 [1961]: 19–20). See also
Arrian 3.22; Diodorus 17.73.3; Justin 11.15.16; Pliny Natural History 36.132.
33
Diodorus 17.95.2; see also Plutarch 62.4; Curtius 9.3.19.
34
His killing of his close friend Cleitus is the best illustration for it.
of his personality that comes through to us when we consider his use of propaganda.
It shows that Alexander took advantage of every opportunity to make himself appear
and behave in a way that inspired both fear and love, anxiety and respect. He was
able to use his successes in specific and unique situations in such a way as to reveal
himself to his contemporaries as one who possessed superlative qualities and powers.
A particular victory argued for Alexander’s invincibility. A particular capture of a
city proved that no city was capable of defense against him. The humane treatment
of a captured city was an illustration of his benevolent rule. The severe punishment
of a rebel was a warning against any would-be rebel. His humane and flattering treat-
ment of a few of his soldiers was proof of his humane and considerate treatment of
all his soldiers. He successfully coordinated his considerable assets of an inventive
mind, enormous self-confidence, an indomitable will, as well as his physical powers
of endurance to promote an image of a superhuman person. In an age when the divine
and the human were separated by a chasm capable of being bridged by exceptional
individuals, Alexander may well have believed in his own divinity. Whether he did or
not, he was willing and effective in advertising his divinity throughout his empire.35
Through his successful use of propaganda, Alexander prepared his contemporaries
and future generations to accept his great military and political accomplishments as
products of some superlative genius. His early death did not allow him or us to see
how he would rule his empire, but the signs suggest that he would have done better
than many historians have concluded.
35
There has been much debate on this subject. Badian’s studies, mentioned in note 10, are
among the most comprehensive. See also J. P. V. D. Balsdon, “The Divinity of Alexander,”
Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 1, 3 (1950): 363–88.
Psichari Father and Son: A Generation at Odds
J. Kim Munholland
This story is part of a generation’s intellectual and spiritual conflict, perhaps one
of the most famous of such conflicts in modern French history. In this example, it
involved a son, Ernest Psichari, a talented young writer who was killed in one of
the opening battles of World War I, and his father, the well-known philologist and
advocate of modern Greek, Jean Psichari, or Ioannis Psycharis. There are two other
important figures in this relationship, the grandfather of Ernest and the father-in-law
of Jean, Ernest Renan, and his daughter, Noémi Renan, who married Jean and was
the mother of Ernest. This was a generation’s conflict that had a personal, family di-
mension to it. We turn first to the son, Ernest Psichari.
Among the young French intellectuals who came of age at the turn of the twen-
tieth century, and who would rebel against the secular, scientific, and pacifist values
of their fathers’ generation, none was more uncompromising than Ernest Psichari.
Grandson on his mother’s side of the historian and biblical scholar Ernest Renan, Psi-
chari has left a series of writings that chronicle a spiritual quest that took him away
from the secular, positivist, Republican, and antimilitary atmosphere of his youth and
his family environment at the time of the Dreyfus Affair. This quest led first toward
a military career in the French colonies and then brought him to the Catholic Church
on the eve of World War I, when he entered the Third Order of St. Dominic, intending
to become a village priest, perhaps in the strongly Catholic Brittany of his agnostic
grandfather, Ernest Renan.1
This goal would never be reached. Within nine months of Psichari’s admission
to the Dominican Order war broke out in Europe, and the young Catholic officer,
serving at his colonial army garrison in Cherbourg, went to the front to lead his men
in the just cause of France. On 22 August 1914, he fell in battle, one of the first casu-
alties of that deadly conflict. Like his friend, Charles Péguy, who also had followed
a course from Republican secularism to an ardent French nationalism, and who also
would be killed in battle in September 1914, Ernest Psichari became a symbol and
1
Henri Massis, Notre ami Psichari (Paris: Flammarion, 1936), 230.
266 J. Kim Munholland
martyr for this staunchly nationalistic and intellectually conservative generation’s

national sacrifice.2
Ernest Psichari’s trajectory from his early secular skepticism in religion, seen as
a legacy from his grandfather Renan, toward the church by way of the colonial army
has been extensively chronicled.3 As a young lycée student, Ernest Psichari at first
adhered to the values of his father’s generation. In religious matters he was a skeptic
and anticlerical. He became partisan in the cause on behalf of Captain Dreyfus and
Republican justice in opposition to the military’s condemnation of the Jewish officer,
an accusation of treason inspired by rampant anti-Semitism within the French Army.
In a lengthy letter to his father Ernest deplored the way that “Catholicism and cler-
icalism, anti-Semitism and narrow ideas have invaded France.” The late 1890s was
a time of political engagement and controversy in France, and the lycée student was
among those who were active in condemning the forces of reaction, seen in the army
and the church. Yet even in this early, Dreyfusard phase of Ernest’s life, he greatly
admired France, a France, as he put it, “that surpassed all other nations with its beau-
tiful and great ideas.”4
Ernest’s father, Jean Psichari, was even more deeply involved in pursuing justice
for Captain Dreyfus. The Psichari household became one of the active Dreyfusard
salons, animated by discussions of events of the moment and agitated by debates over
new social theories and projects for founding popular universities for working people.
The turbulence of the Dreyfusard debates and the passions it aroused transformed
the Psichari household. Ernest’s sister, Henriette, has described the way in which her
father would discuss for hours legal texts and their meaning with his political allies
and with his own family.5 Jean Psichari became one of the founding members of the
Ligue pour les droits de l’homme in 1898.
2
Ronald Thomas Sussex, The Sacrificed Generation: Studies of Charles Péguy, Ernest Psi-
chari and Alain-Fournier (Townsville, Australia: University of North Queensland, 1980).
3
The young generation has been described in several texts, among them, Agathon [Henri
Massis and Alfred de Tarde], Les jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1913); Rich-
ard Griffiths, The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature, 1870–
1914 (London: Constable, 1966); and Sussex, The Sacrificed Generation. Important works
on Ernest Psichari include Wallace Fowlie, Ernest Psichari: A Study in Religious Conversion
(New York: Longmans, 1939); Eugen Weber, “Psichari and God,” Yale French Studies, no. 12
(1953): 19–53; Henri Massis, La vie d’Ernest Psichari (Paris: L’Art Catholique, 1916); Massis,
Notre ami Psichari; Daniel-Rops, Psichari (Paris: Plon, 1942; rev. ed., 1947); A.-M. Goichon,
Ernest Psichari d’après des documents inédits (Paris; Éditions de la Revue des Jeunes, 1921;
1933, 1946); Henriette Psichari, Ernest Psichari, mon frère (Paris: Plon, 1933); and Paul Pé-
dech, Ernest Psichari ou les chemins de l’ordre (Paris: Tequi, 1988).
4
Ernest Psichari to Jean Psichari, 13 July 1898, in Lettres du Centurion, vol. 3 of Oeuvres
complètes de Ernest Psichari (Paris: Conard, 1948), 110–13.
5
Henriette Psichari, Ernest Psichari, mon frère, 73.
Psichari Father and Son 267
Jacques Maritain has left a sympathetic portrait of the open, warm, and welcom-
ing atmosphere of the Psichari household during these days.6 The Psicharis enter-
tained a wide circle of friends, reflecting Noémi’s graciousness and Jean’s convivial
and enthusiastic personality. Accounts of the time describe Jean Psichari and Noémi
as a “brilliant couple,” although, as Jean Psichari’s biographer notes, the brilliance of
their salon provoked envy among some intellectuals, who were inclined to look upon
Jean Psichari as something of a parvenu.7 A more critical portrait may be found in
Henri Massis’s account of the “liberal, political and literary anarchism … [that] had
established its headquarters there during the Dreyfus Affair.”8 The proceedings and
discussions were symbolically overseen by the portrait of Ernest Renan, painted by
his son Ary, that hung in the salon, looking down like a benevolent, optimistic deity,
seemingly lost in abstract thought and detached from the struggles of the real world.
Eight years later this atmosphere had changed. Again Massis provides the de-
scription of a gathering in the spring of 1908 in which Noémi Psichari, despite her
allegiance to her father’s ideals, seemed to give a spiritual serenity to the proceedings.
Those present were mostly friends of Ernest Psichari, who was just back from Africa,
where he had begun his career in the French colonial army. Among the visitors was
Jacques Maritain, Ernest Psichari’s close friend from their days as lycée students to-
gether. Maritain had been with Ernest in the debates and engagement of the Dreyfus
years, including a strong commitment to social causes, but he and his young wife,
Raïsa, had recently abandoned their agnosticism and had converted to the Catholic
faith. The turn away from the secular climate of their elders had already begun during
the lycée years, when Jacques and Ernest had attended the lectures of Henri Bergson,
whose critique of positivism, materialism, and abstract reason had attracted large
crowds to the Collège de France.
Both Ernest Psichari and Jacques Maritain were close to Charles Péguy, another
Dreyfusard who also was in search of a new spiritual truth amid the secular climate of
the now triumphant radical Republic. After his Dreyfusard years Péguy had adopted
an intense nationalism that focused upon the perceived threat of Germany following
the international crisis of 1905 that had nearly brought Europe to war. His journal,
Cahiers de la Quinzaine, was a vehicle for the new thinking that gave voice to this
generation of nationalists and spiritual seekers.
Amid this search for spiritual and emotional truth, the figure of Ernest’s father,
Jean Psichari, seemed increasingly irrelevant, at least in the eyes of Ernest’s friend
and constant admirer, Henri Massis. Jean Psichari was a rationalist who, following
the advice of his father-in-law and mentor, Ernest Renan, had abandoned his early
dreams of becoming a writer. Instead, he applied scientific methods to the study of
6
Jacques Maritain, Antimoderne (Paris: Éd. de la Revue des Jeunes, 1922), 211–12, cited in
Ioanna Constantoulaki-Chantzou, Jean Psichari et les lettres françaises (Athens: Emman.
Papadakes, 1982), 129.
7
E. Haraucourt, Des jours et des gens (Paris: E. Flammarion, 1946), 154–56, cited in Con-
stantoulaki-Chantzou, Jean Psichari, 4.
8
Massis, Notre ami Psichari, 11–13.
the Greek language, opening the way to the emergence of modern Greek that broke
with the high culture of classical Greek tradition. Jean Psichari’s revolutionary ap-
proach to the language question provoked a storm of controversy in Greece when his
seminal work, Taxidi (My Voyage), was published in 1888.9
Massis’s description of Jean Psichari’s presence in the Psichari home on rue
Chaptal contrasted the serene and almost spiritual quality of Noémi Psichari with the
exuberant and, in Massis’s judgment, almost comical appearances of the scholar and
linguist. During these evening gatherings Jean Psichari would emerge from his large
library, which was mainly devoted to scientific works on philology, to declaim what
Massis condescendingly described as his “misplaced enthusiasms.” He would recite
poetry in a “coarse and vulgar voice” to the young crowd gathered around Ernest Psi-
chari and Noémi Renan. He would then retire to his library, to which he admitted only
his students from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Massis more
than implies that Jean Psichari’s preoccupations with his scientific work, however
worthy, seemed arid, abstract, remote, and out of touch even with the calm, spiritual
quality that Noémi expressed in keeping with the philosophical serenity of her father,
Ernest Renan, whose presence continued to hover over the household. Clearly Massis,
whose own work, Les jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui, chronicled the transformation of his
generation into advocates of action in place of reason and skepticism, regarded the
senior Psichari as a figure from the past.
These contrasting images of the Psichari foyer suggest the sea change that was
taking place in the intellectual climate of France at this time. Ernest Psichari rep-
resented the new voice of those who preferred action to reason, spiritual values to
scientific ones, and a militant nationalism to the universal, humanistic concepts and
pacifism of their fathers. What had happened in the space of eight very short but
important years? The changes can be found in the experience of Ernest Psichari and
his personal crisis, which in extremis became representative of his generation’s ques-
tioning of their received values.
Ernest Psichari’s personal and intellectual crisis occurred when he was just eigh-
teen. He had passed his baccalauréat impressively and seemed destined for an aca-
demic career in keeping with his family tradition. Throughout his youth his father
had watched carefully over his progress, providing him with guidance and encour-
agement, particularly in the mastery of languages and in a love for French literature.
Above all, there was an emphasis upon reason and scientific methods. In one of his
early letters to his father, Ernest Psichari expressed his uncertainty on the choice
between a career in science or in literature. He seemed better endowed for the latter,
and his talent showed in his essays and youthful experiments in poetry. His father
introduced him to Latin and Greek, applying his own methods of teaching. Yet Er-
nest Psichari would reject a seemingly logical, almost programmed turn toward the
academic side of literature or philology.
The break came when he was spurned in a love affair. He had become enamored
of the elder sister of his good friend Jacques Maritain, but she was seven years his
9
Hommage à Jean Psichari (1854–1929) à l’occasion du vingtième annniversaire de sa mort
(29 septembre 1929) (Paris: Klincksieck, 1950), 17.
senior, quite a difference when one is eighteen. Her decision to marry someone else
plunged Ernest into despair. He left home and spent several months wandering the
streets of Paris in search of menial employment, staying in cheap, rundown hotels. He
twice attempted suicide and was stopped only by the intervention of a friend. He then
decided to bury himself in the army.
In the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair all young men were required to serve as
draftees for two years in the French Army, although for lycée graduates the term of
service was reduced to one year. Ernest volunteered to serve a year earlier than the
law required. At the time he wanted no more than to forget the past and to submit to
the discipline and obedience of a military hierarchy while putting his unhappy love
affair behind him. As he put it in one of his diary entries, the army offered order
against the disorder of his time. But he worried about the reaction of his family with
its strong antimilitary traditions to his decision.10 He felt that only his mother would
understand what had compelled him to follow in that path. From this point Ernest
Psichari would confide in her and also in the mother of Jacques Maritain, Mme. Gen-
eviève Favre, herself the daughter of Jules Favre, a Republican politician who had
been instrumental in the forming of the Third Republic.
Although still respectful in tone, letters to his father became less frequent than
in his days at the lycée when he had sought paternal approval, but the relationship
was not broken. Despite the distance, both intellectually and physically, Ernest kept
in contact with his father. During his first tour of duty in the Congo, he wrote to
his father that he was engaged in creating a grammar for the Baya language and he
sought his father’s advice and approval. He also began his writing career with a series
of journal entries that would be published after his death as Carnets de Route. These
reflections served as the basis for his first autobiographical novella, Terres de Soleil
et de Sommeil. Again he sent these early efforts to his mother asking for both her
opinion and his father’s.11
On the other side of this relationship, his father was more sympathetic with his el-
dest son’s quest than someone like Massis might have imagined. On the eve of Ernest
Psichari’s departure for a second tour of African duty in Mauritania, Jean Psichari
recommended that he carry with him the Sermons of Bossuet and Pensées of Pascal,
surprising recommendations from a religious freethinker. “If one wants to know a
man,” Jean Psichari advised, “it is necessary to read Bossuet and read him in his
sermons.”12 Jean Psichari was obviously not the total agnostic he was reputed to be.
At the end of his first year in the army, Ernest Psichari’s reenlistment dismayed
his family, as he had feared, and it caught his friends by surprise. Even his superiors
were astonished that the grandson of Ernest Renan should embark upon a military
career. He informed his parents and his commanding officer that a desire for action
10
11
Ibid., 45–47.
12
Jean Peyrade, Psichari: Maître de grandeur (Paris: Julliard, 1947), 35.
and his distaste for Paris and a life as a bureaucrat inspired his decision.13 He wanted
to go on campaign, which led him to choose service in the colonial army. Soon he
was on his way to Africa, where he would encounter Islam and begin to reflect upon
his own religious heritage.
In his letters to his mother and to Mme. Favre, who even more than his mother
became confidante to his innermost thoughts, he spoke of his spiritual dissatisfac-
tion and his rejection of the skepticism and materialism of metropolitan France. The
army appeared to be order against what he perceived as the disorder, the intellectual
questioning, the decadence, and the spiritual emptiness of his time.14 He looked upon
colonial service as a form of crusade on behalf of French civilization and its tradi-
tions. He also found a passion for writing, beginning first with his diary, in which he
recorded his reflections and thoughts, evidence of his personal voyage of discovery.
His spiritual quest had begun, but he was not yet ready to embrace the church. In a
reply to a lengthy letter from Maritain, who hoped that he would return from his soli-
tary adventures believing in God, Psichari readily admitted that he found the church’s
values superior to those of the positivists and rationalists of the day. While he was
attracted to the house, he informed his good friend, he was not yet ready to enter.15
After gaining a commission in the colonial artillery, Ernest Psichari returned
again to Africa in 1909, this time to the solitude of the desert in Mauritania. It was
here that his quest brought him to the brink of embracing a fervent Catholicism, and
it was in the course of his experience in Mauritania that his break with the ideas and
ideals of his father and his father’s generation became even more apparent. His en-
counter with Islam challenged his own culture and its material values. As a Moroccan
put it, “You French, you have the realm of the earth, but we, the Moors, we have the
realm of heaven.”16
What the French had, Psichari believed, was the civilization of Christendom, and
this tradition was necessary to counter the faith of Islam. Earlier he had written that
in Africa, France was “indeed alone in our pride and our domination.”17 France could
secure its domain in Africa only by gaining or forcing the Moors to respect the reli-
gion of France. In a crucial passage he wrote, “During the six years I have known the
African Moslems, I have realized the folly of certain moderns who want to separate
the French race from the religion which has made it what it is, and whence comes all
13
Ernest Psichari to Jean Psichari, 2 February 1904, in Lettres du Centurion, 125–27.
14
Henriette Psichari, introduction to Oeuvres, 1: 15, 17.
15
Ernest Psichari to Jacques Maritain, 6 August 1908, in Lettres du Centurion, 130; and
16
Ernest Psichari to Maurice Barrès, 15 June 1912, in Lettres du Centurion, 229, cited in
Henriette Psichari, introduction to Oeuvres, 1: 15.
17
Psichari, Terres de Soleil et de Sommeil, in Carnets de route. Terres de soleil et de sommeil,
vol. 1 of Oeuvres, 270.
its greatness.”18 Only by returning to the tradition of the church could France prevail
in its civilizing mission.
Recovering faith meant rejecting the materialism of his father’s generation. Er-
nest Psichari’s experience may be found in his last work, published after his death,
Le Voyage du Centurion. In this final, autobiographical novella the protagonist, Max-
ence, observes that the so-called educators and masters of French literature, such as
Maxence’s own father, had forgotten the existence of a soul, of the human capacity for
belief, love, and hope.19 Through Maxence, Ernest Psichari thanked Africa for having
saved him from “a detestable life.”20 Above all he rejected all that was “modern.” The
army and increasingly the church represented a French tradition that was permanent,
even eternal, in opposition to the forces of change and progress. “Progress is one
form of Americanism,” he has his protagonist of L’appel des armes complain, “and
Americanism disgusted him.”21 In another passage he has two generations confront-
ing one another. He wrote, “By a kind of transmutation of values, it was the father
who represented the present and the son who represented the past, the son who turned
toward history and the father who appealed to the future” in the name of progress
rather than tradition.22
Rejecting his father’s scientific materialism, Psichari was almost ready to em-
brace the church, but struggling with his own conscience and knowing the pain that
his conversion would cause his father and his mother as well, Psichari hesitated until
the eve of his return to France at the end of 1912. In August he wrote to Mme. Favre
that tradition rather than dogma attracted him to the church, and in a letter to Marit-
ain two months earlier he admitted that he still lacked faith and Divine Grace.23 Then,
on the eve of his return he wrote to Maritain that his days of meditation in the desert
had brought him to God.24 In the crucial first weeks of 1913 he would find the faith
and Divine Grace that would bring him fully, passionately, and unconditionally into
the church.
While he turned for support to Jacques Maritain during these crucial days, he
also found consolation and support from Maritain’s older sister, whose marriage a
decade earlier had left Ernest Psichari broken and despondent. Jeanne Maritain had a
daughter from her marriage, but she had separated from her husband and had turned
18
Ernest Psichari to Monsigneur Jalabert, bishop of Senegambia in Dakar, 1912, in Lettres du
Centurion, 233, cited in Weber, “Psichari and God,” 24.
19
Cited in Peyrade, Psichari: Maître de grandeur, 24.
20
Ernest Psichari, Voyage du Centurion, in Lettres du Centurion, 42.
21
Ernest Psichari, L’appel des armes, in L’appel des armes. Lex voix qui crient dans le désert,
vol. 2 of Oeuvres, 25.
22
Ibid., 93.
23
Letters of 26 August 1912 and 15 June 1912, in Lettres du Centurion, 230–31, 224–27, cited
in Weber, “Psichari and God,” 24–25.
24
Ernest Psichari to Jacques Maritain, December 1912, in Lettres du Centurion, 239.
toward the church for spiritual guidance. During his time in Africa, Ernest Psichari
always had carried with him a small photograph of her. Upon his return from Mauri-
tania at the end of 1912 he found her transformed by her faith, and she asked him to
join her in prayers for his conversion.25 Psichari’s sister claimed that there was some
thought of marriage, since Jeanne Maritain’s marriage had been only a civil cere-
mony that had not been sanctified by the church. Ernest Psichari, whatever his emo-
tions, respected the institution of marriage as indissoluble, even if it were outside the
church.26 Their relation resumed but in a purely spiritual sense, and Psichari always
referred to her as “my beloved friend” and thought of himself as her spiritual brother.
But he did convert. He decided to take up the faith that his father and his grand-
father had abandoned. On 4 February 1913 Psichari read his confession of faith in
a small chapel in the Maritain household where he received the benediction of the
priest present. He also received absolution and was assured that his Greek Orthodox
baptism was valid, something that he had questioned during his time in Africa. The
following Saturday he became confirmed by Monsigneur Gibier, the bishop of Ver-
sailles. The next day he took his first communion. Father Clérissac, a Dominican who
had been a major guiding spirit for Psichari, said mass, and Jacques Maritain assisted.
That afternoon under a brilliant sky they made a pilgrimage to Chartres.27 Ernest
Psichari’s conversion to the Catholic faith was complete and wholehearted.
Almost immediately his spirit was tested by a family crisis. Upon his return
from Mauritania in December, he had discovered to his sorrow that his parents were
getting a divorce. The cause was Jean Psichari’s affair with a younger woman. The
previous summer the senior Psichari had taken a cure where he met a twenty-year-old
music student, Irene Baume, and fell deeply in love with her. He was so smitten with
his young mistress that he had the audacity to invite her to Rosmapamon, the Renan
home in Brittany where the family spent their summer vacations. Noémi could not
put up with this blatant insult, and she asked for a divorce. This was not Jean’s first
infidelity. He earlier had had an affair with a servant at Rosmapamon. The woman
died young, and Jean had composed an epitaph in Greek, “komaso kala,” or “sleep
well,” for her headstone.
The divorce caused a scandal. Most of their friends understandably blamed and
turned their backs on Jean Psichari, taking the side of Noémi. This family crisis,
coming at the very moment of his conversion, tested Ernest Psichari, who retained
strong emotional ties to his family. He was torn between respect for his father and
tender affection for his mother. Whatever pain it cost him, he chose to stay with his
mother. He wrote to Maritain that on the Sunday when he accompanied his father to
the gate of the house on rue Chaptal he had “truly seen the depths of human misery,
25
Pédech, Ernest Psichari, 169.
26
After his conversion, Ernest Psichari asked that Jeanne help him “walk the difficult path”
where God had called him and called upon her to follow as well. He concluded this letter by
referring to himself as “your brother forever.” See Ernest Psichari to Madame T…, 20 Febru-
ary 1913, in Lettres du Centurion, 243–45.
27
Pédech, Ernest Psichari, 162–64.
and since then each hour has been poisoned, terrible.”28 His mother had become “an
elderly, abandoned woman,” and he remained constantly at her side. As a sign of her
bitterness over her husband’s betrayal, his mother resumed her premarriage name,
Noémi Renan.
Ernest regretted that his mother in her misery could not be consoled by his newly
found faith, and he feared that the announcement of his conversion might add to her
despair. When he told her of his conversion during this “long and miserable week”
following Jean Psichari’s departure, she was sympathetic to his decision and told him
that what he had done was right if he believed that faith was necessary for him. She
then gave him the golden cross of his Orthodox baptism, which he wore constantly
and was with him when he was killed in battle in August 1914.29 In an effort to dis-
tract her, he accompanied her on a tour in Belgium during Holy Week.
After his post-African leave ended, Ernest Psichari rejoined his garrison in Cher-
bourg. His religious odyssey would continue, culminating in his initiation into the
Dominican Order. The discipline and asceticism of the Dominicans appealed to Psi-
chari. His decision to enter the Dominican Order marked a decisive turn toward the
church and a step beyond his earlier commitment to the traditions of the army. Still,
he intended to continue active military service, expecting to be sent to Morocco in
October of 1914 while he prepared for a further advancement in the Dominican Order.
He also completed his work on Voyage du Centurion, which he regarded as a
kind of repentance for his previous work, L’appel des armes, which he considered not
sufficiently devout since it was written before he had turned fully to the church. Nev-
ertheless, the book won great critical acclaim, particularly among those close to the
Action Française and its editor, Charles Maurras, and a number of Catholic writers
also praised it. This would be his final work, and he would never make the next step in
his religious vocation. Whatever the future might have held, Psichari had completed
his pilgrimage toward an absolute devotion to France’s military and religious heri-
tage. He would give his life in the service of this national devotion.
His friend Massis would later claim that Ernest Psichari had died on the West-
ern Front in order to expiate the sins of his grandfather, Ernest Renan.30 His sister,
Henriette, denied that he had sought a martyr’s death and redemption or revenge for
the sins of his grandfather (or his father, for that matter). This assumption distorted
Ernest Psichari’s relationship to his grandfather, Henriette claimed, since Ernest had
greatly loved Renan and admired the searching quality of his thought. According to
her recollection, Noémi Renan saw a connection between her father and her son in
their uncompromising search for truth. From Africa Ernest Psichari had complained
28
Letter to Jacques Maritain, 25 February 1913, in Lettres du Centurion, 246, quoted in Mas-
sis, Notre ami Psichari, 170.
29
Pédech, Ernest Psichari, 165–66.
30
Richard Griffiths, The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature
1870–1914 (London: Constable, 1966), 217.
of the harm that Anatole France had done to his grandfather’s memory.31 In any event,
Ernest disliked being used in polemical controversy, and in 1913 he took exception
with a priest who said that his grandfather would roast in Hell.32 When Father Cléris-
sac assured him that it would be up to God to pass judgment on Renan, Ernest was
reassured that his grandfather was not entirely lost.
On the eve of the war Ernest’s father, accompanied by his young, second wife,
had returned to Greece on a mission connected with his scholarly work. War broke
out, and shortly after his return from Greece, Jean Psichari learned of his son’s death
on the battlefield. Although they had been at odds intellectually and spiritually, the
death of Ernest deeply affected Jean Psichari. In 1915 he published a poem in honor
of Ernest, “Au fils tué à l’ennemi,” in which he gave vent to his grief. The death of
his son was a lesson for the father that brought Jean Psichari closer to a rediscovery
of his own faith.
Jean Psichari’s grief further deepened upon news of the death of his second son,
Ernest Psichari’s younger brother Michel, who fell in battle in Champagne in 1917 af-
ter having survived and been decorated for his exploits during the battle over Verdun
in 1916. The brothers, although different in temperament, had shared a common inter-
est in the military and in the intense spirit of French nationalism and taste for action
that had developed among their generation before the war. Once again Jean Psichari
expressed his sorrow in poetry, “Au second fils tué à l’ennemi” (1919).
These losses deeply affected and greatly changed Jean Psichari. No longer the
radical agnostic, pacifist, and detached “scientific” intellectual of the 1890s, Jean Psi-
chari became an ardent, emotionally passionate nationalist. In the poem to his son
Ernest he expressed his understanding and sympathy with his son’s spiritual quest,
and in this poem and his poem to his second son killed in battle, he gave expression
to his sympathy for the nationalism of the younger generation. Jean Psichari’s nation-
alism assumed a bitterly anti-German direction at the end of the war. His was among
a minority five votes (out of thirty-three) that called for the exclusion of those German
members of the Linguistic Society who had signed the petition of German intellectu-
als supporting the war effort.33
After the war, Jean Psichari’s intellectual and literary associations also changed.
Like his son, Ernest, the elder Psichari drew close to the ultranationalistic Action
Française and began writing for it. He admired conservative Catholic writers such as
Paul Bourget. In his turn toward a staunch nationalism, his trajectory followed that of
such illustrious republicans as Georges Clemenceau, who had evolved from a leading
Dreyfusard and supporter of a radical, secular republic into the prime minister who
drove France to victory in the last year of the war. Jean Psichari had fully approved of
Clemenceau’s crackdown on advocates of a negotiated peace with Germany during
the war, often turning against former political allies of an earlier time. Jean Psichari’s
31
Henriette Psichari, citing from her brother’s unpublished “Pensées à dos de chameau,” in
Ernest Psichari, mon frère, 208–09.
32
Ibid., 210.
33
Constantoulaki-Chantzou, Jean Psichari, 136.
intellectual evolution toward nationalism and a questioning of the values of his own
generation would be recorded in his postwar novel, Soeur Anselmine (Sister Anselm).
This novel represented a return to fiction after a twenty-year absence punctuated
by his poetic interlude of the war years. It marked a spiritual and personal turning
point for Jean Psichari. Through the voices of two friends, a middle-class intellectual
and an aristocratic man of letters, Jean Psichari reinterpreted his own spiritual and
intellectual odyssey and that of his generation, which had witnessed both the war and
the defeat of 1870–71 as well as the costly victory of the war of 1914–18. The plot
bears resemblance not only to Jean Psichari’s life, but also to that of his eldest son,
Ernest.
The main protagonist is the bourgeois intellectual, André Pauron, who is a voice
for Jean Psichari. Pauron is attracted to the younger sister of his aristocratic, literary
friend, Jean de Warlaing. The two friends are poets who are admirers of the Parnas-
sians, and they are also rationalists of their time, despite de Warlaing’s early educa-
tion with the Jesuits. André chided his companion for his attending mass to please
his mother for sake of appearances. As for the sister, despite André’s free-thinking,
he admires what he perceives as an ideal piety in her devotion to her prayers, calling
her “an angel of nature.” He considered her to be an ideal wife and mother, but he
turned elsewhere and married Sophie, a non-believer whose intellectual certainties
separated her from the spiritual torments of his friend’s sister, Anselmine. Devoting
himself to his studies and a university career that followed, he distanced himself from
Anselmine and even from her brother, Jean, who suffered from an illness that brought
his premature death.
André’s marriage to Sophie can be seen as a key to Jean Psichari’s own marriage
to Noémi Renan, and intended as a narrative of Jean Psichari’s own intellectual and
personal development. On the eve of war, André became increasingly dissatisfied
with his life, constrained by the narrow rationalism of his household. Increasingly he
felt separated from his wife, as if they were two individuals living apart. What sepa-
rated them was André’s continued passion for poetry and writing and his impatience
with the scientific, philological, and university environment. He blamed Sophie for
ignoring his imaginative side and for drawing him away from the literary environ-
ment of his life before they were married. He no longer wanted to restrict himself to
the life of a professor, but longed to escape into the world of poetry, fulfilling his long
dream of a life in literature. Seeking to distance himself from Sophie, he traveled to
England in search of English authors. When war erupted, André returned to France.
Before his death, André’s friend, Jean de Warlaing, had asked his sister to send
a book to André, which reflected his own turn toward a spiritual longing as he faced
death. At that time both brother and sister had lost track of André, and the book
with its message went undelivered. In the meantime, Anselmine married, but when
she was left a widow not long after her marriage, she entered a convent and devoted
herself to pious thoughts and charitable deeds. Only when André published a book
in 1916 was she able to locate him and deliver the book as her brother had requested.
Suddenly André, who had been depressed by his own personal life and greatly upset
by the war, having turned strongly nationalistic in his views, found himself renewed
and rejuvenated in the presence of Anselmine. In the twilight of his life, André found
a new love, not the love of passion but a tranquil and serene love and a calm sense of
renewal and purpose at the end of his life. Anselmine brought him a sense of spiritual
renewal and emotional tranquility. He no longer found the company of priests dis-
turbing. Instead, he sought them out.
The spiritual climax of Soeur Anselmine comes rather melodramatically when
André experiences a very high fever and fears that he is to die. He recovers, however,
and with his recovery comes his faith and a new sense of Charity. This leads him to
an awareness of a certain reality in the aftermath of a fratricidal war that was “‘a his-
torical truth, a moral truth, a necessary truth,’ a French truth, which was the Catholic
Church. That was his only reality, the only true lifeline.”34 In this thinly disguised
autobiographical novel, Jean Psichari visited the events of his own life that had given
him a certain direction. As his biographer notes, Jean Psichari’s postwar novel, Soeur
Anselmine, and its message of renewal, nationalism, and faith, contrasted and made
a diptych with his novel from the 1890s, La Croyante, which was harsh in its antire-
ligious, anti-Catholic message. By the time he published Soeur Anselmine, Jean Psi-
chari, changed by the hatred and cruelty of the war, seemed to achieve a kind of spir-
itual, philosophical balance.35 He left behind the turbulence and passionate debates
of the Dreyfusard years to seek a spiritual and moral serenity upon which to rebuild
a new sense of order after the trauma of the war. In this way, the message of André
Pauron/Jean Psichari was also a national appeal for the French to overcome their
differences, particularly in religious matters, that had divided them for half a century.
If Soeur Anselmine marked a personal turning point for Jean Psichari and a re-
turn to literature, his second important postwar work revealed a philosophical evo-
lution away from the intellectual legacy of Ernest Renan. The celebration in 1923 of
the centenary of Ernest Renan’s birth was the occasion for Jean Psichari to rethink
his relationship to this towering figure of French intellectual history. The publication
of Ernest Renan–Jugements et Souvenirs was both a personal and a critical account
of Jean Psichari’s relationship to his famous father-in-law. In his preface to this book,
Jean Psichari warned the reader that this would not be a book like others on Renan. It
would be less eulogy or appreciation than a reconsideration of Renan as a writer and
as an influence upon Jean Psichari and his own career. His study and memory of Re-
nan would reveal his turn from his self-description as “the old fountain of positivism”
of the 1890s to a person who was more in awe of the unknown in the universe than
certain about the prospect of knowing all the truths of the material world. He recalled
his early relationship with Renan before his marriage to Noémi. In an early encounter
shortly after passing his university examinations, he expressed his enthusiasm for
French literature, particularly the golden age of the seventeenth century. He wanted
to join the great writers and carve his own niche in the pantheon of French letters.
Renan quickly discouraged him from thoughts of a literary career by attacking the
34
The plot of this novel, to say the least, is a bit forced. The account is based upon ibid.,
141–45.
35
Ibid., 145.
craft of fiction as a form of lying. Fiction was subjective, and from Renan’s scientific
perspective, this was falsehood, not the search for truth.
Renan’s was a dictated judgment that caused the young Jean Psichari to abandon
thoughts of a literary career and take up philology, employing Renanian skepticism
and scientific methods in the study of the Greek language.36 Renan strongly sup-
ported him in this direction, and Jean Psichari became his disciple, although the two
had quite different temperaments, with Renan the more detached philosopher and
Jean Psichari the more emotionally engaged crusader for a cause, a person of passion
as much as one of objective, detached reason. Jean Psichari tried to reconcile the sci-
entific and poetic in an essay that appeared in La Nouvelle Revue in 1884, which was a
defense of the Parnassians, titled “La Science et les destinées nouvelles de la poésie.”
He maintained his friendship with Leconte de l’Isle, whose writings he recommended
to his son Ernest. There was little doubt about the consequences of Jean Psichari’s
scientific approach to linguistic analysis, however, and in this sense modern Greek
letters owes at least an indirect debt to the influence of Renan. Jean Psichari’s work
led to a revolutionary transformation of Greek into the modern language that made
possible the works of Kazantzakis, Sefaris, Elytis, and others among the remarkable
lexicon of writers who shaped Greek literature in the twentieth century.37 The result
was that in Greece, Ioannis Psycharis became as famous, influential, and controver-
sial an individual as Ernest Renan had been in France.38
Although he accepted Renan’s advice, Jean Psichari still longed for an outlet that
would enable him to exercise his imagination and express the emotional side of his
nature. In 1891 on the eve of Renan’s death the following year, Jean Psichari took his
first step toward liberating himself from Renan’s shadow when he published a work
of fiction, Jalousie. As Jean Psichari’s biographer notes, this was a brief act of defi-
ance on the part of a “son” (or son-in-law) releasing his own personality from a more
famous elder. Here, of course, was a parallel with Ernest Psichari’s act of liberation
from both his famous father and his even more famous grandfather.
Yet this disobedience did not have an immediate sequel. Only with the war and
its aftermath was Jean Psichari prepared to confront Ernest Renan. One of his objec-
tives in writing Ernest Renan–Judgements et Souvenirs was to demolish what he re-
garded as the “negativism” in Renan’s thought, the constant skepticism and doubting.
In so doing, he argued that Renan was in reality something of a mix, a cross between
Voltaire and Chateaubriand, a rather strained juxtaposition but one that revealed his
desire to find common ground for reason and faith. Another way of doing this was
to stress Renan’s literary style as a writer alongside his strengths as a scholar. In so
doing, Psichari opened up another controversy among Renan supporters and scholars
who felt that Psichari was distorting Renan’s message as a result of his own intellec-
36
Ibid., 173–74.
37
Hommage à Jean Psichari, 17.
38
Constantoulaki-Chantzou, Jean Psichari, 173. Constantoulaki-Chantzou also notes that
Jean Psichari had many supporters and many enemies in Greece, just as Renan found advo-
cates and severe critics, particularly from the Catholic Church, in France.
tual and spiritual transformation. Jean Psichari’s biographer justifies his critique as
making possible a more critical look at Renan, claiming that at the age of Ecclesias-
tes Jean Psichari could be permitted a judgment on his intellectual “father” without
abandoning his filial respect.
Yet Jean Psichari, as we have seen, had moved away from the rationalism and
skepticism of the Dreyfusard years. In his twilight years he turned toward a spiritual
order and regained his faith. The decisive influence upon him was no longer Renan
but his own son, Ernest Psichari. His wartime poem in eulogy to the fallen soldier had
been sympathetic to Ernest Psichari’s passionate quest of the immediate prewar years
that had led him to the Catholic Church. As he put it in his reminiscences of Ernest
Renan, it had been his son Ernest who had awakened his own faith and had exposed
the shortcomings of Renanian rationalism. Jean Psichari now possessed the same
commitment to order and spiritual certainty that his son had sought. He recalled that
when he was sixteen he had nearly entered the order under the influence of a Domin-
ican Father Didon. Now he returned to religion, and he had embraced the nationalism
of the Action Française, admiring nationalistic and Catholic writers such as Maurice
Barrès or Paul Bourget.
Jean Psichari also embraced the doctrines of action in opposition to the reflection
and detachment of reason. In this further distancing from the ideals of the Renanian
generation, Jean Psichari reconsidered the pacifism that fed the antimilitarism of that
generation’s ideology. Of course, the experience of the war and the tragedy of losing
his two sons played an important part in this re-evaluation. He claimed that Renan’s
spirit was inclined toward peace, but Jean Psichari argued that law as a guarantee of
peace was a fragile instrument and had to be backed by force. The contrast in outlook
toward questions of war and peace, reason and passion, to be found among the three
generations, Ernest Renan, the grandson, Ernest Psichari, and the father, Jean Psich-
ari, may be seen in three differing visions of the Acropolis and the spirit of Athena.
In Ernest Renan—Jugements et Souvenirs, Jean Psichari turned to Renan’s
“Prayer on the Acropolis” (“Prière sur l’Acropole”) and essentially revised Renan,
producing a quite different interpretation. The Great War and the events in Smyrna
in 1922, which led to the expulsion of the Greek community, led him to consider
that Athena as a symbol of Justice had also something of the warrior spirit that was
essential to the goddess of reason and justice. For France and for Greece, justice and
the law could only be assured by force. Rather than a prayer to reason, Jean Psichari
argued that his son, Ernest, “would have prayed differently on the Acropolis.”39 There
is no doubt that Ernest Psichari’s vision of the Acropolis and its symbolism differed
from Renan’s. Henriette Psichari noted that while Ernest Renan and Ernest Psichari
shared an uncompromising search for truth, Ernest Psichari’s prayer would not be to
the apostle of reason and wisdom that Renan had found in the Acropolis, but to the
“mystical rose, a house of gold, … the morning star.”40 By the time Jean Psichari ap-
proached the end of his life, his vision of the Acropolis as the embodiment of wisdom,
39
Cited in ibid., 181.
40
reason, and justice was closer to the mystical one of his son than the rationalist one of
his father-in-law. He admitted as much when he confessed that his two sons, Michel
as well as Ernest, had opened him to unexpected points of view.
Constantoulaki-Chantzou has argued that the nationalism that Jean Psichari em-
braced after the war and his admiration for the traditions of the Catholic Church
anchored him firmly in French soil. But how firm was his attachment to France, and
was he not rooted in two soils? Jean Psichari was at the crossroads of both French
and Greek culture, French by education and Greek by birth. At the end of his life he
turned not to the faith of the Catholic Church but returned to that of Greek Orthodoxy.
Following his last trip to Greece in 1925, he prepared to face death, which would
come four years later. He chose to be buried according to the Greek Orthodox rite
and asked that his tomb be placed on the island of Chios facing Asia Minor.41 Jean
Psichari participated in two intellectual and spiritual worlds, but on the French side
he has remained in the shadow of both son and father-in-law, while he has stood as a
towering figure for the culture on whose soil and in accordance with whose traditions
he was buried.
41
Constantoulaki-Chantzou, Jean Psichari, 216.
George Seferis and the Prophetic Voice
Peter Mackridge
The significance of voice in George Seferis’s poetry is obvious right from its early
stages. For Seferis (1900–71), as for all adherents of the Greek demoticist movement,
the living voice was of supreme significance for the creation and reception of poetry
and for human communication in general. As early as 1936, Seferis wrote, “Poetry
that doesn’t invite the voice is bad poetry.”1 Fifteen years later (6 August 1951), in an
unpublished letter to Philip Sherrard from London, he wrote: “[I]f you want to write a
single word which sounds you must extract it from your guts,” and he went on to cas-
tigate those who are able only “to perceive printed characters on the paper; no wonder
that they make no sense of anything.”2 These words bring to mind “certain old sailors
of my childhood” in the poem “Upon a Foreign Verse,” who “used to recite, with
tears in their eyes, the song of Erotokritos.” For Seferis, as for all Greeks until very
recent times, the seventeenth-century verse romance Ερωτόκιτος (Erotokritos) was
not a poem but a song, which had been handed down from generation to generation
by word of mouth.
For Seferis, poetry was not a monologue but a dialogue between living people.
In general, dialogue was a vital necessity for Seferis, whose essay entitled “Διάλογος
πάνω στην ποίηση” (Dialogue on Poetry; 1939) only became a “Μονόλογος πάνω
στην ποίηση” (Monologue on Poetry) after his interlocutor—his brother-in-law, the
philosopher Constantine Tsatsos, had ceased to listen to him.
In our technological world, communication by way of the living voice is becom-
ing more and more scarce, as Seferis implies with reference to the recording of the
voice on disk: “Is it the voice / of our dead friends / or the gramophone?” he wonders
in one of his haikus. Seferis returns to the gramophone in the poem “Τρίτη” (Tuesday)
from “Σημειώσεις για μια ‘εβδομάδα’” (Notes for a “Week”), where “on every disk
/ a living person plays with a dead one,” and the poet goes on to contrast the grooves
of the disk with “the seams of the human skull.” As he writes sarcastically in the next
1
George Seferis, Δοκιμές [Essays], 3rd ed. (Athens: Ikaros, 1974), 1: 33. The English transla-
tions of Seferis’s poetry in this essay are based on those by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sher-
rard: George Seferis, Complete Poems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), but I
have felt free to alter them where appropriate. All other translations are my own.
2
Denise Sherrard, ed., This Dialectic of Blood and Light: George Seferis – Philip Sherrard,
An Exchange: 1947–1971 (Limni, Evia, Greece: Denise Harvey, 2015).
282 Peter Mackridge
poem in the same series, “Τετάρτη” (Wednesday), “our life is rich because we’ve
invented perfected machines / for when our senses decay.”
In the poem “Πάνω σ’ έναν ξένο στίχο” (Upon a Foreign Verse), the shade of
Odysseus appears before the poet, “whispering […] words in our language,” and tells
him “how strangely you grow into manhood conversing with the dead when the living
who remain are no longer enough.” In this early poem the poet does not quote Odys-
seus’s actual words, but instead conveys them through reported speech. By contrast,
in this essay I want to focus on cases where Seferis quotes the words of other persons,
in direct speech, in order to express his views. It is well known that in his early poetry
Seferis uses the voices of imaginary characters such as Stratis Thalassinos and Ma-
thios Paschalis. Through these fictional characters Seferis was able to express certain
emotions in a more objective manner.3 But Μυθιστόρημα (Mythistorima) too is a
work for various voices—or for a voice that speaks in different tones—in which the
poet plays various roles, among them those of Odysseus, Orestes, and Andromeda.
It would be feasible to stage a theatrical performance of Mythistorima in which
various actors spoke the dramatic monologues of the various characters.4 Mythis-
torima—literally “myth-story”—is the normal Greek word for “novel.” But, despite
its title, Mythistorima is a dramatic poem par excellence. A note that Seferis once
intended to accompany Mythistorima contains the following sentence: “My aim isn’t
to write poems but to describe a character.”5 Even though in this note Seferis suggests
he’s writing fiction, it’s clear that this multiple character speaks throughout the poem;
far from being described, he presents himself to an audience as a dramatic character
might do. A study of the role of the theater in Seferis’s poetry would reveal significant
aspects of his poetics. But I do not propose to concern myself with this here; I will
confine myself simply to pointing the reader to three relevant poems: “Saturday” from
“Notes on a ‘Week,’” where the poet presents us with a Pirandello-like scene in which
an actor does not know what role he is supposed to play (the indications are that it is
Orestes); “Θεατρίνοι, Μ.Α.” (Actors, Middle East) from Ημερολόγιο καταστρώματος,
Β΄ (Logbook II); and the section “Επί σκηνής” (On Stage) from Τρία κρυφά ποιήματα
(Three Secret Poems).
In his mature poetry Seferis makes increasing use of voices that do not belong
to some persona or some alter ego of the poet, like Stratis Thassalinos and Mathios
Paschalis, but to real (rather than mythological) characters, now dead, who possess
some special authority and whose words carry particular weight. We can observe this
3
See Dora Menti, “Στράτης Θαλασσινός και Μαθιός Πασχάλης: δυο προσωπεία του Γιώργου
Σεφέρη” [Stratis Thalassinos and Mathios Paschalis: Two masks of Giorgos Seferis], Ποίηση
[Poetry] 13 (1999): 188–204.
4
It is characteristic of the Modernist aspirations of Mythistorima that Virginia Woolf’s
“novel” The Waves, which is exactly contemporaneous with it (1931), also consists of the
monologues of various characters.
5
G. Giatromanolakis, “Η ποίηση-μοντάζ του Σεφέρη” [Seferis’s montage poetry], Το Βήμα
[To Vima], 5 May 1995, quoted from Menti, “Στράτης Θαλασσινός και Μαθιός Πασχάλης,”
196.
George Seferis and the Prophetic Voice 283
phenomenon especially in poems that were written in particularly critical historical

and political circumstances. In such poems Seferis appropriates prophetic voices that
comment on the situation of his time and in many cases warn of some impending ca-
tastrophe. Seferis was painfully aware that, like Cassandra, he had prophetic gifts that
other people ignored.6 Thus, in the poems in Ημερολόγιο καταστρώματος, Α΄ (Log-
book I; written 1937–40), he spoke about the imminent world war; in Κίχλη (Thrush;
written in 1946), about the Greek Civil War, and in Ημερολόγιο καταστρώματος, Γ΄
(Logbook III; written 1953–55), about the liberation struggle of the Greek Cypriots
and the intercommunal slaughter that accompanied it.7 The opprobrious description
of Seferis by one of the Greek junta’s newspapers as “the old Smyrniot Pythian”
after his famous public statement against the Colonels’ dictatorship in 1969—which
indirectly prophesied the Cyprus debacle of 1974—was not wide of the mark. Despite
this, however, and unlike the older poet Angelos Sikelianos, Seferis normally avoided
displaying his prophetic gifts, at least in his own voice. Perhaps this was because he
lacked Sikelianos’s faith and self-confidence.8 An exception is “Η μορφή της μοίρας”
(The Shape of Fate), written during World War II, which ends with the following
lines:
Don’t ask, just wait: the blood, the blood

will rise one morning like Saint George the horseman
to nail the dragon to earth with his lance.
We find an early form of the prophetic voice in “Ο δικός μας ήλιος” (Our Sun),
written on 6 September 1937, a month before the creation of the Axis by Hitler and
Mussolini. While the poet and his companion share the sun that conceals the violence
and cruelty of reality, a woman shouts: “Cowards, / they’ve taken my children and
cut them to pieces, it’s you who have killed them.” Here the poet and his like seem to
6
As an official of the Greek Foreign Ministry, George Seferiadis had privileged access to
information about world affairs. But in this essay I am talking about Seferis the poet, not
Seferiadis the diplomat. By the same token, there is no evidence that Seferis himself actually
heard disembodied voices.
7
The late Th. D. Frangopoulos, writing in 1977 about the poet who “with his prophetic in-
tuition that makes him see […] what is about to happen,” adds that Seferis had prefigured the
Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974: “It is no coincidence that the only two figures to whom
whole poems of this collection are devoted, and who seem at first sight to lack an immediate
connection with Cyprus, are Pentheus and Euripides, both of whom suffer a ferocious physical
dismemberment. The poet (and maybe the diplomat) had a premonition of the partition [of Cy-
prus].” Th. D. Frangopoulos, “Ες Κύπρον: δευτερολόγημα πάνω στα κυπριακά ποιήματα του
Σεφέρη” [To Cyprus: Second thoughts about the Cypriot poems of Seferis], in Καθημερινές
τομές [Daily incisions] (Athens: Dioyenis, 1977), 29. I wish to thank my friend N. K. Petropou-
los for bringing this passage to my attention.
8
Edmund Keeley devotes an article to Seferis’s political voice in Modern Greek Poetry: Voice
and Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 95–118. Keeley is more concerned
with the message than the technique, which is what interests me in this essay.
284 Peter Mackridge
be held partially responsible for the violent actions that took place in the recent past
because they were caught up in purely aesthetic concerns. Later, some messengers ar-
rive after a long journey. The poet’s friend tells them to relax first and then to deliver
their message, but they reply, “We don’t have time,” whereupon they immediately
expire. Finally, the friend leaves, taking with her “the golden silk” that had veiled
the reality of the world and thus enabling the poet to realize that the messengers were
right: indeed, “we don’t have time,” since war is approaching and “tomorrow our
souls set sail,” as Seferis puts it in a later poem, “Ένας γέροντας στην ακροποταμιά”
(An Old Man on the River Bank).9
Later, Seferis uses prophetic voices that are not heard throughout the poem but
are framed by the poet’s speech, as happens in “Our Sun,” except that now the voices
belong to historical characters. Such voices belong to people who have some special
relationship with the divine. In the prologue to his Modern Greek version of the Book
of Revelation (1966), Seferis wrote: “The word of the prophet is the word of God, it
isn’t his own. Sometimes it may be transmitted to him without the intervention of the
consciousness.”10 Indeed, in some of his poems Seferis narrates the visitation of some
voice that comes to him unbidden.
In the final poem of Logbook II, “Τελευταίος σταθμός” (Last Stop), written on
5 October 1944, a few days after the signing of the short-lived Caserta Agreement
between the Greek government of George Papandreou and the representatives of the
resistance organizations, various voices of the dead are heard: the Old Testament
prophets and St. Paul, the War of Independence hero General Makriyannis (who
learned to write after that war), and a heroic soldier from the campaign against the
Italians in Albania in 1940–41 named Michalis. The poet uses Makriyannis’s phrase
“guile and deceit” with reference to the crimes committed in war in general, but
especially, perhaps, the unjust actions committed both by the officials of the Greek
government-in-exile and by those who remained in Greece. The poet goes on to in-
troduce the motif of grass:
Man is soft and thirsty as grass,

insatiable as grass, his nerves roots that spread;
when the harvest comes
he would rather the scythes whistled in some other field.
These lines are reminiscent of the words of Isaiah 40:6: “All flesh is grass, and all the
goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field.” At the end of the same verse-para-
9
Perhaps because of the time when he was living, Seferis believed that every poem he wrote
might be his last. See the words he wrote to Andreas Karandonis on 10 February 1950—words
that he would have liked to address to their friend George Katsimbalis: “Chief, you must get
used to saying that everything I publish is my last; and, if there’s anything more, you should
know that for Seferis it’s an exceptional extension of time on behalf of fate, which has granted
him a few extra hours.” See G. Seferis and A. Karandonis, Αλληλογραφία 1931–1960 [Corre-
spondence 1931–1960] (Athens: Kastaniotis, 1988), 178.
10
Η Αποκάλυψη του Ιωάννη [The revelation of John] (Athens: Ikaros, 1975), 10–11.
graph we hear the pseudobiblical phrase, “A time to sow and a time to reap,”11 which
announces “the time for payment,” implying that, now that the Greek politicians are
returning to their homeland, unjust deeds will be punished. Two of these voices, then
(that of Makriyannis and the pseudobiblical phrase), prophesy that justice will be
done. At the end of the poem we hear the words of the soldier Michalis: “We go in
the dark / we move forward in the dark”—words that imply that those who wish to do
good are obliged to act without leaders and without compasses, simply following their
consciences. It is significant that most of the voices heard in “Last Stop” utter phrases
that are primarily oral and only secondarily textual.12
Seferis’s “symphonic” poem Thrush was completed on 21 October 1946, the
month that saw the announcement of the foundation of the “Democratic Army of
Greece” and the official beginning of the Civil War. Thrush is especially rich in
voices—quite apart from that of Odysseus, who is heard throughout, and those of
Elpenor and Circe in part 2. At the end of part 2 we hear the voice of a government
minister on the radio announcing the beginning of the war. It does not matter whether
this is the beginning of the Albanian campaign in 1940, or the German invasion in
1941, or the Civil War: the poet is referring to the successive announcements of war
that were heard during those unhappy years. It is no coincidence that the first frag-
ment of the minister’s speech that we hear, “There is no more time,” repeats almost
word-for-word the prophetic words of the messengers in the prewar poem “Our Sun.”
In part 3 of Thrush the poet-Odysseus makes the last of several descents into
Hades to consult the dead. There he hears various voices: first Elpenor, then Tiresias,
and finally Socrates. After the Athenian philosopher’s words, which refer to justice,
exile, and death, the first section of part 3 culminates in the lines:
Countries of the sun yet you can’t face the sun.

Countries of man yet you can’t face man.
These words do not belong to Socrates himself, but they appear as the conclusion to
what he has previously said. The preceding words, “only God knows,” perhaps imply
that these two lines, with their prophetic style, belong to some divine voice. At all
11
This phrase is reminiscent of the following: “A time to be born and a time to die; a time
to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted” (Eccles. 3:2), and “whatsoever a man
soweth, that shall he also reap” (Gal. 6:7).
12
Michalis’s words (see their origin in the diary entries of 11, 20, and 26 February 1941, in
G. Seferis, Μέρες [Days] [Athens: Ikaros, 1986], 4: 23, 28, 30) echo a favorite phrase from St.
John of the Cross that Seferis had already quoted in one of his essays: “He who is learning the
finest details of an art moves forward in the dark and not with his initial knowledge, because if
he did not leave it behind he would be unable to free himself from it” (“Monologue on poetry,”
May 1939, in Seferis, Δοκιμές, 1: 154). Seferis had already recorded the same passage in his
diary on 31 December 1931: Μέρες [Days] (Athens: Ikaros, 1984), 2: 34. It is characteristic
of Seferis that he identifies the process of groping one’s way to artistic creation with groping
one’s way through the moral maze.
286 Peter Mackridge
events, the transition from mythical characters (Elpenor and Tiresias) to the historic
(Socrates) is worth noting.13
In the second section of part 3 of Thrush, however, the voices disappear: “[A]
s the years go by […] you converse with fewer voices, / you see the sun with differ-
ent eyes”;14 in this final section of the poem voice gives way to vision, even though
we still hear the words of the Pervigilium Veneris: “[W]hoever has never loved will
love”—“in the light,” adds Seferis. In Logbook III, by contrast, voices abound, as
Seferis watches the wound of Cyprus fester because of the persistent refusal of the
British government to grant the right of self-determination to the Greek Cypriots.15
The first poem of Seferis’s Cyprus collection, Αγιάναπα, Α΄ (Ayanapa I), rep-
resents a farewell to the Odyssean Nekyia. Here the poet-Odysseus realizes that
during his successive visits to Hades over the years he has been unable to hear the
voices of the dead, but has seen them instead. The voices he has encountered in Hades
have proved to be unsatisfactory.16 At the fishing village of Ayanapa in Cyprus he
sees, as if for the first time, the light of reality. (Compare the words from the immedi-
ately preceding poem, Thrush, which I quoted earlier.) From now on the poet ceases
to descend to Hades to consult the dead; instead, the voices of the dead now come to
him unbidden, in this world.17
13
Roderick Beaton, George Seferis (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1991), 46, points out
that while in his later poetry Seferis “is still seeking communication with earlier periods of
Greek history, he is now doing it primarily through the written record, rather than through the
primitive vehicle of myth.”
14
On this point compare “you gaze at the sun, then you’re lost in darkness,” and “you see
them in the sun, behind the sun” in the same section of this poem.
15
Cf. the words of G. P. Savvidis, “Μια περιδιάβαση” [An excursion], in Για τον Σεφέρη [For
Seferis] (Athens: Konstantinidis and Mihalas, 1961), 393: “It is, I think, worth noting how
many otherworldly voices, how many whispers, how many disembodied or fleeting presences
haunt every page of this collection.” Savvidis goes on to list the titles of ten out of the seven-
teen poems of the collection in which such voices or presences make themselves known. It is
significant that in part 3 of Thrush the voices of the dead are described as “whispers,” just as
in some of the poems of Logbook III.
16
Giorgos Giorgis, Ο Σεφέρης περί των κατά την χώραν Κύπρον σκαιών [Seferis on the mis-
chievous events ion the land of Cyprus] (Athens: Smili, 1991), 114–15, implies indirectly that
when Seferis refers to the voices of the dead, he means the reading of texts.
17
In Μέρες [Days], vol. 7 (Athens: Ikaros, 1990), 43 (diary entry of 28 February 1957), after
describing his wandering through the streets of the New York neighborhood where his dead
brother Angelos had lived, he likens his visit to his childhood home at Skala Vourlon in Asia
Minor in 1950 to a “descent into Hades” and concludes that he does not want to repeat this
experience.
The voice that is heard throughout the poem “Ελένη” (Helen) belongs “to some
Teucer or other.”18 Teucer’s voice is a rare example of a mythical (as opposed to his-
torical) voice in Seferis’s later poetry. Usually the voices we hear in his Cyprus poems
belong either to historical characters such as Neophytos the Cloisterer or to pseudo-
historical characters such as the anonymous speakers in “The Demon of Fornication.”
Even though Seferis occasionally quotes the ipsissima verba of the renowned dead,
more often he places in their mouths either free paraphrases of their words or else
words they never spoke at all.19
The poem “Νεόφυτος ο Έγλειστος μιλά–” (Neophytos the Cloisterer speaks–)
is one of the two poems of the Cyprus collection that have a dateline (“Enkleistra,
November 21, ’53”).20 This rare indication of place and date highlights the topicality
of this poem. The other such poem, “Σαλαμίνα της Κύπρος” (Salamis in Cyprus)
(“Salamis, Cyprus, November ’53”), also conveys a highly political message. It is no
coincidence that Neophytos is a monk, since most of the voices that Seferis appropri-
ates in his mature poetry belong, as I said earlier, to persons whose authority stems
from a privileged relationship with the divine. Neophytos’s is another voice from
the past that comments allegorically on the present situation. In his poem Seferis
has the twelfth–thirteenth-century monk Neophytos speak about the sorry state of
Cyprus under Western domination and foretell the punishment of those responsible.
According to the Cypriot historian Giorgos Giorgis, in this poem Seferis makes “an
associative transition from the first to the second English occupation.”21 At the end
of the poem, using a highly ironic anachronism, Seferis has Neophytos appropriate
the voice of the English national poet, who, in his turn, speaks through the cynical
and disillusioned voice of Othello: “You are welcome, sirs, to Cyprus. Goats and
monkeys!”22 —words that, for Seferis, reflect the contempt shown by the British im-
perialists toward the Cypriot people (i.e., that Cyprus is full of goats and monkeys).
18
In the first draft of “Helen,” after the epigraph and before the main body of the poem,
Seferis wrote: “Teucer, taking his cue from a phrase he heard, speaks.” Compare the title
“Neophytos the Cloisterer speaks –” in the same collection.
19
At the end of “Helen” too we note the reference to messengers, who announce “that so
much suffering, so much life, / went into the abyss / all for an empty tunic, all for a Helen.”
This poem was partly inspired by the failure of the struggle against Hitler’s evil empire to
enable the peoples of the world to gain their freedom from other empires.
20
In each case the dateline most probably refers to Seferis’s visit to the particular site rather
than to the date of composition.
21
Giorgis, O Σεφέρης, 119.
22
For this poem, see Katerina Krikos-Davis, Kolokes: A Study of George Seferis’ “Logbook
III” (1953–1955) (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1994), 72–84. With these words (using the singular
“sir”) Othello welcomes Ludovico, who has brought him the order replacing him with Cassio,
whom he believes to be Desdemona’s lover. In a letter written on 26 August 1954 to G. P.
Savvidis, Seferis mentions that the Cyprus Tourist Board uses the slogan “You are welcome,
sir, to Cyprus…,” and he comments that “the ellipsis makes you complete the line: Goats and
288 Peter Mackridge
In a similar way the voice that speaks in “Ο δαίμων της πορνείας” (The De-
mon of Fornication) comments on current events by paraphrasing the narrative of
the fifteenth-century chronicler Machairas—the Cypriot equivalent of Makriyannis
as the voice of justice in Seferis’s view.23 “The Demon of Fornication” is Seferis’s
most Cavafian poem; according to Georgis, it is also the most political.24 The first 59
lines present, from the viewpoint of the counsellors, the events that culminate in the
assassination of King Peter. The counsellors, driven by political expediency, opt not
for “truth” (l. 1) or “right” (l. 45), but for “the lesser evil” (l. 46), thus condemning the
honest Juan Visconti to death in a dungeon.25 Perhaps Seferis is referring indirectly
to the political leaders of Greece who opposed the union of Cyprus with Greece,
preferring the independence of the island as “the lesser evil” (according to this inter-
pretation the Catalans with their fleet might represent the British). While the question
of references to contemporary reality in Cavafy’s poetry remains contentious, there
is no doubt that Seferis’s reading of Cavafy as a political poet helped him to become
a political poet himself.
At the end of the poem, in order to comment on the fate of King Peter, Seferis
abandons the viewpoint of the counsellors and adopts instead the voice of an omni-
scient narrator. After informing us that the knights killed the king and the Turcopolier
cut off “his member and his testicles,” the narrator concludes: “This was the end /
appointed for King Peter by the demon of fornication”—words that sanction the just
punishment meted out to Peter for his unbridled sexual lust after his discovery of his
wife’s infidelity.26
In “Salamis in Cyprus” the poet narrates a visit to the archaeological site of Sala-
mis at a time when, according to Giorgis, “Cyprus was a volcano waiting to erupt.”27
At one point, says the poet, “I heard footsteps on the stones. / I didn’t see faces […] /
But the voice, heavy like the tread of oxen.” This is once again the voice of Makriyan-
nis, which is heard in a Seferian paraphrase:
Earth has no handles

to be shouldered and carried off,
monkeys!” See G. Seferis, “Κυπριακές” επιστολές του Σεφέρη 1954–1962 [“Cypriot” letters
from Seferis 1954–1962] (Nicosia: Politistiko Idryma Trapezis Kyprou, 1991), 42.
23
For the similarities between the careers of the civil servant Machairas and the civil servant
Seferis, see Georgis, O Σεφέρης, 114–15; for Seferis’s disagreements over their attitude toward
the common people, see ibid., 126.
24
Ibid., 130 and 135.
25
See Georgis (ibid., 139), who talks about the “political opportunism” and the “political
amoralism” of the counsellors (152 and 164).
26
For this poem, see Krikos-Davis, Kolokes, 84–94. Another instance of the just punishment
of a tyrant is to be found in Seferis’s late poem “On Gorse,” where the voice that utters the
moral is Plato’s.
27
Giorgis, O Σεφέρης, 86.
nor can they, however thirsty they are,

sweeten the sea with half a dram of water.28
Here the words of the just general, who had a special relationship with God, are mo-
bilized by Seferis to condemn the unjust attitude of British imperialism towards Cy-
prus. Makriyannis’s prophetic words are amplified through the addition of fourteen
lines by Seferis himself, who places them in the general’s mouth:
And these bodies [i.e., the Cypriots],

formed of a clay they know not,
have souls.
They [i.e., the others, the British] gather tools to change them;
they won’t succeed […].
Wheat doesn’t take long to ripen,
it doesn’t take much time
for the yeast of bitterness to rise,
it doesn’t take much time
for evil to raise its head,
and the sick mind emptying
doesn’t take much time
to fill with madness—
These last words echo Machairas.29 The disembodied voice finishes with the phrase
“there is an island,” which Seferis quotes from Aeschylus’s Persians.30
Soon afterwards we hear a paraphrase of the prayer of the heroic Royal Navy
commander Lord Hugh Beresford, killed by the Germans near Crete in April 1941,
who prays God to make us remember the causes of war: “greed, dishonesty, selfish-
ness, / the desiccation of love.” The second of the three causes presented by Beres-
ford (δόλο in the poem) accords entirely with the words of that other heroic soldier,
Makriyannis, quoted by Seferis in “Last Stop,” namely, “δόλο και απάτη” (guile and
28
Makriyannis’s actual words can be rendered as follows: “For the earth has no handles for
people to carry it on their backs, neither the strong nor the weak.” The source of the second
pair of lines has been located by Xenofon Kokolis, Σεφερικά μιας εικοσαετίας [Twenty years of
articles on Seferis] (Thessaloniki: Epikentro, 1993), 346–47: “And what’s he (the king) strug-
gling to achieve? To change the religion of an exhausted and tiny nation—to take half a dram
of water and throw it in the sea to sweeten it so he can drink it.” Kokolis adds that Makriyannis
is here addressing the “interloping representatives of authority.”
29
For the connections with Machairas, see Savvidis, “Μια περιδιάβαση,” 373 and 395.
Also see Roderick Beaton, Ο Γιώργος Σεφέρης και η χρήση της ιστορίας: Μαχαιράς και
Ημερολόγιο καστρώματος, Γ΄ [George Seferis and the use of history: Machairas and Logbook
III], in Πρακτικά Συμποσίου “Λεόντιος Μαχαιράς-Γεώργιος Βουστρώνιος, δυο χρονικά της
μεσαιωνικής Κύπρου” [Proceedings of the symposium “Leontios Machairas—Georgios Vous-
tronios, two chronicles of medieval Cyprus] (Nicosia: Idryma A. G. Leventi, 1997), 107–11.
30
“There is an island in front of Salamis” (Persians, 447); the islet in question is Psyttaleia.
290 Peter Mackridge
deceit), while the third word, ιδιοτέλεια (translating Beresford’s “selfishness”) recurs
frequently in Makriyannis’s memoirs. It is however worth noting that, whereas Beres-
ford himself spoke of “the lack of love,” Seferis speaks of “the desiccation of love,”
which echoes the phrase “love’s dried up” in “Santorini,” a poem he wrote twenty
years earlier. Here we catch Seferis placing his own words in the mouth of some au-
thoritative dead person, and we see clearly that the prophetic voices that speak in his
poetry are not purely external but are closely related to the poet’s inner voice.
Toward the end of “Salamis in Cyprus” the poet assures his interlocutor that
the messenger moves swiftly

and however long his journey, he’ll bring
to those who tried to shackle the Hellespont
the terrible news from Salamis,
and the poem closes with the disembodied “Voice of the Lord upon the waters” re-
peating the words of Aeschylus and the imaginary Makriyannis: “There is an island.”
Thus the voice that speaks within the “apocalyptic and mantic atmosphere” of the
poem, as Katerina Krikos-Davis describes it,31 is identified with the omniscient voice
of the Lord.32 In this way the poet’s voice, by appropriating the words of the just
Makriyannis and the words of God himself speaking through the mouth of David
(Psalm 29), acquires “divine sanction.”33
It is significant that in “Salamis in Cyprus” we are dealing with a complex of
seven voices (the psalmist David—and, through him, God, Aeschylus, Machairas,
Makriyannis, Beresford, and Seferis himself) that are all of one mind. It is also worth
noting that the simple Greek Makriyannis takes his place beside other prophets, just
as the simple soldier Michalis in “Last Stop” utters words that echo those of the
Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross. In the lecture on Makriyannis that he gave in
Alexandria and Cairo in May 1943, Seferis describes the Greek general as “the sure
messenger of our long and unbroken popular tradition” who speaks “with the voice
of many men.”34 We recall Alcuin’s saying, Vox populi, vox Dei. In the same lecture
Seferis points to the remarkable similarity between the words that Makriyannis puts
in the mouth of a Turkish bey (“We’ll be ruined because we’ve been unjust”35) and
Aeschylus’s message in the Persians, that Xerxes was defeated at the battle of Sala-
mis because of his hubris: he was punished by the sea because he had committed the
“overweening act” of flagellating it. In this lecture we see clearly some of the first
31
Krikos-Davis, Kolokes, 147.
32
Ibid., 140–41.
33
Ibid., 147. Krikos-Davis connects the “voice of the Lord upon the waters” with the refer-
ences to the voice that is heard repeatedly by St. John in the Book of Revelation (1: 15, 14: 2,
19: 6; we find the same image in Ezek. 42: 2).
34
Seferis, Δοκιμές, 1: 261.
35
Ibid., 257.
seeds of the poem “Salamis in Cyprus.” At the end of his lecture, having described
Makriyannis as “a guide,”36 Seferis says: “The only thing we can do is to converse
with companions who are known or unknown to us; to heed the messages.”37
Up to now I have noted that the words of other characters are quoted especially
in poems that bear some relation to the contemporary political situation. By contrast,
in poems where the political dimension is less obvious, such as the final section of
Thrush, “Το φως” (The light), “Έγκωμη” (Engomi), and Three Secret Poems, we are
dealing with a vision rather than a voice. Yet the voices that speak in Seferis’s mature
poetry don’t always utter prophecies relating to the political situation. We see an
instance of this in the earlier poem “Les anges sont blancs,” where Seferis presents
Henry Miller speaking in mythological guise.
In two poems of Logbook III the voices are reminiscent of the end of the poem
“Sacred Way” by Sikelianos, where the poet wonders if there will come “a time / when
the souls of the bear and the Gypsy / and my own soul […] will celebrate together,”
whereupon “a murmur spread over me […] / and it seemed to say: ‘It will come.’” We
find a similar metaphysical prophecy in Seferis’s “Memory II,” written after the death
of two men named Angelos: Sikelianos and Seferis’s younger brother. Most of the
lines in this poem, which Seferis was inspired to write during his visit to Ephesus in
1950, are uttered by a figure reminiscent of Sikelianos, who appears before the poet
as he sits in the ancient theater. When the poet asks the figure whether “the empty
shells” of the theaters “will […] be full again some day,” it replies, “Maybe, at the
hour of death.”
If this prophecy is uttered without any particular certainty (“maybe”) and with-
out any particular optimism (“at the hour of death”), at the end of another poem from
the same collection “Μνήμη, Α΄” (Memory I) we hear a voice expressing a more
positive message. This message is not uttered entirely by the voice of one of the re-
nowned dead, but rather by the inner voice of the poet, though in the fourth line the
poet appropriates the voice of Christ:
one morning the resurrection will come,

dawn’s light will blossom red as trees glow in spring,
the sea will be born again and the wave will again fling forth Aphrodite.
We are the seed that dies.
I am reminded again of the lecture on Makriyannis that Seferis gave during World
War II: “[S]uffering like ours today cannot but lead to a great resurrection.”38
Finally, in the second poem that contains references to Machairas, “Τρεις
μούλες” (Three Mules), the poet hears a voice speaking to him in a dream; this is the
voice of Oum Haram, aunt of the prophet Mohammed, who died at Larnaca when she
fell from her mule during a visit to Cyprus. The description of this voice is similar to
36
Ibid., 256.
37
Ibid., 263.
38
Ibid.
292 Peter Mackridge
the description of Makriyannis’s voice in “Salamis in Cyprus”: “I heard the clatter

of hooves like silver dinars / and it was as if she was crossing hills of salt / towards
Larnaca, astride her mule.” The poet, then, not only hears but sees Oum Haram, who
speaks in a whisper about her death. It is significant that the holy woman does not
blame the mule that toppled her to her death:
I was full of the will of God;

a mule can’t bear that much weight;
don’t forget, and don’t wrong the mule.
As we have seen, in certain poems by Seferis a dead person addresses us with his liv-
ing voice: such is the case with Teucer in “Helen” and with Neophytos the Cloisterer
in the poem of that name. In “Μνήμη, B΄” (Memory II) the Sikelianos-like figure
appears to converse with the poet. But even in those cases where the character who
speaks is not visibly present, Seferis does not simply quote a passage from a text; on
the contrary, in his mature poetry the old text is brought back to life and reactivated as
a living voice. When personages from the past speak to us and offer us advice, Seferis
implies, we have a duty—both to ourselves and to history—to listen to their voices.
The Thoughts and Uncertainties of
Good Citizen Anestis Volemenos1
George Philippou Pierides
Translated from the Greek by Donald E. Martin
During the past three years since I retired, cut off from the contacts that bind us all to
the world of our colleagues, I have come to feel somehow that I am in a void, without
support.
For all the thirty-five years I spent as an official at the Bank, I felt that I was
solidly based, that I was solid myself, that I had a place in the community (as a bank
official), a job waiting for me every day, even if it was only that dull routine at the
Bank. I had something to look forward to, as an individual—my career—but also as
a member of a group—my colleagues at the Bank—in the periodic musters that we
do for one reason or another.
But now that I am idle for hours at a time, I remember again the words of Mr.
Lekousiotis, that beloved teacher of ours back when we were in high school: “The
psychological make-up of every person is a many-sided composite, a serious part of
which is the role he plays in the community, either in the profession he practices or in
his dedication to an art or whatever he adopts as his social mission.”
We loved Mr. Lekousiotis because he stood out as a teacher, for his humanity and
for that way he had of stretching the narrow confines of a course subject to relate it
to life.
If those words of Mr. Lekousiotis remain engraved on my memory, it is because
you, my good friend Crito, spoke to me of them many times to emphasize their mean-
ing. I was not particularly interested in wise words and theories. But I would listen to
you closely whenever you became engrossed with such matters. And I felt a pride in
listening to you reflect so clearly about these subjects just as we are proud of anyone
who speaks beautifully and correctly, even if (or precisely because) he does not share
our own way of thinking.
You were the best student in our class, while I was among the middling. But that
does not mean that I was short on brains. If I did not get into literature, as they say, it
was because my thoughts work—and work very sharply—upon the practical side of
The original Greek text appears in Ο καλός πολίτης και οι άλλοι [The good citizen and the
others] (Athens: Nefeli, 2003).
294 Translated from the Greek by Donald E. Martin
my life, the immediate goal of each instant, a goal that I very often reach. In that area
no wise man could think better than I. Is not my success as a citizen of the community
a proof of my shrewdness? How many of my fellow students who got into literature
are successful today, as I am?
And yet even today something beautiful moves me from within when I recall
the friendship that bound us, Crito, and I see you standing there, fine, independent;
though how prosperous a citizen you succeeded in becoming is a matter that time and
distance have kept me from knowing.
Actually, you helped me get through my courses and examinations. And I owe
you a favor for that. You concentrated entirely upon your school work because you
were thirsty for learning and thinking, while for me study was a boring business, a
necessity for getting from one level to the next in order finally to get the longed-for
diploma. I found what I needed in your friendly efforts to help me, while for your part
I think you found satisfaction in helping a friend, a noble intention not often seen.
And we were neighbors.
We would sit and study together, more often at your house, which was poorer but
more peaceful. Tasia, your older sister, would sit at her sewing or take care of things
around the house, careful not to disturb our work. Your father, a tailor, was at work
during those hours. Your mother was no longer living.
My house was anything but peaceful, with Gregoris and Panayotis, my two
younger brothers, either playing or fighting and hollering, and my mother yelling
even louder when she got after them.
My father was a grocer at the market place.
As the first-born, I should have been named after my grandfather Grigoris Vole-
menos, according to tradition. But since I was born on the night of the Resurrection,
my pious parents agreed with Father Neophytos to honor the Resurrection of Christ
and baptized me Anastasios. Even my grandfather, a stickler about what he consid-
ered his privileges, thought it inadvisable to resist the ecclesiastical opinion and gave
in. Fortunately, he lived to see his name restored when the second son was born and
baptized Grigorios.

Now that my work at the Bank no longer fills up most of my day and I can sit idle
by the hour, memories of those years often come flooding through my mind. Vague,
fragmented, incomplete memories jostle one another, and something impels me to
take up pen and write; perhaps it is the necessity to put them into order, to restore
their continuity and shape.
And as I write I feel for some unknown reason that I am speaking to you, that it
is to you that I am writing, Crito. Perhaps because all these memories are bound up
with the role you played in them. I feel that my former self, just as I was back then, is
emerging with these memories into the present, obliterating years and distance; that
we are returning, you and I and the others, whom I recall one by one such as they
The Thoughts and Uncertainties of Good Citizen Anestis Volemenos 295
were back then, returning, not as shadows, but as ourselves, palpable, given a new
life. Strange!
You left shortly after graduation and went to England to work wherever you
could find jobs. At the same time you were studying at some university in London.
History.
We used to correspond regularly back then. That is how I found out that you
married an English girl, Jennifer, and later had a child, a boy. As time passed, our
correspondence thinned out, perhaps because we took different paths. At one point I
got a letter from you from Melbourne, where you said you were settled and teaching
at a school. I gathered that you had become an English-speaking teacher. What else
could you do? You had to survive and take care of your family. You did not say that in
so many words in your letter. I got it from the wearied tone that I sensed in what you
wrote. I hope that I am wrong.

At the Bank I discovered a professional pursuit that I found satisfying in two ways. It
put me in with reputable members of society, and it gave me well-grounded hopes that
if I pursued a career at the Bank, I would not be long in becoming comfortably well-
off; in a position to obtain whatever I pleased and to live well (as in fact it turned out).
That is what every sensible person wants most. That and one other thing: to stand
out. To stand out from the rest, in his possessions, in the luxury of his house, in the
ease with which he spends money and maintains a good life. Often we even call upon
God in our prayers to fulfill these desires. (What is not in your interest is to stand out
from the rest in the matter of ideas. You will be regarded as unsocial if they see you
as thinking differently from them.)
After this fine arrangement there remains only to spend your time pleasantly, to
fill your free time and your thoughts with whatever suits your natural inclinations, as
you see so many men and women of the upper crust doing. One will be a fan of the
soccer games or the horse races, another will keep up with the latest fashions, others
will socialize at teas and parties, another will play cards, another will be into orga-
nized philanthropy, and on and on. Our society offers so many easy ways for the good
citizen to kill time, to enjoy a comfortable life, a clear conscience, and sound sleep.
And the assurance that everything is going well or, if it isn’t, it will. Even including
the persistent struggle to save Cyprus from the Turkish occupation. You will say,
what do I contribute to this struggle? Well, of course, I contribute in my own way. I
belong to the class of citizens who have to do with the economy. And everyone knows
that our economic strength, our economic development is the prop upon which the
struggle for vindication leans. And if fortune smiles upon me and I prosper, I am no
less patriotic than anyone else.

As for me, I became a devotee of the automobile: automobiles in general and my own
automobile in particular, to trade in regularly for the newer model. When I was still
at the Bank I would frequently spend hours in the morning on some of my days off
washing and shining it. I still do when it needs it. But I especially like driving it and
knowing that it gleams and stands out as one of the most perfect and most expensive.
Of course, I could indulge myself in this satisfaction only after I was making progress
at the Bank and commanding an appropriately increasing income.
While we are on the subject, the automobile is not just a useful means of trans-
port. If it was just that, they would not have to make it so costly and expensive to keep
up. The luxury car is a jewel, as is a beautiful house, with its luxurious furnishings, a
jewel that shows good taste and comfortable economic circumstances.

As for my wife Erato, I can say that we live well. We have been married for over
twenty-six years, and she has never given me reason to say that I regret my choice,
even though I took her with no more dowry than her piano and a number of books.
In spite of the difference in our ages (I was thirty-seven and Erato twenty-four when
we were married), she has never shown signs of the flightiness often characteristic
of young women. Nor have I any reason to be dissatisfied with the way she runs the
household, her carefulness always to appear well dressed and affable, as befits a lady
of the house in our class.
However, I have a vague impression that she gives only a part of herself to her
role as lady of the house, though she plays it with all proper care and graciousness.
She has a strange way of being and not being present when we are alone or with com-
pany. It is as if the other part of her is concentrated somewhere else; I know not where.
What can that thing be which she feels the lack of or which she used to have
that got away? She did not have anything. She used to take care of herself and her
mother by giving piano lessons to young beginners. Now she has whatever any sen-
sible woman would want: a beautiful house, financial security, a friendly circle of
acquaintances in the upper crust.
She has never indicated any objection to the way I manage our life and well-being
or to my automotive hobby. And yet she would sit right there next to me in the car
and make it subtly clear that she was not really there, that she was not sharing in my
pleasure.
In the first years of our married life she would occasionally attempt to persuade
me to read some book that she was reading and thought important, or to go to a con-
cert or a lecture. To make her happy I would make the attempt to read, or I would go
to some cultural event. But how could I go on doing that? I was bored with the reading
and all the rest. I did not say that to her, but of course she knew it.
Later came pregnancy and birth. Erato dedicated herself entirely to the child, the
only one we ever had, Vathoula. And the only other concern she had thereafter for all
those years, as I said, was her housekeeping and social duties.
But I see that our daughter has my own down-to-earth character. She likes living
well. She is beautiful, and she knows it. (Fortunately, she got her beauty from her
mother: fair skin, brown hair, svelte figure, almond-shaped green eyes.) The year
before last, when she was twenty-two, she took part in a beauty contest, but came
in second. That put her way out of sorts. Her mother tried to talk her around, but
when she saw her persistence, she backed off. But there was no going with us to the
beauty pageant festivities. That was the only occasion she refused to go anywhere
with me. For several days after that episode Vathoula was bitter and not at all nice to
her mother. But even then Erato did not lose her composure.
Vathoula is gone now. For a year she has been in Italy, where she is studying
commercial art. She plans to go into advertising. She picked this area and her future
career by herself. I think it is a good choice. Advertising is a wide-open and lucrative
profession for anyone, man or woman, who has the means to open his own office and
is sharp enough to steer at will the shopping tastes of the consuming public.
Erato, for her part, tried to suggest something else to her daughter. Painting,
yes, she said, good, very good, but real painting, real art. I know, mama, Vathoula
answered; what you are calling real painting can be great art, but you have to dedicate
yourself to it without being sure of success. I belong to my generation, and I prefer
my security.

Now that we are alone, Erato and I, we continue to live well and harmoniously in the
way that I described.
I have stopped wondering about the “other” Erato, with that closed-up self that
seems absent when we are together. After all, as long as she does her duties and
behaves properly, why should I worry myself about what appears to be her mental
absence? Perhaps it is not the way I think it is. And anyway, I do my duty and more
on her behalf, seeing to it that she lacks for nothing. She even has a maid every other
day for the housework, in spite of the high wages charwomen demand.
Naturally, the years have begun to weigh upon us both. But I appear—and feel—
younger than my age. I usually spend the morning at my club, drive my car as before,
drink a couple of whiskeys when we entertain or are entertained; in short, I continue
to live my life as well as I can. Erato looks older than she is. Still, she has not left off
sitting down at the piano once in a while. In the evenings she usually spends her free
time reading or listening to something from her collection of music on cassette tapes.
She plays it softly, and with the dining room between us, it does not bother me in the
big living room where I watch TV. Rarely does she join me, and then only for as long
as the program she wanted to see lasts. Why she picks that particular program off the
daily TV menu only she knows. With the exception of children’s programs, which I
do not watch, anything, or almost anything, that comes on the screen is for me an ef-
fortless way of killing the evening hours before bedtime. You sit comfortably in your
easy chair and the little screen serves up in color and in substantial quantities what-
ever you want: love stories, travelogues, heroic exploits, crime, adventures, wars, and
on and on. And all this without tiring your mind. Television does your thinking for
you. I am especially interested in watching broadcasts of automobile rallies, local
or foreign. Even the advertisements are interesting when they show something new
and improved: cars, furniture, appliances, etc., which one can buy, so long as there is
money enough to replace the old one.
Erato has two friends of her own age who occasionally come over to visit, now
one, now the other. They are, she said to me, fellow students from back in high school,
with whom she shares intellectual interests and unforgettable memories. So she said,
rose from her chair, went over to the open window, stood there a few moments look-
ing out, came back, sat down again in the same chair, rested her hands on her knees,
and remained there hunched over. She smiled an afflicted smile. “And dreams,” she
murmured as if talking to herself.
Her usual way of being there and elsewhere at the same time.
When Erato mentions unforgettable memories, she means the uprising and strug-
gle of 1955–59, in which she was somehow involved, then a high school student. She
does not speak often about that time of her life, back when, in the enthusiasm of her
youth, she took part in demonstrations, handed out fliers, and probably carried out
other assignments, and, like so many other boys and girls, encountered dangers and
coarse treatment at the hands of the English military.…
As I was then a good deal older and was working at the Bank, I looked upon these
things from the outside, as did most people of my generation, some with empathy,
some with pride, some with anxiety. But those kids were in the thick of things. They
lived through them passionately. And they followed from up close the fighters who
were only a bit older than they were, practically of the same age, and they saw the
sacrifices that many of them made.
And as for what she means by “dreams”… As if I didn’t have dreams myself! We
all did—each one according to what he wanted out of life—back when we had not
yet confronted reality. Some of us came to our senses and forgot our dreams, others
not. They stayed in limbo. It is just that which I do not understand in Erato, who in
other respects I see is a sensible person. Why does she not wholeheartedly get into the
happy life I offer her? Now and then I worry when I remember that we married for
love. I cannot say how much she loves me anymore, but I do love her.

It was natural for us, too, to dream; I mean us fellow students in high school. This
coming together in the first flowering of youth is for every generation the first ex-
perience of shared friendship—and the only one free from cares. And each one of
them who made up the group would guard it as an ideal in his memory. But, come
now! This ideal picture is only an illusion, an imaginary and lost paradise. Even then,
before we scattered, each taking his own road, the harmony that united us (in spite
of our wrangling over ideas and theories) was based on our ignorance of reality. For
us at that time reality was what books told us. And the books did not always tell us
the bitter truth, the truth that one sees when he starts fighting and compromising in
order to stay alive.
What reality did each of us emerge into and how did we confront it when we
came out of the warmth of student life and took the road carved by circumstances? I
never gave it a thought for as long as I was occupied with my work at the Bank. Only
now that my thoughts have set out to unfold on their own has the question come up.
And I am at a loss when I see that I am in a position to answer it for but few members
of that group.
Among the photographs in my drawer there is one of us in our last year in high
school. In the front row, seated in chairs, are our teachers, some with feet planted
on the ground, others with legs crossed. In the middle is our principal, wearing his
permanently austere expression (I cannot remember him ever smiling). Behind the
teachers, standing in three rows, each of the back ones higher than the one in front
of it, were the students, all twenty-three of us, all male (in those days the schools
were divided into the boys’ and the girls’ schools). I look them over one by one, their
faces and expressions, recalling the names of each, his character, his manner, all that
was needed to sketch a person connected with my school years. But out of the twen-
ty-three posing in this photograph, each of whom thought that our friendships would
last for the rest of our lives, how many can I trace down to the present? I study their
faces one by one and name off Crito, Pieros, Nikitas, Miltos, Kotsos, Giosifis … that’s
all. I do not know where any of the others is or what he is doing now. I did not expect
there to be so few … I know perfectly well that forty-five years have gone by since
then, but I have never given them much thought, and it seems only yesterday. Now I
understand that forty-five years ago is not yesterday. And I reckon that all these fel-
low students of mine, whom I have preserved unchanged in my memory, just as they
appear in the photograph, are now over sixty—those who are alive at all!
For a while after graduation, a short while for some, longer for others, we had
stayed close and accessible, even if we saw one another but rarely. Then fate took
them one by one out of our circle onto other roads, to other places, where they would
keep the rest of us deep in their memories just as we appear in the photograph.

I was in charge of the Department of Deposits at the Bank. I was sitting at my desk
behind the counter where the other employees of the Department wait on the custom-
ers. While busy doing paperwork and signing documents, I heard a woman’s voice
call out to me: Anestis!
I turned and whom do I see standing on the other side of the counter? Lovely Ta-
sia, your sister, Crito. She had just come in and was taking her place in line. She was
not young any longer, but her face, with its normal features, its calm, open expres-
sion and laughing gold-brown eyes, was preserved almost unchanged. Tasia was not
beautiful, but her good nature, mirrored in her face, made everyone like her. She was
wearing a grey dress, no jewelry, hair cut short, as many women who worked with
their hands normally wore it. I was torn by two opposite feelings. I was pleased to see
Tasia and at the same time I was annoyed that a woman dressed so commonly called
to me so familiarly in front of the customers and my subordinates. I got up from my
desk and went over to her, I on one side of the counter and she on the other.
“I’m happy to see you, Tasia,” I said.
“I’m happy to see you, too, Anestis,” she said. “I didn’t know you worked here.
I came to open an account to put my savings in. How are you, Anestis? It’s been a
long time.”
I was just as eager to chat with Tasia, to find out what was new with her, but I
could not forget my position, dally about the business of the Bank, and stand around
shooting the breeze with her. I found a solution.
“Are you still at the same place?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, “I’m there with my husband.”
“I’ll come over one day for a chat.”
“Come in the evening,” she said. “Both of us work during the day.”
I handed her over to the teller and returned to my place.
I indeed went over to Tasia’s one evening. I met her husband there. They lived at the
same common level as before and I gathered that they got along well thanks to Tasia’s
ability to accept with good humor the circumstances of her life and to create a cheer-
ful ambience for them.
From the little she told me I gathered that they had gone through difficult times
after her father’s death, but she did not hesitate to find work in a garment factory, first
ironing then sewing on the machines, where she has worked ever since.
I was impressed by her husband. I believe that they are a good match. He is a
farmer, a refugee from Morphou. His name is Vasilis. Starting from scratch he set
up an independent landscaping firm here in town: taking care of the gardens around
private homes whose owners, usually well-off, have either no time or no inclination to
do this work. He equipped himself with the appropriate tools, hoes, spades, clippers,
saws; he had a phone installed, put an ad in the papers, and set out with the first call
he got.
“And did it work out well?” I asked.
“Yes, it’s going well,” he answered. “Now I’m working almost every day and
make a good living.”
He was speaking quietly and looking straight at me with his grey eyes, shaded by
thick black brows. Tall, lean, and sun-burned, he sat with his hands, two great, sinewy
bands, resting on his knees.
“Do you ever think about Morphou, your family home?” I asked.
“That’s always on my mind,” he answered. “But what can I do but hope that we’ll
get back. No matter what the situation you’re in, the first thing you have to do is to
get a livelihood.”
“Do you have brothers and sisters?”
“A sister, widowed in the first year of her marriage. Her husband was killed in
the invasion. He was in the army. She’s with our parents now in a refugee settlement.”
And he said these things calmly, without raising his voice, his hands untroubled on
his knees.
I was impressed.

As I said before, I am in touch with very few of my old school friends. Not because
I want it that way; it turned out quite contrary to my expectations. It is life, harsh re-
ality, and not ourselves, which marks out the road each of us will take. We scattered.
And most of them are now beyond my own horizon—as I am beyond theirs.
But I cannot say that even the few of us who occasionally meet do so in the
same climate of fellowship we once knew. The roads we followed, the ambitions,
the circumstances, all the many details that compose the inner horizon of each, were
different.

Pieros was one of the best students in our class. A shortish, slight fellow with large
brown eyes and thick brown hair, he was dedicated to his studies, clumsy in sports
and games. His clumsiness did not raise him up in our esteem, but we loved him
because he was honest and guileless, so much so that he was gullible to a laughable
degree. We thought he was, in a funny sort of way, a good and serviceable fellow.
After high school he attended the College of Education for the two years then
required, and came out a teacher.
I did not come across him again until only the year before last, after we had both
retired. But I used to hear about him from Aunt Myrto. She was my father’s cousin
and unbelievably competent for a woman that fat and immobile. She succeeded in
being well informed about what every one of her acquaintances was doing and going
through; she knew exactly what was happening in every household. But she knew
especially about Pieros, because she got him his wife. Aunt Myrto was absolutely set
on the notion of finding spouses for the people she liked. She considered it a merito-
rious act.
At one point she met Ismene, a girl who worked in sales at a clothing salon. She
was a bit older, with a lovely dark complexion and a slender figure. She took good care
of herself, knew how to dress tastefully, even though—or perhaps because—she had
begun to fear that she might never get married. Once or twice she confided to Aunt
Myrto her uneasiness and her secret hope that a good man would be found to make
her his wife.… he would be her pride and glory. As was natural (and Ismene knew it)
Aunt Myrto laid her plans for a meritorious act. She knew Pieros and was aware that
he was a good person, eager to do the right thing, to help others. And she touched
precisely that string of his heart to help Ismene and make her his devoted spouse. And
good Pieros, touched not only by Aunt Myrto’s words but also by Ismene’s beauty and
modesty, married her.
But Ismene was not long in showing her other side. She praised the Lord, but only
because he helped her find a husband. Then she began to hen-peck Pieros to have her
way in everything.
And good Pieros never thought for a moment that he might fight back. He just left
himself in her power. That is the story of Pieros, as Aunt Myrto recounted it to me
when I told her that I chanced upon Pieros after so many years and that I was struck
by his appearing so aged, both physically and mentally.
“His difficulties are eating away at the fellow,” Aunt Myrto informed me. “But
truth be told, he has himself to blame, too. The man who gets involved with a stub-
born woman has two ways to deal with her. One way is to pay no attention to her. The
other is to come on stronger than she does and knock the stubbornness out of her. Our
good Pieros could do neither. Instead, he buckled under and now eats his heart out
because he did so. For as long as he taught, he found solace in his work. Everyone says
he was a good teacher and loved his work. But now he doesn’t have that consolation
and he’s ended up as you see him. Who’s to blame for him?”
It never entered Myrto’s mind for an instant that she might be to blame herself,
when she applied all her expertise to get Pieros married.

Nikitas was the opposite of Pieros. The only son of a wholesale cloth merchant,
ill-mannered, he respected nothing and no one. His whims were his only guiding
principle. He was among the last in the class and he did not care.
Somewhat short and stocky, with a square jaw and curly hair, he would carry his
points by shouting more loudly that anyone else, even though he did not usually have
the slightest idea of what the conversation was about.
After high school his father sent him to London to one of the trade schools
that they call “institutes,” where he took a two-year course in finance and returned
equipped with relevant certification for continuing more effectively his economic
studies in the business, under the guidance of his father.
Now he directs the business (his father died long ago). He is a very capable
wheeler and dealer, very rich, and, naturally, passes for very clever, even though his
mental capacity—what he has of it—does not go beyond the confines of his business.
He has a private office, closed off with glass paneling, in one of the corners of
his gigantic warehouse. Two picture frames hang on the wall, one containing a pho-
tograph of his father, the founder of the enterprise, and the other his “diploma” from
the London Economics Institute.
I go once in a while to see him, just to pass the time. His conversation is pleasant,
because he is well informed about all the shenanigans and gossip of the market place.
And whenever he tells you something he thinks is funny, he breaks out in a great
guffaw.

Miltos was our poet.

He was writing verses even back in our high school years. He was a regular bor-
rower from the literature section of the school library, taking out a book and returning
it in two or three days only to get another. One would have thought that he was in a
hurry lest he leave one unread.
I could never understand that appetite for books. Sure, reading your lessons is
necessary to get your grades, to pass your exams, but to read just to be reading—that
I do not understand.
Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that most everyone in our class had interests dif-
fering from those that occupied Miltos, we liked him because he was friendly to ev-
eryone, and he was never swell-headed about his poetical proficiency or the praises he
got from the teachers or his good grades. Even his appearance—skinny, with sparse,
light brown hair and big, blue, optimistic eyes—made him likeable.
He went to Athens to study literature, but lasted only three years. He had to do
without to make it that far. His father, a supervisor at the public works, had had a
stroke and was not in any position to send him the little money he did send.
He came back, then, and has been living ever since, into his sixties, giving pri-
vate lessons to the weaker students at the high school. In time he found a second occu-
pation as a proofreader for a daily newspaper. A difficult life. Yet he remained just as
he was back in high school, head in the clouds, trusting in humanity, as he says, and
writing poems. (From what I hear, he is one of our most distinguished poets.)
We see one another now and then, early in the morning, when I chance to be out
in my garden, as I often am at that hour, and he is out for a walk. The apartment build-
ing where he lives is not far from my house. We stand around talking, sometimes on
opposite sides of the garden fence, sometimes in the garden. We have friendly talks,
but we each preserve our own way of thinking and of living.
I am satisfied with myself and my way of life, and I would not exchange it for the
way Miltos lives. What can he earn from his two jobs? Chicken feed. And for him to
have a wife and a daughter Vathoula’s age! And yet he seems carefree, or so I gather
from seeing him always calm and thinking about things unrelated to his personal
circumstances. I picture him as dedicated to something he believes true and beautiful,
unheeding of the very human instinct of self-interest. But in spite of the fact that I am
sure his head is in the clouds, I like and admire Miltos. Is that not strange?

Kotsos was full of life, a non-stop mover and shaker and general hell-raiser. He liked
to be in charge and was almost always the one to speak up for the class whenever there
was to be some showdown.
He studied law, went into politics, and became a leading political figure.
I follow him in the newspaper and watch him on TV whenever he happens to be
on. He is, in fact, an able politician and a good speaker, especially when he forgets
that he does not believe what he is saying. With his deep, official-sounding, somewhat
gravelly voice and the way he has of emphasizing his words by flailing the air with
his fist, he persuades you to believe what he says, since it is always in agreement with
what you want to hear.

Giosifis, nicknamed “Arab” from his darkish complexion, was always first in the
religion classes.
When his father sent him off to Athens to study, we thought he would take up
theology.
I have not had any communication with him since then. Our relations have never
been cordial. I used to be annoyed by his dedication to whatever had anything to do
with religion, and by his ability to look good in church with his show of zeal. Not that
I am not in sympathy with him: I, too, think that every devout man with any sense
knows that it is to his advantage to make a show of his devotion. Giosifis gets to me
in this matter because he is better at it than I am.
I was puzzled, then, when I found out that he returned as a doctor, and a special-
ist at that. After he graduated in Athens, he did two years of post-graduate work in a
university in London on a fellowship underwritten by some Christian brotherhood.
Back here he married very richly, thrived in his profession, built a palatial clinic, and
got rich.
Even though I still cannot stand him, I admit that he is a very competent man.

A number of others stayed here to live, but since then we have met only on rare oc-
casions, and I do not know much about their lives. Things change and circumstances
arise for each of us which willy-nilly alienate us from each other as if we were not
living in the same place.
Minas entered public service initially under the English, and continued under the
democracy. He went far, up to the level of director.
Now he is retired, too.
Tasos was in insurance. Now he is a representative of a large English insurance
company and earns a lot of money. He even owns race horses.
Louis, cute little Louis, who loved music and took piano lessons from our high
school days, kept on playing until he passed the examinations that take place here in
the British Council. He founded a music conservatory which he is still director of.
They say that even today, at his age, he is still a stylish fellow. He never married. He
lives with his mother, who is over eighty.
For most of us Pambos was nothing more than a dreamer. He milked his ideas
out of his favorite books, which he would read and then speak beautifully about social
justice, equality, and other such things.
He entered the work force as soon as he got out of high school, but did not apply
his common sense. He did not think to stick to one job and get ahead. He just wasted
his time writing and publishing in the press comments and polemics to defend his
socialist ideas or to attack whatever seemed shady to him.
Finally, he became a reporter and continues writing his articles up to the present
with the same spirit and the same devotion.
The only thing that he has acquired after so many years of work is the good rep-
utation he enjoys among the common folk and part of the intellectua1 set. But if you
looked at the matter dispassionately, how many of the commoners or the intellectua1s
who agree with his ideas would be willing to overlook their personal interests or even
to stop pursuing and working for them to the exclusion of all else? They all proclaim
together their esteem for whatever contributes to the good of all, but individually each
one sees to it that he comes off as well as possible.

I study the photograph again and find it strange. I have no clue about the rest of them,
where their lot placed them, where their roads took them, what they look like now.
It’s impossible for me to imagine them as different from what I see right here in the
photo, as if the forty years gone by had not existed for them. And strangest of all is
that the disappearance of the passing years suddenly brings me, too, back to that time,
to recreate it in my mind, or rather in my heart, to relive it as though it were yesterday,
and to want it back.
The good part is that such seizures of the imagination come over me but rarely
and do not last long.
I find my solid self again. And I am puzzled: what can it be that now and again
compels me—me, the practical, successful man—to pine after those times when I
was still young and green, and unaware of what I wanted. Here I am, satisfied with
myself and with my life, and yet suddenly willy-nilly a cloud of vague feelings moves
inside me, feelings I have long ceased to bother with.
I am puzzled, but I do not find an answer.
1988
The Cyprus Question: International Politics and
the Survival of the Republic of Cyprus
Van Coufoudakis
This essay is dedicated to Theo Stavrou, a colleague, a friend, a historian, and a

Cypriot par excellence. From his position at the University of Minnesota he pro-
moted the study of Greece and Cyprus in the academy and the community. He taught
courses, edited journals and books, and organized conferences and lectures on topics
of interest to Hellenism. These activities have provided a most valuable service to
those with interests in Modern Greek Studies. Moreover, Theo Stavrou contributed
to the development of the University of Cyprus, the first public university to be estab-
lished in postindependence Cyprus. For these and for his many other contributions
we owe Theo Stavrou a word of thanks.
This essay is about his homeland, Cyprus. It addresses the international dimen-
sions of the problems that beset sovereign Cyprus and threaten its independent exis-
tence and cultural heritage.

In 1959, the governments of Great Britain, Turkey, and Greece arrived at a series
of agreements providing for the independence of Cyprus from British colonial rule.
The London and Zurich agreements ended a four-year-long Greek Cypriot uprising
against the colonial authorities. However, the anticolonial struggle was complicated
by the Cold War interests of the superpowers, by political conditions in Greece and
Turkey, by rivalries between the two countries, by the relations of each of the Cypriot
communities to their respective motherlands, and by Britain’s divide-and-rule tactics.
The London and Zurich agreements on Cyprus provided the rigid framework
on which the constitution of the Republic of Cyprus was based. Eminent constitu-
tional experts characterized the Cypriot constitution as unique and unprecedented1
because of the unusual veto powers reserved for the Turkish Cypriot minority and
the difficulty of amending the constitution. Confidential American diplomatic as-
1
Thomas Ehrlich, “Cyprus, the ‘Warlike Isle’: Origins and Elements of the Current Crisis,”
Stanford Law Review 18, 6 (1966): 1021–98; also, see Stanley A. de Smith, The New Common-
wealth and Its Constitutions (London: Stevens and Sons, 1964).
308 Van Coufoudakis
sessments2 accurately pointed to the likelihood of deadlock and long-term instability

in the new republic because of these complicated agreements. This was indeed the
case. Minority obstructionism3 led President Makarios of Cyprus to propose thirteen
constitutional amendments late in 1963, which were rejected first by the government
of Turkey and then by the Turkish Cypriots, who promptly withdrew from the govern-
ment. By December 1963, intercommunal violence had erupted on Cyprus, threaten-
ing the stability of southeastern Europe and NATO’s cohesion, and opening the door
to possible Soviet involvement.
In view of the limitations imposed on the Cypriot republic by its guarantor pow-
ers, the government of Cyprus sought to consolidate its independence and sovereignty
through its participation in international organizations and by actively maintaining
diplomatic relations around the world.
Thus, the crisis that erupted on Cyprus in December 1963 set in motion a number
of policies whose fundamental assumptions are still affecting the evolution of this
perpetuated dispute. One such policy is that of the internationalization of the Cy-
prus dispute. The government of Cyprus saw the United Nations and other regional
organizations as a means of upholding the legitimacy of the Cypriot republic and its
government and of safeguarding its sovereignty and territorial integrity, especially in
the aftermath of the withdrawal of the Turkish Cypriots from the government of the
republic, and Turkey’s military threats against Cyprus. In contrast, de-internation-
alization was the policy thrust of the United States, whose preference was for quiet
diplomacy through NATO, or through a Greco-Turkish dialogue. Washington sought
to protect and promote American and Turkish interests in the dispute,4 because Wash-
ington valued Turkey’s strategic importance in the region. Washington and other in-
fluential actors viewed the Cyprus problem through the prism of international and
regional politics, thus distorting the internal dimensions of the dispute. This has been
a constant in the evolution of the Cyprus problem.
Since the independence of Cyprus in August 1960, successive Cypriot govern-
ments, against overwhelming odds, have had as their primary policy priority the
maintenance of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the republic and the recog-
nition of its government. Thus, the issue of the continuity of the Republic of Cyprus
has been another constant in the evolution of this dispute. From December 1963 to
the 1974 Turkish invasion, the republic survived despite threats to its existence which
included the threat of a Turkish invasion, Turkish Cypriot secessionist activities, and
the destabilization of the Cyprus government by the Greek junta. There were also
diplomatic initiatives by the United States, NATO, Greece, and Turkey that sought
2
United States Department of State, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Intelligence Report
No. 8047, “Analysis of the Cyprus Agreements,” 14 July 1959.
3
On this, see Stanley Kyriakides, Cyprus: Constitutionalism and Crisis Government (Phila-
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968).
4
A classic example is the rejection of UN mediator Galo Plaza’s 1965 report. This report is
one of the most perceptive documents on the Cyprus problem.
The Cyprus Question 309
the limitation, if not also the termination, of the independence of Cyprus. These ini-
tiatives were justified as serving Western strategic interests in the region.5
Under the urgency of the situation a UN peacekeeping force (UNFICYP) was
placed on the island in March 1964, under the control of the Security Council. Al-
though significantly reduced in size, the UNFICYP remains on Cyprus to this day.
Peacemaking complemented the UN’s peacekeeping activities under the good offices
of the secretary-general. However, UN peacemaking initiatives were systematically
rejected or undermined when they contradicted Washington’s objectives.6
In seeking a settlement of the Cyprus problem acceptable to Turkey, three other
tactics were used: (1) the destabilization of the government of Cyprus by the junta
ruling Greece (1967–74); (2) the fostering of Turkish Cypriot secessionist activities
in Cyprus through the formation of Turkish Cypriot enclaves, funded and armed by
Turkey; and (3) the threat of force against the sovereign island state. This included the
bombing of Cyprus by the Turkish Air Force in the summer of 1964, and the threat
of a Turkish invasion in June 1964 and November 1967. Washington was instrumen-
tal in stopping both invasions. In the 1964 incident, President Lyndon B. Johnson,
apprehensive of Moscow’s warning to Turkey and reluctant to face another confron-
tation with the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, delivered
an “ultimatum” to Prime Minister Inonu. It should be noted, however, that, as Dean
Acheson’s 1964 Geneva initiatives showed, Washington disagreed not with Turkey’s
objectives in Cyprus, but only with its tactics, which risked broader American secu-
rity interests. The 1967 American intervention also took place at a time of regional
instability, following a devastating Arab-Israeli war. Moreover, the concessions made
by the Greek junta to Cyrus Vance appeared to satisfy Turkey.
Why then did Washington and NATO allow Turkey to invade Cyprus in 1974?
While the coup from Athens provided the rationalizations for the invasion, the ab-
sence of a Russian threat gave Henry Kissinger the opportunity to permanently
change the negotiating balance of power in Cyprus and to satisfy Turkey’s long-stand-
ing demands on the island. The post-1972 detente with the Soviet Union and the
Kissinger-Gromyko understandings about regional superpower interests made So-
viet-American relations very different from those of 1964. Kissinger assessed the
role of the Soviet Union during the 1974 crisis in terms of what the Russians did not
do. Moreover, contrary to his attribution of the 1974 crisis to the Watergate paraly-
5
Following the constitutional crisis of December 1963, Washington and London considered
various peacekeeping and peacemaking options through NATO, through the replacement of
President Makarios, and even through limited Turkish military actions in Cyprus. The chief
architect of these policies was George Ball. Dean Acheson’s Geneva initiatives in 1964 and the
Greek-Turkish “Lisbon Consensus” of June 1971 were additional examples of American-in-
spired attempts to limit or even terminate Cypriot independence.
6
As in the case of the 1965 Galo Plaza report and the mediation initiative by Secretary-Gen-
eral U-Thant in 1971.
310 Van Coufoudakis
sis,7 Kissinger had far greater opportunity to manipulate events without White House
supervision.
With nearly 38 percent of its territory under foreign occupation and its legitimate
president in virtual exile, Cyprus had reached another fork on its tortuous road to
independence. The Greek-sponsored coup of 15 July 1974 not only gave Turkey the
opportunity to attain a long-standing goal, it also destroyed the agreement reached
between the two communities on 13 July 1974 on the issues that had divided them
since 1963. Needless to say, Rauf Denktash had consented to virtually all “thirteen
points” that had triggered the 1963 constitutional crisis. In the aftermath of the Turk-
ish invasion, Cypriot diplomats, with support from various foreign governments, the
US Congress, and the Greek-American community, were able to gain Washington’s
reluctant recognition of the continuity of the Republic of Cyprus and its government
since the 1963 constitutional crisis. Even though Cyprus won this diplomatic battle,
with all its important consequences for the long-term settlement of the dispute, this
issue remains a major point of leverage for American diplomats. This is especially
true in the aftermath of the 1983 Turkish Cypriot Unilateral Declaration of Indepen-
dence (UDI) and the creation of the so-called Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus
in the occupied areas.
Another constant in the evolution of the Cyprus problem involves the relations
between Athens and Nicosia. Since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Cyprus
has been an issue affecting popular sentiment in Greece and, consequently, Greek
politics. Cypriots consider themselves culturally and historically to be part of the
Greek nation despite the island’s geographical distance from the Greek mainland and
the unique characteristics of Cypriot culture. Successive Greek governments con-
fronted the dilemma of the domestic political pressures created by each phase of the
Cyprus issue, which was ripe for exploitation by Greek opposition parties, and in the
post–World War II period complicated Greece’s pro-Western foreign and security
policy. When forced to choose, Greece relegated the issue of Cyprus to a secondary
priority. This trend persists until today, further providing a source of policy continu-
ity.8 The Cyprus problem caused the downfall of many Greek governments. Thus, in
contrast to the total dependence of the Turkish Cypriots on Turkey, especially prior
to the last decade of the twentieth century, Greek Cypriots, despite their dependence
on Greece, were able to influence Greek policies and politics. In turn, Greece, often
acting as the Ethnikon Kentron (the national center of Hellenism), attempted to im-
pose its policies on the Cypriots. This reached a climax when the junta ruling Greece
(1967–74) destabilized and eventually overthrew the Cyprus government in a coup
that provided Turkey with the pretext to invade Cyprus. The bitter aftermath of the
invasion and the inability of the newly restored democratic Greek government to
stop the second phase of the Turkish invasion in August 1974 brought relations be-
7
Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 192–239,
330–43.
8
The latest examples are the decisions surrounding the deployment of the S-300 anti-aircraft
missile system in December 1998, and the impact of the Greek-Turkish rapprochement on the
current phase of negotiations on Cyprus.
tween Greece and Cyprus to a new level of maturity. Each side gained a better under-
standing of the other’s limitations and commitments. Political elites in both countries
viewed the invasion and occupation of Cyprus not as an isolated event but as part of
the broader threat posed by Turkey’s revisionist policies in the Aegean and in Thrace.
This required coordination, consultation, and cooperation between the two countries
in diplomatic, economic, and military matters. Athens, publicly at least, defined its
role as a supportive one, while policy decision-making was centered in Nicosia.
A final element of continuity characteristic of the Cyprus problem has been the
consistency of Turkish policy and its adaptation to the evolving international envi-
ronment. The 1959 Zurich and London agreements formalized Turkey’s position as a
party of equal interest in Cyprus. While Turkey adopted a strict constructionist view
of the Cypriot constitution and of the degree of the independence of the new republic,
it liberally interpreted its role as a guarantor power, especially following the Decem-
ber 1963 constitutional crisis. Turkey argued that the right of intervention under the
Treaty of Guarantee included the right of unilateral military intervention in Cyprus,
even though such an interpretation was in conflict with the UN Charter.
Turkey also maintained that the Turkish Cypriots were one of the two co-founder
communities and not a minority in the Republic of Cyprus. This is why it promoted
their maximum autonomy and opposed any limitation of the veto powers granted to
the Turkish Cypriots by the Zurich and London agreements. Following the 1963 con-
stitutional crisis, Turkey continued financing, arming, training, and directing Turkish
Cypriot politics, and managing the movement of Turkish Cypriots into enclaves not
under government control. These actions in turn, along with the various schemes
for the partition of Cyprus, enhanced the suspicions of the Cypriot government as
to the motivations of Turkey and its surrogates on the island. The issue of the degree
of Turkish Cypriot autonomy confounded intercommunal negotiations from 1968 to
1974, because these demands were seen as a step towards the partition of the island.
The fear of partition affected Greek Cypriot negotiating behavior even prior to inde-
pendence, and has remained a constant of Cypriot policy since 1960.9
In the aftermath of the Turkish invasion and the escalating Greco-Turkish con-
frontation, Turkey lost interest in a traditional-type partition of Cyprus, as this would
have extended Greece’s border to Turkey’s southern coast. Instead, Turkey shifted its
position in favor of a loose confederation that would maintain a weakened Republic
of Cyprus under Turkey’s hegemonial control.
The 1974 Turkish Invasion and Its Aftermath
Turkey’s 1974 invasion of Cyprus, the ethnic cleansing that was carried out by the
Turkish army, and the occupation of nearly 38 percent of the republic’s territory not
9
The issue of partition was first raised in 1955 in discussions between Greece and Turkey, and
the idea was endorsed by the United States. Britain’s Macmillan plan, proposed in the closing
days of colonial rule, would have partitioned Cyprus between Greece and Turkey. The idea of
partition reappeared in various forms under the 1964 Acheson plan, the Toumbas-Caglayangil
1966 protocol, and under the Greek-Turkish “Lisbon Consensus” of 1971.
312 Van Coufoudakis
only changed the negotiating balance between the two communities but also drasti-
cally altered the demographic makeup of the island. The organized influx of Turkish
mainland settlers, who now appear to outnumber the Turkish Cypriot population,
added a new dimension to the problem.
The search for a comprehensive solution began in 1975 in Vienna and has contin-
ued to this day. After twenty-six years, some one hundred UN resolutions on Cyprus,
and the involvement of special emissaries, representatives of the secretary-general,
and other international mediators, the problem remains unresolved. At least four fac-
tors account for the perpetuation of the Cyprus problem. These include: (1) the failure
to implement the UN Security Council resolutions on Cyprus; (2) the prevalence of
strategic, economic, and political considerations over a functional and viable solu-
tion; (3) the intransigent policies of successive Turkish governments; and (4) the po-
litical conditions existing in each Cypriot community.
Washington’s approach, in contrast to that of Nicosia, emphasized the de-inter-
nationalization of the Cyprus problem. All UN Security Council resolutions on Cy-
prus were adopted unanimously. They contain the fundamental principles for a viable
solution of the problem. However, Washington succeeded in protecting Turkey from
any effective sanctions for its violations of international law; it has watered down the
wording of many resolutions, while introducing terminology compatible with Amer-
ican and Turkish goals; and it has opposed the implementation of these resolutions.10
President Gerald Ford, under considerable domestic and international pressure,
continued American recognition of the restored democratic government of Cyprus as
the government of the republic, despite the Turkish occupation of nearly 38 percent
of the republic’s territory. That recognition was continued by President Jimmy Carter
in the aftermath of President Makarios’s death in August 1977 and former foreign
minister Spyros Kyprianou’s succession. As previously indicated, the issues of the
continuity of the republic and recognition of the government as the government of
all of Cyprus remained a constant of Cypriot policy. This goal attained even greater
urgency in the aftermath of the 1974 invasion and occupation, and the unilateral dec-
laration of independence of the occupied areas in 1983, when the so-called Turkish
Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) was established under Turkish auspices. Even
though the TRNC has been recognized only by Turkey, the mere threat of its recog-
nition by other states and American pressure, particularly in the last five years, for
“acknowledgment” of the existence of a “political entity” in the occupied areas has
become a new source of diplomatic pressure on the Greek Cypriots.
10
The issue of implementation of UN resolutions gained prominence following the 1990
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and American demands for Iraq’s compliance with all UN Security
Council resolutions. Washington has argued that the resolutions on Iraq were adopted under
Chapter 7 of the Charter and not under Chapter 6, as in the case of Cyprus. International law
experts argue that Article 25 of the Charter obligates UN members to carry out all Security
Council resolutions.
Washington’s post-1974 Cyprus policy attempted to minimize the impact of the

Turkish invasion on Greek-Turkish relations,11 while also engaging in peacemaking
efforts on Cyprus without undermining America’s strategic and economic ties to Tur-
key. Washington therefore focused on obtaining concessions from the Greek Cypriots
in order to achieve movement on the peacemaking front. This was recognized by Tur-
key and the Turkish Cypriots, who anticipated that their goals would be met through
a long-term, consistent, and intransigent policy that anticipated Greek Cypriot ac-
ceptance of the reality created by the 1974 invasion and occupation. American policy
statements and peacemaking initiatives reflect this balancing act.
The first formal American policy statement on Cyprus following the 1974 Turk-
ish invasion was Kissinger’s 22 September 1975 statement before the UN General As-
sembly. His “Five Points” on a Cyprus settlement included acceptance of the indepen-
dence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of Cyprus. He emphasized the need for
a territorial allocation that accounted for the economic and security interests of both
communities and for Turkish Cypriot autonomy. Since then, for the Greek Cypriots,
the challenge has been getting Washington to fulfill promises included in policy state-
ments that appear to contain basic Cypriot objectives. The stalemate in the Vienna
rounds of talks brought Clark Clifford, President Carter’s emissary, to Cyprus in Feb-
ruary 1977. His primary purpose was to express Washington’s support for substantive
talks on Cyprus reflecting constitutional tradeoffs for territory. He therefore sought
from the Cypriot government unilateral concessions that would bring the Turks and
the Turkish Cypriots back to the negotiating table with more flexible positions.12 This
included the fulfillment of the Makarios-Denktash agreement on a bicommunal fed-
eration, which constituted a major shift in Greek Cypriot policy. Clifford employed
a negotiating tactic that I describe as the “salamization” of the Cyprus problem. This
involved getting a unilateral concession from the Greek Cypriots without anything in
return from the Turkish Cypriots, in order to restart stalemated negotiations. Negotia-
tions would end in a new stalemate due to Turkish Cypriot/Turkish intransigence, and
the cycle would repeat itself. Clifford represented President Carter, whose principled
stand on the Cyprus problem during the 1976 American presidential campaign had
raised high hopes for an early, just, and viable solution of the Cyprus problem both in
Cyprus and in the Greek-American community. This is why influential Cypriot lead-
ers feel bitter to this day about the sincerity and credibility of American emissaries.
Clifford’s visit came days after a UN-sponsored meeting between President Ma-
karios and Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash that produced a set of broad guide-
lines for the solution of the Cyprus problem.13 A couple of years later, Makarios’s
successor attempted to refine these guidelines in another meeting with Denktash.
11
The possibility of a Greek-Turkish conflict, the reintegration of Greece in NATO’s military
wing, etc.
12
Miltiades Christodoulou, Κύπρος, η Διχοτόμηση. Μία Πορεία Χωρίς Ανακοπή [Cyprus the
partition: A course without pause] (Nicosia: Proodos, 1996), 164.
13
Republic of Cyprus, Public Information Office, Cyprus Intercommunal Talks (Nicosia:
P.I.O., 1979), 23.
314 Van Coufoudakis
However, the Makarios-Denktash agreement, which was based on the constitutional

principle of a bicommunal federation, changed the nature of the peacemaking efforts
on Cyprus and opened the way to constitutional schemes akin to confederation de-
manded by the Turkish Cypriots and Turkey.
In the spring and summer of 1978 the Carter administration, contrary to its
pre-election promises, intensified its efforts to lift the congressionally mandated arms
embargo on Turkey. This once more reflected Washington’s opposition to any sanc-
tions on Turkey, based on the rationalization that sanctions would only strengthen
Turkey’s intransigence. The embargo had at any rate become a merely symbolic act,
because the executive branch systematically undermined the congressional action by
making it possible for Turkey to procure weapons through NATO and other sources.
President Carter narrowly succeeded in lifting the embargo late in the summer of
1978 by promising to redouble Washington’s peacemaking efforts in addition to pro-
viding Congress with bimonthly reports on the progress made towards a resolution
of the Cyprus problem. These symbolic and rather meaningless reports present sani-
tized accounts of “progress” while failing to criticize Turkey for its actions. Turkey’s
astute diplomacy has not failed to notice the fundamental assumptions of American
policy.
Some three months after the lifting of the arms embargo on Turkey, Washing-
ton presented its first comprehensive plan for the resolution of the Cyprus problem.
Known as the “ABC” plan14 because of its co-sponsorship by Britain and Canada,
the plan was the brainchild of Matthew Nimetz, legal adviser at the US Department
of State. The plan presented on 10 November 1978, on the eve of the discussion of
the Cyprus problem at the United Nations,15 included detailed constitutional propos-
als indicating Washington’s preference for a loose federation. The plan tempered its
acceptance of the UN resolutions with “other agreements,” i.e., the 1977 Makarios/
Denktash agreement, and left open to negotiation issues critical to the Greek Cypriots
such as those of territory, security, the withdrawal of the occupation forces, etc. Even
though the “Nimetz Plan” failed to break the deadlock in the intercommunal talks, it
is fair to say that it has become the foundation of subsequent American and UN initia-
tives on Cyprus. For this reason, the first substantive American plan is an important
landmark in the post-1974 history of Cyprus.
The 1983 unilateral declaration of independence by the Turkish Cypriots was the
culmination of Turkey’s long-standing plans on Cyprus, despite Turkish arguments
that Turkish Cypriot leader Denktash acted unilaterally. Even though Denktash was
slowly gaining stature in the Turkish political world, his dependence on Turkish eco-
nomic and military support made such a move virtually impossible without a “green
light” from Turkey’s nationalist military establishment. Even though a rudimentary
Turkish Cypriot “administration” attempted to control the Turkish Cypriot enclaves
that were established in the aftermath of the 1963 constitutional crisis, and a suc-
14
Ibid., 62–65.
15
An old American tactic intended to preempt discussion at the UN that could “negatively
impact” a new round of talks on Cyprus.
cessor “administration” was set up in the aftermath of the invasion, the 1983 UDI
was a turning point in the evolution of the Cyprus problem. The so-called TRNC
remains unrecognized by all states except Turkey. It has also been condemned by
all international and regional organizations,16 while states have been called upon not
to recognize this entity. Moreover, national and regional courts have refused to give
validity to acts of the so-called TRNC. However, Turkey has held steadfast in its ac-
tions, hoping that time will bring about an acknowledgment of the post-1974 realities,
first by the international community and eventually by the government of Cyprus. At
the time of this writing, Turkey’s long-term strategy appears to be working, while the
government of Cyprus is fighting rearguard actions at the United Nations and else-
where attempting to stem Turkey’s attempts to upgrade the standing of Denktash’s
status and that of his regime. The creation of the so-called TRNC has also given
impetus to the Turkish Cypriot calls for a confederation of two equal, sovereign, and
recognized states.
Washington’s diplomatic efforts face a number of dilemmas: how to keep the
parties talking even though the gap separating their positions has increased, and how
to get the Greek Cypriots to make the ultimate concession, i.e., acknowledgment of
the TRNC, in what amounts to a constitutional confederation.
The Cyprus Problem since the End of the Cold War
The last decade of the twentieth century brought significant changes in the interna-
tional dimension of the Cyprus problem. The end of the Cold War left the United
States as the dominant power in the international system. The collapse of the former
Soviet Union reduced even further Russia’s limited influence in this dispute. The en-
suing collapse of Yugoslavia restored legitimacy to partition and ethnic cleansing as
solutions to ethnic problems, creating a bad precedent for Cyprus. Finally, an invigo-
rated European Union set a new framework for expansion in post–Cold War Europe.
Cyprus concluded an association agreement with the European Community in
1972. In 1990, the government of Cyprus applied formally for membership in the
European Community, and since then membership in the EU became a top Cypriot
policy priority. In the fall of 1993 the Council of Ministers of the European Union
accepted the Cypriot application, despite concerns expressed by the commission over
the lack of a political settlement. Integration talks with Cyprus commenced in March
1998. The European Union recognized the continuity of the Republic of Cyprus and
its government, and this was reflected in actions of European courts and other EU
bodies. The prospect of membership and the application of the acquis communautaire
offered new options for resolving intractable issues, such as those of human rights,
borders, and security. The United States, until the Clinton administration, had not
looked favorably at the involvement of the EU in the Cyprus problem. The change in
American policy served a number of objectives. It provided a new source of pressure
on the Cypriot government to resolve the problem. Working in cooperation with Brit-
16
UN Security Council Resolution 541, adopted 18 November 1983.
316 Van Coufoudakis
ain, Germany, and other EU members, Washington promoted the idea of a solution
prior to the entry of Cyprus to the EU. This was done despite public statements at the
highest level of the EU that even though a political settlement was desirable prior to
membership, the lack of a settlement would not stop the integration of Cyprus. Wash-
ington’s advocacy of a solution prior to entry gave Turkey an indirect veto over the
membership of Cyprus, a power that Turkey did not formally have. Further, a solution
prior to integration would legitimize derogations from recognized human rights17
that normally would be protected under the acquis and other European legislation.
Washington’s policy change also served another objective. By pressing the Europeans
to grant candidate status to Turkey,18 Washington gained political credit in Ankara by
being Turkey’s sole promoter among the reluctant Europeans.
The diplomatic activism of the 1990s carried over into the new millennium. UN
Security Council resolutions on Cyprus called on the secretary-general to utilize his
“good offices” in the peacemaking process. He was therefore primarily responsible
for maintaining the dialogue between the government of Cyprus and the Turkish
Cypriots. In this task the secretary-general has been assisted by his own special rep-
resentatives, in addition to the special representatives of the United States, Great
Britain, and other foreign countries, initiatives by secretaries of state and foreign sec-
retaries, and the usual embassy level contacts. The involvement of so many foreign
diplomats under the guise of supporting the secretary-general raised questions about
the coordination of their efforts, their commitment to a substantive process, their
knowledge of the issues, and the players involved in these talks.19 There were also
questions about the aims and the tactics employed by these negotiators.
The Americans in particular expressed their frustration with the inconclusive
negotiations. They attributed the lack of progress to the two parties and their “lack of
political will” to make necessary concessions. However, Washington did not question
its assumptions about Turkey and its foreign policy, and its unwillingness to support
the implementation of UN resolutions on Cyprus.
The American approach appeared to be along the lines of “keep them talking,”
even though the gap separating the two sides was growing larger each year with new
Turkish/Turkish Cypriot demands. The negotiating initiatives fluctuated between at-
tempts at a comprehensive solution through a framework agreement arrived at in
high-level meetings, to limited confidence-building measures that could open the
way to a comprehensive solution. Some of these meetings involved face-to-face ne-
17
In particular, the implementation of the “three freedoms,” i.e., movement, settlement, and
property ownership.
18
Candidate status was granted to Turkey at the Helsinki meeting of the EU in December
1999. Turkey was expected to meet a number of conditions by 2004, prior to the commence-
ment of integration talks.
19
For example, President Clerides and Denktash have been involved in the Cyprus problem
since its colonial days.
gotiations between the president of Cyprus and Turkish Cypriot leader Denktash,20
proximity talks,21 or even informal exploratory talks among foreign representatives
and representatives of the two sides.22
These meetings often produced documents such as the 1992 Boutros-Ghali
“set of ideas” which reflected commonalities in the positions of the two sides and
identified areas in need of further negotiation, or the 1993–94 proposals for confi-
dence-building measures. These documents could not break the deadlock because the
Turkish Cypriots used them as stepping stones to promote their separatist policies.
On 29 August 1994, the so-called Turkish Cypriot Assembly endorsed Denktash’s
negotiating position dropping federation as the aim of the comprehensive settlement
in favor of a confederation. Needless to say that the formal shift violated the 1977 and
1979 high-level agreements and the UN resolution that endorsed the principle of a bi-
zonal-bicommunal federation. While the Turkish Cypriots and Turkey continued with
their unilateral actions,23 the government of Cyprus negotiated along lines agreed
upon since 1977. Successive Cypriot governments never had the political courage to
force the negotiations back to a zero base to counter Turkish Cypriot unilateral ac-
tions. By proving that they negotiated in good faith, the Greek Cypriots were forced
into continuous concessions in order to keep the negotiations alive without any reci-
procity from the other side.
In a series on “non-papers” the secretary-general’s representatives in the 1997
face-to-face talks in Troutbeck, New York and Glion, Switzerland attempted to
“bridge the gap” in the position of the two sides by attempting to force the Cyprus
government closer to the idea of confederation and of an acceptance of Turkish Cy-
priot sovereignty. The government of Cyprus, however, did take some bold initiatives
in an attempt to break the deadlock on security issues by presenting on 17 December
1993 a detailed demilitarization proposal. Turkey and the Turkish Cypriots rejected
this proposal and insisted on a continued Turkish military presence and intervention
rights. The United States in turn has used this proposal to push for Greek Cypriot de-
militarization, while maintaining a smaller Turkish military presence in the occupied
areas with limited intervention rights in a reconstituted international force, preferably
under NATO command.
Thus, by the end of the Clinton administration, the Cyprus problem was treated
not as a problem of invasion and occupation but as an intercommunal dispute. The
break-up of Yugoslavia had given new legitimacy to confederation schemes and to
ethnic separation. Turkey maintained that the Cyprus problem had been solved in
1974, and that the purpose of any negotiations was to legitimize the condition created
since 1974, while clarifying issues of borders and property compensation. Turkey’s
20
Such as those between President Vassiliou and Denktash in New York in July and October
1992, the May 1993 meeting in New York between President Clerides and Denktash, and those
of 1997 at Troutbeck, New York, Glion, Switzerland, and Nicosia.
21
Such as those in the current phase of negotiations in Geneva.
22
Informal talks held in London during the spring of 1995.
23
The 1983 Turkish Cypriot UDI, the formal abandonment of federation in 1994, etc.
318 Van Coufoudakis
long-term strategy on Cyprus was finally paying off. Aware of American attitudes on
the importance of Turkey, it considered the de facto recognition of the political entity
in the occupied areas to be a matter of time, and that international mediators would
force the Cyprus government to acknowledge that reality.
In the second term of the Clinton administration the resolution of the Cyprus
problem and the improvement of Greek-Turkish relations became a higher priority of
American foreign policy. Greek-Turkish relations entered a new phase of instability
in the aftermath of the January 1996 crisis over the Imia islets. Since 1974, Cyprus
burdened Greek-Turkish relations even though implicitly it was not a Greek-Turkish
issue. A resolution of the Cyprus problem was expected to have a positive effect on
Greek-Turkish relations, while an improvement in Greek-Turkish relations would cre-
ate a more positive climate for the resolution of the Cyprus dispute.
Three other developments directly impacted the negotiations on Cyprus. First was
the European Court of Human Rights ruling on the Loizidou case on 18 December
1996, which upheld not only the continuity of the Republic of Cyprus but once more
held Turkey accountable for its control of the occupied areas and the consequent loss
of Loizidou’s enjoyment of her property rights.24 This ruling directly impacted the
American and Turkish attempt to resolve property issues through compensation and
by limiting the rights of settlement and property ownership in the occupied areas by
Greek Cypriots. The second development related to the killing in cold blood of un-
armed Greek Cypriot demonstrators along the dividing line near Dehrynia in October
1996 by Turkish Cypriot security forces and members of Turkey’s right-wing terrorist
group, the “Grey Wolves.”
The third issue was the joint decision of the governments of Greece and Cyprus
to acquire the S-300 anti-aircraft missile system to enhance Cypriot air defenses in
view of Turkey’s overwhelming air superiority. Washington did not allow the sale of
American defensive weapons to Cyprus. It also opposed the deployment of the S-300
system in Cyprus, while remaining virtually silent as Turkey threatened military ac-
tion against Cyprus in the event the anti-aircraft system were to be deployed. Under
American pressure, in December 1998 the government of Cyprus announced that
the S-300s would not be deployed in Cyprus but, instead, would be sent to Greece
for deployment on the island of Crete. This decision effectively destroyed myth of a
Greece-Cyprus unified defense dogma. Turkey had threatened the use of force, and
Greece and Cyprus blinked. For Turkey, this was a significant victory, as it proved
that its diplomats could rely on their country’s military strength to achieve their ob-
jectives. Washington in turn recognized Turkey as a regional hegemonial power.
Greek-Turkish relations reached a low point with the arrest of Kurdish leader Ab-
dullah Ocalan in Kenya in the spring of 1999.25 The Ocalan affair caused a shake-up
24
The Loizidou ruling, along with the US Federal District Court ruling on the Kanakaria mo-
saics, had significant political and legal implications. The European Court of Human Rights
ruling on the Loizidou case remains unimplemented at this time, despite calls by the Council
of Ministers of the Council of Europe for Turkey’s compliance.
25
Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdish rebellion against Turkey, had been evicted
from Syria in October 1988 after Turkey threatened military action against Syria. In his quest
in the Greek Foreign Ministry. George Papandreou, son of the late Greek Prime Min-
ister Andreas Papandreou, assumed command of Greek foreign policy. The impact
of the Ocalan affair and a summer of devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Greece
gave Papandreou the opportunity to take bold initiatives vis-à-vis Turkey. These ini-
tiatives, and especially the support Greece extended at the Helsinki EU meeting to
Turkey’s EU candidacy in December 1999, improved the image of Greek foreign
policy in Europe and in the United States.26 The conditions imposed at Helsinki on
Turkey’s candidacy placed the ball squarely in Turkey’s court and in the court of the
EU, as the lack of progress in Turkey’s European vocation up until then had been con-
veniently blamed on Greece. The improvement in Greek-Turkish relations in the last
year of the twentieth century has not had a positive effect on the Cyprus negotiations,
as the next section will show.
The United States, the G-8 Formula, and the 2000 Round of Proximity Talks
Washington, capitalizing on the euphoria of the improved climate in Greek-Turkish

relations, embarked on a campaign to make the governments of Greece and Cyprus
more responsive to Turkey’s regional concerns. It also lobbied for Turkey’s EU candi-
dacy, without linking Turkey’s compliance to any of the conditions set by the EU and
expected of members and candidates of the EU. At the United Nations, Washington
attempted to quietly upgrade the status of the regime in the occupied areas of Cyprus
during the discussions on the renewal of the UN peacekeeping force.
UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, in a letter to the president of the UN Security
Council dated 20 April 1998, concluded that Turkey defined its Cyprus policy in the
context of “two states and three problems.” This included the recognition of Turkish
Cypriot statehood as the prerequisite for a solution. In turn, the three problems in
need of resolution were those of security, settlement of property claims, and the de-
lineation of borders. Further, they demanded the acknowledgment of the legitimacy
of Denktash’s government and its political procedures; the lifting of the economic
embargo; the continuation of Turkey’s military guarantee; and the acknowledgment
of the political equality of the two sides in all aspects of the negotiations. Denktash
also demanded the withdrawal of the Cypriot application to the EU, and that the UN
and all external mediators accept this “new political reality.” The secretary-general
acknowledged that Denktash’s “new positions” essentially rejected the intercommu-
nal framework discussed in all previous rounds of negotiations. Turkish and Turkish
Cypriot officials blatantly argued that the Cyprus problem had been solved with Tur-
key’s 1974 intervention and with the “population exchange” that followed. Turkey, in
order to facilitate its EU aspirations, agreed late in 1999 to re-open talks on Cyprus
for asylum Ocalan received clandestine support from members of the Greek government. He
was arrested in Kenya in the spring of 1999 in a joint operation between the United States and
Turkey.
26
Helsinki European Council, presidency conclusion, 10 and 11 December 1999. Note in
particular paragraphs 4, 9 (a) (b), and 12.
320 Van Coufoudakis
and seek a peaceful resolution of its differences with Greece. However, having at-
tained candidacy status, it became clear that Turkey sought the de facto recognition
of the occupied areas and the formation of a confederation of two independent, sov-
ereign, and recognized states on Cyprus. It was in this context that they were willing
to address issues of property compensation, security, and limited border adjustments.
Turkey was fully aware of Washington’s progressive support of most of these
ideas, especially because, in his mission to Nicosia in May 1998, Richard Holbrooke
promoted the idea of an “acknowledgment” of the Turkish Cypriot political entity by
the Greek Cypriots. That acknowledgment included the legitimacy of the laws and
institutions established there since 1974, and the fact that the Cyprus government did
not speak on behalf of the Turkish Cypriot community. Instead, the Turkish Cypriots
were represented by leaders elected through legitimate procedures. Sir David Han-
nay, the British representative on Cyprus, shared similar views. Both argued that such
an acknowledgment would provide the needed momentum in a new round of talks.
This, of course, had been the history of the Cyprus negotiations since 1974.
Washington once more took steps to undermine the United Nations by bringing
the Cyprus problem to the meeting of the G-8 in Cologne, Germany, on 20 June 1999.
The attempt to minimize the role of the United Nations has been a constant element
of American policy since the 1950s. The G-8 formula27 on Cyprus was later endorsed
by UN Security Council resolutions 1250 and 1251 of 1999. The two sides were called
to a new round of talks based on the following four principles: talks without precon-
ditions; discussion of all issues; sustained talks in good faith and until a solution is
found; and full consideration of relevant UN resolutions and treaties.
The G-8 formula contained both “good” and “bad” news. The reference to the
UN resolutions implied an endorsement of a bizonal-bicommunal federation, with
single sovereignty, international personality, and citizenship. Further, earlier resolu-
tions condemned the pseudostate created by the Turkish army in the occupied areas
and called for its nonrecognition. The “bad news,” however, was that “the parties”
could put on the table all issues without preconditions. This meant that Denktash
could present himself as president of a sovereign and independent state, and that he
could present his proposal for a confederation of two sovereign states. The reference
to the “other” international agreements implied discussion of the Treaty of Guarantee
and Turkey’s intervention rights, in addition to the 1977 and 1979 high level agree-
ments. Secretary-General Annan, in his report to the Security Council on 22 June
1999, closely reflected the American and British ideas by noting that the political
status of the Turkish Cypriots needed to be addressed. He attempted to do that in an
addendum on the status of UNFICYP in December 1999, but his attempt to do the
same in June 2000 failed after repeated warnings by the Cyprus government. This
was the reality facing the Cyprus government as it entered inconclusive rounds of
UN-sponsored proximity talks with the Turkish Cypriots in the spring and summer
of 2000. The proximity talks were also attended by American and British negotiators.
What advice did Washington offer the “two sides” as they entered this latest
phase of proximity talks?
27
Press Release 20 June 1999, “G-8 Statement on Regional Issues,” 3.
1. Look to the future and not to the past.

2. Do not debate whether the events of 1974 were an invasion or an
intervention.
3. Do not debate abstract notions of federation/confederation, or the nature
of sovereignty. Arrive at a constitutional solution first, and name it later.
4. Leave out of the negotiations “humanitarian” issues. These issues, in ad-
dition to the missing, included the 90,000+ Turkish settlers.
5. The government of Cyprus should commit to confidence-building mea-
sures, including the gradual lifting of sanctions against the so-called
TRNC.
6. President Clerides and Denktash were urged to show political courage
and imagination so as to close their careers with an agreement, because
they have the moral authority over their respective publics, and can un-
burden their successors from politically costly choices.
The irony and cynicism of American policy is that while publicly American offi-
cials endorse a settlement based on a bizonal, bicommunal federation, privately they
have given their full support to a confederation of two independent, sovereign states.
American officials promote the “land for constitutional concessions” principle. The
greater the territorial compromise, the looser the confederation becomes. In 1992, the
United States had presented some ninety-two map variations that were rejected by the
Turkish Cypriots. These territorial concessions ranged from over 25 percent to almost
32 percent of the territory for the Turkish Cypriot “state.” Alternative scenarios have
also been prepared on the structure of the executive branch, while selective provision
from the Swiss, German, Belgian, and Canadian constitutions have provided justifi-
cations as to how sovereignty can be divided in a two-state confederation, despite the
UN resolutions calling for a state with a single sovereignty.
The following ten points offer insights as to how Washington has attempted to
address the Turkish and Turkish Cypriot demand for recognition of the so-called
TRNC as a precondition for substantive talks.
1. The United States will not support recognition as a precondition for the
talks, but will assist the Turkish Cypriots to attain recognition as an out-
come of the talks.
2. The United States is interested in having continuous negotiations be-
tween the two parties to keep the momentum created by American initia-
tives and by the recent improvement in Greek-Turkish relations.
3. Meaningful talks require that the Greek Cypriots need to come to terms
with the reality that has been created since 1974, and to be sensitive to
Turkish Cypriot needs and concerns. For Washington the problem is one
of intercommunal power-sharing and not one of invasion and occupation.
4. It is up to the parties to decide what relationship they will have. They
need to show flexibility, realism, and political courage. The United States
will offer constructive suggestions and alternative scenarios to guide the
talks.
322 Van Coufoudakis
5. Even though federation may be desirable, it must be wanted by both

sides. The reality, however, is that the new constitutional arrangement
requires an acceptance of elements of “legitimized partition” reflecting
the conditions existing since 1974. A stable partition will be better than
the current unstable status quo.
6. The two sides need to negotiate the core issues and not debate issues
like federation or confederation, invasion or occupation. The core issues
involve: boundaries, property exchanges, resettlement of displaced per-
sons, three freedoms, and compensation. Therefore, in these talks, it is
the substance that counts, not the form! Once a settlement is reached,
then, constitutional experts and politicians can name it whatever they
may!
7. Rauf Denktash and the Turks are realists and will come to the talks with
something less than the de jure recognition of the TRNC as an indepen-
dent and sovereign state. Denktash will accept an “acknowledgment”
by the government of Cyprus that he and his administration represent
the Turkish Cypriots and speak on their behalf. Once granted such an
acknowledgment he will negotiate in good faith. The US Department of
State, Britain, and Australia suggest that the September 1993 exchange
of letters between the government of Israel and the Palestinians be used
as a precedent.
8. An “acknowledgment” by the government of Cyprus does not have to be
disclosed publicly until negotiations have reached a satisfactory stage.
9. Even though “acknowledgment” amounts to recognition of the Denk-
tash administration as the de facto government of the territory under its
control, it will not have other legal consequences. Assurances will be
offered to the Greek Cypriots that the international community, with the
exception of Turkey, will not recognize de jure a Turkish Cypriot state.
10. When a full agreement has been reached, the international community
will allow “a brief moment of sovereignty” to the Turkish Cypriots, so
that both sides can form a new partnership on Cyprus based on the polit-
ical equality of the two constituent states.
By the end of July 2000, the gap separating the two sides was growing, and
this created a serious dilemma for the government of Cyprus. Abandoning the talks
would have serious political consequences, especially on the progress of the talks
with the EU. Remaining in the talks exposed the government of Cyprus to American,
British, and UN pressures for an acknowledgment of the Turkish Cypriot “state” and
for the formation of a confederation of two independent, recognized, and sovereign
states. Aware of these conditions, Turkey and the Turkish Cypriots held fast to their
position on confederation, as shown in the paper submitted by Denktash to Alvaro
de Soto, the representative of the secretary-general in Geneva during the July 2000
phase of the talks.28
28
For an extensive, accurate summary in English, see Cyprus Weekly (14–20 July 2000), 5.
The Proximity Talks during the Year 2000: An Assessment
The much touted proximity talks failed to reconvene in January 2001 as UN, Amer-
ican, and British negotiators had anticipated. Turkish and Turkish Cypriot leaders
held fast on their demand for the recognition of the TRNC29 as a precondition for
any further talks. They also declared that the proximity talks had ended and that a
new framework for negotiations was needed so as to account for the interests of two
independent and sovereign states on Cyprus.
In a desperate attempt to save the talks in the fall of 2000, UN secretary-general
Annan made an opening statement to President Clerides and Denktash in New York
on 13 September 2000. In that opening statement the secretary-general indicated that
“each of the ‘parties’ represents its side—and no one else—as the political equal of
the other … the equal status of the parties must and should be recognized explicitly
in the comprehensive settlement.” Al Moses, President Clinton’s emissary to the Cy-
prus talks, indicated that the “deliberate ambiguity” surrounding this statement was
intended to keep Denktash in the talks and that the secretary-general’s statement was
made with the full knowledge and cooperation of the US government. To Denktash
the statement of the secretary-general was welcome news, as it implied the first step
toward the de facto recognition of his “state.”
It is this “deliberate ambiguity,” the contradictory statements by various foreign
diplomats,30 and the lack of any sanctions on Turkey and the Turkish Cypriots that
has <<have?>> brought the Cyprus problem to the point where the existence of the
Republic of Cyprus is now at risk. However, there is no ambiguity on most other key
issues, including (1) that the United States and Turkey share the objective of a con-
federation on Cyprus despite American assertions on behalf of a bizonal-bicommu-
nal federation; (2) that the final political settlement is likely to reflect the “realities”
created since 1974, and will likely contain “elements of legitimized partition”; and
(3) that the United States is seeking a comprehensive settlement prior to the entry of
Cyprus in the EU in order to limit the effects of the acquis communautaire, especially
on the “three freedoms” (movement, settlement, property ownership).
The proposals contained in the “non-papers” handed to the two parties during the
November-December phase of the talks fully support the assessments made in this
essay. A few examples will suffice.
29
The minimum Turkish/Turkish Cypriot position centers on a de facto rather than a de jure
recognition of the so-called TRNC. Much as the United States suggested, Turkish Cypriot
leader Rauf Denktash, speaking to the Turkish Daily News on 8 December 2000, suggested
that he would accept a “Palestinian status” for his “government” as it assured equality and
sovereignty. Denktash acknowledged that this would not bring recognition by the UN or other
Western powers. However, even President Clinton extended “red carpet treatment” to Arafat,
who negotiated on an equal basis with the Israeli government.
30
Especially on whether Cyprus can enter the EU without a political settlement.
324 Van Coufoudakis
The Turkish Settlers
International law is clear on the issue of settlements and settlers in occupied terri-
tories. Yet the United States for more than ten years has described the issue of the
illegal setters as a “humanitarian” one that must be kept out of any political negoti-
ations for a comprehensive settlement. Key American diplomats acknowledge that
few settlers will relocate from areas that will be restored to government control, but
that they will not necessarily return to Turkey. For those desiring to return to Turkey,
the United States proposes international assistance. In reality, the more than ninety
thousand illegal Turkish settlers now in the occupied areas are likely to remain there,
compounding the flight of the Turkish Cypriots to Germany and Britain, thus totally
changing the demographic profile of the Turkish Cypriot community.
The Freedom of Movement
In principle, Cypriot citizens will enjoy freedom of movement across the “border” af-
ter an appropriate transitional period. However, the Turkish Cypriot “authorities” will
have the ability to limit access to the Turkish Cypriot sector to “undesirable” persons
that may present a threat to the Turkish Cypriot community and its institutions. The
preparation of these lists will be the exclusive right of the Turkish Cypriots and there
will be no appeals from such restrictions.
Territorial Adjustments
The United States, in concert with UN negotiators, is proposing an “equitable” solu-

tion on this issue. The US/UN proposals provide from 25–32 percent of the territory
for the Turkish Cypriot sector, with over 29 percent as an ideal arrangement. The
actual territorial allocation will be affected by the nature of the constitutional formula
that will be accepted by the Greek Cypriots. That is, the looser the confederation,
the greater the territorial concessions by the Turkish Cypriots and Turkey. Four ad-
ditional criteria will guide the final territorial allocation: (1) security, (2) population
ratios, (3) productivity, and (4) economic development. For example, the Turkish Cy-
priot civilian airfield at Tymbou will remain in the Turkish Cypriot sector as it is vital
to the economy of that sector.
There is also a new condition introduced in the November 2000 round of the
talks that is even more restrictive. Paragraph 15 of the secretary-general’s text calls
for balance between the maximum number of Greek Cypriots who will return to
areas formerly under Turkish Cypriot control and the least dislocation of Turkish
Cypriots. This is why the secretary-general calls for the “least inconvenience” as the
key factor behind any territorial adjustments. With these qualifications, the actual
territorial adjustments will not amount to much.
Property
This issue of property rights relates to the freedom of movement, settlement, and
territorial adjustments. It also raises the problem of derogations from the acquis com-
munautaire. The U.S. and UN negotiators presented a “non-paper” on this issue early
in the proximity talks. This was done for two reasons: (1) to preempt the application
of the acquis through a restrictive bilateral agreement between the two communities;
and (2) to stop efforts for the implementation of the Loizidou case and other similar
cases by the European Court of Human Rights. Turkey, by refusing to implement this
ruling, is likely to hinder its candidacy for membership in the EU.
The issue of property ownership has another dimension. Property rights are in-
dividual rights under European law that may not be negotiated away by third parties.
The secretary-general’s November proposals contain the usual mix of “good news
and bad news,” with the latter dominating the negotiating drafts. Paragraph 14 of the
US/UN proposals recognizes property rights under international law. However, the
same paragraph qualifies the right to property by indicating that it cannot undermine
the character of the “constituent states.” This is why Annan’s “non-paper” proposes
a combination of exchange and compensation as a means of addressing the issue of
property rights.
Paragraph 13, in many respects, discloses the real intent of the US/UN media-
tion effort. Recognizing that proposed restrictions will violate the protection of the
acquis, it asks for the understanding of the EU so that these terms will not have to be
renegotiated. As for the “non-paper” on the constitutional structure of the new Re-
public of Cyprus,31 it makes the constitution based on the London-Zurich agreements
look like an ideal constitution.
The long history of the Cyprus problem shows how economic and strategic in-
terests of external powers contributed to the deadlock and to the tragedy of Cyprus.
In the process, the rights of all Cypriots were violated, along with the rules of inter-
national and American law. In addition, American policy undermined further the
stature of the UN as an agent of conflict prevention and conflict resolution.
The prospect of EU membership provides new opportunities for resolving this
perpetuated problem. A solution based on the implementation of all UN resolutions
on Cyprus and the principles of the acquis can only provide stability and protection
of the rights of all Cypriots. Meanwhile, at the start of the new millennium, Cyprus
remains the last divided and occupied country of Europe.
Postscript
The preceding pages have outlined the critical role played by the United States and
the United Kingdom in the evolution of what has come to be known as the Cyprus
Problem. Since the original essay was completed, a number of major developments
31
The text has been reprinted in Cyprus Weekly, 24–30 November 2000, 4.
326 Van Coufoudakis
have taken place confirming the continuity of Anglo-American policy and providing
new venues for the resolution of this perpetuated problem.
On 16 April 2003, the Republic of Cyprus along with nine other candidate coun-
tries signed the Treaty of Athens, which opened the way for the 1 May 2004 EU en-
largement. Soon afterwards, Cyprus also became a member of the euro zone. Next to
the 1974 Turkish invasion of the Republic of Cyprus, the accession of Cyprus to the
EU remains the most significant event in the history of the republic. Delicate Cypriot
diplomacy overcame objections raised by the United States, the United Kingdom, and
Turkey, and EU discord over the direction of its next enlargement. The accession of
Cyprus to the EU should facilitate the resolution of the Cyprus Problem if UN medi-
ators pursue a solution based on the principles of democracy, human rights, and the
rule of law, the very principles on which the EU is based.
The UN Secretary-General’s mission of good offices in Cyprus was defined by
UN Security Council Resolution 186 (1964). The failure to reach a comprehensive
and viable resolution of the Cyprus Problem led to a shift in the Secretary-General’s
role and tactics. After intense preliminary negotiations held between the fall of 2002
and the end of 2003 with the government of the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish
Cypriot leadership, Secretary-General Kofi Annan, assisted by American and British
negotiators, assumed the role of an arbitrator in the Cyprus dispute. He had no ex-
plicit Security Council authorization for the change in his mission from one of “good
offices” to one of binding arbitration.
Between 2002 and 2004, Kofi Annan produced five versions of a comprehensive
resolution plan. The final version, “Annan-V,” was presented at a meeting in Burgen-
stock, Switzerland in March 2004. It amounted to a complete adoption by the UN of
all of Turkey’s demands. The text of the comprehensive solution included more than
nine thousand pages of complex legal texts and annexes. This text was presented for
approval by separate and simultaneous referenda to the two major Cypriot commu-
nities. There was little time for discussion of a complex document that confounded
even legal experts. The president of Cyprus, the late Tassos Papadopoulos, inherited
the concessions made by his predecessor. He addressed the Greek Cypriot public on 7
April 2004 and called for a “no” vote on the proposed settlement. As he stated, a “no”
vote was not against reconciliation and reunification in Cyprus. It was a vote against
a dysfunctional plan that legalized the outcome of the Turkish invasion. The Greek
Cypriot public, already alarmed by the concessions made to Turkey without any rec-
iprocity, overwhelmingly rejected the plan by 76 percent of the vote. In contrast, the
Turkish Cypriot community and the Turkish settlers, who made up the majority of
the population of occupied Cyprus, voted in favor of the plan by a nearly 65 percent
margin. The vote in occupied Cyprus was not surprising. Annan-V granted Turkey all
of its demands; gave the illegal settlers all the benefits of EU membership; extended
to the occupied areas all the economic and social benefits available in the Republic of
Cyprus; and granted the minority population veto rights in the affairs of the republic.
The Greek Cypriot vote was fully justified, as Annan-V legitimized the out-
come of the 1974 Turkish invasion and placed the financial burden of reunification
(estimated between $12–15 billion) on the Greek Cypriot economy. A “donors con-
ference” called on at the last minute by the United States and the UN in an attempt
to rescue this plan was able to raise only $750 million to help the Cypriot economy!
Turkey, the cause of all the economic dislocation and economic disparity on the is-
land, pledged nothing. Annan-V included major derogations from European law and
deprived Cypriot nationals of fundamental rights under the European Convention on
Human Rights. The dysfunctional and unprecedented “bi-zonal bi-communal fed-
eration” constitutional model violated the European Convention on Human Rights,
because it was based on discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, religion, and lan-
guage. Annan-V would have also replaced the internationally recognized Republic
of Cyprus with a confederation of two largely autonomous states, much as Turkey
demanded. The resolution plan granted Turkey, a non-EU member, the right to station
troops with intervention rights in the affairs of the new republic. This was an unprec-
edented arrangement in post–Cold War Europe.
The Secretary-General’s plan also revoked select treaties signed by the Republic
of Cyprus. This included the 2003 treaty between the Republics of Egypt and Cyprus
on the delimitation of their exclusive economic zone. This was another concession by
Kofi Annan to Turkey. Ankara had not signed or ratified any of the UN’s three trea-
ties on the Law of the Sea which are EU law. Annan-V also expanded Britain’s rights
in its so-called sovereign base areas in Cyprus above and beyond the rights granted
to Britain as a condition of Cypriot independence. These concessions to Britain and
Turkey had nothing to do with the resolution of the Cyprus Problem.
After many recriminations about the Greek Cypriot rejection of the 2004 UN
plan, on 8 July 2006, the president of the Republic of Cyprus, the late Tassos Pa-
padopoulos, and Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat agreed on a new set of
principles to guide a new round of talks under UN auspices. These talks intensified
following the election of Dimitris Christofias to the Presidency of the Republic of
Cyprus in February 2008. At the time of this writing, the latest round of UN-spon-
sored talks is carried out under the auspices of a new UN mediator, former Australian
foreign minister Alexander Downer.
The United Nations, United States, and United Kingdom, following the post-
mortem they conducted on the causes of the rejection of the 2004 arbitration plan,
have changed tactics in the new round of negotiations. Gone are the public threats by
Alvaro de Soto and Tom Weston, as well as the rigid negotiation deadlines demanded
by the previous negotiators. Instead, there is a lot of rhetoric about the “Cypriot-led
and Cypriot-owned” talks. Despite the toned-down rhetoric, the substance of the new
round of talks remains the same, judging by documents leaked to the Cypriot press.
It appears that Alexander Downer has reintroduced key portions of the failed Annan
Plan for renegotiation. Repeated meetings between the president of the Republic of
Cyprus and the Turkish Cypriot leader with UN secretary-general Ban Ki Moon have
confirmed the change in the style but not in the substance of UN diplomacy. This
time, the UN appears to be aiming at a comprehensive solution prior to the assump-
tion by the Republic of Cyprus of the EU Presidency on 1 July 2012.
If a solution is agreed upon by the two sides, it will be put to separate and simul-
taneous referenda, as was done with Annan-V. Now that the Republic of Cyprus is
a member of the EU, the Greek Cypriot public is unlikely to endorse any resolution
328 Van Coufoudakis
plan that imposes a dysfunctional governance model, legitimizes the outcome of the
Turkish invasion, and violates the rights of all Cypriots as European citizens.
The resolution of the Cyprus Problem and the reunification of the Republic of
Cyprus is a desirable goal. It is an achievable goal if the solution is built on the prin-
ciples on which the EU is based. Failure to do so will perpetuate the division of the
Republic of Cyprus, undermine the credibility and political standing of the EU, and
increase political instability in the critical region of the eastern Mediterranean.
Economic Reform and the Rise of Political Forces in
Early Post–Civil War Greece: The Case of Karamanlis’s ERE
Evanthis Hatzivassiliou
In the past few years, the study of the postwar period has attracted increasing atten-
tion in Greek bibliography, as extensive archival material has become available, not
only in the United States and Britain, but also in Greece itself. Predictably, the first
wave of these new studies involved the Cyprus question, but there is now a growing
tendency to look again at other topics, such as Greek foreign policy in general, the
Greek political scene, and the economy. The publication in 2000 of a new volume
of Ekdotike Athenon’s Ιστορία του Ελληνικού Έθνους (History of the Greek Nation)
dealing with the post-1941 period was a clear indication that this era is already in the
forefront of research.
This article will attempt to discuss some of the fundamental options of Greek
political forces in the 1950s. It does not aim to present a detailed account, but rather to
examine some issues the author regards as crucial in understanding the course of the
country’s history. It will be argued that Greek political history in the first post–civil
war period should be seen in the context of the larger transformations of the coun-
try’s economy and society; political forces as well as individual leaders rose and fell
exactly as a result of their ability to respond to these transformations; “conspiracies”
and “foreign interventions” have played a much less important role than is sometimes
suggested. It was in these years that Greece gradually managed to achieve economic
development and lay the foundations for its integration into the Western world.
Reconstruction and Development, 1950–56: The Need for Reform
The years from the end of the civil war to the first electoral victory of Constan-
tinos Karamanlis’s ERE were crucial for Greece’s future. The search for a better
future after World War II (as well as for a new structure of Greek political life) was
postponed until after the civil war. After the civil war and up to 1952 the former
Venizelist parties (now called the “Center”) dominated the governments. In the 1950
general election the Liberals and the People’s Party (the major prewar political orga-
nizations and victors of the civil war) together received slightly more than one-third
of the votes, 36 percent. This was an indication of the desire of the public for new
330 Evanthis Hatzivassiliou
schemes, new parties, and new policies.1 In 1950, the National Progressive Center
Union (EPEK), under General Nicolaos Plastiras, a Center-Left party, appeared as
the most dynamic new force, and played a major role in the political scene until 1952.
But EPEK remained a loosely organized party, its leader fell ill in 1952, and anyway
it never had an overall majority in Parliament; as a result, it had to form coalitions
with the Liberals and never enjoyed full command of the political scene. Thus, this
was a period of instability: three elections took place (March 1950, September 1951,
November 1952), while the many differences between the two main Center leaders,
Sophocles Venizelos of the Liberals and Plastiras of EPEK, meant that governments
fell easily, and this was a great obstacle in the effort to undertake the badly needed
long-term economic programs.2
During the next three years the victor of the 1952 election, Field Marshal Alex-
andros Papagos, and his conservative Greek Rally dominated Greek politics. It is in
this period that the main step toward economic development was made, namely, the
large-scale devaluation of the drachma and the adoption of liberalization measures by
Spyros Markezinis, the minister of economic coordination, on 9 April 1953. Greece
seemed to enter at last a period of development, but Papagos fell ill in 1955, at a time
when the Cyprus question had come to the forefront, the Rally had split, and Markez-
inis had founded a new party, while the Left seemed to gain ground (a coalition of the
Left-wing EDA party and Center-Left forces had scored an impressive victory in the
1954 municipal elections). This new political crisis led, after Papagos’s death in early
October 1955, to the appointment of Constantinos Karamanlis to the premiership.
King Paul’s decision to appoint Karamanlis without waiting for the election of a party
leader was severely criticized by the Opposition, while it has also been suggested that
the United States had played an active part in the advent of the new prime minister.
Recent research, however, has shown that at that crucial moment the Americans had
not intervened in favor of Karamanlis and that on the contrary the U.S. embassy was
taken aback by his appointment.3 At any rate, the advent of Karamanlis provided a
solution to the crisis: the new prime minister founded a new party, the National Rad-
ical Union (ERE), and won the February 1956 election, which thus stabilized a new
group of conservative leaders in Athens.
1
See this view in Grigorios Dafnis, Τα ελληνικά πολιτικά κόμματα, 1821–1961 [Greek polit-
ical parties, 1821–1961] (Athens: Galaxias, 1961), 156–57; for the view that the result of this
first post–civil war election involved a rejection of civil war practices as well as the search for
new perspectives, see Elias Nikolakopoulos, Η καχεκτική δημοκρατία: Κόμματα και εκλογές,
1946–1967 [The sickly democracy: Parties and elections, 1946–1967] (Athens: Patakis, 2001),
110–24.
2
Yiannis Stefanidis, Από τον εμφύλιο στον ψυχρό πόλεμο: Η Ελλάδα και ο συμμαχικός
παράγοντας (1949–52) [From the civil war to Cold War: Greece and the Allied factor (1949–
52)] (Athens: Proskinio, 1999).
3
Evanthis Hatzivassiliou, Η άνοδος του Κωνσταντίνου Καραμανλή στην εξουσία, 1954–1956
[The advent of Constantine Karamanlis to power, 1954–1956] (Athens: Patakis, 2001), espe-
cially 223–40 and 301–10.
The Case of K aramanlis’s ERE 331
Yet, the picture of “governmental instability” until 1952 or the “domination of

the Right” after 1952 is not enough to provide a full explanation of the many devel-
opments in these crucial years. It certainly leaves aside the most important issue in
postwar Greek politics, namely, the search for development and its repercussions on
the political level. The defeat of the Communist Party (KKE) in the civil war had
provided for a military solution to the challenge of the Left, but it did not (and could
not) remove the social causes—the extensive poverty after a period of great trials—
which could strengthen the Communists again. Economic development was a major
demand of the Greek public after the hardships of the 1940s: according to a prominent
scholar, it was “a basic program of [political] mobilization in the 1950s.”4 It is indeed
impossible to examine Greek political history in that period without appreciating the
fundamental fear of the pro-Western Greek political forces about the revival of the
Left exactly as a result of the low standard of living, or without taking into account
the pressing need of the public for development.
The extensive destruction of the 1940s, the occupation, the postwar hyperinfla-
tion, the civil war, the famine during the occupation (and the danger of famine after
that) had left increasing numbers of citizens in miserable living conditions. The 1940s
had also left traumatic memories to politicians as well as state officials of a coun-
try that had already gone through war, triple occupation, and a long civil conflict.
Postwar reconstruction and, at a second phase, economic development were urgently
needed after such turmoil. Electrification and industrialization were absolutely nec-
essary in a country whose population had swiftly moved to the cities during the civil
war; these people had to find work and security, otherwise they could be driven to
despair and to political options that could once more reject the country’s social and
political order. In other words, the pro-Western camp had prevailed in the civil war,
but the social balances and the outcome of the ideological struggle remained uncer-
tain.5 The potential of Greece for development had been noted before, even in the late
1940s,6 but these ideas had not been put in practice; perhaps many Greek officials
and politicians did not even consider these schemes as anything more than wishful
thinking. On the contrary, new prospects seemed to appear from outside Greece’s
borders. Recent bibliography stresses the modernizing role of the American inter-
vention in Greece, through the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan in 1947–52:
although sometimes harsh in their intervention, American officials transplanted new
political methodologies based on the ideals of professionalism in the context of a
4
Elias Nicolakopoulos, “Από το τέλος του Εμφυλίου Πολέμου έως την άνοδο της Ένωσης
Κέντρου” [From the end of the civil war to the rise of the Center Union], in Ιστορία του
Ελληνικού Έθνους [History of the Greek nation] (Athens: Ekdotike Athenon, 2000), 16: 183.
5
See, for example, C. Tsoukalas’s paper on the ideological consequences of the civil war, in
Greece in the 1940s: A Nation in Crisis, ed. John O. Iatrides (Hanover, NH: University Press
of New England, 1981): 319–41.
6
Panos Kazakos, Ανάμεσα σε Κράτος και Αγορά: Οικονομία και πολιτική στη μεταπολεμική
Ελλάδα, 1944–2000 [Between the state and the market: Economy and economic policy in
postwar Greece, 1944–2000] (Athens: Patakis, 2001), 99–111.
modern liberal democracy, and raised the prospect of industrialization and devel-
opment.7 Bringing forward a new agenda, US leadership also played a major role in
the survival of modernizing political forces that had emerged within Greece—often
calling themselves “radical”—and that had been crushed in the passions of the civil
war.8 Yet, US intervention itself could not solve all the country’s problems: the ef-
forts of indigenous forces were needed to produce tangible results. This was why the
survival of the Greek “radicals” in the late 1940s was so important: their parties (the
Unionist Party and the Democratic Socialist Party) were sidelined, but their proposals
remained on the political agenda; it was they who would carry out the post–civil war
reform in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Monetary stability was also regarded as absolutely essential, and this derived
both from the memories of the terrible hyperinflation of 1944, and from the realiza-
tion, as prominent intellectuals and economic officials stressed, that without mone-
tary stability no hope for development existed.9 Of course, frequent changes of gov-
ernments could endanger the aim of monetary stability. Thus, despite their efforts
(especially in 1951–52, when George Kartalis was minister for economic coordina-
tion),10 the unstable Center governmental coalitions of 1950–52 failed to cover this
7
See, among others, James Edward Miller, The United States and the Making of Modern
Greece: History and Power, 1950–1974 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2009); Konstantina Ε. Botsiou, “New Policies, Old Politics: American Concepts of Reform in
Marshall Plan Greece,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 27, 2 (2009): 209–40; George Pa-
goulatos, Greece’s New Political Economy: State Finance and Growth from Postwar to EMU
(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 24; and Sotiris Rizas, Η Ελληνική Πολιτική
μετά τον Εμφύλιο Πόλεμο: Κοινοβουλευτισμός και Δικτατορία [Greek politics after the civil
war: Parliamentarianism or dictatorship] (Athens: Papazisis, 2008), 120–22. See also Michalis
Psalidopoulos, Ο Ξενοφών Ζολώτας και η Ελληνική Οικονομία [Xenophon Zolotas and the
Greek economy] (Athens: Metamesonykties Ekdoseis, 2008).
8
Evanthis Hatzivassiliou, “Greek Reformism and Its Models: The Impact of the Truman Doc-
trine and the Marshall Plan,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 28, 1 (2010): 1–25.
9
See, for example, the views of the leading academic, governor of the Bank of Greece from
1955 to 1981 (and prime minister of the all-party government in 1989–90), Xenophon Zo-
lotas, in his books Νομισματική σταθερότης και οικονομική ανάπτυξη [Monetary stability
and economic development] (Athens: Bank of Greece, 1958), and Νομισματική ισορροπία και
οικονομική ανάπτυξη: ελληνική οικονομία κατά την τελευταίαν δεκαπενταετίαν—Προβλήματα
και προοπτικαί [Monetary balance and economic development: The Greek economy during
the last fifteen years—Problems and perspectives] (Athens: Bank of Greece, 1964). See also
Psalidopoulos, Ο Ξενοφών Ζολώτας και η Ελληνική Οικονομία.
10
See Stefanidis, Από τον εμφύλιο στον ψυχρό πόλεμο; Kazakos, Ανάμεσα σε Κράτος και
Αγορά, 138–41; George Politakis “Οι πρωθυπουργικές Πλαστήρα και η οικονομία” [Plastiras’s
premierships and the economy], in Ιστορικόν-πολιτικόν συνέδριο για το Νικόλαο Πλαστήρα:
Πρακτικά [Historical-political conference on Nicolaos Plastiras: Proceedings] (Karditsa:
Prefecture of Karditsa, 1994), 157–70; and Michalis Psalidopoulos, “Στις αναρχές της
νομισματικής μεταρρύθμισης του 1953: Ο Γεώργιος Καρτάλης στο Υπουργείο Συντονισμού
(1951–52)” [In the origins of the 1953 monetary reform: George Kartalis in the Ministry of
demand of the public for development, and it is exactly this failure that must be held
accountable for the decline of the Center and old Right-wing parties, as well as for
the rise of Papagos’s Greek Rally. There were of course other reasons for the Center’s
electoral decline in these years,11 but it has also been pointed out by a leading Greek
analyst that its internal disputes and its consequent failure to respond to the public’s
demand for development was the main reason why the Center (which, with its liberal
tradition, seemed destined to govern postwar Greece) finally left the initiative to the
conservatives.12
The Rally’s powerful lieutenant and minister of economic coordination, Markez-
inis, succeeded in bringing about a major reorientation of the economy. But it is im-
portant to note that the admittedly successful devaluation of April 1953 was followed
by a period of transition until 1956, marked by high inflation (a result of the extensive
devaluation) and by desperate attempts to reestablish the monetary balance through
special taxation,13 at a time when the country continued to spend enormous sums
on defense. These meant that the standard of living of large numbers of citizens re-
mained low, if it did not actually drop in some cases. It is on these repercussions of
the 1953 devaluation that the Opposition centered its criticism toward the Rally and it
is because of these repercussions that the comeback of the Left was facilitated: with
KKE illegal, the United Democratic Left (EDA) showed a steady increase in its vote
both in the 1953 by-elections as well as in the 1954 municipal elections.
In other words, neither the military victory in the civil war nor the first wave of
economic reform (the 1953 devaluation) provided for a lasting solution to the coun-
try’s fundamental problem—how to eradicate poverty and thus to avoid a Left come-
back. The transition from reconstruction to development proved difficult and full of
potentially explosive political side effects. It is exactly the fear of these side-effects,
combined with the prospect of Papagos’s death and with the electoral revival of EDA,
that made the 1954–56 political crisis so dangerous in the minds of many politicians
and observers; it is exactly the fear of EDA, the many failures of Vice Premier Ste-
fanos Stefanopoulos and the hope that another person of reformist ideas could hold
things that led King Paul to appoint Karamanlis to the premiership.14 It is indicative
that in early October 1955, immediately after Papagos’s death, the leading liberal
daily Το Βήμα (Tribune), without expecting Karamanlis’s appointment, rejected the
Coordination (1951–52)], in Ο Γεώργιος Καρτάλης και η δύσκολη δημοκρατία: Σαράντα χρόνια

από το θάνατον του [George Kartalis and the difficult democracy: Forty years since his death]
(Athens: Society for the Study of Modern Greek Culture, 1998), 119–30.
11
Thanassis Diamantopoulos, Η ελληνική πολιτική ζωή: Εικοστός αιώνας [Greek political
life: The twentieth century] (Athens: Papazisis, 1997), 172.
12
This is repeatedly pointed out in Grigorios Dafnis, Σοφοκλής Ελευθερίου Βενιζέλος, 1894–
1964 [Sophocles E. Venizelos, 1894–1964] (Athens: Ikaros, 1970), especially 517.
13
See Bank of Greece, Τα πρώτα πενήντα χρόνια της Τραπέζης της Ελλάδος, 1928–1978 [The
first fifty years of the Bank of Greece, 1928–1978] (Athens: Bank of Greece, 1978), 371–490.
14
Hatzivassiliou, Η άνοδος του Καραμανλή.
idea of early elections and noted that as things stood, such a course would amount to
“a leap in a vacuum.”15
Running the danger of oversimplification, one could argue that in 1950–55 there
were two kinds of political interpretations of the country’s economic situation. First,
the idea that the economy could play a “defensive” role against the “challenge of
communism.” All pro-Western political parties, either of the Right or of the Center,
agreed that raising the standard of living could pose an effective barrier to an elec-
toral revival of the Left. An editorial of the major conservative daily Η Καθημερινή
(The Daily) in May 1955 (at a time when new taxes were being imposed) noted that
per capita income in the United States was $1,200, in Britain and Belgium $800, in
France $600, but in Greece only $180: “well, these 180 dollars are 180 open gates to
communism.”16
There was, however, a second, more flexible view of the political role of the
economy. Recent research points out that, as in other Western countries, in early
postwar Greece a new development strategy appeared, which accepted a degree of
state planning and state investment, mainly on the level of industrialization; this new
economic/political strategy tried to insert a measure of state initiatives in a free mar-
ket and thus create a mixed economy (this was why this thesis was described as
“liberal eclecticism”); the main supporters of this view were academics like Xeno-
phon Zolotas, governor of the Bank of Greece from January 1955, and politicians like
Spyros Markezinis and Constantinos Karamanlis.17 There also were other represen-
tatives of the same view, such as Panayis Papaligouras, minister of commerce and of
economic coordination in 1954–58 and 1961–63.18 It has also been noted that in the
postwar period, under the leadership of these figures, the Greek conservative camp
was characterized by “a relative reserve toward the ‘anarchic’ market,” and by the ac-
ceptance of the role of the state “as an instrument of capitalist integration and devel-
opment.”19 The supporters of this view were not rigid “conservatives,” but reformists
15
Το Βήμα, 5 October 1955.
16
Η Καθημερινή, 15 May 1955.
17
Kazakos, Ανάμεσα σε Κράτος και Αγορά, 169–79; for the emergence of these strategies, see
also Evanthis Hatzivassiliou, Ελληνικός φιλελευθερισμός: Το ριζοσπαστικό ρεύμα, 1932–1979
[Greek liberalism: The radical trend, 1932–1979] (Athens: Patakis, 2010).
18
See Michalis Psalidopoulos, ed., Παναγής Παπαληγούρας: Ομιλίες, άρθρα [Panagis Pa-
paligouras: Speeches, articles] (Athens: Aeolos, 1996); and Psalidopoulos, “Ο ρεαλιστικός
φιλελευθερισμός του Παναγή Παπαληγούρα και η οικονομική πολιτική της περιόδου 1952–
67” [The “realistic liberalism” of Panagis Papaligouras and the economic policy of the 1952–
67 period], in Η ελληνική κοινωνία κατά την πρώτη μεταπολεμική περίοδο (1945–67) [Greek
society during the first postwar period (1945–67)] (Athens: S. Karagiorgas Foundation, 1994),
376–81.
19
Thanassis Diamantopoulos, Η ελληνική συντηρητική παράταξη: Ιστορική προσέγγιση και
πολιτικά χαρακτηριστικά [The Greek conservative camp: A historical approach and its politi-
cal characteristics] (Athens: Papazisis, 1994), 40–41.
who wanted radically to change the structures of the Greek economy and political
scene. Arguably, in the 1954–56 political crisis, and especially in late September
and early October 1955 (at a moment when the political system was threatened with
collapse), it was namely to the representatives of this dynamic view of Greek politics
that the king turned his attention. Markezinis had left the Rally, and thus the other
representative came to the forefront: Karamanlis, the most successful minister of the
home front, the minister of public works, a person who seemed capable of addressing
the dual problem of development and political stability.
Once in power, Karamanlis was to pursue the goal of development with an ef-
ficiency and determination unusual in Greek political history. In previous years he
had already expressed the view that major reforms were needed in the country. For
example, during his short service as defense minister in the autumn of 1950, he had
often said that the economic and social progress of the country was the only way to
ameliorate its problems, including that of stability and security. Thus, in September
1950, in an interview with Reuters, when asked whether the KKE posed a threat, he
noted that “the KKE itself cannot now threaten the security of Greece. But there is
a danger that it will acquire this opportunity in the future, if the civic parties do not
pursue a more prudent policy.”20
Later on, Karamanlis often said that his primary aim was “to relieve Greece of
its eternal poverty, which was the cause of its political misfortune.”21 After becoming
prime minister, he had a chance to put his ideas into practice, as a leader of a new
generation of political figures, such as George Rallis, Papaligouras, Constantinos Pa-
paconstantinou, and former Liberal politicians who joined ERE, such as Constanti-
nos Tsatsos or Evangelos Averoff-Tossizza—in other words, the people who would
become the Karamanlis team until the late 1970s. This was why the February 1956
election was so crucial: first, it was a head-on clash between Karamanlis and the
Democratic Union of all the Opposition parties (including EDA) except Markezinis’s
Progressives; but mostly, it was the election which stabilized this new group of people
in power and enabled them to take important initiatives in the following years.22
In this crucial election, Karamanlis came out strongly as the main representative
of far-reaching reform. Thus, he founded a new party, the National Radical Union, an
initiative which enabled him to take some distance from the old Rally. Furthermore,
the founding declaration of ERE, by Karamanlis himself, could be described as a
kind of manifesto of the new reformists. He pointed out that the election would bring
a “new generation” of leaders to the forefront; he noted that the old National Schism
20
Karamanlis, interview with Mario Modiano, 30 September 1950, in Κωνσταντίνος
Καραμανλής: Αρχείο, γεγονότα και κείμενα [Constantine Karamanlis: Archive, events and
texts], gen. ed. Constantinos Svolopoulos (Athens: Ekdotike Athenon and Constantinos Kara-
manlis Foundation, 1992), 1: 131.
21
See Takis Lambrias, Στη σκιάν ενός μεγάλου: Μελετώντας 25 χρόνια τον Καραμανλή [In the
shadow of a great one: Studying Karamanlis for 25 years] (Athens: Morfotiki Estia, 1989), 140.
22
On the 1956 election, see Nicolakopoulos, Η καχεκτική δημοκρατία, 196–214; and Hatzi-
vassiliou, Η άνοδος του Καραμανλή.
of Venizelists and anti-Venizelists was out of date and that the old parties merely re-
produced that antiquated divide, which had brought
[a] sick political climate, which had bred military coups, revolutions, changes
of regime, economic bankruptcies, and mostly the loosening up of our polit-
ical ethos. It often stopped the progress of the country and, mostly, made it
impossible for the nation to fully take advantage of its sacrifices and strug-
gles.… One could say that in our country, a state, meaning the function which
encourages and furthers the activity of the nation, does not exist.… The in-
crease of our national income, necessary for the survival of our race, the ame-
lioration of the people’s condition through social justice, the necessary moral
improvement [exygiansis; literally, “the reestablishment of a moral order”]
and many others, are connected to this fundamental problem, the political
problem. I believe—and my view is based on my personal experience and
search—that Greece can change shape and its people [can change] destiny.
Thus, he continued, ERE, as a new political force, promised to bring about a “peace-
ful revolution” and “the change that for many years is a demand of all our people.”23
This was an electoral declaration (hence Karamanlis’s reference to the primacy
of the “political problem”), but the spirit of the new reformist view was all too obvi-
ous: Karamanlis suggested that in order to avoid another period of unrest, it was not
enough to raise the standard of living; it was necessary for the pro-Western forces to
make their own “peaceful revolution” and to change the structures of the country. It is
notable that there is a general agreement in the bibliography that he was indeed char-
acterized for his reformist priorities.24 Even writers who took a critical view towards
Karamanlis have expressed similar views: “But perhaps the new element that ERE
will introduce, apart from the [young] age and the activity of its leader, will be the
effort for quicker economic development and for some modernization of the state.”25
ERE has often been described in older bibliography as a mere continuation of
the Rally—perhaps because its term in office succeeded that of Papagos’s party and
together they formed an uninterrupted period of eleven years of conservative domi-
nation (“’Ενδεκα χρόνια Δεξιάς,” eleven years of the Right). This view oversimplifies
things and overlooks crucial aspects of the ERE’s nature and strengths. First, the
Rally was a confederation of various conservative forces which had been united un-
der Papagos’s leadership and were still under the influence of Papagos’s lieutenants
(Markezinis, Stephanos Stephanopoulos, Panayiotis Kanellopoulos, or at a later stage
the “younger men,” Karamanlis, Papaligouras, Rallis). The press often referred to this
23
Karamanlis, founding declaration of ERE, in Κωνσταντίνος Καραμανλής, 1: 337–38; for
more on this, see Hatzivassiliou, Ελληνικός φιλελευθερισμός, chap. 9.
24
See, among others, Meletis E. Meletopoulos, “Γενεαλογία της ελληνικής Δεξιάς, 1909–
1989” [A genealogy of the Greek Right, 1909–1989], Νέα Κοινωνιολογία 5 (1989): 22–32.
25
Spyros Linardatos, Από τον εμφύλιο στη χούντα [From the civil war to the junta] (Athens:
Papazisis, 1978), 3: 49.
confederate nature of the Rally, especially after Papagos fell ill and the government
showed signs of poor coordination. For example, the influential daily Εστία (Hestia)
often criticized the “remnants of the People’s Party” under Stephanopoulos or the
“children’s chorus,” i.e., the younger ministers.26 But ERE included new people (128
out of its 299 candidates in 1956 stood for election for the first time),27 and was much
more coherent, perhaps also because the old barons of the Rally did not participate
in it. Furthermore, its 1956 electoral victory gave to ERE exactly what EPEK or the
Rally lacked—cohesion.28 ERE’s coherence was strengthened after Karamanlis man-
aged to prevail in the party’s two internal crises in 1957 (when Vice Premier Andreas
Apostolides resigned) and in 1958 (when the resignations of Rallis and Papaligouras
over electoral reform were followed by the resignations of another thirteen MPs, lead-
ing to the May 1958 election which Karamanis won easily). It was now, after the 1958
election, that Karamanlis became the undisputed leader of the conservative camp.29
It is notable that ERE held together even in 1963, at a moment when King Paul, who
had just ousted Karamanlis, evidently tried to use salami tactics and break the par-
ty.30 Indeed, ERE, especially after 1958, was under the tight control of Karamanlis,
who was often criticized by the press or the political cartoonists about his explosive
character and strong treatment of his ministers.31
A second important difference with the Rally can be found in the participation
in ERE of some more “younger people” coming from the Liberals, among them Con-
stantinos Tsatsos, Evangelos Averoff, and Grigoris Kasimatis, who joined the party in
January 1956, immediately after its foundation. The participation of these figures also
stressed the reformist attitude of the new party. Thus, in an article in Καθημερινή in
February 1956 (during the electoral campaign), Tsatsos noted that these Liberal poli-
ticians had decided to side with Karamanlis, because they were tired of the old quar-
rels between Venizelists and anti-Venizelists, and because the economic effort of the
country needed to continue under a reformist party with a strong leadership.32 Aver-
26
See, among others, the editorials of Hestia on 3, 10, and 17 November 1954, or on 21 March
1955.
27
Nicolakopoulos, Η καχεκτική δημοκρατία, 198.
28
Dafnis, Τα πολιτικά κόμματα, 161.
29
Diamantopoulos, Η ελληνική πολιτική ζωή, 177; and Rizas, Η Ελληνική Πολιτική, 181–204.
30
See Karamanlis’s note (late 1960s) on his disagreement with the king and his resignation in
1963, in Κωνσταντίνος Καραμανλής, 6: 26–28.
31
On Greek political cartoons of that period, see Evanthis Hatzivassiliou, ed., Η εξωτερική
πιλιτική της Ελλάδας με τη πένα του γελοιογράφου: Ο Φωκίων Δημητριάδης σατιρίζει τον
Ευάγγελο Αβέρωφ, υπουργό των εξωτερικών, 1956–1963 [The foreign policy of Greece through
the pen of the political cartoonist: Phokion Dimitriades satirizes Evangelos Averoff, foreign
minister, 1956–1963] (Athens: E. Averoff Foundation, 2000), where references are being made
to the strong character and leadership of the prime minister.
32
Constantinos Tsatsos, “Η μόνη διέξοδος” [The only way out], Kathimerini, 11 February
1956; see also Dimitris Michalopoulos, “Η συμμετοχή των φιλελεύθερων στην ίδρυση της
off, who would soon become foreign minister (1956–63), publicly stated that the new
party would express the ideas and principles of the “nationally minded Center.”33 It is
important to note that the postelectoral Karamanlis government of 1956 included six
former Liberals who had just joined ERE: Tsatsos (prime minister’s office), Averoff
(agriculture), Kasimatis (without portfolio), Demetrios Makris (interior), St. Kotiades
(merchant marine), D. Manentis (under-secretary for agriculture). It also included the
first woman cabinet minister in Greek history, Lina Tsaldaris at social welfare. It is
also indicative of Karamanlis’s desire to go beyond the old divides of Venizelists and
anti-Venizelists, that in March 1956, at the twentieth anniversary of Eleftherios Veni-
zelos’s death, the government officially paid homage to his memory34 —something
inconceivable for the old Right.
On the other hand, it has been noted in older publications that the participa-
tion of some Liberals was not enough to change the orientation of ERE, since many
more Centrists had joined the Rally (including a former prime minister, Emman-
uel Tsouderos), without changing its right-wing nature.35 But the Center figures who
joined the Rally never acquired much power (and the aging Tsouderos was slowly left
on the sidelines), while Tsatsos, Averoff, and Kasimatis immediately became leading
personalities of ERE and its governments, and actually became members of the elec-
toral committee of the party in the very same 1956 election.36 Their influence was
important enough for the British embassy to allege in 1958 that the internal revolt
of MPs which led to the election of that year was also triggered by their displeasure
over the excessive power that these former Liberals had acquired at the expense of
the older “Right” figures in ERE.37 Taking into account that the old conservative
barons (Markezinis, Stephanopoulos, and, during a first phase, Kanellopoulos) did
not participate in ERE, Karamanlis’s party had significant differences compared to
the Rally. In recent bibliography there is a tendency to view the Rally period as a
“transitory stage” to ERE, rather than as a part of a monolithic period of unchanging
conservative domination.38
ΕΡΕ και η προσωπική συμβολή του Κωνσταντίνου Τσάτσου” [The participation of the Liber-
als in the foundation of ERE and the personal contribution of Constantinos Tsatsos], Τετράδια
Ευθύνης 16 (1982): 150–64.
33
See Evanthis Hatzivassiliou, “Ευάγγελος Αβέρωφ-Τοσίτσας: Πολιτική πορεία (1946–
1990)” [Evangelos Averoff-Tossizza: Course in politics (1946–1990)], in Ευάγγελος Αβέρωφ-
Τοσίτσας (1908–1990) (Athens: E. Averoff Foundation, 2000), 48.
34
See Κωνσταντίνος Καραμανλής, 2: 30.
35
Linardatos, Από τον εμφύλιο στη χούντα, 3: 49.
36
Hatzivassiliou, Η άνοδος του Καραμανλή, 257.
37
Allen to Selwyn Lloyd, 7 March 1958, London, The National Archives, FO 371/136220/6.
38
Meletopoulos, “Γενεαλογία της ελληνικής δεξιάς”; see also that Nicolakopoulos, in Η
καχεκτική δημοκρατία, examines the Rally and the ERE periods in different, successive, chap-
ters.
Another interesting aspect of ERE is the term “radical” in its title, which also
appeared after 1974, in Karamanlis’s description of the New Democracy ideology as
“radical liberalism.” Even today, this term provokes strong criticism as being either
meaningless, or a contradiction in terms (for in the Greek political vocabulary, “radi-
calism” is regarded as a characteristic of the Left: thus, the KKE’s official newspaper
is called just that—Ριζοσπάστης [The Radical]). Yet, research provides a different
picture. “Radicalism” had already been used in Greece with another meaning: it was
the translation in Greek of the name of the French radicals of the beginning of the
century, who suggested that in a free economy, the state should still play a super-
vising role; at that time this was indeed a novel concept, expressing a new trend of
European liberalism. The term appeared for the first time in a Greek political text
in March 1908, when the Cretan paper Κήρυξ (The Herald) of Chanea used it to de-
scribe the new political ideas that Eleftherios Venizelos brought to Greek political
thinking.39 And it was exactly this idea, the limited yet crucial “supervising” role
of the state in economic affairs, that was central in the new “radical” trend in the
1930s and 1940s, of which Karamanlis now was the main political representative. The
members of Karamanlis’s team (including the former liberals who joined ERE) had
been prominent in this radical trend, which had been crushed during the civil war but
now reappeared to claim political hegemony.40 Of course, one should not go as far as
suggesting that Karamanlis in 1956 expressed a form of Venizelism. It is also obvious
that Karamanlis used this term as an easily understood political slogan to declare that
his party was a new political force. Yet, it is similarly clear that in the Greek political
culture of that time, “radicalism,” especially as an economic strategy, had a specific
meaning with which Karamanlis and his team were associated.41
The Take-off, 1956–63: Development and Transformation of Greece
It was now, after 1956–57, that the Karamanlis team managed to lead the country to
a phase of rapid development; the country’s GNP rose by 6 percent per year, inflation
remained at an average 2 percent per year and per capita income rose at a total of
85 percent.42 The Greek “economic miracle” became possible also thanks to careful
planning which paid special attention to three sectors of the economy: agriculture,
39
Constantinos Svolopoulos, Ο Ελευθέριος Βενιζέλος και η πολιτική κρίσις εις την αυτόνομον
Κρήτη, 1901–1906 [Eleftherios Venizelos and the political crisis in autonomous Crete, 1901–
1906] (Athens: Ikaros, 1974), chap. 2, on the ideological aspects of Venizelos’s activity in that
period.
40
See Hatzivassiliou, Ελληνικός φιλελευθερισμός; see also the introduction of that book for a
discussion of the term “radical” in the Greek context.
41
See also Kazakos, Ανάμεσα σε Κράτος και Αγορά, 296–97.
42
On Greece’s rapid development in these years, see, among others, Bank of Greece, Τα
πρώτα πενήντα χρόνια; Kazakos, Ανάμεσα σε Κράτος και Αγορά, chap. 2; George Alogoskou-
fis, “The Two Faces of Janus: Institutions, Policy Regimes and Macroeconomic Performance
in Greece,” Economic Policy 20 (1995): 149–92; and Pagoulatos, Greece’s New Political Econ-
industry, and tourism, which were the priorities of the two five-year plans—of the
“provisional” one of 1959 and of the 1960 plan. At any rate, the very idea of economic
planning was a novelty in Greek economic and political history. This period (espe-
cially the years 1958–61) could be described as the great leap in the development
of Greek industry, since it was then that the greatest investments were decided: to
name but a few, new electricity plants and hydroelectrical works, the large oil re-
finery in Thessaloniki, the sugar refineries, the aluminium plant at Locris (a project
which caused severe criticism from the Opposition), the fertilizer plants etc., while
three industrial centers emerged in northern Greece (Ptolemais, Thessaloniki, and
Kavala). Furthermore, thanks to large public works of land reclamation and dams,
agricultural production increased, and Greece for the first time achieved the much
desired σιτάρκεια (sufficiency on wheat), the lack of which was one of the factors
responsible for the famine during the war. In 1962, despite protests from Athens, the
United States decided to end military aid to Greece, arguing that the Greek economy
had now sufficiently developed.43 It is no coincidence that in 1961 the population of
the major cities became for the first time in Greek history equal to that of the agri-
cultural areas at about 44 percent, that in the same year the share of industry in the
gross national income surpassed that of agriculture, or that the number of automo-
biles reached over 100,000 (compared to less than 23,000 in 1956).44
Equally interesting were the political consequences of this process: the Kara-
manlis governments’ priority was exactly to give the country a sense of direction,
politically as well as economically. Hence their anxiety to develop more than one
sector of the economy, and to essentially build a Western European society. Their
reformist understanding led them to consider that development was important not
merely because it raised the standard of living, but mostly because it gave the oppor-
tunity to integrate Greece into the Western world. Thus, the effort on the home front
was combined with a reform in the country’s foreign policy which has been outlined
elsewhere:45 from 1956 onwards, Greek foreign policy under Averoff searched for a
long-term orientation of the country which was finally achieved in the Treaty of As-
sociation with the European Economic Community (EEC) of 9 July 1961.
omy, 29–45 and 56–62. For a collection of primary sources, see Κωνσταντίνος Καραμανλής,
vols. 2–5.
43
On the end of U.S. aid, see Sotiris Rizas, Η Ελλάδα,οι Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες και η Ευρώπη,
1961–1964: Πολιτικές και οικονομικές όψεις του προβλήματος ασφαλείας στο μεταίχμιο
Ψυχρού Πολέμου και ύφεσης [Greece, the United States and Europe, 1961–1964: Political and
economic aspects of the security problem in the passage from Cold War to detente] (Athens:
Patakis, 2001); and Miller, The United States and the Making of Modern Greece, 68–72.
44
Diamantopoulos, Η ελληνική πολιτική ζωή, 182–83.
45
Evanthis Hatzivassiliou, Greece and the Cold War: Frontline State, 1952–1967 (London:
Routledge, 2006). The best analysis on postwar Greek foreign policy can be found in Con-
stantinos Svolopoulos, Η ελληνική εξωτερική πολιτική [Greek foreign policy], 2: (1945–1981)
(Athens: Hestia, 2001).
It is important to stress that for the Karamanlis governments, mere cooperation

with the West (through NATO) was not enough; they aimed at the country’s “detach-
ment” from the political, economic, and social context of the Balkans and at its full
integration into the Western system. To achieve this, Athens turned its attention to
novel concepts of European integration and became the first country to sign a Treaty
of Association with the EEC.46 The Greek decision to form an association with the
EEC was made in 1958, at a time when coordination was being discussed between the
EEC and the emerging European Free Trade Association (EFTA). At that moment,
association could come only in the context of such a multilateral arrangement, but in
November 1958, shortly before Karamanlis’s and Averoff’s successful visit to Bonn,
a brief for the prime minister stressed that “Greece aims at any event [οπωσδήποτε]
at the closer cooperation with the European Economic Community, probably in the
form of an association in the EFTA framework, or even independently of that.”47
Indeed, immediately after the EEC-EFTA negotiations broke down in December
1958, Greece rushed to submit its own application. In August 1959, at the start of the
negotiations with the Six, Athens decided that its primary aim was to make sure that
association would provide for future full membership. The document which outlined
Greek aims noted:
1. Acceptance of the principle that the association of Greece with the Euro-
pean Economic Community aims at full entry; therefore it is necessary to
provide for the method of revision of the agreement for the gradual achieve-
ment of this aim.48
The Treaty of Association provided for precisely that. During the negotiations, Ath-
ens often stressed to the EEC members that Greece had now achieved development
and did not want to orient its exports to the “easy solution” of seeking markets in
the Communist East, but to integrate economically in the Western European system.
This was also repeated in Karamanlis’s important letter in November 1960 to his EEC
counterparts:
The association of Greece with the Common Market cannot but be evaluated
through the wider European interest in keeping the Greek economy, while
properly developing, inside the context of the free western European econ-
46
See Konstantina Botsiou, Griechenlands Weg nach Europa: Von der Truman-Doctrin bis
zur Assoziierung mit der EWG, 1947–1961 (Frankfurt-am-Main: Peter Lang, 1998); and Mo-
gens Pelt, Tying Greece to the West: US-West German-Greek Relations, 1949–1974 (Copenha-
gen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006).
47
Brief for Karamanlis for the Bonn visit, November 1958, in Κωνσταντίνος Καραμανλής, 3:
280.
48
Note on Greece’s aims in the negotiations with the EEC, 5 August 1959, in Κωνσταντίνος
Καραμανλής, 4: 162–63.
omy. This would prevent the dependence which threatens the Greek economy
[from the Eastern bloc].49
In other words, the Greek decision to join the EEC was made in the late 1950s, not in
the mid-1970s; the Treaty of Association embodied the aim of a long-term orientation
of the country diplomatically, but also economically, socially, and politically. This
new orientation followed (and became possible thanks to) the rapid development of
the country’s economy in the same period. It was an integral part of the reformist
view of Greek politics, as put forward by Karamanlis and his team.
However, a further notable view has recently been put forward about the decision
to seek association with the EEC: the country’s European option involved first an ef-
fort to modernize the economy in a wider European context, because, as Papaligouras
noted in Parliament, modernization was impossible within the narrow confines of the
Greek market; second, association involved the stabilization of the country’s political
regime as well; this was why it was accepted by the pro-Western Center Opposition,
while it was fiercely resisted by the Left (the EDA party) and by those members of the
Greek political and intellectual elite who were skeptical about its integration into the
West.50 There is much in this view: the dual process of development and association
with the EEC was seen as an interactive process which aimed to seal the country’s
history for many years to come; it was in line with Karamanlis’s emphasis on long-
term efforts.
In recent Greek bibliography, the role of Karamanlis and of his close associ-
ates in planning and implementing the policy of integration in the Western system
is universally accepted—even by those who in earlier periods doubted the merits of
this policy. Yet, it is necessary to put things in their proper perspective. It is true that
Karamanlis and his team doggedly tried (both in 1958–61 and again in 1974–79) to
secure Greece’s path toward Europe, facing strong criticism—sometimes, in 1958–61
even disbelief, since their policy was ambitious: Greece was a Balkan country re-
cently destroyed by war and civil war, strategically vulnerable in the midst of the
Cold War, geographically detached from the Six, and yet wanted to join the union of
the most advanced European states. But Karamanlis and his associates also had some
important cards in their hands, which are often overlooked. Mostly, Greece was a
European country: it had an old parliamentary tradition (since 1843); it had a political
tradition of radicalism since the days of Rigas, which sought its roots in the French
Revolution; it also had a maritime and commercial tradition which helped an out-
ward-looking understanding of the world. All pro-Western parties understood Europe
as Greece’s “natural space”: it must be remembered that even during its “relentless
struggle” against ERE in 1962–63, the Center Union did not dispute this European
option; indeed, this was the only issue on which the Center Union did not attack the
government in those years. The European option (even in a less ambitious form than
49
Karamanlis to the prime ministers of the EEC, 26 November 1960, in Κωνσταντίνος
Καραμανλής, 4: 451–52.
50
Kazakos, Ανάμεσα σε Κράτος και Αγορά, 231–43.
the one pursued by Karamanlis) had been a common element in all forces of liber-
alism in modern Greek history: for example in 1929–30, Greece under Eleftherios
Venizelos was one of the very few European countries which unreservedly accepted
Aristide Briand’s plan for a European Federation;51 even in the late 1940s, facing a
desperate situation at home during the civil war, Greek governments (coalitions of the
Liberals and the People’s Party) kept showing a strong interest for the development of
ideas on European cooperation.52
Thus, the pursuit of a European option was acceptable to a wide spectrum of
Greek public opinion and of the political elite. This was a solid foundation on which
Karamanlis and his associates could build: they did not invent the European option
and they did not build it from scratch. But they dared proceed from the level of a the-
oretical acceptance of Greece’s European character to the actual implementation of
this policy (on the economic, as well as the diplomatic levels); they also realized that
Greek society in the 1950s had the strength and the will to pursue this goal. Finally,
they were the first European statesmen outside the Six who realized that the future
belonged to the EEC, with its supranational institutions, rather than to less ambitious
schemes such as the EFTA.
Certainly, despite the success of the economic effort, not all was smooth and
easy. There were other factors, which have been perceptively described as “the dark
side of the economic miracle”—for example, the extensive immigration of this pe-
riod.53 Of course, immigration was a social phenomenon which manifested itself in
other countries of the European South which were going through a phase of rapid
industrialization, while in the case of Greece it was also to a large extent the result
of the destruction of the countryside during the war and the civil war in the 1940s.
But it also was a sign of the extreme stress to which Greek society was still sub-
jected. Similarly, rapid economic growth was facilitated by tight government control
on workers’ unions. There also were excesses of parts of the state mechanism which
dealt with “internal security,” there were efforts by the Palace to exert control on the
army, as well as the rigidly conservative character of the 1952 Constitution. Although
contemporary views on the “state of the Right” have shown that it was less monolithic
than often suggested, and that Karamanlis himself was trying to limit the influence
of such “parallel” power centers, the legacy of the civil war made its presence felt
throughout this period. Finally, the economic success of the country did not mean
that all was perfect or that social tensions could not rise again; the following extract
from the annual review for 1959 (sent in January 1960) by the British ambassador, Sir
Roger Allen, a good observer of Greek affairs, is indicative of the important progress
51
Constantin Svolopoulos, “L’ attitude de la Grèce vis-à-vis du projet Briand d’ union fédérale
de l’ Europe,” Balkan Studies 29, 1 (1988): 29–38.
52
Marietta Minotou, “Η προοπτική της ευρωπαικής ενοποίησης μετά τον Δεύτερο
Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο: Η επίσημη στάση της Ελλάδας (1946–1950)” [The perspective of Euro-
pean unification after World War II: The official attitude of Greece (1946–1950)], Διαχρονία
3/4 (1998): 3–16.
53
Kazakos, Ανάμεσα σε Κράτος και Αγορά, 224–28.
of Greece in the 1950s, but also of the potential tensions that rapid modernization
could trigger in the country:
Athens is no longer an overgrown Levantine village; it has pretensions to

being a cosmopolitan or at least a European capital. Throughout the country
there is a network of comparatively good main roads with frequent bus ser-
vices. Some villages now have a piped water supply system of a kind; a few
even electricity. There are cars, there is the radio. Village schools have been
built, though the supply of teachers is still very inadequate. There has been
a growth in agricultural production. But the fundamental weaknesses of the
economy remain. The lack of any real system of social welfare remains. The
disparity between the rich and the vast majority who live on a barely subsis-
tence level remains. The lack of outlet for the literate lower and middle-class
remains. Maladministration and corruption in official circles are still rife.
And the effect of these things has only been accentuated by the changes that
have taken place. Greece, in short, is an underdeveloped country which is still
beginning the painful process of development.54
Another important conclusion of recent research touches upon the role of the
Western powers, especially the United States, in Greek politics. Since 1947, there
certainly was a strong dependence of Greece on the United States, which repeatedly
intervened in Greek politics. Ambassador Peurifoy’s famous statement in favor of
the first-past-the-post electoral system in 1952 is correctly regarded as the peak of
this American tendency to intervene in the Greek political scene—although it is of-
ten overlooked that this electoral system was favored by both the Rally and EPEK,
and therefore Peurifoy’s intervention was directed against the Liberal preference for
proportional representation, and not against the Center in general.55 After 1952, how-
ever, things started to change: the emergence of the Rally government, based on a
huge parliamentary majority and under the leadership of a strong personality, Papa-
gos, together with the steady improvement of the Greek economy as well as with the
obvious priority of the United States, especially under Eisenhower, to reduce eco-
nomic and military aid to its European allies, led to a more complex relationship with
the Western superpower. As noted before, despite allegations about a US intervention
at that moment, the American embassy, far from “imposing” Karamanlis in the pre-
miership in 1955, was surprised at his appointment. Nor did the Americans play any
role in bringing him down in 1963 (as has sometimes been alleged); in 1963 the US
embassy actually preferred a victory by ERE, but also noted that Karamanlis could
not stay in power forever, and was ready to work with the Center Union.56
54
Allen to Selwyn Lloyd, 13 January 1960, TNA/FO 371/152961/1, Greece: Annual Review
for 1959.
55
Nicolakopoulos, Η καχεκτική δημοκρατία, 159–60.
56
Rizas, Η Ελλάδα, 142–51.
Recent research has shown that, far from seeking to impose their own solution,
in times of crises the Americans used to step back and wait for the Greek political
system to produce a resolution. The United States reacted along these lines both in
1955 and in 1963 exactly because it believed that in case of a change of government, it
should make certain that the next one, whatever that might be, was friendly to Wash-
ington. Since such a new government could be a coalition, the Americans wanted
to make sure that they could keep excellent relations with all pro-Western Greek
political forces. It was only in the 1956 election, when Karamanlis stood against a
coalition, which they perceived as a Popular Front, that the Americans clearly sup-
ported him. Apart from 1956, the United States might prefer Karamanlis, but would
not endanger its connections with the other Greek parties in order to support him.
In other words, recent research suggests that although U.S. influence should not be
overlooked, the US role in the shaping of political events was substantially smaller
than what the Greeks themselves sometimes want to admit.57
Conclusions
It is, of course, impossible, in the context of an article, to provide a detailed overview

of such a crucial period as the first post–civil war decade. This author does not claim
that the story, or even the article’s bibliography, are complete. Undoubtedly, there are
additional important aspects on which one may expand. This article was an attempt
to outline the importance of the wider demand for economic reform as a factor which
largely determined political developments; it was inside this wider context that indi-
vidual personalities could make their impact and political parties could rise and fall.
Thus, the “great game” in Greek history was played in exactly this period, from
the end of the civil war to the early 1960s and the Treaty of Association with the EEC.
In the 1940s the country had to make a choice between two worlds; and it had to make
it in a painful way, through a civil war. After that, new political forces, mainly repre-
sented by the Karamanlis team, pursued the long-term option of integration into the
Western system, and were finally successful in achieving development, thus changing
the structures of the Greek economy and society. To be sure, this success also had
its flip side of the coin: for example, it is now argued that one of the main tools for
development, the state’s role in the economy, lay the foundations for rigidity in later
periods.58 But the economic miracle was real and the country did change.59
Here, in the end, lay the major success of Karamanlis and the explanation for his
electoral domination of postwar Greece: his importance did not derive from the fact
that he was a “great man,” or “clever” (in fact, he always put emphasis on common
sense rather than the touch of genius, which he considered as leading sometimes to
irresponsibility). On the contrary, he managed to make an impact exactly because
57
See mostly Miller, The United States and the Making of Modern Greece.
58
This is a main argument in Kazakos, Ανάμεσα σε Κράτος και Αγορά.
59
See also the analysis in William H. McNeill, The Metamorphosis of Greece since World
War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
he kept his sight firmly fixed on the long-term effort of Greece’s integration into the
Western system, and thus he was in a position to respond to and to “translate” politi-
cally the wider political and social demands of Greek society.
Such an argument can also provoke objections: people may point to the mecha-
nisms of the “state of the Right” and the position of the Left in that period: aspects
which have also been underlined by writers friendly to Karamanlis himself (for ex-
ample, the subtitle of one of his biographies was exactly “la démocracie difficile.”) 60
This article, however, suggests that, although extremely important, these were “tem-
porary” phenomena, compared to the more permanent changes that economic devel-
opment brought in Greek society and in the orientation of the country.
Similarly, the argument of this article should not be taken to mean that there
were no reformist forces and people outside the ERE. Perhaps the most notable case
was that of George Kartalis, the young leader of the DKEL (Democratic Party of the
Working People), whose policy as minister of coordination in 1951–52 is now being
praised by research; it is also suggested that he would have played a major role in
Greek politics in later years, but his untimely death in 1957 deprived the Center of
a great leader. Kartalis was in favor of electoral cooperation with the EDA—which
made the conservative Center and the Americans extremely reserved, if not outright
hostile, to him—but he did have the ability and the dynamism to leave his mark. Sim-
ilarly, Markezinis (had he not left the Rally in 1954), could also play the role of the
prime reformist of the Right; but Markezinis was a tactician (a characteristic which
often appears in people of unusual intelligence), and this cost him dearly against the
cold, pragmatic, “common sense” attitude of Karamanlis. Finally, the Center Union
after 1961 did put forward some new views, which could be described as an evolv-
ing social democratic agenda (although the CU never actually used this term), but it
disappointed many of its supporters with its concessions to populism after acquiring
power in 1963.
At the same time, although the ERE’s group of leaders around Karamanlis (the
“radicals”) were reformists, the party itself included people of ultraconservative—
sometimes reactionary—views, stemming out of the anticommunism prevalent in a
country which had experienced the start of the Cold War through all-out civil war; the
cases of Andreas Apostolides, a former Metaxas supporter and vice premier until his
resignation in 1957, and of Constantinos Maniadakis, former minister of public secu-
rity under the Metaxas dictatorship and then an ERE MP, were indicative. Further-
more, during electoral campaigns ERE often proved ready to take up the anticom-
munist banner—as happened in 1956 during its head-on clash with the Democratic
Union, which resembled a Popular Front, or in the 1961 election, when (regardless of
60
Maurice Genevoix, La Grèce de Karamanlis: Ou la démocratie difficile? (Paris: Plon, 1972).
It is interesting that this adjective, or a similar one, appears in the title of many books on Greek
political history of that period: for example, in the one about Kartalis (Ο Γεώργιος Καρτάλης
και η δύσκολη δημοκρατία), the major book by Nicolakopoulos (Η καχεκτική δημοκρατία), and
the constitutional overview by Aristovoulos Manessis, Η εξέλιξη των πολιτικών θεσμών στην
Ελλάδα: Αναζητώντας μία δύσκολη νομιμοποίηση [The evolution of political institutions in
Greece: Seeking a difficult legitimization] (Athens-Komotini: Sakkoulas, 1987).
later accusations of “violence and fraud”) both the ERE and the Center Union aimed
to limit the EDA’s 25 percent of 1958.
But, on the whole, Karamanlis and the group of the ERE’s leaders did have a
fresh, outward-looking view on the strategic options about the economic and political
status, as well as the international orientation of the country. The dual process of de-
velopment and the European option was the crux of the “peaceful revolution” which
Karamanlis had declared in 1956. Thus, it was in the 1950s and early 1960s that
the country moved decisively toward becoming a developed member of the Western
world and its European subsystem. This, of course, made a political reform necessary
as well, and that was exactly what Karamanlis tried to do with his 1963 proposal for
the revision of the constitution, which evidently made the Palace turn against him and
bring him down. After that, a relatively modernized Greek society was left with an
outdated institutional system, and this also played its role in the mid-1960s political
crisis, with dire consequences. But that is another story.
Using Humor to Cross the Greek Tu/Vous Line:
A Personal Account
Kostas Kazazis†
This paper is about subverting the familiar-versus-formal system of address in

Modern Greek (that is, the tu versus vous modes of address). In particular, I examine
humor as a strategy that people may use if they are unhappy about being expected
to address intimates in the deferential, second-person-plural (vous) mode. I do not
know if other Greek speakers, besides myself, use the same strategy. I will, therefore,
illustrate my points with examples from my own linguistic behavior.
I often use the adverb sociolectally: the technical term sociolect refers “to a
linguistic variety (or lect) defined on social (as opposed to regional) grounds, e.g.,
correlating with a particular social class, or occupational group.”1
Ancient Greek did not make the tu/vous distinction with a singular addressee.
When ancient Greeks said ὦ Σώκρατες ‘Socrates!’, they did not necessarily treat the
addressee in a familiar fashion. Or, to put it neohelleno-centrically, the ancient Greek
vocative Σώκρατες has at least three counterparts in Modern Greek, to wit:
(1) Σωκράτη which we normally use with the second-person-singular (tu) mode
of address; nowadays, it is only exceptionally that we use a bare first name
with the second-person plural (vous)—whereas in French, for instance, this
is routine, as in Vous avez faim, Marianne? ‘Are you hungry, Marianne?’;
(2) Κύριε Σωκράτη, literally, ‘Mr. Socrates’; this I regard as sociolectally lower-
middle-class or even lower: it can be used with either the singular (tu) or the
plural (vous) mode of address; and, finally;
(3) Κύριε Σωφρονίσκου, κύριε Σωφρονισκόπουλε, κύριε Σωφρονισκίδη—or what

have you—; in other words, κύριε ‘Mr.’ + last name, which we normally
use with the second person plural (vous); when used with the second person
singular (tu), I regard it as sociolectally “lowish.”
1
Dwight L. Bolinger and Donald A. Sears, Aspects of Language, 3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1981), chap. 9, as quoted in David Crystal, A Dictionary of Linguistics and
Phonetics, 4th ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1997), s.v. “sociolect.”
350 Kostas K azazis
Unlike what was happening in ancient Greek, urban modern Greeks—and,

increasingly, also their rural counterparts—today are likely to take umbrage if
someone addresses them inappropriately in the familiar, second-person-singular (tu)
mode. That is because, by the middle of the nineteenth century, urban Greeks had
begun to use the opposition between the familiar second singular and the polite or
deferential second plural more or less like their French counterparts, who probably
also had served as their models.
Now, some Greek parents, including my own, used to insist that their children
address them in the deferential (vous) mode. I say “used to insist,” because that
custom has retreated considerably since the time when I was a child (I was born in
1934). In fact, it is my impression that addressing one’s parents in the vous mode was
somewhat rare even among those of my contemporaries who belonged to the same
urban middle-middle class as I did.
Once, when I was already an adult, an acquaintance expressed surprise that I
used the deferential second-plural (vous) mode in addressing my father. My father’s
response was, “That’s the way Kostas wants it.” He then turned to me and asked, “Isn’t
that so?” It certainly was not! It was my parents who insisted that I address them with
vous, not me. Still, I was so scared of my father that I did not dare contradict him,
especially in the presence of a mere acquaintance; so I agreed.
As a child, I was secretly envious of friends and classmates who used the familiar
mode of address when speaking to their parents. What I was really envious of, of
course, was the easy relationship between parent and child that this linguistic usage
seemed to reflect. Given my uneasy relationship with my father, I did not much mind
addressing him in the second person plural. But with time my mother, the parent with
whom I felt the greater affinity, became a friend. While I suspected that she would
have been shocked if I suggested that I begin addressing her in the familiar (tu) mode,
I nevertheless felt awkward speaking to her in the deferential (vous) mode. What
bothered me was the distance implicit in the deferential mode of address.
To reduce that awkwardness somewhat, as an adult, when speaking to my mother,
I began to switch intermittently from the deferential second plural to the familiar
second singular. In order not to appear disrespectful, however, I did so only by also
switching into a seemingly tongue-in-cheek, anything-goes type of discourse, and
that only in contexts in which I thought the switch was appropriate.
The variables that determined whether the tongue-in-cheek mode was called for
coincided only vaguely with the usual sociolinguistic ones of topic and setting. By
far the most important determining factor was who else was present. Thus, to spare
my mother any embarrassment, I never addressed her in the familiar second-person-
singular (tu) mode in the presence of complete or virtual strangers.
In 1967, I spent several months in Athens taking care of my mother, who was
suffering from terminal cancer. During that period, I probably spoke to her most of
the time in the deferential mode, which for me remained the customary, “straight,”
unmarked way of addressing her. For instance, when I would enter her bedroom first
thing in the morning or after her afternoon siesta, I would ask her
Using Humor to Cross the Greek Tu/Vous Line 351
(4) Κοιμηθήκατε καλά (μανούλα)

‘Did you (plural) sleep well (mommy)?’
Or I would let her in on my immediate culinary plans by saying
(5) (Μανούλα,) γιὰ ἀπόψε λέω νὰ σᾶς κάνω φρουτοσαλάτα· ἐντάξει

(Mommy,) for tonight, I thought I’d make you (plural) some fruit salad,
OK?’
On the other hand, I would sometimes choose to say more or less the same things in
the tongue-in-cheek, anything-goes, marked mode, as in (6) and (7), below:
(6) Κοιμήθηκες καλά, Ζωρζεττάκι μου

‘Did you (singular) sleep well, my Georgette (diminutive)?’
(7) Μάνα, γιὰ ἀπόψε λέω νὰ σοῦ κάνω φρουτοσαλάτα· ἐντάξει

‘Mother, for tonight, I thought I’d make you (singular) some fruit salad,
OK?’
Notice that the tongue-in-cheek utterances, (6) and (7), contain a noun in the vocative,
whereas the straight ones, (4) and (5), do so only optionally. Now, my normal, unmarked
way of addressing my mother was μανούλα, literally, ‘little mother’. Μανούλα is the
diminutive of the somewhat folksy (or poetic) noun μάνα ‘mother’. Μανούλα differs
from μάνα, however, in that it is sociolectally neutral; in other words, unlike μάνα,
the diminutive μανούλα is not in the least folksy. For me it would have been strange to
address my mother as μανούλα and at the same time use the familiar second-person
singular, as in sentence (8):
(8) Κοιμήθηκες καλά, μανούλα

‘Did you (singular) sleep well, mommy?’
Sentence (8) would have been stylistically incongruous, since it combines the tongue-
in-cheek second-singular mode of address with the “straight” term of address,
μανούλα. On the other hand, in my tongue-in-cheek, marked utterances, I deemed
it indispensable to use also a tongue-in-cheek, marked vocative—as we saw in (6),
Ζωρζεττάκι, and (7), μάνα.
A few words about some of these tongue-in-cheek, marked vocatives are in
order here. My mother’s given name was Γεωργία ‘Georgia’, but that was only her
baptismal, official name. Her intimates called her Ζωρζέττα ‘Georgette’ or sometimes
even Ζωρζέτ ‘Georgette’ (usually pronounced more or less as in French). Some
people also addressed her by a diminutive form of Ζωρζέττα, namely, Ζωρζεττάκι or
Ζωρζεττούλα. And so did I, in my tongue-in-cheek mode, in addition to calling her
by some form or other of the male counterpart of her given name, such as Γιῶργο
352 Kostas K azazis
(which is sociolectally neutral for ‘George’), Γιώργη (which is folksy), or Γιωργάκη (a

sociolectally neutral diminutive of Γιῶργο, itself the vocative of Γιῶργος ‘George’)—I
have discussed the use of male first names in addressing women in a previous work.2
I sometimes prefaced those tongue-in-cheek vocatives with some form of the
words for ‘Mrs.’ or ‘Mr.’, as required. For ‘Mrs.’, I’d use κυρία or its folksy counterpart
κυρά- (neither of which can be used with the grammatically neuter diminutive
Ζωρζεττάκι); for ‘Mr.’, I used either κύριε or its folksy counterpart κυρ-. As we saw
in the case of κύριε Σωκράτη in (2), even the sociolectally neutral terms for ‘Mrs.’,
κυρία, or ‘Mr.,’ κύριε, if combined with a first name, produce a sociolectally lowish
impression, at least as far as our family was concerned. We’ll see below why that did
not bother me in the least, but on the contrary suited my purposes very well.
In addition to those proper names, in switching to the familiar (tu) mode, I would
also address my mother by what for me were marked terms for ‘mother’, such as μάνα
‘mother’ (which we have already encountered in [7]) and its augmentative, μανάρα;
I regard both of these as sociolectally rather low, except that μάνα can also be poetic,
as I noted above.
Not surprisingly, I did not use a marked vocative in every single one of my tongue-
in-cheek utterances. Nevertheless, I always saw to it that every time I switched to the
tongue-in-cheek mode, my first utterance would also include such a marked vocative.
Thus, that vocative served as a marker signaling that what accompanied it was not
the usual, “straight” register I normally used in speaking to my mother. I did that in
order to make sure that she realized that this was merely my jesting mode and not
think even for a moment that I was being disrespectful. And the best way I knew
how to achieve this was by supplementing my grammatically second-person-singular
forms with vocatives that would have been unthinkable in my normal, unmarked way
of addressing her. That is also why I did not balk at using some modes of address
that we considered socially “beneath” us, such as κυρία Ζωρζέττα, κυρα-Ζωρζέττα,
κυρα-Ζωρζεττούλα, μάνα, κυρα-μάνα (lit., ‘Mrs. mother’), μανάρα, κύριε Γιῶργο, κυρ-
Γιώργη, Γιωργάκη, and so on.
To paraphrase what I said earlier, this verbal redundancy (or overkill) on my part
ensured that my mother would never take my familiar, second-person-singular way
of addressing her as “straight,” “normal,” and unmarked.
When we were alone, my mother never protested against my verbal ruse. In the
presence of friends and acquaintances, however, she would sometimes turn to them
and say, in unambiguously mock-indignant or mock-resigned tone:
(9) Εἶδες πῶς μοῦ μιλάει

‘Do (lit., ‘did’) you see how [disrespectfully] he talks to me?’
2
Kostas Kazazis, “Gender and Sex in Standard Modern Greek Pet Names,” in The Joy of
Grammar: A Festschrift in Honor of James D. McCawley, ed. Diane Brentari et al. (Amsterdam:
John Benjamins, 1992), 161–71.
Using Humor to Cross the Greek Tu/Vous Line 353
This way, she presumably preserved her image as a parent whose child normally
treated her with respect, even though he occasionally engaged in a bit of harmless
verbal horse-play.
To sum up, by making it clear to my mother that these departures from my
habitual, deferential discourse were done in jest, I spared her generational and class
sensibilities. At the same time, those departures from the norm gave me a chance
to take a break from the deferential mode of address, which I found stifling when
speaking to someone who was as close to me as my mother was.
Poetry Translation Reviews Reviewed:
Possible Criteria for Reviewing Poetry Translations
David Connolly
Slaves we are, and labour in another man’s plantation;

We dress the vineyard, but the wine is the owner’s; if
the soil be sometimes barren, then we are sure of be-
ing scourged: if it be fruitful and our care succeeds,
we are not thanked; for the proud reader will only say
the poor drudge has done his duty.
—John Dryden (1631–1700)
The words above by John Dryden describe the lot of the literary translator in the
seventeenth century. Three centuries later, very little would appear to have changed,
if we are to judge from most reviews of translations of literary works. Reviews of
works of literature in translation almost invariably focus on the original work rather
than on the translation of the work. Reviewers without first-hand knowledge of the
original work opt for a criticism of the translation, as if it were the original, dealing
wholly with the product as opposed to the process of translation. Alternatively, re-
viewers who know the work in the original content themselves with an appreciation
of this and have little or nothing to say about the quality of the translated work other
than general remarks of a highly subjective nature, usually confined to the end of
the review as, so it often seems, a kind of afterthought. The result is that one has the
impression, when reading reviews of literary works in translation, that the translation
process plays no part whatsoever in the presentation and reception of the work.
A random survey of reviews of literary works in translation would normally re-
veal the following types of review.1 First, there are those reviews where no mention
is made that the work under review is, in fact, a translation or, at least, no criticism
of the translation is attempted, leaving the reader to infer that this is a translated
work and providing no information as to what kind of translation is being offered.
Most attempts at translation criticism by reviewers fall, however, into the category
of the “last paragraph afterthought.” This may take the form of the reviewer’s arro-
gant one-sentence dismissal (“this translation is insensitive” or “the translation will
1
The comments which follow are all gleaned from recent reviews of Greek literature in En-
glish translation.
356 David Connolly
prove tolerably useful as a crib”) or the condescending concession (“the translator

makes a competent attempt”), but with no explanation of why the translation under
review is “insensitive” or “competent.” The same criticism could be made of those
subjective value judgments of reviewers who sum up the translation in one word as
being “excellent” or “accurate,” though without stating the criteria on which these
judgments were made. Other reviewers avoid opening themselves to this criticism by
evaluating the translation in terms of “fluency” or “readability”; criteria, that is, that
they consider to be self-explanatory but that are often unreliable criteria on which to
assess the quality of the translation. Perhaps the most common approach by reviewers
is to begin their few comments on the translation with a positive statement about the
translator’s attempt, before going on to point out lexical inaccuracies (usually minor
and often debatable) which, of course, the reviewer implies that he would never have
made. Usually, reviewers make no reference to where or how the translator has been
successful, only to how many “mistakes” or infelicities the reviewer has been able to
spot. Alternatively, if such mistakes are hard to find, the reviewer will have recourse
to comments of the type “I would have worded it differently.” In fact, reading reviews
of translated literature, one often wonders why the omniscient reviewer did not trans-
late the work himself as he leaves the reader in no doubt that he could have done far
better than the “poor translator, who did his best, but….”
Translation criticism, particularly by literary scholars, seems unable to rise above
quibbling about semantic accuracy on a lexical or, at most, sentential level. This, to-
gether with whether or not the translated work reads fluently seem to be the only cri-
teria used for assessing the quality of the translation (where this is attempted). What,
then, becomes painfully evident from an examination of reviews of translated works
is the lack of any critical apparatus on the part of reviewers for assessing literary
works in translation. One of the major issues in the field of literary translation studies
concerns the question of evaluation of translations and what the criteria (other than
purely subjective ones) might be for such an evaluation. There are, of course, those
who see “good” and “bad” as empty words when used of translations, and it has to
be said that translation studies have, in recent years, begun to focus on the way texts
have been translated in a particular culture and in a particular age as reflecting the
view of translation in that culture and age.2 There has been a shift of emphasis in the
discussion to the examination of questions such as who translates, why, and with what
aim? Who makes the selection of texts to be translated? How does the translated text
function in the receptor-culture?3 According to this approach, a literary translation,
therefore, is simply that which is accepted as a literary translation by a certain cul-
tural community at a certain time. It is a wholly target-orientated/product-orientated
approach. So, the focus of attention is not on evaluation but simply on the description
of the translated text. However, as both a student and teacher of literary translation
2
See A. Lefevere, “Literature, Comparative and Translated,” Babel 29, 2 (1983): 74.
3
See, for example, the work of I. Even-Zohar, “Polysystem Theory,” Poetics Today 1, 1–2
(1979): 287–310; and G. Toury, In Search of a Theory of Translation (Tel Aviv: The Porter,
1980); Toury, Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (Amsterdam: John Benjamins,
1995).
Poetry Translation Reviews Reviewed 357
(not least, as a practitioner), I have to believe that the art of literary translation can
be taught or at least that students can be helped to develop their talents and skills in
order to produce not only different kinds of translations but also better ones. And if
translations are to be thus evaluated, in terms of better or worse, this automatically
requires the existence of criteria (other than purely subjective ones). I will attempt
in what follows to suggest some general criteria for reviewing translations of poetry.

Any evaluation of a translation of a poetic text should, first of all, be in terms of the
translator’s aims, which should always be stated. As Kimon Friar writes: “There is
no one form of translation which is valid or ‘better’ than another, for this depends on
intention. Once the translator has stated clearly what he set out to accomplish, and
for what purpose, his work then should be judged according to the integrity of his
accomplishment and not be condemned for what it was never meant to be. All forms
of translation are valid and should be judged on their own terms.”4 The problem often
created is by reviewers and critics wishing to establish a hierarchy of value between
these different kinds, but again on very questionable criteria.5 A great deal of the
literature on poetry translation is about value judgments based on the critical method
of comparison with the original with the result that imitations and adaptations fare
badly. There are, of course, numerous reasons why the translator may choose to trans-
late a particular text. He may choose to translate because he wishes to test the capaci-
ties of the target language (TL) to express a certain kind of poetry, perhaps enriching
and renewing the TL at the same time (as with George Seferis and his translations of
W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot into Greek).6 He may translate because he is commissioned
by either poet or publisher to do so (for financial or other reward). He may translate
because he feels an affinity with the poet’s work and is inspired to want to appropriate
the poem in the TL (for personal reasons). He may use the poem as a starting point for
creating a new poem in the TL, through emulation, imitation, adaptation, and all the
other extreme forms of free translation (as, for example, with Ezra Pound and Robert
4
K. Friar, Modern Greek Poetry: From Cavafis to Elytis (New York: Simon & Schuster
1973), 652.
5
There has been much discussion on the demarcation lines between translations, versions,
imitations, etc. According to A. Lefevere, Translating Poetry: Seven Strategies and a Blue-
print (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1975), 76: “The translator proper is content to render the
original author’s interpretation of a theme accessible to a different audience. The writer of
versions basically keeps the substance of the source text, but changes its form. The writer of
imitations produces, to all intents and purposes, a poem of his own, which has only title and
point of departure, if those, in common with the source text.”
6
See G. Seferis, Αντιγραφές [Copies] (Athens: Ikaros, 1965), 7; and Seferis, Δοκιμές [Essays],
2 vols. (Athens: Ikaros, 1974), 2: 19.
358 David Connolly
Lowell).7 Or, his aim may be to make the poet known in the TL culture because the
author is, in the translator’s opinion, a major and original poetic voice that is worth
the “thankless efforts” (according to both Odysseus Elytis and Seferis) involved in
translation.8
A statement of the translator’s aims, whatever these may be, is essential from the
reader’s (and reviewer’s) point of view. It should be the reader’s right to know what
kind of translation is being offered. Only if the translator’s approach is known can
the reader even begin to discern the original’s outline behind the translation. We may
assume like Robert de Beaugrande that the TL reader selects a translation with the
intention of finding a text that represents the original as completely and as accurately
as possible, unless, of course, he reads the translation because it is by a particular
poet, so that emphasis of interest is on the work of the poet-translator rather than
poet of the source text (ST).9 The former view would seem to be widespread among
practitioners judging from the conversations with notable translators in the collection
edited by Edwin Honig. So, Fitzgerald remarks that “the translator serves the poet
being translated, and the service done is exclusively to bring the foreign work across
into the other language,” and Christopher Middleton maintains that “translators are
there to put themselves at the service of the spirit of the author.”10 This contrasts
with the Romantic ideas exemplified by Dante Gabriel Rossetti that “the only true
motive for putting poetry into a fresh language must be to endow a fresh nation, as
far as possible, with one more possession of beauty.” Perhaps the greater emphasis in
recent times on the translator’s duty to the ST author and his literature stems from the
fact that foreign authors are often translated today as representative of their literary
tradition and culture with the aim to highlight not only the author but the whole of
his literary tradition. This is particularly evident with literatures belonging to what
Eric Dickens refers to as “languages of lesser currency.” He points out that it is ulti-
mately individual authors who make or break the reputation of such literatures with
an English-speaking audience, and that translators of such literatures tend to have
two basic aims: “bringing worthwhile individual authors into their corner of the in-
7
Pound, for example, defined his Homage to Sextus Propertius (London: Faber & Faber,
1934) as something other than a translation; his purpose in writing the poem, he claimed, was
to bring a dead man to life. It was, in short, a kind of literary resurrection. Compare Lowell’s
statement: “I have tried to write live English and to do what my authors might have done if
they were writing their poems now and in America.” R. Lowell, Imitations (London: Faber &
Faber, 1962), xi.
8
See O. Elytis, Δεύτερη Γραφή [Second Writing] (Athens: Ikaros, 1976), 11: “The task is a
thankless one”; and G. Seferis, Μεταγραφές [Transcriptions] (Athens: Leschi, 1980), 232: “The
translation of poems is the form of writing that gives the least satisfaction.”
9
R. de Beaugrande, Factors in a Theory of Poetic Translating (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1978),
123.
10
E. Honig, ed., The Poet’s Other Voice: Conversations on Literary Translation (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), 103–04, 186.
ternational limelight, and highlighting the fact that certain small cultures possess a
body of literature potentially interesting to a wider audience.”11
Evaluation must, then, be based on the translator’s aims. A translation has to
be judged in terms of its consistency with these aims and not for something it was
never meant to be. Ben Belitt emphasizes this when he says: “I asked to be judged
in terms of what I initially set out to do and what I initially concede you cannot ex-
pect of me.”12 All aims are acceptable provided they are clearly stated. What is not
acceptable is inconsistency with these aims or mistakes in decoding and encoding, or
loss that is due to the translator’s lack of skill. It is the translator’s duty to state what
kind of translation is being offered and the reviewer’s responsibility to assess the
translation for its consistency with these aims. Though, it must be said that the aims
themselves may be open to criticism. For example, the reviewer may disagree with
the translator’s choice of idiom as not being appropriate to a particular poet, but he
cannot fault the translation if the translator is consistent in using his adopted idiom
throughout. Having established and commented on the translator’s aims and kind of
translation offered, what criteria are then available to the reviewer for evaluating the
translation in terms of consistency with these aims?

As noted earlier, one of the two basic criteria used by reviewers in their attempts to
evaluate translations is to hunt for mistakes on a lexical level alone and base their
“evaluation” of the translation purely on whether a word is referentially accurate or
appropriate (reviewers rarely give examples of the translator’s successful solutions).
The misreading of one word by the translator, or an infelicitous rendition in the con-
text of the whole poem, let alone a whole collection of poems, does not warrant the
attention given to it by reviewers. Mistakes of this kind are not really as important
as they are often made out to be, at least as long as they are incidental, and do not
make nonsense of the poetic text as a whole. But, apart from this, the insistence of
reviewers on confining their evaluation to questions of referential accuracy and inter-
pretation reveals an insensitivity to the other levels on which a poem functions. Fortu-
nately, translators do not generally exhibit such insensitivity. On the contrary, what is
stressed continually by practising translators, over and above any one particular aim
or approach, is the need for constant reworking and reassessment of the translated
text in an attempt to make it correspond to the original poetic text on all the levels on
which a poem functions.
What are these levels? First, a poem contains information; it conveys the poet’s
ideas or sentiments and, as such, consists of some statement or message referring to
the real world. It thus functions on a semantic level. Second, a poem not only informs
but delights through the manner or style in which it informs, or as Horace puts it:
11
E. Dickens, “Translating from Languages of Lesser Currency,” In Other Words 3 (1994):
30–31.
12
Ben Belitt in Honig, The Poet’s Other Voice, 76.
360 David Connolly
“Poets aim at giving either profit or delight, or at combining the giving of pleasure
with some useful precepts for life.”13 It may not exhibit the traditional verse forms of
meter or rhyme, but, insofar as it is successful as a poem, it will be characterized by
rhythm and certain formal devices, which constitute its orchestration and allow us to
talk of a poetic style. It functions, therefore, on a second, stylistic level. Third, any
poem, insofar as it functions as a poem for a particular reader, will have an emotional
effect on that reader; it will have a communicative impact on the reader over and
above any message or style it may possess. In other words, a poem also functions on
a pragmatic level.14 If a translation of a poem is to be successful, it must, therefore,
also function on these three levels, and in ways corresponding to those of the original
poem. The added difficulty for the translator is, of course, that these levels interact.
There are many points in a literary text where, for example, pragmatic and stylistic
considerations coincide. Similarly, on a semantic level, it could be argued that the full
meaning of any text lies in the intricacies of stylistic and semantic interaction (the old
concept of the inseparability of form and content). In the transfer between languages
and cultures, however, achieving equivalence on all levels will rarely be possible. So,
for example, in order to maintain equivalence of sound patterns, it will be necessary
to sacrifice equivalence on a syntactic or semantic level. Similarly, pragmatic equiv-
alence is often at variance with semantic or stylistic equivalence. The demand for
equivalence on all the various levels of a poem creates tensions pulling in different
directions which the translator will either have to try to balance or to decide which
will be given preference. James S. Holmes, in his model of translation, asserts that
as soon as the translator begins looking for correspondences, he will be faced with
a choice between three types of correspondences which he terms semantic, formal,
and functional, and which correspond more or less to what I refer to above as the
semantic, stylistic, and pragmatic levels.15 He notes that “it is a rare thing when the
three happen to coincide across language barriers” and elsewhere, he stresses the
13
Horace, “On the Art of Poetry”, trans. T. S. Dorsch, in Classical Literary Criticism (Har-
mondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1965), 90.
14
S. Gontcharenko, “The Possible in the Impossible: Towards a Typology of Poetic Transla-
tion,” in Translators and their Position in Society: Proceedings of the Xth Congress of FIT, ed.
H. Bόhler (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumόller, 1985), 143, expresses a similar view: “[A]t the basis
of any translation lies the law of triune equivalence…. First, of semantic equivalence, due to
which the translation conveys exactly what the original does. Second, of stylistic equivalence,
which makes the translation a stylistic match to the original. Third, of perceptive, or prag-
matic equivalence, which assures the identity of impact exercised by the translation and the
original on their respective readers.”
15
He calls these types of correspondences “semasiologues” (i.e., features corresponding in
meaning, but in neither function or form), “homologues” (i.e., features corresponding in form,
but not in function), or else “analogues” (i.e. features which correspond in function, but not
in form).
inadequacy of any definition of translation postulating correspondence on any single

one of these levels.16
The aim of the reviewer should not be, as in so much translation criticism, to
simply hunt for and highlight mistakes or quibble with the translator’s interpretations.
To examine how successful a translation is will require an analysis of the way the
original functions as a poetic text in a particular language, in a particular tradition,
and at a particular time, together with an examination of whether the translated text
functions in a similar or corresponding way in the target language and culture. This
will entail an examination and comparison of the translation and the original (al-
ways in terms of the translator’s stated aims), with examples concerning the way in
which the translator deals with the problems that arise on the semantic, stylistic, and
pragmatic levels. With single poems, such an analysis is feasible. With collections of
poems or novels, all that can be done is provide one or two characteristic examples
of the general problems on each level. What is not acceptable, or is at least open to
criticism, is when loss on any one level (semantic, stylistic, or pragmatic) is a result
not of the often insurmountable difficulties faced by the translator when crossing
linguistic and cultural borders but is due to the translator’s incompetence, as when a
translator has made error after error due to ignorance of the language or an insensitive
reading. In this case, we are dealing with an irresponsible misrepresentation of the
poet’s work. Equally unacceptable, however, is the review which criticizes a transla-
tor for mistakes or infelicities on any one level alone, without taking into account the
degree of successful correspondence on the other levels and on all the levels together.
A mistake or infelicity on the semantic level may have been dictated by an attempt on
the part of the translator to achieve closer correspondence to the original on the other
two levels. It is the reviewer’s duty to point this out, assuming, of course, that he is
aware of the problems involved, which is often not the case.

Apart from having recourse to pointing out mistakes in the translation, usually the
reviewer’s only other criterion for assessing translations is whether the translated
text is “fluent” or “readable.”17 What the reviewer means by this, however, is rarely
16
J. S. Holmes, Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies (Amster-
dam: Rodopi, 1988), 85, 101.
17
This practice of reading and evaluating translations on the basis of their fluency has long
prevailed in the UK and US, as has been discussed at length by Lawrence Venuti, The Transla-
tor’s Invisibility. A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995). He argues convincingly
that a translated text is judged acceptable by most publishers, reviewers and readers when it
reads fluently, when the absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities makes it seem trans-
parent, giving the appearance that it reflects the foreign writer’s personality or intention or the
essential meaning of the foreign text; the appearance, in other words, that the translation is not
in fact a translation, but the “original.” The illusion of transparency, Venuti asserts, is an effect
of fluent discourse, of the translator’s effort to ensure easy readability by adhering to current
usage, maintaining continuous syntax, fixing a precise meaning. What is so remarkable here is
362 David Connolly
explained. Even more perplexing is the fact that it is often used as a criterion for
assessing translations of literary texts that are not intended to be particularly “flu-
ent” or “readable” in the original. Translators who in their translated text normalize
language which in the original text deviates from the norms of the source language
seriously misrepresent their author and should meet with reproof, not approbation,
from reviewers. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Reviewers praise translations for
their “fluency” even though the original text may be far from fluent. Every translator
knows that deviations from the norms of the target language and/or from the “poetic”
norms of a particular tradition will be attributed to his incompetence rather than to
the author’s creativity. Most reviews only consolidate this situation. So, in addition to
the three levels discussed above, on which the translator has to seek correspondence,
we might add one more level: the “poetic” or normative level, which simply means
that in addition to the difficulties involved in accounting for the poem’s content, form,
and effect, the translator of poetry has also to produce a text that will meet the read-
er’s and reviewer’s expectations of a poem in the TL culture. The “poetic” or nor-
mative level refers to the fact that if you want acceptance for your translations, your
translated poem has to conform to the prevalent poetic norms or poetic sensibility in
a given culture. It has to have some intrinsic poetic quality defined in terms of the po-
etic norms of a particular time, place, and tradition. This basically amounts to an ac-
knowledgement of the expectations of the readership for poetry in a specific language
or tradition. This is succinctly expressed by Tess Gallagher, who notes: “Though we
often can’t tell how much fidelity [or correspondence] the translations we read bear
to their originals, we do know a good poem in English, and this seems to be the de-
ciding factor in the translations that win us.”18 And, similarly, R. A. Brower remarks:
“The average reader of a translation in English wants to find the kind of experience
which has become identified with ‘poetry’ in his readings of English literature. The
translator who wishes to be read must in some degree satisfy this want,” though pre-
sumably the reader is also looking for something different or wouldn’t turn to foreign
literature.19 On the purely poetic level, then, the search for fidelity or correspondence
to the original poem on the three levels discussed above becomes secondary to the
criterion of conformity with the poetic norms of a particular culture and tradition.20
that this illusory effect conceals the numerous conditions under which the translation is made,
starting with the translator’s crucial intervention in the foreign text. The more fluent the trans-
lation, the more invisible the translator. Venuti gives examples from translation reviews of the
dominance of fluency in English-language translations as a criterion for “good translation”.
18
T. Gallagher, “Poetry in Translation: Literary Imperialism or Defending the Musk Ox,”
Parnassus—The Poetry Review 9, 1 (1981): 166.
19
R. A. Brower, On Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 173.
20
As T. Hermans, ed., The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation (Lon-
don: Croom Helm 1985), 165, writes: “Translation is evidently a goal-oriented activity and in
terms of this need to make the translation conform to what is considered poetry in a particular
socio-cultural system, the translator is obliged to conform with the norms of that system, i.e.
the norms of the target or recipient system. So the act of translating is a matter of adjusting
This may, in part at least, explain Elytis’ cool reception in translation in the En-
glish-speaking world 21 in contrast to Cavafy and Seferis, whose poetry conforms—
or has been made to conform through translation—to what the English reader has
come to expect of poetry in the twentieth century.22 As an example, I might refer
here to a review in the TLS of Elytis’ collection The Oxopetra Elegies in my English
translation.23 The review begins as follows: “In the thankless discipline of translat-
ing poetry, certain combinations of author and language are particularly intractable;
and few tasks can be harder than to make a convincing English version of Odysseus
Elytis’ late poems. The problems stem partly from the poet’s adoption of a declara-
tive, highly rhetorical and at times would-be prophetic voice—a style no one since
Whitman has successfully invoked in English, and which at its most heated is more
likely to provoke ridicule than awe. The greatest difficulty, however, remains Ely-
tis’ language, with its almost rococo love of flourish and ornamentation; the English
equivalent is indigestible unless leavened by irony, a quality in which these poems
are entirely lacking.”24 Given the fact that, in Greece, the critical acclaim for this
collection when published in 1991 was overwhelming, and the fact that the reviewer
is not, on the whole, critical of my translation, I can only assume that the criticism of
the poems in English has to do more with their failure to conform to the prevailing
poetic norms in the English-speaking world.

and (yes) manipulating a Source Text so as to bring the Target Text into line with a particular
model and hence a particular correctness notion, and in so doing secure social acceptance.…
The ‘correct’ translation therefore is the one that fits the correctness notions prevailing in a
particular system, i.e. that adopts the solutions regarded as correct for a given communicative
situation, as a result of which it is regarded as correct. In other words, when translators do what
is expected of them, they will be seen to have done well.”
21
E. Keeley and G. Savidis, The Axion Esti (London: Anvil Press, 1980), 10, note: “Generally,
our aim throughout the poem has been to create a rhetorical equivalent that sounds natural and
contemporary in English, even if sometimes a bit abstract or hyperbolic by comparison to the
language normal to poetry in the English-speaking world since Pound and Eliot and Auden
established what has become the contemporary idiom in their tradition.”
22
E. Keeley, “Collaboration, Revision and Other Less Forgivable Sins,” in The Craft of Trans-
lation, ed. J. Biguenet and R. Schulte (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 59,
explains that in his translations with Sherrard of Cavafy: “Our impulse was to bring Cavafy
into the post-Sixties by creating a voice for him that we hoped would sound as contemporary
as the best Anglo-American poetry of the day.” He also adds (ibid., 61) that: “Our effort to
bring Cavafy into the post-Sixties world met with a generally warm reception from reviewers.”
23
D. Connolly, Odysseus Elytis: The Oxopetra Elegies (bilingual) (Amsterdam: Harwood
Academic Publishers, 1996).
24
J. Stathatos, review of Odysseus Elytis: The Oxopetra Elegies, by D. Connolly, The Times
Literary Supplement, 30 May 1997, 25.
364 David Connolly
To sum up, I have suggested the following as possible criteria for the evaluation of
poetry translations:
• What kind of translation is being offered? If the translator has not clearly
stated his aims, it is the reviewer’s responsibility to at least infer these
aims in order to assess the translation accordingly. Is the translation con-
sistent with these aims? Are these aims reasonable, given the type of po-
etry being translated and the linguistic and cultural traditions involved?
• Does the translation function in a way that is similar or that corresponds
to the way the original poem functions on all levels. Does it exhibit those
same linguistic and stylistic features which characterize a particular poet
in his own language? Is the choice of idiom in the TL suitable for render-
ing this particular type of poetry?
• Where there is significant semantic, stylistic, or pragmatic loss in the
translation, is this unavoidable or due to the translator’s lack of com-
petence? This does not mean hunting for mistakes, but requires the re-
viewer to be aware of the problems involved and the solutions possible.
• Is the translation acceptable as a poem in the target language and culture
or does it at least function as a piece of creative writing in its own right?
This is not the same as requiring that it appear as if originally written
in the TL or that it be totally domesticated in keeping with the linguis-
tic and poetic norms of the receptor-culture. I can see no justification
for demanding that The Axion Esti appear as an English poem. It is a
Greek poem not only in subject matter but also in formal conception, and
should, in my opinion, appear to be so and retain its Greek accent even in
the TL.
• Was the poetic work worth translating? Assessment in this respect should
be made both in terms of the work’s importance and originality in the
poet’s own cultural tradition but also in terms of its potential interest
and influence (if any) on the language and literature of the TL culture.
Similar questions to be asked here are whether it is a work that inevitably
loses so much in translation that the translator is, in fact, rendering a
disservice to the author.
Every experienced translator knows that there are limits to what can be achieved;
these have to do with the capacities of the TL and the constraints of the TL culture,
and norms as discussed above, but also with the translator’s skill.25 The translator’s
skill is not limited to the linguistic level. He also needs the critical ability to judge
works from foreign literatures, to discern what may be of potential interest to his tar-
get readership and to assess what works can be effectively translated. He should have
a thorough knowledge of the literary tradition and sociocultural background against
which a certain ST is written, and he must possess a certain amount of creative talent
25
See Lefevere, Translating Poetry, 101–03, who lists a five-point inventory for assessing the
competence of the literary translator.
himself. The ideal translator should therefore combine the personalities of the lin-
guist, scholar, critic, and creative writer. The difficulties involved and the demands
made upon the translator perhaps help to explain why the translation of a poem is
never totally satisfactory, and why the translator has eventually to stop somewhere.
Many statements by practicing translators testify to the fact that no matter how long
the translator works, no matter how many drafts are rejected, no matter how many
rewritings are undertaken, no matter how successful the resulting text may be, there
will always be the original remaining to show that the translation is less than we
would wish it. The difficulty of accounting for all the various aspects and functions of
the original poem has led many translators and poets alike to declare that translating
poetry is impossible. Personally, I side with those who, like the late Joseph Brodsky,
see it rather as “the art of the impossible.” Reviews of translated texts would be more
constructive and meaningful if reviewers themselves were perhaps a little more prac-
ticed in this “impossible art.”
Russia and Eastern Europe
Khazaria, Kiev, and Constantinople in the
First Half of the Tenth Century
Thomas S. Noonan†
Mesmerized by chronicle accounts of the route from the Varangians to the Greeks
and the Rus´-Byzantine trade treaties of the first half of the tenth century, too many
historians assume that the foreign relations of the early Kievan state revolved primar-
ily around its ties with Byzantium. In fact, Rus´-Vikings first appeared in northwest-
ern European Russia around 750, and by the late eighth century, they had established
a lucrative trade with the Near East via the Don-Donets basins and Khazaria. This
trade flourished during the course of the ninth century, when millions of Islamic
silver coins or dirhams were imported into European Russia and the Baltic by Rus´
merchants operating from bases in northwestern Russia (Ladoga and Riurikovo goro-
dishche) and the upper Volga (Timerevo and Sarskoe). As the result of this trade,
the Rus´ developed very close ties with the Khazar khaganate and were very much
influenced by its institutions. In the ninth and tenth centuries, for instance, Khazaria
was run by a ceremonial head of state called the khagan and an actual ruler called the
beg. In 839, a group of men who called themselves Rhos appeared in Constantinople
and professed to have been dispatched there by their ruler, who was called Chacanus
(rex illorum Chacanus vocabulo). The Byzantine emperor, in turn, sent these men
to the western emperor in Ingelheim as part of an official embassy and asked the
emperor to help them return home safely, since the route by which they had come to
Constantinople was blocked by ferocious barbarians.1 While there is great contro-
versy surrounding this report, it seems clear that these Rhos/Rus´ were either agents
of the Khazar khagan sent to Constantinople or representatives of an independent
entity located somewhere in European Russia whose leader had borrowed the title of
the Khazar ruler.2 In the latter case, from the 830s at the latest, one band of Rus´ was
in such close contact with the Khazars that it sought to legitimize its own power by
assuming the sacred title of the charismatic Khazar dynasty.
This process of legitimization through the adoption of the Khazar title of kha-
gan continued in the tenth century. Both Ibn Rusta and Gardîzî noted that the Rûs
1
The Annals of St.-Bertin, trans. J. L. Nelson (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press,
1991), 44.
2
For the latter point of view, see P. B. Golden, “The Question of the Rus´ Qaǧanate,” Ar-
chivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 2 (1982): 77–97.
370 Thomas S. Noonan
ruler was called the khâǧan/khagan of the Rûs.3 Similarly, the anonymous Ḥudûd
al-cÂlam indicates that the Rûs king is called the Rûs khâǧan.4 The parallels between
the tenth-century Khazar and Rus´ ruling structures were also functional. Ibn Faḍlân,
describing the situation ca. 921, noted that the king of the Rus´ “has a viceregent who
manages his armies, fights his enemies and represents him among his subjects.” He
then went on to note that the Khazar beg, not the khagan, “leads the [Khazar] armed
forces and manages them, conducts the affairs of the kingdom and assumes the bur-
dens thereof, appears before the people and raids [external enemies].”5 The Rus´ bor-
rowed more than just a legitimizing title from the Khazars; they had also adopted the
Khazar practice of a dual kingship with a ceremonial khagan who ruled nominally
along with a beg, who had real executive power.
The desire to associate themselves with the Khazar khagan was so strong that
even in the eleventh century, long after the khaganate had collapsed ca. 965, the Rus´
grand princes of Kiev were sometimes referred to as khagans. Around 1050, Metro-
politan Hilarion, for example, called Grand Prince Vladimir “our khagan” and “the
great khagan of our land,” while he alluded to his patron and contemporary, Grand
Prince Iaroslav, as “our devout khagan.”6 These references seem strange coming as
they did from a man who described Grand Prince Vladimir as “the new Constantine”
who had brought the true faith to Kiev. But, such sentiments were not unique among
Rus´ of the eleventh century. The north gallery of the cathedral of St. Sophia in Kiev
contains a graffito, ascribed to the time of Grand Prince Sviatoslav II (1073–76),
which asked God to “save our khagan.”7 Finally, it is worth noting that the contro-
versial Igor´ Tale, considered by some to be a genuine work of the Kievan period, has
references to khagans Sviatoslav, Iaroslav, and Oleg.8
The above evidence makes it clear that very strong economic and political ties
existed between the Rus´ and the Khazars going as far back as the late eighth and
early ninth century and that the Rus´ borrowed both the title khagan and the institu-
tion of dual kingship from the Khazars. Nevertheless, it is also clear that starting in
the early tenth century the Rus´ grand princes of Kiev developed increasingly strong
3
A. P. Martinez, “Gardîzî’s Two Chapters on the Turks,” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 2
(1982): 167; and Golden, “Rus´ Qaǧanate,” 82.
4
Ḥudûd al- cÂlam. “The Regions of the World”: A Persian Geography, 372 A.H.–982 A.D.,
trans. V. Minorsky, ed. C. E. Bosworth, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Gibb Memorial Press, 1970), 159.
5
James E. McKeithen, trans., “The Risâlah of Ibn Fadlân” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University,
1979), 152–54.
6
Metropolitan Hilarion, “Sermon on Law and Grace,” in Sermons and Rhetoric of Kievan
Rus´, trans. and ed. Simon Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Distributed by Harvard University
Press for the Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University, 1991), 3, 17, 18, 26.
7
S. A. Vysotskii, Drevnerusskie nadpisi Sofii Kievskoi XI–XIV vv. (Kiev: Naukova Dumka,
1966), 1: 49–52.
8
The Song of Igor’s Campaign, trans. Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Vintage Books, 1960),
71.
Khazaria, Kiev, and Constantinople in the First Half of the Tenth Century 371
economic and political ties with Constantinople, ties which were greatly strengthened
by the conversion of Grand Prince Vladimir to Byzantine Orthodoxy ca. 989. In the
course of time, these ties became so potent that the earlier close relationship with
Khazaria was largely forgotten or ignored. It is the purpose of this study to explore
the great “diplomatic revolution” in the foreign affairs of Kiev which saw it move out
of the Khazar orbit and into that of Byzantium, a development which, as we shall see,
took place in the first half of the tenth century.
Khazar hegemony over the middle Dnepr region in general and Kiev in particular
dates to the first half of the ninth century. According to the Primary Chronicle, some
time after the death of the legendary founders of Kiev (Kiy, Shchek, and Khoriv), the
Khazars imposed a tribute of one sword per hearth upon the Polianians, the East Slavic
tribe inhabiting Kiev and surrounding areas.9 An alternative version, also found in
the Primary Chronicle, indicates that in 859 the Khazars imposed a tribute of one
white squirrel skin per hearth upon the Polianians as well as the Severianians of the
Desna basin and the Viatichians of the upper Oka basin.10 This Khazar imposition of
tribute over the East Slavic tribes of the middle Dnepr leaves no doubt that Khazar
rule extended over these areas. This domination is reiterated in entries dated to the
880s that state that the Severianians paid the Khazars a “light” tribute while the
Radimichians of the upper left-bank Dnepr paid the Khazars one shilling, i.e., one
dirham, apiece.11 Since the Derevlianians allegedly began to pay the Rus´ of Kiev a
tribute of one black marten skin apiece in the 880s, they may also have been subjected
to Khazar tribute although this is not specifically stated.12 Khazar rule over some
of these East Slavic tribes apparently lasted for some time. The Primary Chronicle
noted, in an entry dated to the late 950s, that the Viatichians still paid the Khazars a
tribute although it had now been converted to one silver coin per ploughshare.13
Lest there be any skepticism about these reports of Khazar domination over the
East Slavs, we need only consult the Extended Redaction of the Reply of the Khazar
King Joseph, where he stated, ca. 950, that his realm included the Arisu (=the Mord-
vin tribe of Erza?), the Ts-p-mis (probably the Cheremis), the V-i-i-tit (Viatichians?),
the S-v-r (Severianians?), and the S-l-viiun (another Slavic tribe, perhaps the Radi-
michians or Ilmen´ Slavs?). Joseph went on to note that each of these peoples serve
him and pay tribute to the Khazars.14 In other words, both Rus´ and Khazar sources
agree that many East Slavic and even Finnic tribes later incorporated into the Rus´
state centered in Kiev had previously paid tribute to the Khazars. While it is not clear
9
The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text, trans. and ed. Samuel Hazzard Cross and
Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953), 58.
10
Ibid., 59.
11
Ibid., 61.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid., 84.
14
P. K. Kokovtsov, Evreisko-khazarskaia perepiska v X veke (Leningrad: Izdatel´stvo Aka-
demii nauk SSSR, 1932), 98.
when Khazar rule over the Rus´ lands began, it was no later than the first half of the
ninth century.
Let us now examine Rus´-Khazar relations in the second half of the ninth cen-
tury. According to the Primary Chronicle, Askold and Dir, two men serving under
Riurik in Novgorod (actually Ladoga or Riurikovo Gorodishche), received permis-
sion to go to Constantinople. While sailing down the Dnepr, they came to Kiev, where
the descendants of Kiy, Shchek, and Khoriv “were living … as tributaries of the
Khazars.” The chronicler then states that Askold and Dir decided to stay in Kiev and
subsequently extended their control over the lands of the Polianians, i.e., the middle
Dnepr region around Kiev. A few years later, Askold and Dir allegedly attacked Con-
stantinople, but their fleet was destroyed in a storm.15
This entry, while plausible, raises a number of serious problems. In the first
place, there are some grounds to question the very historicity of Askold and Dir as
well as their supposed exploits. Recent scholarship, for example, argues that the 860
attack on Constantinople was launched from somewhere in northern Russia rather
than from Kiev.16 At most, Askold and Dir seem to be the leaders of a small band
of adventurers who headed south in search of fame and fortune. At the least, they
were inventions of the later chroniclers who apparently sought to legitimize the es-
tablishment of the Rus´ grand princes in Kiev by having them seize the city from
Askold and Dir.17 This account also raises problems because it omits all mention of
the Khazars. We are supposed to believe that a band of Rus´ from the Novgorod re-
gion suddenly appeared in Kiev, a town whose inhabitants were Khazar tributaries,
and established their undisputed rule over it and the surrounding area while the Kha-
zar overlords seemingly did nothing. Rather than conclude that the Khazars meekly
withdrew without any resistance, it seems far more realistic to assume that Askold
and Dir, if they existed, came to some understanding with the Khazar rulers of Kiev.
Co-dominium is no doubt too strong a word for the new situation that arose in Kiev
ca. 860. It is more likely that Askold and Dir entered into Khazar service and helped
the Khazars collect tribute from the local peoples. Just as other Rus´ served the Kha-
zar khagan as envoys and mercenaries, so the Rus´ of Askold and Dir became part of
Khazar local government in the middle Dnepr.
Askold and Dir were not the only Rus´ from the Novgorod region to move south
to Kiev and the middle Dnepr. Around 880, Oleg, Riurik’s successor, supposedly led
a large army south to Kiev pretending to be a merchant on his way to Constantinople.
When Askold and Dir came out to meet them, they were promptly killed, and Oleg
15
Primary Chronicle, 60.
16
Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200 (London: Long-
man, 1996), 50–58; and Constantine Zuckerman, “On the Date of the Khazars’ Conversion to
Judaism and the Chronology of the Kings of the Rus Oleg and Igor: A Study of the Anonymous
Khazar Letter from the Genizah of Cairo,” Revue des Études Byzantines 53, 1 (1995): 270.
17
Before Oleg killed Askold and Dir and seized control of Kiev, he purportedly said to them:
“You are not princes nor even of princely stock, but I am of princely birth.” See Primary
Chronicle, 61.
then announced that Kiev would be “the mother of Rus´ cities.”18 This chronicle en-
try describing Oleg’s seizure of Kiev also omits all references to the Khazars. We
are led to believe that there was no Khazar dominion of any kind over the city and
that Askold and Dir were its sole rulers. Furthermore, subsequent chronicle entries
from the 880s, as we have seen, relate how Oleg forced the other East Slavic tribes
of the middle Dnepr to stop paying tribute to the Khazars and to give the tribute to
his band instead. Again, this transfer of tributary status from Khazaria to Kiev sup-
posedly took place without any opposition from the Khazars. The chronicler implies
that Khazar rule over the entire middle Dnepr simply melted away when Oleg’s band
appeared in Kiev and then demanded tribute from the various East Slavic tribes.
Such an interpretation is clearly unacceptable. There is no reason to believe that the
Khazars beat a hasty retreat and relinquished all control over the middle Dnepr once
Oleg and his army arrived.
How then do we explain Oleg’s relationship with the Khazars ca. 880? Recently,
Constantine Zuckerman has undertaken a detailed reanalysis of the chronology of
Oleg’s and Igor’s reigns based on an examination of the Primary Chronicle, First
Novgorod Chronicle, and the Schechter Text/Cambridge Document. He concluded
that the time of Oleg’s movement from the Novgorod region south and his seizure of
Kiev should be moved forward from the 880s–890s to the 910s–930s. This redating
would help to explain why Oleg, whose death is recorded in the Primary Chronicle
under the year 912, perished, according to the Cambridge Document, in Persia during
the early 940s.19 Since Zuckerman’s argumentation makes good sense, Oleg’s appear-
ance in Kiev should now be dated to the early tenth century. Askold and Dir, if they
existed, probably died sometime in the second half of the ninth century.
The accounts of Askold, Dir, and Oleg, even though they may be apocryphal
or misdated, do highlight one crucial fact. During the second half of the ninth cen-
tury and especially its last twenty-five years, Kiev and the middle Dnepr received
increasing attention from Rus´ bands in central and northern Russia. It is now be-
lieved (based on archaeological excavations) that significant numbers of Rus´ first
appeared in the city during the 880s.20 What was it that made Kiev more attractive to
the Rus´ of the north starting in the late ninth century? While the Primary Chronicle
focuses its attention upon the political activities of such semilegendary Rus´ leaders
as Askold, Dir, and Oleg, it is also important to consider the economic situation of
Kiev during the second half of the ninth century. As noted earlier, during the ninth
century, the Rus´ conducted a very active commerce with the Islamic world via the
Khazar khaganate. Based on the find spots of the hoards of Islamic silver coins or dir-
hams deposited at this time, the main routes for this trade led via the Don and Donets
18
Ibid., 61.
19
Zuckerman, “On the Date,” 259–68.
20
Johan Callmer, “The Archaeology of Kiev to the End of the Earliest Urban Phase,” Harvard
Ukrainian Studies 11 (1987): 323–53; and Volodymyr I. Mezentsev, “The Emergence of the
Podil and the Genesis of the City of Kiev: Problems of Dating,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies
10 (1986): 48–70.
basins to the upper Volga and upper Dnepr. The middle Dnepr, like the middle Volga,
had little or no place in the Islamic trade of the Rus´ at this time.21
Rus´ commerce with the Near East via Khazaria was dominated by well-orga-
nized bands of Rus´ who operated from long established bases in northern and central
Russia. Their monopoly over the Islamic trade proved very profitable. During the
period from 780 to 899, some 30,000 dirhams have been reported from finds in Euro-
pean Russia alone. If we add the dirhams from the Baltic that passed through Russia
(around 20,000) and multiply by a wastage factor (to account for dirhams that were
melted down, never recorded, or have not yet been found) of from 10 to 100, then it
is possible to estimate the volume of trade at 500,000 to 5,000,000 silver dirhams. If
each dirham weighed around 2.8 grams, then between 14,000 and 140,000 kg of silver
were involved. The rich and powerful Rus´ bands who controlled the Islamic trade
had no interest in sharing their profits with other Rus´ bands, especially those new
bands (like Riurik’s) that had only appeared in European Russia around the middle of
the ninth century. New Rus´ adventurers like Riurik, Askold, Dir, Oleg, etc., had to
look elsewhere if they were to gain fame and fortune. Consequently, it is not surpris-
ing that some newly arrived Rus´ began to seek their fortune along the middle Dnepr.
The Rus´ who first became active in Kiev no doubt functioned as Khazar servitors
and had as their primary duty the maintenance of Khazar rule, which was primarily
manifested in the collection of tribute from the local peoples. They had no role in the
Rus´ trade with the Near East that went through the Caspian and Caucasus. This trade
was in the hands of other Rus´ bands, bands that were quite independent of the Rus´
in Kiev. The Rus´ of Kiev were thus less prosperous than other Rus´ bands and were
unquestionably excluded from the eastern trade.
Given the above background, let us now explore the diplomatic revolution in
Kiev’s relations with the outside world that occurred during the first half of the tenth
century. Sometime early in the century, an ambitious and able Viking parvenu named
Oleg assumed leadership of the small band of Rus´ inhabiting Kiev. Oleg had to face
the fact that his band was relatively poor compared with the Rus´ who dominated
the Islamic trade, while his overlords, the Khazars, had to contend with a severe
military-economic crisis. Khazaria had maintained good relations with Byzantium
over the course of several centuries. In the 620s, Khazars had allied with the emperor
Heraclius against the Sasanian rulers of the Caucasus. In the first half of the eighth
century, a marriage between the Khazar and Byzantine royal houses cemented an
alliance against an expansionist Umayyad caliphate that threatened both empires.
Finally, in the late 830s, Byzantium helped the Khazars to construct a fortress in the
Don steppe to guard against an unidentified foe. At the same time, Khazar and Byz-
21
Thomas S. Noonan, “Ninth-Century Dirham Hoards from European Russia: A Preliminary
Analysis,” in Viking-Age Coinage in the Northern Lands, ed. M. A. S. Blackburn and D. M.
Metcalf, British Archaeological Reports, International Series, no. 122 (Oxford: British Ar-
cheological Reports, 1981), 57; and Noonan, “Coins, Trade and the Origins of Ninth Century
Rus´ Towns,” in XII. Internationaler Numismatischer Kongress Berlin 1997: Akten —Pro-
ceedings—Actes, ed. Bernd Klug (Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2000), 934–42.
antine interests came into conflict in the Crimea and the northwestern Caucasus.22
As borderlands located between these two empires, it was natural that both states
would seek to dominate them. The inherent territorial tensions between Byzantium
and Khazaria would inevitably become more severe when there was no common en-
emy like the Arabs to force them into an accommodation. Under these circumstances,
Byzantium was apt to exploit any weaknesses in Khazaria.
In the ninth century, Khazaria experienced serious problems in the steppe re-
gions between the Volga and the Dnepr. As noted above, in the late 830s the Khazars
had requested Byzantine assistance to construct a fortress in the lower Don steppe
to help repel some anonymous enemy. While the identity of this enemy is the sub-
ject of much discussion, the group threatening the lower Don steppe was most likely
the Hungarians.23 The creation of the Hungarian land of Lebedia in the Don-Dnepr
steppes represented a serious threat to the Khazar position here. Then, in the 880s,
when the Khazars apparently used the Pechenegs to drive the Hungarians westward
out of Lebedia,24 the situation deteriorated further. The Pechenegs, who now occupied
Lebedia, became enemies of Khazaria who presented a major threat to the khaganate.
The Khazar lands in the Don-Dnepr steppe were now lost while the prosperous re-
gions of the Don-Donets forest steppe and Crimea, with their developed agriculture,
rich pasture lands, and extensive craft production, were exposed to constant danger.
By the late ninth century, Byzantium no doubt concluded that the time had come to
attack Khazaria and regain control over the entire Crimea.
While the exact dates and identities of the parties involved remain the subject
of some discussion, the Schechter Text or Cambridge Document clearly reveals the
animosity that existed between Byzantium and Khazaria at the time.25 During the
reign of the Khazar king Benjamin, ca. 880–ca. 900, a potent anti-Khazar alliance
consisting of the Burtās, the Torks or Oghuz, the Black Bulghars, the Pechenegs,
and the Macedonians, i.e., Byzantines, attacked Khazaria. The khaganate was saved
and the anti-Khazar alliance defeated, thanks to the intervention of the king of the
Alans on the side of Benjamin. As Pritsak notes, it seems evident that the organizer
22
Thomas S. Noonan, “Byzantium and the Khazars: A Special Relationship?” in Byzantine
Diplomacy, ed. J. Shepard and S. Franklin (London: Variorum, 1992), 109–32; and Noonan,
“Why Dirhams First Reached Russia: The Role of Arab-Khazar Relations in the Development
of the Earliest Islamic Trade with Eastern Europe,” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 4 (1984):
151–282.
23
K. Tsukerman, “Vengry v strane Lebedii: Novaia derzhava na granitsakh Vizantii i Kha
zarii ok. 836–889 g.,” Materialy po arkheologii, istorii i etnografii Tavrii 6 (1998): 659–84;
Constantine Zuckerman, “Les Hongrois aux pays de Lebedia: Une nouvelle puissance aux
confins de Byzance et de la Khazarie ca. 836–889,” in Byzantium at War, ed. N. Oikonomides
(Athens: National Research Foundation, 1997), 51–74.
24
Tsukerman, “Vengry,” 666–67.
25
I have followed the interpretation of Pritsak regarding the Schechter Text. See Norman
Golb and Omeljan Pritsak, Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1982), esp. 132–44.
of this anti-Khazar coalition was Byzantium.26 Following this setback, Byzantium

tried a new approach against the Khazars during the reign of the Khazar king Aaron,
ca. 900–ca. 920. Early in the tenth century, the Alans were converted to Byzantine
Orthodoxy. The emperor then induced the king of the Alans to attack the Khazars.
This time, however, Aaron hired the Torks/Oghuz as his allies and the Alans were
defeated. Presumably as a consequence of this reverse, the Alans abjured Christianity
sometime in the 920s and expelled the Orthodox clergy sent to them by the Byzantine
emperor.27 The late ninth and early tenth centuries were thus marked by a series of
campaigns against the Khazars instigated by Byzantium. The Byzantine objective
was apparently to use its proxy forces to weaken the Khazars and thus regain terri-
tories in the Crimea which had been lost to the Khazars earlier. While this strategy
failed, due to the ability of the Khazars to recruit their own mercenaries, it illustrates
very clearly the pronounced anti-Khazar policy that dominated Constantinople.
Despite these failures, the Byzantines were not prepared to abandon their ag-
gressive anti-Khazar policy. In the early 940s, they found a new proxy to pursue
their wars against Khazaria. The emperor Romanus Lecapenus bribed Helgi/Oleg,
the king of the Rus´, to attack Tmutorokan´, the main Khazar city in the Kerch straits.
Oleg seized the city and looted it during the night while the local commander, the
pesah, was absent. When the pesah heard of this raid, he marched into the Byzantine
Crimea, took several Byzantine towns and cities, including Kherson, and presumably
looted them. The pesah then marched from Kherson against Oleg, defeated him after
a four-month campaign, and took back the loot seized in Tmutorokan´. When Oleg
pleaded that he had been lured by Romanus to attack Tmutorokan´, he was compelled
by the pesah to launch a naval raid against Constantinople or the Byzantine coasts
somewhere in the Black Sea. After four months at sea, Oleg’s forces were destroyed
by the Greek fire employed by the Byzantine navy. “Ashamed to return to his [own]
country, he fled to Persia by [the Caspian] sea and there he and his troops fell.”28
Several points in this account of Oleg’s adventures are crucial for our analysis.
First, the Byzantines now considered the Rus´ of Oleg as one of the peoples inhabiting
the northern coasts of the Black Sea who could be induced to fight Byzantium’s wars
for it. Usually, such a role was reserved for nomadic peoples such as the Pechenegs.
Oleg’s Rus´ must thus have established close ties with Byzantium. Second, the Khazars
presented a very dangerous threat to Byzantine possessions in the Crimea. The pesah
was able to ravage these territories and threaten Kherson, the very center of Byzantine
power in the peninsula. The ease with which Khazaria could endanger the Byzantine
position in the Crimea suggests why Byzantium was so keen to weaken the khaganate.
Third, despite their close ties with Byzantium, Oleg’s Rus´ were still under Khazar
domination. Although it took the pesah four months to bring Oleg to bay, the Rus´
of Kiev were defeated by the Khazars and compelled to accept Khazar overlordship
again. Khazar rule over Kiev was still real. Finally, just as the Byzantines tried to use
26
Ibid., 112–15, 132–35.
27
Ibid., 114–15, 135–36.
28
Ibid., 114–19, 137–38.
Oleg against the Khazars, the Khazars tried to use Oleg against Byzantium. Oleg was
caught between the two powers and he suffered greatly from their efforts to use his
Rus´ as their agents against the other. Quite clearly, it was in Oleg’s best efforts to
extricate himself from this untenable position. If he could not free himself from the
demands of both empires, then at least he could try to gain his independence from one
of them. In any event, the late ninth and first half of the tenth century was marked by
growing hostilities between Byzantium and Khazaria, hostilities which began to have
very negative consequences for Oleg and the Rus´ of Kiev.
Khazaria’s economic problems arose from the major change that took place in
Rus´ trade with the Islamic world around 900. Prior to that time, as we have seen,
the eastern trade of the Rus´ went through the Khazar khaganate across the Caspian
and Caucasus to the Near East. The Khazars collected a tithe on all the goods that
were transported through their lands as well as collecting other tolls and taxes. Start
ing around 900, however, the main trade route connecting European Russia with
the Islamic world shifted. This commerce now ran along the upper Volga to Volga
Bulgharia on the middle Volga. Rus´ merchants brought their slaves and furs here,
where they exchanged them with Islamic traders who had come across the steppe
by caravan from Khwârizm in Central Asia. This dramatic shift is clearly revealed
in the numismatic materials. Most of the dirhams deposited in northern Europe dur
ing the ninth century were struck in the cAbbâsid mints of the Near East such as
Baghdad/Madînt al-Salâm. Tenth-century dirhams deposited in northern Europe
were overwhelmingly struck in the Sâmânid mints of Central Asia such as Tashkent/
al-Shâsh and Samarqand. Judging from the coin evidence, around 80 percent of the
Islamic trade with the Rus´ now went via the caravan route from Central Asia, while
only 20 percent of the eastern commerce continued to come by the old Caspian–
Caucasus route. At the same time, the volume of trade increased markedly during
the tenth century. If some 50,000 dirhams were deposited in northern Europe during
the ninth century, then some 300,000 were deposited here during the tenth century.
While the volume of the Rus´-Islamic commerce going via the khaganate was still
substantial, the volume of this trade going through Volga Bulgharia was four times
greater. To put it bluntly, Khazaria had lost 80 percent of its former market share,
which meant huge losses in tithes, tolls, taxes, and other revenues. Since the Volga
Bulghars were tributaries of the Khazars, the latter recouped some of these losses
from the tithes assessed on merchants involved in the Khazar-Volga Bulghar com
merce along the Volga. But, these revenues did not make up for the fact that the main
intermediary in the Islamic trade was now the Volga Bulghars, who amassed a vast
fortune from this commerce.
To increase the wealth and power of his band and to deal with the economic-mil-
itary crisis confronting his Khazar overlords, Oleg devised a threefold strategy. The
first part of his plan was to tap into the wealth derived by the Bulghars from their
trade with Central Asia. This effort is reflected very clearly in the numismatic ev-
idence. During the ninth century, no hoards of Islamic dirhams were deposited in
Kiev or surrounding regions of the middle Dnepr.29 Then, suddenly, in the early tenth
29
Noonan, “Ninth-Century Dirham Hoards,” 57.
century, two huge dirham hoards appeared in Kiev. One of these hoards, unearthed in
1851, apparently consisted of 2,000–3,000 dirhams. Unfortunately, most of the hoard
was dispersed and only 512 dirhams were preserved. However, the largest group of
the preserved dirhams, the 401 coins sent to the Coin Cabinet of the Hermitage in
St. Petersburg, has not been published, and the detailed, written account of them has
not been made available to scholars. Nevertheless, based upon the hundred or so dir
hams which have been published, the hoard can be dated to 905–06. About half of
these hundred or so dirhams were recent Sâmânid dirhams issued by Central Asian
mints.30 Fortunately, we possess a very detailed account of the second huge hoard
from Kiev, which was uncovered in 1913 and contained 2,930 dirhams. Most of the
genuine dirhams in this hoard (87.6 percent) were Abbâsid coins struck prior to 880.
In other words, they were dirhams imported into European Russia during the ninth
century. However, 10.7 percent were new Sâmânid dirhams struck in Central Asia.31
The presence of recent Sâmânid dirhams in both hoards indicates that Kiev was now
obtaining dirhams from Volga Bulgharia where these coins were imported into Eu-
ropean Russia from Central Asia. Under Oleg, a direct connection between Kiev and
the Islamic trade was brought about for the first time.
However, the Rus´ merchants of the upper Volga and northwestern Russia who
controlled the Islamic commerce on the Rus´ side had no desire to let their rivals in
Kiev have a share in their highly profitable monopoly. Consequently, only two other
hoards were deposited in Kiev during the remainder of the first half of the tenth
century, and one consisted of 6 dirhams preserved from a larger group of perhaps 40
found in a grave.32 The second of these hoards contained over 190 dirhams and was
deposited ca. 935–36.33 In short, Kiev’s participation in the Islamic commerce that
Oleg had initiated in the early tenth century came to a rather abrupt end. The Rus´ of
Kiev were not going to get rich and powerful through the eastern trade.
If one could not gain fame and fortune through the Islamic trade, then it was
possible to achieve the same goals by raiding the Islamic lands. Thus, during the time
of Oleg, the Muslim population along the Caspian coasts became a favorite target of
the Rus´. Mascûdî, for example, recounts the famous Rus´ raid against the Muslim
towns on the western coast of the Caspian which took place some time after 912–13.
An expedition supposedly containing some five hundred ships carrying five hundred
men each appeared in the Sea of Azov and entered into negotiations with the Khazar
king. The Rus´ requested permission to pass through Khazaria and sail down the
Volga by the Khazar capital of Itil´ and enter into the Khazar Sea (the Caspian). The
Rus´ marauders promised to split the booty from their raids on the towns along the
coast evenly with the king. The king agreed and the Rus´ sailed up the Don, portaged
across to the Volga, and then sailed down the Volga into the Caspian. The Rus´ ships
30
Thomas S. Noonan, “The Monetary History of Kiev in the Pre-Mongol Period,” Harvard
Ukrainian Studies 11 (1987): 411–13, no. 4.
31
Ibid., 414–15, no. 16.
32
Ibid., 414, no. 11.
33
Ibid., 413, no. 6.
then spread out over the Caspian coasts looting and pillaging everywhere they went.
When they concluded their raiding, they returned north to the estuary of the Volga
and informed the Khazar king that they were prepared to divide the spoils of their
raids with him equally. However, the Muslim mercenaries of the Khazars along with
other Muslims resident in Itil´ heard what the Rus´ had done to their brethren along
the Caspian coast and told the king that they were going to deal with these butch-
ers who had attacked their fellow Muslims. Unable to resist their demands, the king
warned the Rus´ raiders that the Muslims were going to fight them. The Rus´ disem-
barked from their ships and confronted a Muslim force said to have numbered fifteen
thousand. In the ensuing battle, the Rus´ suffered a catastrophic defeat, with thirty
thousand men supposedly perishing. Some five thousand Rus´ were able to escape but
most of them were apparently killed fleeing north by land.34
This was not the first raid undertaken by the Rus´ into the Caspian. The first
such raid documented in the written sources dates to the period 864–83 and was
directed against the southern coasts of the Caspian in Jurjân province. This raid was
unsuccessful. It is important to note that Jurjân was located along the route followed
by Rus´ merchants who crossed the Caspian on their way to Baghdad. The second
raid came in 910 and was also directed against Jurjân. With the aid of the Sâmânids,
the Rus´ were again defeated. The third raid was launched by the Rus´ in 911–12 in
retaliation for their defeat the prior year. After some initial success, the Rus´ were
once again defeated. The fourth naval expedition is the one described above at some
length.
The Rus´ raids in the Caspian share some common characteristics. First, all four
raids were unsuccessful. The Rus´ were either defeated by the Muslim forces along
the southern coasts or they were annihilated on their return home through the Khazar
capital of Itil´. Raiding in the Caspian was very dangerous. The local peoples seemed
able to defend themselves and could sometimes count on the assistance of regional
states such as the Sâmânids. In the event the Rus´ expeditions were victorious and
much booty was gathered, there was no guarantee that the Rus´ could safely escape
from the local Muslim population of Itil´ on their way up the Volga to the place where
they apparently portaged to the Don. Raiding in the Caspian was not very profitable
for the Rus´.
Second, it would appear that all four raids were conducted with the connivance
of the Khazar rulers, although this is only stated explicitly with respect to the fourth
raid. The Khazars maintained close control over the entrance to the Sea of Azov from
the Kerch strait and were well aware of the dangers presented by Rus´ raiders. King
Joseph, for example, specifically stated: “I protect the mouth of the river [Volga]
and do not allow the Rus´, coming on ships, to enter the [Caspian] sea in order to go
against the Muslims.”35 However, as we know from Mascûdî, the king was some-
times willing to make an exception to this rule and allow the Rus´ to raid his Muslim
34
Mascûdî, Murûj al-Dhahab [Meadows of gold], in V. Minorsky, A History of Sharvān and
Darband (Cambridge: W. Heffner and Sons, 1958), 150–53.
35
Kokovtsov, Perepiska, 102.
neighbors, especially when he would receive a share of the booty. The Rus´ could not
proceed freely through Khazaria on their way to the Caspian. They had to first obtain
the permission of the Khazars.
Finally, there can be no doubt that the Rus´ raiders who operated on the Caspian
with the consent of the Khazars must have come primarily from Oleg’s group in Kiev.
Aside from some freebooters, almost all the other Rus´ were involved in the trade
with Volga Bulgharia. Oleg’s band was the only group active in Khazaria on a regular
basis that had both relatively good relations with the Khazars and easy access to the
Caspian. In sum, the efforts by Oleg to supplement his income and power through
raiding in the Caspian proved unsuccessful. Oleg was not able to gain the fame and
fortune he sought through such an uncertain and dangerous tactic.
Since trade with the Volga Bulghars and raiding in the Caspian could not provide
the wealth and power Oleg sought, he was forced to turn to a third alternative, the
establishment of commercial relations with Byzantium. The aim of Oleg and his band
was to develop trade ties with Constantinople. It was possible to raid Byzantine pos-
sessions in the Black Sea and Constantinople itself, but the Rus´ suffered greatly from
the Greek fire employed by the Byzantine navy. It was not that easy to escape from a
determined Greek fleet within the limited confines of the Black Sea. Thus, while raid-
ing did take place, trade was unquestionably a more dependable source of wealth and
power. The Primary Chronicle records four major events in Rus´-Byzantine relations
during the first half of the tenth century: (1) a 907 Rus´ raid on Constantinople fol-
lowed by a trade treaty; (2) a 911 Rus´-Byzantine trade treaty; (3) an unsuccessful 941
Rus´ expedition against Byzantium; and (4) a 944 Rus´ expedition against Constan-
tinople which culminated in a new trade treaty.36 While there is considerable debate
about the authenticity and dates of each of these events as well as their relationship
to each other, it is possible to place them in a general framework which makes sense.
Around 907, Oleg decided that the time had come to establish regular trade ties
with Byzantium. Having established themselves in Kiev and the middle Dnepr, albeit
as Khazar dependents, the Rus´ had access to an abundance of furs, slaves, wax,
and honey collected as tribute or captured from the East Slavic tribes of the area.
Constantinople, the greatest city in all of Europe, offered a lucrative market for these
goods. And it was a market in which the Khazar authorities of Kiev had little interest.
The furs which they collected from the East Slavic tribes were evidently shipped to
Itil´, where they were exchanged with Islamic merchants from the Near East.
Byzantium, however, maintained a highly regulated commercial system. One
did not simply travel to Constantinople and begin trading. Furthermore, after the 860
Rus´ attack on Constantinople, the Byzantines had very good reasons to be suspicious
of any Rus´ who approached their capital. The Rus´ therefore had to compel the Byz-
antines to open the markets of Constantinople to their merchants. The opening salvo
in Oleg’s Byzantine policy was to attack Constantinople in 907. Since his campaign
went well, Oleg quickly got the attention of the Greeks. At this point, Oleg was able
to advance his real objective, i.e., his demand for a trade treaty with Byzantium. The
Greeks were not adverse to such a treaty providing that the safety of their capital was
36
Primary Chronicle, 64–69, 71–77.
ensured and provisions were agreed upon to maintain law and order while Rus´ mer-
chants were in Constantinople. The 907 expedition came to an end with a short, pro-
visional Rus´-Byzantine trade treaty. This provisional treaty was soon replaced by a
more permanent and detailed 911 treaty that no doubt reflected the experience gained
from the first Rus´ merchant groups to engage in commerce in Constantinople under
the terms of the 907 treaty. In any event, Oleg now had what he wanted, a formal
trade treaty with Byzantium that guaranteed the Rus´ merchants of Kiev free access
to the richest market in all of Europe. If the Rus´ of Kiev could not become rich and
powerful through trade with the Volga Bulghars or raiding in the Caspian, then they
were on their way to fame and fortune through their commerce with Constantinople.
The Rus´-Byzantine commerce established by Oleg ca. 907–11 functioned quite
well for some thirty years. Then, suddenly, Oleg launched an attack on Constantino-
ple around 941. This expedition, as we have seen, was not Oleg’s idea. Rather, having
raided the Khazar lands at Byzantine request, Oleg was subsequently defeated by the
Khazar pesah and forced to conduct a naval campaign against Byzantium in retalia-
tion. This campaign ended in disaster for Oleg’s forces and he never returned home.
By doing Byzantium’s bidding, Oleg ended up completely disrupting Rus´ trade with
Byzantium.
Oleg’s successor, Igor´, now had the task of restoring Rus´-Byzantine relations.
Whether or not he initiated an expedition against Constantinople is immaterial. What
is crucial is that Igor´ was able to negotiate a new trade treaty with Byzantium. And a
very enlightening clause of this new treaty stated: “Your Prince shall moreover pro-
hibit his agents and such other Rus´ as come hither from the commission of violence
in our villages and territory.”37 There was to be no repetition of the 941 campaign.
In fact, the Rus´ ruler of Kiev was now responsible for certifying that any Rus´ who
ventured south from Kiev to visit Constantinople was a genuine merchant. Those
who lacked certification were to be detained and held prisoner until Constantinople
and Kiev conferred over their arrest. In the years following the new 944 treaty, Rus´
commerce with Constantinople flourished. A Byzantine source paints a vivid picture
of the situation ca. 950 when each fall the Rus´ prince of Kiev and his retinue made a
circuit through his lands collecting tribute from the East Slavic tribes. In the spring,
boats carried a huge quantity of furs, slaves, wax, and honey from the entire upper
and middle Dnepr water basins toward Kiev. Here, the goods were transferred to
more seaworthy boats which then descended down the Dnepr in large caravans. Fol-
lowing a variety of dangers including the Dnepr rapids and Pecheneg raiders waiting
on the riverbanks, this caravan entered the Black Sea and then sailed along the coast
to Constantinople.38 This report, compiled from one or more eyewitness sources,
leaves no doubt that under Igor´ Kiev’s commerce with Constantinople was flourish-
ing and the bad days at the end of Oleg’s reign were forgotten.
37
Ibid., 74.
38
Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De Administrando Imperio, trans. R. J. H. Jenkins, ed. Gy.
Moravcsik (Budapest: Pázmány Péter Tudományegyetemi Görög Filológiai Intézet, 1949),
chap. 9, 56–63.
Oleg’s successful Byzantine option necessitated a readjustment in relations with

the Khazars. Given Byzantine enmity for Khazaria, it would be impossible to con-
tinue as a Khazar dependent who had an active trade with Constantinople. It is not
clear when Khazar domination of Kiev ended. As late as 945, there was a Khazar
quarter of Kiev.39 The so-called “Kievan Letter” was composed ca. 930 by represen-
tatives of the Jewish community in Kiev.40 But, despite the continuing presence of
a Jewish/Khazar population in Kiev, the city slowly but surely passed from Khazar
control and became independent under Oleg and Igor´. The latest date for this change
was probably in 944 when Igor´ had to reestablish trade relations with Byzantium.
Forced to choose between Khazaria and Byzantium, Oleg and Igor´ decided that the
only real route to wealth and power for them and their band was the “Byzantine
card.” The profits denied to the Rus´ of Kiev from the Bulghar trade and raiding in
the Caspian could be more than compensated for by the lucrative commerce with
Constantinople.
39
Primary Chronicle, 77.
40
Golb and Pritsak, Khazarian Hebrew Documents, 5–32, 71.
Preparations for Travel to St. Petersburg
in the Eighteenth Century
Michael Bitter
For as long as I have known him, Professor Stavrou has been, quite literally, on the
move. In fact, he rarely seems to be stationary for long. His travels for business and
pleasure frequently take him to very distant places, such as the Mediterranean and
Russia, as well as to a variety of domestic destinations. One of the most daunting
aspects of distant or lengthy travel always seems to be that of adequate, yet efficient
preparation and packing. With his lifetime of travel experience, Professor Stavrou has
undoubtedly reduced his own packing routine to a science. So, too, it was in the past,
when travel to Russia often required packing a supply of items unobtainable there, as
well as arranging letters of introduction to grease the wheels of the state bureaucracy.
Most often, those who have gone before have provided advice and introductions
for novice travelers to Russia, and Professor Stavrou has supplied both to many of his
students. These aspects of preparing for travel to Russia are something that recent
researchers have shared with earlier Western travelers to Moscow and St. Petersburg.
One such traveler has been the object of my own research for some time, and his
preparations for a mission to St. Petersburg in 1733 provide an interesting comparison
of the similarities and differences in travel to Russia over time.
In the spring of 1733, King George II of Great Britain sent George, Lord Forbes,
the future third earl of Granard, as envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary
to the Russian court of Tsarina Anna Ioannovna. The purpose of this high-ranking
diplomatic mission was the negotiation of a commercial treaty that would regain for
English merchants the privileged position within the Russian market they had oc-
cupied earlier, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Since that time, English
merchants had lost ground in their commercial dealings with Russia to political dis-
putes and continental competition, especially from the rapidly growing Prussian cloth
industry.
Lord Forbes was sent to reverse this trend. He was a career naval officer with sub-
stantial international experience, who would later become an admiral of the British
fleet. His distinguished social position and his close association with the king made
him an excellent choice as representative to the prestige- and status-conscious Rus-
sian court at St. Petersburg. Throughout the course of his mission to Russia, Forbes
drew on the knowledge and experience of the British resident to the tsarina’s court,
Claudius Rondeau. At the time of Forbes’s arrival, Rondeau had represented the Brit-
384 Michael Bitter
ish crown in Russia for six years and had befriended some of the most influential
individuals at court. The combination of Forbes’s position and Rondeau’s connections
proved a potent and successful force in Anglo-Russian diplomacy.
Lord Forbes began preparing for his mission to St. Petersburg in December of
1732. In January 1733, even before the official notification of his appointment had
reached St. Petersburg, he sent Claudius Rondeau a friendly letter of introduction.
Rondeau replied enthusiastically to Forbes’s overture. Writing on 20 February 1733,
the day after receiving the message from Lord Forbes, Rondeau thanked him for his
“kind and obliging letter.”1 He promised to “always do my utmost, to deserve your
Lordship’s friendship, which you are pleased so graciously to offer me.”2 Owing to
the fact that it was winter, Rondeau assumed that Forbes would travel to St. Peters-
burg over land, rather than by sea. Ordinarily, much of the Gulf of Finland, on which
St. Petersburg is located, was frozen until the late spring. Though his appointment
was announced in February, Lord Forbes did not begin his journey to Russia until
May. This explains Rondeau’s concern that Forbes would “find it very fatigueing in
this Season of the year, that the Roads are almost impassable after you have passed
Berlin.”3 He assured Forbes that, upon his arrival in St. Petersburg, he could “depend
to find a hearty welcome, and an Appartment of three or four Rooms in my House and
my Equipage will also be at Your Service, and I shall do my best to render this place
agreeable to Your Lordship.”4 From this earliest contact, Rondeau was determined
to contribute as much as possible to the personal comfort of Lord Forbes and to the
success of his mission.
Rondeau’s letter also provided Lord Forbes with some very useful information
concerning the customs of the Russian court. In an attempt to prepare the minister
for life in the Russian capital, Rondeau warned him that he “must not expect to find
St. Petersburg a Second London, or Paris.”5 Indeed, the severe climate and unfamil-
iar living conditions had often led the resident to complain of the cold and isolation.
Though, according to Rondeau, life in St. Petersburg was less cultured and cosmo-
politan than in some of the other great European capitals, the Russian taste for luxury
and the extravagance of the court made the cost of living there almost prohibitive.
Throughout the years, Rondeau had often described the material magnificence of
the Russian court. Balls and dinners were sumptuous. Clothes and equipages were
extravagant. Customarily, the most lavish events were the annual celebrations of the
tsarina’s coronation and name day. The yearly coronation celebrations usually lasted
three days. They included balls, dinners, fireworks, and, frequently, Italian plays. The
annual celebrations of Anna Ioannovna’s birthday on 28 January and her name day
1
Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), document T3765/H/6/8/2, the corre-
spondence of the third earl.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid.
Preparations for Travel to St. Petersburg in the Eighteenth Century 385
on 3 February obligated the Russian nobility as well as the foreign representatives to

go to great expense purchasing separate attire for each occasion. Rondeau’s detailed
account of these celebrations in 1732, the year before Lord Forbes arrived, provides
a glimpse of this Russian extravagance. On the tsarina’s birthday, all of the foreign
ministers and notables in the capital were invited to dine at court. That afternoon,
the troops in the city paraded on the frozen Neva River before the palace. Part of this
display included a mock battle with General Count Münnich commanding an attack
on entrenchments specially built for the occasion. In the evening, there was a ball and
another court dinner. Rondeau reported:
I cannot well express how magnificent this court is in cloathes: though I have
seen several courts, I never saw such heaps of gold and silver lace laid upon
cloth and even gold and silver stuffs as are seen here. The third of next month
is Her Majesty’s name’s day, which will be another great holyday, so that till
that is over nobody will think of any business, for at present everybody is
taken up in preparing fine cloathes against that time.6
This ostentation and show was understandably astonishing for someone of Rondeau’s
social position and fiscal constraints. A significant part of his personal and profes-
sional life included identifying the most responsible and accountable course of action
in both business and diplomacy. The king had warned him never to use his official
position to defend any British merchant in a dispute of questionable merit. This ha-
bitual regard for financial responsibility led him to question the ability of the Russian
nobles to continue to afford their extravagant displays. He expressed his concerns to
his superior in London, Lord Harrington:
I cannot imagine, my lord, that this magnificence will last many years, for,
if it should, it must ruin most part of the russ nobility, for several of them are
obliged to sell their estates to buy fine cloathes.7
Of course, Rondeau had no way of knowing that he was witnessing only the first,
rather modest years of what, especially under the reigns of Elizabeth I and Catherine
II, was to become one of the most extravagant and fiscally irresponsible periods in
Russian court history. Rondeau felt the need to inform Lord Forbes about the expen-
sive tastes in clothing and accoutrements cultivated by the Russian court. Foreign
ministers of Forbes’s rank were expected to conform to these same standards or risk
derision. The cost of all such luxury items in St. Petersburg was exorbitant. In his
letter of 20 February, Rondeau suggested that Lord Forbes purchase all of these nec-
essary items in London and bring them with him to the Russian capital. He wrote:
6
Sbornik Imperatorskogo Russkogo Istoricheskogo Obshchestva (SIRIO), 168 vols. (St. Pe-
tersburg: A. Devrient, 1867–1916), 66: 410.
7
Ibid.
386 Michael Bitter
I think it necessary to inform your Lordship, that nothing can be bought here,
but at an extravagant rate, and as this Court is Magnificent in equipages, and
particularly in fine clothes I believe it would be very necessary you should
provide yourself in England with everything of that nature before you come
away.8
An examination of Forbes’s ledger shows that he took Rondeau’s advice to heart.

Lord Forbes kept a detailed account book of the expenses he incurred in prepara-
tion for his mission to St. Petersburg.9 His clothing was the third most costly category
listed, totaling almost £213, and was by far the most detailed listing. The first pur-
chase of cloth was made on 18 December 1732, only one month after news of Forbes’s
appointment had reached the Russian court. According to the British ministers of the
Northern Department, the appointment was still nothing more than a rumor, yet the
envoy was already purchasing his wardrobe. This first acquisition consisted of nine
yards of black velvet and three and one-half yards of scarlet Florence satin. Subse-
quent purchases included such exotic-sounding fabrics as dove-colored velvet, yellow
Padua soye, and white and yellow shagrine. In addition to the fabrics, Lord Forbes
also purchased gold and silver lace and buttons, silk and woolen stockings, six pairs
of shoes, one dozen pairs of gloves, a pair of buckles, two wigs, hats, ribbons, and a
gilt-hilted sword. The tailoring bill for making four suits of clothes amounted to £15.
The largest items were the costs of embroidering one suit of velvet with gold, amount-
ing to £43, and another with silver, at £38. The next most costly items were the broad
and narrow gold and silver lace, £22 and £11, respectively, which were purchased by
the ounce rather than by the yard. The only other individual items which amounted
to £10 or more were the combined purchases of velvet, totaling over £25, and the
two wigs, costing £10. The smallest recorded purchase was that of needles and pins,
amounting to just three shillings.
This section of the ledger is one of only two which continued to record expen-
ditures after Lord Forbes’s arrival in Russia. The final entries listed as clothing ex-
penses were recorded on “June the 20th at Petersbourg.” They consisted of four and
one-half arshins of “Black Cloth,” fifteen arshins “Black Shagrine,” and “the making
of the Black Cloths and Furniter.”10 After he went to so much trouble and expense to
acquire a suitable wardrobe in London before his departure, it may seem strange that
Lord Forbes bothered to have one additional, plain suit of clothes made for himself
shortly after his arrival in St. Petersburg. Clues to the explanation of this action lie
in the color and simplicity of design of these clothes, as well as in the timing of their
purchase.
On 14 June 1733, the duchess of Mecklenburg, older sister of Tsarina Anna Io-
annovna, died at the age of forty-one. Catherine Ioannovna had married Duke Karl
Leopold of Mecklenburg in 1716. The marriage had been arranged by the bride’s
8
PRONI, document T3765/H/6/8/2, the correspondence of the third earl.
9
PRONI, document T3765/H/5/5/1, the folio account book of the third earl.
10
Ibid. An arshin was a Russian unit of measure equal to 28 inches or 71 centimeters.
uncle, Peter the Great, primarily because of the strategic importance of the Duchy of
Mecklenburg in the tsar’s conflict with Sweden. Infamous for his obnoxious person-
ality and behavior, the duke was unpopular within his own duchy and was shunned by
many of the courts of Europe. He had originally proposed to the widowed Anna Ioan-
novna, hoping to leave his unpopularity in Mecklenburg to become duke of Courland.
Owing to the importance of Mecklenburg in Peter’s military calculations, he was
unwilling to allow Karl Leopold to leave the duchy for a region already controlled by
Russia. The tsar proposed substituting his unmarried niece for the widowed Anna.
Catherine Ioannovna’s marriage to the Duke was difficult from the start. Eventually,
the duchess decided to separate from her ill-tempered husband and return to Moscow.
She had lived at the Russian court with her young daughter since 1722. Anna Ioan-
novna was very fond of her sister and her young niece, Anna Leopoldovna, whom she
considered heir to the Russian throne. The death of Catherine Ioannovna in June of
1733 was a great blow to the tsarina. Not having anticipated the death of a member
of the tsarina’s family, Lord Forbes had not purchased appropriate mourning attire in
London before his departure. It seems reasonable to assume that the plain, black suit
of clothes Lord Forbes purchased shortly after the death of the duchess, and several
days before her internment, was required as proper mourning attire. His first audi-
ence with the tsarina was not held until the beginning of July and he might have worn
this mourning suit out of respect for Anna Ioannovna’s grief.
In addition to his own clothing, Lord Forbes also purchased new liveries for
those of his servants who accompanied him to St. Petersburg. He spent over £103 on
liveries for his servants, almost half of the amount spent on his own clothing. The
account book shows that Lord Forbes dressed his servants in blue liveries with yellow
trim and lining. The livery purchases were made in large quantities. In the first three
months of 1733, the account records purchases of twenty pairs of both shoe and knee
buckles, ninety-one dozen livery coat buttons, thirty dozen livery breast buttons, fif-
ty-seven yards of blue cloth, fifteen yards of yellow, and a surprising one hundred and
five yards of yellow shaloon, a lightweight twill cloth used for lining coats and other
garments. The single most costly livery expense was £30 and 18 shillings for “livery
lace bead.” The silver lace for twelve livery hats cost more than the twelve cockaded
hats themselves, £4 11s. 9d. versus £3 7s. 6d.
By far the largest single category of purchases was that of silver plate. As George
II’s envoy, Lord Forbes would be expected to entertain members of the Russian court
and other foreign ministers on important occasions at his residence in St. Petersburg.
To accomplish this in a style befitting his post, he commissioned an entire silver table
service for his mission to Russia. The smallest item listed in this category was £66
for a silver epergne, weighing two hundred and three ounces.11 In March, the account
book shows that almost £276 was paid a Mr. Crag and Comp., Silversmith, for “plate
to compleat the epargne and eight salt sellers; weighing in all 349.5; Workmanship
11
An epergne is defined by Webster’s Dictionary as “an often ornate tiered centerpiece con-
sisting typically of a frame of wrought metal (as silver or gold) bearing dishes, vases, or candle
holders or a combination of these.”
388 Michael Bitter
Engraving and Box.”12 Finally, on 18 April, nine days after George II had issued
his instructions and letters to Lord Forbes directing him to proceed to Russia “with
what expedition you can,”13 the account book records the largest silver purchase, con-
sisting of over 3,233 ounces of “Wraght Plate Workmanship, Cases and engraving,
Blades [etc.].”14 This final acquisition of tableware cost a remarkable £1,112, bring-
ing the total Forbes paid for silver plate to over £1,354. As a matter of comparison,
Rondeau rented his house in St. Petersburg, which he described as being “very dear,”
for £100 per year.15 At this rate, the silver plate Lord Forbes took with him to St. Pe-
tersburg cost more than Rondeau’s housing for his entire term of service in Russia,
from 1727–39. Even in London, the Russian representative at the British court, Prince
Kantemir, was able to rent a fully furnished house suitable to a minister of his rank
and position for £200 per year.
The second largest category of purchases consisted of “Coaches, Horses and
other Things Belonging to the Stables.” Again, in this instance, Lord Forbes heeded
Rondeau’s advice concerning the exorbitant cost of equipages in the Russian capital.
He made sure that everything necessary for the proper conveyance in and around St.
Petersburg of a minister of his rank and standing was ordered and sent to Russia to
coincide with his own arrival. The largest expense within this category was the pur-
chase, in Lübeck, of eight coach horses, totaling almost £230. Shipping these horses
from Lübeck to St. Petersburg, along with the two men who accompanied them, cost
an additional £22. The account book even recorded an extra £5 paid to send the two
grooms back to Germany. Lord Forbes needed eight horses in order to pull the two
coaches he shipped from London. One of these coaches was a Berline. The other was
a state chariot lined with crimson velvet that cost £130. This vehicle was specially
outfitted with silk fringe and lace for an additional £10. The state coach was pulled by
six horses with one additional horse ridden by a “fore rider.” Thirty-five pounds was
paid for two “town harnesses,” probably for the Berline, and a set of harnesses for
six horses, additional fittings, and three saddles. A small tailoring expense recorded
the making of a seat cloth for the Berline and “housings” for the fore riders out of
the same “Blew Cloth” of which the servants’ liveries were fashioned. The total bill
for coaches, horses, and these other, related expenses amounted to more than £455
sterling.
The smallest category of expenses included in the account book was labeled
“Stationary.” It totaled only slightly more than £14, yet it is equally as interesting and
informative as any of the others. The most expensive single item in this category was
the stationer’s bill of exactly £5. This amount was most likely spent on writing paper,
pens, and ink. Listed separately are such necessities as the account book itself, along
with two “daily books” and a journal, a seal, sealing wax, a tin case, and a “foot rule.”
12
13
SIRIO, 66: 577.
14
Ibid.
15
SIRIO, 66: 436.
The cost of Lord Forbes’s actual voyage to St. Petersburg totaled only slightly
more than £197, and represented 8.5 percent of his total initial expenses. Lord Forbes
traveled with two ships. The smaller was the Tuscany Galley, which carried only
luggage, consisting of Forbes’s coaches, silver plate, and part of his equipage. The
larger vessel was the Lowestoff, a man-of-war of twenty guns commanded by Captain
Cotterell. Lord Forbes, all his servants, and the rest of his luggage traveled on the
Lowestoff. The record of actual travel expenses included in the account book spans
the period of the voyage itself, since the cost of Lord Forbes’s transportation was
paid only upon his safe arrival at Kronstadt, the port island of St. Petersburg. Upon
his arrival at Kronstadt, the expense account records the payment of £52 10s. with
the explanation, “Gave to Capn. Cotterell at his coming to an Anchor two miles from
Cronslot.”16 Additionally, Lord Forbes “Gave to the rest of the ship company,” the
sum of £33 10s. He paid only slightly less than these combined amounts, £73 9s., for
the freight of his equipage carried in the Tuscany Galley. Though these payments
account for most of the voyage expenses recorded in the account book, Lord Forbes
had to pay additional fees to have himself taken ashore near Peterhof and his servants
and luggage transported approximately twenty-six miles, from the port of Kronstadt
to the city of St. Petersburg. The ledger records that Lord Forbes “Gave to Admirall
Gordon Boat Crew [sic] me a shore and for carrying my equipage from Cronslot to
Petersburg,” the sum of £11 13s.17 Considering the comparative distances involved,
St. Petersburg proved, from the very first, to be a rather expensive destination.
In addition to all of these expenses associated with his Baltic voyage, Lord Forbes
also furnished the provisions for the entire journey. His account book shows that he
paid over £46 for the “fresh Provisions” at the beginning of the voyage. Another £25
was paid to Captain Cotterell for the shipboard provisions he provided. This was in
addition to the provisions Forbes purchased and shipped to Russia for his personal use
over the course of his residence in the capital.
The section of Lord Forbes’s ledger devoted to the accounts of provisions and ad-
ditional expenses offers a glimpse into a more practical aspect of his appointment to
the Russian court. He paid out over £20 in advance wages to his servants, presumably
so that the servants left behind and the family members of those accompanying him
to Russia would have something on which to live during his absence. For food items,
Lord Forbes paid the “Cheese Monger” nearly £5; the “Oyl Monger” more that £3;
and the grocer £9 15s. “for 300. Waight of Sugar.”18 In addition, he purchased corks,
“a Peck of Mustard Seed,” hartshorn, and Isinglass to take with him to St. Peters-
burg.19 The only entry among the accounts of provisions that is difficult to identify is
16
17
Admiral Thomas Gordon was commandant of the port of Kronstadt and was, at various
times, in charge of the entire Russian fleet. He died in 1741.
18
19
Hartshorn was “a preparation of ammonia used as smelling salts.” Isinglass (the origin of
which may be the Middle Dutch huusblase, from huus ‘sturgeon’ + blase ‘bladder’) was “a
semitransparent whitish very pure gelatin prepared from the air bladders of fishes (as stur-
390 Michael Bitter
the purchase of “a pound of Bark,” for which Lord Forbes paid sixteen shillings.20 The
total amount spent for these personal provisions and servants’ wages was nearly £45.
The final page of the ledger book is titled, “Abstract of the whole Expence of Lord
Forbes’s seting out for his Commiss. to Petersburg—in 1733—.” The total amounts in
each category of expense are listed and then totaled as follows:
1. For Clothes 212p. 6s. 6d.

2. For Liveries 103p. 14s. 2d.
3. For Coach Horses & Equipages 455p. 14s. 8d.
4. For Plate 1354p. 6s. 3d.
5. For Stationary 14p. 3s. 11d.
£ 2140p. 5s. 9d.
For his Voyage & Freight for his goods 197p. 6s. 3d.
This abstract could not have been drawn up before Lord Forbes’s arrival in St. Peters-
burg, since several of the freight and clothing charges were incurred in Russia. The
total expense of his mission to Russia, including certain purchases within the first
month of his residence in St. Petersburg, amounted to slightly more than £2,337. The
commission of silver plate was responsible for more than half of this total amount.
The initial cost of Lord Forbes’s appointment to Russia represented a substantial
investment on the part of the British government in the improvement of Anglo-Rus-
sian relations. The care that went into maintaining the outward dignity of the envoy’s
office was evident. The total initial expenditure was considerable, though it is dif-
ficult to place within a meaningful context. The sum was equivalent to more than
twenty-three years of rent for the house in which Rondeau, the British resident, lived
in St. Petersburg. Conversely, upon his departure from St. Petersburg in 1734, Lord
Forbes received a diamond ring as a gift from Empress Anna Ioannovna. This ring
was later appraised at £1,100, nearly half the value of these initial expenses. To the
average Briton, the initial costs of Lord Forbes’s appointment amounted to a princely
sum. Yet, at the courts of Europe, this sum might not have been considered extraordi-
nary. Rondeau had earlier reported that certain members of the Russian nobility spent
as much as a tenth of this amount on a single suit of clothes.
geons) and used esp. as a clarifying agent and in jellies and glue” (Webster’s Ninth New Col-
legiate Dictionary).
Great Britain imported a significant amount of isinglass from Russia, where sturgeon
were plentiful. Ironically, then, the isinglass Lord Forbes purchased to carry with him to St.
Petersburg may actually have originated in Russia.
20
Possibilities for the identity of this item are Cinnamon or Cinchona, the bark of a tropical
tree that was used to produce quinine as a treatment for malaria. St. Petersburg is surrounded
by water and provided a favorable summertime habitat for mosquitoes, yet Forbes and Ron-
deau never expressed a concern with malaria in their correspondence or diaries.
Lord Forbes heeded Rondeau’s advice and equipped himself in London with
most of the accoutrements of a minister plenipotentiary. His preparations and pur-
chases were appropriate to a diplomat of his title and position as well as to the per-
ceived importance of his mission. The successful negotiation of the Anglo-Russian
Commercial Treaty of 1734 by Forbes and Rondeau fully justified the care and ex-
pense accorded his preparations for travel to Russia.
The preparations of few modern travelers could compare to those of Lord Forbes
in 1733. Today, we have the advantage of traveling to St. Petersburg at high speed
and in relative comfort. However, just as Lord Forbes benefited from the advice and
guidance of Claudius Rondeau, so, too, many of Professor Stavrou’s students have
benefited from his knowledge and experience, in addition to the numerous “letters of
introduction” he has written for those traveling to Russia and other destinations. For
this guidance and assistance, we will always be grateful.
Battling Bishops in Catherine II’s Russia
Gregory Bruess
Introduction
This essay seeks to accentuate some of the complexities of religion and empire in
Catherine II’s Russia by examining the relationship between two archbishops who
served along the southern frontier in the late 1780s and early 1790s. The two prelates
in question were the archbishop of Astrakhan and Stavropol, Nikiforos Theotokis,
and the archbishop of all Armenians in the Russian Empire, Joseph Argutinskii-Dol-
gorukii. The titles of office alone not only betray a potential source of administrative
conflict between the two hierarchs but also reflect the peculiar nature of religious life
in late eighteenth-century “Orthodox” Russia. First, Nikiforos was the archbishop
of the diocese of Astrakhan and Stavropol. Accordingly, his ecclesiastical authority
extended no farther than the boundaries of the diocese. Joseph, spiritual leader of all
Armenians in the Russian Empire, clearly was not constrained by the same spatial
limitations. Second, Nikiforos’s title possessed no ethnic qualifier whereas Joseph’s
did. Third, Nikiforos was an archbishop of the Russian Orthodox Church while Jo-
seph was an archbishop of the Armenian Apostolic Church, yet both served the Rus-
sian state. These seemingly unorthodox differences do, however, make sense when
examined in the light of Catherine’s domestic and foreign policies.
Catherine’s Policies
Catherine the Great consciously adopted and implemented policies that reflected
the reforming spirit of the French Enlightenment and German Aufklärung. Central-
ization, classicism, consolidation, standardization, rationalization, regularization
(reguliarnost´), and unification were the watchwords of her regime. At the most fun-
damental level, Catherine’s reforms expanded the domain of the state into realms
previously dominated by other institutions. Her reform efforts affected all matters
political, social, economic, and cultural.
Catherine was an avid student of the economic and populationist theories of
the French Physiocrats and the organizational theories of the German Cameralists.1
1
On foreign colonization policies, see Roger P. Bartlett, Human Capital: The Settlement of
Foreigners in Russia, 1762–1804 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
394 Gregory Bruess
These rationalist theories simply stated that more subjects and more territory trans-
lated into more economic productivity and wealth. Furthermore, a highly centralized
and uniform government was essential to tapping that wealth. Catherine planned to
acquire more subjects through territorial expansion and colonization schemes di-
rected at all Europeans, but specifically at the oppressed Christians of the Ottoman
and Persian Empires. Their departures would serve two positive purposes for Russia:
first, they would weaken the Ottoman and Persian economies through the loss of
productive merchants while strengthening Russia’s, and second, they would create
a sizable community of former Ottoman and Persian subjects who aspired to gain
religio-national independence for their fellow countrymen.
Catherine’s religious policies reflected her belief that, although the state was re-
sponsible for the material and spiritual well-being of its subjects, the church was
instrumental in assisting the state in this task. Even though Catherine had “instru-
mentalized” religion, she understood that religious belief and, more important, the in-
stitutions that propagated those beliefs, were essential for creating and maintaining a
semblance of social harmony and control. In this sense religion was to be encouraged
but at no time was it to rival the state for secular power. Catherine, as she noted in
her Nakaz, believed that it was beneficial to the state that all her subjects should hold
religious beliefs and be free to practice them without fear of persecution.
In such a state as ours, which extends its sovereignty over so many different
nations, to forbid, or not to allow them to profess different modes of religion,
would greatly endanger the peace and security of its citizens. [T]he most cer-
tain means of bringing back these wandering sheep to the true flock of the
faithful, is a prudent toleration of other religions, not repugnant to our Ortho-
dox religion and polity.2
To that end, Catherine and Governor General Potemkin intentionally selected

non-Russian clerics to serve as diocesan heads in southern and southeastern Russia
because of the ethnic diversity of that region and its proximity to the Ottoman and
Persian territories inhabited by their Orthodox countrymen. While perhaps not shar-
ing Catherine’s utilitarian views on religion, these prelates were able to contribute to
the realization of her agenda of imperial expansion and consolidation while actively
promoting the liberation of Christians from the Ottoman and Persian Empires in the
last quarter of the eighteenth century. Although each appreciated religion differently,
each understood its importance in giving meaning to life and determining identity in
late eighteenth-century Russia.
In the broadest terms, two foreign policy problems confronted Russia during
Catherine’s reign: Poland and the Ottoman Empire. In regard to the latter, Catherine’s
desire to secure the southern borderlands and the northern littoral of the Black Sea
to advance Russian commercial and military interests met with resistance from the
2
W. F. Reddaway, ed., Documents of Catherine the Great: The Correspondence with Voltaire
and the Instruction of 1767 in the English Text of 1768 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1931), 209.
Battling Bishops in Catherine II’s Russia 395
Ottoman Empire whose vassals, the Crimean Tatars, controlled that territory. Cath-
erine also irritated the Ottomans and Persians by taking up the time-honored cause
of fomenting dissent among their respective Christian populations. As a consequence
of the growing hostility between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, the two empires
went to war in 1768. The war concluded six years later with the signing of the Treaty
of Kutchuk-Kainardji in 1774. Among the treaty’s provisions were Russian territorial
acquisitions on the Black Sea coast to the east and west of the Crimean Peninsula, the
freedom of commercial navigation on the Black Sea, independence of the Crimean
Khanate, and Russia’s right to make representations on behalf of Christians in Con-
stantinople. The treaty also allowed those Christians who fought alongside Russian
forces, primarily Greeks, to emigrate from the Ottoman Empire to Russia.
Catherine quickly created the two new provinces of Novorossiia and Azov from
the recently acquired territories and appointed Prince Grigorii Potemkin to govern
them. Catherine was transfixed by the promise of Novorossiia. It was a blank slate
upon which she was free to write whatever pleased her enlightened sensibilities or
piqued her imagination. Just as Peter I had transformed the north in his quest for
Western technology Catherine II sought to invent a “New Russia” in the south in her
search for an Enlightened Russia. It was in this new land that the Greeks, and other
Christians fleeing the Ottoman Empire, settled.
The Bishops
Two bishops who served the Russian state in the capacity stated above were Niki-
foros Theotokis and Joseph Argutinskii-Dolgorukii. Nikiforos was born on the is-
land of Corfu in 1731.3 His earliest education was under the direction of a local mo-
nastic priest (ieromonakh), Ieremias Kavvadias, who recognized his potential and
convinced him to further his education at the Greek Gymnasium in Padua, which
he did in 1749. He returned to Corfu in 1754, was ordained as a ieromonakh, and
became an accomplished educator and preacher. In 1765, the ecumenical patriarch
summoned Nikiforos to a new position in Constantinople. His departure from Corfu
initiated an odyssey that would include two visits to Constantinople, two short stays
in Iassy, publishing activities in Leipzig, a brief tenure as metropolitan of the diocese
of Philadelphia in Venice, and, finally, end ten years later with his arrival in southern
Russia. In 1779, Catherine appointed him archbishop of Slaviansk and Kherson (the
provinces of Novorossiia and Azov). He succeeded Archbishop Voulgaris, who was
also a Greek prelate in the service of Russia and also from Corfu. In 1787, Potemkin
decided to transfer Nikiforos to the diocese of Astrakhan and Stavropol.
Joseph was, in a sense, the Armenian equivalent of Nikiforos and Voulgaris. The
Russian government was very active in recruiting Greek ecclesiastics as a means
to lend support to its foreign policy against the Turks and domestic programs in the
southern Ukraine and Crimea; all of which was a part of the so-called “Greek Proj-
3
On Nikiforos Theotokis, see Gregory L. Bruess, Religion, Identity and Empire: A Greek
Archbishop in the Russia of Catherine the Great (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs,
1997).
396 Gregory Bruess
ect.” In a similar manner, Archbishop Joseph was to serve as an integral part in Rus-
sian designs in the Caucasus or what Prince Potemkin referred to as his “Armenian
Project.” While Voulgaris and Theotokis played almost no role in the actual imple-
mentation of Russian foreign policy in the Balkans, Joseph was to have a more active
role in Russian foreign policy in the Caucasus. All, however, had in common a very
strong desire to protect and assist the communities of their countrymen in Russia.
Joseph was born in the small village of Sanachin near Tbilisi in 1743. He entered
the monastery of Echmiadzin (the seat of the Armenian Church and its head or ca-
tholicos) outside Erevan and studied under Catholicos Simeon, who ordained him as
bishop in 1771.4 Two years later, Joseph was elevated to archbishop. In June 1774 he
arrived in Astrakhan as the new archbishop and leader of the Armenians living in
Russia.
In 1778, Nikiforos (although not archbishop until 1779, he arrived in Russia in
1776) and Joseph were both involved in the resettlement of thirty thousand Chris-
tians who, at the instigation of Potemkin, were forced to evacuate their homes and
businesses in the Crimean Khanate. The Christians were predominantly Greek and
Armenian. In 1779, the Greeks founded the town of Mariupol and the Armenians the
town of Nakhichevan. The evacuation from the Crimea of two-thirds of the Christian
population was part of a broader scheme to annex the Crimea to the Russian Empire,
which occurred in 1783.
At the same time, Catherine was directing her attention toward Ottoman and
Persian dominions in Transcaucasia. Wishing to establish a foothold in the region
and to create yet another distraction for the Ottomans, the empress sought a more for-
mal relationship with the small Georgian kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti and its leader,
Tsar Irakli.5 In 1783, Archbishop Joseph participated in the negotiations with Irakli
that concluded with his acceptance of Russian suzerainty and military protection in
the Treaty of Georgievsk. Catherine was not only correct in her estimation that her
new treaty with Irakli would pique the Turks, but coupled with the annexation of the
Crimea and her famous “voyage to the Crimea” in 1787, her provocative actions drove
them to declare war in 1788. By Catherine’s order, Joseph accompanied the Russian
army and furnished it with strategically important information on conditions in the
Ottoman Empire that he obtained from Armenians fleeing the Turkish territories of
Bessarabia and the Danubian Principalities. In 1792, Potemkin founded a town on
the Dniester River for the Armenians who had fled the Ottoman Empire and named
it after himself, Grigoriopol.
Apart from their activities associated with the expansion of empire, Nikiforos
and Joseph, as bishops, had certain fundamental responsibilities. Upon consecration
a bishop is bequeathed with three powers: ruling, teaching, and celebration of the
sacraments. The main duty of the bishop is to guide and rule over the members of
4
Russkii biograficheskii slovar´ [hereafter, RBS] (St. Petersburg: Izdanie Imperatorskogo
russkogo istoricheskogo obshchestva, 1896–1918), 333.
5
Ronald Grigor Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1988), 55–59.
his diocese in all matters relating to faith and morals. Of particular importance to the
guidance of his flock is his teaching of the true faith and his assistance to them in
maintaining that faith. He is empowered to act as a teacher of the faith through the
receipt of charisma (a gift) from the Holy Spirit. This special gift does not confer
on him infallibility in teaching, which would reject his humanity, and any errors in
teaching will be corrected by the church as a whole. Finally, it is through the bishop
or one of his delegates (e.g., priest) that the holy sacraments are celebrated. Thus, the
bishop is an integral part of the hierarchy and history of the church, but he does not
exist apart from the main body of the church which is his flock. Only in union with
the laity does the bishop become whole.6
The Russian Orthodox Church during the Synodal Period (1721–1917) elaborated
upon the traditional threefold powers of a bishop to make the position more amena-
ble to the Russian situation as initially perceived by Peter the Great. The standard
duties of a Russian Orthodox bishop in the eighteenth century were quite simple,
but this did not mean that they were easy to fulfill. A bishop was required to reside
in his appointed diocese (the fact that this was a listed requirement suggests that one
could expect not to find the bishop in his diocese at any given moment), make regular
visitations to the parishes in his diocese (this often times proved impossible given
the sheer number of churches in the central dioceses and the poor road systems in
the extensive outlying dioceses), oversee diocesan administration, open seminaries
(when the money was available), and submit annual reports to the Holy Synod on the
condition of the diocese. As part of the bureaucratic and administrative rationaliza-
tion of Russia embarked on by Peter I and continued by his successors, the boundaries
of any particular diocese came to mirror those of its secular equivalent: the province.
Just as the governor general was responsible for all subjects in his province and was
in turn responsible to the emperor, the bishop was responsible for all members (i.e.,
priests, monks, laity) of the church residing within these boundaries and reported to
the Holy Synod. This applied equally to all ecclesiastical establishments, including
seminaries, parish schools, monasteries, churches, and other church buildings with
one exception: stavropigial´ monasteries. Stavropigial monasteries, for a variety of
historical reasons, fell under the jurisdiction of distant ecclesiastical bodies, usually
the Holy Synod in St. Petersburg or the ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople.
Astrakhan
As a result of Catherine’s enlightened religious policies and aggressive colonization

efforts, the number of non-Orthodox believers in Russia increased dramatically in
the last quarter of the eighteenth century. This was especially true of the southern
provinces that absorbed the majority of the foreign colonists. The inhabitants of the
provinces of Astrakhan and the Caucasus were for the most part Orthodox, but Old
Believers, Armenian and Georgian Christians, Protestants (Lutherans, Mennonites,
Moravian Brethren), Catholics, Muslims, Jews, and Hindus also made up the popu-
6
Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963), 252–53.
398 Gregory Bruess
lation. The diocesan leadership’s toleration of other religious groups, of course, re-
flected Catherine’s wish for all of her subjects to live in harmony without the threat
of persecution, harassment, or proselytization. Diocesan toleration faded, however,
when it perceived attacks on its flocks’ immortal souls.
By all accounts, the number of Catholics in the diocese of Astrakhan and Stav-
ropol was minuscule. Theotokis’s feelings toward them, however, had not substan-
tially altered since his experiences with a Catholic majority twenty years before. On
18 March 1788, Archbishop Nikiforos published a directive concerning Catholics
in the diocese. He was troubled by the possible negative ramifications of Orthodox
believers who were in the service of non-Orthodox households (and specifically of
the Catholics whom he regarded as active proselytizers). The consistory wanted to
determine, with the assistance of the parish priests to whom this directive was sent,
whether or not these individuals were still “sons of the true Church” who attended
Orthodox services, feast days, observed Lent, and received the Eucharist as other
Orthodox. Priests were to compile lists of all those in the service of non-Orthodox
households within their parish and submit them to the consistory annually. The con-
sistory wanted the names of any individuals prevented from doing their duty. This
directive, it was noted, pertained to Orthodox believers who “not only live with In-
dians, Muslims, Armenians, Lutherans, Catholics, etc., but Schismatics, slaves or
servants of merchants and other raznochintsy, not only in Astrakhan town, but in the
whole eparchy.” Most of the Orthodox in this position lived with Tatars and Arme-
nians, and some with Old Believers and Lutherans. According to official consistory
records, not one priest reported that a master had in any way impeded his Orthodox
servants from participating in Orthodox services.7 Two very different conclusions
can be drawn from this: either the priests were bribed by the offending individuals
and were not reported, or a spirit of religious toleration pervaded these particular
interfaith situations.
There were, of course, situations in the diocese when religious toleration was
noticeably absent. The largest non-Orthodox community in the city of Astrakhan
was Armenian. In 1793, the city had four thousand households and sixteen hundred
(ten thousand people) of those were Armenian. The religious leader of the Armenian
Apostolic Church and, in effect, the Armenian community in Astrakhan was Arch-
bishop Joseph Argutinskii-Dolgorukii.
The Armenian community in Astrakhan was under considerable pressure to
convert to Orthodoxy in the early 1770s and a large number did. Joseph possessed a
moral strength that the secular leaders (the Armenian sud or court) of the community
entirely lacked, and he used it to his advantage in stemming the tide of apostasy. In
the four years after his arrival the number of apostates diminished drastically: only
seven men and one woman.8
7
Ioann Savvinskii, Astrakhanskaia eparkhiia, 1602–1902 gg. (Astrakhan: Tip. V. L. Egorova,
1905), 1: 261–63.
8
Ibid., 2: 154.
Archbishop Joseph acted exceedingly harshly toward those who did convert in
spite of his blandishments. In February 1790 Archbishop Nikiforos received a letter
from Father Ivan Ivanov, an Orthodox priest who had converted from the Armenian
Church and was living in Mozdok. Ivanov requested that Theotokis offer him pro-
tection from an irate and malicious Archbishop Joseph. The archbishop, according
to Ivanov, “does not allow Armenians to visit me at my home, publicly damned me
twice in sermons in 1784 and 1788 and harasses me constantly.”9 The source of this
vitriol can be found in an incident ten years earlier when the recently converted Fa-
ther Ivanov and two Armenian merchants, Egor Panin and Boris Naskidov, petitioned
Archbishop Antonii (Nikiforos’s predecessor) to place in their possession one of the
Armenian churches in Mozdok, which was built by Panin, in order to attract other
Armenians to Orthodoxy. Antonii informed the Holy Synod and Astrakhan Chan-
cellery of this request; the synod deferred to the secular authorities, who reasoned
that if there were no objections from the Armenian community the request would be
approved. Not surprisingly, Archbishop Joseph vehemently opposed such an event
and worked assiduously and fervently to prevent its realization. Archbishop Joseph
correctly chose to repulse this assault on the Armenian Church by strengthening it
institutionally by establishing the Astrakhan Spiritual Consistory and the Mozdok
Spiritual District in 1785.10 Joseph used the authority and offices of these institutions
to discourage and punish “enemies” of the church.
One month after receiving the letter from Father Ivanov, Nikiforos received a
similar complaint from another Armenian in Mozdok who had converted to the “Gre-
co-Russian rites” and was systematically harassed by Archbishop Joseph.11 This in-
dividual, Andrei Ivanov, was the brother of the first complainant. He recounted how
he was treated as a second-class citizen and how, at one time, a congregation, incited
to violence by one of Archbishop Joseph’s sermons, set upon him and chased him
through the streets of Mozdok.12 As a last resort, Andrei Ivanov went to the local mil-
itary commander, Colonel Taganov, to seek protection. The commander recognized
Ivanov’s precarious position and ordered the local police to protect him from his
fellow citizens but was able to provide this for only two weeks. Andrei Ivanov closed
his letter with a plea for protection from the diocesan leadership.13
Archbishop Nikiforos sent his report to the synod and it replied on 3 May 1790.
The synod stated unequivocally that Archbishop Joseph was in violation of the syn-
od’s 1782 statute no. 202, which allowed for the practice of all beliefs without being
9
Rossiiskii gosudarstvennii istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA) f. 796, op. 71, g. 1790, d. 107, l. 2.
This is the Russian translation of the original which was in Armenian.
10
Savvinskii, Astrakhanskaia eparkhiia, 2: 159–60.
11
RGIA f. 796, op. 71, g. 1790, d. 107, l. 6.
12
That Archbishop Joseph was actually personally responsible for all the maltreatment ac-
corded the Ivanov brothers is doubtful (his offices were in Astrakhan), but he bore indirect
responsibility for not condemning the actions of others.
13
RGIA f. 796, op. 71, g. 1790, d. 107, ll. 6ob.–7.
400 Gregory Bruess
subject to abuse, profanity, or quarrels, and no. 244, which pronounced that anyone
who breached no. 202 could be taken to court and punished for the infraction.14 The
synod instructed Theotokis to inform Joseph of these statutes and of the severity of
the penalty for not abiding by Her Imperial Majesty’s wishes. The response also sug-
gested that Archbishop Joseph was transgressing the intent of Catherine’s Charter to
the Towns and Nobility of 21 April 1785 that included sections on religious tolerance.
The synod concluded by recommending that if Archbishop Joseph continued this
behavior he must be reported to Governor General P. S. Potemkin.15
Archbishop Nikiforos informed the synod in June 1790 that he had forwarded
material on the case to the Astrakhan Chancellery and he had written to the Astra-
khan Armenian consistory concerning the events in Mozdok.16 In an apparent attempt
to protect himself, Archbishop Joseph ordered the Mozdok Spiritual District to begin
an investigation into the alleged incidents of 1784 and 1788 and collect depositions
from Armenian citizens who had been harmed by the pernicious influence of the
Ivanovs. These depositions were sent to the Holy Synod by the Armenian consistory
in Astrakhan as evidence in defense of Joseph. The witnesses stated that they were
infuriated by the turbulent life of the priest and had requested that the archbishop do
something about it. The archbishop promised them that he would put a stop to the
quarrels between them and the “turbulent man.”17
The synod issued an ukaz on 12 August 1792 which declared that Archbishop
Joseph’s activities had been fully examined and found to be outrageous in their bla-
tant disregard of Catherine’s statutes on religious toleration. The synod added that
the Armenian consistory was guilty of complicity in this affair because it sent to the
Holy Synod the depositions which all contained sentences taken from the archbish-
op’s own injunction to the witnesses “in clear violation of the law.” The consistory
also acted in a negligent manner when it arbitrarily discredited the evidence of the
local commander. The case was now to be passed on to the civil authorities of the
Caucasus namestnichestvo.18 Archbishop Joseph’s importance to Catherine’s plans in
the Caucasus and the prosecution of the war against the Ottoman Empire during this
affair effectively precluded any action being taken against him by the government.
Marriage difficulties also attracted the attention of the consistories and the synod
if the difficulties involved mixed-faith couples. In April 1791, Archbishop Nikiforos
reported to the Holy Synod the interesting case of an Armenian man, Gavriil Manui-
lov, who recently had converted to Orthodoxy and wanted his estranged wife to re-
turn to live with him.19 It seems he was singularly impossible to live with and the
wife simply refused. When the wife, Tsagika Azarapetova, was questioned about
14
Ibid., l. 9.
15
Ibid., ll. 18–18ob.
16
Ibid., ll. 21–21ob.
17
Ibid., ll. 31–32.
18
Ibid., l. 35ob.
19
RGIA f. 796, op. 72, g. 1791, d. 149, l. 1.
her situation by the Astrakhan consistory, she revealed that she and her husband al-
ready had requested a divorce from the Armenian consistory (before he converted
to Orthodoxy) and added that upon receiving the divorce she was entering a second
marriage. Disregarding this, Theotokis ruled in Manuilov’s favor but was informed
by Governor Brianchaninov that the request could not be allowed because the Arme-
nian consistory had granted her the divorce, but was awaiting Archbishop Joseph’s
approval. Theotokis refused to accept this reasoning and appealed to the Holy Synod
to allow his decision to stand because the Armenian archbishop had not yet respond-
ed.20 The synod argued against this action by Theotokis and recognized Tsagika’s
right to an answer from the Armenian Church. If the Armenian archbishop, however,
did not confirm the consistorial decision soon then she should return to her husband.
Theotokis finally received word of Archbishop Joseph’s confirmation and the divorce
was granted.21
Although these incidents highlight the conflicts between the Orthodox and Ar-
menian community and their respective spiritual leaders, there is reason to believe
that the communities also cooperated. For example, in one incident, an Armenian
couple in Astrakhan could not get married on one particular day because the Ar-
menian parish church did not have any marriage crowns (ventsy). They solved the
problem when they simply walked to the nearby Orthodox parish church and asked
the priest if he had any crowns in the church. He, according to the story, did and quite
gladly gave them to the couple. The Orthodox priest even accompanied the couple
back to the Armenian church for the wedding ceremony.22
Conclusion
By the fall of 1792, both archbishops had left Astrakhan. Nikiforos retired to Danilov
Monastery in Moscow. He served as its abbot, wrote a number of religious and sci-
entific works, and continued to advocate the cause of Greek independence. In 1797,
Paul I bestowed on him the Order of St. Anne, First Class. In 1799, allied military
successes against Napoleonic France had placed the Ionian Islands under Russian
control. Church and civic leaders in Corfu considered him as a possible candidate
for bishop, but concerns about his advanced age and health ultimately denied him the
position. He died at Danilov in May 1800.
Joseph moved his archepiscopal offices to Holy Cross Monastery in Nakhiche-
van, where he later established a Gregorian-Armenian printing press.23 A few years
later, he once again served the Russian army by accompanying it on the Caucasian
20
Ibid., l. 2ob.
21
Ibid., ll. 7–7ob.
22
Savvinskii, Astrakhanskaia eparkhiia, 2: 155 n. 2.
23
In 1793, the Nakhichevan press published two books: Dveri milostyni (Doors of alms), a
short history of the two Armenian cities of Grigoriopol and Nakhichevan, and a translation
of Fenelon’s Adventures of Telemach. Archbishop Joseph was himself a published author: in
402 Gregory Bruess
campaign of 1796 under the command of Count Valerian Zubov (the youngest brother
of Catherine’s lover, Platon). In 1799, Paul I bestowed on him the Order of St. Anne,
First Class, and later that same year, church and civic leaders in Echmiadzin elected
him to the position of catholicos of the Armenian Apostolic Church. He was granted
leave from Russian service and departed for Armenia. He died en route in March
1801 in Tbilisi.24
The careers of Nikiforos and Joseph clearly reflected Catherine’s policies as they
affected religion and empire. Her staunch advocacy of religious toleration (not to be
confused with religious freedom) was emblematic of Enlightenment-inspired subor-
dination of matters religious to matters secular. During her reign, exclusive adher-
ence to Russian Orthodoxy was not required to be a loyal Russian subject. Above
all, the ethnic and religious diversity of Russia’s southern frontier demanded equally
diverse policies from St. Petersburg and its representatives. The appointments of
Nikiforos, an Orthodox bishop, and Joseph, an Armenian bishop, underscore this
approach. Nikiforos was responsible for the spiritual and moral well-being of the
empire’s Orthodox subjects and Joseph for the empire’s Armenian Christian subjects.
That the two bishops had conflicts as they saw to the needs of their respective flocks
is not surprising.
In sum, Nikiforos and Joseph were extremely similar. The empress appointed
them to be competent ecclesiastical administrators in a region where the secular
power of the central government was relatively weak. Catherine was also aware of the
potential foreign policy implications of enticing non-Russian Christian communities
and hierarchs to Russia from the Persian and Ottoman Empires. The bishops’ duties,
however, extended well beyond the administration of imperial subjects; more import-
ant, from the perspective of the bishops, was the struggle to keep their believers on the
paths to eternal salvation and, quite possibly, to “national” independence. Thus, there
were instances when purely administrative (imperial) duties collided with pastoral
obligations. Although neither bishop blatantly refused an imperial command, there
did seem to be plenty of room for idiosyncratic interpretation. Just as the bishops
were constantly negotiating with the imperial center over the importance and appro-
priateness of decrees to their local conditions, their respective religious communities
were negotiating the meaning and practice of proper or correct Christian belief. The
“lived” religious experience of Orthodox and Armenian subjects at times had more in
common with each other than with their own ecclesiastical hierarchy. As with the em-
press, the bishops nearly always sought accommodation over confrontation with their
believers. Perhaps most instructive about this study of the battling bishops, Nikiforos
and Joseph, is that it reveals not only the diverse and contested nature of the Russian
southern frontier in the late eighteenth century but of that entire grand experiment:
imperial Russia.
1790 Potemkin published Joseph’s history of Russian-Armenian relations during the reign of
Peter the Great.
24
RBS, 333.
Europe’s Bellicose Periphery:
Russia and the Cretan Insurrection of 1841
Lucien J. Frary
Nineteenth-century Russian foreign ministry files and journalistic literature provide

telling details and first-hand impressions of the diversity of Ottoman society, the ri-
valries among European powers, and the passions and interests of Russian educated
society. During the reign of Nicholas I (1825–55), the foreign ministry in St. Peters-
burg was willing to place religion at the forefront of international affairs. Russia’s
position as the protector of the Orthodox world had helped define it as a great power.
The 1841 rebellion for the unification of Crete with the young Greek kingdom is
one of many episodes illustrating Russia’s engagement in Mediterranean and Balkan
Orthodox affairs. Although St. Petersburg exercised self-restraint and caution during
the Christian-Muslim conflict on Crete, its depiction in the Russian press encouraged
readers to ponder a more active role in world affairs.
Balkan Orthodox Christians were a popular topic in nineteenth-century Russian
journals. As print media evolved, the Pravoslavnyi Vostok (Orthodox East) assumed a
special place in Russian literature. Russia’s long-standing ties to Orthodox lands con-
tributed to the cultural and ideological ferment of the 1830s and ’40s. Press reports
of non-Orthodox missionary societies and the heterodox challenges of nationalism
sparked interest in Russia’s religious heritage and its spiritual connections with the
Holy Land and Mount Athos. The religious revival, characteristic of the period, marks
an important stage in the evolution of the modern Russian identity. More specifically,
the success of the Greek Revolution, and the sympathetic portrayal of Christians in
jeopardy, perpetuated a commitment to religious values, but also posed a challenge
to the tsarist autocracy.
The cultural atmosphere of Nicolaevan Russia was rich in artistic and intellec-
tual expression. A transformation had taken place. Russian literature was beginning
to take on a larger public forum. The advent of the publishing industry and the spread
of education allowed readers to follow events both inside and outside the empire. Op-
portunities for new literary figures, including travel writers and journalists, emerged
during this golden age of Russian letters. Works by the artist Karl P. Briullov and the
historian Mikhail P. Pogodin, by the theologians Aleksandr S. Sturdza and Porfirii
Uspenskii, by the statesmen Andrei N. Muravév and Konstantin M. Bazili, by the
404 Lucien J. Frary
composer Fedor N. Glinka and the poet Vil´gel´m K. Kiukhel´beker paint a tapestry
of Russian interest in Eastern Orthodox lands.
After a long war against the Ottoman Empire, Greece, in February 1830 (under
the London Protocols) became an independent, sovereign state. During its formative
decades, the Greek kingdom became a popular topic in the Russian press. Almost
daily, information about increased Russian-Greek trade contacts appeared in Russian
newspapers. Statistical surveys, charts, and tables informed readers about Greece’s
economy and potential profits for Russian merchants.1 Greek Romance, folklore, and
heroism were common topics featured in book form and in journals, like Biblioteka
dliia chteniia (The Reading Library), Moskvitianin (The Muscovite), and Otechest-
vennye zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland).2 Reports of archeological discoveries, reli-
gious reforms, and educational enterprise kindled Russian society’s commitment to
Orthodox culture.3 Philhellenism inspired Boris I. Ordynskii, one of Russia’s first
neo-Hellenists, to teach classical and modern Greek at the Iaroslavskii Gymnasium
in the 1830s. He published translations of Aristophanes and the three-volume work
of Spyridon Trikoupis, Ιστορία της Ελληνικής Επαναστάσεως (History of the Greek
Revolution).4 Vasilii F. Dombrovskii, founder of the Kiev Archaeological Commis-
sion and professor of history at the University of Vladimir, pioneered the studies
1
Odesskii vestnik, 8 April 1836; 27 June 1836. Examples include “Narodonaselenie grechesk-
ogo korolevstva,” Biblioteka dlia chteniia 8 (1835): 24–25; “Afiny v 1839 godu,” Otechest-
vennye zapiski, no. 5 (1839): 92–97; K. F. Lippert, “Gretsiia v nyneshnem svoem sostoianii:
Statía pervaia. Zhizn´ i literatura v noveishei Gretsii,” Otechestvennye zapiski, no. 11 (1841):
14–32; and Lippert, “Gretsiia v nyneshnem ee sostoianii,” Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo
prosveshcheniia 34 (1841): 20–28.
2
See Vissarion Belinsky, review of G. Evlampios, Amarantos, ili rozy vozrozhdennoi Ellady,
Otechestvennye zapiski, no. 3 (1844): 1–4; N. F. Shcherbina, “Klefty,” Otechestvennye zapiski,
no. 5 (1841): 72–76; D. P. Oznobishin, “Umiraiushchii kleft,” Otechestvennye zapiski, no. 3
(1842): 69; I. I. Panaev, “Grecheskoe stikhotvorenie,” Sovremennik 9 (1851): 42.
3
On cultural establishments, such as the Greek Archeological Society and the University in
Athens, see Odesskii vestnik, 9 April 1839; and Severnaia pchela, 5 February 1836; 27 May
1839; 11 August 1839; 25 July 1840. For essays in journals, see “O pestrote arkhitekturnoi u
drevnikh Grekov,” Biblioteka dlia chteniia 23 (1837): 43–69; “Nyneshnee sostoianie Gretsii,”
Biblioteka dlia chteniia 26 (1838): 118–26; “Pribytie grecheskoi korolevy v Afiny i pridvornyi
bal v Gretsii,” Biblioteka dlia chteniia 28 (1838): 47–51; V. A., “Ogorcheniia i udovol´stvye
nemtsa v Afinakh,” Biblioteka dlia chteniia 37 (1839): 46–62; and T., “O vozobnovlenii af-
inskikh pamiatnikov drevnosti v kontse 1836 i v nachale 1837 godov (Iz zapisok russkogo
puteshestvennika),” Otechestvennye zapiski, no. 7 (1840): 31–42.
4
The Aristophanes translations appeared in Otechestvennye zapiski, no. 1 (1849): 1–40; no.
6 (1850): 123–60, 75–122; “Otpadenie Gretsii ot Turtsii i evropeiskaia politika togo vremeni,
otnositelńo Gretsii i Turtsii,” Russkaia beseda 19, 1 (1860): 131–84, is the translation of Trik-
oupis. For more, see E. A. Bobrivyi, “Boris Ivanovich Ordynskii,” Varshavskie universitetskie
izvestiia, no. 8 (1903): 1–32; and Russkii biograficheskii slovar´ (St. Petersburg: Izdatel´stvo
Imperatorskogo russkogo istoricheskogo obshchestva, 1896–1918), 12: 305–06.
Europe’s Bellicose Periphery 405
of Byzance après Byzance.5 Since its foundation in 1827, Odesskii vestnik (Odessa
Herald) catered to the large Greek community of Odessa. When reporting on the
inauguration of the Greek Archeological Society, it asserted that “the liberation of
Hellas is an extremely important event for the study of antiquities and history.”6 Even
the Journal de St.-Pétersbourg, an official foreign ministry publication, disseminated
pan-Orthodox views in its news columns on free Greece.
The Russian press often contrasted Greek enlightenment with European decay.
The rebirth of Athens, as a political capital, became a beacon of material and cultural
progress. Severnaia pchela (Northern Bee) informed readers of the success of the
Greek people, mentioned prominent individuals by name, and stressed the merits of
Russian involvement.7 Although it would be incorrect to say that journalists wrote in
support of the Greek kingdom’s territorial expansion, colorful versions of irredentist
operations—at times restrained, at times exaggerated—were reported. For a country
of slightly over 740,000 subjects, Greece received generous coverage.8
Under Nicholas I, the Russian foreign ministry took religion seriously. The writ-
ings of Russian consuls and agents illustrate foreign policy-making from the primary
outposts, where ecumenical Orthodoxy confronted religious nationalism and eccle-
siastical independence. The multifaceted reflections of Russian consuls in Greece
(Athens, Thessaloniki, and Patras), in Cyprus (Larnaca), in Crete (Chania [Canée]),
and in Asia Minor (Smyrna) demonstrate the complexities of foreign policy formation
and introduce social, religious, and cultural commentary. St. Petersburg’s decision,
in 1841, to abstain from intervention in Crete, shows how tsarist policy, while driven
by Orthodox interests, aimed to cooperate with the Western powers in the interest
of peace. Yet, the unrest on Crete shows how efforts to enforce the principles of the
Congress of Vienna (1815) in the European center led to the eruption of violence in
the periphery. Scrutiny of peripheral outbursts, like the Cretan insurrection of 1841,
challenges Paul Schroeder’s scholarly conceptualization of the era as one marked by
international law, peace, and stability.9
5
V. F. Dombrovskii, “O vliianii Gretsii na razvitie grazhdanskogo obrazovaniia Drevnei
Rusi,” Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia 29, 1–3 (1841): 1–20; and “Opyt is-
torii nachertatelńykh khudozhestv v Rossii,” Khudozhestvennaia gazeta, 31 August 1838.
6
Odesskii vestnik, 12 January 1838.
7
See Severnaia pchela, “Grecheskoe torgovoe morekhodstvo,” 20 October 1839; “Vzgliad na
sovremennuiu Gretsiiu,” 10 June 1842; “Nyneshnie Afiny,” 6 October 1842; and “Obshchestvo
v Afinakh,” 22 February 1843.
8
The population figure appeared in Severnaia pchela, 23 December 1837. The foreign col-
umn heading “Gretsiia” began replacing “Turtsiia” and “Turetskaia Granitsa” in Severnaia
pchela, 22 March 1828.
9
The authoritative international history of this era is that of Paul W. Schroeder, The Transfor-
mation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). See also Ed-
ward Ingram, “Bellicism as Boomerang: The Eastern Question during the Vienna System,” in
The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848: Episode or Model in Modern History?,
ed. Peter Krüger and Paul W. Schroeder (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 205–27; and
406 Lucien J. Frary

A long-time source of international discord, the island of Crete—a strategic area

on Europe’s periphery—became an Ottoman possession in 1669 after a long war
with Venice. During the following century, Crete recovered and enjoyed relative
peace. However, latent anti-Ottoman sentiment led to intermittent outbursts of vi-
olence (1770, 1821–23, and 1827–30), in some cases encouraged by Russia. Toward
the concluding phase of the Greek Revolution, the so-called protecting powers (Rus-
sia, France, and Great Britain) struggled with the sensitive problem of safeguarding
Christians on Crete, while upholding the sultan’s authority. Their decision was a com-
promise of sorts; allied vessels blockaded the island to restrict the spread of violence.
Although St. Petersburg aimed to cooperate with its allies, Russian admirals were
willing to intervene when Christians were in danger.10
After lengthy discussions among the protecting powers, the London Protocol of
1830 left Crete under Ottoman rule. As compensation for losses in the Peloponnese,
the sultan awarded its governorship to the Egyptian Pasha Mehmed Ali. But Ali re-
jected it, considering it unlikely to be a gainful affair. Instead, through a mixture
of force and reform, the pasha’s talented subordinate, Mustafa Pasha, reestablished
tranquility.11 Although Ottoman rule was sanctioned by the European powers, “aban-
doning Crete to the Turks” was generally unpopular among Russian observers. Spyr-
idon I. Destunis, Russian consul in Smyrna (1818–21) and translator in the Asiatic
Department, expressed his opinion in an essay completed in the early 1830s:
What will be the future fate of this island?… Would the Greeks, who for
nine years fought for their emancipation, want to bear again on their already
liberated neck all that has weighed on them under the yagatan [sword] of the
ayan [official] to work the land for the profit of their tyrant?… The proximity
of Crete with independent Greece will keep the inhabitants of the [Aegean]
islands and the Greek peninsula in continual alarm in regard to the plague.
You only have to cast your eyes on a map to convince yourself that the island
is, so to say, an appendix of Greece.12
Another outspoken critic of Ottoman rule over Crete was the well-known Rus-
sian writer and religious thinker, Aleksandr Sturdza. In a position paper composed in
the early 1830s, Sturdza aimed at convincing powerful men in St. Petersburg of the
Matthew Rendall, “Russia, the Concert of Europe, and Greece, 1821–29: A Test of Hypotheses
about the Vienna System,” Security Studies 9, 4 (2000): 52–90.
10
Karl Nesselrode, “Otchet o deistviiakh nashei diplomatii za 1829 god,” Rossiiskii gosu-
darstvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov (RGADA) f. 3, op. 1, d. 86, l. 23.
11
Mustafa Pasha commanded a body of Egyptian troops on the island since its capture by
Ibrahim Pasha in 1824.
12
S. Iu. Destunis, “L’île de Crète” (1826–32), Rukopisnyi Otdel, Rossiiskaia Natsionalńaia
Biblioteka f. 250, d. 75, ll. 62–65.
political, economic, and moral disadvantages of Ottoman governance: “The island

of Crete is a European island like all of those which have been ceded to Greece; she
is not a member of the system of islands which are Asiatic.” According to Sturdza,
the imagined contrast between Western and Eastern civilizations was more than a
question of geography; he alleged that the Greeks were culturally superior to their
Asian governors. Claiming that their “primitive institutions” made the Ottomans un-
fit to govern, Sturdza propagated the viewpoint of Ottoman inferiority and European
enlightenment. He was also concerned about the security of Greece, when he wrote:
“A Crete still inhabited by Greeks offers no advantages to Turkey other than to hold
Greece always in distress, to cause it great expenses, and to promote attack as soon
as the occasion presents itself.” In addition, Sturdza alluded to the danger of British
expansion, as Ottoman authority declined.13
Orientalist perspectives like Sturdza’s were not isolated private affairs, as shown
by a Severnaia pchela column praising the “extraordinary achievements” of the
Greeks after centuries of “tyrannical rule by the Turks.” “Social enlightenment takes
gigantic strides,” wrote the author, “ancient Greek is taught in all schools. Homer and
Plato are read freely … not rarely do you meet twelve-year-old boys who can solve
problems of trigonometry.”14 Later publications echoed this sense of Western superi-
ority and declared that the “second part of the history of Crete”—the era of Ottoman
rule—“is reproachful and a blow to the pride of our European civilization. We think
that we have reached the ideas of humanitarianism, progress, etc., whereas a whole
string of coarse facts show … that we are still far away from genuine civilization.”15
Observers like Sturdza professed certain reservations about Russian interven-
tion, yet viewed the Orthodox East as an area of vast potential material wealth and
moral probity waiting for engagement. The emotional appeal did not go unnoticed
among the tsar’s top foreign servicemen, who warned of future troubles if Crete and
the motherland (Greece) remained divided.16
Uprisings on the island of Crete (1866–68 and 1897–98) have been the subject
of adequate scholarly attention.17 Of lesser magnitude, the insurrection of 1841 pro-
13
A. S. Sturdza, “Bumagi, kasaiushchiesia Gretsii: Kopii protokoli, konferentsii i dr.,” Otdel
Rukopisei, Institut Rossiiskoi Literatury f. 288, op. 2, d. 13, ll. 58, 62–63. On Sturdza, see
Stella Ghervas, Réinventer la tradition: Alexandre Stourdza et l’Europe de la Sainte-Alliance
(Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008).
14
Severnaia pchela, 26 March 1841. A two-page essay in Severnaia pchela, 11 November
1841, explores contemporary Athens.
15
I. Kapustina, “Istoricheskii ocherk ostrova Krita,” Russkaia mysl´ 12, 1 (1899): 32–33.
16
Nesselrode to Heiden, St. Petersburg, 31 March 1829; and Nesselrode to Heiden, St. Peter-
sburg, 24 April 1829, RGADA f. 15 (dopolnenie), op. 1, d. 53, ll. 77–81, 84–92.
17
S. K. Smirnov, “Kandiia,” Russkii vestnik 68, 3 (1867): 341–69; Emmanuel Papadaki, Os-
trov Kandiia: Neskol´ko zametok kandiota o geografii, istorii i nyneshnem sostoianii ostrova
(St. Petersburg: A. Transhelia, 1867); I. Kapustina, “Istoricheskii ocherk ostrova Krita,” Russ-
kaia mysl´ 12, 2 (1899): 22–40; Iu. Abegg, “Zametka o Krite,” Sbornik konsul´skikh donesenii
MID, vypusk IV, V, VI (St. Petersburg: MID, 1898): 340–56, 522–26, 426–35; M. M. “Proshloe
408 Lucien J. Frary
vides a useful prism to view the Ottoman system, the functioning of the Russian
foreign ministry, and reactions from the Russian press.18 The episode constitutes an
important signpost in Greece’s irredentist quest and shows how state interest could
overpower pan-Orthodox sympathy. It demonstrates how, while outwardly cooperat-
ing with its allies, St. Petersburg also aimed to maintain its traditional influence in
the Orthodox East.
The violence on Crete was part of a chain of insurrections generally known as the
Near Eastern Crisis of 1839–41. The crisis began when Sultan Mahmud II attempted
to recover the losses from the Near Eastern settlement of 1833 by harnessing the
independent aspirations of Mehmed Ali. The result was disastrous for the Ottoman
armies; in quick succession the sultan died, and the entire Ottoman fleet set sail for
Alexandria and surrendered to the Egyptian pasha. Simultaneous revolts broke out
in Serbia, the Danubian principalities, Macedonia, and Thessaly. As threats against
the Ottoman throne multiplied, many Greek patriots aimed for more immediate roads
toward the unity of Crete with Greece.
The intersection of Ottoman reform efforts and expanding contacts with the out-
side world had important consequences on Crete. At the time of the 1841 crisis, the
majority of the island’s approximately 130,000 inhabitants were Christians. Accord-
ing to Russian consuls, many Muslims were ethnic Greeks who had adopted Islam.19
Contemporary accounts confirm a shared Ottoman culture: Christians and Muslims
differed little, and Greek was the common language. Yet, the chronic outbreak of
rebellion attests to tensions which underlaid daily interactions.
Based on the reports of P. Thoron, Russia’s agent in Chania, Mustafa Pasha’s gov-
ernment was efficient, fair, and beneficial throughout the 1830s.20 A garrison of Arab
ostrova Krita,” Nabliudatel´, no. 7 (1898): 211–17; Aleksandr Shtiglits, Ostrov Krit, mirnaia
blokada i mezhdunarodnyi plebistsit (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia G. Ia. Gertsa, 1897); I. G.
Senkevich, Rossiia i kritskoe vosstanie 1866–1869 gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1970); G. M. Piatig-
orskii, “The Cretan Uprising of 1866–1869 and the Greeks of Odessa,” Modern Greek Studies
Yearbook 14/15 (1998/1999): 129–48; E. Driault and M. Lhéritier, Histoire diplomatique de la
Grèce de 1821 à nos jours, 5 vols. (Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 1925–26), 3:
180–238; and O. V. Sokolovskaia, Rossiia na Krite: Iz istorii pervoi mirotvorcheskoi operatsii
XX veka (Moscow: Indrik, 2006).
18
M. Stavrinos-Paximadopoulos, Η αγγλική πολιτική και το κρητικό ζήτημα, 1839–1841 [En-
glish policy and the Cretan question, 1839–1841] (Athens: Ekdoseis Domos, 1986), provides
the British perspective. Also see D. G. Rozen, Istoriia Turtsii ot pobedy reformy v 1826 godu
do Parizhskogo traktata v 1856 godu, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Akademiia Nauk, 1872), 2: 53–
55; N. A. Dulina, Osmanskaia imperiia v mezhdunarodnykh otnosheniiakh (Moscow: Nauka,
1986), 130–38, 170; and M. Sabry, L’Empire égyptien sous Mohammed-Ali (Paris: P. Geuthner,
1936), 395–404.
19
See Senkevich, Rossiia i kritskoe vosstanie, 21; Smirnov, “Kandiia,” 341; and Abegg, “Zam-
etka o Krite,” 354. According to Russian consuls, in the 1860s approximately 250–300,000
people lived on the island, two-thirds Christian and one-third Muslim.
20
A selection of Thoron’s correspondence is available in René Cattaui, ed., Le règne de Mo-
hamed Aly d’après les archives russes en Égypte, 3 vols. (Cairo: Impr. de l’Institut franç ais
regular soldiers from Egypt helped maintain peace. Patriotic Cretan Christians, how-
ever, viewed the Near Eastern crisis as a moment propitious to sever ties with their
Ottoman governors. The insurrection in Crete gained impetus from several springs:
desire for national unity (at least, according to Russian archival and journalistic mate-
rials), distrust of the Ottoman administration, and Muslim-Christian rivalry. Another
cause was the change in administration in the spring of 1838, when Mustafa Pasha
was ordered to Syria to suppress an uprising. Thoron reported that “the departure of
Mustafa Pasha was for Crete a day of true grief and the entire population expresses
deep regrets… Both Greeks and Muslims are sorrowful and worried about the loss
of his paternal administration, which has gained the esteem and love of all classes.”21
In the fall of 1838, Thoron began reporting on the hostile designs of Cretan émi-
grés living on mainland Greece, and the infiltration of Greek subjects into the is-
land. In the summer of 1839, a group of prominent Christian-Cretans petitioned the
protecting powers for intervention against “the Turks.” One year later, Mario Santi,
Russian consul in Cyprus, reported of the spread of confusion and disorder on Crete
“provoked by the indecision of the vast group of different parties.”22 When Crete
came again under Ottoman control (according to the Convention for the Pacification
of the Levant, signed in London in July 1840), the desire for revolt gained force. Mes-
merized by patriotic euphoria, many Greeks aimed to liberate Crete from “foreign
rule.”23
In the winter of 1840, an armed revolt was secretly planned. The rebellion began
in February, when a group of about fifty palikaria (brave young men) assembled in
Platissia, a village just south of Chania, and proclaimed independence and national
unification. They published a pamphlet entitled Κρητικοί Συνάδελφοι (Cretan Com-
patriots) and a statement of protest against alien rule endorsed by an assembly of
notables and priests.
Thoron, the executor of tsarist directives, adopted a policy of non-intervention
and applauded the prudence of the Ottoman governor. In Thoron’s estimation, British
agents were exploiting the situation to expand their influence and promote a consti-
tutional government under their protection.24 His concerns were seconded by Karl
d’archéologie orientale du Caire, pour la Société royale de géographie d’Égypte, 1931–36). The
Russian consul in Sofia (Abegg, “Zametka o Krite,” 346–48), confirmed the appraisal of Mus-
tafa Pasha’s government. See also Henry Dodwell, The Founder of Modern Egypt: A Study of
Muhammad Ali (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), 242–48.
21
Thoron’s report appears in Alexander Medem (Russian consul in Egypt) to Peter Ruck-
man (Russian agent in Constantinople), Alexandria, 27 April 1838, in Cattaui, Le règne de
Mohamed Aly, 3: 94.
22
Santi to A. P. Butenev, Larnaca, 30 May 1840, Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Imperii
(AVPRI) f. 180, op. 517/1, d. 1083, l. 3.
23
Stavrinos-Paximadopoulos, Η αγγλική πολιτική και το κρητικό ζήτημα, 179–81; and Driault,
Histoire diplomatique, 2: 214.
24
Thoron to Medem, Canée, 19 March 1841; Thoron to Titov, Canée, 10 April 1841; Thoron to
Titov, Canée, 21 April 1841, AVPRI f. 180, op. 517/1, d. 1154, ll. 2, 10–11, 16–18.
410 Lucien J. Frary
Kiuster, the Russian agent on Syros, who reported that the British resident and naval
commander had proposed a show of force to remind the insurgents of the conse-
quences, if they failed to disperse.25 St. Petersburg reacted to Thoron’s reports with
a statement expressing the tsar’s unwillingness to participate in the Cretan affair.26
In March 1841, thousands of armed Christian rebels, under the banner of a Greek
National Commission, assembled in the northwest Apokoronas region of Crete. The
rebellion gained momentum in April, when a Greek from Zakynthos, named Left-
eris, killed a Muslim Cretan on a secluded street in Chania. The morning after, an
assembly of 500 Muslim Cretans demanded satisfaction. Without a trial, the Ottoman
authorities arrested and executed Lefteris for the murder. A posse of armed Chris-
tians recovered his body and displayed it under the windows of the pasha’s residence.
Violence erupted when “two armed Turk-Cretan fanatics,” according to Thoron, “ac-
cidentally” murdered “two Cretan Greeks.” “Blood begets blood,” wrote the tsar’s
agent, who was certain that the entire Greek population was now in open revolt. Ap-
proximately 3,500 Christians prepared for a showdown, as the Ottoman government
mustered its forces.27
By mid-April 1841, the rebel leaders, now based in the southern village of Vafi,
issued a statement to the protecting powers demanding national unification of Crete
with the kingdom of Greece. Thoron hoped that tranquility and order would soon be
established, for “the Turkish cause suffers when the Greek cause gains partisans.”28
In early May, an expedition of 2,000 troops under the command of Admiral Tahir
Pasha was preparing to crush the rebels in the south. Skirmishes commenced be-
tween Sfakiotes (Greek Christians from a mountainous area in southwestern Crete),
and Ottoman regular soldiers and Albanian mercenaries. According to Thoron, ca-
sualties remained low because the Greeks would strike rapidly and then flee to the
mountains.29
Turmoil on Crete drew the interest of the Russian Embassy in Athens. From Oc-
tober 1840 until late summer 1841, First Secretary Ivan E. Persiany was in charge of
the Russian Embassy. His voluminous dispatches during this period (most of which
relate to disturbances on Crete and elsewhere in Ottoman Europe) demonstrate how
Russian representatives had informed the Greek government in Athens of St. Peters-
burg’s condemnation of disorder. He supported the efforts of the Ottoman army to
disperse the insurgents on Crete. His Greek heritage notwithstanding, the Russian
first secretary spoke eloquently against Greek irredentism.
25
Kiuster to Persiany, Syros, 21 March 1841, AVPRI f. 133, op. 469, d. 8/1841, ll. 197–201.
26
Thoron to Titov, Canée, 14 April 1841, AVPRI f. 180, op. 517/1, d. 1154, ll. 3–4.
27
Thoron to Titov, Canée, 14 May 1841; Thoron to Titov, Canée, 10 April 1841, ibid., ll. 3–4,
10–11.
28
Thoron to Titov, Canée, 21 April 1841, ibid., ll. 12, 13.
29
Thoron to Titov, Canée, 6 May 1841, ibid., ll. 22–23. On the Sfakiotes, see William Miller,
Essays on the Latin Orient (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), 44, 186, 188, 189,
194.
Persiany’s communiqués and instructions, devoted to the conflict between the

sultan and the Egyptian pasha, contain valuable descriptions of the unrest apparent
throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Persiany claimed that secret francophile soci-
eties and groups of bandits were on Mehmed Ali’s payroll.30 Coincidentally, Sever-
naia pchela reported on disturbances in Albania fueled by bribes from the Egyptian
pasha. The same newspaper report accused prominent Greeks of involvement in an
insurrectional society called the Cretan Committee, and condemned the raids of the
famous Macedonian rebels (Theodoros Grivas and Ioannis Velentzas) into Ottoman
territories. Brigandage, rapine, and piracy in the eastern Mediterranean became com-
mon topics in the Russian newspapers.31
When news of events on Crete reached the Aegean archipelago, Catholics on Sy-
ros demonstrated in support of the insurgents. Russian Consul Kiuster, who reported
on the hearty sympathy felt by all Syros Greeks for the Christian Cretan rebels,
claimed that more than four hundred native Cretans had left Syros to join the fight-
ing.32 After reaching Crete, they were joined by numerous Sfakiotes who had refused
to turn in their arms, as the Ottoman governors had demanded. Some rebels insisted
on the immunities and privileges promised them under the Egyptian governor. Oth-
ers desired a system of limited autonomy, like the one instituted on Samos. Persiany
insisted that members of the Cretan Committee, including Cretan natives Nikolaos
Renieris, Archimandrite Missael Apostolidis, and Emmanuel Antoniadis (editor of
the pro-British Greek newspaper Αϑήνα [Athens]), were to blame for the troubles.33
As the Russian embassy in Istanbul worked on what was to become the Straits
Convention of 1841, Secretary Persiany was ordered to collect as much fresh, detailed
information about the Cretan affair as possible.34 The Russian ambassador to the Sub-
lime Porte, Vladimir P. Titov, was concerned that the turmoil on Crete would upset
the newly reestablished order in the eastern Mediterranean. His feelings were shared
by the British Ambassador, John Ponsonby, who had reported earlier of armed Greek
captains landing vessels on Crete, and of an Ottoman force of 2,000 dispatched from
Istanbul. Meantime, in Athens, hundreds of armed Greek men were preparing to join
the rebellion. Some were Cretan natives, but others simply craved the action.
In late 1840, the return of control of Crete to the Ottomans increased the Chris-
tians’ resentment against the governors of the sultan. Fedor A. Ivanov, Russian consul
in Smyrna, wrote that rumors about the transfer of authority raised a storm of protest,
30
Persiany to Nesselrode, Athens, 19 December 1840, AVPRI f. 133, op. 469, d. 8/1841, ll.
11–17.
31
Severnaia pchela, 11 January 1840.
32
Kiuster to Titov, Syros, 29 June 1841; Kiuster to Titov, Syros, 1 August 1841, AVPRI f.
180, op. 517/1, d. 1399, ll. 20–21, 27. Kiuster served a decade on Syros, the headquarters of the
Russian postal service in the eastern Mediterranean. See “Kiuster, K. K.,” AVPRI f. 159, op.
464, d. 1914.
33
Persiany to Nesselrode, Athens, 24 March 1841, AVPRI f. 133, op. 469, d. 8, ll. 141–42.
34
Titov to Persiany, Büyükdere, 18 June 1841, AVPRI f. 180, op. 517/1, d. 1809, ll. 157–58.
412 Lucien J. Frary
for the inhabitants of Crete preferred to live under the Egyptian government.35 A
contemporary Greek Russian observer disagreed: life under “the Egyptian dynasty”
was bitter. “Christian Cretans were reduced to such extremities that they lacked daily
bread because of the tribute.”36 In any case, Persiany reported that the rebels “pre-
ferred to die than abandon their country without having obtained the goal of their
grievances.”37
Fearful of the specter of popular rebellion, the Greek government had to be care-
ful not to become too closely associated with the insurgents and risk antagonizing
the representatives of the protecting powers. To be sure, the government in Athens
did not turn a blind eye to the organization of Cretan relief. King Othon himself do-
nated several thousand drachmas at a theatrical performance, the proceeds of which
were to benefit the insurrection. According to Persiany, the king’s contributions were
symbolic and “created a profound sensation” among the public.38 Severnaia pchela
reported that King Othon had donated about eight thousand drachmas to assist the
poor: “the money will probably be used to subsidize the needs of Cretan families
which live in Greece or fled there recently.”39 Charitable actions of monarchs were
favorite subjects of Russian publishers, only in this case the king’s handouts were
used to assist a popular rebellion.
At this time, St. Petersburg was willing to surrender whatever commercial and
political privileges in the Black Sea it had obtained from previous international trea-
ties; this served Russia’s aims to reconcile with Great Britain, while keeping France
in check. It was a good policy and explains, in part, why St. Petersburg abstained
from taking part in the Cretan imbroglio. But despite the atmosphere of cooperation,
Great Britain and Russia continued their rivalry on the margins of the continent.
Agent Thoron described the uprising on Crete as “a crude English intrigue.”
Members of a secret society, he observed, including some Sfakiotes and “a relative of
the British envoy on Crete,” were taking advantage of the occasion to place the island
under the authority of a freely elected president.40 To policy makers in St. Petersburg,
this was tantamount to British domination, a concern that was furthered by reports of
discrimination on the British-governed Ionian Islands.
While Russia maintained its policy of non-intervention, French and British naval
officers attempted mediation to reestablish tranquility. The Sublime Porte responded
35
Ivanov to Titov, Smyrna, 11 September 1840, ibid., d. 1454, l. 121.
36
Papadaki, Ostrov Kandiia, 18.
37
Persiany to Nesselrode, Athens, 27 March 1841, AVPRI f. 133, op. 469, d. 8/1841, l. 175.
38
Persiany to Nesselrode, Athens, 27 May 1841, ibid., ll. 278–85.
39
Severnaia pchela, 12 June 1841.
40
Thoron to a friend in Syros, Canée, 10 March 1841, AVPRI f. 133, op. 469, d. 8/1841, ll.
192–93.
by setting up a blockade, a development that received extensive coverage in Russian

dailies.41
During the final week of May 1841, the rebel situation became desperate. Sig-
nificantly outnumbered, the rebel leaders delivered to Persiany (via Archimandrite
Missael) a supplication signed by hundreds of Cretans pleading for Russian protec-
tion. In his capacity as first secretary, Persiany, replied that the Russian embassy was
unable to interfere in the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire. Contrast Persiany’s
comment with the following report from British Ambassador Ponsonby:
I learn from an excellent authority that the Russian minister in Greece has
constantly repeated to those of his partisans in Candia who are employed in
spreading Russian influence on that island that the Russian government will
procure the union of Candia with Greece on the terms of the King of Greece
being considered suzerain, Candia to pay a small tribute, etc., and have a gov-
ernment entirely independent of exterior control or influence.42
Archimandrite Missael responded to Persiany’s laissez faire attitude with a despon-

dent message reiterating the tenet that the Greeks would rather perish than resubmit
to “the Turkish yoke.” With marked reservation, Persiany forwarded Missael’s note to
St. Petersburg accompanied by a last-minute comment on the newly established rebel
government.43 Accepting the appeal was significant, for some observers construed
it as Russian acknowledgment of the insurgents’ demands. As a result, Nesselrode
reprimanded Persiany for his “incautious actions” and for behaving in a manner that
outwardly condoned the rebellion. Persiany was ordered henceforward “to do nothing
more than gather information and act with extreme circumspection.” 44
St. Petersburg continued to instruct its envoys to work in concert with the other
powers. Russian Ambassador Titov praised agent Thoron for reinforcing the efforts
of the Ottomans to crush the insurgency. Angelo Moustoxydis, the Russian consul
in Thessaloniki, reported that about four thousand Albanians had been sent to Crete
to reinforce the Ottoman troops. This news was favorably received by the Russian
embassy in Istanbul. Moustoxydis referred to the governor of Thessaloniki’s efforts
to muster forces as “wise and prudent.”45 Yet tranquility was rarely long-lasting in
nineteenth-century Ottoman Europe. After the Albanian mercenaries began to rebel
against their Turkish officers because of insufficient pay; the sultan’s government was
41
Severnaia pchela, 12 May 1841; 13 May 1841; 28 May 1841; 12 June 1841; 10 July 1841.
42
Ponsonby to Palmerston, Therapia, 12 December 1838 [n.s], RGADA f. 1, op. 2, d. 90, ll.
70–71.
43
Persiany to Nesselrode, Athens, 11 May 1841, AVPRI f. 133, op. 469, d. 8/1841, ll. 254–69.
44
Nesselrode to Persiany, St. Petersburg, 17 June 1841, ibid., d. 9/1841, ll. 109–13.
45
See Titov to Thoron, Pera, 15 March 1841, AVPRI f. 180, op. 517/1, d. 1154, ll. 58; Titov to
Thoron, Pera, 8 April 1841, AVPRI f. 180, op. 517/1, d. 1154, ll. 59–61; and Moustoxydis to
Titov, Thessaloniki, 10 June 1841, AVPRI f. 180, op. 517/1, d. 1306, ll. 108–10.
414 Lucien J. Frary
forced to raise their salaries. Recruiting sufficient troops to cover all the regions in
turmoil was becoming a problem for the Sublime Porte.
The reaction of the Ottoman chargé d’affaires in Athens, Constantine Musurus
Pasha (whose father was from Rethymno, Crete), sheds light on Greek-Ottoman rela-
tions during this period. Musurus protested over an incident in which a vessel carry-
ing two thousand rifles, one thousand okes (an oke was about 2.8 lbs.) of gunpowder,
and a considerable quantity of lead was intercepted near Poros by Greek pirates.46
A translation of an article from the Greek newspaper Ελληνικόν Ταχυδρομείον (The
Greek Post), printed in Severnaia pchela, informed Russian readers that “doubtlessly,
these arms were meant for Crete.”47 Given the circumstances, Persiany warned that
Greek-Ottoman relations “were destined to be compromised,” as King Othon perse-
vered in “his system of inertia.”48 The tsarist representative urged the Greek govern-
ment to redouble its efforts to curtail the passions of its subjects.
As the Cretan insurrection reached the boiling point, another major rebellion was
under way in Thessaly (along the northern border of independent Greece). In order
to suppress the uprising, thousands of Ottoman and Greek troops gathered there.
According to Persiany, King Othon approved of the borderland revolts, for he favored
uniting these territories with Greece.49 For months, the situation in Thessaly was
extremely tense, as Greek captains, sailors, priests, and palikaria threatened the lives
of the outnumbered Muslim population. Musurus informed Greek prime minister
Paikos about the government’s lack of urgency. Istanbul’s envoy complained that the
rebels were making preparations in broad daylight.50
The new movement on Crete for national liberation reignited old sympathies and
hopes which twelve years of peace had been unable to erase. The Greek Russophile
newspaper Αιών (Century) reported that news about the massacres and anarchy in the
borderlands “would clearly prove to Europe that Christians cannot live with the Turks
… and that the natural and legitimate heir of Turkey in Europe is free Greece.”51
Persiany remarked that secret associations organized in Greece “continue to furnish
funds, provisions, and munitions of war to all those who go to Crete [and] to the
islands of Saint Eustratios and Saint Marine, where there is a concentration of adven-
46
Musurus to Paikos, Athens, 23 June 1841, AVPRI f. 133, op. 469, d. 8/1841, ll. 407–10; Mu-
surus to Mavrokordatos, Athens, 3 July 1841, AVPRI f. 133, op. 469, d. 8/1841, ll. 411–12; and
Kiuster to Titov, Syros, 29 June 1841, AVPRI f. 180, op. 517/1, d. 1399, ll. 20–21.
47
Severnaia pchela, 26 July 1841.
48
Persiany to Nesselrode, Athens, 27 March 1841, AVPRI f. 133, op. 469, d. 8/1841, l. 171.
49
See Persiany to Nesselrode, Athens, 27 July 1841, ibid., ll. 420–21; and John S. Koliop-
oulos, Brigands with a Cause: Brigandage and Irredentism in Modern Greece, 1821–1912
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 116–19.
50
Persiany to Nesselrode, Athens, 11 August 1841, AVPRI f. 133, op. 469, d. 8/1841, ll. 429–31.
51
Αιών [Century], 3 June 1841. Coincidentally, Severnaia pchela, 1 December 1841, praised
Ottoman efforts to forbid subscriptions to Greek newspapers.
turers, who wish to stir up revolt in Thessaly.”52 In his dispatches, Persiany included
pamphlets by the Cretan rebels, titled Radamanthys and Emancipation des Popula-
tions Chrétiennes et Israélites en Orient, both in French translation.
Events on Crete reached a climax in June 1841 with the arrival of over 10,000
Ottoman soldiers. Their presence forced the rebels to submit in July. In order to pre-
vent a bloodbath, French and British vessels helped hundreds of insurgents (including
Archimandrite Missael) to return to Greece. The Russian squadron did not assist,
even though at least three warships that we know of (the Ajax, Paris, and Silach)
were stationed nearby. Under the cover of night, French and British vessels with ref-
ugees on board ran the Ottoman blockade. Thoron observed, bitterly, that “the guilty
Greeks” (that is, the rebels) were abandoning their debts on Crete: “this is truly a
sad gift that they bestow on Greece.”53 In other words, Thoron felt the insurgents
deserved punishment.
News of the cessation of hostilities was well received in the Russian capital.
Severnaia pchela repeatedly reported that the restoration of the sultan’s authority had
returned peace and tranquility to the island.54 Although the Ottoman reaction can be
characterized as restrained, the insurrection of 1841 had important consequences.
Once law and order was reestablished, unconditional amnesty was extended to all
Greeks who took part in the rebellion. The final pacification of the island, however,
was not so simple: thousands of Albanian mercenaries, unpaid, and hungry, were left
on the island.
In his report in December 1841, Thoron reflected on the immediate past, noting
that Mustafa Pasha’s rule was less than perfect, and that a better future seemed possi-
ble, now that civil and military authority was divided between two Ottoman officials.
However, in the year’s final dispatch, Thoron warned of brewing disorder caused by
the reimposition of the jizya (head tax) and an unfair system of justice.55

Analysis of the general reaction to the Cretan revolt of 1841 displays the contradic-
tions among the principles of religious piety, monarchical legitimacy, and national
unity in the minds of Russian readers. Sympathetic Russian reports about the Cre-
tan rebels suggest a difference of opinion between educated society and the state.
Thanks, in part, to news from independent Greece, the image of the struggle of the
Orthodox Christians under Ottoman rule became an important feature of Russian
print culture in the following decades.
During the early 1840s, as Tsar Nicholas I adopted a more conciliatory attitude
toward Great Britain, Russian foreign policy in the Near East retained its religious
52
Persiany to Nesselrode, Athens, 27 May 1841, AVPRI f. 133, op. 469, d. 8/1841, ll. 282–83.
53
Thoron to Titov, Canée, 6 August 1841, AVPRI f. 180, op. 517/1, d. 1154, l. 37.
54
Severnaia pchela, 13 May 1841; 12 August 1841; 26 August 1841; 29 August 1841.
55
Thoron to Titov, Canée, 6 December 1841, AVPRI f. 180, op. 517/1, d. 1154, ll. 56–57.
416 Lucien J. Frary
character. With respect to Greece, the tsar continued to emphasize the benefits of
strong monarchical institutions and the maintenance of the territorial status quo. In
the broader picture, although Russia and Britain, the great European flanking powers,
were not at war with each other, they competed for prestige and influence in conflicts
on the margins of the continent. The principles of the Concert of Europe helped main-
tain peace in the center but failed to account for troubles on the fringes. The cost of
tolerating and even promoting a limited amount of instability in the Ottoman Empire
became most apparent in 1853 and again in 1914. Thus, in general terms, this essay
supports the proposed conceptualization of the Congress of Vienna era (1815–48) as
one of mutual consensus, law, and political equilibrium, but at the same time suggests
that the price for peace in the European core was the export of bellicosity to the con-
tinent’s periphery.
The Greek Benevolent Association of Odessa (1871–1917):
A Minority Civic Organization in Late Imperial Russia
John A. Mazis
The years between the Great Reforms and the beginning of World War I were in
many respects the golden age of the Russian middle class. To be sure, even during its
golden age the Russian bourgeoisie did not even begin to rival the political and social
prominence of its Western counterpart (for, even after the concessions of 1905, the
Russian autocracy continued to frustrate the attempts of the middle class to share
political power). Nevertheless, the changes which occurred after the 1860s brought
about a resurgence of the middle class, which attempted to play a larger role in Rus-
sian public life. This was the time when civil society appeared on the Russian scene
and civic organizations became a more frequent phenomenon. It was in this spirit
of civic involvement that the Odessa Greeks, Russia’s largest and wealthiest Greek
community, established themselves in a philanthropic society. While this society was
in many ways similar to other Russian associations of the kind, it was also different
in that it was from its inception a political as well as a philanthropic entity. Due to
the privileged position of the Greeks in Imperial Russia the organization was able to
flourish without hindrance from the authorities. Thus, the story presented here can-
not be taken as representing the norm for the Russian Empire as a whole but, to use
the title of one of Isaac Babel’s works, it represents “The Way Things Were Done in
Odessa.”
The majority of the Greek immigrants, the subject of this study, were refugees of
war who had come from Greece during the second half of the eighteenth and the be-
ginning of the nineteenth century. As a result of the Russian-Ottoman War of 1768–74
thirty thousand Greeks who had revolted against the Ottomans in support of Russia’s
war effort became refugees. Catherine the Great felt obligated to accommodate these
coreligionists, many of whom had fought in Russian-organized military units.1 Most
of these Greeks settled in coastal cities of southern Russia.2 The Greeks of Russia
1
Franco Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1776–1789, Part II: Republican
Patriotism and the Empires of the East, trans. R. Burr Litchfield (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
2
Grigorii Arsh, “Οι Έλληνες της Ρωσίας” [The Greeks of Russia], in Μουσείο Φιλικής
Εταιρίας [Museum of the Friendly Society] (Athens: Foundation for Hellenic Culture, 1994),
17–18.
418 John A. Mazis
became easily integrated into Russian society and provided their host country with a
number of outstanding individuals in a variety of fields. By the 1860s and 1870s the
Greeks of Odessa were looking for ways to make their mark in their community.3
That desire was instrumental in the creation of the Greek Benevolent Association of
Odessa (known as Ελληνική Αγαθόεργος Κοινότης εν Οδησσώ in Greek and Gre-
cheskoe blagotvoritelńoe obshchestvo in Russian).
By its very nature, Imperial Russia was not a fertile ground for the creation and
operation of civic groups. The idea corporate entities not sponsored and controlled by
the government was rejected by the regime, which believed that sooner or later such
entities would come under the influence of antigovernment forces.4 Such associations
as were allowed to exist were nonpolitical in nature. Since Russia had problems with
many of its minorities, it was deemed dangerous to allow the existence of ethnic civic
groups, as they could easily become hotbeds of opposition to the regime. It is not
without design that, during the reign of Nicholas I (1825–55), new restrictions were
placed on civic groups. It was not until after Nicholas’s death and the relative open-
ness of the society that accompanied the reform efforts of the early sixties that civic
groups were allowed to flourish. As a result, the number of benevolent associations
in Russia increased from 40 in 1855 to 348 by 1880,5 and to approximately 3,700 by
1901.6 The creation of civic groups can be attributed not only to the desire of philan-
thropy, but also to the frustration of the progressive Russian middle class. That mid-
dle class, which included among its members not only the wealthy but also educated
professionals, was committed to social change and understood the importance of pub-
lic initiative (samodeiatelńost´). Therefore, since it was excluded from implementing
social reforms through political participation, the middle class channeled its efforts
into social improvements through civic action.7 Indeed, the new activism of the mid-
dle class has been called “silent bourgeois revolution” because, as Adele Lindenmeyr
put it, “[i]n the Russian context, all independent public initiative was political, even
when it was not overtly opposition, because it challenged, indirectly if not directly,
3
Vasilis Kardasis, “Νότια Ρωσία τον 19ο αιώνα: Οι Έλληνες Ομογενείς” [South Russia in
the nineteenth century: The Greek diaspora] (paper presented at the conference “The Greeks
in Ukraine [Eighteenth–Twentieth Century]: Social Life, Trade, Culture,” Foundation for Hel-
lenic Culture, Institute for Balkan Studies, Odessa State University, Odessa, 27 September
1996).
4
Adele Lindenmeyr, “The Rise of Voluntary Associations during the Great Reforms: The
Case of Charity,” in Russia’s Great Reforms 1851–1881, ed. Ben Eklof (Bloomington: Indiana
5
Adele Lindenmeyr, Poverty Is Not a Vice:Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial Russia
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 116–22.
6
Lindenmeyr, “The Rise of Voluntary Associations,” 265.
7
See Lindenmeyr, Poverty Is Not a Vice, 123; and Lindenmeyr, “The Rise of Voluntary As-
sociations,” 270–71.
The Greek Benevolent Association of Odessa (1871–1917) 419
the autocracy’s control over society.”8 To be sure, the government continued its tight
control of such entities, but the general relaxation by the state allowed even minority
groups to establish their own ethnic associations.
The Greek Benevolent Association of Odessa (henceforth GBAO) was created
in order to solve two major problems facing the Greek community of that city. The
first problem was financial in nature. After the end of the Crimean War (1856), when
Odessa experienced a relative decline as a commercial center, the Greek community
of the city felt the negative impact of that economic downturn. The other problem
resulted from changes in Russian policies vis-à-vis the empire’s ethnic minorities. In
an attempt to unify the country and make it more manageable, the state fostered a pol-
icy of systematic russification which aimed at homogenizing Russian society by ab-
sorbing the various minorities into the Russian majority culture.9 Since, by virtue of
already being Orthodox, it was halfway to the government’s goal, the Greek minority
was an ideal target for russification. As a result of Russia’s policy of russification,
as many as half of Russia’s Greeks were to an appreciable degree assimilated by the
beginning of the twentieth century.10 The greatest concern of the Greek minority was
russification through intermarriage. A large number of Greeks married Russians and
as a result their children became russified.11 The leaders of Odessa’s Greek commu-
nity wanted to create an organization which, among other things, would help preserve
the Greek national identity.
The GBAO came into existence on 25 August 1871.12 Among the 103 founding
fathers of the GBAO one finds the most prestigious leaders of the Greek community.13
Its charter provides some explanation as to the organization’s ultimate success and
longevity. The first article of the charter sets forth the association’s goals: (a) to take
care, by any means, of Odessa’s needy Greeks both those living in the city as well as
of those who are passing through; (b) to provide for the upkeep of the Greek Church
of the Holy Trinity; (c) to maintain and improve Odessa’s existing Greek educational
and philanthropic institutions; and (d) to create such new institutions as it deemed
8
Lindenmeyr, Poverty Is Not a Vice, 196.
9
“Russification in Tsarist Russia,” in The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History
ed. Joseph Wieczynski (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1983), 32: 205–11.
10
Theologos Panagiotides, Ο εν Ρωσία Ελληνισμός [The Greeks of Russia] (Athens: Trem-
bela, 1919), 11, 15.
11
Emmanuil Kapsambelis, Αναμνήσεις Διπλωμάτου [Memoirs of a diplomat] (Athens: n.p.,
1939), 27.
12
Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Odesskoi oblasti (GAOO) f. 765, op. 1, d. 1, ll. 12–19. The leaders
of the Greek community petitioned the city authorities in 1867 for permission to form an as-
sociation. Due to various legal and bureaucratic problems, the petition took four years to be
approved.
13
Patricia Herlihy, Odessa: A History, 1794–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1986), 151. See also GAOO f. 765, op. 1, d. 1, ll. 18–19.
420 John A. Mazis
necessary.14 If one excludes political activity (an option unavailable to civic groups
in nineteenth-century Russia), religion, education, and philanthropy were the three
areas in which a group was legally allowed to operate. Thus, the new Greek orga-
nization was from its inception designed to dominate the affairs of Odessa’s Greek
minority. The second article of the charter dealt with the association’s membership.
All Greek residents of Odessa, regardless of citizenship, could become members pro-
vided they paid annual dues of at least three rubles. All members had the right to
participate fully in the association’s annual meeting, vote, and be elected to office.
(Although not explicitly barred from participation, Greek women were not involved
in the GBAO.) Article 35, Section A mentions eleven ways by which the needy could
be helped:
1. A one-time cash payment

2. Monthly cash payments
3. Non-interest loans
4. Free medical care
5. Free or low-rent housing
6. Food and clothing for free or for minimal cost
7. Work for those unemployed for whatever reason
8. Care for the families of those in jail
9. Legal assistance for those due to appear before the court
10. Help for those needing a passport or residency permit
11. Help for those wishing to repatriate15
The inaugural meeting of the board of trustees of the GBAO convened on 10

December 1871.16 Most of the board members came from the wealthy mercantile
class. The board elected Theodore Rodokanaki as president, Gregory Maraslis as vice
president, and John Voutsinas as treasurer. Rodokanaki served as president until his
death in 1882. He was succeeded by Maraslis, who served until his death in 1907. The
board of trustees of the GBAO lost no time in fulfilling its stated goal of supporting
the church. During its third meeting (17 January 1872), the following financial ar-
rangements were made: Out of the 12,000 rubles available, one-third, or 4,000 rubles,
was earmarked for the upkeep of the Church of the Holy Trinity. The GBAO’s support
to the church continued over the years at the same level. Although percentage-wise
the allotment to the church was never again as high, in absolute numbers it continued
to increase.17 A few months later, the GBAO assumed direct administration of the
Church of the Holy Trinity.18 In addition to the Greek Orthodox Church of the Holy
14
GAOO f. 765, op. 1, d. 1, l. 12.
15
Ibid., l. 17.
16
Ibid., d. 2, l. 1.
17
Ibid.; GAOO f. 2, op. 1, d. 857, ll. 56 and 157; and GAOO f. 274, op. 2, d. 13, l. 18.
18
GAOO f. 765, op. 1, d. 2, ll. 5–6.
Trinity, the GBAO assumed management of the Greek Commercial School for Boys,
an educational institution of long standing and another jewel in the crown of the
Greek community in Odessa.
The fourth item of article 1 of the GBAO charter stated that one of the organiza-
tion’s goals was the creation of such institutions as the organization deemed neces-
sary.19 Over the years the GBAO was responsible for the establishment of three new
institutions which were to serve the Greek community of Odessa. In 1908 a certain
Mr. Paraskevas proposed to establish a craft school for Greek girls. The new school
was to accept girls from the age of thirteen and above and offer a two-year course in
sewing. The GBAO was to administer the school in cooperation with the Paraskevas
family.20 Another institution established by the GBAO was the Maraslion Nursing
Home. As the name suggests, the nursing home was made possible due to the gener-
ous contribution of Gregory Maraslis. The nursing home was completed and opened
its doors in August 1896.21 The most important institution created by the GBAO was
the Rodokanakio School for Girls. From today’s point of view, one might be sur-
prised to find that the GBAO, a nineteenth-century bourgeois entity, run exclusively
by men, was progressive enough to establish a school for girls. However, it should be
remembered that the Greek community of Odessa already had the means to provide a
first-class Greek education to its male members. By the 1870s, when the GBAO was
formed, the Greek Commercial School for Boys was already in existence for over
fifty years and had an excellent reputation for scholarship even among non-Greeks.
Its curriculum was more classical than business-oriented. Clearly, the educational
needs of the Greek males of Odessa were being met. Thus, it was only logical that
similar educational needs of females should have high priority.
On 17 January 1872, a short time after the creation of the GBAO, its board of
trustees allocated 2,000 rubles (out of a total of 12,000 at its disposal) to be used
for the benefit of the School for Girls.22 The board was unanimous in agreeing that
it would retain close supervision over all aspects of the school’s operation. Most of
the teachers were to be Greek or Greek speakers. The board agreed to allow up to
fifty poor girls to study for free (the Girls’ School was a boarding establishment),
while the rest would pay 30 rubles per year for the lower and 50 rubles a year for the
upper grades. The GBAO board agreed on a temporary home for the school and then
hired two Greek teachers to teach the Greek, Russian, and French languages, callig-
raphy, mathematics, and home economics, while German and piano were elective
subjects.23 The subjects taught at the new school were in line with state guidelines for
secondary public education for girls. At the time in Russian schools for girls, religion,
19
Ibid., d. 1, l. 12.
20
Ibid., d. 10, l. 68.
21
See Sofronis Paradissopoulos, “Activities of the Greek Charity Society in Odessa 1871–
1896” (unpublished essay), 9.
22
GAOO f. 765, op. 1, d. 2, l. 1.
23
Ibid., ll. 7–8.
422 John A. Mazis
Russian, mathematics, geography, history, natural sciences and physics, handwriting,

needlework, and gymnastics comprised the core curriculum, while French, German,
drawing, music, singing, and dancing were electives.24 After graduating from the
Rodokanakio School, the young ladies were eligible to attend the third grade of any
Greek gymnasium. The fact that the Greek Parliament passed a law according to
which the Rodokanakio School for Girls was recognized as equivalent to Greek sec-
ondary schools was indicative of the school’s high standards.25 Soon after the opening
of the School for Girls, it became clear that due to increasing enrollment the GBAO
needed to build a permanent home for the school. For the academic year 1874–75 the
board of trustees planned to enlarge the school so that it would have a kindergarten,
three lower, and two higher grades. For that reason, it proposed to hire three more
teachers and increase the school’s annual budget to 6,640 rubles. On 15 November
1874 it was announced that the building of the new school house was almost com-
pleted, and since Theodore Rodokanaki was a major benefactor (he donated the total
amount of construction, which came to about 40,000 rubles) and the president of the
GBAO, the board of trustees resolved to petition the authorities to name the school
“Ροδοκανάκειον Ελληνικόν Παρθεναγωγείον και Νηπιαγωγείον” (Rodokanakio
Greek School for Girls and Kindergarten).26
The various institutions supported by the GBAO could not address all the prob-
lems facing the Greek community of Odessa. In many cases, poor individuals or
families needed immediate and direct assistance, often in the form of cash. For that
reason the GBAO was active in providing assistance to individuals on a case-by-case
basis.27 Any Greek resident of Odessa, and even those passing through the city, who
found themselves in need of financial assistance could apply for help at the GBAO.
The direct assistance which the GBAO provided to the needy can be divided into two
broad categories. The first consisted of regular cash payments distributed twice a year
(Christmas and Easter) to a number of poor individuals. The second was assistance to
individuals who faced particular needs. In some cases the GBAO provided monetary
assistance, in others assistance in kind. The usual amount of money given to indi-
viduals was three to five rubles.28 The GBAO recognized that some individuals and
families needed, and were worthy of, continued support. Such were families whose
breadwinner was dead or chronically ill and the children still too young to earn a
living. With the passage of time, and as the GBAO became better known as a char-
24
See Nicholas Hans, History of Russian Educational Policy (1701–1917) (New York: Russell
and Russell, 1964), 127–28.
25
Paradissopoulos, “Activities of the Greek Charity Society in Odessa 1871–1896,” 7–8.
26
GAOO f. 765, op. 1, d. 2, ll. 19–20.
27
Ibid., d. 1, l. 17.
28
Ibid., d. 8, ll. 33–34, 59, 67–68, 71, 73–73; ll. 2–3, 21–23. In a few cases the amounts given
were larger (twenty-five rubles to a priest’s widow and twelve rubles to an unidentified indi-
vidual were only two such cases). See ibid., d. 2, l. 30, and d. 8, l. 1.
itable institution, the number of petitions rose steadily.29 While poverty among the
Greeks of Odessa did not disappear, the GBAO’s efforts went a long way in providing
a “safety net” which alleviated much of the problem.
The GBAO was a typical Russian voluntary charitable organization in a number
of ways. For example, like the majority of Russia’s private charities, the GBAO was
located in an urban center.30 Also, like the overwhelming majority of Russian charita-
ble associations, it demanded relatively low annual dues in order to attract more par-
ticipants. According to Russian government sources, the dues for most charities were
between 1.5–3 rubles per year. As an association of an ethnic minority the GBAO
was a rare, but not unique, phenomenon in the Russian Empire. Although only 3.5
percent of charitable associations were formed by minority ethnic groups, in absolute
numbers 130 such entities existed.31 While the GBAO was in many ways a typical
Russian charitable association, when it came to wealth and membership it was quite
atypical. The GBAO budget for the year 1873 shows an income of 27,689.66 rubles
and an equal amount in expenses.32 In comparison the GBAO balance sheet (Γενικός
Ισολογισμός) for the year 1917 shows receipts of 98,647.46 rubles and expenses of
95,731.75 rubles.33 The gross value of the GBAO’s assets came to 529,693.18 rubles.34
The assets of the Greek Orthodox Church of the Holy Trinity and the School for
Boys were omitted from the balance because they, although controlled by the GBAO,
had separate boards of administrators and budgets. The 1917–18 balance sheet of the
School for Boys shows a gross value of 878,634.91 rubles.35 Comparing the GBAO
with other Russian organizations of the same type demonstrates its privileged eco-
nomic condition.
29
Ibid., d. 24. Thus, the GBAO file for the year 1903 contains about 250 pages out of a total
of 260 (11 x 8 inches) of petitions. See ibid., d. 16.
30
Lindenmeyr, Poverty Is Not a Vice, 200–01, and 205. The GBAO dues were 3 rubles a year
until an increase during World War I. Some elite organizations, such as the Imperial Philan-
thropic Society, had a minimum requirement of 25 rubles a year.
31
Lindenmeyr, Poverty Is Not a Vice, 204–05.
32
GAOO f. 2, op. 1, d. 857, l. 56.
33
GAOO f. 765, op. 1, d. 26, ll. 184–87. This document is dated 31 December 1917, and given
the political events of the era should be considered the last budget of a “normal” year.
34
In comparison, the 1898 balance sheet of the St. Petersburg Noble Assembly shows a total
endowment of 360,890 rubles. See Seymour Becker, Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial
Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1985), 140.
35
GAOO f. 765, op. 1, d. 24, l. 124. Unlike the GBAO balance sheet, that of the Boys’ School
is not a detailed account but more of a summary.
424 John A. Mazis
Table 1. Capital Assets of Charitable Associations Circa 190136
Capital Assets Number of Societies Reporting Percentage

No capital assets 216 6.5
1,000 rubles or less 942 28.2
1,000–3,000 643 19.2
3,000–5,000 298 8.9
5,000–10,000 403 12.1
10,000–50,000 612 18.3
Over 50,000 rubles 227 6.8
The GBAO with capital assets of almost 530,000 rubles (in 1917) belonged to the se-
lect few, less than 7 percent, of well-to-do Russian charitable associations.37 Also, the
GBAO was one of few Russian charitable organizations that enjoyed the high income
that enabled it to engage in several charitable activities.
Table 2. Charitable Associations’ Income and Expenditure Circa 190138
Income Number of Societies Reporting Percentage

500 rubles or less 779 23.3
500–2,500 1,320 39.6
2,500–10,000 827 24.8
Over 10,000 410 12.3
Expenditure
500 rubles or less 1,073 32.2
500–2,500 1,227 36.9
2,500–10,000 681 20.5
Over 10,000 348 10.4
Total GBAO income for 1917 came to a little over 44,000 rubles, while expenditures
for the same year totaled over 54,000 rubles.39 This kind of evidence leads one to
36
In Poverty Is Not a Vice, Adele Lindenmeyr presents a number of informative tables which
help to better quantify the phenomenon of nineteenth-century Russian civic groups. The tables
presented here are found in ibid., 238–39. Another work which includes a number of important
tables and figures is Rossiia 1913 god: Statistiko-dokumentalńyi spravochnik (St. Petersburg:
Rossiiskaia akademiia nauk, 1995), 381–400.
37
GAOO f. 765, op. 1, d. 26, l. 185.
38
39
GAOO f. 765, op. 1, d. 26, l. 187.
deduce that the GBAO was secure in its position as one of Russia’s foremost char-
itable associations. As stated above, one of the reasons for establishing civic orga-
nizations in Russia was the desire of the middle class to participate in public life in
any way possible. While the various charitable organizations did not become mass
movements, they did make it possible for a large number of people to participate in
charity works. As table 3 shows, GBAO membership was relatively large compared
with the average number of participants in other Russian charitable organizations.
In 1901 Russia’s charitable associations had a total membership of almost 450,000.
Membership in those associations was distributed as follows.40
Table 3. Size of Charitable Associations by Location, circa 1901
Location Number of Associations Average Membership

Provincial Capitals 1,419 194
District Towns 1,283 86
Other Towns 195 156
Countryside 361 94
Average membership for all associations was 138. The GBAO membership (334) was
almost two and a half times the national average. Given the fact that membership
in the GBAO was limited, not by rule but by custom, to males, one should calcu-
late the members as a percentage of Odessa’s Greek males. Out of a total of 3,166
Greek-speaking males in Odessa, 334 (9.5 percent) belonged to the GBAO.41 Further-
more, since not all Greek-speaking males of Odessa were of adult age, the percentage
of eligible Greeks who joined the GBAO was even higher. Clearly, then, the GBAO,
was quite representative of the Greek community of Odessa.
During its forty-five years of existence the GBAO had a good track record as a
charitable institution. Evidence shows that it not only fulfilled but even surpassed
the mandate stated in its charter. As it turned out, the GBAO became much more
than an ethnic benevolent organization. Due to its longevity, stability, wealth, and
the institutions, and individuals it supported, the GBAO became the leading organi-
zation of the Greek community of Odessa. In that respect, it was political, not in the
narrow definition of partisan politics (although in time it did play that role as well),
but rather in the broader sense of representing a community in an informal yet real
way. Clearly, the GBAO did not seek to influence general Russian policy, domestic
or foreign. Besides, the Russian political system was opposed to any type of external
input. At the same time, however, the GBAO sought, and gained, preferential treat-
ment from the Russian government in some important areas. For example, Greek
educational institutions were unofficially exempted from the more onerous demands
of the russification policy. As the GBAO became better known in Odessa, it attracted
40
41
For the number of Odessa’s Greek-speaking males, see Herlihy, Odessa, 242.
426 John A. Mazis
the attention of other official organizations.42 Even the Russian authorities recognized
by deed, if not by word, that the GBAO was the community’s leading institution, as
attested by the following incident. On 12 December 1881, the imperial authorities of
the Black Sea port of Batum asked the GBAO for financial support in order to make
accommodations for some needy Greeks. According to the request, an unspecified
number of Greeks had come to Batum from the Ottoman Empire, presumably as
refugees. The latter received some help from local authorities and private sources
but needed supplementary support. The GBAO responded swiftly and positively to
the request. Within a week the organization had collected 2,876 rubles to be used for
that purpose. Another 500 rubles came from Maraslis, while Rodokanakis donated
50 sacks of flour.43 This event was symbolically important as it demonstrated that
although the Russian authorities did not recognize the GBAO as the official represen-
tative of the Greeks of Odessa, it did turn to the organization as the leading institution
of that community. This was not the last time that the GBAO helped Greek refugees
in Russia. During World War I, when Romania was overrun (1916) by the German
army, a number of Greek refugees crossed the frontier into Russia. The GBAO was
instrumental in helping those refugees as well.44
The fact that the GBAO had assumed the position of the leader of the Greek com-
munity as a whole can also be detected by the official calls to the organization’s offi-
cers by prominent Greeks passing through the city. When the queen of Greece, Olga,
who was Russian by birth, was passing through Odessa in 1873, the GBAO organized
and hosted her reception. GBAO officers as well as students of the various GBAO
institutions welcomed the queen, who dedicated the cornerstone of the new building
of the school for girls. In addition to a gift of flowers and some icons, the GBAO gave
Olga 10,000 rubles to be used by her for charities in Greece.45 Since Olga made the
same trip many times on her visits to her Russian relatives, the GBAO played the host
repeatedly. The GBAO also hosted welcoming ceremonies on the occasion of other
visits by VIPs to Odessa. Lastly, there were the occasions when the Greek community
of Odessa came together to celebrate a Greek national event. Such was the case with
the annual celebration of Greek Independence Day (25 March), when the GBAO was
again both the organizer and host of the celebration.46
The GBAO was always receptive to requests for support of Greek national causes.
This was the case in 1911, when the government of independent Crete solicited help
from the GBAO.47 The GBAO’s level of support for national causes is evident in the
handwritten letter it received from Greece’s prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos,
42
GAOO f. 765, op. 1, d. 10, ll. 53, 114.
43
Ibid., d. 2, ll. 36–37.
44
Ibid., d. 10, ll. 271–82.
45
Ibid., ll. 13–14, 43, and 41.
46
Κόσμος [The World], 25 March 1908, 3.
47
GAOO f. 765, op. 1, d. 19, ll. 89–96. Crete was semi-independent from 1897 until its union
with Greece in 1912.
dated 31 January 1913, at the height of the First Balkan War. Venizelos took time
out of his busy schedule—in addition to being premier he was also minister of de-
fense—to thank the GBAO for its generous donation of 90,000 gold French francs
earmarked for “national needs.”48 In addition to its monetary contribution to Greek
national causes, the GBAO continued to provide assistance in other ways. Over the
years, whenever Greece became involved in war, the GBAO offered “humanitarian”
aid. Quite often the GBAO and the Greek community of Odessa financed the trans-
portation of volunteers from Russia to Greece in support of the Greek army. Also, the
GBAO made sure that, if need be, the families of those volunteers were taken care
of in their absence. A case in point is the Russian-Ottoman War of 1877–78, when a
number of Greeks from Russia joined the Russian army as well as Greek paramilitary
units.49 Similarly, after the disastrous (for Greece) Greek-Ottoman War of 1897, the
GBAO opened its coffers and helped a number of Odessa Greeks who volunteered to
fight in that war.50 The GBAO and the Greeks of Odessa were also involved in helping
volunteers join the Greek army during World War I.51
During World War I, the GBAO became politicized (particularly in respect to
Greek affairs) in an unprecedented way. Political events in both Russia and Greece
created a climate in which the Greeks of Odessa could voice their political beliefs
openly, even though Russia was still governed by an autocratic regime. While Russia
was involved in the war against the Central Powers, Greece was hesitant. Venizelos,
the Greek premier, was an admirer of France and Britain. He argued that because of
treaties and national interests Greece should enter the war on the side of the Western
allies. King Constantine I, who had studied at the German Military Academy and was
married to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s sister, favored neutrality. Eventually the country was
split into two, creating a “National Schism” that transcended national boundaries and
manifested itself in the Greek communities of the diaspora. The Russian emperor,
Nicholas II, had many ideological and personal ties with the Greek royal family. As
an autocrat, Nicholas understood the “right” of kings to govern independently from
parliaments. On a personal level, Constantine was related to the Romanovs through
his mother Queen Olga, who was a Russian grand duchess. At the same time, Russia
was at war with Germany and Constantine’s pro-German sentiments put him at odds
with his Russian relatives. This ambivalent official position allowed Odessa’s Greek
community to voice its preference for one or the other of Greece’s two opposing
factions.
The Greek community of Odessa had a history of supporting Venizelos’s policy
of political and economic change. After the successful conclusion (1913) of the First
48
Ibid., d. 22, l. 62.
49
The activities of Odessa’s Greeks during that war have only recently been examined by
Professor Piatigorskii, who took advantage of the postcommunist opening of state archives.
See Grigorii Piatigoskii, “The Cretan Uprising of 1866–1869 and the Greeks of Odessa,” Mod-
ern Greek Studies Yearbook 14/15 (1998/1999): 129–48.
50
GAOO f. 765, op. 1, d. 8, ll. 43–44.
51
Αναγέννησις [Renaissance], no. 6 (4 June 1917): 3.
428 John A. Mazis
Balkan War, Odessa’s mainstream Greek newspaper, Κόσμος (The World), hailed
Venizelos as Greece’s leader, noting that the Greek premier’s efforts not only reju-
venated Greece itself, but the new spirit spilled over to the Greeks of the diaspora,
including the Greek community of Odessa.52 On 4 March 1915, when Venizelos was
still premier and Greece neutral due to royal insistence, the Board of Trustees of the
GBAO passed a resolution asking Greece to abandon its neutrality and enter the war
on the side of the Western powers.53 Later that year, when the disagreement between
the king and Venizelos led to the premier’s resignation, the GBAO came out openly
for Venizelos, sending him a telegraph expressing their support.54 Over the next few
years, up to the communist victory in the Russian Civil War, the GBAO, while main-
taining its character as a benevolent organization, came to assume the characteristics
of a political organization.55 In 1915 many communities of the Greek diaspora clam-
ored for their country’s entrance into the war on the side of the Western powers. They
decided to act independently of the Greek government and convene in a representa-
tive body composed of Greeks from different communities of the diaspora. That body
would coordinate the actions of the diaspora Greeks, show that there were Greeks
who supported the West, and bring pressure on the king of Greece to change his pol-
icy. The Greek community of Odessa was invited to send representatives to Paris, the
site of the proposed gathering. On 21 December the Board of Trustees of the GBAO
agreed to designate as their representatives to Paris, the site of the proposed meeting,
Messrs. Rallis and Triantafyllidis, two GBAO members who had the advantage of
being already in that city.56 The indication from the GBAO record is that the associa-
tion acted independently without asking the permission of the Russian authorities or
the advice of the Greek consul. Thus, during World War I, the GBAO behaved as a
political organization: it advocated a particular course of political action and pursued
its aims independently of both the Greek and Russian governments.
52
Κόσμος, 5 May 1913, 1. It should be noted that this newspaper was not partisan Venizelist,
having often editorialized that Greece needed the royal family. See Κόσμος, 1 November 1909,
1.
53
GAOO f. 765, op. 1, d. 24.
54
Ibid., l. 21, dated 18 September 1915. The telegraph was sent after unanimous vote by the
GBAO Board of Trustees. This gesture put the GBAO and the Greek community of Odessa,
which the organization clearly represented, on the liberal side and openly against the wishes
of the king of Greece.
55
The GBAO and its energetic vice president, Eleftherios Pavlides, were the force behind
the creation of an umbrella organization representing all the Greeks of South Russia. See
Αναγέννησις, 25 June 1917, 3, and 23 July 1917, 1. Pavlides was the most active member of the
Board of Trustees of the GBAO and the sponsor of the earlier resolution supporting Venizelos.
After the Russian Revolution Pavlides went to Greece, where he became the leader of Greece’s
community of Greek refugees from Russia and long-time president of their union.
56
GAOO f. 765, op. 1, d. 24, l. 22–23. The Board of Trustees of the GBAO discussed the tele-
gram for the first time on 8 December 1915.
The GBAO did not limit its overt political activities to Greek matters. Taking
advantage of Russian political developments, the Greeks of the Russian Empire as a
whole assumed a political role. In 1917, between the February and October Revolu-
tions, the various Greek associations of Russia created an umbrella organization in
order to respond to the monumental events sweeping the country. All of the Greek
philanthropic organizations (each South Russian city with a sizable Greek minority
had its own civic group) were represented.57 These organizations met on 29 June 1917
in Taganrog and agreed on the following objectives:
1. union of all the Greek associations in Russia;

2. safeguarding the independence of the Greek Orthodox Church from its
Russian counterpart;
3. recognition by the Russian authorities of the Greek schools as ethnic
schools with the right to teach Greek language, history, etc.;
4. establishment of a Greek bank and other institutions which would help
the community;
5. publication of a Russian-language Greek newspaper;
6. focus on the problems of rural Russia;
7. definition and coordination of the political position of Russia’s Greek
community in order to achieve its other goals.58
Objectives 2 and 3 dealt with traditional institutions, which the Greeks of Russia had
come to view as national and independent from the host state. Objectives 5 and 6 dealt
with the vast majority of ethnic Greeks, who lived in rural areas and were Russian
speakers. A Russian-language Greek newspaper could achieve two goals: (1) reach
hundreds of thousands of Greeks who spoke only Russian; and (2) make the Greek
case known to the Russian public in general. By focusing on the rural question, the
Greeks of Russia once again had two targets: protecting the interests of the thousands
of Russian-speaking Greeks (who were mainly rural dwellers) as well as the interests
of the leaders of the Greek community, many of whom were large land owners. At
the time of the above meeting, the Greeks of Russia were walking a tightrope. On the
one hand, they wanted to organize themselves on a pan-Russian level and thus take
advantage of the liberal policies of the new government, which was willing, unlike its
tsarist predecessor, to accommodate the various minorities (the attempts by the tsarist
government to russify the Greek element were eased by the new government).59 On
57
It is reported that Vice President of the GBAO Eleftherios Pavlides called for a panhel-
lenic meeting of the Greeks of Russia with the goal of creating an umbrella organization. See
Αναγέννησις, 14 May 1917, 1–2.
58
Αναγέννησις, 2 July 1917, 1.
59
Michael Dendias, “Αι Ελληνικαί Παροικίαι ανά τον κόσμον” [Greek communities through-
out the world] (Athens: Sideri, 1919), 24. The Provisional Government was willing to allow
more freedom for the country’s ethnic minorities mainly for two reasons: (1) it accepted
self-determination in principle, which meant either allowing a part of the empire to become
430 John A. Mazis
the other hand, the Greeks did not want to become too involved in Russia’s political
affairs and run the risk of being identified with a party that might lose the political
battle. In any case, the October Revolution changed the country’s political and social
conditions, and the newly formed pan-Russian body of Greeks did not play any role in
the country’s future. The Bolshevik coup and the eventual victory of the Reds against
the Whites spelled the end of the GBAO.
Given the events of 1917–20s, the end of the GBAO was inevitable. The commu-
nists, more so than the tsars, were ideologically opposed to nongovernmental charity
organizations, wanted to control the property of such institutions, and distrusted all
types of non–communist-led civic groups. The Bolsheviks tolerated private charita-
ble institutions and allowed them to operate during the 1921–22 famine but banned
them soon thereafter.60
The long history of Hellenism in Russia and Odessa came to an abrupt end.
The few Greeks that are left in the city today are either elderly Greek speakers or
young Russian speakers.61 The Maraslis house is now a medical school.62 The Greek
Orthodox Church of the Holy Trinity is still in use, serving a dwindling, mainly
Russian, number of faithful. Recent grants by the Greek government have restored an
old Maraslis property, which now houses the offices and library of the Athens-based
Foundation for Hellenic Culture. Tourists to the city who do not know its ethnic his-
tory would be surprised to find that in Odessa’s center there is a “Greek Square” and a
“Greek Street,” reminders of a time when Greeks from all over the Greek world came
to Russia, as later they would come to America, to make their fortune.
independent, such as Finland, or at a minimum granting smaller minorities a large measure

of autonomy; and (2) the Provisional Government was surrounded by external and internal
enemies, thus it was willing to compromise in order to attract support.
60
61
While Odessa is located in Ukraine, it is a city of mixed ethnic groups with a clear Russian
character.
62
Many thanks to Lilia Belousova, director of the Odessa Regional State Archives, for pro-
viding me with information regarding Maraslis’s house.
Sir Arthur Evans in the Balkans: A Romantic Crusade
Thomas A. Emmert
For nineteenth-century British travelers, the exotic East began in the Balkans some-
where south of Zagreb and a kilometer or two out of Belgrade. Scores of Victorian
vagabonds left the comforts, security, and predictability of home to roam the territory
of the moribund Ottoman Empire. The Balkans and Anatolia offered a romantic ad-
venture with the certainty of exotic culture and the possibility of danger. In most of
the inevitable travelogues which resulted from these journeys, the authors themselves
are the heroic figures, suffering the vicissitudes of travel with a modicum of pain,
some humor, and a respectable dose of good grace.1 The Victorian public devoured
these works in their search for adventure, vicarious peril, and a glimpse into the life
and customs of a strange and unknown land.
In the 1860s some of this literature found its way into the hands of Arthur Evans,
the young son of John Evans, a British paper mill owner and amateur numismatolo-
gist and paleontologist. The Evans home was a perfect laboratory for Arthur, the fu-
ture discoverer of Knossos on Crete. Arthur’s grandfather, a country parson and avid
bibliophile, left his young namesake a collection of some fifteen hundred etchings and
engravings of places in the world that he had visited only in the pages of Victorian
travelogues. He also gave Arthur one of his favorite books, Robert Walsh’s Overland
Tour from Vienna to Constantinople (London, 1828). This work, which Arthur read
many times, helped to plant the first seeds of a romantic wanderlust.
Arthur Evans’s childhood fascination with the world was also nurtured by his
father’s love for the past. Not only did Arthur enjoy the benefits of his father’s impres-
sive library, but he accompanied his father to archeological digs and scholarly con-
1
Among the more interesting works were George Carlisle, Diary in Turkish and Greek Wa-
ters (Boston: Hickling, Swan, and Brown, 1855); James Creagh, A Scamper to Sebastopol and
Jerusalem in 1869 (London: R. Bentley and Son, 1869); Francis Galton, The Art of Travel;
or, Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries (London: J. Murray, 1855); H. A.
Leveson, The Old Hunting Grounds of the Old World (London: Saunders, Otley, and Co.,
1860); R. R. Madden, Travels in Turkey, Egypt, etc. (London: H. Colburn, 1933); Murray’s
Handbooks: A Handbook for Travellers in Turkey. Describing Constantinople, European Tur-
key, Asia Minor, Armenia, and Mesopotamia (London: J. Murray, 1854); Laurence Oliphant,
Episodes in a Life of Adventure (London: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1887); C. Pridham, Kos-
suth and Magyar Land: Adventures during the War in Hungary (London: J. Madden, 1851);
and H. J. Ross, Letters from the East, 1837–1857, 2nd ed. (London: J. M. Dent and Co., 1902).
432 Thomas A. Emmert
ferences. Scattered among the countless books of the Evans household were ancient
coins, pottery, and other artifacts from John Evans’s digs. Of all the Evans children,
only Arthur shared his father’s intense interest in the past. He read voraciously and
poured over coins and pieces of pottery. His early years were clearly an apprentice-
ship for a lifetime of scholarship.
His mother, on the other hand, helped to encourage the romantic impulses in Ar-
thur. She had spent a number of years in Madeira, spoke Portuguese, and entertained
her son with passionate tales of life in the Mediterranean. Arthur was constantly
transported beyond the confines of middle-class England, and thus the foundation
was laid for the vivid imagination and immoderate idealism of the mature archeolo-
gist.2
In the summer of 1871 when he was only twenty years old, Arthur set out to
discover the exotic world of the Balkans. He was a restless young man. In 1870 he
had entered Brasenose College at Oxford, after a somewhat undistinguished public
school career. Known more for his wit and his rebellion against convention than for
his excellence in scholarship, Evans was, nevertheless, determined to pursue a career
as a scholar. His summer travels in 1871 were the first step towards realizing that goal.
Accompanied by his brother and a friend, Evans journeyed to Zagreb and Sisak
and then made a seven-hour trip to the town of Kostajnica, where he was completely
enraptured by the colorful character of this settlement on the borders between East
and West. He spent only one day there, but it was apparently enough to whet his ap-
petite for a lifetime of adventure in the Balkans.3
The following summer, with knapsack in hand, Evans returned to the region with
a difficult journey from Hungary into Wallachia. He traveled over unknown moun-
tains to escape border patrols and clearly demonstrated that spirit of raw adventure
which would serve him well later in Bosnia and Herzegovina and eventually on Crete.
His travels took him to Ploesti and Bucharest which disappointed the romantic sleuth
because he found them only “caricatures of a French town.”4 Only when he reached
Belgrade did Evans find the exotic world he knew so well from his well-trained imag-
ination. The brilliant colors of the women’s costumes and everything about the city
overwhelmed his senses. He had found his home.
It would be two years before Evans returned to the Balkans to pursue more seri-
ous travel and research. In the meantime he finished his studies at Brasenose, visited
2
There are two biographies of Arthur Evans. The first appeared shortly after his death and is
a study of three generations of the Evans family by Arthur’s half-sister, Joan. See Joan Evans,
Time and Chance: The Story of Arthur Evans and His Forebears (1943; repr., Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1974). The second and a somewhat more popular account is by Sylvia L.
Horwitz, The Find of a Lifetime: Sir Arthur Evans and the Discovery of Knossos (New York:
Viking Press, 1981), 14. Both of these works were important in providing some essential back-
ground in Evans’s biography for this article.
3
See Joan Evans, Time and Chance, 165.
4
Quoted in ibid., 172, from Arthur Evans’s own account of the journey which he published in
1873: “Over the Marches of Civilized Europe,” Frazer’s Magazine 7 (May 1873): 578.
Sir Arthur Evans in the Balkans 433
Sweden, where he traveled all the way to the Arctic Circle, and enrolled in the spring
of 1875 at the University of Göttingen for a term of postgraduate studies in history.
When that term ended in late July he traveled to Zagreb, where he met his brother
and began a much more ambitious journey into Bosnia. The trip would change his
life forever.
Even before he left for Zagreb, Evans had decided to write a book about his jour-
ney. He wanted to describe the region and its people, their history and antiquities, for
the British reader. More than anything else he was determined to become an expert
on the region, and the book would be good training for his critical eye. This aspiring
archeologist brought with him a solid background in the classics and in the history of
the region, the curiosity and descriptive ability of an anthropologist, and the idealism
of a romantic liberal who was ready to champion the cause of the oppressed. For this
man of adventure it would be his good fortune to cross the Sava just as a major insur-
rection was breaking out in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
He traveled from Zagreb to Sisak, along the Sava River to Brood (Slavonski
Brod), south to Sarajevo and Mostar, and finally along the Neretva River to the sea
and his final destination of Dubrovnik. This trip was the inaugural experience in
his lifelong devotion to scholarship and, more popularly, to the cause of freedom in
the Balkans. During the two months of his trip he fulfilled the expectations of the
careful travel writer by making everything an object of intense interest. Evans was
marvelously descriptive of flora and fauna, of folklore and antiquities, of a world
which time had seemingly left untouched. He marveled at the traditions of the peasant
population, the zadruga (the peasant commune), undocumented ancient inscriptions,
Bogomil stecci (tombstones), and the beauty of the hills, mountains, and meadows.
He talked with everyone he met, collected Serbo-Croatian vocabulary, and strug-
gled to make himself understood in Latin, German, Italian, and French. He saw ev-
erything through the eyes of a historian, always looking for the historical context of
an idea or phenomenon, and often trying to understand the deep roots of a problem
and not just the contemporary manifestations of that problem. He worked tirelessly,
took copious notes, and returned to London with enough material to finish his book
in a matter of weeks.
The result of his efforts, entitled Through Bosnia and Herzegovina on Foot, was
a great success.5 Unlike many of the travel books of his fellow Englishmen, however,
in Evans’s work the native population was not simply a backdrop for the self-discov-
ery and personal heroism of the author. Evans searched for the soul of the region’s
people and never hid his partisan perspective on both the history and the contem-
porary dilemma of these people. By the time he had finished his peregrination and
writing he was a committed disciple of South Slavic unity and a strong proponent of
Gladstone’s anti-Turkish platform.
The account of Evans’s travels reveals a remarkable young scholar, not always
objective but clearly comfortable with his material. In a lengthy review of pre-Ot-
5
He also included a rather lengthy subtitle: During insurrection, August and September,
1875, with an historical review of Bosnia and a glimpse at the Croats, Slavonians, and the
Ancient Republic of Ragusa (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1876), 5.
toman Bosnian history prefaced to the travelogue, he demonstrates his impressive

background in the medieval historical literature of the region.6 Unfortunately, he
finds it difficult in this survey to tame his antipapist sentiment. He considers the
Bogomils the first Protestants of Europe, blames Rome for the Turkish conquest, and
reminds his own readers that England itself owes a debt to Bosnia for the “sublime
Puritanism” of its medieval legacy.
His analysis of the uprising in its early days is impressive for its understanding
of the longtime grievances of the Christian peasantry, the particular policies which
helped to spark the insurrection, and the early development of the confrontation. Ev-
ans first heard of the insurrection in early August as he prepared to enter Ottoman ter-
ritory from Slavonski Brod. There he received news that an insurrection was spread-
ing from Herzegovina and that the Vali Pasha had proclaimed martial law throughout
the region. Evans demonstrated no alarm at the situation but rather plunged ahead on
foot into Bosnia.
He managed to avoid the rebel arena until he arrived in Herzegovina. During the
first few days of his visit, he quietly observed the customs of the local population and
labored diligently to assess those similarities among people which might encourage
political unity someday. Certain similarities in customs between Croat and Serb ac-
counted for much more, he believed, than the “perceived animosities” between these
two peoples.7
He attended a religious festival in honor of the Assumption, enjoyed roast lamb
on the spit, and listened to what must have been a ganga, for he described the sound
of the singers as “a positive nightmare of bagpipes.”8 He marveled at the oral epic
which he believed encouraged Bosnians to see themselves as brothers of Montenegro
or Old Serbia. He met Catholic monks who worried about the “Great Serbian” idea
and hoped to prevent it with Austrian control of the region.
In Sarajevo he began to understand better the impact of the insurrection. There
was panic there as news arrived that the uprising had begun in Banja Luka and was
spreading along the Sava. The Christian population feared that the Muslim nobles, re-
sentful after the loss of many of their provincial privileges in the reforms of 1850–51,
might use the insurrection to massacre the Christians. In that context Evans reported
that many viewed the newly completed Orthodox cathedral as a clear provocation. Sa-
rajevo, he observes, is “a vast garden, from amidst whose foliage swell the domes and
cupolas of mosques and baths. Loftier still, rises the new Serbian Cathedral, lancing
upwards, as to tourney with the sky, near a hundred minarets.”9
The fear of massacre forced two English teachers, Miss Irby and Miss Johnston,
to pack up their small school and evacuate the city with some of their best students.
They managed to get to Prague, but eventually the women would return to the Bal-
6
Ibid., xix–lxiii.
7
Ibid., 119–20.
8
Ibid., 138.
9
Ibid., 241–42.
kans to spearhead a refugee relief effort out of Knin. Evans would be in frequent
contact with them during his years in the Balkans.
Evans was not hesitant to repeat the rumors he heard of oppression and torture.
Unlike the British consul in Sarajevo, W. R. Holmes, who refused to believe most
rumors, Evans generally accepted them. Eventually in the course of his years in the
region he did what he could to verify his accounts with eyewitness interviews with
victims and survivors. As he relates tales of Bashibazouk actions, reports on the
tyranny of turkophile Phanariot bishops, and agonizes over the reign of terror which
appeared to be developing, Evans realizes that the future is not promising. “Nothing
but the present [is] certain,” he reflects, “her nearest future overclouded, forebodings
of internecine struggles within; the sulphurous vapours of civil and religious war
rising around her.”10
In Mostar he met with the British consul Holmes, who presented Evans with the
official Turkish version of the insurrection which blamed the whole affair on some
forty outside agitators from Montenegro and Dalmatia. While the consul was appar-
ently willing to accept this somewhat myopic interpretation of the uprising, Evans
provides a much broader reading of the situation. In his view, no outside agitators
were necessary to spark this essentially agrarian revolution against the Muslim land-
owners. For Evans the blame rested clearly with anti-Christian policies; with the tax
farmers, especially in 1875 after the failed harvest of 1874; and with those who com-
mitted violent or discriminatory actions against the Christian population.11 Near the
village of Nevesinje, for example, where the uprising in Herzegovina began, peasants
told Evans that they had clear demands:
1. To end the molesting of Christian women and girls;

2. To stop the desecration of Christian churches;
3. To gain equal rights with the Turks;
4. To receive protection from the violence of the local police;
5. To force the tax farmers to take only what they were entitled to take and
only at the proper time of the year;
6. To guarantee that every house should pay only one ducat in total taxes
each year;
7. To end all forced labor by humans and animals.12
Technically, the peasants were not allowed to cut their crops until the taxmen had
made their appearance. But fearing famine in 1874 they did harvest them and then
refused to comply with the demands of the tax farmers when they finally arrived in
January of 1875.
In his description of the insurrection that began in June, Evans’s sympathies are
clearly on the side of the Christian peasantry. He compares their situation to that of
10
Ibid., 282.
11
Ibid., 331–32.
12
Ibid., 336.
the peasants in the French Revolution. And while he admits that there were some
terrible atrocities perpetrated by the Christians, he absolves them of their excesses by
placing the blame on “the tyranny of the centuries.”13
Evans ended this journey to the Balkans with a first visit to Dubrovnik. He was
completely captivated by the city, and he knew immediately that someday he would
call this “Athens of Illyria” his home. While his attention was drawn to the history
and antiquities of Dubrovnik, his concern for the insurrection was never far from his
mind. He could hear the noise of fighting in the hills of Herzegovina, and the city had
become a refuge for hundreds of Christian peasants from the interior. He even began
to envision a role for the city and its environment in the future South Slavic nation
he came to champion. In his words, “the plodding genius of the Serbs needed to be
fanned into energy by these fresh sea breezes—their imagination languishes for want
of this southern sunshine.”14
Evans returned to England in September 1875, but his heart remained in the Bal-
kans, and from the moment he reached Dover he was already plotting his next jour-
ney. In June 1876 Evans’s hastily prepared book appeared on the shelves of London
bookstores. Its success was certainly helped by the fact that Serbia and Montenegro
joined the rebellion that same month. Suddenly this young student who had failed to
win a fellowship for graduate work at Oxford was a Balkan expert. He was called on
for comment and reviews of books on the Balkans, and he was frequently quoted in
Parliament.
More than anything else, of course, Evans was determined to return to the Bal-
kans. He did not have to wait long. His father, who usually supported his son’s efforts
in spite of their political differences, had a friend whose nephew was the editor of the
Manchester Guardian. The paper was supportive of Gladstone and opposed to Otto-
man policy and presence in the Balkans. It took little influence to convince the editor
to send Arthur Evans to the region to serve as a special correspondent for the paper.
Toward the end of January Evans left for Trieste, and on 8 February he sent his first
dispatch back to the Guardian.15 He stayed in the region until the end of November
and used Dubrovnik as a base of operations.
By this time there was no doubt about Evans’s partisan passion for the Balkan
Slavs. Having little concern for his own safety, he appeared determined to press
his case by following the rebellion and by interviewing both Turk and rebel. Evans
wanted the English public to know how desperate the situation had become in the
areas he visited. At the same time he was eager to find a grassroots sentiment for
South Slav unity.
He began his investigation in Knin where the English teachers, Miss Irby and
Miss Johnston, were working with refugees from Bosnia. It was the plight of the
refugees which had the greatest impact on Evans. Since the English public had already
reacted with horror and indignation at the reports of the Bulgarian massacres, Evans
13
Ibid., 338.
14
Ibid., 434.
15
Cf. Arthur Evans, Illyrian Letters (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1878), 16.
wanted his readers to understand that the situation was just as horrible in Bosnia. He
argues that over a quarter of a million people were refugees in Austrian territory,
while countless others were barely alive and hiding in caves near the frontier. He de
scribes unbelievable suffering: emaciated victims of famine, smallpox, and typhus,
and people in caverns whose “faces [were] literally eaten away with hunger and
disease.”16
Having learned of Turkish atrocities in the village of Očijevo, Evans was deter-
mined to hike there himself in order to verify the victims’ reports. Even the swollen
and icy Una River was no obstacle to this tenacious adventurer. In Očijevo he lis-
tened to shocking stories of pillage, rape, and murder. He examined the victims and
documented their bruises. And he carefully named his sources in order to provide
evidence to counter the embarrassing silence that characterized the attitude of the
British Foreign Office.
Evans repeatedly ridiculed Holmes, the British consul, for refusing to accept the
validity of any of the rumors. Even the British vice consul in Mostar was reporting
impalements and beheadings and essentially contradicting most of what Holmes was
reporting. The impact of Evans’s telegrams and letters to the Guardian was swift.
Members of Parliament demanded prompt investigation of the situation in Bosnia by
the British Foreign Office.17
In the meantime, Evans forged ahead with his dogged determination to inves-
tigate the rebellion. With a courage that seemed to belie his five-foot-two frame, he
struggled on foot to the headquarters of Mileta Despotović, a Serb who was appointed
to command the Bosnian rebels by Prince Milan Obrenović. Evans was not impressed
with the man who offered him “tea a la Russe and spongecake glace,” all within miles
of Christian refugees who were dying of hunger.18 The commander’s pretentious bra-
vado and his “despotic” manner did not impress the British correspondent.
Evans’s most undaunted adventure was his visit to the Bosnian begs in Kulen
Vakuf, which he describes as the “Delphi of Moslem Bosnia.”19 He had been warned
to avoid this eagles’ nest for his own safety, but Evans wrote to the mudir of the Ot-
toman sultan at Vakuf and was eventually received like the padishah himself. The
residents of the town had been cut off by the insurgents for almost two years and were
ready to assume that Evans came in some official capacity from the British Foreign
Office. He found Kulen Vakuf to be crowded with “three thousand of the worst fanat-
ics in Bosnia, Begs who had lost their rayah serfs, Mahometan villagers dispossessed
by the insurgents, townspeople whose bigotry had at all times been conspicuous even
in Bosnia.”20 The experience convinced him that the only solution for the region
16
Ibid., 15.
17
See ibid., 84–91. In his collected letters to the Guardian, Evans provides some appended
notes concerning the policy in the Balkans of the representatives of the British Foreign Office.
18
Ibid., 20.
19
Ibid., 108.
20
Ibid., 93.
was Austrian occupation. He assumed that Austrian influence would strengthen the
Christian element in the region, guarantee an influx of foreign capital, and act gener-
ally as a civilizing element on behalf of the powers of Europe.21 While arguing this,
however, Evans also came to the conclusion that the problem in the Balkans was not
essentially a conflict between Islam and Christianity. It was rather a question of West-
ern progress and Asian stagnation.22 As he moved through Bosnia his disdain for the
imperial Ottoman system only became more and more intense. He writes:
History, geography, everything that can expand the mind is hunted from the
schools; science is unborn; and the small fanatic training that the children do
receive is worse than none at all.… Wander where you will in Bosnia, it is
still the same—roads fallen to rack and ruin, bridges broken down, or where
some mightier work of engineering still withstands the hand of time … the
curious traveler discovers that they are the handiwork of Serbian kings or
Roman emperors.… Look where one will in Bosnia, the melancholy conclu-
sion is forced on one that the mediaeval civilization of the Christian kingdom
was distinctly on a higher level than the nineteenth century standard of the
provincial Turk.… Turn out the Osmanli bureaucracy from Bosnia, establish
Western control, cut off the native Mahometan from his oriental associations,
and it may yet be found that Islam in Bosnia is no more opposed to liberal
ideas than it was amongst the Moors of Spain.23
Eager to discover what historical traditions had been preserved from the “higher civi-
lization” of the Bosnian medieval kingdom, Evans found that the peasants’ traditions
in this region of western Bosnia were all Serbian. Tsar Dušan and Prince Lazar were
their heroes, and everything seemed to suggest the “silent advance of Orthodoxy born
on a tide of nationality.”24 This encouraged Evans to believe that South Slavic unity
was indeed possible in the future.
Unfortunately, his anti-papism was never in retreat. He suggests that some Croats
in Zagreb were not supportive of South Slav unity because of the “denationalizing
influence of Rome.”25 He describes the Orthodox as more manly and moral than the
Latins, and observes that while the Orthodox priest grasps his congregation by the
hand, the “Romish priest leads them by the nose.”26 He is even so indiscreet as to
suggest that the only region of Bosnia where there are prostitutes is where Catholic
21
Ibid., 107.
22
Ibid., 127.
23
Ibid., 125–27.
24
Ibid., 24.
25
Ibid., 66.
26
Ibid., 29.
priests are in ample number.27 Finally, in order to counteract what he considered a

clerical influence in the refugee schools in Dubrovnik, Evans procured for these stu-
dents one hundred popular histories of the Serbs. “There is now,” he writes, “scarcely
a small Hercegovinian there who can’t pass an exam in the history of the national
heroes and of the ancient Serbian Czardom.”28
In late June 1877, Evans shifted his concentration to the war in Montenegro. He
continued to observe the confrontation there through September with the successful
Montenegrin siege of Nikšić. Clearly, these proud Montenegrin warriors impressed
the young Englishman. He identified them as the protectors of Serbian independence
and emphasized the enormous importance these men placed on the liberation of
Kosovo, which he described as the “cradle of the Serbian Empire, [the] desecrated
shrine of the Serbian Church.”29
In his descriptions of Montenegro Evans is clearly at his best. He paints an unfor-
gettable portrait of Cetinje and the extraordinary beauty of its people, of the monot-
onous dirges of a nation in mourning, and of the proud mountains which “[haunted]
him like a passion.”30 He was in Cetinje when the news of the fall of Nikšić reached
the village, and he describes a scene which he feels almost incapable of narrating:
The people surged along the street, firing, shouting, singing, leaping with
joy. It is an enthusiasm, an ecstasy, unintelligible, impossible in a civilized
country—hardly to be expressed in civilized terms.… Crowds are continu-
ally bursting into national songs, and hymns, broken at intervals with a wild
‘Živio! Živio!’.… These ballads are the poetic chronicles of four hundred
years of incessant fight for freedom against the Turk, and those who hear
them seem to clothe themselves in the flesh and blood of generations of heroic
forefathers.… But the night grows old.… The Metropolitan gives the sig-
nal to conclude the festivities by moving towards the monastery. The crowd
follows his footsteps, and bursts as by a spontaneous instinct into that most
thrilling of Montenegrin songs—a song which touches on the most hallowed
memories and the dearest aspirations of a people three quarters still enslaved
… ‘Onamo, onamo, za b’rda’ …
Out there, out there, beyond the mountains;

In some dark cave beneath the hill,
They say my Czar is sleeping still.
He wakes! and rising in our wrath
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid., 147.
29
Ibid., 164.
30
Ibid., 166.
We’ll hurl the proud usurper forth:

From Dechan church to Prisrend towers is ours!31
Throughout his adventure Evans never relinquished his idealism that spoke of unity
and a better future for the people of his adopted land. He also never forgot his love for
scholarship. It was the archeologist in Evans who could offer a poignant report of a
people’s utter misery and still include the discovery of an artifact or a description of a
Roman stone. He thrilled at the ruins of castles and churches and made sketches of old
monuments, pieces of pottery, and village costumes. He observed a local skupština
in session and marveled that every villager appeared to be a musician, poet, and his-
torian. In November, after almost ten months of this extraordinary adventure, Evans
returned to the refugee camps run by Miss Irby, where he celebrated another sign of
hope in the midst of the most awful wretchedness. With a mortality figure of perhaps
sixty thousand refugee deaths in the camps in Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia, there
was ample reason for Evans to wonder, “Who might not be tempted to doubt whether
a future still existed for these degraded pariahs?”32 But then he met some of the two
thousand children in Miss Irby’s refugee schools, and his spirit was reborn. With
these children, he says, “one feels that the hope of Christian Bosnia may not have set
for ever!” One experience in particular impressed him greatly:
Nothing took my fancy more than the spirit with which the children repeated
parts of their national heroic lays that they had learned by heart. I think that
they had been told to fold their arms while reciting, but one lad, when he
came to a thrilling passage in the lay of Kosovo, unlocked his arms, and,
throwing one hand behind him, pointed, with an energy of gesticulation all
the more impressive from his previous calmness at some imaginary actor in
that national tragedy. It was quite natural: he so obviously had the hero before
his eyes.… Their imagination, their powers of realizing what is not patent to
the eye—of converting ideas into realities—are something quite abnormal
among European peoples.33
At the end of November 1877, Evans returned to England in order to edit his recent
dispatches to the Manchester Guardian for a second book, which he entitled Illyrian
Letters.34 In April 1878, however, he was back in Dubrovnik, eager to monitor devel-
opments over the mountains as the war ended and the Great Powers met to redraw the
Balkan boundaries. In July he traveled to Belgrade and hoped to explore Serbia and
Kosovo, but the Serbian government had a prohibition against the travel of any for-
31
Ibid., 186–92.
32
Ibid., 220.
33
Ibid., 224–25.
34
Illyrian letters, a revised selection of correspondence from the Illyrian provinces of Bos-
nia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, Dalmatia, Croatia and Slavonia, addressed to the
Manchester Guardian, during the year 1877 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1878).
eigners into the interior of the country. Evans complained, “that for meanness, petty
tyranny, duplicity, and corruption the official Serbia, under the Ristic administration
can hardly have a parallel.”35 From there he tried to accompany Austrian headquar-
ters into Bosnia but without success.
Evans returned to England in August 1878 and the following month was married
to an English woman he had met in Dubrovnik during his extended residence there
in 1877. By the end of October they were both on their way to Dubrovnik, where
they would spend the next five years. Evans continued to write and to carry out his
historical and archeological research. He left Dubrovnik regularly to follow rumors
of renewed insurrection and to gather evidence for his usual partisan articles. It was
not long before he was convinced that the Austrian occupation was a terrible mistake.
Evans’s career as a Balkan correspondent culminated in the autumn and winter
of 1881–82.36 An uprising against the Austrian occupation broke out above Kotor,
and Evans entered the region clandestinely to report on it. His activities and his an-
ti-Austrian rhetoric understandably raised the suspicion of the Austrian government.
Before long the journalist was more than a partisan observer of the rebellion. He was
hiding refugees in his home, receiving secret messages about Austrian troop move-
ments, and arranging shelter for some of the rebels. On 2 March 1882 the Austrian
authorities arrested him in Dubrovnik and ordered his expulsion from their territory.
Five days later they imprisoned him and confined him until 23 April, when he was
formally released and expelled from Austrian territory. He would not return to Du-
brovnik until 1932.
The rest of Arthur Evans’s story is the familiar one. Exiled from his adopted
home, he returned to England to settle down and write articles about the antiquities
he had studied in the Balkans. Before long, however, the restless romantic was on his
way to Greece, where he met Heinrich Schliemann and eventually began his fabled
adventure which ended in the discovery of Knossos on Crete.
Although his work on Crete was to become the focus of his life, he never forgot
his “Illyrian people.” His activities during World War I were vivid testimony to his
dedication to the goal of Yugoslav unity. He gave lectures in which he encouraged
the creation of an independent Yugoslav state. When the English authorities detained
some refugees from Dubrovnik because they were considered citizens of an enemy
state, Evans gave them shelter at his estate. When Serbian boys were rescued from
Serbia and brought to England in order to avoid conscription by the Germans, Evans
set up tents for them on his land until more permanent housing could be found.37
In July 1917, Evans was invited to Corfu to meet with representatives of the
South Slavs to discuss a future nation. At home in England he held secret meetings
with South Slav leaders and also with representatives of the Czech National Council.
And finally, at the end of the war when peace negotiations in Paris seemed to be at an
35
Joan Evans, Time and Chance, 213.
36
Cf. ibid., 239–58.
37
Horwitz, Find of a Lifetime, 192–93.
impasse concerning the Yugoslav cause, Evans traveled there to lend his wisdom and
support to the South Slav delegation.38
Arthur Evans enjoyed only one visit to the new state of Yugoslavia. In 1932, a
half century after the Austrian authorities released him from the prison in Dubrovnik,
Evans returned as a quiet hero to the place he had wanted to live in forever. “Where
else,” he once asked, “is Earth wedded like this in eternal sympathy to the heaven
above?”39 By then he was an eighty-one-year-old man, satisfied by his own success
but weary from the failures and fears of his contemporary world. Certainly, his brief
visit had its moments of poignant nostalgia and sadness. But as he sat in the garden
of his former home in Dubrovnik and looked out at that “evanescent lilac” sea, there
surely was a smile of satisfaction as he recalled the extraordinary adventure of his
romantic crusade.
38
Joan Evans, Time and Chance, 189–95; and Horwitz, Find of a Lifetime, 193–94.
39
Joan Evans, Time and Chance, 209.
Identifying “the Asian” in Russian Colonial Writing:
Evgenii Markov’s Russia in Central Asia (1901)
Peter Weisensel
One of Russia’s most popular travel writers in the late nineteenth century was Ev-
genii L´vovich Markov (1835–1903), the author of the most thorough book on Central
Asia published in its time, Rossiia v Srednei Azii (Russia in Central Asia).1 Russia in
Central Asia appeared fifteen years after the fall of the last organized resistance to
Russian expansion in the region by the Tekke Turkomans in 1884. At more than one
thousand pages in two volumes Russia in Central Asia was an educated Russian’s best
hope for understanding what the conquest of Central Asia had accomplished by 1901.
Analysts of the cultural texts of Russian imperialism typically focus on the writ-
ings of professional Orientalists or the texts of Russia’s literary greats.2 Markov’s
1
E. P. Markov, Rossiia v Srednei Azii, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: M. M. Stasiulevich, 1901).
Translations in the present essay are the author’s unless otherwise indicated.
2
For commentaries on Russian Orientalism, see Paul Austin, “The Exotic Prisoner in Russian
Romanticism,” Russian Literature 16–18 (1984): 217–74; Katya Hokanson, “Literary Impe-
rialism, Narodnost´ and Pushkin’s Invention of the Caucasus,” Russian Review 53, 3 (1994):
336–52; Hokanson, “Russian Women Travelers in Central Asia and India,” Russian Review 70,
1 (2011): 1–19; Hokanson, Writing at Russia’s Border (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2008); Susan Layton, “Imagining the Caucasus Hero: Tolstoj vs. Mordovcev,” Slavic and East
European Journal 30, 4 (1986): 1–17; Layton, “Primitive Despot and Noble Savage: The Two
Faces of Shamil in Russian Literature,” Central Asian Survey 10, 4 (1991): 31–45; Layton, Rus-
sian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994); Layton, “Eros and Empire in Russian Literature about
Georgia,” Slavic Review 51, 2 (1992): 195–213; Peter Scotto, “Prisoners of the Caucasus: Ideol-
ogies of Imperialism in Lermontov’s ‘Bela,’” PMLA 107, 2 (1992): 246–60; David Schimmel-
penninck van der Oye, Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to
Emigration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Vera Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient: The
Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Tolz, “Orientalism, Nationalism, and Ethnic Diversity in
Late Imperial Russia,” Historical Journal 48, 1 (2005): 127–50; Milan Hauner, What Is Asia to
Us? (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990); Leah Feldman, “Orientalism on the Threshold: Reorient-
ing Heroism in Later Imperial Russia,” Boundary 2 39, 2 (2012): 161–80; John P. Hope, “The
Self and the Other: Aleksandr Griboedov’s Orient,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 57, 1–2 (2015):
108–23; Daniel Brower and Susan Layton, “Liberation through Captivity,” Kritika: Explora-
444 Peter Weisensel
The Southeastern Frontier of the Russian Empire.

Source: Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and
Central Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 29.
book, however, represents a different category—the middlebrow text written for peo-
ple desiring real-world information coming out of contemporary Central Asia. Mar-
kov took his place in this huge body of writing, but, as we shall see, his book left an
ambivalent message.
tions in Russian and Eurasian History 6, 2 (2005): 259–79; Victor Taki, “Orientalism on the
Margins: The Ottoman Empire under Russian Eyes,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and
Eurasian History 12, 2 (2011): 321–51; Nathaniel Knight, “Grigorév in Orenburg, 1851–1862,”
Slavic Review 59, 1 (2000): 74–100; Adeeb Khalid, “Russian History and the Debate over
Orientalism” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, 4 (2000): 691–99, and
Nathaniel Knight’s response to Khalid, “On Russian Orientalism,” Kritika: Explorations in
Russian and Eurasian History 1, 4 (2000): 701–15; Maria Todorova, “Does Russian Oriental-
ism Have a Russian Soul?” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, 4 (2000):
717–27; Ewa Thompson, Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 2000); Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen, and Anatoly Remnev, eds.,
Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700–1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2007); and Nile Green, ed., Writing Travel in Central Asian History (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2014).
Identifying “the Asian” in Russian Colonial Writing 445
Extended study and reflection on the notion of Orientalism have coalesced lately
in a consensus that Orientalism is an imperfect tool for cracking open the meaning
of Russian texts of empire. Others studying a colonial discourse—for example in the
Dutch East Indies, Australia, and the Pacific islands—have found similar results.3
The Oriental discourse, however, cannot be ignored completely in the Russian case,
as Markov’s Russia in Central Asia amply shows.
In colonial-era texts, proponents of the theory of Orientalism maintain, the Ori-
ental discourse takes a form not unlike Marx’s superstructure-substructure dichot-
omy. Namely, the exigencies of time and place (the historical context), such as facts
of the author’s biography or the aesthetic choices the author makes, may influence
the text in some ways, but, like Marx’s superstructure, they are not determinant, but
of secondary importance. Dominant and most important are those textual elements
which reveal the epistemological basis of Western thinking, a style of thinking that
bifurcates the West, rational and superior, from the Orient, backward, inferior, and
unchanging. This bifurcation, found in texts and other cultural objects of the colonial
era, the West uses to justify imperialism.4
Evidence supporting the presence of a Russian Orientalism (in the above sense
of the word) is too great to overlook. Still, Orientalism and the Oriental discourse
seem an incomplete theory, and Markov’s Russia in Central Asia is a case in point.
This essay turns from a superstructure-substructure-like formula, which hierarchizes
or subordinates information, and substitutes another in its place: all information is
to be considered equally important. From this starting point context becomes more
provocative. It challenges the Oriental discourse, and contradictions begin to appear
in the text.
This is not to deny the existence of a “we-they” Oriental discourse, but to em-
phasize that the discourse varied in strength depending on contextual features. The
reader should look at this essay as an effort to establish a balance between, on the one
hand, critical theory and, on the other, site- and time-specific information from the
Russian experience in the region.
The decisive contexts are three. The first is Central Asia’s nationwide importance
among the array of other public political and cultural concerns of the late nineteenth
century. An overview of news items and editorial opinion of semi-official papers
like Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti (St. Petersburg Gazette), the penny press in the
northern capital, Peterburgskii listok (Petersburg Leaflet), and the provincial paper
Orenburgskii listok (Orenburg Leaflet) reveals a consistent pattern. Most of the time
3
Ann L. Stoler, “Rethinking Colonial Categories,” Comparative Studies in Society and His-
tory 31 (1989): 134–61; Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt,
1870–1979 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); and Nicholas Thomas, Colonial-
ism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1994).
4
Khalid and Knight (see n. 2) differ over the relative importance, on the one hand, of an Ori-
ental discourse and, on the other, the exigencies of time and place to a writer’s understanding
of the Orient. See also Edward Said’s ordering and hierarchizing of textual information in
Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 5–8, 13–14, and passim.
446 Peter Weisensel
the press (and perhaps the press is a stand-in for the public’s interests and concerns)
watched the West, not the East in everything from politics to theater and ladies’ fash-
ions. Matters in Turkestan, Russia’s new colony, became topics of commentary when
something seized the public’s attention: the events of the conquest; cases of revolt;
the cost of maintaining Russian rule; and the local people’s progress toward “civiliza-
tion.” Most readers probably gave only passing attention to matters in Turkestan when
compared with, for example, the national cause of raising the civil and cultural level
of the newly emancipated Russian peasants. Turkestan as a topic of public interest or
concern probably did not occupy the first position. If, as Orientalist theory maintains,
whom one juxtaposes one’s self to determines the “they” of the Oriental discourse,
then the “they” would appear to be, with some exceptions, Europe, not Turkestan.
The second context is Russian rule in Turkestan itself. At first Russia’s colo-
nial enterprise differed little from the pattern of other colonial powers. The events
occurring between 1865 (the conquest of Tashkent) and 1884 (the surrender of the
last Turkoman strongholds of Mary and Tedjen) were similar to what we see in other
colonial wars, such as the French wars of conquest in West Africa. Generals, espe-
cially after the Crimean defeat, yearned for career-building exploits and were willing
to take unauthorized steps to gain them, steps which the Imperial State Council, the
Imperial Council of Ministers, and the tsar would later sanction.5 The Central Asian
states—the medieval monarchies of Kokand, Bukhara, and Khiva—were divided
among themselves, and their armies were unprepared to compete against Russia’s
modern nineteenth-century military technology. Consequently, the conquest was rel-
atively easy. Only a few hundred Russian troops died in combat between 1865 and
1884, whereas tens of thousands of Central Asians did, and the territorial gain for
the Russians was enormous, about 1.5 million square kilometers, or an area slightly
smaller than Alaska. The justification was also familiar: the “civilized states” had a
right to secure their borders and commerce from the incursion of wild and nomadic
peoples with whom they had contact. The absolute necessity, so the argument went,
was greater than their ambition.6
The conquered territories, the khanate of Kokand, portions of the khanates of
Bukhara and Khiva, and portions of the Kazakh steppe, were combined to form a
new colonial entity, the Governor-Generalship of Turkestan. It eventually comprised
5
The career of General M. G. Cherniaev is particularly relevant here. See David MacKenzie,
The Lion of Tashkent: The Career of General M. G. Cherniaev (Athens, GA: University of
Georgia Press, 1974), chaps. 3–4.
6
This was the explanation of Foreign Minister Gorchakov to the capitals of Europe, attempt-
ing to explain Cherniaev’s march on Tashkent in 1864. See Dietrich Geyer, Russian Imperi-
alism: The Interaction of Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1860–1914, trans. Bruce Little (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 94–95. The standard account of the conquest in Russian
is M. A. Terentév, Istoriia zavoevaniia Srednei Azii, 3 vols. and atlas (St. Petersburg: Tip. V.
V. Komarova, 1906). In English, see V. V. Grigorév’s translated account in Eugene Schuyler,
Turkistan, 2 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1877), 2: 391–415; and Hélène Carrère d’Encausse,
“Systematic Conquest, 1865 to 1884,” in Central Asia: A Century of Russian Rule, ed. Edward
Allworth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 131–50.
five oblasti (districts), each with its own military governor but all under the author-
ity of the governor-general in Tashkent. At first, the largest number of Russians in
Turkestan consisted of the occupying troops and military administrators who lived
in military camps or in segregated communities on the outskirts of the native cities.
The local elites and mounted troops were taken into Russian service, but most people
remained apart. Whether nomadic, semi-settled, or settled, all locals were denied full
rights and, by the Turkestan Statute (1886), which guided the colony’s administration,
were relegated to a legal category, inorodets (pl. inorodtsy—“alien”) outside Russia’s
estate system. The term was also widely used metaphorically by this time to mean
any non-Russian group in the empire that maintained a non-Russian, non-European
culture and was difficult to assimilate.7 As Andreas Kappeler has emphasized, they
remained a segregated, colonial people.8
Turkestan did not rest easily in the Russian Empire.9 Dan Brower was the first to
observe (see his Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire cited in n. 9) that the
two fundamental principles of the Turkestan Statute (1886), authoritarian control and
civil citizenship, were mutually incompatible. The Russian administrators in Tash-
kent and St. Petersburg agreed in principle on certain things: the civilizing mission
leading to the merger of Turkestan with the imperial legal and administrative system;
promotion of the Russian language and Western education; religious toleration; and
promotion of public health. However, they broke into conservative and reform camps
when issues, or crises, arose that seemed to threaten the security of the Russian en-
deavor. In the coexistence of resistance and collaboration in the local community, one
might say, a parallel situation existed.
Evidence of what seemed like Muslim resurgence and resistance confirmed the
fears of the conservatives, often the governor-generals of Turkestan and the Ministry
of War, who then proposed to inter-ministerial committees in St. Petersburg a revision
of the Statute in favor of more authoritarian control. Conversely, when the situation
warranted it, the reformers, usually officials from the civilian ministries of finance,
education, and internal affairs, would press forward their priorities, developing and
expanding civil liberties and local control for the inorodtsy. The army, on at least one
occasion, referred to the reformers as “the young gentlemen from St. Petersburg,” that
is, naïve, uninformed do-gooders.
7
Dov Yaroshevskii, “On Both Sides of the Boundary: Social Mapping of Tatars in Imperial
Russia, 1832–1905” (paper presented at the National Convention of the American Association
for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Washington, DC, November 1995).
8
Andreas Kappeler, Russland als Vielvölkerreich (Frankfurt/Main: C. H. Beck, 1993), 166.
9
The most recent works on the Russian administration of Turkestan are Daniel Brower, Turke-
stan and the Fate of the Russian Empire (London: Routledge, 2003); Robert D. Crews, For
Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2006); A. S. Morrison, Russian Rule in Samarkand 1868–1910 (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 2008); Jeff Sahadeo, Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865–1923
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); and Elena I. Campbell, The Muslim Question
and Russian Imperial Governance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015).
448 Peter Weisensel
At times the advocates of patience and the advocates of force confronted one an-
other, for example, after a violent incident at Andijan in 1898, when a Sufi ishan and
his followers, incensed by the spread of Russian culture and the passivity of the Mus-
lim religious elite, attacked the local Russian garrison with loss of life. Consequently,
in 1900 Governor-General Dukhovskoi brought forward a proposal to abandon reli-
gious toleration as the best protection of civil order. Representatives of the Ministry
of Finance and the Ministry of Internal Affairs responded that the attack should not
be taken too seriously. The Andijan incident was relatively insignificant when com-
pared to the achievements of Russia’s entire commitment to Turkestan, which were
attained by religious toleration and patience.
Perhaps the most explosive complication was land ownership. Russian peasants
came to Central Asia under government auspices following an official decision that
a sizeable Russian presence would reinforce imperial control. Beginning in the early
1890s, this extended to arming Russian settlers, which accelerated after the Andi-
jan uprising. To meet the need for more land for Russian settlers, the Resettlement
Administration of the Ministry of Interior surveyed plots for farming settlements
on a restricted basis in the Steppe province, but as pressure for land continued, the
restrictions were loosened. In 1891, the government made a decision, disastrous for
its relations with the Central Asians, by declaring certain land “excess,” that is, land
left after an allotment of 30 hectares per nomad and 6 hectares per farmer had been
calculated, and the “excess” was made available for Russian settlement.10 The Rus-
sian population of Turkestan and the Steppe province grew from ca. 325,000 in the
early 1880s to 690,000 in 1897 and 1.95 million (in a total population of 8.17 million,
excluding Bukhara and Khiva) in 1911.11 To show the volatile nature of the land ques-
tion, the Andijan revolt occurred in the Fergana oblast´ one year after it had been
opened to Russian settlement in 1897. Markov visited the Fergana oblast´ in 1891 and
observed that “already too much of Asia has fallen into Russian hands.”12
Whether sparked by the land question, or by perceived disrespect for Islamic
customs, as when Russian public health officials mishandled a cholera epidemic in
1892,13 the incidents of violence that followed, Jeff Sahadeo maintains, tended to
legitimate existing anti-Muslim feeling among the Russian population. Sahadeo pro-
poses that violent clashes, such as the cholera riot, began to change the feeling among
informed Russians that it was wise and useful for Russia to become an Asian power.
The third context, Markov’s literary biography, helps us explain his style, his ap-
praisal of Russia’s merits as an imperial power, and, importantly, his thinking about
the minorities of the empire. After graduating from Khar´kov University, Markov
took a teaching position in the Tula Men’s Gymnasium. He was attracted to the ideas
10
Kappeler, Russland als Vielvölkerreich, 167.
11
Richard Pierce, Russian Central Asia, 1867–1917: A Study in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1960), 137; and V. Kabuzan, Russkie v mire (St. Petersburg: BLITS,
1996), appendix 14, 303.
12
Markov, Rossiia v Srednei Azii, 2: 76.
13
Sahadeo, Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 94–107.
of the physician and pedagogue N. I. Pirogov that education should develop the whole
individual. A colorful and prolific publicist, Markov became well known for his writ-
ings on contemporary social and educational issues in serious, reform-oriented jour-
nals of the day, Otechestvennye zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland), Delo (The Cause),
and Russkaia rech´ (Russian Speech). He was a liberal Westernizer who, encouraged
by the reforms of Alexander II (1855–81), strove for a reform program of civil liber-
ties, nationalism, and capitalism.
Later, Markov’s disagreement with the increasingly conservative regime in the
Ministry of Education brought him to resign his post as director of the Simferopol´
Men’s Gymnasium. This was followed by a yearlong sojourn in Switzerland and Ger-
many. He published his travel notes, which were well received, and thereafter part of
nearly every year was spent traveling and writing up his impressions for the press.14
His descriptions, filled with colorful imagery and lyrical to the point of excess, al-
ways found a publisher and a willing audience. He was particularly fond of warm and
sunny places: the Balkans, the Crimea, Transcaucasia, Greece and the Greek islands,
Turkey, Egypt, and Italy. His writings whetted the appetite for travel by the wealthier
middle and upper classes, seeking to escape St. Petersburg’s and Moscow’s winters.
Others, without the wherewithal for steamship tickets and suites in European hotels,
could travel vicariously, swept along by Markov’s exuberant lyricism.15
Although his travel essays included descriptions of antique sites, historical back-
ground, and the state of the roads and ports, Markov was no Russian Baedeker.16
His perspective was impressionistic rather than practical. Particularly revealing for
us, Markov observed other traveling Europeans in Athens, Cairo, or Damascus, and
commented on how these tourists’ behavior seemed to embody their national char-
acter: the Americans, bluff and abrupt; the British, cool and aloof; the Germans,
arrogant and loud. Although Russia, too, was an empire, Markov concluded from
these encounters that the Russian national character, which he described as one of
meekness and mildness, would prove to be undeniably successful in the newly ab-
sorbed Orient because it would reassure Asians of Russia’s good intentions and make
them more inclined to accept Russia’s “civilizing.”17 Today one might interpret this as
a cynical effort to whitewash Russia’s dirty imperial business in Asia. But, we should
not overlook a patriotic goal that fairly jumps out of the text. Often disparaged in the
14
“S chuzhoi storony,” Otechestvennye zapiski, nos. 6–8 (1869): 225–50, 1–32, 313–44 re-
spectively.
15
Not everyone completely appreciated his style. V. G. Korolenko called it “trenchant, quite
tasteless,” and marked with “brilliance of exposition and clearly inappropriate familiarity”
See Russkoe bogatstvo, no. 4 (1904): 18.
16
For a complete bibliography of Markov’s works, including his travel essays, see S. A. Ven-
gerov, Istochniki slovaria russkikh pisatelei (Petrograd: Tip. Imp. Akademii Nauk, 1917), 4:
183–85.
17
See, for example, his commentary on the European, especially English, tourists in Cairo,
in E. L. Markov, Puteshestvie na vostok: Tsar´grad i arkhipelag. V strane faraonov, 2 parts in
1 (St. Petersburg: M. M. Stasiulevich, 1890), 2: 210–24.
450 Peter Weisensel
West for her own backwardness, Russia had the means, her meek national character,
with which to best the mean-spirited Westerners in the common European task of
“civilizing” Asia.
Otherwise, Markov’s encounters in the hotels of Cairo did not diminish his en-
thusiasm for Europe as the ideal model for Russia’s future. In the essay “On the Rus-
sian People and the Russian Way of Life,”18 he described the Russian national virtues
as “endurance and patience.” In the final analysis, though, the Russians (he meant the
peasants) must absorb Western European culture and cooperate with their tutors—
the educated class—to improve themselves.
We get an inkling of Markov’s views on empire and Russia’s minorities in his
fiction. In the novel The Seashore one finds a link to the non-Russians.19 The protago-
nists were high-minded landowners who established a successful family estate in the
Crimea by dint of hard work. They devoted themselves to freedom, nature, and health.
The local Crimean Tatars watched, learned, and followed the landowners’ example.
It seemed that, like the peasants, the Tatars were in need of leadership and civilizing
by educated Russian landowners, like Markov, who owned an estate in Khar´kov
province. Two travel accounts, Crimean Sketches20 and Caucasian Sketches,21 also
revealed Markov’s concern for protecting the Tatars from russification. This earned
him praise by critics.22 Markov thought of himself as a moderate in all things: the
truth lies neither on the right nor on the left, but always in the middle.23 Nevertheless,
Russians (if they were educated) were entitled to a leading, “civilizing” role.
After the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, Markov’s views on the intelli-
gentsia, reform, and the non-Russians changed dramatically. In the article “Riot of
the Minds,”24 he turned on the intelligentsia, demanding that they abandon “vapid
Frondeism” and support the government against the “heroes of dynamite.” This con-
stituted for Markov a flight to the regime of Alexander III, which, for all intents and
purposes, broke his links to a program of reforms. After impressing the critics with
his defense of the Tatars, he now shifted his sympathies to the new regime, whose
program was synonymous with persecution and russification of the minorities. Pa-
ternalistic defense of minority interests turned abruptly to doubt and suspicion of all
forces critical of the new Russian nationalist course taken by Alexander III, including
18
Otechestvennye zapiski, nos. 11 and 12 (1865).
19
Golos, 11–13 September 1875.
20
Ocherki Kryma (St. Petersburg: Tovarishchestvo M. O. Vol´f, 1872; 4th ed., St. Peters-
burg, 1911); originally published in the journals Otechestvennye zapiski and Vestnik Evropy,
1867–72.
21
Ocherki Kavkaza (Moscow: Izd. Tovarishchestva M.O. Vol´f, 1887; 3rd ed., Moscow, 1915).
22
Novoe vremia, 8 February 1873; and Nedelia, no. 4 (1873).
23
“V chuzhom piru: Pro domo sua,” Novoe vremia, 11, 20, 31 August 1882.
24
“Smuta umov,” Russkaia rech´, no. 1 (1882).
the minorities. It was in this state of mind that Markov and his wife visited Central
Asia in the spring of 1891.
Russia in Central Asia and the Oriental Discourse
Seen alone through the prism of the Oriental discourse, Markov appears as an agent
of the colonial culture. He conveys back to his readership a kind of knowledge, which
is dismissive of Asians and which sharpens the Russians’ self-identity. A bifurcated,
we-they discourse, visible in Russia in Central Asia, reminds us of the classics of
nineteenth-century Orientalism by Burton, Nerval, Cromer, Chateaubriand, Lamar-
tine and Flaubert, where the knowing, defining, modern, and superior West gazes at
the unchanging, passive, fatalistic, and backward Orient.25
Using the engineering feats of the empire, the Transcaucasian and Transcaspian
railways, Markov traversed in days distances that had taken weeks in the past. Using
his vantage point next to the window, and occasionally a stroll among the local people
on the platform when the train stopped, he enlightened his readers with the distinctive
physical and cultural characteristics of each group, bringing the whole group to life
by describing only one or two individuals. He observed, for example, the Abkhazians
at the port of Batum:
Murders in this underpopulated and half-wild region are a common occur-

rence. Recently, General Zavadskii was murdered and his murderer was hung
after a quick trial. Here justice is in the hands of military courts. Quick justice
is the only deterrent to these born highwaymen and robbers. For centuries be-
fore the Russian occupation they maintained the slave trade, in which neigh-
bor would steal the children of neighbor, and every village was at knifepoint
with every other. Naturally the robber’s soul originated in this setting and
neither church nor school has had much effect to this day.26
Markov compared the Muslim Abkhazians to Russians in sharp terms. Christianity

was meager protection, because the Georgians also found themselves distinguished
from Russians and were lowered to the level of dogs.
The Georgians are a naturally handsome people known for their bravery
against exultant Islam. There is no hatred of the Turks fiercer than that of
the Georgians. In all Russia’s wars with the Turks they have advanced to the
forward positions seeking out their historical enemies just as bred hunting
dogs seek the game.27
25
Said highlights these authors as the structurers and restructurers of Orientalism in the
nineteenth century. See Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 113–97.
26
27
Ibid., 1: 74–75.
452 Peter Weisensel
At Baku, Markov reminded readers of the hierarchy established between those who
had and those who lacked the power of correct speech. He met a Persian cabby who
tried to praise the achievements of Russian power, but in pidgin Russian:
[Baku was] just a village, there was nothing! Now Baku has what Tiflis [i.e.,
Tblisi] has. Every day is bazaar, steamship every day. Many merchant, much
monies. Man rich in Baku, Persian rich, Armenian rich, Tatar rich, Russian
rich. There is kerosene and oil. Only no waters, no garden. Many garden but
far away.… In the mountain much water; might bring it, only much monies.28
Markov and his wife embarked from Baku and crossed the Caspian to Uzun
Ada on the eastern shore. Markov’s vantage point on the upper deck gave him the
opportunity to ascertain the actual significance of this relatively short voyage. It was
a crossing from Europe to Asia, a journey from life to death: “This is the fateful line
where the great Asiatic desert, the realm of death, leaps out in a desperate face-to-
face struggle with the water, the wellspring of life.”29
His characterization of the crowd at the dock was disdainful, in terms that were
undistinguishable from the worst cases in other colonial cultures:
Our ship ties up tight to the dock and a small knot of dusty and furtive black-
skinned Oriental people eagerly surround the disembarking passengers,
staring with preying eyes, wondering about [the prospect of] some pickings.
[We] somehow are terrified to leave the civilized comfort of the steamship,
its mirrored dining rooms and velvet couches, to turn ourselves over to the
ominous sands and to this filthy, and also ominous, crowd. There are no cab-
bies, servants, hotel touts, or porters, no one. Ragamuffins of an athletic type,
with black, thieves’ eyes and brown mugs burned by the sun and covered
with greasy sweat, push through, almost tear our things from us, and rush
off somewhere hidden by the pressing crowd of the same pop-eyed mugs.30
Aside from being “mugs” and later, “two-legged wolves,”31 the Tekke Tur-
komans, inhabitants of the Transcaspian district, were creatures living without ref-
erence to time; Markov characterized them as “living monuments to the life-long
struggle” of nomads—Turan—with Aryan agriculturalists—Iran—which had been
going on “since the beginning of time.”32
28
Ibid., 1: 121–22.
29
Ibid., 1: 187.
30
Ibid., 1: 188–89.
31
Ibid., 1: 205.
32
Ibid., 1: 202.
They arrived at Khiva, pacified in 1876 by Russian bayonets but unbroken of “the
old wildness, the old Asianness,”33 and then on to Bukhara with its ancient mosques
and madrassas. They toured the town in a great carriage, accompanied by an armed
escort from the Bukharan police, who drove the people from the road with their whips
so that the Russians could pass. Bukhara though was disappointing, like all the auls
(villages) in Turkestan:
Endless narrow lanes are bounded by endless clay walls, only rarely inter-
rupted by arched gates, wicket gates leading to courtyards and solid walls or
clay urns belonging to one or another house. [The clay mosques] are just as
monotonously constructed and as unremarkable as the domestic dwellings.34
A visit to the Bukhara bazaar revealed that each national group in the crowd,
Tadjiks, Uzbeks, and Kazakhs, were essentialized, reduced to a fixed set of physical
and behavioral features. Kazakhs, whom Markov called “the dressing gowns” after
the long frock worn by men and women, were identifiable on sight:
The Kazakh face is not entirely the same as the Uzbek or even the Turkoman
face; there is much more Mongolian or Kalmyk in it. His entire demeanor is
somehow wild, half-bestial. The yellow and shriveled ones are particularly
wild-looking, toothless, without whiskers but with little tufts of hair on their
chins. Pointed caps of white leather like sugar cones with broad brims, lined
sometimes with red or blue as they have been since the time of Tamerlane,
convey the Mongol presence even more than their physical appearance.35
Sexual speculation entered the text when Markov speculated about Tadjik women,
unseen behind their veils; they must all be beautiful because Alexander the Great
chose Roxanna from the Tadjiks.36
They visited Samarkand, the “Hungry Steppe,” and crossed the Syr Daria to
Tashkent, the capital of Turkestan. Tashkent, as other cities in Turkestan, was divided
into a Russian “new” Tashkent and a squalid, monotonous native Tashkent, “a mass
of small houses, yards, parks and kitchen gardens throughout its entire expanse.”
Tashkent’s Russian enclave, though, with schools, government buildings, and a new
jail, was a model of good order, cleanliness, modernity, and clever design.
Continuing eastward, they passed through the rich agricultural Fergana and Zara-
vshan valleys, but the native settlements and cities, Khodjent (Khudjand), Kokand,
Margelan (Margilan), Andijan, and Osh, aside from their bright and new Russian sub-
urbs, were all squalid and dull. Outside Osh Markov and his party witnessed an inci-
33
Ibid., 1: 363.
34
Ibid., 1: 371–72.
35
Ibid., 1: 427.
36
Ibid., 1: 404.
454 Peter Weisensel
dent on the road: a crowd was being roughly pushed aside by a Russian colonel with
his family on their way to visit some village headman. This was, Markov reminded
his readers, no worse than what the local people had endured under previous regimes,
and besides, power that was felt was power obeyed.37 Their own traveling companion,
the Russian district police commander, roughed up a local headman when he found
the road through the man’s district in bad repair. But Markov saw nothing abnormal
in this: “Without such quick and rough investigations, which the locals consider nor-
mal, it would be difficult to keep order in this wild land.”38
The mountain valleys of the Pamirs provided Markov with opportunities for his
lyrical descriptions but he focused on the nomadic Kara-Kirgiz people, their clans,
camps, and customs concerning women and marriage: “primitive humanity in a land
ancient even in the time of the biblical patriarchs.”39 His return to Samarkand and de-
scription of its architectural monuments took up the last portion of the stay in Central
Asia. He returned to Russia via the Transcaspian railway and the Volga River.
This précis reveals features typical of the Oriental discourse identified by many
critics of colonial culture (Fanon, Said, Fabian, Todorov, Curtin, Kiernan, and oth-
ers). The West, symbolized by the Caspian Sea (life-giving water), abutted on Asia,
where the sea met the dead sands of Transcaspia. The people, powerless and reactive,
were locked in time; their attitudes and customs were essentially the same as in the
times of Alexander the Great or Tamerlane. The catalyst in their lives was the exam-
ple of Russian culture, demonstrated and executed by the Russian administration.
The Asians resisted or only slowly emulated this irresistible model of Western civili-
zation, suggesting that they may never become civilized. Markov made the obvious
distinctions among nomads, farmers, merchants, and the major ethnic groups, but in
the most important respects they were the same; all had the same ideas and goals, and
all were to be treated roughly because Asians understood only power. Aside from an
occasional ancient architectural monument, their cities were monotonously the same.
Heightening the distinction between Russian and Asian was the animalization of the
inorodtsy: the “simian mug” of the Kazakh; the tiger-like whiskered face of the Tur-
koman, and so on.
Russia in Central Asia in a Historical-Cultural Context
Thus far the selected passages seem to demonstrate in Markov a Manichaean vision
of the Russian-Central Asian encounter. Now we examine the text through the prism
of context. Focus will be on four themes often ascribed to the Oriental discourse:
Russians and “Others”; the Oriental “gaze”; Europe’s “mission civilisatrice;” and cul-
ture as the driving force of policy.
Russians and “Others”

37
Ibid., 2: 93–94.
38
Ibid., 2: 122.
39
Ibid., 2: 119.
Russians called themselves Europeans, but they had their own way of describing their
“Others.” Researchers have pretty well established that the appearance of modern
European biological racism vis à vis dark-skinned people sometime in early nine-
teenth century was associated with the concurrence of several events: the large-scale
slave trade; the Enlightenment’s passion for grouping biological forms into different
species; and the introduction of a method of thinking and speaking about biological
forms which made a whole species knowable by knowing only one individual in it.
The primary taxonomy of the “Others” in Russia was culture, not race. The heart
of the difference between race and culture was that a taxonomy based on culture did,
in fact, allow for the possibility of progress, while the biological model did not. The
“pop-eyed mugs” of the Turkomans, consequently, were not what they seem.
Peter I (1682–1725) and his successors opened Russia to all manner of Western
imports, including the European Enlightenment. In the eighteenth century, enlight-
enment meant compiling a taxonomy of the physical world. By mid-century, taxo-
nomical efforts shifted from bees, parrots, gorillas, and elephants to humans. The
task became the search for order within the “family of man.” First principles were
arrived at: name, territory, habitat and faith. But the inadequacies of such categories
led gradually through the century to the ascendancy of customs. In this new universe
the Russians clearly established their superiority over the non-Russians of the empire
because of their education, or enlightenment, and their Christianity, because they
were sure that truth and piety were the best transmitters of science. The touchstones
of identity became, not race, but diet, treatment of women, type of habitation and,
later, cleanliness and the possession of a coherent religion. The categories though
piled up and resulted in an ethnic rating system with the perfection of the Enlighten-
ment and the Russians at the top, and none of the markers of enlightenment and those
who lived without them at the bottom. The bottom dwellers were called dikii (wild),
not because they were dark-skinned, but because they lived in a state of savagery,
ignorance, and stupidity. All, nevertheless, was not lost even for them. As Aleksandr
Radishchev (1749–1802), the most famous liberal critic of serfdom in the era of Cath-
erine II, wrote, “Nature needs several generations to equalize intellectual abilities
in humans,” and those lower on the scale could always learn from the Russians and
improve themselves.40
The idea of different levels of civilized life and the possibility for upward mo-
bility became thoroughly ingrained in Russian thinking, and, obviously, the notion
was fundamentally at odds with distinctions based on biology. The “evolutionary
model” was incorporated into the Statute of Alien Administration of Siberia (1822),
composed by the great statesman of the era of Alexander I, Mikhail Speranskii, and
his assistant, G. S. Baten´kov. The categories of evaluation were not always clear, but
the assumption was that wanderers would eventually become nomads, and nomads,
40
This portion of the essay leans heavily on Yuri Slezkine, “Naturalists versus Nations: Eigh-
teenth-Century Russian Scholars Confront Ethnic Diversity,” Representations, no. 47 (Sum-
mer 1994): 170–85. The quotation is from page 185.
456 Peter Weisensel
settled agriculturalists.41 The emphasis in the Siberian Statute was on gradual and
voluntary change. This concept was incorporated later in the Turkestan Statute of
1886, which guided the governor-generalship down to the end of the empire. The in-
orodtsy could eventually achieve civilization and then they would be rewarded with
full membership in the Russian Empire.42
The pace of this transformation, however, was never clear. As measured by the
privileges granted by the Russian authorities, the inorodtsy in Turkestan advanced so
slowly that when the 1917 revolution came they had not achieved legal equality. Part
of the reason lay in the casual way the authorities took on their part in the civilizing
mission. The Russian army did not take active measures to advance “civilization,” but
left progress to advance at a pace set by the inorodtsy themselves. Russian schools
were established for them but enrollment was entirely voluntary. Even though the
behavior of Russian soldiers was to serve as an example for the Asians to emulate, in
practice the soldiers’ rowdiness hardly advanced the prestige of Russia’s culture. The
Russian authorities refrained from interfering in local customs, so long as it did not
diminish Russian authority. Local people retained their preconquest courts, custom-
ary courts for the Kazakhs and Islamic courts for the Uzbeks and Tadjiks. Custom
was allowed to adjudicate water use, recordkeeping, and tax collection, and the Or-
thodox Church was forbidden to proselytize.43 Underlying the Russian inaction was
also the fear that aggressive “civilizing” would undermine order.
Markov absorbed the notion of the perfectibility of all. He recognized that some
inorodtsy stood higher than others on the ladder of progress and deserved corre-
sponding treatment. At the top were the Kazakhs. At the Men’s Gymnasium in Tash-
kent, the students were Russian and Kazakh. Because they were less under the sway
of the mullahs, Markov said, the Kazakhs were most interested in Russian educa-
tional institutions as a way to advance themselves. An examination witnessed by
Markov revealed that although they were not great scholars, the Kazakh students had
mastered the Russian language. They were already finding places in the Russian ad-
ministration, and soon they would no longer be foreigners. “The school is a wonderful
reformer,” Markov explained. He went on to the Tashkent Teachers’ Seminary and
41
Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1994), 81–88. See also Marc Raeff, Siberia and the Reforms of 1822
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1956).
42
Polnoe sobranie zakonov rossiiskoi imperii (St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennaia tip., 1888–
1916), series 3, vol. 6, no. 3814 (1886), the Turkestan Statute.
43
On the general relationship between the church and state in Turkestan, see, also, among the
annual reports of the bishops of Tashkent and Turkestan to the Holy Synod the following: for
1890 (Bishop Neofit), Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA) f. 796, op. 442,
d. 1366, ll. 10, 12, 20; and 1895 (Bishop Nikon) RGIA f. 796, op. 442, d. 1595, ll. 17. In passing,
it is interesting to note that the army decided it was dangerous to proselytize and meddle in
local customs, but, oddly, it was not dangerous to turn land over to Russian settlers, despite
local custom. See “Ob ustanovlenii pravil otvoda chastnym predprinimateliam svobodnykh
kazennykh zemel´ v Zakavkaze i Turkestane dlia ogrosheniia i ekspluatatsii, 1910–1917,” Ros-
siiskii gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv (RGVIA) f. 400, op. 1, d. 3933. ll. 1–123.
found Kazakh students being trained to teach in the inorodtsy schools. “They con-
stitute the main path to Russian education and Russian citizenship.” He continued,
“a well-prepared teacher is a conqueror of souls in the broad expanse of our foreign
conquests.”44 Later, visiting Kazakh camps, Markov was moved to introspection by
their hospitality and nobility:
I will not say that the visit to the nomads shook my natural bias for the forms
of life developed by European civilization. But in a bothersome way I rec-
ognized that this much-despised patriarchal way of life of the half-wild no-
madic people was no longer impenetrable or bottomless, separated from our
own multilayered and cunning-minded way of life. I was convinced that the
ways of human happiness and fulfillment fortunately are much more diverse,
broad, and numerous than they seemed to us, contemporary Europeans, who
have been partially blinded by the false brilliance of our own civilization.45
At the lowest rung of Markov’s ladder stood the Turkomans, the nomadic inhab-
itants of the arid lands just to the east of the Caspian Sea. In a passage typical of his
treatment of them Markov remembered the comment of a Turkoman in a conversation
about the unattractiveness of participating in Russia’s market and getting a regular
job:
Why work? If I need money I’ll go to Persia, nab three Persians and sell them
in Khiva. I’ll live on the proceeds for six months without having to do another
thing. It’s possible.46
The Turkomans, Markov continued, shunned cities and settled, civilized life, and
were more at home with the asses and the antelopes. Their settlements were less
like towns than like armed camps. They were innate thieves and they felt nothing of
enslaving anyone, even another Muslim. Here, there was little desire to adapt one’s
self, a complete denial of Russia’s mission civilisatrice, but it was their behavior, not
biology, that set them apart. 47
If the Kazakhs and Turkomans occupied the high and low rungs of the ladder
of progress, the Uzbeks, the farmers and merchants of Bukhara and Khiva, rested
on a middle rung. They were not animalized because they did not behave like asses,
antelopes, or tigers. Rather, like the Russians, they were farmers and businessmen,
and had, in fact, even a better work ethic than the Russians.48 Still, they showed dra-
matically little interest in becoming “civilized.” There was only one Uzbek student in
44
Markov, Rossiia v Srednei Azii, 1: 501–03.
45
Ibid., 2: 172–73.
46
Ibid., 1: 228
47
Ibid., 1: 201–10, 222–28.
48
Ibid., 2: 16–17. They also work better than Arabs or Turks. See ibid., 2: 72–73.
458 Peter Weisensel
the Teacher’s Seminary, Markov noted, and others whom he interviewed knew almost
no Russian after six years’ study.49 The reason was the deadening influence of the
fanatical Muslim mullahs:
The Uzbeks have their own clergy, and the Uzbek clergy strictly opposes
Russian institutions. The fanatical mullahs think that this [i.e., not opposing
Christian institutions] is the first step leading to Christian conversion.50
We will return to Islam presently.
The Oriental Gaze
To Markov the power of the mullahs and qazis over the people was the greatest obsta-
cle to Russia’s civilizing mission. They propagated the ridiculous rote memorization
of Arabic texts, when no one could understand Arabic. They exhorted the people
with false tales about the Russian “infidel culture,” and they resisted Russian law and
Russian institutions.51 It was a “fanatical mullah” and the mob that he controlled who
drove Markov and his companions from the steps of one of the mosques in Bukhara
and forced them to beat a hasty retreat in their phaeton.52
My wife and I unmistakably felt the hatred of the Asian for the Russian, and
the hatred of the Muslim fanatic for the Christian, a hatred on which all these
Bukharan theologians in white turbans and green robes feed. The crowds,
which gather around the mosques, look at us with an undisguised expres-
sion of hostility. My wife’s uncovered face somehow has incensed them. Our
unclean, heathen-dog presence in this sacred place has obviously touched
them to the depths of their souls, and only the presence of the karaul-beg
[Bukharan policeman] who carries an impressive lash, and yes, perhaps the
memory of the Russian soldiers’ tunics, barely keeps this snarling crowd
within sensible limits.53
There are two ways to interpret this quotation. First, Markov here gazed at the
angry mob of Muslims, whose faith he interpreted entirely through a Western prism.
To Markov it was obvious that a Muslim unquestioningly and mindlessly followed a
mullah’s lead, and to the crowd and the mullah he and his wife were unclean heathen
dogs. He knew nothing of the prescription against women going about in public with
49
Ibid., 1: 501.
50
Ibid., 1: 503.
51
Ibid., 1: 411–12 (infidel culture); ibid., 2: 70–71 (resist Russian institutions); ibid., 2: 90
(resist Russian law).
52
Ibid., 1: 412–13.
53
Ibid., 1: 411–12.
face uncovered, and only violence impressed Muslims. Only the threat, or memory of
violence—the soldiers’ tunics—kept the crowd in check.
Markov was agitated and he continued:
Do not comfort yourself with a view through rose-colored glasses; we must

be prepared for any situation and expect anything possible. [They] are neither
pacified nor completely occupied with their trades, handicrafts, or fieldwork.
There can be no doubt that with the first slip-up of Russian power in Asia …
Muslim fanaticism and hatred of us, the hatred of the defeated for the victor,
will determine everything.54
But, there is a second interpretation. What should we make of the angry crowd? Was
it not “gazing back” at the Europeans and thereby empowered? Markov sensed just
that and for a moment he was frightened, and the tables were turned. Momentarily
Europeans like him were no longer masters. He was struck by the haughty stare, so
out of place for a native. Only the policeman’s lash, he thought, kept the crowd from
tearing him to pieces. If, though, the mob realized its power, one policeman’s whip
could never hold them back, and they would strike. Fearing the worst, Markov and his
companions rushed to their carriage and left immediately. One can say that Markov’s
description of the incident, the beginning point of which was the gaze of the mullah,
empowered the mullah and the crowd.
Markov frequently recorded the hostile, even haughty, demeanor when he en-
countered the inorodtsy in the streets and villages. Vicious village dogs “snapping
at our legs” mimicked the hostility of their masters toward the intruders.55 Adults
refused to acknowledge gifts of candy to their children, and they would “glare hos-
tilely” at the European lady’s morning dress.56
The Mission Civilisatrice and Russia’s Rank in the World: Culture and Policy
Russia in Central Asia is replete with comparisons of the Russian and Western Eu-
ropean missions civilisatrice in Asia. Markov saw not just inorodtsy and Russians, a
binary model, but the other European colonial powers as well. A ternary, not a binary,
model took shape.
Continually lagging behind England, France, and Germany in the most import-
ant measures of nineteenth-century civilization—rule of law, democratic political
institutions, secularization, and economic and scientific advancement—Russia’s ac-
quisition of a colony in Central Asia gave her a new challenge, or a new chance, to
match the “civilized” colonial standard set by the premier imperial states. If success-
ful, Russia could prove to Europe and to herself her own Europeanness.
54
Ibid., 2: 283.
55
Ibid., 1: 275, 288–89
56
Ibid., 1: 286, 2: 71–72
460 Peter Weisensel
In the context of the conquest of Central Asia, books, like Eugene Schuyler’s
Turkistan (sic!) (1876), found Russia’s backwardness on display everywhere in Turke-
stan. Schuyler presented a witheringly negative critique of Russian colonial inepti-
tude, brutality, and corruption. Perhaps Russians were not entirely European but, in
significant respects, Asian. The Russian press reaction was indignant and patriotic.57
George Curzon, the viceroy of India and the premier colonial voice of Great Britain,
more or less agreed with Schuyler after visiting parts of Central Asia in 1889: “The
conquest of Central Asia is a conquest of Orientals by Orientals.”58
A comparison of Russia’s and Europe’s accomplishments in Asia, was woven
through Markov’s narrative. Incidentally, the demand for Europe’s respect in the Rus-
sian press may have played a role in shaping his response. Newspapers were well
aware of Europe’s dismissal of Russia’s Europeaness. In the Orenburgskii listok (15
March 1898) the editor surveyed the imperial world: “The English, Germans, and
French have failed either by doing nothing (France), their brutality (Germany), or
through bad relations with their colonial subjects (England). Without pride in our
accidental ascendancy over the native and without the slightest desire to make him
accountable, we have lived in Central Asia only 30 years and we feel that it has al-
ready become our native province.” The success of the campaign on Khiva in 1873
encouraged the editor of the Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti to offer the Americans
some free advice on how to pacify their hostiles: “The American system by which
the number of regular troops is severely restricted … is not particularly practical. It
is much better for civilization to take a defensive position than to neglect [it], and as
a result of the oversight have neglect become a bloody avenger and destroyer of hu-
manity.” The editor of the penny-press Peterburgskii listok imagined the victories in
Turkmenia earning Europe’s respect. “The attention of the whole world is turned to
the Russian conquests in Central Asia… All Europe marvels at the limitless endur-
ance of the Russian soldier.”59
Markov divided the world into three parts: Russia, Europe, and Asia. He began
by assuming that Russia was joining a common European struggle to civilize Asia.
The struggle was not Russia’s alone, but Europe’s as a whole.60 In the Russian suburb
outside Samarkand Markov was moved by the orderliness and cleanliness to point out
that both England and Russia were fulfilling Europe’s responsibility in the colonial
world. Wherever it went, the British Empire dispersed the Englishman’s freedom of
initiative. But if England had its methods, so did Russia have hers.
57
Eugene Schuyler, Turkistan, 2 vols. (New York: Scribners & Armstrong, 1877). Schuyler’s
book could not be translated and published in the Russian Empire until after 1905 when cen-
sorship laws were relaxed.
58
George N. Curzon, Russia in Central Asia in 1889 and the Anglo-Russian Question (Lon-
don: Longmans Green, 1889), 392.
59
Orenburgskii listok, 15 March 1898; Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, 13 May 1873; Peter-
burgskii listok, 15 April 1885.
60
Markov maintained that the Russian colonial model of generosity, respect for
local customs, and modesty in power avoided the evils of segregation and arrogance.
Russian soldiers in Turkestan were “meek heroes.”61 England and Europe’s neglect of
these virtues was their Achilles’ heel in Asia. Meekness and modesty in power was
reinforced by Russia’s superior knowledge of Asia, assuming knowledge as experi-
ence gained by centuries of interaction with the Tatars and nomads. With the combi-
nation of culture and experience Russia became a kind of superior Europe, fulfilling
Europe’s mission civilisatrice, but doing a much better job of it. The third player,
Asia, became reimagined as a proving ground where Russia hoped to demonstrate to
Europe her Europeanness.
A Japanese newspaper in 1901, responding to a Russian editor’s bragging in the
Birzhevye vedomosti (Bourse News),62 disputed Russia’s noble goals in Asia, claim-
ing that Russia’s intent was theft sustained by force of arms. Had Markov been aware
of the exchange of opinion, he would have defended both the goal, Russia’s mission
civilisatrice, and the use of necessary force to protect it. Markov was not concerned
with the incompatibility of civilization and violence. Russia was meek and patient
when the inorodtsy cooperated with Russia’s mission. But, as many passages in Rus-
sia in Central Asia show, if the inorodtsy resisted or dissimulated, Russia was com-
pelled to drive them to civilization at bayonet-point.
Conclusion
A discourse in colonial literature that bifurcates Europeans and their “Others” has
become an identifying feature of Western Europe’s encounter with Asians. Extending
our field of vision beyond England and France to Russia, and to books like Markov’s
Russia in Central Asia, reveals however considerable diversity in European colonial
culture. Appraising Russia in Central Asia through two different prisms—the Ori-
ental discourse and a cultural-historical context—displays the merits but also the
limits of each to uncover meaning individually. Together, however, they do better
than alone.
One important conclusion from this study is that the West-East binary opposi-
tion is undermined. Russians defined people culturally, not racially; hence progress,
or change, was always possible. Markov’s treatment of the Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and
Turkomans reflected this cultural definition of people. If racial difference was char-
acteristic of Western colonial literature, changing the critical identifier to culture had
to represent a softening of the West-East discourse in the Russian cultural world. Nor
is the European “gaze” intact. Sometimes the powerless could “gaze back.” Lastly,
merging passages in the text with a larger cultural context revealed another discourse.
In this case, the venture in Central Asia became more than a mission civilisatrice. It
was as well a Russian writer’s defense of Russia’s European identity, and even its su-
periority to Europe, running parallel to, but apart from, what appears to be a typical
61
Ibid., 1: 533. See also ibid., 1: 296–301 (Europe does not understand our methods in Asia).
62
Birzhevye vedomosti, 26 October 1901, 1.
462 Peter Weisensel
Oriental discourse. The binary discourse becomes a ternary discourse. Russia be-
comes the middle element, identifying herself by contrasting herself to both Europe
and to Asia. In Russia in Central Asia West-East differences become greyer, more
relative, and indeed not black and white.
Beyond that, Markov’s book stumbles upon a central problem that vexed con-
temporary colonial administrators. How should Russia rule Turkestan before a time
when the inorodtsy had advanced sufficiently to allow them to be absorbed into the
normal legal and institutional structure of the empire? And, if they did not advance
sufficiently, evidenced by cases of hostile outbursts, were forceful means justified?
Like the regime in Turkestan itself, at times Markov came down on the side of the
bayonet when events seemed to warrant it, but at other times he recognized that not
all inorodtsy were equally obstinate. Markov’s book captured the character of gover-
nance in Turkestan and brought it to the Russian public. As regards the culture-policy
relationship, some may think that culture (books) creates policy, but in Markov’s
Russia in Central Asia culture reflects policy. By ignoring the conflict between civili-
zation and force, Russia in Central Asia reconciled the irreconcilable.
“A Link with Time”:
Anna Akhmatova’s Poetry for History Courses
Marjorie W. Bingham
No one absorbs the past as thoroughly as a poet.

—Joseph Brodsky1
Theofanis Stavrou and Joseph Brodsky introduced me to the poetry of Anna Akhma-
tova. In our Russian history class at the University of Minnesota, Professor Stavrou
not only did political history but spoke of the Acmeist poets of the “Silver Age.” In
1969, he organized a group of professors and graduate students involved in Russian
studies to go to the Soviet Union. As part of the trip, some would meet with dissi-
dents, spiritual heirs of that pre-Soviet age.For them, poets like Akhmatova, Osip
Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak were models not only of fine poetry, but also moral
integrity. A recent Ph.D. in American Studies, I did not have the Russian background
of other participants of the trip, but my assigned task was to bring contemporary
American poetry to the future Nobel Prize poet Joseph Brodsky. Meeting with
Brodsky was a bit like undergoing another Ph.D. oral: who were America’s greatest
poets? Which are better, Frost’s shorter or longer poems? How do you feel about
blank verse? Generally, I seemed to have passed, but Brodsky was truly dismayed
at my meager knowledge of Akhmatova’s poetry. Chagrined, I would return home
to read her works and, eventually, devote a chapter on her in the Russia book in the
Women in World Cultures series.2 Over the years her poetry became a continued part
of the history survey courses I taught at St. Louis Park High School and Hamline Uni-
versity and in women’s history workshops around the country. Akhmatova’s poetry
is particularly good for use in history classes for three reasons: (1) her “triple sense of
time”—past, present, and future all in one poem; (2) its clarity and engagement with
readers; and (3) the shift from autobiography to an enhanced biography of a genera-
tion of Russians.
But before we take up these three major points, I would like to explore the idea of
using poetry in what may already seem heavily burdened by history survey course. T.
1
Joseph Brodsky, “Introduction,” in Anna Akhmatova: Poems, ed. and trans. Lyn Coffin
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), xvii.
2
Marjorie Wall Bingham and Susan Hill Gross, Women in the U.S.S.R.: The Scythians to the
Soviets (Hudson, WI: G. E. McCuen, 1980), 117–23.
464 Marjorie W. Bingham
S. Eliot, in his essay “Hamlet and His Problems,” developed the idea of an “objective
correlative.”3 The poet takes an object, idea, or event and weaves around it various
levels of significance to provide multiple meanings. In teaching survey courses, in-
cluding a one-semester course on “Western Civilization” (Neanderthal to NATO, we
called it in anguish), I had found it necessary to choose materials that could “weigh
heavily”; that could cluster many points in a brief amount of time. Certainly, stu-
dents were reading all sorts of material outside of class, but to encourage a dialogue
in limited class time, more focused, accessible materials were important. Over the
years I shifted many readings, class projects, debates on World War I, for example,
but I found I always included Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem to a Doomed Youth” and
“Dulce et Decorum Est.” These two poems, in their contrasting languages—the first
formal, elevated, the second colloquial—marked a major shift to the modern, the
ironic questioning of values, and the poet’s life itself part of the generational cost
of the Great War. Further, Owen’s contemporaries, like Siegfried Sassoon, Robert
Graves, Virginia Woolf, and Vera Brittain, offered a “cluster” for further study. But
the poems could also lead to military history—the “rattling” of the machine guns,
the use of gas warfare—there was that as well. Not all poems “work” as well, at least
for me. Though I have tried to work in some of my favorites like John Keats or Emily
Dickinson, the connections to world trade and politics often mean too steep a detour
to connect their work to the flow of the course. But Akhmatova’s work not only ties
centrally to the Russian story, it makes it meaningful.
Brodsky, in describing the twentieth century, suggests something of T. S. El-
iot’s view and the significance of a great poet in tragic times: “At certain periods of
history, it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into
something graspable, something that otherwise couldn’t be sustained by the mind.”4
What Akhmatova sustained was, in her own words, “two of everything, two wars,
two destructions, two famines, two revolutions.”5 World War I, the Russian Revolu-
tion, the Russian Civil War, the Purges, World War II, and the Cold War mark her
years and poetry. Often I used the following poems in class to either introduce or
summarize these eras. While there are certainly many others that are relevant, these
seem to work well in class. If only one poem can be chosen, Requiem is probably the
most crucial:
First World War: “July 1914” (“All month a smell of burning…”);

“We Don’t Know How to Say Goodbye” (1917)
Civil War/Exiles: “I Am Not One of Those Who Left the Land”
3
T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criti-
cism (London: Methuen, 1920).
4
Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1986), 52.
5
Quoted in Anatoly Naiman, “A Guest Upon the Earth,” in The Complete Poems of Anna
Akhmatova, trans. Judith Hemschemeyer, ed. Roberta Reeder (Somerville, MA: Zephyr,
1990), 2: 22.
Anna Akhmatova’s Poetry for History Courses 465
Purges: “The Last Toast” (“To lying lips that have betrayed us”)
World War II: “Courage” (“We will preserve you Russian speech”)
Stalin Era: “Requiem” (“I have learned how faces fall to bone”)
Cold War: “The Last Rose” (“With Morozova I should bow and obey”)
In a history course, most instructors do not have the luxury of time enough to analyze
the more complex of Akhmatova’s poems, like Poem without a Hero. Nevertheless,
her verse lends itself to the study of history because she herself believed that history
was significant. As the critic Kornei Chukovsky put it, “Akhmatova was a ‘master of
historical painting.’”6 She was so because she had a “triple” sense of time, a clear,
accessible vision, and an awareness of how her life was part of a larger story.
Her triple sense of time—past, present, and future—may have been the result of
her early studies. Generally not emphasized in her biographies, Akhmatova began her
serious academic studies in the field of history. Attending Higher Women’s Courses
(academic courses held when women were excluded from Russian universities) in
Kiev and St. Petersburg, she selected a history of law and general historical studies
as her emphasis.7 The sense of precedent in law and historical chronology may have
provided her with this underlying “triple” sense of time. Then, too, the events of the
twentieth century swirled about her personal life: “My memory has become incredi-
bly sharp. The past surrounds me and demands something. What? The kind shadows
of the distant past almost speak to me.”8 In even such a brief quotation, we can see
Akhmatova in the present—“her sharp memory”; the past—“kind shadows”; and the
future—“demands something, what?”
Almost all the poems listed above have this triple sense of time. For example, the
“Instead of a Preface” that begins the poem Requiem:
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months waiting in
line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identi-
fied me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who
had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of
the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered
here):
—“Can you describe this?”
And I said:
—“I can.”
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her
face.9
6
Ibid., 2: 15.
7
Anna Akhmatova, “A Little about My Life,” in Anna Akhmatova and Her Circle, comp.
Konstantin Polivanov (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas, 1994), 3.
8
Anna Akhmatova, “From a Letter to XXX,” in ibid., 19.
9
Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward, comp. and trans., Poems of Akhmatova (Boston: Little
Brown, 1967), 9.
The past is represented by the months waiting in line; the “now” by the women asking
in a whisper about describing their situation; and the future by the poet’s intent to
write. Further poignancy about the past is added by Akhmatova noticing the fleeting
smile “over what had once been her face.”
This thinking back and forward in time was also part of Akhmatova’s speculation
about chronology and how her generation fit into time. According to her, the twentieth
century—the real century—began in 1913–14 with the beginning of World War I—a
view many historians would later share.10 In her poem “In Memorium, July 19, 1914”
(the date of Russia’s entry into the war), she stated that between 1913 and 1914, “We
aged a hundred years, and this / Happened in a single hour.”11 She wondered about
her century, “Has this century been worse / than the ages that went before?”12 She
defended the time of her youth (1910s) from the Soviet view of it as decadent:
No one really knows in what epoch one lives… I recently heard someone
say: “The 1910s were the most vulgar time.” Perhaps that is what one feels
compelled to say today, but I replied that along with everything else, it was
the time of Stravinsky and Blok, Anna Pavlova and Scriabin, Rostovtsev and
Chaliapin, Meyerhold and Diaghilev. Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Tsvetaeva
began their careers… This was their time. In the Uffizi Gallery in Florence,
statues of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Michelangelo and da Vinci are dis-
played. I thought they were the busts of famous men, but an Italian told me:
“No, they’re just native Florentines.” It was the same in the 1910s.13
Though Akhmatova had pride in her contemporaries, she also could be brutal in
the evaluation of her generation and present a later, darker side. “Ask my contempo-
raries— / Convicts, hundred-and-fivers, prisoners— / And we will tell you / How we
lived in unconscious fear / How we raised children for the executioner, / For prison
and for the torture chamber.”14
Though Akhmatova does not seem to have read much of William Faulkner, her
outlook on history is much the same as his “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
The villain in her Poem without a Hero is the man who ignores and forgets his role
in his friend’s suicide. She was, however, somewhat critical of memory and memoirs:
“Regarding memoirs in general, I warn the reader that 20 percent of all memoirs
are false in one way or another… Continuity is also a delusion. The human memory
is constructed in such a way that, like a projector, it illuminates separate moments,
leaving the rest in impenetrable darkness. Even a wonderful memory can and should
10
Anna Akhmatova, “1910s,” in Anna Akhmatova and Her Circle, 16.
11
Anna Akhmatova, “In Memorium,” in Complete Poems, 1: 449.
12
Ibid., 1: 517.
13
Anna Akhmatova, “1910s,” in Anna Akhmatova and Her Circle, 14.
14
Anna Akhmatova, “Poem without a Hero (Additions),” in Complete Poems, 2: 473.
forget some things.”15 Further, in her poem “Cellar of Memory” (18 January 1940) she
wrote of how engulfing memory can be: “through this mold, these fumes and slime /
Flashed two green emeralds. And the cat mewed. Well, let’s go home! / But where is
my home and where is my reason?”16
In some ways, it turns out that history was her home. Most of her life, Akhma-
tova lived with others and was “homeless,” partly because of her distaste for domestic
chores but also because the Stalinist state had taken so many rights from her. As she
put it in another way, “People of my generation are not threatened by such returns—
we have no where to return to.”17 But for her there was a kind of permanence else-
where: “for me poetry is a link with time, with the new life of my people.”18
This serious consideration of the past, “links with time,” gives another dimen-
sion to the use of Akhmatova’s poetry in survey classes. More than accumulation of
facts, lessons, problem solving, students also need a vision of how time plays a part
in their lives and some healthy skepticism about how historians put together a story.
Akhmatova provides one kind of role model, reconciling past pain with future vision.
Her poetry has another quality that makes her work valuable for the teacher of
survey courses. Her writing is accessible, clear, and engages the reader. Though I
have “walked” students through T. S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and
parts of Dante’s Inferno, the explanation of allusions often means overburdening the
historical point. Though Akhmatova could certainly write difficult poetry, as in Poem
without a Hero, her aim was to write verse that could directly communicate with the
reader. As the beginning of Requiem states, “Can you describe this? Yes, I can.” Her
audience was the lines of women outside the red walls of the Stalinist prisons—and
the rest of us. Clarity is not the same as simple, as any language arts instructor could
tell students. It means thinking clearly about a subject, having a definite point of view,
and directly confronting the issue. All of these were dangerous qualities for a writer
in the Stalin years. Unlike writers, say, in the prerevolutionary era in France, who
often masked their views in more abstract language, Akhmatova’s early verse is re-
markably direct. In some of the later poems she did resort to “secret writing,” making
literary allusions which would signify what she really meant. But most of her poems,
while the meanings may become complex, have a kind of openness about them.
Judith Hemschemeyer makes the point that Akhmatova’s poetry is often one of
“encounter,” direct address; she “almost always needed a ‘you.’”19 One of her reasons
for disliking Robert Browning’s writing was that he wrote in the second person, dis-
tancing himself from the poem. In the index of opening lines of her poems, the “you”
and “we” listings go on for several pages. Even in poems without a direct encounter,
there is often a sense of intimacy with a character, frequently seen in contrasting pub-
15
Anna Akhmatova, Poem without a Hero, in Anna Akhmatova and Her Circle, 22.
16
Anna Akhmatova, “Cellar of Memory,” in Complete Poems, 2: 125.
17
Anna Akhmatova, “The Shukhardina House,” in Anna Akhmatova and Her Circle, 9.
18
Ibid., 5.
19
Judith Hemschemeyer, “Translator’s Preface,” in Complete Poems, 1: 2.
lic and private moments. One of the poems I have used with more advanced students
is “The Gray-Eyed King.” At first this seems a simple poem about a king dying, a
queen’s hair turning gray, and a non-royal couple sharing the news. But then we see
the wife putting her daughter with “eyes of gray” to bed, and another level of meaning
comes into the poem. We look at the king, the queen’s gray hair (and wonder how sud-
denly it really turned to gray), the husband and wife and their relationship differently.
Distant grief about a public figure becomes more private for the wife. This poem may
seem rather remote from historical concerns, but I then ask students to reflect on the
poem, written in 1910, and compare it to later Soviet indictments of Akhmatova’s
“decadence” and lack of “class solidarity.” The poem is accessible, then, as a human
story, but students can also see how levels of meaning become political and, even,
dangerous later; it’s not safe to mourn kings even in metaphor.
But probably the most important attribute of Akhmatova’s work for use in a his-
tory class is the way in which she is able to make her seemingly autobiographical
poems into the biography of a generation. She is not only able to address the “you”
of Russia, but also to create a “we.” Most clearly, this comes across in her World War
II writing, for example in her “An Address Broadcast on the Program ‘This is Radio
Leningrad’” (September 1941). Akhmatova, until her evacuation to Tashkent from
October 1941 to June 1944, was part of the population that suffered German attacks
on St. Petersburg. Like the women she addressed in the radio broadcast, she had
sewn sandbags, stood in bread lines, and lost friends to German shelling. While the
language is general about the courage of Leningrad women, Akhmatova also brings
it down to the particular:
Like all of you now, I am kept alive by the single, unshakable belief that Len-
ingrad will never become fascist. This belief is strengthened in me when I see
the Leningrad women who defend Leningrad so simply and courageously and
maintain its normal human life… Our descendants will give every mother
… her due, but their attention will be particularly riveted by the Leningrad
woman who stood on the roof during the bombing with a boat hook and tongs
in order to protect her city from fire; the Leningrad air-raid warden who aided
the wounded amidst the still burning debris of the building… No, a city that
has nurtured such women cannot be conquered.20
Her poem “Courage” states, “We are not afraid though housetops fall.” Significantly,
however, it is “Russian speech” that is being protected, not the Soviet state.21 Her
long Poem without a Hero is dedicated to the Leningraders of World War II. Stu-
dents may miss the implications of her insistence on Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and
instructors may need to remind them of the bitterness many felt about the siege of
20
Anna Akhmatova, “An Address Broadcast on the Program ‘This Is Radio Leningrad,’”
in Akhmatova, My Half-Century, ed. Ronald Meyer (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1997), 259.
21
Kunitz and Hayward, Poems of Akhmatova, 125.
the city. There was a sense that the long siege could have been lifted earlier and that
Stalin, in particular, had not done all he could to prevent the huge casualties sustained
by the city. Typically, Akhmatova did not waste much emotional energy in attacking
her enemies; instead, her focus was on the bravery of the victims. In another poem,
“To Londoners,” she reflects on all the plays of Shakespeare, what “we’d rather read,”
instead of reading about the Blitz, the bombing by the Germans in 1940. The details
she picks from the poem set up the war itself, the vulnerable Juliet carried to her
grave “with songs and torches to lead” and the murderous Macbeth “in darkness as
in an abyss.”22 The war she sees as Shakespeare’s “twenty-fourth” drama—his folio
contains only twenty-three.
Curiously, though Akhmatova seems to have taken for granted that the Germans
acted immorally and does not have much time for them, she is not above using irony
about those who remained neutral during the war. Indifference seems to have been
a major failing in Akhmatova’s category of values. She had criticized those who ex-
iled themselves from Russia; “We [those who stayed] are the people without tears,
straighter than you … more proud.”23 After World War II, she shared her feelings
about a Swedish professor who came to see her:
I received a letter from a Swedish professor who is writing a book about me.
He wrote that he was coming to see me. And he did come, but I was in the
hospital, so he went there to see me. A fine fellow and he knows a lot, but the
most amazing thing was the blinding whiteness of his shirt. It was as white as
the wing of an angel. While we had two bloody wars and a lot of other blood,
the Swedes were washing and ironing that shirt.24
Probably the poor man had just purchased a new shirt to be respectful to a poet he ad-
mired, but the hospital image, representing the strains of those listed disasters, marks
Akhmatova’s contrasting fates.
Her use of autobiography to identify with others beyond herself can also been
seen in her interest in women’s issues. She and her friend, editor Lydia Chukovskaya,
were not above making fun of other women. When Akhmatova received one letter,
they categorized it as “rapturous, provincial, a typical woman’s letter.” Chukovskaya
said, “I tried to express my indignation at those female readers who imagine that
Akhmatova writes for women.”25 Fear of being seen as just a “woman’s poet” is
reflected in her comment that historians would lump Akhmatova with other female
writers who came from entirely different political positions—like Communist Larisa
Reisner or Symbolist Zinaida Gippius. “All of us … will be called ‘women of their
22
Anna Akhmatova, “To Londoners,” in Complete Poems, 2: 175.
23
Kunitz and Hayward, Poems of Akhmatova, 75.
24
Meyer, Akhmatova, My Half-Century, xiii.
25
Lydia Chukovskaya, The Akhmatova Journals, 1: 1938–41 (New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1994), 133.
time’… They are sure to find a common style.”26 The underlying rebellion against
the assumed male historians doing the evaluation does suggest, however, some of her
support for women’s rights. Sioban Dillion, in her essay “Anna Andreyevna Akhma-
tova: Overview,” deals with some of the complex ways the poet was both connected
to feminism and apart from it.27 Akhmatova’s very name is a story in itself. Her birth
name, Gorenko, was dropped at the request of her father, who did not want his name
associated with her poetry. Instead, Anna chose the name of a Tatar female relative.
Her poetry, in “Lot’s Wife,” often deals with women in rebellion. Instead of con-
demning Lot’s wife, who went against what she was told to do, Akhmatova asked,
“Who will weep for the woman … Who gave her life in a single glance.”28 Akhma-
tova also became annoyed at the Soviet establishment singling her out as being di-
vorced but writing biographies of male writers without mentioning their divorces.29
Annoyed, she also wondered why her looks mattered when those of Walter Scott did
not. Though her poetry deals with many aspects of love, the following may suggest
why there were three divorces in her life:
Submissive to you? You’re out of your mind!

I submit only to the will of the Lord,
I want neither thrills nor pain,
My husband—is a hangman, and his home—prison.30
One of the challenges of teaching history survey courses is how to include wom-
en’s history along with all the other material. Not only does Akhmatova’s poetry rep-
resent women’s views, but she also, in the integrity of her own life, illustrates some-
one who was “prepared to endure the unexpected gifts of Destiny.”31 Her divorced
first husband shot by the Soviets; her son imprisoned twice, friends like Mandelstam
dead in the camps, and her own life threatened—these were her ironic “gifts.” So
shunned was she when out of favor that she felt a leper with a rattle in her hand.
Though she was forced to write some pro-Soviet verses to save her son’s life, the bulk
of her work stood for honesty in human feeling.
It was this honesty that also makes Akhmatova part of a significant historic “clus-
ter.” Just as Owen was part of a network of writers and artists still seen as a significant
era in British cultural history, so Akhmatova was part of the Russian resistance to
Soviet impersonalization. Like Pasternak, Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, and, later,
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky, Akhmatova was a great writer, but she
26
Ibid., 1: 62.
27
Sioban Dillion, “Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova: Overview,” in Gay and Lesbian Litera-
ture, 2, ed. Tom Pendergast and Sara Pendergast (Detroit, MI: St. James Press, 1998).
28
Anna Akhmatova, “Lot’s Wife,” in Complete Poems, 1: 567.
29
Meyer, Akhmatova, My Half-Century, 32.
30
Anna Akhmatova, “Anno Domini MCMXXI,” in Complete Poems, 1: 553.
31
Anna Akhmatova, “Grand Confession,” in ibid., 2: 709.
also traveled in significant company. In teaching survey courses, I have often found
it easier for students to see individuals more clearly when compared to others. Rather
than dealing with a list of women suffragists, we examine Susan B. Anthony as ac-
tivist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton as intellectual, Carrie Chapman Catt as organizer, and
Lucy Stone as moderator. Rather than a mishmash of painters of the Renaissance, we
look at how each dealt with the question of light and perspective. Akhmatova was one
of those individuals who touched lives significantly, whether supporting Nadezhda
Mandelstam’s memorization of her dead husband’s poetry or encouraging the next
generation of poets like Brodsky. She was, Brodsky said, “the poet of human ties.”32
So often names march across history textbook pages like so many black dotted
ants. Often it is the most terrible examples of humanity that students come to know—
Stalin, Hitler, Genghis Khan. Akhmatova represents something else—courage, hu-
manity, and artistry. As she said, “I was with my people, then, / There, where my
people, unfortunately, were.”33
32
Brodsky, Less than One, 52.
33
Anna Akhmatova, “Requiem,” in Complete Poems, 2: 95.
Rethinking Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata and
Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground
Bryn Geffert
Even cursory readings of Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata and Dostoevsky’s Notes from
the Underground reveal numerous similarities: both are highly charged, ideological
works; both employ fictional narrators who exhibit behaviors and beliefs abhorrent
to their respective authors; both focus on fractured and abusive relations between the
sexes; the protagonists in each have withdrawn from society; and both tales provoke
and aggravate the reader. These similarities prompted Robert Louis Jackson’s conclu-
sion in a 1978 essay that The Kreutzer Sonata is “perhaps the most ‘Dostoevskian’”
work of Tolstoy. In that essay and in a subsequent work, he argued that fundamental
similarities can be found in the two works’ structure, characters, ideology, and use of
the protagonist/narrator.1
Admiration for Jackson’s insights notwithstanding, this essay contends that such
similarities are overstated. Jackson’s primary point—that certain common elements
can be identified in the works—is beyond dispute. But Jackson’s points of compar-
ison, particularly in his 1978 essay, also suggest profound differences that Jackson
either skips over lightly or ignores altogether.2 The Kreutzer Sonata and Notes from
the Underground are, at root, markedly different works concerned with quite differ-
ent problems.
Jackson identifies the following similarities in the two tales:
1. Both Pozdnyshev, the protagonist and narrator of The Kreutzer Sonata,

and the Underground Man, the protagonist and narrator of Notes from
1
Robert Louis Jackson, “Tolstoj’s Kreutzer Sonata and Dostoevskij’s Notes from the Under-
ground,” in American Contributions to the Eighth International Congress of Slavists: Zagreb
and Ljubljana, September 3–9, 1978, 2: Literature, ed. Victor Terras (Columbus, OH: Slavica
Publishers, 1978), 280–91; Jackson, “In the Darkness of the Night: Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata
and Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground,” in Dialogues with Dostoevsky: The Over-
whelming Questions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 208–27.
2
While the thrust of both pieces is similar, Jackson moderates some of his claims in the later
article, drawing a more nuanced comparison that admits to somewhat greater differences be-
tween the two works. This essay draws upon both pieces. The translations here are the author’s
unless otherwise noted.
474 Bryn Geffert
the Underground, strive ardently to maintain their freedom, and both

believe that freedom can be threatened by the commitment implied in
sexual relations. Both use money to distance themselves from such com-
mitments: the Underground Man tries to pay the prostitute Liza after sex,
and Pozdnyshev recollects that he once became “terribly upset when I
did not manage to pay a woman who, after apparently falling in love with
me, had given herself to me.”3
2. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy exhibit other, varying degrees of discomfort
with sex.
3. Dostoevsky’s views of the family “remarkably coincide with [Tolstoy’s]
views in The Kreutzer Sonata, views that assume a more frenetic expres-
sion, of course, in the monologue of Pozdnyshev.”4 Tolstoy’s attention to
such themes makes The Kreutzer Sonata “singularly ‘Dostoevskian.”5
4. Pozdnyshev and the Underground Man both relate their tales in the form
of confessions.
5. Both works are polemics, in which “a hard core of ideological, social, and
philosophical discussions are interwoven with personal narratives.” Both
constitute “a broad critique of society.”6
6. Pozdnyshev’s murder of his wife suggests the Underground Man’s “spir-
itual murder” of Liza. These crimes weigh on their consciences and pro-
vide the primary “psychological motivation” for their narratives.
7. Both the Underground Man and Pozdnyshev live on the periphery of so-
ciety, in darkness, from where they reveal disgusting truths about them-
selves and their contemporaries.
8. Both protagonists “give evidence of the triumph of biological, instinctual
man over rational, social man.”7
9. Both works employ an irrational hero to “simultaneously expose and ex-
emplify what in the author’s view is a social calamity.”
10. “The confessions of Pozdnyshev and of the Underground Man are out-
pourings of men who, although conscience-stricken, are bent on justify-
ing themselves.”8
11. Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy suggest ambivalence about their stories.
We may add other points of comparison to this list. Both Pozdnyshev and the Under-
ground Man serve as cautionary examples, warnings of the depths to which one can
3
Jackson, “Tolstoj’s Kreutzer Sonata and Dostoevskij’s Notes from the Underground,” 280;
and Jackson, “In the Darkness of the Night,” 209.
4
Jackson, “Tolstoj’s Kreutzer Sonata and Dostoevskij’s Notes from the Underground,” 284.
5
Jackson, “In the Darkness of the Night,” 209.
6
7
Ibid., 287; and Jackson, “In the Darkness of the Night,” 221.
8
Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata and Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground 475
sink by emulating their lives. John Kopper suggests that The Kreutzer Sonata “pro-
duces rituals of self-exposure,”9 a description that applies equally well to the Under-
ground Man’s tortured recollection of his treatment of the prostitute Liza. Both nar-
rators are excruciatingly unsympathetic. Both serve as mouthpieces for their authors
while simultaneously exhibiting behavior each author finds repellent. One, however,
must be careful of taking these parallels too far or suggesting that such similarities
imply similar goals or structural themes; these points of comparison also reflect deep
divisions in style and polemical intent.
Sexuality and Marriage
We must acknowledge, as Jackson notes, a striking similarity between the Under-

ground Man’s attempt to pay Liza for sex and Pozdnyshev’s recollection that he be-
came “terribly upset” when he “did not manage to pay a woman who, after apparently
falling in love with me, had given herself to me.”10 Indeed, both protagonists profess
to be entirely uninterested in a meaningful commitment beyond the physical act, and
both believe they can escape this commitment by paying for services rendered.
Jackson is wrong, however, to believe that these passages suggest a similar atti-
tude towards sex. Granted, neither Tolstoy nor Dostoevsky approves of the sex that
occurs in their stories, and both find their characters’ treatment of women repellent.
But Jackson moves to shaky ground when he suggests common approaches toward
sexuality and sensuality—“a certain similarity between Pozdnyshev’s apocalyptic
approach to marriage and sexuality and [Dostoevsky’s] own view of this matter.”11
Nothing in Notes from the Underground indicates an indictment of sex itself. The
Underground Man heaps criticism on himself for his verbal abuse of Liza, but he
never condemns the act of sex. He does speak of “something loathsome” rising in him
before their sexual encounter, but this “loathsome” feeling likely describes his desire
to dominate; we should not read it as a criticism of the sexual urge per se. Nothing in
Notes from the Underground suggests the “apocalyptic” approach to sexuality that
Jackson finds in The Kreutzer Sonata.
Thus, to develop a parallel between Pozdnyshev’s and Dostoevsky’s views on
sexuality, Jackson turns from Notes from the Underground to Dostoevsky’s other
writings, in which he identifies a “duality” in Dostoevsky’s attitudes toward sex. Jack-
son finds such a “duality” when comparing Dostoevsky’s condemnation of “swinish
sensuality with all its consequences” in his notebook on The Brothers Karamazov,
with Dostoevsky’s concurrent admiration for the “earthly Karamazovian” force in the
9
John Kopper, “Tolstoy and the Narrative of Sex: A Reading of ‘Father Sergius,’ ‘The Devil,’
and ‘The Kreutzer Sonata,’” in In the Shade of the Giant: Essays on Tolstoy, ed. Hugh McLean
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 179.
10
11
Ibid., 281.
476 Bryn Geffert
novel.12 But must an admiration for earthiness alongside a condemnation of “swin-

ish” sensuality constitute a duality? Or if we concede this suggestion momentarily
for the sake of argument, might not such a “duality” in fact suggest Dostoevsky’s
attempts to limit the bounds of acceptable earthiness?
Jackson argues that Dostoevsky “tends to identify the highest consciousness of
moral beatitude with personalities in whom the sexual instinct is sublimated, under-
developed, or crippled.”13 Such a sweeping statement invites elaboration that Jackson
does not provide. But were he able to make this case, it would not necessarily follow
that a “sublimated, underdeveloped, or crippled” sexual instinct in highly developed
characters implies the sort of vituperative condemnations of sexuality we find in The
Kreutzer Sonata. Even Jackson acknowledges that Dostoevsky “refuses to idealize
the asexual state.”14 (He concedes in the latter of his two pieces that “fundamental
differences separate Dostoevsky’s position from that of Tolstoy’s anti-hero,” but he
continues to insist on a “duality” in Dostoevsky’s views on marriage and sexuality.)15
Such an admission makes it difficult to understand how, exactly, The Kreutzer Sonata
reflects Dostoevsky’s thinking. There is nothing in all of Dostoevsky to suggest The
Kreutzer Sonata’s call for total chastity or Pozdnyshev’s characterization of sex as
“nasty and shameful” (merzko i stydno).16
Pozdnyshev describes sexual relations with his wife as spiritual murder, a debas-
ing, brutal act that leads to actual murder. But the Underground Man never points to
his sexual encounter with Liza as the basis for his treatment of her, and there is reason
to believe Dostoevsky means to suggest other causes (see below). It is clear that the
Underground Man feels trapped after sex, but we should assume such feelings stem
from the emotional commitment implied by sex rather than from the act itself. He be-
rates Liza for trusting him and loving him but never for sleeping with him. He abuses
Liza emotionally, but nothing in the narrative suggests physical abuse, and nothing
equates sexual contact with physical abuse.
Jackson also concludes that Dostoevsky’s views on marriage “remarkably co-
incide” with Tolstoy’s views in The Kreutzer Sonata, and he turns for evidence to a
passage about the resurrection in Dostoevsky’s notebook:
[For in the resurrection] (1) They do not get married and do not seek to pos-
sess—because there is no reason to; to develop, achieve one’s goals by means
of changing generations, is no longer necessary, and (2) marriage and seeking
12
Ibid., 283; and Jackson, “In the Darkness of the Night,” 213.
13
In his later draft Jackson substituted “sublimated, crippled, or dormant” (“In the Darkness of
the Night,” 213).
14
15
Jackson, “In the Darkness of the Night,” 214–15.
16
Lev Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii v dvadtsati tomakh (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe iz-
datel´stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1960–65), 12: 162.
to possess women is as it were the greatest deviation from humanism, the

complete isolation of the pair from everyone (little remains for everyone). The
family, that is the law of nature, but still an abnormal, and egotistical state in
the full sense, coming from man. The family—the most sacred thing of man
on earth, for by means of this law of nature man achieves the goal through de-
velopment (that is, through the change of generations). But at the same time,
also according to the same law of nature, in the name of the final ideal of his
goal, man must continuously deny it.17
But do such (somewhat cryptic) views of marriage “remarkably coincide”18 (or, in

Jackson’s latter essay, “at essential points coincide”)19 with Tolstoy’s views in The
Kreutzer Sonata? Dostoevsky here describes two states of being: one temporal and
one spiritual, one before the resurrection and one after. Marriage will prove unnec-
essary in the still-to-come celestial world, yet for now it remains, as he writes, “the
most sacred thing of man on earth.”
Other writings suggest that Dostoevsky bore nothing but respect for the temporal
ideal of marriage, family life, and children. His wife, Anna, wrote that upon the birth
of their child, Dostoevsky “knelt for a long time before my bed and kissed my hands.
For the first ten minutes we were so stunned with happiness that we did not know
whether we had been given a boy or a girl.”20 In The Devils, Shatov describes similar
rapture over a birth:
There were two, and suddenly a third person, a new spirit, whole [tselńyi],
complete [zakonchennyi], as if not from human hands; a new thought and a
new love, even frightening. And there is nothing more lofty [vyshe] in the
world!21
In his Diary of a Writer, Dostoevsky speaks of the “sanctity of the family” (sviatynia
semí), which can be “holy” (sviata).22
Such passages challenge any comparison between Dostoevsky’s attitudes to-
wards marriage and those of The Kreutzer Sonata, a work in which marriage, sexu-
ality, and even procreation are reviled: “Children are a torment [muchené], nothing
17
Jackson, “In the Darkness of the Night,” 214–15; translated slightly differently in Jack-
son, “Tolstoj’s Kreutzer Sonata and Dostoevskij’s Notes from the Underground,” 284; passage
from Fedor Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 30-ti tomakh, ed. V. G. Bazanov (Len-
ingrad: Nauka, 1972–88), 15: 173.
18
19
20
Geir Kjetsaa, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Writer’s Life, trans. Siri Hustvedt and David McDuff
(New York: Viking, 1987), 218.
21
Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 10: 452.
22
Ibid., 22: 72.
478 Bryn Geffert
more.”23 Making a case for an end to procreation, Pozdnyshev sardonically replies to

his listener’s objections
Yes, would not the human race perish?… Preach abstinence from childbear-
ing in the interest of greater pleasure [chtoby bol´she bylo priiatnosti]—that’s
allowed; but just hint at [zaiknis´] abstinence from childbearing in the name
of morality—and, gracious, what a cry [batiushki, kakoi krik]: as if the human
race would cease because every tenth person wants to stop being a swine?…
Why should it continue?… And why should we exist?24
Such sentiments echo Tolstoy’s statements in his nonfiction, and we can take Pozdny-
shev here to be a direct spokesman for Tolstoy. (Tolstoy once noted that the conclu-
sions of The Kreutzer Sonata appalled him, but he nevertheless found them impossi-
ble to dismiss.)25 But where, in all of Dostoevsky’s writings, are we to find a character
speaking for Dostoevsky who espouses sentiments such as these?
In The Kreutzer Sonata marriage appears as little more than economics: social
conventions dictate that women be treated as goods; women become commodities
marketed to others; and prearranged marriages force a woman to become “a slave in a
bazaar or bait in a trap” (raba na bazare, ili privada v kapkan).26 Even an ideal mar-
riage (at least society’s understandings of that ideal) is corrupt. Pozdnyshev carefully
notes that, in the midst of his debauchery, he continued to live what he considered “an
honest family life” (chestnaia semeinaia zhizn´).27
For Tolstoy and for Pozdnyshev marriage does not justify sex; it does not make
sex moral. Sex within marriage produces “nothing except the mutual hatred of part-
ners in crime [nenavist´ vzaimnaia soobshchnikov prestupleniia], both for the insti-
gation of and participation in the crime.”28 Pozdnyshev knows his wife “only as an
animal.” “I didn’t know then that ninety-nine percent of married people lived in a hell
[v takom zhe adu] such as the one in which I lived, and that it cannot be otherwise.”29
The presence of children, born of carnal relations, “not only did not improve our life
but poisoned it [otravlialo ee].”30
The Underground Man speaks of families in far more positive terms. He does
acknowledge that “Many families have trouble” (Mnogo iz-za etogo v semíakh
khuda byvaet), and he bemoans “those cursed families [v tekh semíakh prokliatykh]
23
Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 12: 169–70.
24
Ibid., 157.
25
26
Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 12: 152.
27
Ibid., 165.
28
Ibid., 162.
29
Ibid., 175.
30
Ibid., 173.
in which there is neither love nor God.”31 But he continues: “And what if all in the
family succeeds, if God blesses it, if the husband turns out to be good, loves you,
cherishes you, does not leave you! It is good in such a family!”32 True, such rhapso-
dizing represents at least in part the Underground Man’s self-aggrandizing pompos-
ity, an attempt to impress Liza by spewing lofty sentiment. But we need not dismiss
such sentiment simply because he puts it to ill use, or because he lacks the means to
live according to its precepts. An equally reasonable interpretation might suggest that
Dostoevsky here describes an ideal state eluding the Underground Man’s grasp. Dos-
toevsky employs this speech, in other words, not to indict the ideal, but to indict the
failure to reach it. Given Dostoevsky’s own admiration for the family, we may assume
that the Underground Man acts in this instance as a spokesman for Dostoevsky, as
an example of one who partially grasps the ideal but lacks any hope of obtaining it.
Narratives as Confessions
Jackson asserts that both The Kreutzer Sonata and Notes from the Underground can
be read as “confessional” narratives. He does not provide a definition of “the confes-
sional form,” although he seems to equate confession with the “outpourings of men
who are both conscience-stricken and bent on self-justification.”33
So do these works accord with common understandings of confessions? Nei-
ther can be considered a confession in Rousseau’s tradition. Ralph Matlaw, Carol
Flath, and others suggest that Notes from the Underground, is, in fact, a parody of
Rousseau’s Confessions and a subversion of the Enlightenment and Romantic ideals
it enshrines. Dostoevsky even considered borrowing Rousseau’s title as part of his
parody. Whereas Rousseau celebrates a Romantic fascination with innocence, the
Underground Man excoriates those intoxicated by Romanticism. Notes from the Un-
derground undermines the notion that one can account for oneself simply by attempt-
ing a sincere, honest history. Barbara Howard writes:
The underlying assumption of the Confessions that it is possible to resolve the

paradoxes and discontinuities of the self by relating its history (“l’histoire de
mon âme”) is rejected in the Notes.34
Unlike Rousseau, the Underground Man can resolve nothing. He retreats from the
world because he cannot resolve the seemingly irresolvable problem of acting in total
31
32
Ibid.
33
34
Barbara Howard, “The Rhetoric of Confession: Dostoevskij’s Notes from the Underground
and Rousseau’s Confessions,” Slavic and East European Journal 25, 4 (1981): 28.
480 Bryn Geffert
freedom.35 J. M. Coetzee observes that although the Underground Man promises a

confession that will outdo Rousseau’s in truthfulness, his confession “reveals nothing
so much as the helplessness of confession before the desire of the self to construct its
own truth.”36 Carol Flath terms Notes from the Underground an “anti-confession” or
a narrative by a narrator who repeatedly casts doubts on his own words. Rousseau
seeks certainty and clarity through his confession. But the Underground Man,
feeling no basis of certainty … cannot make decisions and act. He cannot

even act upon his own self-consciousness to freeze it in some position or
other, for it obeys its own laws. Nor can he regard himself as a responsible
agent [as does Rousseau], since accepting responsibility for oneself is a final
position.37
In Rousseau, self-consciousness leads to self-understanding and clarity. In Notes

from the Underground, self-consciousness simply feeds on itself.
It is thus more accurate to refer to Notes from the Underground as an apologia
than a confession. The Underground Man does admit his sickness—“I am a sick
man … I am an evil man. I am an unattractive man” (Ia chelovek bolńoi … Ia zloi
chelovek. Neprivlekatelńyi ia chelovek)38 —yet he strives to justify his behavior: he
proves unwilling and unable to reject or even modify it. While repeatedly asserting
that he writes only for himself, his habit of addressing “gentlemen” (gospodi) un-
derlines his supreme concern with the impression he conveys; he strives to convince
his readers of the inevitability (and hence, in a sense, rightness) of his actions. His
repeated (though unreliable and sporadic) self-deprecation is, in fact, a plea to be
understood, embraced, and even worshipped. Hence we should read Notes from the
Underground as the apologia of a self-destructive and self-hating man, who believes
against all reason (which he has largely abandoned) that he can make a sympathetic
case for his behavior.
Pozdnyshev, of course, makes no attempt to excuse his own behavior. He does
identify its external causes, but he never suggests that such causes absolve him of
guilt. His narrative aims not to win sympathy for his actions, but to renounce them.
Like Rousseau—whose work impressed Tolstoy—Pozdnyshev identifies the causes
premiéres of his behavior. Without ignoring enormous differences between Tolstoy
and Rousseau, we can identify a common quest for truth in both The Kreutzer Sonata
and The Confessions. Pozdnyshev could easily say with Rousseau: “Je me suis montré
35
I contend that Howard is wrong to claim that the Underground Man “lacks Rousseau’s
confidence [my emphasis] in his ability to discern the ‘causes premiéres’ (primary causes) of
his behavior” (ibid.). I will examine such causes later in this essay. But I accept Howard’s point
about his inability to escape the paradoxes in which he is caught.
36
J. M. Coetzee, “Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky,” Com-
parative Literature 37 (1985): 220.
37
Ibid., 216.
38
tel que je fus, méprisable et vil quand je l’ai été” (I have shown myself as I was, as
contemptible and vile when my behavior was such).39 Again, what the narrators of
The Kreutzer Sonata and The Confessions make of contemptible and vile behavior
differs significantly. The point here simply is that Pozdnyshev adheres to Rousseau’s
faith in the rightness of confession.
Pozdnyshev admits that his entire life was a waste. The Underground Man can-
not, for such an admission would deny his ability to act freely. Thus, Pozdnyshev can
ask forgiveness—“Forgive me” (Da, prostite)40 are his last words—but the Under-
ground Man cannot.
Pozdnyshev’s narrative assumes aspects of a religious confession: he acknowl-
edges his sin, retreats from that sin, and asks forgiveness. But the Underground Man,
as Carol Flath notes, cannot confess faithfully and thus cannot accept forgiveness.
He cannot ask forgiveness from a God he cannot accept. In fact, Flath finds a blas-
phemous mockery of God in the Underground Man’s attempt to make others ask
for his forgiveness, thus appropriating what rightly belongs to God. In Dostoevsky’s
well-known letter to his brother Michael (which complained of the censor’s removal
from Notes all references to Christ), Dostoevsky argues that only faith will release the
Underground Man from his imprisonment. But faith, of course, holds no place in the
Underground Man’s thought. And without faith in one who is higher, there remains
nobody to whom he can confess.
Motivation
Jackson is right to note that both Notes from the Underground and The Kreutzer
Sonata contain “a hard core of ideological, social, and philosophical discussion” and
that both constitute a “broad critique of society.”41 Both the Underground Man and
Pozdnyshev take frequent jabs at high society and at various popular, ideological po-
sitions. But although both works constitute critiques of society, those critiques differ
markedly. Dostoevsky suggests that the Underground Man’s intellectual and ideo-
logical positions account for his state, while Tolstoy and Pozdnyshev place the blame
on societal norms and permissiveness rather than on any political or philosophical
ideology.
We must concede that both narrators do, at times, criticize similar things. Both
take swipes at Romanticism. Pozdnyshev laments “It’s astonishing how complete is
the illusion that beauty is goodness” (Udivitelńoe delo, kakaia polnaia byvaet illiu-
ziia togo, chto krasota est´ dobro).42 He bemoans the confusion of “lofty sentiments”
39
Jean Jacques Rousseau, Les confessions (Paris: Bordas, 1966), 30.
40
41
Jackson, “Tolstoj’s Kreutzer Sonata and Dostoevskij’s Notes from the Underground,” 285;
and Jackson, “In the Darkness of the Night,” 217.
42
482 Bryn Geffert
(vysokye chuvstva) with simple lust.43 The Underground Man echoes these concerns:
“The more I became conscious of goodness, and of all that is ‘beautiful and lofty,’
the deeper I lowered myself into the mud and the more capable I became of getting
completely stuck in it” (Chem bol´she ia soznaval o dobre i o vsem etom “prekras-
nom i vysokom,” tem glubzhe ia i opuskalsia v moiu tinu i tem sposobnee byl sover-
shenno zaviaznut´ v nei).44 “Our romantic,” he concludes, is “a grand person [shirokii
chelovek] and the greatest rogue [perveishii plut] of all our rogues, I assure you of
that.”45
The polemical differences between the works, however, prevent us from taking
these similarities much farther. Upper-class society and its moral code serve as Pozd-
nyshev’s primary target: “I’m a landowner and a graduate of the university, and I was
a marshal of the nobility. “I lived before my marriage as all live, that is lecherously
[razvratno], and like all people of our circle living lecherously, I was sure that I lived
as was necessary. I thought I was a cute fellow and a fully moral man.”46
Society provides no moral guidance: “I never heard those older persons whose
opinions I respected say [promiscuity] was evil [durno]. On the contrary, I heard from
people I respected that it was good.”47 Even the best of society is immoral: “I know
several girls of higher society who were enthusiastically [s vostorgom] given by their
parents to syphilitics. Oh, oh the abomination [merzost´]!”48
Even seemingly innocuous social fashions come under attack.
But look at those unhappy and despised [prostitutes], and at the highest,
refined ladies: the apparel, the fashions, the perfumes, the baring of arms,
shoulders, and breasts, the tightly clothed, prominent rear, the passion for
little stones, for expensive, glittering things, the amusements, dances and mu-
sic, the singing.49
Pozdnyshev comes to hate all displays of conspicuous consumption: exchanging gifts,

gorging on sweets, expensive weddings, and flattery heaped on the wealthy. In short,
he directs his diatribe largely against the socioeconomic conventions of the society
he believes reduced him and his wife to their depraved state. “She was raised as the
position of women in our society requires [trebuet polozhenie zhenshchiny v nashem
obshchestve], and therefore as all women of the privileged classes without exception
43
Ibid., 12: 149.
44
45
Ibid., 5: 12.
46
Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 12: 142–43.
47
Ibid., 12: 144.
48
Ibid., 12: 147.
49
Ibid., 12: 150.
are raised, and how they cannot but be raised.”50 Almost every aspect of society bears
responsibility for the “refined conventions [svetskie usloviia] in which a man and
woman are allowed the greatest and most dangerous closeness [blizost´].” “You would
become a laughing-stock to other people if you prevented closeness at balls, closeness
of doctors with their female patients, closeness in the occupations of art, painting, and
especially music.”51 Thus, marriage and the marriage market constitute just one ex-
pression of a polluted society. As John Kopper notes, the microcosm of marriage rep-
licates “the codes of a larger universe, a society of wide-ranging permissiveness.”52
The Underground Man, on the other hand, directs his criticisms almost entirely
towards philosophy and ideology. Granted, we find hints of his age’s general corrup-
tion: “I was piteously developed [Ia byl boleznenno razvit], just as a man of our times
should be developed.”53 But societal norms do not inform the Underground Man’s be-
havior as they do Pozdnyshev’s. Immediately after admitting to his “morbid develop-
ment,” he criticizes similarly developed competitors— dismissing them as “obtuse”
(tupy) and like a “flock of sheep” (barany v stade)54 —an attack that reflects his desire
to rise above and prove himself superior to the other “sheep.” He does not strive, as
did Pozdnyshev, to be ordinary and enmeshed in convention; he strives, rather, to
become extraordinary. To be extraordinary, one must rise above such convention, not
be swept along by it.
Before continuing this thought, we must note Dostoevsky’s dual use of the Un-
derground Man, both as a spokesman against certain philosophical schools and as
a cautionary example of becoming enamored with these schools. The Underground
Man serves as both critic and victim. Dostoevsky employs him in the first sense—as
a direct spokesman—to take shots at positivism, utilitarianism, and Romanticism. He
criticizes Russia’s positivistic journalists. His long diatribe against a table of values
predetermining the best action for any given situation constitutes a jibe at utilitarian-
ism. Romanticism is not spared:
The characteristic of our romantic is to understand everything, to see ev-

erything and see often incomparably more clearly than our most positivistic
minds see; not to accept anyone or anything, but at the same time not to dis-
dain anything.55
But the Underground Man also represents the very ideologies he condemns. Like the
Romantics, he is overwhelmed with the beautiful and the elevated when imagining
himself as Liza’s savior. Like the utilitarians, he calculates endlessly how best to
50
Ibid., 12: 165.
51
Ibid., 12: 188.
52
Kopper, “Tolstoy and the Narrative of Sex,” 168.
53
54
Ibid.
55
Ibid., 5: 126.
484 Bryn Geffert
increase his standing and advantage. And like the positivists he so dislikes, he ob-
sesses over certainty: “You see, to begin to act you must first be completely at peace
[nuzho byt´ sovershenno uspokoennym predvaritelńo], without a doubt remaining.
Well, how am I, for example, to put myself at peace?”56 The answer, of course, is that
he cannot. He is disabled and unable to act; he retreats underground. The certainty he
criticizes in others he desires for himself, but he cannot obtain it. The most resolute
action he can muster is a refusal to move from the path of an oncoming officer, and
even this act requires repeated, tortuous tries before he succeeds.
Pozdnyshev, on the other hand, requires no certainty. His passions sweep him
along. He finds comfort in whatever norms his social class promotes. Action requires
no real decision on his part. He shows no concern over finding perfect truths or pre-
serving autonomy—he simply follows the crowd. Pozdnyshev’s interests are society’s
interests. The Underground Man’s interests are his own, and he knows they are his
own because he defines them against society (and even against his own welfare).
The question of rationalism or advantage does not much concern Pozdnyshev.
Even his relations with his wife—though selfish and vindictive—are driven more by
pure hatred than by any calculation of personal advantage. Lust (endorsed by society)
drives him. But advantage means everything to the Underground Man. His interac-
tions with Liza, with his school “friends,” with the officer, are all calculated to assert
his advantage. Freedom is the maximum advantage, and thus even actions injurious to
himself (the metaphor of running into the wall) have value if they preserve freedom:
But I repeat to you for the hundredth time, there is one case, only one, when
a man can purposely, consciously [soznatelńo] want for himself even that
which is harmful, stupid, even the stupidest—namely in order to have the
right to want for himself that which is stupidest.57
We may concede that Pozdnyshev does desire what turns out to be highly injurious
to himself (although he escapes a murder conviction, his life is in tatters); but the
motivation that leads to murder is informed by the lust that leads to hatred, not by a
conscious attempt to deny his self-interest in the name of freedom. Thus, although
both Pozdnyshev and the Underground Man act in similar ways towards women, the
motivations or passions behind their behavior differ markedly.
We can put all of this another way: the Underground Man is dissolute in large
part because he is seized with ideas; Pozdnyshev is dissolute because he capitulates
to societal norms. Ironically, the Underground Man retreats into inaction through
a failed, active engagement with ideas, while Pozdnyshev acts violently and deci-
sively due to his passive and unquestioning acceptance of society’s norms. The Un-
derground Man arrives at inaction through action, while Pozdnyshev arrives at action
through passivity.
56
Ibid., 5: 108.
57
Ibid., 115.
Murder
Jackson links Pozdnyshev’s murder of his wife to the Underground Man’s “symbolic
murder” of Liza. The Underground Man, writes Jackson, “fells Liza, as though with
an ax, by his cynical confession.”58
We must consider two questions here: Are both Pozdnyshev and the Underground
Man “murderers,” and are both Liza and Pozdnyshev’s wife “murdered”? There can
be no question that Pozdnyshev murders his wife. Tolstoy offers a graphic description
of the gruesome act. But it is not clear that the Underground Man “murders” Liza,
even in a metaphorical sense. He berates her, humiliates her, and tries to subjugate
her. But do such acts constitute “symbolic murder,” and, if so, how do we explain the
glimpses of real concern in his interaction with her, glimpses wholly absent in the last
days of Pozdnyshev’s relations with his wife? The Underground Man’s passions are
so befuddled that we cannot be sure he wants to destroy Liza. His professed desire to
save her need not be negated by the egotistical thrill he obtains by imagining himself
a savior.
It is tempting to dismiss any altruistic motive on the Underground Man’s part by
pointing to his own observation that “knavery so easily goes hand in hand with feel-
ing” (Da i plutovstvo ved´ tak legko uzhivaetsia s chuvstvom).59 But such an admis-
sion does not prove that he possesses no genuinely good feelings. In another attempt
to dismiss any altruistic motives he claims, “The game [igra], the game attracted me,”
but then he admits, “yet it was not only the game.”60 There is something more to his
feelings for Liza than his freedom-loving ego would have us, and him, believe.
As noted earlier, we must be cautious of accepting wholesale the Underground
Man’s attempts to impugn his own motives. When he criticizes himself for exercising
compassion, he attributes such compassion to “nerves” (nervy) and a tendency to “ex-
aggerate everything” (vse-to ia preuvelichivaiu).61 He dismisses his concern for Liza
as “sentimentality” and its expression as mockery. But is his concern nothing more
than sentiment? Or are his revisionist accounts of his motives a panicked attempt to
maintain autonomy in the face of a frightening commitment, a commitment he de-
cides to break by humiliating Liza? This latter possibility is equally reasonable, and
perhaps even more so, given his constant attempt to rework and subvert past state-
ments and actions. If we accept this latter possibility, we can more easily understand
his claim that his cruelty towards Liza “was not from the heart” (ne ot serdtsa).62 Such
an explanation also helps us understand his admission that “I did not know then that
even in fifteen years I would still picture Liza with that pitiful [zhalkii], distorted,
58
59
60
Ibid., 162.
61
Ibid., 166.
62
Ibid., 177.
486 Bryn Geffert
unnecessary smile she had at that minute.”63 In short, he cannot dismiss his real feel-
ings. He is torn, not because he loathes Liza, but because he fears the consequences
of loving her. “Would I not come to hate her [Razve ia ne voznenavizhu ee], perhaps
even tomorrow, namely because today I kissed her feet?”64 Hate becomes an artificial
means of preserving autonomy, not an expression of true passion. The Underground
Man presents himself as a murderer because those feelings incompatible with murder
threaten his independence.
If one of our protagonists is not a murderer, we must then ask whether both
victims are murdered. Again, there can be no argument that Pozdnyshev’s wife is
murdered, both in spirit and in body. Tolstoy portrays her—if not exactly as an ac-
complice or a deserving victim—then as a participant in the crass and degrading act
leading to the mutual hatred and spite that result in murder. Pozdnyshev’s wife is not
innocent. While it would be foolish and unjust to suggest that she deserves her fate
(even Pozdnyshev, who felt nothing but hatred towards her, recognizes she does not),
she is, like her husband, at least partially implicated in Tolstoy’s mind by her partici-
pation in sexual economics.
Liza, however, is innocent. She exhibits compassion and something akin to love
for the Underground Man despite of his humiliating treatment of her. When he tells
her that he laughs at her and will hate her—that he wants to reduce her to tears, humil-
iate her, and induce hysterics—she holds out her hands, throws her arms around him,
and kneels motionless beside him for a quarter hour: truly a breathtakingly selfless
and compassionate act.65 It is not the act of one who, as Jackson maintains, has been
murdered. Neither has Liza been subjugated. When the Underground Man presses
money into her hand, she leaves it on the table, maintaining a measure of self-respect.
We do not know what becomes of her, but our last glimpse is of a compassionate
woman who endures terrible treatment, exhibits love, and refuses to be treated as a
prostitute. Unlike Pozdnyshev’s wife, she lives, and with more than a scrap of dignity.
The Periphery of Society
Jackson is right, of course, that the Underground Man and Pozdnyshev live on the
periphery of society. He notes that both protagonists narrate their stories in darkness
(the darkness of the underground and the murky darkness of a train carriage). Both
have retreated from society, dispensing with society’s norms and prevailing ideolo-
gies. But it is worth asking how permanent their retreat is. Do they intend to remain
underground or on the periphery, stuck in their frustration and sin? The Underground
Man, alienated from society, mired in his irresolvable obsessions with autonomy and
self-interest, will never emerge from his morass apart from Christ. He is dead, as
dead as the casket bearing the prostitute to be buried in the Volkovo Cemetery.
63
Ibid., 166.
64
Ibid., 177.
65
Ibid., 173–74.
But we find hints that Pozdnyshev may be on his way to recovery. The Kreutzer
Sonata lacks the consistently strong death imagery found in Notes from the Under-
ground. Jackson is right to see the darkness of the railway carriage as an indication of
Pozdnyshev’s retreat and of his moral condition during the early parts of his narrative
(a condition Pozdnyshev describes as dead and rotted away). But Pozdnyshev’s entire
narration does not occur in darkness. Pozdnyshev and his listener are both conscious
of the coming dawn, and thus it is difficult to agree with Jackson that the train “is
itself an embodiment of apocalypse.”66
Pozdnyshev, we must admit, is wary of the dawn; he wants to tell his entire story
before sunrise: “We still have plenty of time, it’s not dawn yet [ne rassvetalo esh-
che].”67 But dawn is coming, and Pozdnyshev does not finish before it arrives. Towards
the end of the tale the atmosphere in the train turns from darkness to “semi-darkness”
(v polutemnom).68 The “half-light” of the coming dawn (v polusvete zari)69 suggests,
perhaps, the possibility of a partial rebirth. It is significant that Pozdnyshev makes no
protest nor expresses any discomfort with the coming light—a marked change from
his earlier complaint about a lamp.
This new light parallels developments in his own confession. Dawn approaches
as he relates the most horrific part of his tale—the most complete acknowledgment of
his sin and the immediate prelude to his plea for forgiveness. In other words, sunrise
coincides with his final, most open admission of his worst deed and with his unmit-
igated expression of remorse. The carriage lightens as he describes “the first time I
saw in [my wife] a human being” (v pervyi raz uvidal v nei cheloveka).70 He begins
to weep, sobbing and shaking.71 We need not agree with Jackson that the murder has
locked “him into an eternal prison of alternating hatred and remorse,”72 for here we
find sincere contrition, an admission of guilt that holds nothing back. Morning twi-
light suggests a new transparency in his emotions. The earlier desire for darkness,
real and metaphorical, is waning. He is not yet fully in the light (he covers himself
with a blanket just before his listener departs, and we never see the sun’s first rays),
but those rays approach from just beyond the horizon.
The Underground Man exhibits no such consistent or lasting remorse. He does, of
course, repeatedly castigate himself, and he even asks Liza for forgiveness, but these
acts do not represent true remorse—they are too inconsistent and too intermingled
with self-absorption and attempts at self-justification. Whereas Pozdnyshev pleads
(genuinely, we assume) for forgiveness, the Underground Man asks for forgiveness
66
67
68
Ibid., 197.
69
Ibid.
70
Ibid., 210.
71
Ibid., 211.
72
488 Bryn Geffert
as he concurrently tries to humiliate Liza—to push her symbolically back into prosti-
tution by pressing money into her hand. Carol Flath notes that the Underground Man
cannot confess faithfully and thus cannot ask for forgiveness. But Pozdnyshev does
both. And because he does, there is cause—however uncertain—for hope.

The roots of evil in Notes from the Underground differ fundamentally from the roots
of evil in The Kreutzer Sonata. Pozdnyshev’s tale demonstrates the consequences
of no self-control, that is, it demonstrates what happens when the sexual urge re-
ceives free reign, unencumbered and even encouraged by society’s skewed norms.
But the Underground Man, obsessed with the philosophy of his youth, reaps the con-
sequences of his desire for absolute control. A desire for control motivates nearly
everything he does and, in the end, does not do. He strives to be free of all strictures,
even those mandated by logic. He tries to control his fate absolutely, even if doing
so means acting contrary to his own interests. He wants to control others, and he is
willing to deny love and human feeling to gain such control. He gives himself up to
nobody—not even (and, perhaps, most important) to Christ. In the end, he can con-
trol nothing, not even his thoughts: his retreat to the underground represents the final
confirmation of his failure.
Pozdnyshev, on the other hand, possesses no desire to control himself prior to his
confession. He is governed by passions. Those mores to which we often attribute a
controlling function—notions of propriety, sentiment, convention—only legitimize
and exacerbate his baser instincts, creating a man totally out of control. It is ironic
that this lack of control leads to a desire for absolute control, concluding with the
murder (the ultimate form of control) of his wife. In this sense, at least, the result for
Pozdnyshev is the same as for the Underground Man—a final, desperate attempt at
total control that spirals totally out of control.
But the paths that lead to this desire could not be more different. And only Pozd-
nyshev chooses the path to repentance and forgiveness.
From Scylla to Charybdis: Discontent with Employment and
Education in the Early Soviet State
Elizabeth A. Harry
For what did we shed workers’ blood?

—Party member and miner, February 1925
This essay examines one aspect of the tensions in the early years of communism in
Russia caused by continuing economic and social inequality, which contributed, near
the end of the 1920s, to the so-called Stalinist revolution—a revival of revolutionary
militancy, a renewed attempt to level society.1 In spite, or perhaps because of the
horrors of war and revolution from 1914 to 1921, there were in the early Soviet state
great expectations of a new and just society, expectations that were further fueled
by communist rhetoric and propaganda. When, in 1921, in an attempt to quell popu-
lar unrest and economic collapse, the Bolsheviks adopted the New Economic Policy
(NEP), those expectations were dashed.2
During the Russian Civil War (1919–21), grain requisitioning alienated virtually
the entire peasantry. At Lenin’s behest, in March 1921 the Bolsheviks instituted the
NEP, which, among other things, substituted grain seizure with a tax in kind, allow-
ing peasants to market their surplus. The government also legalized private trade, de-
nationalized and privatized small production (keeping control, however, of the “com-
manding heights” of the economy), and adopted budget austerities that led to a sharp
contraction in social services. Although they enabled a restoration in agriculture and
industrial production, these policies appeared, to many communists and nonparty cit-
izens, to represent the return of capitalism, social injustice, and the byvshie (literally,
“formers,” the old elites).
1
The epitaph at the beginning of this chapter quotes an appeal sent in February 1925 to
the party leadership from a party member and miner in the Shakhty region of the Donbass
who wrote to protest workers’ low wages. The supplicant found the situation unacceptable,
considering the revolution and workers’ contributions to industrial recovery and growth, and
especially in comparison to the considerably larger salaries of spetsy (specialists, i.e., the
technical intelligentsia). See Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsialńo-politicheskoi istorii
(RGASPI) f. 17, op. 84, d. 646, ll. 287–88.
2
NEP was a term used to describe an ad hoc policy.
490 Elizabeth A. Harry
The NEP of the 1920s has been idealized as a relatively open period in Russia’s
history, characterized by rapid social change, cultural experimentation, and eco-
nomic freedom.3 This social experimentation stood in stark contrast to the cultural
conformity and conservatism that characterized Stalinism. However, in spite of the
government’s efforts, many studies have illustrated that the 1920s were also years of
political and social chaos, economic disparity, and deep anxiety over national—and
individual—prospects.4 A long-standing sense of social injustice pervaded Russian
society, and the revolution only fueled growing expectations of change. Instead of
social justice, the 1920s brought only new and widespread suffering—famine, in-
flation, unemployment. More importantly, deprivation and hardship were was not
shared equally by all. On the contrary, the limited economic opportunities afforded
by NEP enriched private entrepreneurs, government officials, speculators, and the
ubiquitous middlemen who plied trade and plundered state industry. While the work-
ers suffered from cutbacks, the Nepmen (private entrepreneurs) reaped profits, and
industrial specialists were paid increasingly higher salaries. Moreover, NEP seemed
to favor the interests of the stronger peasants over those of the poor peasants and
workers. In short, NEP brought economic growth and cultural freedom, but exacer-
bated economic and social disparities. In doing so, it violated the egalitarian assump-
tions of the October Revolution and contributed to the popular perception that the
Bolsheviks had abandoned socialism. These policies and developments later brought
grave social and political consequences.
3
See Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the
Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). For a recent comparative
study on how twentieth-century communist regimes in Russia, China, and Cuba attempted to
create new, superior human beings on which the construction of new societies would depend,
see Yinghong Cheng, Creating the “New Man”: From Enlightenment Ideals to Socialist Real-
ities (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009). A recent work, which argues that the effort
to construct new human beings was based not on Bolshevik ideology but on modern Western
state practices that both the Russian and Soviet governments imitated, is David Hoffman,
Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914–1939 (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2011). On similar efforts by the Provisional Government and the
soviets to enlighten and remake Russian citizens during 1917, see Sarah Badcock, “Talking to
the People and Shaping Revolution: The Drive for Enlightenment in Revolutionary Russia,”
The Russian Review 65, 4 (2006): 617–36.
4
A major collection of articles on the problems of NEP is Andrei K. Sokolov, ed., NEP v
kontekste istoricheskogo razvitiia Rossii XX veka (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN,
2001). Sokolov, “Istoricheskoe znachenie NEPa,” 6–12, bemoans the tendency to view NEP
outside its historical context, namely, the difficulties inherent in a volatile and thus unstable
Soviet society and government immediately following the revolution. Sokolov is not specific
about what caused NEP’s demise but suggests, among other causes, unemployment. In another
article in the same collection, contrary to the tendency among historians to view the failure
of NEP in a lack of political liberalization to accompany economic liberalization, G. B. Ku-
likova posits the existence of a “political NEP.” See “NEP i problema vovlecheniia mass v
deiatelńost´ gosudarstva,” 86.
Discontent with Employment and Education in the Early Soviet State 491
Recent studies exposed numerous areas of conflict and tension in 1920s Rus-
sia—an abiding, angry resentment among the lower social orders within the soci-
ety—that exploded at the end of the decade in the “Great Turn” under Stalin.5 This
essay explores and decodes the meanings that lay beneath the expressions of rage and
5
Some notable studies that have focused on discontent during NEP, particularly among key
groups, begin with Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union
1921–1934 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), a pioneering work on the social
history of the Soviet Union. Fitzpatrick examined the Soviet education system during NEP
and showed that higher education at first retained its prerevolutionary character in instructors,
student body, and philosophy, but during the Cultural Revolution opened its doors to a new
generation of Red specialists and administrators who would form the future Soviet ruling
class. See also Peter Konecny, “Chaos on Campus: The 1924 Student Proverka in Leningrad,”
Europe-Asia Studies 46, 4 (1994): 617–35. On worker-peasant tensions, see Douglas Weiner,
“Razmychka? Urban Unemployment and Peasant In-Migration as Sources of Social Conflict,”
in Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture, ed. Sheila Fitz-
patrick, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1991), 144–55. Other contributions to the same volume on the working class include John B.
Hatch, “Labor Conflict in Moscow, 1921–1925”; Diane P. Koenker, “Class and Consciousness
in a Socialist Society: Workers in the Printing Trades during NEP”; and Wendy Z. Goldman,
“Working-Class Women and the ‘Withering Away’ of the Family: Popular Responses to Fam-
ily Policy.” See also Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Ronald G. Suny, eds., Making Workers Soviet:
Power, Class, and Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); William J. Chase,
Workers, Society, and the Soviet State: Labor and Life in Moscow, 1918–1929 (Urbana: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 1987); David L. Hoffmann, “Land, Freedom, and Discontent: Russian
Peasants of the Central Industrial Region prior to Collectivisation,” Europe-Asia Studies 46,
4 (1994): 637–48; Lynn Viola, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of
Soviet Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); and Mark von Hagen, Sol-
diers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). For a study of the NEP period in general, see
Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society between Revolutions, 1918–1929 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Recently, the study of NEP has expanded with the founding of the journal The NEP
Era, 1921–1928, edited by Alexis Pogorelskin at the University of Minnesota–Duluth. In an
issue of Russian History/Histoire russe devoted to the journal’s inauguration (the first volume
appeared in 2007 as The NEP Era: Soviet Russia 1921–1928), Pogorelskin noted that during
the 1990s, NEP historiography was sharply divided between East and West, the Russians con-
centrating on politics, and Western scholars, particularly Americans, focusing on the social
history of the period (“Guest Editor’s Introduction: The Politics of NEP and the Politics of Its
Historiography,” Russian History/Histoire russe 27, 4 [2000]: 377–79). This is an interesting
observation, considering its possible relevance for the debate on how Stalinism developed—
from above or below. However, the social history of NEP and its problems was subsequently
addressed in archival studies by other Russian scholars, including Andrei Sokolov, whose
work on examining NEP’s social history through letters to the center is discussed below. On
the question of NEP discontent, see my essay based on the present work, “Petitioners and
Their Discontents: The Lost Generation of the 1920s,” The NEP Era: Soviet Russia 1921–1928
2 (2008): 61–80.
animosity, thereby providing a dynamic picture of the frustrations and resentments

during the NEP.6
NEP was not merely an economic system. The individualism and private en-
terprise of the 1920s permeated all aspects of society, as any Marxist would expect:
economic relationships were reflected throughout society and culture. Seven years
of war and revolution left millions of people indigent and desperate. But with NEP,
the Communist government apparently abandoned an egalitarian solution to the cri-
sis—in effect, Russia was no longer communist. For many citizens, NEP signified
abandonment of themselves and the revolution. Far from constructing an egalitarian
socialist society that would ensure material security, NEP unwittingly promoted class
differentiation and impeded an equitable distribution of material resources. The revo-
lution thus underwent a mutation; for average people, the collective struggle became
an individual struggle, just as in a capitalist state; individuals could not rely on the
collective for protection, but were left to sink or swim on their own, competing for
work and survival. In short, the collective struggle became an individual struggle to
gain admittance into the collective.
The collective per se exhibited stratification. Egalitarianism became passé; so-
cial Darwinism prevailed; competition replaced cooperation as the predominant eco-
nomic and social ethic. This change in course dashed the expectations of those who
viewed the communist revolution as an antidote to the evils of prewar Russia; suppli-
cants found this new emphasis on individuality and independence inconsistent with
socialism. Indeed, it was noted that individual existence in the free market system
was more difficult under NEP than it had been before the revolution, or under similar
systems in the West.
Growing unemployment during NEP aggravated competition for survival.
Among the unemployed, women and youth were disproportionately represented, al-
though even party membership or Red Army service did not ensure employment.
Ubiquitous complaints reached the central leadership from communists and veterans,
who were worn out from sacrifice and overwork, and now discarded. Their appeals
were rife with expressions of incredulity and indignation at their treatment by the
government they had brought to power.
Unemployed people shared a pervasive sense of hopelessness and uselessness.
Supplicants commonly described the pain of being a burden in a system that vilified
idleness. The irony of being unemployed in a workers’ state was not lost on the unem-
ployed themselves. In the new communist society, idleness was perceived as crimi-
nal; thus, even the involuntarily idle often sought to demonstrate in their appeals that
they were blameless in their indigence.
Both the party leadership and society at large were aware that high unemploy-
ment, especially of communists, presented political and security risks. Political un-
rest among the unemployed caused weakness and disunity in the party. And a weak
party doubtless would encourage opposition both internally and externally. Average
6
The use of letters to the center to examine the problems of NEP society was first done by
Andrei K. Sokolov, gen. ed., Golos naroda: Pis´ma i otkliki riadovykh sovetskikh grazhdan o
sobytiiakh 1918–1932 gg. (Moscow: Rosspen, 1998).
communists and nonparty citizens alike, incredulous that a country of such vast re-
sources was unable to support its population, shared the leadership’s concern.
Fear of unemployment contributed to demands for education and job training. On
the one hand, the jobless hoped to improve their marketability through higher educa-
tion and specialized courses; on the other, those already employed sought education
for job security. Obtaining higher education came to be considered a prerequisite for
entering, or remaining within, the newly competitive socialist collective. And in a
culture in which education traditionally defined elite status, citizens with ambition
to rise above their circumstances and communists newly promoted to positions of
greater authority felt inadequate without education. Vydvizhentsy (workers promoted
to administrative ranks) hoped that education would raise their self-confidence. For
their part, cultured citizens and even party leaders held a thinly veiled contempt for
the uneducated that discouraged their inclusion in the vanguard of the proletariat.
Because of the limited resources of the early Soviet government, however, educa-
tion, like other branches of government, operated on a restricted budget. The system
could not even remotely satisfy the demand, especially for higher education. This
situation further threatened the building of socialist society; unequal access to edu-
cation meant unequal access to the fruits of education. During NEP, higher education
remained especially impervious to the throngs of workers and peasants clamoring
for admission. Administrators and professors bemoaned the influx of “zero” students
entering universities with little preparation and a working-class background. Since,
therefore, the education system could not, or would not, meet the demand, the govern-
ment made admission to courses and schools more difficult through arbitrary imped-
iments and requirements. Moreover, poverty and, in the case of peasants, simple lack
of access to the most basic tools of education impeded advancement.
Both the Bolsheviks and widespread elements throughout society assumed that
the Soviet Union would have to raise the general level of education and culture of its
population to compete with the West, particularly with the English and Americans,
who were used as a yardstick for material success. Thus, many Soviet citizens en-
deavored to do their duty and educate themselves. Unfortunately, many fulfilled that
duty, only to find that they remained unemployed. Their frustration was profound.
Mutation of the Revolutionary Struggle
Lenin’s abandonment of radical communism in 1921, intended as a temporary change

in economic strategy, meant that both individual businesses and individuals would
have to survive on their own.7 According to one observer, the principal change under
the new system was that suddenly “the bulk of the population was obliged to shift for
7
In his study of Moscow metal workers, Kevin Murphy concluded that as NEP matured, the
threat of unemployment eroded worker solidarity and collective action and paved the way for
Stalinism. See Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory
(2005; repr., Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2007), 226.
themselves [as in the West] … only [it was] vastly more difficult.”8 Security, the real
benefit that people hoped to gain in their social contract with the government under
communism, no longer formed part of the bargain; the contract was null and void. A
young, unemployed woman from Baku, abandoned by her relatives and slowly dying
from starvation, pleaded with Stalin for work of any kind, lamenting that “on top of
everything else, I am utterly alone.”9
In effect, with the introduction of NEP in 1921, the definition of revolution
changed. For the majority, the market made competition for work and survival the
goals of everyday life. In May 1923, the party secretary of Kostroma guberniia (prov-
ince) noted in a confidential letter to the Central Committee a “great surge of revolu-
tionary spirit” among peasant and working-class youth, who were joining the Kom-
somol (Communist Youth League) in record numbers. The secretary noted, however,
that, “in any case, the incentive [to join] is material.”10
Competition for resources became the route to survival not only on an individ-
ual plane, but also on the organizational level throughout the government and party
apparatus, discouraging cooperation and consultation among government agencies.
Organizations and factories chafing at economic independence became indignant at
the suggestion that a socialist government would sooner see the demise of industry
and, consequently, of jobs than subsidize their operations. In a March 1922 letter to
an administrator of Glavmetall (central administration for the metallurgical indus-
try), the director of the automobile trust TsUGAZ protested the recommendation to
turn over auto factories within the trust to khozraschet (cost accounting; industrial
self-sufficiency under NEP), arguing that such a measure would sound the factories’
death knell. The director appealed to the administrator, “not only as the director of
TsUGAZ, but also as member of a party to which we both have the honor of belong-
ing.” As it was, the director observed, workers were on the verge of striking at the
factories because TsUGAZ did not have the money to pay them and was struggling to
fill orders under a shrinking credit supply. The director concluded that
already in two or three weeks in such a situation, the auto factories will die a
natural death from disintegration. Personally, I do not have the least desire to
be their gravedigger.… For four years I scraped along during the Republic’s
most difficult time.…
In your position you can find some obliging people who will not explain
themselves to you with long letters, but who will do everything you want
them to, but I, happily, cannot. I consider myself responsible to the revolution.
8
Edwin Ware Hullinger, The Reforging of Russia (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1925), 7.
9
RGASPI f. 17, op. 85, d. 517, l. 65. There is evidence that Stalin actually helped the woman;
at least, he gave instructions to that effect: l. 64 is a directive to Narkomtrud (People’s Com-
missariat of Labor) to find her work. But this type of attention, especially to a nonparty citizen,
seems to have been unusual. In the large sample of letters used for this study, appeals from
women to the central party leadership on any subject were rare.
10
Ibid., op. 67, d. 109, ll. 163–71.
Echoing this message, an auto factory director sent a long discourse to the govern-
ment on the history of the automobile industry in foreign countries, arguing that
nowhere was a national auto industry able to thrive without “consistent government
support.”11 But in the Soviet situation, that support was not forthcoming, either for
the auto industry or for individual citizens. As the factory director suggested, many
found this new emphasis on individualism inconsistent with socialism.
Unemployment and Abandonment
As the preceding discussion implies, building socialism in NEP Russia became not
only difficult but, ideologically, an oxymoron. There was palpable and widespread
concern that the revolution’s intended beneficiaries were not receiving an equal
chance to participate in the construction of Soviet society. That perception grew
along with the rate of unemployment, which John Maynard Keynes described in the
mid-1920s as “severe and increasing.”12 The plight of the indigent was exacerbated
by the Soviet government’s inability to extend financial assistance to all those who
needed it: the unemployed; pensioners, invalids, workers, and peasants with incomes
below subsistence; and the armies of besprizorniki (homeless children) that roamed
the Soviet countryside.13
Rural migration exacerbated urban overcrowding and unemployment. Between
1923 and 1928, unemployment grew steadily, the national rate more than doubling,
and in Moscow, almost tripling. The higher rate in the capital was due to a constant
rate of immigration of 100,000 per year. Moreover, these estimates were probably
low after 1925, when registration with the ineffectual labor exchanges became volun-
tary. As many appeals to the center indicate, the unemployed held out little hope for
finding work through labor exchanges and often did not bother to register with them.
After 1925, there was a “free market” in labor, meaning that employers had even
more freedom to hire whom they would. In practice, this meant that skilled workers
and union members were laid off in favor of migrant labor, peasants who were willing
to work under any conditions and for lower wages.14
11
Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki (RGAE) f. 4086, op. 1, d. 33, ll. 20–22, 24.
12
John Maynard Keynes, A Short View of Russia (London: L. and Virginia Woolf, 1925), 21.
13
Unemployment assistance from the Moscow government was well below the minimum
wage and did not extend to migrant laborers (who had to demonstrate three months’ residency
to obtain assistance). William J. Chase, Workers, Society, and the Soviet State: Labor and Life
in Moscow, 1918–1929 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 140, 159.
14
Ibid., 136–38, 144. Chase noted that economic necessity was the biggest cause for rural mi-
gration to the cities. He also noted that, until 1925, employers hired workers illegally—evad-
ing the labor exchange—in order to hire whom they wished. The trade unions exerted pressure
against this trend until November 1924, when peasant migrants were granted equal rights on
the exchange. From January 1925 to March 1927, the “free market” in labor gave employers
total control over hiring. The worsening of employment conditions for urban workers after
Among the various social groups, women consistently suffered most from un-
employment. Employers routinely laid off women to make room for men, as after de-
mobilization in 1921 and 1922, despite the government’s decree that women and men
should be considered on an equal basis for layoffs. Nor did women benefit after 1925,
when unskilled male peasant laborers were hired in preference to women. Under con-
ditions of severe unemployment, discrimination against women in the workforce held
true, even in traditionally female-dominated industries, such as textiles.15
By the late 1920s, unemployment had reached close to 20 percent, about the
rate on average experienced in the West during the Great Depression. This estimate
included only those officially registered by the trade unions and the 281 local labor
exchanges. Peasants swelling the urban workforce aggravated Lenin’s celebrated
smychka (worker-peasant alliance), causing resentment that later contributed to
worker support for the collectivization campaign under Stalin.16 Rural overpopulation
and competition for land caused friction in the village that would be exploited
through divide-and-conquer tactics by party activists and administrators during
collectivization.17
Competition for work created conflicts not only between workers and peasants,
but also among various strata of the working class. The working class was made up
of skilled and unskilled workers, who had significantly different goals. The skilled
labor force was opposed to wage equality after the revolution and fought to preserve
their relatively higher status. Nonetheless, because of a general superfluity of labor,
skilled workers scarcely fared better under NEP than the unskilled. Moreover, in the
campaign to raise productivity, management aggravated competition among workers,
whom they separated into productive, “proletarian” workers and “backward” workers
who opposed productivity campaigns. The result was that competition not only failed
to heighten “socialist corporate consciousness,” but further alienated workers from
the means of production.18
That lack of a collective consciousness was reflected dramatically in the fate of
the besprizorniki. The increasing exclusivity of the socialist collective, operating on
1925, combined with the general rise in unemployment, may account for the fact that appeals
to the center concerning unemployment appear more numerous during the later NEP years.
15
Ibid., 149–50. For a comprehensive discussion of women’s unemployment and poverty
during NEP—which in many cases drove them to prostitution—see Wendy Z. Goldman,
Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), especially chap. 3.
16
Weiner, “Razmychka?”, 144–55.
17
David L. Hoffmann, “Land, Freedom, and Discontent: Russian Peasants of the Central
Industrial Region prior to Collectivisation,” Europe-Asia Studies 46, 4 (1994): 637–48. Dis-
contented landless peasants made inroads throughout the decade into rural soviets, which
remained dominated by the “peasant farmers” for some time after the revolution. See Orlando
Figes, “The Village and Volost Soviet Elections of 1919,” Soviet Studies 40, 1 (1988): 21–45.
18
John B. Hatch, “Labor Conflict in Moscow, 1921–1925,” in Fitzpatrick, Rabinowitch, and
Stites, Russia in the Era of NEP, 58–71.
both material and emotional levels, becomes clear in the following. In May 1927 the
Central Committee received an appeal, “or more precisely a huge request,” from a
bezprizornik, an 18-year-old who had been orphaned at an early age. The supplicant
“grew up in train stations,” working at casual labor of various kinds to support him-
self, and saw that “everywhere [there was] injustice, everywhere the influence … of
NEP.” Eventually he found work in construction, and “began a new life, the life of a
producer.” But this newfound security and sense of purpose proved to be short-lived
when he lost his job “because of politics.” He apparently spoke out against the fac-
tory administration’s policies on wage rates and distribution of work among artels
(peasants’ or workers’ cooperatives). He was fired, and “the party cell could not do
anything about it.” Following this, the author found himself once again on the streets,
suffering from deep emptiness:
Now … when I see a meeting, hear the “hoorah!”, then I am prepared to give
everything to the masses, dissolve into them, tears uncontrollably well up in
my eyes, but this dream is cruelly choked by the deep root of bureaucratism
and narrow-mindedness. Explain to me and help me so that this [dream] in
my head will not be in vain, use me, for that, I only need the minimum for life
and nothing more.19
Notable here is the youth’s apparent willingness to fulfill whatever purpose the col-
lective required of him, in return for a chance to survive. The appeal further shows
how the loss of work and lack of inclusion caused not only material but also emotional
distress.20
The number of homeless children in the 1920s ranged from the conservative esti-
mate in the Bol´shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (Great Soviet Encyclopedia) of seven
million, to “the precise figure of 9,351,467 children to be found in an émigré source.”
Soviet officials attempting to find a remedy were stymied in their efforts both by
19
RGASPI f. 17, op. 85, d. 518, l. 23.
20
Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 293, claims that orphanages became fertile re-
cruiting grounds for the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. Alan Ball notes that while Narkom-
pros administered 90 percent of the detdoma (orphanages) during the 1920s, other government
agencies, including the OGPU, also operated detdoma, colonies, and clinics. The primary
difference between the detdoma run by Narkompros and those by OGPU was that the lat-
ter stressed discipline in reforming street children. Ball also notes that Feliks Dzerzhinskii,
head of the OGPU, was notorious for his concern for homeless children. Dzerzhinskii had
approached Narkompros head Lunacharskii as early as 1921 and insisted that the GPU assist in
the task of saving them. See Ball, And Now My Soul Is Hardened: Abandoned Children in So-
viet Russia, 1918–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 137, 157. A less sym-
pathetic assessment of Dzerzhinskii and his motives for helping abandoned children is given
by Lennard D. Gerson, The Secret Police in Lenin’s Russia (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1976), 128–29. The source for the claim that the NKVD recruited from the detdoma
apparently came from the US Air Force’s interviews of defectors from the Soviet secret police.
See Gerson, Secret Police, 296 n. 129.
the enormity of the problem and by the lack of resources under NEP. All govern-
ment agencies saw their budgets drastically reduced, including Narkompros (People’s
Commissariat of Enlightenment) and others responsible for the besprizorniki. The
burden for a solution fell on local government agencies that could not afford it. Offi-
cials found the causes for homelessness not only in the upheaval caused by war and
famine, but also in “the social conditions of the middle part of the decade,” specifi-
cally, rural youth escaping poverty and abuse or parental exploitation of their labor,
or seeking work and excitement in the city; family disintegration; and inadequate
schools for both regular and special education. The problem of the besprizorniki that
existed in the 1920s was not solved until the 1930s, when Stalin’s industrialization
drive offered employment opportunities for older children and educational opportu-
nities for younger ones.21
Young people comprised one of the biggest groups among the unemployed, since
they had neither seniority nor experience.22 In his letter of greeting to Lenin in Oc-
tober 1922, a representative of the Komsomol from Kursk province wrote that “for
us this greeting is symbolic. In Ilích, communist youth sees for itself a model in the
struggle against exploiters and, especially, in the current conditions of NEP which
sharply aggravate conditions of existence of youth.” The komsomolets (member of
the Communist Youth League) wished Lenin a speedy recovery, so that he might
continue to be a model for Soviet youth.23 But to what purpose, one might ask? Mem-
bers of the Komsomol, who were encouraged to educate themselves in preparation
for leadership in the campaign to build socialism, were presented with little opportu-
nity for building any future, socialist or otherwise. A komsomolets from a village in
Voronezh province wrote to Stalin in 1927, pleading for work. The youth had written
previously to Kalinin,24 but without result. His next appeal, to the head of the Komso-
mol, Comrade Chaplin, was equally fruitless: “his answer was, ‘we have in our ranks
1,000 unemployed komsomoltsy, and we cannot get work for everyone.’”25
The desperate situation of youth came through to the party leadership in count-
less appeals for work. A sixteen-year-old from Rostov-on-Don appealed in February
21
Margaret K. Stolee, “Homeless Children in the USSR, 1917–1957,” Soviet Studies 40, 1
(1988): 64–83. Of course, as Stolee observed, other initiatives under Stalin, such as collectiv-
ization and the resulting famine, caused new waves of besprizorniki.
22
Unemployment for juveniles became increasingly severe during NEP. The number of ju-
veniles employed in industry had dropped from 120,000 in 1921 to only 5,000 by 1923. High
unemployment exacerbated the plight of the besprizornye. Youth also fared poorly; by 1928,
75 percent of registered unemployed nationwide were ages 18 to 29. Like women, juveniles of-
ten were not hired for lack of experience, while older workers and union representatives often
viewed youth who received some job training as threats, since they were trained and willing to
work more intensively. See Chase, Workers, Society, and the Soviet State, 150–52.
23
RGASPI f. 5, op. 1, d. 1677, l. 2.
24
Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin was the nominal head of state of Russia and the Soviet Union
from 1919 to 1946, and one of the few Bolshevik leaders of peasant background.
25
RGASPI f. 17, op. 85, d. 516, l. 291.
1927 to Stalin for work of some kind. His father, a communist and inspector with
the railroad, had been killed three months earlier under the wheels of a train. Conse-
quently, he and a sister had to support a family of seven.26 The boy’s appeal appeared
to have met with some success. It merited a directive to the local party secretary to
find him some work.27 Even so, there is no evidence to indicate that Stalin’s directive
actually was implemented.
Another appeal from an orphan came in March 1927, from the eldest brother of
a family in Perm. His mother was dead and his father killed by the Whites during
the Civil War. Since his family had no other means of subsistence, the boy’s sisters
were entering into a life of prostitution in order to feed them. Their appeals for help
were rejected by the local party organization.28 A seventeen-year-old from Leningrad
appealed to Stalin in March of the same year, requesting help to find work, because
he possessed neither boots nor a coat to face the Leningrad winter.29 Another appeal
for work or some means of subsistence came from a komsomolets in Moscow, who
had enlisted in the Red Army at the age of sixteen, and whose family and friends back
home in Kaluga province were all dead. The supplicant wanted to avoid “wandering
around the city and being considered homeless.”30
Such a fate was harder still for civil war veterans. Making the transition to the
relative insecurity of NEP civilian life was difficult for former soldiers. Once demo-
bilization began in earnest, Red Army soldiers fell into sixth place in priority for food
rationing.31 Distraught, a former Red Army soldier from Nizhnii Novgorod whose
monthly pay of 22 rubles was insufficient to sustain his family implored the leaders
“to plot to fight NEP and strangle it like a dog, so that my mother and sister do not die
of hunger.”32 The veterans’ level of sacrifice and subsequent desperation were enor-
mous. In one pathetic case, a former soldier who had suffered serious wounds and
become addicted to morphine, appealed to Stalin to be euthanized.33
The government’s seeming disregard toward the revolution’s most ardent sup-
porters caused bitterness. One Civil War veteran, an invalid with ten years of service
in the army and a family of four, wrote: “My family and I live in inhuman conditions
… but people are still deaf, the revolution has still not reeducated them.… It is not
26
Ibid., l. 135.
27
Ibid., l. 134.
28
Ibid., l. 274.
29
Ibid., ll. 35–37.
30
Ibid., d. 517, l. 206.
31
Von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship, 8, 130.
32
RGASPI f. 17, op. 85, d. 517, l. 152.
33
Ibid., d. 518, ll. 207–10.
their affair if someone else is dying, as long as their own family enjoys well-being and
to see that causes pain in my heart.”34
In their frustrated search for employment, those who were not party members
often suspected that the latter were favored. Thus ran the appeal from a recently de-
mobilized peasant from Nizhnii Novgorod province. He expressed his indignation in
a letter written in April 1927, addressed not to Stalin but to Kalinin, “defender and
patron of the poor.” The peasant explained that he and his fellow peasant-soldiers had
been promised a new life upon demobilization. In exchange for fulfilling their duties
they would receive “work without having to stand in line, lumber on favorable terms,
privileged access to insurance and living space, and so on.” However, the soldiers en-
countered “just the opposite.” The supplicant had already gone four months without
a job. In his frustration and disillusionment, the peasant wondered where one could
find justice, and asked,
For what did I serve? The fate of tribulations and contempt of local authori-
ties? And all for what, for what… Now, wherever I go to present my services
for work they always ask me: “party member, trade union?” What stupid
questions. I maintain that all have an equal desire to live. Do party members
or trade union members really work more or carry more responsibility in the
Red Army? Not in the least.35
Yet, while nonparty citizens complained about the advantages that party cadres
enjoyed, the fact was that party membership was no guarantee of survival, let alone
privilege. One party member, a former fireman in Saratov province, pointed out his
willingness to go wherever the party sent him, and had moved “without complaint
… when it was necessary for the party.” But now he found himself in Saratov, where
the raikom (district-level party committee) was unable to find work not only for him,
but for many other fellow communists as well. The fireman ended his appeal by re-
questing that they give him “the opportunity to exist.”36 Another desperate appeal
came in September 1927 from a party member in Artemov raion (in the Sverdlovsk
region in the Urals). His wife, herself a former party worker, at the time cared for their
baby, and both husband and wife suffered from tuberculosis. The husband wrote his
appeal to the central government from jail, where he was serving time for assaulting
a militiaman in a state of drunken despair. He was concerned that his family had
neither winter clothes nor food.37 Another appeal for financial assistance came from a
party member, a family man with a wife and two children, who in 1921, while work-
ing for the party, had suffered “psychological damage” at the hands of bandits. The
34
Ibid., d. 517, l. 38.
35
Ibid., l. 34.
36
Ibid., d. 516, l. 192.
37
Ibid., d. 524, l. 201.
supplicant had been in and out of sanatoria and was unable to work, and his family
was starving:
I should move away, I should go far from home. I should make a clean break
in life, because at home I howl, I cry, I tear my hair out, I am a nervous
wreck—I see terrible visions. I beg you to save me. I leave home … I leave my
naked, hungry family. The children cry: “Papa, do not go, we want to eat.” …
It is shameful that a party member should have to write this, but I am telling
you this and howling like no one else.38
Many found it difficult to comprehend that ten years after the revolution, even party
members went untreated and unfed in a socialist state.
This reaction was common in appeals from veterans who were also party mem-
bers. These supplicants commonly expressed astonishment at the party’s failure to
provide either work or support. One appeal for work came from a komsomolets and
Red Army veteran from Astrakhan´. His father and brother had both been commu-
nists; the father was killed in the line of duty, and the brother disappeared in Moscow
“without a trace.” His sister had also been killed by “a band of Antonov’s men.”39
The supplicant himself had previously searched for work through the labor exchange
without result, and his appeal to the gubkom (province-level party committee) for
work had been refused, with the explanation that he was only a member of the Kom-
somol. Incredulous over the response, the komsomolets asked: “Would the authorities
really allow a revolutionary to die?”40
This astonishment is echoed in a letter to Kalinin in May 1927 from a komso-
molets from Vladimir province. The author appealed for work or a pension for his
family. The father and eldest son had been killed in the war. The family at first re-
ceived some assistance from the government, but subsequently got nothing, and the
young communist could not get work at the local factory. He fairly sputtered with
indignation:
And truly, Mikhail Ivanovich, look, we lost two for the cause of the October
Revolution, and the third worked on behalf of society. But now—they will not
give assistance or hire me—no help of any kind from anywhere—and truly
we will die—the ones who defended October, who gave up our lives—and
now, and now, although I have been a komsomolets since 1921, with pleasure
I would go and beat and cut up those communists who are sitting there now at
the Kolćhuginsk factory—sitting there sweating and do not know anything
else about it.… You know there are a lot of rich peasants around here who
38
Ibid., d. 523, l. 118.
39
A. A. Antonov was a Socialist Revolutionary and the leader of a major anti-Bolshevik peas-
ant revolt in the Tambov region at the end of the Civil War. The revolt was crushed in 1921, but
Antonov survived another year with a small band of followers.
40
RGASPI f. 17, op. 85, d. 524, l. 116.
are working, and they will be able to survive, but our brother-bedniak [poor
peasant] soon will not be returning.41
The young communist’s appeal strongly suggests the widespread suspicion among
unemployed supplicants that there were jobs for those with connections. As if in re-
sponse to this suspicion, the factory cell secretary, who was the object of the desper-
ate youth’s wrath, answered his charge by assuring the authorities that he would be
happy to hire the komsomolets as soon as there was a vacancy. But, as it was, there
were not enough positions open at the factory to hire other party members.42 Another
interesting and common aspect of this appeal is the tendency of exasperated suppli-
cants to turn their frustration on scapegoats or favored groups perceived to benefit, in
this case, “rich peasants.”
Nevertheless, the soldiers of the revolution had fulfilled their end of the bargain
and demanded that the government now do the same. Thus, a party candidate from
Zhitomir okrug (district) in Ukraine appealed to Stalin in June 1927 for work. The
supplicant had served as a commander and commissar in the Civil War and still had
bullet fragments in both legs, but could obtain neither work nor a pension. Despite
his sacrifice for the sake of the revolution, the veteran became “unnecessary,” an
outcome that clearly astonished him.43 Similarly, a former Red Army soldier sent his
demands to the central authorities in July 1927. After demobilization, he had been
hospitalized for some time but was subsequently unable to secure a place in a sanitar-
ium because he no longer served in the army. The soldier, who had worked as a daily
wage laborer in Moscow, had for two months been without work:
As for relatives, I have not had any since 1914.… I gave the best years of my
life … but now have been thrown out on the street, no good to anybody. I only
ask that I be allowed to exist. I need: 1. medical treatment. 2. means for sur-
vival.… I honestly fulfilled my duty until the last and to the letter [during the
Civil War].… I am convinced and believe now, as I did then, that we always
must defend [the revolution] against the white parasite.44
Evident here is the common progression from distress over individual insecurity to
the wish or expectation, even demand, to eliminate enemies.
Unemployed party members deeply resented their perceived dependence for
work on class enemies. In 1927 a party member from Chernigov province begged the
Central Committee
41
Ibid., d. 523, l. 42.
42
Ibid., l. 38.
43
Ibid., l. 142.
44
Ibid., l. 199.
to answer my question—why … is it impossible for a communist to find work

anywhere, and only go to meetings from which nothing good comes. I have
been out of the army for six months and cannot find work anywhere.… I
waited as long as I could, but now have to go to the nepman for work. Give
me an answer.45
As the rigors of war service and party work took their toll, veterans and party
members often became invalids due to disease, most commonly tuberculosis, or
nervous exhaustion. Thus, the party was constantly in need of new blood. On the
eve of the “Lenin enrollment” (recruitment of new party members in 1924), the vast
majority of old communists were suffering from “physical and moral exhaustion.”46
In early 1924, during internal discussions on party democracy, one party cell in an
electro-mechanical plant in Moscow province proposed an addendum to their reso-
lution on unity that was seemingly unrelated. The addendum urged that measures
be taken “as soon as possible to provide for party members losing their health on the
revolutionary front struggle.”47 The party’s appeal for unity, it seemed, prompted a
reciprocal appeal from party workers for support.
Besides incredulity and resentment, worn-out revolutionaries expressed a feeling
of uselessness. The feeling of emptiness outside the collective was most profound for
those who had once belonged to it. A request for work—from a twice-wounded Civil
War veteran from Cherepovets province—echoed a common refrain:
Why, comrades, when I was needed by Soviet Russia, then they knew me and
found me useful and considered me a son of the proletarian defense, but now
that I have been wounded and crippled, I became of no use to anybody?48
Along with anger and resentment, unemployed and abandoned communists and
veterans often expressed shame. The more desperate supplicants became, the more
deeply they felt their disgrace. A party member and Civil War veteran, four times
wounded during his service, appealed from Moscow in April 1927, as many did, “as
a communist,” hoping that the center would pay attention to one of their own, “with
a request to give me proper advice on how to get myself out of this stupid situation.”
The veteran and his family had no possessions to sell, and
to expect help was apparently useless, since I am nothing to the party. If some
party member named Tosov kicks the bucket from hunger, you can replace
him with anyone you please.… In fact, I myself would not be here crying for
help, but when you have a family and a hungry baby, you are prepared to do
45
Ibid., d. 517, l. 83.
46
T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the U.S.S.R. 1917–1967 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1968), 117.
47
RGASPI f. 17, op. 11, d. 205, l. 9.
48
Ibid., op. 85, d. 516, l. 303.
anything. I hope, comrade Stalin, that all the same you will give me an oppor-
tunity to escape from this situation.49
Similarly, in March 1927 an old revolutionary and party member from Voronezh
province who had worked for many years in the revolutionary underground ap-
pealed for assistance, because he and his wife were both ill. Together they received a
monthly pension of 11 rubles, 63 kopecks, and found themselves in “the most critical
circumstances … things could not be worse.” A previous appeal addressed to the
Central Committee had generated no help. The old communist now pleaded with
Stalin personally “not to allow a party member to be subjected to the ridicule of the
kulak element.”50
Another appeal came from a party member from Saratov province, who had been
a batrak (agricultural laborer) and served in the Civil War and who had contracted
tuberculosis. Unable to work or obtain support for medical treatment, he sent an as-
tonished appeal to Stalin:
How offensive, how disappointing, when I was healthy—I was necessary, but
when I became ill everyone turned away from me, did not even give me the
means to live, I cannot work.… Surely this cannot be! Surely I have earned
a cure from the government wherever necessary. Have I really earned this
contempt, even though I lost my health for the sake of the workers? Such
treatment of a worker is unfair.… It cannot be.51
Because Soviet society condemned it, idleness, voluntary or not, was perceived
as criminal. Those without work often felt that they were being punished for some
unnamed crime, their outrage and desperation mixed with guilt over unknown trans-
gressions. As Red Army units were disbanded, soldiers often saw demobilization as
a punishment for some error on their part.52
Many unemployed thus perceived their situation to be not merely shameful. Idle-
ness in a workers’ state implied political unreliability, and so unemployed supplicants
often sought to convince the party leadership that they should not be blamed, because
they were willing to work. In 1927 a komsomolets from Rostov-on-Don appealed to
Stalin for work. He had grown up in Penza province, but during the Civil War part
of “Antonov’s band” attacked his village; while defending their home, his father was
“cut to pieces with their sabers.” The youth became homeless and could not find work:
49
Ibid., d. 517, l. 57.
50
Ibid., d. 516, l. 249. Apparently, the government was not unwilling to extend assistance but
cautious in its response. The appeal merited a directive to the Voronezh gubkom to verify the
author’s history (ibid., l. 247).
51
Ibid., d. 523, l. 203.
52
Von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship, 176.
“I want to be a worker, but no one will give me the opportunity.”53 There was great
irony in the lack of work in a workers’ state, irony not lost on the unemployed them-
selves. The contradiction between party propaganda and reality was apparent in the
appeal of another komsomolets, a former batrak from Ukraine. He complained that
in the old days, “when there were landlords,” one was at least “free to earn money.”
But now, ten years after the revolution, there was no work to be had at all, and “to live
without work is very difficult.” The writer went on to lament that “to beg for help is
shameful, only ‘cripples’ beg, and everyone says that a healthy man needs to work,
and not beg. But where do you find work?”54
The party’s inability to take effective action to ease unemployment was devas-
tating. The unemployed and indigent commonly described their plight as bezvyk-
hodnyi (hopeless). This was a far cry from the psychological uplift communism had
promised to the proletariat. Supplicants often indicated that their appeals were a last
resort, as some of them were even considering suicide to escape the hopelessness
of their situation; their very lives depended on action from the center. Indeed, who
else was there for them, and thousands like them, to appeal to, when local officials
turned a deaf ear? One komsomolets, a bedniak and village correspondent from Smo-
lensk province, appealed for assistance.55 He was suffering from tuberculosis and
expressed no hope of recovery in his current circumstances. For him, a “passionate
[desire for] building Soviet power” was closely connected to escaping “cold, hunger,
want, [and] poverty.” He appealed to Stalin:
For a long time I have been a komsomolets and active within the school cell
as head secretary.… Comrades! Now, when I look back over this appeal ob-
jectively, it is too, too painful. Sometimes I think about killing myself, but …
I still want to live, I am still only twenty-two years old.… Comrade Stalin, I
make my request to you.56
Supplicants occasionally sought to establish some kind of personal connection with

the party leadership in an attempt to escape the killing anonymity. Thus, a komso-
molets in Siberia who had formerly served in the Red Army and was now an “invalid
of labor” requested only to see “the leader of the Comparty [Communist Party]” and
meet with him, “to receive advice for further existence.”57
53
RGASPI f. 17, op. 85, d. 524, l. 145.
54
Ibid., d. 517, l. 186.
55
The so-called Rabsel´kor (worker and peasant correspondent) movement was instituted in
the early Soviet state to enlist workers and peasants in contributing articles to Soviet journals
and thus become actively involved in the production of Soviet literature and propaganda.
56
RGASPI f. 17, op. 85, d. 524, l. 157. On the high party debate in the 1920s over the role and
function of the Rabsel´kor movement, see Jeremy Hicks, “From Conduits to Commanders:
Shifting Views of Worker Correspondents,” Revolutionary Russia 19, 2 (2006): 131–49.
57
RGASPI f. 17, op. 85, d. 517, l. 203.
In order to find work or assistance of any kind, however, one had to warrant
inclusion in the family of labor, and so supplicants who apparently were not workers
in the strict sense nevertheless were careful to identify themselves as such. Thus, an
actress with a worker-peasant theater in Moscow appealed to Stalin for help by em-
phasizing her working-class status. She had been married to a student in a military
academy, but they split up; she continued to live in his dormitory for lack of other
quarters. The actress had been rushed to the hospital by ambulance for an operation
and, upon returning, she discovered she was evicted. “That is the kind of country we
live in,” she wrote, “where laborers do not have the right to a place to live!”58 Notably,
the actress identifies herself not as an artist or performer, but as a worker.
Both the superfluity of the unemployed and their attempt to escape it through
connections were illustrated matter-of-factly by a party member writing to Stalin in
July 1927:
I am in the Bashkir organization of the VKP(b), which at the present time

in one district alone has ninety unemployed party members, the majority
of whom are workers, and without hope of receiving work anywhere. I find
myself in the most critical circumstances and have no means of existence.
I wish to go to Central Asia, or maybe still anywhere you see fit to send
me … or maybe I need to come to you, in order to get acquainted.… I have
been a worker and party member since 1919, voluntarily served in the Red
Army from 1918 to 1924 inclusive, and finished officers’ training with the …
R.K.K.A. I was demobilized in 1924. I await your answer with impatience.59
Political Risk of Unemployment
As the preceding discussion illustrates, the assumption that the communist govern-
ment would provide for its people was widespread, especially among party members
and veterans, who considered both their status and sacrifice beyond that of average
citizens. The great numbers of desperate and disaffected communists and Red Army
veterans, not to mention nonparty workers, posed a grave political danger of which
the Party was fully aware. For example, the Leningrad party committee directed
the labor exchange to extend special attention to communists and party candidates
through quotas, and reminded local party committees of their responsibility in find-
ing work for party members.60 Those who were unhappy with the Party’s treatment
could be drawn into opposition. Supplicants lost no time in making this point to the
center, trying to manipulate the leadership’s omnipresent fear of losing their tenuous
hold on power.
Disaffection and demands for security appear to have reached a peak in 1927,
coinciding with the apparent threat of war with England. Collective insecurity height-
58
Ibid., d. 523, l. 52.
59
Ibid., l. 57.
60
Ibid., op. 67, d. 352, ll. 36–37.
ened perceptions of individual insecurity and vice versa. A demobilized Red Army
soldier residing in Moscow had been placed with his family on a waiting list for an
apartment; others like him had been on the list for two or more years. Writing to
Stalin in 1927, the soldier wished to speak to the leader personally about the problem
since, as he pointed out, “the morale of the Red Army depends on such questions.”
The soldier wrote that, while serving in the army from 1921 to 1926, the only thing
that kept his spirits up was the promise of a good apartment in which to live “and, in
case of war, which will come for sure, my wife and baby would have their corner, and
no one could throw them out.”61
The year 1927 was also conspicuous in another regard: it was the tenth anniver-
sary of the October Revolution. The occasion caused many to reflect on how little
they, as individuals, had progressed and, by extension, how little had changed for
the masses of Soviet citizens. In October a party member and veteran of ten years’
service in the Red Army wrote to his comrades in the center to vent his anger. He
explained bitterly that he and his family would be celebrating the tenth anniversary of
the revolution starving and freezing to death in an unheated attic. Here, they had been
waiting in line for housing, having been registered with the Krasnaia Presnia district
soviet in Moscow, for almost a year. The supplicant appealed to the secretariat “as a
communist” and implored the central authorities to rectify his situation “as soon as
possible, since it is already getting colder.” The veteran warned that if “the highest
organs of the party could not take care of their members,” then perhaps it was time to
take them to court. He found such neglect of those who had served the revolution un-
acceptable. Lest his readers miss the point, the soldier left no doubt as to the possible
consequences of such neglect:
In my opinion, the Central Committee of the party needs to pay attention

not only to me, but to party members in general, and determine their situa-
tions and take appropriate measures to get the situation in hand, so that there
would be no “aggrieved” people among party members, for, as we say, the
“aggrieved” border on opposition.62
Just as the general population, party leaders were especially anxious over do-
mestic problems. In June 1924—just months after Lenin’s death—the Moscow party
committee discussions showed deep anxiety that the labor exchange was too “re-
mote” from the needs of the unemployed. Committee members suggested that the
unemployed be sent to the country to work as field hands, or to sanatoria or rest
homes. They also stressed the necessity of paying special attention to unemployed
trade union members, and of approaching the question of closing factories with the
“utmost care.”63
61
Ibid., op. 85, d. 521, ll. 139–40.
62
Ibid., d. 515, l. 75.
63
Ibid., op. 67, d. 122, ll. 1–2.
Solutions to Unemployment
Concern over unemployment was not limited to the party leadership. As early as
August 1923, a citizen from Kiev appealed for the second time to Trotsky to im-
press upon him the gravity of the problem of overpopulation and unemployment, and
the urgent need to colonize Siberia.64 He reminded Trotsky of Lenin’s injunction to
“repartition the earth” and criticized party leaders for their eagerness to send people
east, “when the talk was of Kolchak,” and for their silence now, “when there should be
discussion about the economic front in the East.”65 The supplicant continued:
We have, along with an abundance of vulgar elements that made their ap-
pearance especially with NEP and in the presence of an even greater number
of scum [mraz´], … a very large number of people (party and nonparty) for
whom the revolution is just now beginning.
Many of them are falling into apathy, some driven to disappointment, to
despair, nearly to suicide, not being able to reconcile reality with the ideal.
This is not just because they are unstable, or for lack of ability.… It means
that they need to be sent quickly to a different front, not military … but where
they can apply their energy … and where there will not be room for parasitic
elements to grow.66
Another letter came in 1927 from a Leningrad citizen, with a plan for liquidating
unemployment. The plan, based on his assumption that the Soviet Union had almost
unlimited land for resettlement, did not take into account the fact that the cities were
64
Russian colonization of Siberia began in the imperial period. The literature on peasant
resettlement is vast; major works include Donald Treadgold, The Great Siberian Migration:
Government and Peasant in Resettlement from Emancipation to the First World War (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957); Richard Pierce, Russian Central Asia, 1867–1917:
A Century of Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960); L. F. Skliarov,
Pereselenie i zemleustroistvo v Sibiri v gody Stolypinskoi agrarnoi reformy (Leningrad: Iz-
datel´stvo Leningradskogo universiteta, 1962); M. S. Simonova, “Pereselencheskii vopros v
agrarnoi politike samoderzhaviia v kontse xix–nachale xx v.,” in Ezhegodnik po agrarnoi
istorii vostochnoi Evropy 1965 g. (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1970); B. V.
Tikhonov, Pereseleniia v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine xix v.: Po materialam perepisi 1897 g. i
pasportnoi statistike (Moscow: Nauka, 1978); Barbara Anderson, Internal Migration during
Modernization in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1980); B. V. Ananich et al., Krizis samoderzhaviia v Rossii, 1895–1917 (Leningrad: Nauka,
1984); and E. E. Leizerovich, “Kolonizatsiia i razvitie Kazakhstana i Srednei Azii v xix–xx
vekakh: Dinamika natsionalńostei, transformatsiia khoziaistva, perspektivy regionov,” in
Rossiia i Vostok: Problemy vzaimodeistviia (Moscow: Institut vostokovedeniia RAN, 1993).
65
Alexander V. Kolchak was a commander of the Imperial Russian Navy who established an
anti-communist government in Siberia and led White Russian opposition to the Bolsheviks
during the Civil War from 1918 to 1920.
66
RGASPI f. 17, op. 84, d. 646, l. 464.
besieged by peasants looking for work. But to the supplicant, the very thought of
unemployment in the Soviet Union was inconceivable. He argued that in Western
countries, where every piece of land was privately owned, unemployment was the
“inevitable accompaniment” of the capitalist system. But in Russia, “all the land be-
longs to the laboring people.” Each should be able to have his share, and then no one
would go hungry.67
The Party ultimately offered an alternate solution to the question of land and
hunger. In 1925, reflecting current party policy toward the peasantry, at a guberni-
ia-level party conference in Smolensk the conferees concluded that
the unemployment situation is getting worse. To improve it, the peasants must
be allowed to become more prosperous, which will enable them to hire more
work hands. War Communism must go. One cannot close one’s eyes to the
fact that the top layer of peasants will become better off.… Nevertheless, this
policy is necessary for the state.68
The party resolution stands in notably stark contrast to the non-party Leningrader’s
more egalitarian solution.
Another egalitarian solution to the problem came from a “former military sailor”
from Vladimir, who in 1927 wrote to complain to Stalin that “the great mass of work-
ers and civil servants find themselves in the situation … that [NEP] strikes such
a heavy blow on the proletariat that one cannot even begin to say.”69 This self-ap-
pointed spokesman for the proletariat had several recommendations:
(1) instead of throwing out such a mass [of people] on the labor exchange, it
would be preferable to lower salaries and grant everyone the opportunity to
exist; (2) categorically prohibit the concentration of positions, especially in
the hands of those civil servants who work in two or more establishments and
receive separate salaries from each; (3) in hiring, do not take into consider-
ation seniority or education, but rather capacity to work; (4) prohibit manage-
ment from hiring workforce from outside of the labor exchange; (5) absolutely
give preference in hiring to workers and peasants first, since it is not neces-
sary to employ them the way they were … [under] the tsarist system, that is,
the workers and peasants were needed only for military service, but the rest
of the time … there was no work [for them].
The author of the appeal was a casualty of staff reductions, apparently in a legal of-
fice in which “the son of a priest, the son of a nobleman, an officer, a general, and so
on” were employed. Essentially, the sailor was protesting the privileges in pay and
67
Ibid., op. 85, d. 519, l. 170.
68
Olga A. Narkiewicz, The Making of the Soviet State Apparatus (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1970), 88–89.
69
RGASPI f. 17, op. 85, d. 516, ll. 123–26.
employment opportunities of white-collar workers—who were, in his mind, dom-

inated by former elites. Moreover, his frustration in 1927 over hiring from outside
the labor exchange is significant, since this practice became legal only in 1925, and
doubtlessly contributed to unemployed workers’ frustration. Finally, his reference to
the presumed advantages of those with education ironically points to both growing
anti-intelligentsia sentiment and growing demand among workers and peasants for
education to escape unemployment.
Employment through Education
For those seeking work, the question of acquiring education was more immediate
than for party theorists. Lenin and the leadership postulated that raising the general
standard of living was impossible without raising the cultural level of the population,
and elevating the people’s cultural level was impossible without education.70 Thus,
for many individual communists the immediate goal was to obtain an education,
which would lead to a better job and a higher standard of living, to more personal
freedom and leisure time, ultimately to a culturally richer and more satisfying ex-
istence—in short, to the type of existence previously enjoyed only by a small elite.
Literacy would grant them independence and control over their lives. It thus became
axiomatic that, as the population became educated, a redistribution of wealth would
occur—if opportunities for education were distributed equally, then the fruits of ed-
ucation would also be equal.
The education of the masses, however, would not take place overnight. A group
of students at a rabfak (workers’ faculty in higher educational institutions prepar-
ing undereducated workers and peasants for coursework) at the Moscow Institute of
Communications Engineers wrote to Lenin in September 1922:
The October fissure smashed the locks on the doors of this institute, through
which had tread only the legs of the bourgeois-noble. At first, workers and
peasants timidly began to percolate into the institute in insignificant num-
bers. These numbers that were insignificant in the beginning now have turned
into a wide, working-class torrent.71
70
On the Bolsheviks’ attempts to integrate and reform Soviet citizens through a government
literacy campaign during the 1920s, see Charles E. Clark, Uprooting Otherness: The Literacy
Campaign in NEP-Era Russia (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2000). The
author begins by citing (anti-Soviet/émigré?) scholarship suggesting that contrary to Soviet
government claims, literacy was on the rise in the late tsarist period. Clark asserts that peas-
ants resisted attempts to politicize education under the socialist campaigns and concludes that
the people generally resisted reformation attempts by the government during the 1920s. His
thesis is at odds with appeals used in this study; Clark also appears to treat the various groups
within Soviet society as monolithic (e.g., “the peasant”), with one common, unified agenda
(i.e., to use Soviet power to their own individual ends).
71
RGASPI f. 5, op. 1, d. 1678, l. 45.
Thanks to the revolution, the floodgates of education had opened to workers and peas-
ants. The numbers turned out to be overwhelming.72
Incentives to Education
In the competitive atmosphere of NEP, education became almost a prerequisite for

membership in the socialist collective. Anxiety over the future was omnipresent for
communists and nonparty citizens alike. Supplicants hoped that an education, or
more education, would assure their future prospects. Building a socialist society was
beginning to look a lot like building a capitalist society.
As in a capitalist society, the first consideration was material; most of those ap-
pealing to receive an education were primarily motivated by economic considerations.
For many, education offered the only escape. Thus, in May 1927, two komsomoltsy
from Georgia appealed to Stalin for the opportunity to continue their studies; the
translation from Georgian explains that, “from their letter, it is apparent that the boys
are very needy; they indicate that their economic situation is so bad that they have
considered suicide.”73 Similarly, in September 1927, a komsomolets and unemployed
factory and office worker sent an appeal to study to become an “engineer-mechanic,”
or to obtain work of some kind, “either in the mines or in an office, it does not matter
to me.”74 Another unskilled, semiliterate worker, requested help from Stalin to take
courses in machinery. The worker suffered from a nervous ailment contracted during
the Civil War, when the Whites attacked his home and family. Now, he had to support
his family on an insufficient income and was at the end of his rope. The supplicant’s
desperation was evident in his concluding words—Stalin could either shoot him or
help him; it was all the same to him.75
The unskilled and inexperienced were the most desperate in their struggle to
obtain work or education. In July 1927, a seventeen-year-old komsomolets appealed
to Stalin for help; he was unemployed, unskilled, and without connections. In short,
his prospects were bleak. He begged: “Save me from hunger and poverty and thieving
72
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union 1921–1934 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), examines the lower classes’ struggle for access
to and control over education, especially higher education. Many of the appeals that follow
shed light on the political trends and developments that Fitzpatrick discusses. William Chase,
Workers, Society, and the Soviet State, 151–52, notes that the party’s programs for job training
far exceeded the numbers of unemployed who required them. For an important discussion on
the rabfaky as social, political, and cultural battlegrounds during NEP, see also Christopher
Read, Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia: The Intelligentsia and the Transition from
Tsarism to Communism (London: Macmillan, 1990), chap. 5, “Compromise or Confrontation?
The Contours of Cultural Policy, 1923–5,” especially 220–29, “Cultural Policy in Practice:
The Workers’ Faculties (Rabfaky).”
73
RGASPI f. 17, op. 85, d. 523, l. 5.
74
Ibid., d. 524, l. 245.
75
Ibid., d. 514, l. 303.
and a thousand times I beg you, help me.” Pleading “simply from my worker’s heart
to send me to study,” the youth sought to persuade Stalin to assist him by pointing
out that “it would not cost you anything to help me, but would bring me great joy.”76
As in a capitalist society, in NEP Russia individuals sought an edge on their com-
rade-competitors. A worker from Pskov guberniia appealed for help: he had received
permission to attend a rabfak in Leningrad only to be refused for lack of space. “As
a member of the proletariat” the aspiring worker possessed a “very strong desire to
study,” because he felt he was ill-prepared for “white-collar-social-responsible work,
and I feared I would become marginalized and unemployed.”77 This was not an idle
fear. Another party member from Leningrad, a vydvizhenets, lost his position in the
railroad administration for lack of an engineering degree and appealed, in March
1927, to Stalin for “the opportunity to gain a technical education.” Neither the fact
that he was a Red Army veteran with a large extended family to support nor his years
of work apparently had made much difference in the decision to let the would-be
administrator go: “With the coming of [NEP], I entered the ranks of red specialists,
confronting and overcoming every difficulty, never dreaming that after five years of
work I would be laid off because I did not have an engineering degree.”78
The incentive to obtain an education, however, was not only material. Lenin had
said that the cultural level of the population as a whole was inadequate to the task of
government; thus, several appeals requested financial assistance from the center for
projects intended to raise the people’s cultural level. In January 1927, a citizen from
Ukraine wrote on behalf of a group organizing an “International Academy of the
Arts” to provide free education to children of poor workers and peasants in all arts,
“from theater to architecture.” The supplicant himself, who came from a poor peas-
ant background, had been a worker with the railroad for thirty years and a political
worker in the army, and his brother was in the Komsomol.79 A similar request came
from a Red Army soldier enrolled at a military academy in Nizhnii Novgorod. The
soldier, a Georgian by nationality, asked Stalin for costumes and other necessities to
stage theatrical productions for his school club, since, he argued, “Red Army men
have great cultural need.”80
In the early years of Soviet power, the vast majority of party members had little
formal education, and elites both in Russia and abroad bemoaned the general lack of
intelligence and administrative capability among communists. In describing a local
soviet in Simbirsk, one of the famine regions, a Western observer noted that
the commissars … are all young men in their twenties, except the chief, who
is perhaps in his early thirties.… none of them give the impression of much
76
Ibid., d. 523, l. 122.
77
Ibid., l. 224.
78
Ibid., d. 516, l. 267.
79
Ibid., d. 521, ll. 9–10.
80
Ibid., ll. 188–89.
education, great intelligence, or high character.… They are neither seri-

ous-minded nor reliable.81
This observer described Chekists (Soviet secret police) as “generally unintelligent

and … likely to misinterpret one’s meaning.”82 Another foreigner remarked that the
“proletariat, as such, were not fitted to wield supreme power—above all, not the peas-
ant class.… Nor was even the artisan class competent as a whole.”83 Young members
of the Komsomol were “fully convinced of their ability to rule Russia,” despite the
fact that, “according to Bukharin … 80 to 90 percent of them are political illiter-
ates.”84 These observations were naturally fed by doubts about the lower classes’
capability to rule in general, doubts that appeared as a matter of course to attach to
individual party members, regardless of their inherent or uncultivated abilities or
practical experience. Administrative competence was assumed, in short, to be a class
rather than an individual quality that depended on a background inaccessible per se
to the lower classes.
Many average communists were aware of the assumption that they were inher-
ently unsuited to government or administrative work. A nonparty specialist who
worked on the first Five-Year Plan remarked that workers in the administration made
great efforts to appear educated in the presence of technical specialists and admin-
istrative personnel.85 Such efforts no doubt stemmed partly from the frustration and
hostility of specialists forced to take directives from their less-educated directors.
At a meeting of the central administration of the Commissariat of Trade held in July
1925, the work of certain vydvizhentsy was discussed. The protocol stated that “con-
cerning our vydvizhentsy, it has been indicated that some of them adapt themselves,
and some are unsuitable. The main use of the vydvizhentsy was in [the area of] inspec-
tion. Comrade Shibailo … is of the opinion that vydvizhentsy already have practical
experience, but lack theoretical preparation to promote them to responsible work.”86
Thus, semiliterate workers and peasants once placed in positions of authority
were perpetually nagged by a sense of their own inadequacy. Party members pro-
moted to administrative positions often felt unprepared. In March 1927, a former
factory worker and party member of long standing from Tver guberniia appealed to
the center for admittance to an economics institute and for financial aid to support his
family. For four years, while holding various administrative posts in the economic
sphere, the supplicant had felt his knowledge inadequate to the tasks before him.
81
Frank Alfred Golder and Lincoln Hutchinson, On the Trail of the Russian Famine (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1927), 43–44.
82
Ibid., 100–01.
83
Anton Karlgren, Bolshevist Russia (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1927), 12–13.
84
Ibid., 57–61.
85
Vladimir V. Tchernavin, I Speak for the Silent (Boston: Hale, Cushman and Flint, 1935),
34–35.
86
RGAE f. 5240, op. 1, d. 4, l. 25.
With study at the university level, however, he felt he would be able “to cope.” The
real work of the revolution, of learning how to run the country, had overwhelmed the
vydvizhenets: “In the course of my work since the October Revolution in various …
posts, I became convinced that my devotion to the party alone was no longer enough;
I needed knowledge, and mine was shaky.”87
As some appeals suggest, however, party members’ feelings of inadequacy
stemmed from want not of ability but of a formal education that would legitimize
their power and authority; the sense of inadequacy was based not on a lack of edu-
cation, but on a lack of appearing educated. What vydvizhentsy often requested in
their appeals was thus not practical administrative training, but “a good Marxist ed-
ucation.” In their position as administrators in a party and a culture that prized the-
oretical knowledge, they felt a greater need for a theoretical grounding. This was the
request of a party member and metalworker by trade who had served in the Red Army
and occupied a number of party posts. Although elected to a position in the Tashkent
Obkom (regional party committee), “work with which I am completely satisfied,” the
supplicant felt deeply inadequate because he had “almost never studied anywhere.”88
There is nothing to suggest that the metalworker’s duties actually outstripped his
abilities.
Workers and party members aspiring to rise above their social and economic po-
sition experienced pressure, from within the party, to acquire theoretical knowledge
and culture. In November 1924, Stalin received an appeal from a worker and former
party member, who had been expelled during a purge the previous spring due, in part,
to “semiliterateness and lack of ambition to replenish his knowledge.” Answering
this charge, the supplicant argued that his political training was weak, because, while
a volunteer on the Polish front in 1920, the party did not allow him to complete any
systematic coursework. Nevertheless, noted the worker, he had endeavored to make
up for the deficiency on his own by studying “the program of all Russian [political]
parties and reading through if not all, then the majority of works published at the
time of the revolution.” The party had also charged the worker with “carelessness” in
his work, a charge that was “sharply contradicted” by recommendations filed on his
behalf by the factory cell. In fact, the worker argued, his work record at the factory
and as an activist within the party was exemplary; he himself had founded his factory
party cell.89
In seeking to rise within the new society, education would provide workers and
peasants not only theoretical knowledge but also a sense of confidence. In the work-
ers’ clubs established after the revolution, spontaneously and independently from the
party,
It was characteristic of the work in these circles [within the clubs] that further
education in all fields was envisaged. This did not mean a mere acquiring of
87
RGASPI f. 17, op. 85, d. 516, ll. 182–83.
88
Ibid., d. 517, l. 210.
89
Ibid., op. 84, d. 647, l. 103.
basic knowledge, but the opening of new fields which up to then had been
shut off from workers because of their economic and social situation. This in-
cluded a first visit to a theater or museum, learning to read and write, as well
as practicing one’s own artistic abilities or training in rhetorical skills in order
to facilitate one’s own confidence in articulating opinions and interests.90
What the workers lacked was not only what higher learning might provide for them
in practical terms. Education and culture continued to confer status even in postrevo-
lutionary society. Moreover, that value automatically adhered to those who possessed
such education and culture. As a batrak and komsomolets from Ukraine stated in his
appeal to Stalin for books (especially the collected works of Lenin), he knew that
Stalin was a great man, because “you yourself have written many books [and] bro-
chures,” in contrast to the supplicant himself, who “cannot write such books and do
not even own them.”91
Thus, self-esteem and respect from others was a powerful incentive to get an
education. Both rural and working-class communists harbored a great desire to learn
more about their party in order to remain connected to the elite. In 1924 a komso-
molets and factory worker from Belorussia appealed to his comrades in the Cen-
tral Committee to send him an “outline of Marxism and Leninism, and methods for
studying them.” The worker wanted
to understand these things myself; I have already begun to sort out a book
of Lenin’s on “State and Revolution,” … and therefore I beg you to send me
abstracts of books, some knowledge.… I would like to correspond with you;
I will write in detail about everything in the country.92
Similarly, a peasant from Viatka province, a party member and veteran of both World
War I and the Civil War, appealed to Stalin for an education. He had no cattle or any
other means with which to support his family of three, including his “little daughter
Roza.” The local party organs would not give him any work. He begged his “dear you
[ty] our leader, Comrade Stalin Iosif Vissarionovich, help me in this.” The supplicant
lamented that there were those “in our village who laugh at me.”93 Similarly, a father-
less batrak from Kharkov guberniia appealed to Stalin to help him gain admission to
“some kind of school,” because he feared he would be unable to do so, on his own, due
to “weak technical preparation.” Before the revolution he had been unable to study,
since “those who worked for the kulaks never studied.” The batrak, nevertheless,
taught himself to read and write, but after the revolution had to work once more “for
90
Gabriele Gorzka, “Proletarian Culture in Practice: Workers’ Clubs, 1917–1921,” in Essays
on Revolutionary Culture and Stalinism: Selected Papers from the Third World Congress for
Soviet and East European Studies, ed. John W. Strong (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1990), 39.
91
RGASPI f. 17, op. 85, d. 517, l. 72.
92
Ibid., op. 84, d. 647, ll. 117–18.
93
Ibid., op. 85, d. 517, l. 188.
the kulaks,” until he entered the Komsomol. His great desire for a formal education
apparently stemmed from a wish to be “on equal footing with intelligent comrades.”94
The idea that the country’s future wealth and prosperity depended on raising
the general level of education was widespread. In April 1927, a village teacher from
Kursk province appealed to Stalin for financial assistance to build a school. The ap-
peal clearly illustrates the assumption that there was a direct progression from educa-
tion to culture to wealth to power, for the individual as much as for the country as a
whole. As the teacher pointed out, the school would be a testament, on the eve of the
revolution’s tenth anniversary, to the Soviet government’s dedication to enlighten-
ment. He hoped that the school would make available to both children and adult peas-
ants “not only literacy, but also educated management of agriculture.” Ultimately, the
teacher hoped “to prove that our people could be as educated and rich as, for instance,
the Americans or the English.”95
Obstacles to Education
Educational opportunities were hardly widespread or equal in their distribution. Ad-

mission to institutes of higher education was in great demand, as many appealed to
the center for assistance to obtain admission, or to overturn a refusal for admission.
Supplicants often attributed refusal to the prejudice of professors or administrators,
who wanted to keep out historically undereducated and underprepared students. In
theory, supplicants argued, higher education was supposed to be available to all those
who qualified, not just those “pupils sent there just because parents [could] provide
the funds.”96 In fact, it seemed, the competition was such that access once more
seemed to be a privilege of the elite.
Yet, even party membership did not automatically entitle one to an education.
This fact angered young and old communists alike. A komsomolets and former
worker from the Kirghiz republic sent an appeal to the center asking for an opportu-
nity to study in Leningrad. The supplicant had no means to pay for his own education
and found it “extremely offensive that children of former nobility and merchants,
as it happens in the city of Osh, formerly had the opportunity to study and still do,
sometimes even at government expense, even though they scarcely think to study for
the sake of the government.”97 The author wondered whether he would have to choose
94
Ibid., l. 66.
95
Ibid., l. 196.
96
George A. Burrell, An American Engineer Looks at Russia (Boston: The Stratford Com-
pany, 1932), 184.
97
Although the government set quotas for admitting workers, peasants, and communists into
higher education in 1921–22, apparently the individual VUZy (higher educational institutions,
still dominated in the 1920s by non-Marxists) set their own ratios among party, soviet, Kom-
somol, military, trade union, and individual candidates. This meant that universities were able
to enroll large numbers of class-alien students. Moreover, under pressure from Vesenkha,
beginning in 1926, “academic criteria had equal or greater weight” than social origin in ad-
between begging or suicide, and could not believe that his government would allow
his efforts to come to such an end. Indeed, he maintained that he had “a right to life,
but not the kind of life I lead now, when one road remains for me, the road to death.”
He appealed for help to Stalin “as a party member and as a human being” and, closing
his appeal, asked whether “it was really true, that only those who have money and
good connections have a right to live?”98
Supplicants complained that all types of impediments were placed in the way
of party and nonparty citizens clamoring to obtain an education. Competition for
places in rabfaky and every other kind of educational establishment compelled the
government to create arbitrary barriers to make admission more difficult. Age re-
quirements were one device for limiting access to education. One komsomolets from
Baku, whose father worked in oil production, appealed to Stalin for assistance in ob-
taining a place at a communist university. He had been refused admission because of
his youth and lack of party tenure. Yet, the young communist pleaded with his leader
to grant him the right to continue his education “while I am still young and I have
the energy.”99 A twenty-year-old komsomolets residing in Vladimir, a batrak since
the age of ten who had long been unemployed, echoed these sentiments. Despite his
lack of means, the batrak was active in party work but was forced to lead a vagrant
existence, because of his low pay. The officials had rejected his application to a VUZ,
citing his youth. The homeless youth hoped that Comrade Stalin could lend him some
assistance and answer his plea, in which case he “could say that all the same I have a
comradely friend and brother in the TsK VKP(b).”100
Even though impediments existed for everyone, the young found it more difficult
to get an education, just as they did in their search for work. A peasant komsomolets
from Tver guberniia requested Stalin’s help for admission to study in Leningrad. The
gubkom of the Leningrad Komsomol organization had refused to support him in his
endeavors, suggesting that he find his own means. The young peasant nevertheless
insisted on his right to obtain special training in order to “improve” himself, pointing
out that “there is no law in our Soviet, communist, free government prohibiting any-
one … from studying.” He cited Lenin’s famous exhortation to Soviet youth to “study,
study, and study some more.”101
Barriers to admission also included various types and lengths of party tenure.
For instance, one party member and Red Army veteran from Ukraine appealed to
central authorities in September 1927 for the opportunity to obtain training for propa-
ganda work. His appeal with the local authorities had been tossed back and forth, and,
“in the end, I came to the conclusion that I would never be admitted, because my one-
mission to higher education. See Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet
Union, 89–90, 106.
98
RGASPI f. 17, op. 85, d. 517, l. 197.
99
Ibid., d. 523, l. 238.
100
Ibid., l. 10.
101
Ibid., d. 516, l. 145.
year party tenure was insufficient.”102 Similarly, a communist from Voronezh prov-
ince who had been in the party only two years appealed to the center for assistance in
May 1927. It seemed that a new rule had been promulgated, providing that acceptance
into a Komvuz (communist university) required party tenure of a minimum of five
years. The supplicant, son of a batrak, argued that the new rule discriminated against
those with lengthy party candidatures. He had been a candidate for four years; for a
time, only workers from the bench were being accepted into the party. As a batrak
and soldier until 1924, the supplicant felt he had been held back arbitrarily. Although
he had received some education in the army, he “naturally considered it insufficient”
and thus sought admission for further study.103
Yet, for many, neither age, nor veteran status, nor party or class affiliation would
suffice for admission to education. A party aktiv (militant), Civil War veteran, and
former miner from the Donbass appealed for assistance to continue his education.
Orphaned as a baby, the supplicant had supported himself from an early age; but after
studying at a rabfak for only one year, he left his educational pursuits to do “practical
work.” He pleaded with Stalin “as a party comrade,” since, after all, he wished to
study not only for himself, but “in order to be in the avant garde.”104 Another party
member and former Red Army man from Kursk requested help in September 1927
for admission to a rabfak which he had been refused on the basis that he was too old.
He argued, however, that it was “better late, than never” for him to get an education
and be “of greater benefit to the cause of the working class and peasantry and party
in general.” He contended that, as a communist, he would need “to lead the masses in
the decisive struggle against the worldwide bourgeoisie, and that would be soon.”105
Yet another party member, a student at the Institute of Red Professors in Moscow,
wrote to complain that party members younger than he—and not even workers by
origin—were being promoted to further study, while he was left behind. This was
unfair, the supplicant argued, considering that he had ten years on the bench and
fifteen years’ active party work.106
The fact that the government constantly erected such arbitrary and shifting bar-
riers to education caused great frustration and disappointment for those seeking to
better themselves and, in so doing, further the cause of socialist construction. One
classic horror story came from a bedniak and komsomolets from Siberia, who wrote
in August 1927 that he had been trying to enter a party school for two years. Red tape
had held up his application, until he finally was accepted to study for the upcoming
fall term. The prospective student was prepared to begin school and anticipated the
fulfillment of his dream with great excitement, when at the last minute he was in-
102
Ibid., d. 524, l. 113.
103
Ibid., d. 523, l. 30.
104
Ibid., l. 15.
105
Ibid., d. 524, ll. 120–21.
106
Ibid., l. 263.
formed that a new directive from the center would not allow him to study, since he
was to enter the army within one year’s time. His disappointment was profound:
I thought for sure that in 1927 I would be able to go to school, to broaden my

knowledge and become a useful member of society … thinking that by study-
ing I could raise my low level of education.… I cannot describe how happy I
was, that a peasant lad would be able to go to study; all the bedniaks awaited
the 5th of September, then on the 20th of August they tell me at the district
committee that there is a new directive from the Central Committee.
…Comrade Stalin, explain to me why they pursue such a policy.… For two
years I went to the Rubtsovskii Okrug with my request, and I cannot under-
stand it.107
Ironically, party membership could at times even be a hindrance to advancement

in education. A student at the Kiev Medical Institute wrote to Kalinin in April 1927 to
complain about the burden of party work. He pointed out that nonparty students were
doing better at school because they did not waste so much time on “social work,” end-
less and nonproductive meetings and lectures, and other distractions. As the exasper-
ated student noted, “even semiliterate workers and peasants would say, if you asked
them, that for socialism to be victorious in our country we need professional forces,
we need good engineers, technicians, doctors and so on.” But the fact, for instance,
that, according to the supplicant, party members and komsomoltsy made up only 2
percent of the membership in student science organizations blatantly illustrated the
party’s confusion of priorities. Armies of skilled personnel—within and under the
control and direction of the party—would never materialize under such conditions.
The student also discussed the peasant question and added to his criticism of party
policy that the opposition was not counterrevolutionary. After remarking on this, sig-
nificantly, the student reconsidered his boldness and added: “I am afraid to write
more. You do not have time to read about things you have known for a long time. But,
all the same, I thought it would interest you to know the opinion of the masses.”108 A
komsomolets from Komi autonomous oblast was more self-assured in his remarks.
He appealed to the central leadership for leave from his party work in order to pursue
his education; the oblast authorities had refused him. The author pointed out that,
having spent a childhood in poverty as a batrak, he had been unable to receive “even
the bare minimum general education,” and, as a party worker, “always felt the most
extreme lack of theoretical preparation.” But, he continued, he had the right to obtain
the education necessary to continue his work.109
As the batrak and many others suggested, plain and simple poverty remained,
for the vast majority of the people, the greatest obstacle to education and self-im-
provement, despite the government’s professed ideals. Most supplicants apparently
107
Ibid., l. 43.
108
Ibid., d. 522, l. 228.
109
Ibid., d. 523, l. 99.
disagreed with the party leadership’s theory that cultural advancement had to precede
material improvement. In February 1927, a communist worker from the Urals de-
scribed to party leaders local living conditions—the general scarcity and high prices
of products, such as sugar and meat, the low wages and high cost of living, and the
horrible housing (with many workers camped in filthy barracks). The worker con-
cluded:
The fact is that low wages and high cost of products do not permit the growth
of cultural construction. Workers must concern themselves every minute over
a crust of bread, and therefore one almost cannot begin to talk about cultural
growth.
Consequently, he lamented, “among party members there are workers whose cultural
level and knowledge about society in no way differ from [that of] the rest of nonparty
comrades.”110
Many supplicants reminded the government that its future depended on a timely
investment in the working class, which presumably constituted its main political
base. Thus, a communist factory worker complained to Stalin of workers’ lack of ac-
cess to education: student stipends were insufficient to support workers with families
(the majority of young workers and peasants, according to him). He emphasized that
the “cultural” (not practical) education of young workers and peasants determined
the ability to build “our socialist society”; he further maintained that many were frus-
trated by the gap between the professed ideals of the government and the possibilities
that real life offered them. He closed with a warning that if workers were unable to
educate themselves simply for lack of means, and if only the privileged, who could
afford to study without government assistance, had access to education, then “we will
return to the old [system], from which we only recently emerged.”111
In short, many supplicants believed that the opportunity for education and prog-
ress was slipping away from those who deserved it most. Thus, in May 1927 a party
member and former Red sailor complained: “In recruitment to institutions of higher
education, fewer and fewer workers dedicated to the cause of the revolution receive
help from [worker] organizations to enable them to get in somewhere to study.” This
trend was especially unsettling, “now, when the war front has shifted to the front of
the great construction of the Soviet Union,” and the country was in need of educated
workers. The former sailor, however, would not give up the fight; he maintained that
he could not “remain passive and want[ed] to be in the front lines, beating a path
to socialism.”112 The language employed here is telling: supplicants frequently ex-
110
Ibid., d. 522, l. 90.
111
Ibid., d. 513, l. 257.
112
RGASPI f. 17, op. 85, d. 517, l. 194.
pressed the effort to build socialism in militant terms, reflecting not just communist
rhetoric but also the years of warfare by which they (and the rhetoric) were shaped.113
The special disadvantages of the poor peasantry in gaining an education formed
the basis for many complaints to the party leadership. The growth of the Komsomol in
villages was spontaneous, driven by a hunger among village youth for education and
information about the outside world.114 A variety of obstacles, however, stood in the
way of all peasants seeking education to escape rural backwardness. For many, the
basic problem was simple lack of educational materials. One party member working
in Voronezh province appealed to Stalin on behalf of a group of village communists.
They requested Lenin’s collected works; it seemed that they were too poor to buy any
books, and the nearest library was eighteen versts (about twelve miles) away.115 Simi-
larly, a komsomolets from “a wild, remote corner of Siberia” sent a desperate appeal to
Stalin, in February 1927, wondering how rural youth were to obtain an education. The
youth appealed to Stalin “not as secretary of the Central Committee, but as Comrade
Stalin, communist.” The supplicant had apparently appealed to various government
organs without success and lamented that only those who had connections with party
cadres got ahead. The rest in the countryside were left to educate themselves under
impossible circumstances, perhaps in a village reading room where it was “colder
than outside.” The komsomolets implored Stalin to turn his attention to the village
youth, “who struggled for a future, that is, toward the building of socialism.”116
Requests for reading materials from rural communists, komsomoltsy, and pio-
neers were common. One party member and village correspondent from Ukraine
sent Stalin a convoluted request for a history of the party, which he could not afford
to buy.117 In another appeal, a schoolboy from Nizhnii Novgorod province wrote on
behalf of his friends, requesting books and journals for their Red Corner.118 He de-
113
Recent studies on this include O. M. Morozova, Dva akta dramy: Boevoe proshloe i pos-
levoennaia povsednevnost’ veteranov grazhdanskoi voiny (Rostov on Don: Izdatel´stvo Iu-
zhnyi tsentr RAN, 2010); and Sean Guillory, “The Shattered Self of Komsomol Civil War
Memoirs,” Slavic Review 71, 3 (2012): 546–65. Kevin McDermott noted the influence of Civil
War experience on the party leadership, but not on the population at large: “War and revolution
were inextricably inter-related in Marxist-Leninist theory … but for Stalin war became also
a central tenet of his domestic policies—the idea of an internal ‘class war’ against ubiquitous
‘enemies’ seemed to take possession of him by the early 1930s.” And further: “Wars, civil
wars and the threat of war and social unrest formed a constant leitmotif in the political careers
and personal experiences of all top Bolsheviks” (8).
114
Isabel A. Tirado, “The Komsomol and Young Peasants: The Dilemma of Rural Expansion,
1921–1925,” Slavic Review 52, 3 (1993): 460–76.
115
RGASPI f. 17, op. 85, d. 524, ll. 193, 196.
116
Ibid., d. 516, l. 46.
117
Ibid., d. 522, l. 297.
118
In prerevolutionary Russia, a red corner was a space for Orthodox worship containing
icons; under the Soviet government, it was co-opted for veneration of Lenin and the study of
communism.
scribed himself as an orphan, having lost his father in the Civil War and with a mother
too old to work, but made no material request beyond something to read.119 Similarly,
komsomoltsy from the Minsk region requested literature on political and agricultural
subjects, as well as some posters and portraits to decorate their Red Corner. They
considered their request part of a bargain, assuring Stalin that if he fulfilled his end,
then “we for our part will try to put our knowledge to use and present a good example
on how to practice agriculture.”120
Many supplicants complained that their educational goals were undermined by
a system unwilling to make allowances for the traditionally disadvantaged, and that
workers and poor peasants never would break into the education system unless it
was modified to accommodate them. In 1924 a party candidate, a former batrak and
veteran, appealed for help in clearing him of criminal charges leveled against him
in his village; he was in the midst of his studies and lacked the time and means to
exonerate himself. The supplicant protested this burden, considering the effort he
was making to be a communist “not on paper but in deed,” and that he had formerly
worked unceasingly and had nevertheless “remained illiterate.”121 In another case, a
former worker was dismissed from an officers’ training school in Orel due to “lack of
success,” and his military pay was consequently reduced to 3 rubles 50 kopecks per
month, on which he had to support himself and his elderly parents. The aspiring offi-
cer argued that his dismissal was “unjust,” since he was not to blame for his general
lack of preparation:
Like all workers, I created the means for socialist construction, and, there-
fore, as a laborer I have a right to education, and if my general educational
preparation did not provide me the opportunity to become an officer of the
RKK, then I am not to blame, and therefore I should not be punished for my
failure.… Tell me how to support a family on 3.50 rubles.
The worker’s tone was respectful but demanding. He knew his rights and was not
prepared to see his future ruined due to disadvantages the revolution was meant to
correct.122
Solutions to Lack of Education
In contrast to the party’s prevailing approach to economic and cultural advancement

which upheld class differentiation and cultural and economic disparities, supplicants
appealing for education commonly argued for a leveling of resources and opportu-
nities. In January 1927, a “union of shepherds and batraks” working in the forestry
119
RGASPI f. 17, op. 85, d. 516, l. 96.
120
Ibid., d. 523, l. 96.
121
Ibid., op. 84, d. 646, l. 204.
122
Ibid., op. 85, d. 515, l. 122.
industry in the Northern Caucasus sent a joint appeal to Stalin. They extended their
regards to their “esteemed comrade” in honor of the upcoming anniversary of the
revolution, then proceeded to ask him for a grant from his own salary to open a vet-
erinary school:
We heard that you receive 180 rubles [a month], so we ask you to send us some
money … so that … we could know when and why our cattle become ill. We
would start a school ourselves, but some of us workers and peasants receive 5
or 3 rubles a month. If we spent it, our families would have nothing left, and
therefore Comrade Stalin we appeal to you.123
Similarly, in March 1927, a komsomolets from Tambov uezd (district) wrote of the
difficulties of rural party work. The Party, he maintained, needed to come to the
assistance of bedniaks by cutting party salaries and using the money to buy farm
machinery for poor peasants. In addition, standards for admitting bedniak children to
institutes of higher education had to be lowered, since only “the wealthy [peasants]
passed entrance exams, because they have greater means for preparation.” For that
reason, bedniaks would never come to power, and their interests would continue to be
ignored. The author warned:
[The bedniak] says that our party and Komsomol have long since diverged
from the Leninist path.… we need to drive alien elements from power, pay
lower salaries, beginning with uezd [party] workers and higher, and use this
money to improve bedniak agriculture, those who have nothing.… But until
now they have received nothing, so I decided to write to you, maybe you do
not know about it.124
Undeniably, the vast majority of the population still lacked the most basic ser-
vices to raise their level of existence, of which educational opportunity was but one.
Supplicants often expressed the belief that, until a general improvement in the stan-
dard of living was effected, general access to education and a corresponding rise in
the “cultural level” of the population would remain only an ideal. In March 1927,
a nonparty citizen wrote to the center on the problems of “provocation, banditism,
and hooliganism” that generally plagued the country. The author’s discussion of the
universal shortage of educational materials and books and of hospitals and trained
medical personnel suggested a direct connection between shortages and social ills.125
In a similar vein, in March 1927, a peasant from Saratov guberniia wondered whether
socialism could indeed be attained if all or most of the party’s attention was not fo-
cused on the peasantry who, after all, constituted 75 percent of the population. He
123
Ibid., d. 521, l. 5.
124
Ibid., d. 522, l. 76.
125
Ibid., l. 48.
stressed the necessity of providing mass education to all of the country’s inhabitants,
in order to address the peasantry’s needs.126
Thus, the connection between economic and cultural disparity was central. One
factory worker, not a communist, wrote to complain about unemployment of party
and nonparty workers and suggested that unemployment was related to bureaucrats’
high wages. The worker further lamented that, while there were many schools, rela-
tively few workers were being educated, due to their poor preparation. He, therefore,
suggested that highly paid specialists “need to be utilized 100 percent” to teach in-
troductory subjects to workers, without pay. He clearly resented the gaps in opportu-
nities and living standards and advantages in educational opportunities and wages of
white-collar workers. The playing field was not evening out, and this, according to the
factory worker, was wrong.127
Another proposal for leveling the field came in a remarkable appeal from a stu-
dent at the United Belorussian Military School in Minsk. He advocated the adoption
of Esperanto as a common language to facilitate communication among the various
nationalities and workers of the world. The student argued that, for lack of time, “our
workers” never learned foreign languages: “it is only the bourgeoisie who, out of idle-
ness, sitting on soft couches in sumptuous dwellings, had time to study languages.”128
Supplicants often argued that it was the government’s responsibility to lower
entrance requirements. A twenty-two-year-old party candidate appealed to Stalin to
waive the requirement for the entrance exam to either a “naval academy or technical
institute.” The supplicant was orphaned when his father, serving in the navy, was
drowned at sea; he wished to study to become “an educated and useful person for the
republic.” As a factory worker, however, he feared that entrance exams would prove
too difficult and effectively put an end to his aspirations.129 As another unemployed
party member argued, the difficulties encountered by unskilled workers in finding
work were the fault of the tsarist system. But now, under the new system, the party
needed not only to help unskilled party members obtain education and training, but
also to encourage “comradely” relations between communists in a position to hire
them and rank-and-file party members. Such equality would enhance party unity. The
author pointed out that such questions concerned not only him, “but also a number
of other comrades, of whom some would be extremely pleased if Comrade Stalin …
answered.” He closed his appeal by asking Stalin to excuse his semiliterateness.130
In the short run, however, the creation of hoards of educated citizens often in-
creased frustration and resentment, because there were no jobs for them anyway.
Those who were fortunate enough to receive an education discovered, to their pro-
found dismay, that their efforts were in vain. Superfluity of human beings was the
126
Ibid., ll. 102–04.
127
Ibid., d. 513, l. 128.
128
Ibid., d. 516, l. 272.
129
Ibid., d. 517, l. 253.
130
Ibid., d. 515, l. 185.
problem. In July 1927, a nonparty citizen from Ukraine sent a long, indignant appeal
for justice. After having completed an eight-month course for workers in the judicial
system, the supplicant related bitterly, he found out that no such work was available.
Along with 140 other participants he had been promised a job upon completion of
his studies. Instead, all were instructed to register with the labor exchange which,
the supplicant observed, amounted to remaining unemployed. As it turned out, his
unemployment resulted from a new initiative to hire only those with party or trade
union tenure.131
Similarly, in March 1927, a VUZ graduate wrote bitterly of his disappointment.
Unable to find a job after finishing school, he reckoned that only communists received
employment upon graduation, regardless of their merits or abilities, and not even all
communists at that:
Just as before, when those who were not of the nobility or capitalists, etc., but
simple muzhiks [peasants] were condemned to eternal suffering, so today
those without a party card share the fate of their fathers.… You are a nobody,
you are garbage.… Former priests, clerks, “esteemed citizens” again accom-
modate themselves.
The collective offered education but no opportunities to put that education to use. The
formerly privileged had already infiltrated the Party and managed to retain their old
advantages. Nothing had changed; the situation remained as before the revolution.
The supplicant’s bitterness and resentment toward certain elite groups is unmistak-
able. But beyond that, the graduate concluded, the communists were creating legions
of educated citizens they could not use, simply “because here we have a sufficient
army of persons immediately available for work.”132

During the revolution there were great expectations that a new, egalitarian society
would emerge and provide work and sustenance for all. NEP disappointed those ex-
pectations, altering the revolutionary struggle from a collective effort of oppressed
against oppressors to an individual struggle for survival. This competition defined
society, promoting a general mood of atomization and alienation.
The change of revolutionary goals did not occur without protest through mass
party resignations and numerous appeals to the party leadership. Official elites—
party members, komsomoltsy, veterans, workers, and poor peasants—protested their
abandonment by the government, expressing incredulity, anger, and a pervasive sense
of hopelessness. They threatened the center with political opposition, playing on the
party leadership’s fear of losing power. The unemployed and indigent also sometimes
131
Ibid., d. 518, ll. 62–88.
132
Ibid., d. 522, l. 126.
experienced a sense of guilt. In a workers’ state, those without work felt a particular
loss of dignity and self-esteem.
Many without work or those fearing unemployment sought a competitive edge
through education. Considering education a prerequisite of material advancement,
Lenin himself had exhorted the masses to educate themselves. Moreover, Bolshevik
ideology dictated that the proletariat would be led by an educated vanguard, and
socialism built by a cultured, educated proletariat. However, the lack of opportunity
either for work or education laid bare the contradictions between Bolshevik ideology
and Soviet reality. In the short run, the cultural imperative also caused a pronounced
sense of inferiority among less-educated party cadres.
Ultimately, educating the population was impossible without sufficient funding
or action on the part of the state. Lacking both of these during NEP, the government
was inundated with appeals protesting the arbitrary barriers erected to reduce the
number of applicants. Many supplicants observed bitterly that poverty was still the
greatest barrier to cultural advancement, and, unless the government eliminated the
material disadvantages of the majority, the revolution would in fact have changed
nothing.
The Russian Student Fund and Its Role in the Diaspora
Daniel A. Panshin†
The Russian Emigration
As a result of the Russian revolutions of 1917 and the ensuing civil war, a million or
more refugees left Russia starting in 1917 and continuing into the early 1920s.1 In
this paper I use the word refugee in the particular sense of one who has been stripped
of protection of country of origin, has been rendered stateless, and has not acquired
another nationality.
Exact figures on the size of the emigration are not possible, primarily because of
the chaotic nature and many different routes of the refugees’ departure from Russia,
and because of their frequent lack of passports and identity papers. The emigration
took place “at a time of confused and constant flux,” as refugees moved from coun-
try to country, especially within Europe.2 Other factors that prevented an accurate
1
The author is indebted to the University Archives of the University of Illinois at Urba-
na-Champaign for access to the Russian Student Fund Records, 1919–74, and the Paul B.
Anderson Papers, 1913–82; the Kautz Family YMCA Archives, housed at the University of
Minnesota, Twin Cities Campus, for access to the archival records of the YMCA’s Committee
on Friendly Relations Among Foreign Students and to the records of the McBurney Branch
of the YMCA in New York City (where the Russian Student Fund was officed from the early
1930s to 1964); and the College Archives of the State University of New York College of En-
vironmental Science and Forestry, Syracuse, for information on the student records of Alexis
J. Panshin and on the academic program, tuition, and fees of the college in the mid-1920s.
In his 1922 report to the League of Nations, Dr. Fridtjof Nansen, high commissioner for
refugees, estimated that “there are altogether in Europe roughly one and a-half [sic] million
Russian refugees.” See Russian Refugees: General Report of the Work Accomplished to March
12, 1922, by Dr. Fridtjof Nansen, High Commissioner of the League of Nations (League of
Nations document C. 124, M. 74), 1922, 11. Sir John Hope Simpson in a retrospective study
reported that “the emigration involved numbers variously estimated, but probably about one
million souls.” See John Hope Simpson, The Refugee Problem: Report of a Survey (London:
Oxford University Press, 1939), 62. Other estimates ranged as high as 2,935,000. See Hans
von Rimscha, Der russische Bürgerkrieg und die russische Emigration, 1917–21 (Jena: From-
mann, 1924), 50–51, quoted in Simpson, Refugee Problem, 80–81.
2
Simpson, Refugee Problem, 81.
528 Daniel A. Panshin
count include births and deaths in the diaspora, repatriations, additional refugees
after 1922, and naturalizations in their various countries of refuge. No coordinated
international mechanism for recordkeeping existed, and those not needing aid were
often omitted from the estimates.3
The vast majority of Russian refugees settled in Europe, especially in France,
Germany, and Poland, but they were to be found in all the countries of Europe, and
beyond. Wherever they settled in the 1920s, “the Russians continued to consider
themselves exiles, retaining the hope that their residence beyond Russian borders
would be temporary, and that their return would soon be possible with the collapse,
deemed imminent, of the Soviet government.”4 They typically lived in Russian com-
munities where they preserved a Russian society quite distinct and separate from that
of the host country, and within which they spoke Russian and passionately nurtured a
prerevolutionary Russian identity and an active Russian cultural life. This society in
exile came commonly to be known as Russia Abroad. Their emigration to Europe has
been well described by Robert Johnston, Marc Raeff, and Robert Williams, but the
emigration to other places has been much less thoroughly documented.5
“The first place of refuge rarely became permanent.”6 From the primary initial
places of refuge—Constantinople, Europe, the Far East—additional scatterings took
place to virtually all the countries of the world. From Brazil to Australia, from the
Philippines to South Africa, Russian refugees could be found in the diaspora. To the
United States came 20,000–30,000 of these souls, a number held down both by dis-
tance from Russia and by the severity of immigration quotas then in effect.7
Because many refugees had served in the defeated army or navy, the emigra-
tion included a large number of young men between the ages of eighteen and forty.
All strata of Russian society were represented, although peasants made up a smaller
proportion in the diaspora than they did in the homeland. On the whole, the refugees
were literate, relatively well educated, and excruciatingly poor.8
3
Marc Raeff, Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919–1939 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 23; and Simpson, Refugee Problem, 72.
4
Raeff, Russia Abroad, 4.
5
Robert H. Johnston, “New Mecca, New Babylon”: Paris and the Russian Exiles, 1920–1945
(Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988); Raeff, Russia Abroad; and Rob-
ert C. Williams, Culture in Exile: Russian Emigres in Germany, 1881–1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cor-
nell University Press, 1972).
6
Raeff, Russia Abroad, 17.
7
Simpson, Refugee Problem, 469; and Paul Robert Magocsi, “Russians,” in Harvard En-
cyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephan Thernstrom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
8
Simpson, Refugee Problem, 85; and Raeff, Russia Abroad, 5, 11, 24–26.
The Russian Student Fund and Its Role in the Diaspora 529
Russian Student Fund
Of the 20,000–30,000 Russian refugees who came to the United States, about 1,000
were university students whose educations had been interrupted.9
One organization, the Russian Student Fund, stands out in the help it provided
to Russian refugee students to continue, and complete, their university educations in
America. Its roots emanate directly from Alexis R. Wiren. Wiren’s undergraduate
studies in naval architecture at the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute had been cut short
by World War I. He then transferred to the Naval Academy, receiving a wartime
commission in the navy as a lieutenant junior grade in early 1917. In the early fall of
1917 the Provisional Government of Russia sent Wiren to the United States as part
of its Russian Naval Aviation Commission. When the October Revolution of 1917
stranded him in the United States, he enrolled in 1918 at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology and continued his studies in naval architecture. Wiren, one of the first
Russian refugee students to complete his undergraduate studies in the United States,
received his bachelor’s degree in 1919.10 “In October 1919 he was summoned to the
Russian Embassy [of the Provisional Government] in Washington where his services
were needed in the Staff of the Naval Attache.”11
Boris Bakhmeteff, ambassador of the Russian Provisional Government to the
United States, asked Wiren to work out ways to help some thirty young Russians who
were then continuing their studies in the United States and urgently petitioning the
embassy for assistance. “The ambassador allocated some small funds left over from
uncompleted war contracts,” making available about $20,000.12 But the embassy had
precious little money, and it soon became clear that early arrival of many more Rus-
sian refugees, and refugee students, was imminent.
In June 1920 Wiren was relieved “from his duty at the Embassy in view of the
necessity to reduce the staff” and went to New York City, with the encouragement of
Ambassador Bakhmeteff, to continue his work to assist Russian refugee students.13
He enlisted influential and well-to-do Americans in the endeavor of establishing a re-
volving interest-free loan fund, first through a predecessor organization, the Russian
Students’ Christian Association, organized under the auspices of the Committee on
Friendly Relations Among Foreign Students of the Young Men’s Christian Associa-
9
“Russian Reconstruction,” Russian Student in the American College and University 1, 1
(1924): 2; and R. E. Bowers, “The Origins of the Russian Student Fund,” Russian Review 16,
3 (1957): 46.
10
Stephen Duggan, “Alexis R. Wiren,” Russian Review 5, 1 (1945): 102.
11
I. Mishtowt, captain, Russian Navy, naval attache to the Russian embassy, “To Whom It
May Concern,” 4 June 1920, Russian Student Fund Records [hereafter, RSF Records], 1919–
74, University Archives, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
12
Wiren interview in “Nobles Study Here to Aid Russia; Prepare to Put Bear on Its Feet,”
Boston Sunday Advertiser, no. 5 (December 1920); and Bowers, “Origins,” 48.
13
Mishtowt, “To Whom It May Concern.”
tion—and then through the Russian Student Fund, affiliated also with the YMCA,
and which was incorporated in April 1923 to “aid persons now or formerly of Russian
nationality to obtain academic, technical or professional training in the United States
of America.”14
From 1921 to 1923, the period of operation under the aegis of the Russian Stu-
dents’ Christian Association, assistance was provided to an average of 74 students per
academic year. For the remainder of the first decade of operation (from 1 September
1923 through 31 August 1930), the Russian Student Fund assisted an average of 129
students per year; the peak year was 1926–27, when 165 students received loans.
During its first decade, the fund helped a total of 476 students, of whom 358 had
graduated by 31 August 1930. Thus, by 1930 the fund had assisted approximately half
of the Russian refugee students who had come to America. The average aid provided
per year was $442, but of equal importance was the help extended to the students in
locating a suitable college or university, a task made appreciably more difficult by
the frequent lack of transcripts covering the portion of their collegiate educations
they had completed in Russia and by the students’ typically fragmentary command
of English. In addition, the Russian Student Fund was often able to assist students
in obtaining tuition scholarships. Most students majored in technical subjects such
as engineering, agriculture, forestry, and business. About 3 percent were women.15
The Russian Student Fund continued in independent operation until 1965, when
it merged with United Student Aid Funds, having assisted “almost 1,000 students in a
total of over $1,000,000.”16 After 1930, as a marked decrease took place in the arrival
of new Russian refugees whose university educations had been interrupted by rev-
olution and war, the Russian Student Fund started assisting children born in Russia
and in the diaspora to Russian parents, and after the end of World War II to displaced
persons of Russian origin. The fund in its later years also took on other worthy, Rus-
sian-related activities, such as assisting in the establishment of St. Vladimir’s Ortho-
dox Theological Seminary and of the interdisciplinary journal, the Russian Review.
“The Russian Student Fund, as compared with other Russian emigre organizations
in America, had extraordinary longevity … [and] its service was outstanding both in
number aided and sums expended.”17
14
Certificate of Incorporation of Russian Student Fund, Inc., as filed with the secretary of the
State of New York, 9 April 1923, RSF Records.
15
Alexis R. Wiren, “Ten Years of Work,” introduction by Stephen P. Duggan, Russian Stu-
dent Fund, 1931; Wiren, “Twenty Years of the Russian Student Fund,” introduction by Dug-
gan, Russian Student Fund, [1941]; “Summary from January 1, 1921, to August 31, 1930,”
Russian Student Fund, n.d.; Wiren, “Summary of Operating Results for Classes from 1921 to
1930,” Russian Student Fund, n.d.; all of above in RSF Records.
16
Ellen Routsky, Bonds of Friendship: The Story of the Russian Student Fund ([New York]:
n.p., 1970), 47.
17
Donald E. Davis, “Americanizing Ivan: The Case of the Russian Student Fund,” Historian
43, 2 (1981): 209.
One of the Students
One of the students that the Russian Student Fund assisted was Aleksei Ivanovich
Pan´shin. He (the Russian who would become my father) was born on 5 October
1901 (Old Style) in the family home in the city of Voronezh. He was the youngest of
thirteen children (four sons and nine daughters) of the merchant Ivan Nikiforovich
Pan´shin and his wife Sofía Aleksandrovna Pan´shina.
A relatively prosperous merchant, Ivan Pan´shin owned several houses, a thriving
horse business, and a steam-powered flour mill in the city of Voronezh. In Voronezh
guberniia, in the heart of the fertile Central Chernozem region, he owned three work-
ing estates totalling more than 4,000 acres. On these estates he conducted diversified
crop, livestock, and poultry operations, and also bred and raised horses, both mixed-
breeds and Orlov trotters.
As a boy, Aleksei Pan´shin spent winters in the city of Voronezh, where he at-
tended the First Gimnaziia, and summers at the family’s Mikhailovka estate, some
thirty miles southeast of the city. In June 1917 he graduated from the First Gimna-
ziia, and during the 1918–19 academic year attended Iurév University (now Voronezh
State University) in the biology faculty, the closest available faculty to forestry, the
field in which he had decided to major.18
In early October 1919, the White Army of southern Russia, then under the com-
mand of General Anton Denikin (and later under the command of General Petr Wran-
gel), occupied Voronezh as it reached the northernmost point of its advance. At this
time, a few days before his eighteenth birthday, Aleksei Pan´shin volunteered for duty
as a foot soldier in the White Army and left Voronezh, never to return.
The White Army’s advance soon turned into a full-fledged retreat. By March
1920, only a remnant of Pan´shin’s unit was left, and it found itself in the vicinity
of Batalpashinsk in Kubanskaia oblast´ in the far southwest of Russia (now Cher-
kessk, the administrative center of Karachaevo-Cherkessiia Autonomous Republic).
Pan´shin and two other soldiers sought refuge in the Spaso-Preobrazhenskii Mon-
astery, a woman’s monastery located forty-five miles south of Batalpashinsk on the
north slope of the Caucasus Mountains.
In early December 1920 word reached them that General Wrangel in mid-No-
vember had evacuated all of his forces from the Crimea to Constantinople, and that
organized resistance to the Bolsheviks in southern Russia had ended. The few sol-
diers who were scattered about here and there in the foothills south of Batalpashinsk,
some seventy in all, gathered together and decided to attempt a winter crossing of the
Caucasus Mountains (in preference to being captured by the Red Army). The cross-
ing on foot, by way of Klukhorskii Pass, proved successful, and the group reached
the Black Sea port of Sukhumi in the Republic of Georgia, then briefly independent.
By late February 1921 the group had worked its way east down the coastline to
Batumi. There it commandeered a coastal freighter and set sail for Constantinople on
18
Iurév University had been established in Estonia in 1632, and had moved to Voronezh in
1918 when the Germans threatened.
21 February, five days before the Red Army occupied Tiflis (Tbilisi), the capital of
Georgia, thereby effectively bringing Georgia’s independence to an end. When the
freighter reached Constantinople in late February, that city was already overcrowded
with thousands of Russians, mostly the remnants of Wrangel’s army and their fami-
lies and dependents.
For the next two years Pan´shin and his group pursued an impoverished refugee
existence, but Constantinople could be only a temporary stop for them. Others in
Pan´shin’s group left Constantinople for various places: one for the French Foreign
Legion, one to a monastery in Serbia, another to join his sister in Paris, and so on.
Pan´shin briefly considered emigrating to Serbia, Poland, and Brazil. When clarifi-
cation reached Constantinople in early 1923, however, that university students from
Russia whose educations had been interrupted would be admitted to the United States
in excess of the severely limited immigration quota, he made his decision to leave for
America.
A clerk in the American Embassy in Constantinople changed my father’s name to
Alexis John Panshin (an action I never heard him protest). Armed with his new name
and a satchel, he boarded the King Alexander of the National Greek Line on 7 June
1923. Panshin was one of 160 Russian refugees in steerage class, in the first group of
Russian emigres bound for the United States from Constantinople, 142 of whom were
students. After a stop in Piraeus to pick up more passengers, the King Alexander set
sail for America, entering New York harbor just after the stroke of midnight on 1 July,
one of twelve ships racing to beat the July quotas and unload their human cargoes at
Ellis Island.
For the next year Panshin lived the typical life of the newly arrived immigrant
in the Russian community of lower Manhattan. His first job in America was baking
Lorna Doones for the National Biscuit Company, followed by jobs at cemeteries, first
in the Bronx and then in Brooklyn. In the spring of 1924, determined to return to
college if possible, Panshin applied to the Russian Student Fund for assistance, and
was accepted.
The Russian Student Fund made arrangements for him to attend the New York
State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, one of two forestry programs with
which the fund worked (the other being Yale University). The fund extended assis-
tance to him in the amount of $50 a month plus tuition. Receiving credit for his year
at Iurév University, Panshin was admitted as a sophomore, resuming his university
studies in September 1924 after a break of five years. In June 1927 he received his
bachelor’s degree, graduating second in his class.19 After working for the Sikes Chair
Company in Philadelphia in 1927–28, he returned to the New York State College of
Forestry for graduate studies, completing his master’s degree in wood technology in
1929 and his Ph.D. degree in 1931.
19
During Panshin’s three undergraduate years, the Russian Student Fund advanced him a
total of $1758.31, of which $383.31 went for tuition and fees, and the remaining $1375.00 for
the $50 monthly subsistence allowance during the academic year. Panshin made his first loan
repayment of $10.00 in July 1927, and by July 1939 had repaid the full amount.
Panshin pursued a long and distinguished academic and professional career in

wood technology and forest products in the United States, including more than thirty
years as a teacher, researcher, and administrator at Michigan State University.
From Russia Abroad to Assimilation
At its outset in the early 1920s, the Russian Student Fund was fervently committed
to sustaining Russia Abroad. Its founding precept was to assist Russian students in
a temporary stay in the United States while they completed their university studies
and prepared for an early return to Russia, “once it was free of the scourge of Bolshe-
vism,” to help with reconstruction.
Indeed, such sentiments permeate all of the early Russian Student Fund doc-
uments. The financial assistance agreement form Panshin signed had as its initial
item, “I understand that this Corporation [Russian Student Fund] is helping Russian
students complete their education and training in the United States in order that they
may prepare themselves for participation in Russian reconstruction.” The first para-
graph of the personal information sheet he completed stated that “the Russian Student
Fund, Inc., is organized for the purpose of aiding those who can be of service in the
future reconstruction of Russia.”
But, by the late 1920s, when it had become clear that the Bolshevik regime was
not to be short-lived, a shift started taking place in the point of view of the Russian
Student Fund. For instance, the slogan in the masthead of its monthly publication,
the Russian Student in the American College and University, which had been estab-
lished in November 1924, read: “Raises funds and advances aid to young Russians of
promise to study in America for future participation in Russian reconstruction.” In
September 1927, when the publication shortened its name to the Russian Student and
changed its format, it also dropped the slogan and replaced it in the masthead with:
“Non-Political Non-Partisan Non-Sectarian.” In a 1930 letter to Norman H. Davis,
chairman of the fund’s board of directors, Alexis Wiren wrote, “A few years ago I
thought that conditions are slowly changing and that a moment approaches when any
honest Russian, regardless of his individual political views, may work for Russian
reconstruction. What has taken place since then has proven to me that this hope was
unjustified and that the situation is becoming rather worse than better.”20
In an article in 1930 summarizing the first ten years of operation of the Russian
Student Fund, Wiren stated that “the hope that conditions will change so that these
young specialists could return and work for their country has not materialized as
yet.”21 By the time of its twenty-year report, the hope of return to Russia had been
abandoned. “When the Fund was originally established it was hoped that the political
situation in Russia would change to a point that some graduates, within a compara-
tively short number of years might be in a position to return to Russia and be a sort
of ‘connecting link’ between the two nations. This hope had to be abandoned years
20
Alexis Wiren to Norman H. Davis, 26 June 1930, RSF Records.
21
Alexis R. Wiren, “Ten Years,” Russian Student 7, 1 (1930): 1.
ago.… In the meantime, the Fund can continue to do the useful work of giving en-
couragement and assistance to young men and women of Russian origin, to become
better citizens of the country which has been so friendly to them.”22 In fact, only one
or two students assisted by the Russian Student Fund did return to Russia.

In his Constantinople years of 1921–23, Panshin lived in Russia Abroad. On his ar-
rival in America, he continued to live in Russia Abroad in 1923–24 in New York City.
Although New York City was no match for the major Russian emigre centers of
Paris, Berlin, Prague, and Kharbin, it had a large and active Russian community with
a vibrant cultural life, Russian restaurants and schools, and a number of Russian Or-
thodox churches and cathedrals. During his fourteen months in New York City, Pan-
shin lived in this community, isolated from America. He lived with Russians, spoke
only Russian, read Russian newspapers, observed Russian traditions and customs,
and received his mail at a Russian club on the Lower East Side. For Panshin, his first
break with Russia Abroad took place on the September day in 1924 when he boarded
the train at Grand Central Station that would take him to the New York State College
of Forestry in Syracuse.
In his first years in America, Panshin was homesick and was still clinging to the
hope of returning to Russia; this dream is reflected in the letters he received from his
family. In October 1923 his brother-in-law Josef Szulc wrote, “I’m convinced that
your stay in America will do you a lot of good, if you stay there temporarily.”23 And
in June 1924 his sister Vera commented that “even if you get married, you still will
want to come back to your Mother Russia.”24
By 1925 the advice from his family had started to change. “You write that some-
times you feel a strong desire to relinquish everything and come back to Russia. This
is understandable, but I think you can and should struggle with this kind of mood.”25
In 1927 his sister Shura responded to him again, just three months before he received
his bachelor’s degree: “You ask me what is my opinion about your returning to Rus-
sia.… You would suffer and as a final matter you would be extremely sorry about
your decision to return. My advice is to forget about this desire.”26
A larger break with Russia Abroad came about when he returned to graduate
school in Syracuse in 1928. By then, Panshin had decided that he wanted to pursue an
academic career in the United States. A symbolic, and also real, marker of the evolu-
tion taking place within him was his naturalization in 1930.
22
Wiren, “Twenty Years,” 9, 10.
23
Josef Szulc to Alexis Panshin, 28 October 1923.
24
Vera Pan´shina to Alexis Panshin, 1 June 1924.
25
Aleksandra Pan´shina to Alexis Panshin, 24 June 1925.
26
Aleksandra Pan´shina to Alexis Panshin, 22 March 1927.
In his memoir, he wrote that “the naturalization papers were, however, only of-
ficial confirmation of the slow process of my Americanization. I was hardly aware
of this gradual change of a Russian refugee into a bona fide American citizen, but
change there had been. It was brought forcibly to my attention when I revisited New
York, and found my former Russian friends more foreign—their ideas and aspira-
tions, their whole outlook on life, more incomprehensible—than those of my Amer-
ican friends.”27
The steps in his assimilation continued. In 1933 he met Lucie Padget, a Syracuse
University graduate of English heritage and daughter of a small-town doctor in up-
state New York. On Memorial Day in 1934 they—my father and my mother—mar-
ried. Also in 1934 Panshin achieved a significant success in his budding professional
career in his new country by coauthoring the first wood technology textbook to be
published in the United States.
Perhaps by 1930, and most certainly by the mid-1930s, Panshin had made his
transition: from citizen of Russia, to citizen of Russia Abroad, to assimilated Amer-
ican.
27
Alexis J. Panshin, I Remember (Okemos, MI: self-published, 1972), 230, lithographed in
approximately twenty copies and distributed to family members and friends.
Folk in Soviet Music in the 1930s
Susannah Lockwood Smith
In the 1930s the Soviet Union saw a tremendous upsurge in official support for folk art
genres. Following Maksim Gor´kii’s address to the first All-Union Congress of Soviet
Writers in 1934, in which he underlined the importance of folklore in Soviet society,
amateur folk arts received unprecedented attention from state and Party officials, and
professional versions of folk genres acquired new status. This support for folk genres
put new demands on Soviet musicians and musicologists, from amateur singers in
villages to leading figures in the Composers’ Union in Moscow. Their reactions to
the new policies produced changes in the music traditionally called “folk” and broad
additions to what was included in that category. New requirements set members of the
Soviet music establishment scrambling to establish their own “folk” credentials, even
while prejudice against folk genres persisted. In the end, the turn toward folk genres
established a significant place in musical discourse for the idea of folk music, while
the results in music were mixed.
For the good Communist, there was a plausible theoretical foundation for sup-
porting folk music in Soviet society. Folk music is, by definition, music of the people.
As Gor´kii pointed out in his 1934 address, folklore is closely connected with people’s
real life and working conditions, and expresses the deep hopes and aspirations of the
masses—precisely the kind of art that should be encouraged in a people’s state.1
There were other, more practical reasons for encouraging, as opposed to discour-
aging, folk music. Among a population that still had significantly rural roots, folk
music remained through the 1930s an important popular genre. Even by the end of
the 1930s almost half of the Soviet urban population still consisted of former peasants
This essay stems from work begun with my dissertation, which was completed and defended
in 1997 under the supervision of Theofanis Stavrou. I am very grateful to Professor Stavrou
for his support of my project and scholarship, and particularly for his willingness to step in
as my adviser at the dissertation stage. His wide scholarly interest, knowledge of an extensive
literature, and generous spirit guided me during that critical period, and I continue to feel the
benefit of his advice. It is an honor to be able to dedicate this essay, which addresses one of the
underlying issues of my scholarly work, to him.
1
Maksim Gor´kii, “Sovetskaia literatura: Doklad na Pervom vsesoiuznom s˝ezde sovetskikh
pisatelei 17 avgusta 1934 goda,” in Sobranie sochinenii, 30 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestven-
naia literatura, 1953), 27: 300, 305.
538 Susannah Lockwood Smith
who had migrated from the village in the previous decade.2 Among many of these
new workers, as among the collective farmers, peasant cultural tastes and traditions
persisted. Traditional folk songs and songs like them were more familiar, and were
more easily understood and enjoyed than such genres as classical music or jazz.3 Giv-
ing the official nod to folk performers—by featuring them on the radio, publicizing
their work in newspapers and journals, and supporting their performances—might
indicate to the average citizen that those in power appreciated the same kind of music
that he or she liked. This could be a simple yet effective means of shoring up popular
support for the regime and its other policies. It stands in contrast to the failed policies
of the years of “cultural revolution” of the first Five-Year Plan, in which a resentful
audience of folk music lovers (and amateur performers) found their music reviled in
the press and even banned from radio.4
There was yet another compelling reason for the new focus on folk music: Stalin
himself loved it. This was not advanced publicly as a reason for the change in policy,
as it would not be appropriate to further the “objective” truth about the importance of
folk music with so subjective an argument—although Stalin’s fondness for Russian,
Ukrainian, and Georgian folksongs was well known.5 However, officials made the
point clear in private. In 1936, Platon Kerzhentsev, the highest-placed arts official
in the nation, told choir directors, “Comrade Stalin himself sang in a choir, loves
singing very much, and considers the propagandizing of folk song an extraordinarily
important element in all our work in the area of art, in the area of culture, because folk
song is that kind of art which is most of the masses [massovym].”6 Andrei Zhdanov,
who played a leading role in Soviet cultural policy in the 1930s and ’40s, was also
a folk song aficionado. In 1944 he admitted to knowing over six hundred Russian
folk songs, and even offered song texts that he had collected to folk choir director
2
Citing several sources, David L. Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in
Moscow, 1929–1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 1–2, puts the figure at 40
percent.
3
See ibid., 158–89, for an excellent description of how these values and traditions clashed
with “official” culture. See also Susannah Lockwood Smith, “Soviet Arts Policy, Folk Music,
and National Identity: The Piatnitskii State Russian Folk Choir, 1927–1945” (Ph.D. diss., Uni-
versity of Minnesota, 1997), 71–76, 143–44.
4
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931 (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1978) first associated the phrase “cultural revolution” with the first Five-Year
Plan period. For a more recent discussion of the concept, see Michael David-Fox, “What is
Cultural Revolution?” Russian Review 58 (1999): 181–201. For a discussion of the fate of folk
music during this period, and an example of audience resistance, see Smith, “Soviet Arts
Policy,” 59–84.
5
Juri Jelagin, Taming of the Arts, trans. Nicholas Wreden (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1951),
298, 208.
6
Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI) f. 962, op. 3, d. 92, l. 5.
Kerzhentsev was president of the Committee on Arts Affairs.
Folk in Soviet Music in the 1930s 539
Petr Kaz´min.7 The Soviet arts world was littered with corpses, both figuratively and
sometimes literally, of those whose creations did not appeal to Stalin’s (and, to a
lesser extent, Zhdanov’s) taste. Thus, there were practical considerations, as well as a
plausible theoretical foundation, behind the turn to folk music in the 1930s.
There were two levels of official encouragement of folk music. On one, theorists
attempted to raise the profile of folk music by drawing the attention of music pro-
fessionals to it, by insisting that it be the basis of all Soviet composed music, and by
professionalizing its performance. Although the vast majority of choral circles that
performed folk music were amateur groups, a few prominent folk choirs became fully
professional in the 1930s, setting an example for amateur choirs and giving the genre
recognition as a legitimate form of art. On another level, policy makers supported the
spread of mass musical participation by helping to organize and providing structural
support for amateur choirs that would sing a repertoire of folk music, and by insist-
ing that music professionals assist amateur groups. Both levels of encouragement re-
quired that music professionals devote serious attention to folk music genres, whether
this involved finding and using folk material in academic and lighter compositions,
performing more traditional folk—or even better, new “Soviet folk”—music, or writ-
ing and publishing articles that theorized the function of folk music in Soviet soci-
ety. In private, directors of choirs, composers, musical activists, and others received
instructions from the state arts authority (Komitet po delam Iskusstv or KDI), to
perform more folk songs and compose more music based on folk song.8 In public, the
existence of a folk base to Soviet music and the importance of folk music to Soviet so-
ciety were repeated like a mantra constantly in the music press throughout the 1930s.
What did this mean for folk music in the Soviet Union? Above all, it meant that
there was an increase in the attention paid by officials and others to the humble per-
formers of folk song—in most cases people participating in amateur choral circles,
who sang together for their own enjoyment. They usually sang a repertoire of the
traditional old songs, because these were the songs they knew and loved. These cir-
cles had a long history, and until the late 1920s had generally been “below the field of
vision” of party cultural workers.9 Now such circles were liable to attract the attention
of officials who wished to support efforts at mass music-making. Olympiads were
one means of official support. These were festivals designed to showcase amateur
performing groups by bringing them to the capital for performances and drawing
7
P. M. Kaz´min, S pesnei: Stranitsy iz dnevnika (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1970), 254–56.
At Zhdanov’s request, Kaz´min presented him with two copies of a recently published collec-
tion of 200 songs. Several days later one of the copies was returned to Kaz´min, with a warm
inscription and Zhdanov’s own emendations to four songs, and the text of a fifth.
8
For example, see Kerzhentsev’s remarks in 1937 concerning the repertoire of state musical
collectives. See RGALI f. 962, op. 3, d. 285, ll. 3–4.
9
N. Vol´kovich and L. Shamina, eds., Khorovaia samodeiatelńost´ Rossiiskoi Federatsii:
Khronika, dokumenty, materialy 1917–1940 (Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor, 1989), 176; see
also their excerpts from a 1930 conference comparing the relative neglect of arts work in the
countryside to such work in the cities (59–60).
national attention to their efforts.10 This support, both tangible (in the form of prize
money) and intangible (brief national prominence for the performing ensembles) did
not come without strings: performing ensembles were subject to suggestions by jury
members (as well as comments by newspaper reviewers) with regard to repertoire,
performing style, and even costuming.11 Directors were well advised to take these
suggestions seriously.
The most significant change demanded of many folk ensembles—both choirs
and orchestras, amateur and professional—was that they learn to read music nota-
tion. Many ensembles, such as the Tadjik and Urdmurt folk orchestras, which had a
tradition of oral transmission, began reading music during this period; other ensem-
bles were criticized for not doing so.12 Likewise, directors of amateur choirs in clubs
publicly encouraged one another to train their singers in sight reading and musical
techniques, as well as music history.13 This was a profound change from traditional
musical practice, in which music is learned by listening and imitating, not by reading
something off a page and translating that information in the brain to musical sounds.
This is not to say that traditional oral methods of transmission disappeared in this
period, nor that the average person was a stranger to reading music, but that in this pe-
riod there was noticeable encouragement of extending this kind of musical literacy.14
10
According to the minutes of planning meetings, the entire point of the 1936 All-Union Cho-
ral Olympiad was to propagandize folk music of the Soviet Union’s various nationalities. See
RGALI f. 962, op. 5, d. 30, ll. 1–3. Honoring amateur groups by bringing them to the capital
had additional meaning, as Soviet power was simultaneously centralized and personalized
in Stalin and Moscow. See James von Geldern, “The Centre and the Periphery: Cultural and
Social Geography in the Mass Culture of the 1930s,” in New Directions in Soviet History, ed.
Stephen White (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 62–80.
11
RGALI f. 962, op. 5, d. 47, ll. 1–79.
12
A. Livshits, “Muzykalńaia zhizn´ Tadzhikistana,” Sovetskaia muzyka 6, 9 (1938): 59; B.
Aleksandrov, “Muzykalńaia zhizn´ Turkmenii,” Sovetskaia muzyka 7, 8 (1939): 83; and Mar-
ian Koval´, “Ansambli pesni, muzyki i tantsa narodov RSFSR,” Sovetskaia muzyka 7, 9–10
(1939): 127. Koval´, formerly associated with the radical proletarian Russian Association of
Proletariat Musicians (RAPM), wrote with approval that the Urdmurt ensemble was engaged
in systematic study of music notation; Aleksandrov, son of the composer of the Soviet national
anthem and future director of the Red Army Ensemble (founded by his father), criticized the
Turkmen folk orchestra for not doing the same.
13
Vol´kovich and Shamina, Khorovaia samodeiatelńost´, 67–69; and Genrikh Bruk, “Nas-
toiashchee i budushchee muzykalńoi samodeiatelńosti,” Sovetskaia muzyka 9, 1 (1941): 71–
72.
14
In 1901 the ethnographer Dmitrii K. Zelenin, Novye veianiia v narodnoi poezii (Moscow:
Vestnik vospitaniia, 1901), 9, found peasants who, when asked about their songs, consulted
songbooks published in Moscow; quoted in Robert A. Rothstein, “Death of the Folk Song?”
in Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia,
ed. Stephen P. Frank and Mark D. Steinberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994),
116.
A curious thing was happening at this same time to the word narodnyi. This
word can be translated into English as “folk” or “people’s,” as in the collective, cul-
tural concept of “a people” or “nation.” In Russian, narod refers to both a narrow
concept of traditional folk, and a broader concept of the mass of people. However, for
over a century before the revolution, the term narodnyi had implied “peasant.” The
first Russian folklorists, who began collecting, studying, and categorizing songs in
the eighteenth century, used the word narodnyi specifically to indicate works known
and sung by peasants; songs arising from the everyday culture of the town or city
were simply called “Russian.”15 Since the vast majority of people in the Russian Em-
pire at this time were peasants, the association of the people (narod) with the peasant
(krestíanin) was not inappropriate. This association endured to the twentieth century.
After the revolution, the term narod achieved a wider meaning in the new peo-
ple’s state as a referent to the general populace. Its association with the mass of people
was reflected in its use for such offices as “People’s Commissar” (narodnyi komissar).
Despite this broader characterization of narod in postrevolutionary public discourse,
the traditional association of peasants with narodnaia muzyka did not disappear
immediately. However, during the 1930s, what was meant by the term narodnaia
muzyka did shift away from an implied stress on traditional folklore or peasant roots
to the more general sense of “popular” music. Any sort of connection with the masses
could give music a narodnyi base. Thus, by the end of the 1930s, narodnaia muzyka
referred to a diverse variety of music, including the traditional songs of peasants
(village folk), prerevolutionary factory songs (urban folk), chastushki (contemporary
four-line verses and tunes originating in both urban and rural areas), and those popu-
lar songs by Soviet composers that had some connection with people’s daily life and
experience. The most significant change here is the inclusion of popular new works
by contemporary songwriters. This reflects a trend in the study of folklore in this
period: Dana Prescott Howell has noted that in the second half of the 1930s there was
“a reintroduction of the concept of ‘popular’ with regard to folkloric materials.” She
sees this as part of an effort to downplay the fact of social differentiation in the Soviet
Union and stress the unity of Soviet peoples across the boundaries of nationalities.16
As composed popular songs took their place beside older, traditional peasant
songs, both were called narodnaia songs. However, these two kinds of song differed
from one another in a significant way. The traditional peasant song usually has a
specific local or regional attachment. There is, strictly speaking, no “general Russian
folk song” but rather songs from different regions of Russia, each with stylistic at-
15
F. Rubtsev, “Russkie narodnye khory i psevdonarodnye pesni,” in Stati po muzykalńomu
fol´kloru (Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor, 1973), 184. N. A. L´vov first used the term “narod-
naia pesnia,” after the German “Volkslieder,” to indicate peasant or folk song in his path-break-
ing 1790 song collection, Sobranie narodnykh russkikh pesen s ikh golosami. See Richard
Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 16.
16
Dana Prescott Howell, The Development of Soviet Folkloristics (New York: Garland Pub-
lishing, 1992), 366.
tributes of its region.17 In contrast, the composed popular song is created for a mass
market. If there is any association with geography it is on the national level. The
popular song unites a diverse population through mass culture that is designed to
appeal to the largest number of people possible. This inclusiveness serves the pur-
pose described by Howell, to help create a mass Soviet population not divided by its
significant ethnic differences.
The difference between traditional, local peasant songs and the new conception
of folk music must have been obvious to members of the music establishment, some
of whom may have wished to continue to distinguish between traditional and new
popular songs. If narodnyi now meant “popular,” perhaps another word could be used
to indicate “folk.” This impulse was countered at the highest level. When a partici-
pant in a 1936 meeting between Kerzhentsev and choir directors referred repeatedly
to ensembles performing a repertoire of traditional peasant music as “ethnographic”
choirs, Kerzhentsev called this term neudachno (unsuccessful), preferring the general
term narodnyi instead.18 In essence, he was arguing against classifying traditional
peasant music narrowly with a word that implied a distance between performers and
those who might study the music. Rather, he placed the music in a more general and
inclusive category, one that implied that this music was inherently shared by all peo-
ple. It could be as much a part of mass culture as a new song from a hit movie: both
were popular, that is, of the people.
One might argue that a certain degree of the older definition of “folk” remained
in “folk” music through the activities of popular Russian folk choirs that sang a rep-
ertoire of village music, such as the Piatnitskii Choir, the Iarkov Choir, the Voronezh
Choir, and so on. However, even here there is an interesting development in what
“folk” might mean. As narodnyi more frequently was used to indicate “popular,” the
peasant implications of that word, at least in the Russian context, disappeared. This
reflects a larger change in perceptions of the countryside and the Soviet people during
this period. The peasant was the loser in this process. Soviet officials were eager to
persuade their nation and the world that Soviet society was modern and industrial. A
significant part of Soviet society was still rural, but the official word was that collec-
tivization had, in effect, industrialized the agricultural process. Thus, internal plans
for the 1937 exhibition of Soviet agriculture stated that the exhibition must stress that
Soviet agriculture was “not agrarian, but [that] of an industrial country.”19 People
who raised crops on a collective farm were agricultural workers, not peasants, and
17
See Theodore Levin’s interview with Russian ethnographer and performer Dmitrii
Pokrovskii for a discussion of the significance of regional attachment in folk music, and the
meaninglessness of the term “Russian folk music.” Theodore Levin, “Dmitri Pokrovsky and
the Russian Folk Music Revival Movement,” in Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central
and Eastern Europe, ed. Mark Slobin (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 24–25.
See also Rubtsev, “Russkie narodnye khori,” 184, on the nonexistence of “general” Russian
folk song.
18
RGALI f. 962, op. 3, d. 94, ll. 10, 25.
19
RGALI f. 962, op. 3, d. 50, l. 10.
indeed there seemed to be no room in a fully industrialized economy for that prein-
dustrial character, the peasant. As Victoria Bonnell has shown, this change was indi-
cated in poster art, in which traditional images of peasants (bearded men and stout,
kerchiefed women) were abruptly replaced in early 1930 with pictures of collective
farmers who bore iconographic traits of workers.20 The discourse about music was in
step with this trend. While in 1930 there was much discussion of “peasant” choirs, by
1936 such musical collectives were referred to as either “folk” or “popular” (narod-
nyi) or (albeit “unsuccessfully”) “ethnographic” choirs.21 When the nation’s most vis-
ible Russian folk choir, the Piatnitskii ensemble, became a professional choir in 1936,
one of the conditions of professionalization was that the choir change its name from
the Krestíanskii khor imeni Piatnitskogo (Piatnitskii Peasant Choir) to the Russ-
kii narodnyi khor imeni Piatnitskogo (Piatnitskii Russian Folk Choir). The Soviet
Union’s leading choir in this genre could no longer carry the designation “peasant”;
its new name indicated its widespread “popular” status.
In lieu of traditional peasant music, a new genre was created: new Soviet folk
song. Despite constant reference to the importance of folk art in the Soviet Union in
the 1930s, the older songs began taking second place to new songs about the glories
of Soviet life. The best of these, however, were those that could trumpet new Soviet
sensibilities while exploiting older sonorities and styles. This was what was meant
by giving new songs a folk base. Maksim Gor´kii, in his closing address to the 1934
Writers’ Congress, suggested that contemporary poets would do well to pair new
words to old melodies from the Russian, Ukrainian, and Georgian—and possibly
other—traditions.22 Some composers and folk performers tried their hands at pro-
ducing entirely new tunes that resembled traditional ones. American folklorist Frank
Miller calls this “pseudofolklore,” a genre based on traditional forms, but with very
contemporary topics.23 Peasant singers, frequently under the direct guidance of folk-
lorists with an eye toward political expediency, wrote and performed epics in praise
20
Victoria E. Bonnell, “The Peasant Woman in Stalinist Political Art of the 1930s,” American
Historical Review 98, 1 (1993): 55–82, especially 57–60.
21
“Peasant concerts” disappeared from radio program listings in 1929 (a year before tra-
ditional folk music itself was banned from the radio). The term lingered in print media for
several years: in 1934 there was a debate in Klub about the value of peasant choirs (reprinted
in Vol´kovich and Shamina, Khorovaia samodeiatelńost´, 178–83), and as late as 1936 the oc-
casional reference to the peasant choir genre surfaced. See D. Vasilév-Bulgai, “Pervomaiskaia
programma,” Sovetskaia muzyka 4, 7 (1936): 57. However, at the 1936 meeting between Ker-
zhentsev and choir directors, “peasant” choirs were not even part of the discussion of whether
to call such choirs either “folk” or “ethnographic.”
22
M. Gor´kii, “Zakliuchitelńaia rech´ na pervom vsesoiuznom s˝ezde sovetskikh pisatelei, 1
sentiabria 1934 goda,” in Sobranie sochinenii, 27: 350. Gor´kii’s examples were drawn from
his own knowledge of folk tunes, but he allowed that there were probably usable melodies in
other traditions of Soviet nationalities.
23
See Frank J. Miller, Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore of the Stalin
Era (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990), 3–24.
of Stalin, Lenin, the new Moscow Metro system, the constitution of 1936, and a host
of other topics. One of the most famous of these performers, Marfa Kriukova, used
the term noviny (new songs) to differentiate her works from older ones. Folklorists
adopted this term as a label for this new Soviet folklore.24 The same process obtained
in choral folk song, and many folk choirs moved accordingly: for example, the most
prominent local folk choir of the Voronezh area, which had a rich folk song tradition,
replaced its old songs with modern folk-style songs “about heroes of the Civil War,
about the glorious Red Army.”25 The greatest success story in this genre was the
Piatnitskii Choir, which originally achieved fame and wide popularity through its
performances of Russian peasant songs in fairly traditional arrangements, but won
the highest honor possible, establishment as a State Choir, because of its repertoire of
songs about the contemporary Soviet countryside, composed by the choir’s codirec-
tor, Vladimir Zakharov.26 Traditional songs by no means disappeared from the public
ear, but greater rewards were in store for those soloists and choirs that took up the
new songs. The success of the Piatnitskii Choir can be contrasted to the fate of the
Iarkov Choir, its main rival as leading Russian folk choir in the capital in the 1920s
and ’30s. Petr Iarkov, the director, preferred to take a more purist approach to Russian
folk music performance and found himself at greater odds with the arts authorities;
after his death in 1945 his choir disbanded.
The attention to folk traditions was not limited to Russian traditions, although
governmental officials gave these precedence: in a 1937 planning session on reper-
toire for state-sponsored music collectives, Kerzhentsev stated that one of the top two
tasks of state choirs was “the propagandizing of folk song, Russian first of all, and
other people’s.”27 The Soviet Union was a land of many ethnic traditions, and a rich
array of musical folklore was available for study and public attention. The pages of
Sovetskaia muzyka throughout the 1930s were filled with articles about the musical
24
A. Gumennik and V. Krivonosov, “Marfa Semenovna Kriukova i severnye bylini,” Sovets-
kaia muzyka 7, 1 (1939): 50–55; and Miller, Folklore for Stalin, 12. For a short list of typical
contemporary folk-song themes, see Georgii Khubov, “Zolotoi vek narodnogo tvorchestva,”
Sovetskaia muzyka 5, 10–11 (1937): 32. Felix J. Oinas, “Folklore and Politics in the Soviet
Union,” Slavic Review 32, 1 (1973): 49–52, suggests that many of the folklorists who encour-
aged noviny were on explicit assignment from the government.
25
K. I. Massalitinov, S Russkoi pesnei po zhizni (Voronezh: Tsentralńo-Chernozemnoe
knizhnoe izdatel´stvo, 1981), 13.
26
M. Grinberg, a highly-placed official in the KDI, attributed the Piatnitskii Choir’s great
successes in this period, culminating in its establishment as a State Choir in 1940, primarily
to Zakharov’s compositions, in particular the 1939 hit “I kto ego znaet.” See M. Grinberg,
“Vstrechi i dela,” in Vospominaniia V. G. Zakharova, ed. T. N. Livanova (Moscow: Muzyka,
1967), 208. For a discussion of the process of becoming a state choir, see Susannah Lockwood
Smith, “From Peasants to Professionals: The Socialist-Realist Transformation of a Russian
Folk Choir,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, 3 (2002): 393–425.
27
RGALI f. 962, op. 3, d. 285, l. 3. By the late 1930s there was an increase in published ma-
terials about Russian folk culture, and a decrease in material about other peoples of the Soviet
Union. See Howell, Development of Soviet Folkloristics, 411–12.
traditions of the ethnic minorities of the Soviet Union. Folk performers from the other
republics brought their various instruments to Moscow and also performed on the
radio.28 Often such performances were in the context of a dekada (festival) featuring
the art of a specific republic or area, such as the 1937 Kazakh, Ukrainian, Georgian,
and Uzbek dekady and the 1939 dekada of Kirgiz art.29 Soviet citizens therefore had
increased opportunities to learn about the music traditions of their compatriots, al-
though the cross-cultural efforts were not always entirely successful. Kerzhentsev
was concerned when a series of 1937 festivals of Soviet music in cities across the
nation demonstrated that local tastes remained generally parochial, with Georgian
music featured at the Tbilisi dekada, music by Leningrad composers featured at the
Leningrad dekada, and so on.30
Thus, the result of new attention and support for folk music was mixed. Folk
music was more widely publicized and the music of national minorities played in
areas where it may never have been heard before. Traditional performers might find
themselves suddenly achieving national fame and prestige. At the same time, in many
cases the music itself was politicized, and its performers encouraged to find modern
equivalents to traditional songs and to change the way they approached the music
itself by using music notation. While folk music received unprecedented official sup-
port in this period, to a certain degree traditional song and practice were abandoned
and modern popular song took their place.

As discussed above, the turn toward folk music in official policy of the 1930s required
that members of the Soviet musical establishment, whether composers, conservatory-
trained performers, academics, or critics, devote their attention to folk music. How
did the musical establishment deal with this new policy?
The first thing to note is that not all of this was entirely new. Russian composers
had been integrating folk themes into their music for a century. Soviet composers
would continue to do so. There was, however, in this period a broadening of these
28
An article on the 1939 All-Union Review of Folk Instrument Performers has a full page
listing the different kind of instruments featured over the course of the review and where they
are from. See V. Beliaev, “Smotr narodnykh muzykantov,” Sovetskaia muzyka 7, 11 (1939):
96–97. The radio frequently played folk music from all over the Soviet Union. To celebrate the
twentieth anniversary of the revolution, there was a two-week festival featuring singers, story-
tellers, and instrumentalists representing all peoples of the Soviet Union, most of whom were
invited to Moscow for recording; over 25,000 people auditioned for this honor. See Sovetskaia
muzyka 5, 10–11 (1937): 155.
29
Georgii Khubov, “Muzykalńoe iskusstvo Uzbekistana,” Sovetskaia muzyka 5, 6 (1937):
6–14; and V. Krivonosov, “Mastera narodnogo iskusstva,” Sovetskaia muzyka 7, 6 (1939):
9–18. These dekady were also covered in the national (Pravda) and local (Vecherniaia Moskva)
press.
30
RGALI f. 962, op. 3, d. 314, l. 14.
efforts among the national minorities of the Soviet Union.31 Russians had their great
national operas that arose out of the music of the people—and so should the Uzbeks,
the Georgians, and so on. Indeed, there seemed to be an obsession particularly with
creating new operas in various national traditions, as well as a continued demand by
Sovetskaia muzyka editors and arts officials for a good collective farm opera.32 Young
conservatory graduates (frequently Russians) were dispatched in the central Asian
republics to spark new national musical movements. Older, established academic
composers also tried their hands at writing “national” music of the various Soviet
peoples: Reinhold Glière wrote operas using Azerbaijan and Uzbek folk materials,
and Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov composed works based on the native music of Azer-
baijan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.33 These were serious efforts to establish and
develop “indigenous” national operatic, musical theater, and symphonic traditions,
often under the direction of Russian musicians.34 At the same time the number of
students from the national republics at the Moscow conservatory increased.35
In some cases, these efforts simply encouraged an already established national
tradition. In other cases the result was the development of genres of so-called national
music that were at variance with local musical traditions.36 A clear example of this
was the development of choral singing where none had existed before, such as among
31
It is worth noting that even this was nothing new. According to Malcolm Hamrick Brown,
Russian composer Aleksandr A. Aliabév pioneered the “Asiatic song” genre in the 1830s,
with his compositions that borrowed certain pitch and rhythmic elements from Caucasian
native music. Nevertheless, his compositions generally reveal “a fundamental dependence on
European stylistic norms unqualified by features that might distinguish them from the West-
ern mainstream.” See Brown, “Native Song and National Consciousness in Nineteenth-Cen-
tury Russian Music,” in Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia, ed. Theofanis George
Stavrou (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 69–70.
32
See, for example, “Na vysokom pod˝eme: Muzykalńaia kul´tura Strany Sovetov,” Sovet
skaia muzyka 5, 4 (1937): 13.
33
Boris Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 1917–1981 (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1983), 163, casts doubt upon the “Soviet” nature of Ippolitov-Ivanov’s works,
suggesting that they were much more in the line of nineteenth-century exoticism. On Glière,
see Richard Anthony Leonard, A History of Russian Music (New York: Macmillan, 1968),
350–51.
34
On Uzbek theater and opera, see Iakov Grinval´d, “Iskusstvo schastlivogo naroda,” Vecher-
niaia Moskva, 31 May 1937, 3. This process was still viewed uncritically as recently as the
early 1980s. See A. Ziiatly, “Narodno-pesennoe tvorchestvo sovetskogo Azerbaidzhana,” in
Narodnaia muzyka SSSR i sovremennost´, ed. I. I. Zemtsovskii (Leningrad: Muzyka, 1982),
136–44.
35
Jelagin, Taming of the Arts, 194–96. According to Jelagin, these students essentially re-
placed the students of working-class origin who had been promoted in the 1920s. Both groups
were admitted in what amounted to affirmative action, and many were not up to conservatory
standards.
36
Ibid., 231–33. Jelagin considered that in the latter cases, the music was generally dreadful.
the Kirgiz, Chuvash, Iakutsk, Azerbaijani, and Tatar peoples.37 This, on the face of
it, is absolutely at odds with the spirit of basing musical life in the Soviet Union on its
indigenous folk roots. Rather, it is the grafting of local material onto what, in some
cases, was an alien musical form. Orchestral music in the European tradition was
still held as the epitome of musical composition and performance. Therefore, folk
traditions had to be brought into the sphere of advanced music, by creating “national”
operas and other academic, orchestral works. In a sense, this turns the directive on its
head: European classical music became the structure for development of an ex post
facto “folk” tradition.
Of course, before a new national music could be developed, its folk roots had to
be explored. The academy turned its attention to the non-Russian republics, and there
was an explosion of studies of the music of the various ethnic groups of the Soviet
Union. No issue of Sovetskaia muzyka in the late 1930s was complete without a dis-
cussion of the folk traditions of one group or another. These articles generally touched
on similar points: a description of indigenous music of an area; a discussion of how, in
one way or another, people’s musical expression was discouraged by the bourgeoisie
or church or both before the revolution; and praise for the new musical vitality now
possible in the Soviet era.38 All parts of the nation were covered in these efforts.
When the Baltic states were annexed in 1940, Sovetskaia muzyka almost immedi-
ately printed a section on the music of the Baltic republics, thus introducing (with
remarkable speed) Baltic folk traditions into the Soviet fold. Many of the articles of
the section reflect the same themes: a description of the local music and discussion of
how music suffered under the previous regime.39
The efforts to develop and publicize the “folk” traditions of the Soviet Union’s
many ethnic groups point to a contradiction in social and cultural policy objectives.
On the one hand, there was the desire to encourage these various folk traditions in
order to demonstrate that the Soviet Union was, indeed, a place where culture arose
from people’s genuine traditions and therefore was truly of the masses and not of
an elite. On the other hand was the compelling need to unite the diverse nation in a
common culture—hence the move toward redefining narodnyi as “popular” and the
37
Vl. Vlasov and Vl. Fere, “K itogam Vsekirgizskoi olimpiady,” Sovetskaia muzyka 5, 3
(1937): 90; A. Livshits, “O chuvashskoi narodnoi muzyke,” Sovetskaia muzyka 5, 4 (1937):
57–58; V. Beliaev, “Iakutskie narodnye pesni,” Sovetskaia muzyka 5, 9 (1937): 11–13; Georgii
Khubov, “Muzykalńaia kul´tura v Azerbaidzhane,” Sovetskaia muzyka 5, 10–11 (1937): 139;
and RGALI f. 962, op. 5, d. 47, l. 2.
38
The examples are numerous. From just 1938–39, see A. Livshits, “Muzyka v sovetskoi
Kirgizii,” Sovetskaia muzyka 6, 3 (1938): 75–84; I. Shteinman, “Muzyka v bytu iamal´skikh
nentsev,” Sovetskaia muzyka 6, 9 (1938): 53–57; A. Livshits, “Muzykalńaia zhizn´ Tadzhiki
stana,” Sovetskaia muzyka 6, 9 (1938): 58–63; Biul´-Biul´ Mamedov, “Puti razvitiia muzy
kalńogo iskusstva,” Sovetskaia muzyka 6, 10–11 (1938): 64–68; V. Beliaev, “Kirgizskaia
narodnaia muzyka,” Sovetskaia muzyka 7, 6 (1939): 19–23; and A. Livshits, “Muzykalńaia
zhizn´ Buriat-Mongolii,” Sovetskaia muzyka 7, 12 (1939): 91–93.
39
“Muzyka v pribaltiiskikh respublikakh,” Sovetskaia muzyka 8, 9 (1940): 70–81. The first
article in the section was entitled “Our New Friends.”
creation of a non-local mass culture. The first attempt to resolve this contradiction
was the call that all cultural activity should be “national in form, socialist in content.”
This attempt to base Soviet mass culture on socialist content was not entirely success-
ful, and by the late 1930s older concepts about the supremacy of Russian culture reas-
serted themselves. Efforts to study and publicize the ethnographic diversity of Soviet
life continued, but Russian culture was placed above the rest, a trend that accelerated
with World War II. Ironically, scholars now suggest that the Soviet Union faced an
intractable problem with national minorities in its waning years in part thanks to the
support for further development of separate national identities in each republic.40
The call to base all music on folk traditions played a significant role in another
area of Soviet music theory: antiformalist polemic. Formalism was a poorly defined
concept which, in the eyes of one contemporary European observer, was clearest
as a foil for socialist realism: “thesis and antithesis, white and black, good and evil.
Socialist realism is held to be the sole possible principle of Soviet artistic production;
formalism is violently opposed as the hateful product of decadent bourgeoisie.”41 The
official definition of formalism in music was the separation of musical form from con-
tent. This definition is almost impossibly vague; in practice, anything that seemed to
owe much to modernist trends in contemporary Western music, such as atonality, was
condemned as formalist, although modernism itself was never directly censured.42
In music, socialist realism was equally poorly defined, but the closest that one might
come to achieving the goals of socialist realism was to base all music on narodnyi
sources. This follows, again, from Gor´kii’s 1934 speech to the writers’ congress.
On that occasion Gor´kii laid out the tenets of socialist realism, so the call to pay
attention to folklore was closely associated with the socialist realism movement. For
writers the requirements of socialist realism were clear: to write about the ideal ful-
fillment of socialism as if it had already taken place. For musicians, the task was less
clear—but Gor´kii pointed the way by highlighting folklore. Drawing on folk music
was therefore a safe bet. Equally safe would be equating any music tainted with the
term “formalism” with a lack of folk base. Thus, when Dmitrii Shostakovich was
faced with public reprimand over his “formalist” music in 1936, he was faulted by
Nikolai Cheliapov in a long Sovetskaia muzyka article for not turning to folk song
and folk creativity in his work. However, what is meant by folk song is clearly broad:
Cheliapov notes here that “deep folk roots lie at the base of the work of Vivaldi, Bach,
40
See Ronald Suny, “State, Civil Society, and Ethnic Cultural Consolidation in the USSR—
Roots of the National Question,” and Victor Zaslavsky, “The Evolution of Separatism in Soviet
Society under Gorbachev,” in From Union to Commonwealth: Nationalism and Separatism in
the Soviet Republics, ed. Gail W. Lapidus and Zaslavsky, with Philip Goldman (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 22–44, 71–97. See also Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge
of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1993), 84–126.
41
Kurt London, The Seven Soviet Arts (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1937), 61.
42
Schwarz, Music and Musical Life, 128–29.
Handel, Haydn, etc.”43 Shostakovich’s good friend and colleague, Ivan Sollertinskii,
who was even more closely associated at that time with formalism, publicly promised
to study Georgian folklore as a way of amending the error of his ways.44 The repeated
assertion that Soviet music drew its great strength from its inherent closeness to the
people was equally an assertion that contemporary Soviet music was not formalist;
indeed, in 1940 composer Dmitrii Kabalevskii suggested at a meeting of the Soviet
Composers’ Union that folk music had been helpful in the battle against formalism.45
Folk music therefore was useful to the music establishment. Frequent reference
to its prominence in and its healthful effects on Soviet musical culture served to
illustrate that Soviet musicians were fulfilling their task and building socialism in
their assigned way by developing music with genuine roots in the traditions of all
the peoples of the USSR, and by avoiding anti-Socialist trends like formalism. Nev-
ertheless, there still appears to have been some suspicion of the original narodnaia
muzyka, traditional folk music. Many influential members of the music academies
simply viewed folk music as a lesser art, if an art at all. There is, after all, a differ-
ence between developed artistic traditions and folk practice. Anyone can sing—but
this does not mean that anyone who sings is an artist. To be considered an artist, one
should be trained in the techniques of one’s art, and should have academic knowledge
of its historical traditions and standards of production. Folk singing and folk song
might be music, but this does not necessarily qualify it for consideration in the music
conservatories. Or, it might be studied, but not very well.46
The possibility of prejudice against folk music existed beyond the academy. In
1910, Mitrofan Piatnitskii’s idea to present peasant songs, performed by peasants, on
the Moscow concert stage was derided by Moscow musicians, who thought such a
performance would not withstand serious criticism.47 They were proven wrong, and
Piatnitskii’s choir continued to perform. Nevertheless, in the 1920s when Piatnitskii
tried to get professional status for his Russian folk choir, he was denied because au-
thorities at the Union of Arts Workers thought it inappropriate to put semiliterate
peasants on the same level as distinguished artists.48 Petr Iarkov had better luck with
his folk choir, which achieved professional status in 1925. However, a decade later
43
N. Cheliapov, “K itogam diskussii na muzykalńom fronte,” Sovetskaia muzyka 4, 3 (1936):
5–6.
44
Schwarz, Music and Musical Life, 127. Noting that Stalin was Georgian, Schwarz charac-
terizes this as “flattery so obvious as to be facetious.”
45
RGALI f. 962, op. 5, d. 410.
46
Folk choir director and Soviet folk song composer Vladimir Zakharov wrote that although
he had studied Russian folk song in the conservatory, he realized immediately when he was
faced with a choir that performed real Russian folk songs that his conservatory education had
been completely inadequate in this area. See RGALI f. 2628, op. 1, d. 2, l. 2.
47
V. Paskhalov, “M. E. Piatnitskii i istoriia vozniknoveniia ego khora,” in Sovetskaia muzyka
(Moscow: Muzgiz, 1944), 2: 77.
48
RGALI f. 2001, op. 1, d. 9, l. 9.
state arts workers organizing the 1936 choral olympiad included his choir not among
the professional choirs, but among the “mixed” choirs (that is, in a place between pro-
fessional and amateur).49 As a senior member of the Russian Composer’s Union once
explained to me, it is important to remember that “professional” can mean different
things. A choir that receives a wage for rehearsing and performing, as Iarkov’s choir
did, is certainly professional, but being paid does not necessarily denote that the per-
former has achieved the mastery of a professional artist.50
As discussed above, traditional forms of folk music were not the only kind of
music supported by authorities as music of the narod. Popular songs in general could
also fall into this category. Some of these might still claim deep roots in the country-
side, such as the new Soviet folk songs about collective farm workers by Vladimir
Zakharov. This was not, however, a necessary prerequisite for a narodnaia song: a
general connection to the people—the mass audience—could also do. The simplest,
if tautological, demonstration that a piece of music had a narodnyi base was that the
music spoke to people and was understood and liked by people: that is, that it was pop-
ular. Thus, popular songs for a mass audience by composers such as Isaak Dunaevskii
and Matvei Blanter could also find a place in the big tent of “people’s” music. Support
for these “mass songs” meant honoring such composers as part of the music establish-
ment, particularly in the mid-1930s, when Stalin decreed that “life is getting better”
and light genres of music received greater official support and encouragement.51 It
meant that popular songs from movies, by composers such as Dunaevskii or Daniil
and Dmitrii Pokrass, were awarded the nation’s highest honor, the Stalin Prize,52
an honor also given to concert pieces such as Shostakovich’s piano quintet and the
Twenty-First Symphony of Nikolai Miaskovskii. And it also meant that composers of
lighter fare, including new folk songs, might rise to positions of authority: Zakharov
became secretary of the Composers’ Union in 1948. This indicates that members of
the music establishment had to be open to—or at least put up with—a wide variety of
genres within an important organization such as the Composers’ Union.
The elevation of folk music as a respected genre, and the stubborn persistence of
average Soviet citizens in liking various forms of popular music, presented another
challenge to music authorities, both in and out of government. There was another
trend in Soviet arts that in some ways ran counter to the efforts to give folk traditions
the status of art. This was the attempt to raise the cultural attainment of all Soviet citi-
zens. As people of worker or peasant origin were propelled into positions of responsi-
bility (equivalent to middle management) they strove to emulate the cultural values of
49
RGALI f. 962, op. 5, d. 30, l. 9.
50
Conversation with Boleslav Isaakovich Rabinovich, 28 June 1999. My thanks to Serge Ro-
gosin for putting me in touch with Rabinovich.
51
See Jelagin, Taming of the Arts, 208–09; also Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: En-
tertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 65–80.
52
Retroactively named the State Prize after Stalin’s death and subsequent discrediting.
the formerly discredited prerevolutionary class. They wished to appear “cultured.”53

At the same time, Soviet authorities had some stake in presenting a cultured face to
the world, as if to demonstrate that everyone in the Soviet Union had access to the
best that education had to offer, and as a result all Soviets were discerning individuals
with knowledge and appreciation of the world’s classics—and were not a pack of Bol-
shevik hoodlums or boors. Thus, the state sponsored extensive efforts to improve the
musical taste of the general public, with particular promotion of classical and modern
academic music. It deemed education especially important, and supported efforts to
bring the classics, in performance and lecture, to workers’ clubs; production of mov-
ies of opera, so that workers could learn to love them; and concentration on the classi-
cal repertoire in children’s radio programming.54 Kerzhentsev stated in 1937 that the
second most important objective of state choirs was to perform more folk songs—but
the first objective was to acquaint the “musical public and those interested in music”
with the “treasure house” of classical choral repertoire.55
This drive to raise the musical culture of the Soviet public could include light mu-
sic by such popular composers as Dunaevskii and Blanter, as long as this music was
deemed of sufficient quality. However, folk music—particularly the older peasant
music now also considered “popular”—was somewhat more problematic. Enjoyment
of folk music was posited in many cases as a transitional phase: the peasant or worker
may start out by liking folk music, but the truly cultured Soviet citizen understands,
appreciates, seeks out, and enjoys classical music. To encourage this process, classical
works were sometimes performed on traditional folk instruments, so that the peasant
might learn to love unfamiliar music, such as works by Bach and Glinka, by hear-
ing it on familiar instruments, such as the accordion.56 Pravda described scenes of
53
This is a very cursory summary of a complicated process, which has received significant
scholarly treatment in the past two decades. See especially Vera S. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time:
Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990); Sheila
Fitzpatrick, “Becoming Cultured: Socialist Realism and the Representation of Privilege and
Taste,” and “Cultural Orthodoxies under Stalin,” both in The Cultural Front: Power and Cul-
ture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); and Nicholas S.
Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York:
E. P. Dutton, 1946).
54
E. Rashkovskaia, “Kontsertno-massovaia rabota Mosfila v klubakh,” Sovetskaia muzyka
2, 9 (1934): 49–50; A. Aleksandrov, “Kul´tura i iskusstvo v plane tretéi piatiletki,” Sovetskaia
muzyka 5, 9 (1937): 64; and L. Siniaver, “Radio dlia detei: Zametki o radioperedachakh,”
Sovetskaia muzyka 9, 5 (1941): 82–85. Siniaver’s recommendations for children’s radio pro-
gramming stress the importance of entertaining children with songs—but despite earlier men-
tion of folk songs as having an important place in the radio repertoire, the songs he specifically
recommends for children are those of Schubert, Chaikovskii, and several contemporary Soviet
composers. See also Kurt London’s comments on the extent in 1936 of attempts at educating
the Soviet radio audience about classical music (Seven Soviet Arts, 300–01).
55
RGALI f. 962, op. 3, d. 285, l. 3.
56
B. Ia., “Vecher narodnykh instrumentov,” Sovetskaia muzyka 4, 7 (1936): 77–78. See also
V. Beliaev, “Smotr narodnykh muzykantov,” Sovetskaia muzyka 7, 11 (1939): 101, for a dis-
Russian collective farmers enthusiastically singing arias by Glinka and performing

works of Beethoven and Chopin, and in Sovetskaia muzyka, Aleksandr Livshits could
claim that the people in Kirgizia were unable fully to appreciate music—their own
included—until they learned the music of composers of genius: Bach, Beethoven,
Mozart, Glinka, Rimskii-Korsakov, Musorgskii, and others.57 In some cases, a folk
instrument would be altered in mass production to allow for playing non-indigenous
folk music on it, as was recommended in Sovetskaia muzyka for the Chuvash gusli.58
Arts officials continued urging arrangements of classical works for the accordion in
the 1940s.59 Lip service was always paid to the support and dissemination of folk
music, and particularly to the narodnyi basis of all Soviet music, but the underlying
tone was for encouragement of classical music and modern academic music by Soviet
composers. Popular music, although in and of itself useful and good, was not the
ultimate goal of Soviet musical development. With this in mind, it should come as no
surprise that one Iurév, a member of the Philharmonic organization, wondered how
the performance of choirs such as the Piatnitskii ensemble at a 1937 festival of Soviet
music would “prepare listeners for Fidelio.”60
Yet not all Soviet listeners were, in reality, interested in Fidelio. And given the
increased support for folk genres, and the national prominence given to a wide variety
of folk performers, those listeners who wished to avoid Beethoven or opera or both
had plenty of opportunity to do so and still attend fine concerts performed by pro-
fessional ensembles—some with the highest possible designation, such as the State
Orchestra of Folk Instruments or the State Folk Dance ensemble. What an earlier
generation of music professionals may have appreciated as beautiful or interesting but
dismissed as primitive, was now firmly established as an art form with endorsement
from the highest level of government.
It is difficult to know what Soviet musicians, composers, and musicologists re-
ally thought about this trend, given the limitations placed on their free expression
cussion of using “mass” and “national” instruments as a means of spreading classical musical
culture among the general population.
57
V. Furer, “Narodnoe tvorchestvo,” Pravda, 4 January 1934, 4; and A. Livshits, “Muzyka v
sovetskoi Kirgizii,” Sovetskaia muzyka 6, 3 (1938): 76. Other examples include the first Fes-
tival of Music in Collective Farms (1939) in which the most successful works presented were
“the best works of Soviet composers, Western and Russian classical music,” not folk music.
See “Festival´ muzyki v kolkhozakh,” Sovetskaia muzyka 7, 5 (1939): 75–76.
58
“K voprosu ob organizatsii massovogo proizvodstva natsionalńykh muzykalńykh instru-
mentov,” Sovetskaia muzyka 2, 5 (1934): 45–46.
59
For example, RGALI f. 962, op. 3, d. 1005, l. 29.
60
RGALI f. 962, op. 3, d. 434, l. 54. Despite this official’s grudging admission that the Pi-
atnitskii Choir was one of the high points in the 1937 dekada of Soviet music, which other
officials similarly asserted (RGALI f. 962, op. 3, d. 314, ll. 1, 10), press coverage of the next
year’s dekada continued to privilege the Soviet “classics” over folk performances. See A.
Khachaturian, “Dekada sovetskoi muzyki,” Vecherniaia Moskva, 3 November 1938, 3; and M.
Grinberg, “Dekada sovetskoi muzyki,” Pravda, 12 November 1938, 4.
of anything other than support of state and party initiatives. After emigrating to the
United States, one representative was able to comment bitterly. Juri Jelagin, a conser-
vatory-trained violinist who played in classical, theatrical, and jazz venues in 1930s
Moscow, had this to say of Soviet music:
Everything that is created in the Soviet Union, including music, has a distinctly
backward, primitive character; everything bears an unmistakable second-rate
stamp of pauperization and degradation of technique. This has come about
for a number of reasons: with the elevation of primitive forms of folklore to
the highest position in art the technical standards in artistic creativeness have
been lowered; the limitations of nationalism have been forced on the arts
and the cultural ties with other countries severed; all artistic styles, with the
exception of socialistic realism, have been outlawed and destroyed.61
For the music establishment, the turn toward folk music presented a problem:
how to carry out the order to give all Soviet music a folk base. The clearest solution
to the problem, and the easiest to implement, was to begin studying, publicizing, and
using folk materials from as many of the national groups of the Soviet Union as pos-
sible. This resulted in a lot of work for the ethnomusicologists, and a revival of some
aspects of the nineteenth-century national (and exotic) schools of composition. As the
support for folk music met the equally forceful effort to raise the cultural level of the
Soviet masses, European academic standards were imposed on folk traditions with
hybridized results: a Russian-driven move to create new “national” classical music
among all Soviet ethnic groups, and a standardization and professionalization of folk
performers. Of equal importance, policies on folk music also supplied a convenient
rhetorical device by which to shape Soviet musical development. As the term narod-
naia muzyka commonly came to indicate popular music in general, the call to base all
Soviet music on it meant making music more comprehensible to the common listener.
By Jelagin’s estimation, this ruined Soviet music composition by lowering its creative
standard to appeal to the plebian tastes of Stalin and his cronies.
The thrust of the new trend in music was democratic: an effort to make Soviet
music truly of the people. Despite any good intentions, one can argue that traditional
folk music was, to a degree, harmed by this policy. Certain older singing practices
were changed by a greater dependence on musical notation. Local folk singing circles
increasingly felt the possibly undesired attention of state and Party on their repertoire
and ways of learning. Mass production of certain folk instruments changed both the
instruments themselves and the music they produced. Finally, and perhaps most both-
ersome of all for the researcher decades later, widespread use of the word narodnyi
to indicate a huge range of popular music ultimately rendered the term so broad as to
be nearly meaningless without additional clarification. Some of these changes might
have been inevitable, a result of the relentless onward march of industrialization and
modernization. In any case, these changes were encouraged by official policy, and
61
Jelagin, Taming of the Arts, 330. Jelagin was commenting on the events of 1948 and their af-
termath, but the reasons he cites for the miserable state of Soviet music date back to the 1930s.
the creation of mass popular music connected (at least in theory) to folk traditions be-
came an objective encouraged at the highest level of government. A new official mass
culture was created. The question remains whether the masses, the people whom the
new policy on folk music was supposed to favor, were able to embrace this as their
native music, and whether the new music could serve for them as local folk music had
for earlier generations.
“The Soviet Experiment” and Women:
Brief Historical Reflections
Norma Noonan
The Soviet experiment, as the seventy-four-year Soviet era may be labeled, tried to
make many breakthroughs. Some studies look back on the period as a failed experi-
ment that could not solve the problems endemic to Russia. It was a bold experiment,
driven initially by revolutionary intellectuals who had little, if any, practical experi-
ence in governance and management. They had dreams and a desire for power. Some
leaders were driven by a utopian dream cloaked in Marxism and others by the desire
for power. After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet leaders used persuasion and
force to retain that power. As time passed, the desire to maintain power overwhelmed
the earlier dreams and belief in the system.1 The goals were often lofty, but the reality
never met expectations. In its final decades, the system seemed to muddle through
and made several unsuccessful attempts at reform before it imploded in 1991.
In the context of the Soviet system as a failed experiment, I shall endeavor to
examine the Soviet approach to what Marxists called “the woman question.” With the
exception of a few women in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP),
Russian Marxists, who were focused on the class struggle and the proletariat, paid
little attention to women’s problems before 1917. The Bolshevik faction that eventu
ally won power had developed its solution to the woman question very early, by
attempting to address women’s basic needs as workers and mothers. Nadezhda
1
When first invited to contribute to this special tribute to Theo Stavrou, I thought long and
hard about a topic. I was deeply involved in compiling a complex manuscript on women’s
movements in Russia in the past two centuries. I wanted my article for this festschrift to look
at some aspect of the topic of women in Russia since work on that theme has engaged me in
recent years, but I had no immediate focus in mind. Both Theo and I, although in different
disciplines, have been involved in teaching about Russia and the Soviet Union for more years
than either of us wants to remember. Initially, I planned to write the essay as reflections on
nineteenth-century women’s movements, but then decided instead to focus on a brief retro-
spective of the Soviet period, often described now as “the Soviet experiment.”
See Paul Hollander, Political Will and Personal Belief: The Decline and Fall of Soviet
Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). Hollander’s fascinating analysis of
the way commitment and belief in the system gave way to the quest for power and self-indul-
gence reveals the internal collapse of the USSR because of the loss of faith by the political
elite.
556 Norma Noonan
Krupskaia, assisted by V. I. Lenin, developed early Bolshevik policy on the woman

question. There was little concern for women as women and for approaches other than
revolution to solving women’s concerns.2 The concept of feminism and the women’s
movements in the later years of the Russian Empire were dismissed as irrelevant so
lutions to women’s problems.
The Bolsheviks, led by V. I. Lenin, believed that revolution and their new sys-
tem of governance would eventually eradicate all social problems. The Soviet Union
promised women much but in the final analysis delivered relatively little. The Soviet
Russian Republic gave women equality under the law in 1918, but equality functioned
primarily on paper. The old attitudes remained and were never fully eradicated in the
seventy-four years of Soviet rule. In its early years, the system actively urged women
to become more fully part of society by joining the workforce and participating in
the political life of the nation. Initially, women were encouraged to enter the work-
place and give up their drudgery in the home. They were promised that public ser-
vices would take care of domestic needs, especially food preparation and housework,
and childcare would be the responsibility of society, not of parents. These promises
proved impossible to fulfill. Public services never came up to expectations. The the-
oretical concept of women and men as equal partners in the workplace faded into the
brutal reality of a society in which everyone had to work in order to survive. The im-
plementation of the socialist concept of child rearing as a responsibility of society was
never realized, but resulted in an epidemic of homeless, abandoned children in the
1920s because some parents dumped their unwanted children. As a consequence, the
Soviet government decided to assign the upbringing of children to the newly defined
socialist family. The socialist family was, more or less, the traditional nuclear fam-
ily recast in Marxist-Leninist jargon. Working mothers were promised daycare for
their children while they worked, but daycare in the 1920s and 1930s was poor. Even
decades later, Soviet daycare, however adequate, never substituted for the role of par-
ents. In reality, women entered the workforce but also continued to do the housework
and raise the children, in most cases enlarging rather than diminishing their burdens.
As the Soviet Union evolved, the status of women ebbed and flowed. In the 1920s,
when dreams still had some relevance, women’s stature improved in society, despite
the many problems. A number of policies were set in motion to assist women in
successfully making their transition into the new society. The initiatives to improve
people’s lives ended in the 1930s when all citizens were coerced and propelled into
fulfilling the Five-Year Plans, unrealistically ambitious for the system and brutal in
their demands on the population. During the frantic 1930s with its plans to increase
industrial and agricultural production and develop the country in a relatively short
time, people were expected to give up even their few, precious free days to do “volun-
teer work” as subbotniki. Terror and repression affected all, and revolutionary dreams
died during the Purges, along with a majority of the original revolutionaries.
For Soviet women, the opportunity to work in the economy became a new form
of drudgery adding to their existing burdens. Despite the difficulties of women’s life
2
See Norma Noonan, “Two Solutions to the Zhenskii vopros in Russia and the USSR: Kollon-
tai and Krupskaya. A Comparison,” Women and Politics 11, 3 (1991): 77–99.
“The Soviet Experiment” and Women 557
and the continuing inequality, the myth remained for many years that the USSR had
solved the “woman question,” despite visible evidence to the contrary.3
In the 1940s, women defended the home front and at times the military front, in
the devastating “Great Fatherland War” (World War II). In the early postwar period,
the USSR began reconstruction of its devastated society. The war, and tacitly the
Purges, had reduced the number of men in society. Women filled responsible posi-
tions but were often reminded that men were a scarce and valuable resource because
of their diminished numbers. Women were thus acquiescent about accepting lesser
positions and doing more than their fair share because of the shortage of men. Women
continued to play their multiple roles in society with no hope of reducing their work-
load. Many had lost their spouses and fathers. Many faced the prospect of never mar-
rying and never having a child within marriage. Women who wanted to have a child,
both a deep need and an expectation among Russians, could find men who would
father a child without a familial commitment. The number of single mothers rose,
further compounding women’s burdens and responsibilities. Women’s responsibili-
ties at home remained steady and even perhaps expanded over time. With its focus on
the military-industrial complex, the USSR wasted little time on developing consumer
services and producing labor saving devices that could have eased women’s burdens
at home. Furthermore, because of the wartime devastation, many families lived in
hastily constructed, crowded communal apartments where they shared basic kitchen
and toilet facilities with other families, further making life difficult for women.
By the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet women had achieved many successes on paper,
but their lives remained complex. The communal apartments had slowly given way to
small apartments for individual families, and the more affluent citizens constructed
cooperative apartments, but the responsibilities for home and children remained with
women.
As time passed and revolutionary fervor faded into dry, oft repeated, but seldom
heeded phrases, it was clear that Marxist dogma had made little impact on women’s
and men’s roles in the family and in the larger society. Even though the Russian
Marxists had selectively chosen which parts of Marxism to apply, there had been in
the Lenin years a commitment to improving women’s status. By the time the Soviet
Union entered its mature period in the 1970s and 1980s, not only had all revolution-
ary dreams faded, but there was also complacency about the status quo. Life had
improved for the majority of people. When contrasted with their grandparents’ lives
or with the deprivation of World War II, Soviet citizens lived well. Traditional ideas
about men’s and women’s roles seemed to permeate even those aspects of Marxism
that had been adopted. Women and men seemed to accept that equality in the work
place and in society was an artificial concept to which lip service had to be paid. Re-
searchers increasingly pointed to the impact of the double, and even the triple, burden
on Soviet women.4 Although Soviet researchers still faced some constraints, cautious
3
See P. M. Chirkov, Reshenie zhenskogo voprosa v SSSR (1917–1937 gg.) (Moscow: Mysl´,
1978).
4
See, for example, Nasha sovremennitsa (Moscow: Znanie, 1989).
558 Norma Noonan
studies pointed out women’s problems without blaming the system. Sometimes fiction
was the most useful medium to point out problems. The famous novella A Week Like
Any Other depicted the normal life of a Soviet urban woman perhaps better than any
scholarly essay could convey.5
With the advent of the Gorbachev era (1985–91), many problems were publicly
acknowledged for the first time. In the light of the changing reality, it is not surpris-
ing that during Perestroika (1985–91), M. S. Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet
political system, talked about returning women to “their purely womanly mission”
of home and family.6 The several pages of his 1987 book, Perestroika, devoted to
“Women and the Family” have often been interpreted in the West as a reflection of
a desire to return to traditional values and to persuade women to stay at home.7 In
reality, this statement can be seen less as a desire to see women leave the workforce
and return to their traditional roles as wives and mothers than as an indictment of the
Soviet solution to the “woman question.” In his comments, written amidst his larger,
although ambiguous, vision for the USSR and the world, Gorbachev essentially ad-
mitted that the Soviet approach to the woman question had not worked. Although his
statements were open to more than one interpretation, his intention of giving women
an option out of the drudgery imposed by the Soviet system is clear.
Nonetheless, the Soviet approach to the “woman question” had some merits.
Looking back, one can point to many achievements in the Soviet period, including the
large number of women in the professions, in responsible managerial positions, and in
intellectual life. There was protective legislation setting the conditions for women’s
work, although these were often ignored in practice. Some Western authors reject
the notion of special protective legislation for women, but in the difficult conditions
affecting the Soviet work force, these measures were necessary.
In general, Soviet authors tended to focus on the positive aspects of women’s
achievements rather than their problems.8 Although present in most occupations,
women seldom rose to the top in the professions and rarely held high political po-
sitions. Women were well represented through quotas in the local soviets and in the
Supreme Soviet, as well as in local government, but were almost invisible in na-
tional politics. Women were a majority in selected professions, including medicine
and education, where a judgment had been made that women were best suited for the
“caring” professions and human services. This value judgment was Russian rather
than Marxist, but in virtually every area of social thought Russian values permeated
5
See Natalia Baranskaya, A Week Like Any Other: Novellas and Stories, trans. Pieta Monks
(Seattle: The Seal Press, 1989).
6
See Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Perestroika (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 117.
7
It may have been that Gorbachev hoped that if the Soviet economy became more efficient
and labor productivity improved, fewer workers would be needed in the workplace, and the
remaining workers could get higher wages. In such a context, persuading women to stay at
home was a way to reduce the number of workers without increasing unemployment. See ibid.,
116–18.
8
See A. P. Kotelenets, ed., Zhenshchiny strany sovetov (Moscow: Politizdat, 1977).
“The Soviet Experiment” and Women 559
Soviet Marxism, transforming it into a distinctly Soviet, and Russian, phenomenon

that Marx would have had difficulty recognizing.
By the time the USSR collapsed at the end of 1991, the society had not fully
addressed the problems of women and their status in society. They had consistently
ruled out feminism as incompatible with the system. They had not permitted any in-
dependent women’s movement, and the showcase Soviet Women’s Committee (SWC)
was a propaganda vehicle intended for the country’s international image, rather than
for domestic action.
The Soviet approach to the “woman question” was symptomatic of the failed
solutions to this and many other problems in society. Experiments were tried and
abandoned in the early years. Society survived crises and upheavals, and eventually
settled down to a drab but relatively terror-free existence, with occasional reforms,
until the final experiments to reform the system helped to hasten its demise. In this
sense, the policies designed to address the status of women fit into the larger picture
of the failed Soviet experiment.9
Ironically, in the post-Soviet era, life did not become easier for the vast majority
of women, and in fact sometimes became even more difficult. Indeed, nostalgia de-
veloped for the Soviet safety net and for some of the legal protections the Soviet sys-
tem afforded women. Despite greater freedom for women to organize and advocate
their own causes, life did not improve for women in the new Russia.
Selected Bibliography
Attwood, Lynn. The New Soviet Man and Woman: Sex-Role Socialization in the
USSR. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Browning, Gena K. Women and Politics in the USSR: Consciousness Raising and
Soviet Women’s Groups. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987.
Buckley, Mary, ed. Perestroika and Soviet Women. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1992.
Holland, Barbara, ed. Soviet Sisterhood. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1985.
Lapidus, Gail Warshofsky. Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and So-
cial Change. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
Noonan, Norma Corigliano, and Carol Nechemias, eds. An Encyclopedia of Russian
Women’s Movements. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001.
Rule, Wilma, and Norma C. Noonan, eds. Russian Women in Politics and Society.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996.
9
Part 2 of An Encyclopedia of the Russian Women’s Movements, ed. Norma Corigliano
Noonan and Carol Nechemias (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001) is devoted
to the policies and developments of the Soviet era and provides further evidence of attempts
to solve the “woman problem.”
Back to the Future: A Modern Revival of Sixteenth-Century
Czech Cultural and Political Values
Zdeněk V. David
A perennial problem in Czech historiography has involved the relationship between

modern Czech political culture, which emerged in the nineteenth century, and the
Bohemian Reformation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and how to deal with
the awkward 1620–1780 intermezzo of the Counter Reformation. The relevant dis-
cussions led to interpretations of continuity or discontinuity in the national develop-
ment, which was often viewed as a metahistorical process with the nation figuring as
a real entity.1 Such hypostatizing notions have been deconstructed and discounted
by recent theoreticians of nationalism, who see nationalism as a nineteenth-century
creation, or even an invention.2 This study aims at reconsidering the transmission of
national self-identification from a distant past by adopting a fresh approach, free of
the romantic or metaphysical view of nationality. The continuity, or discontinuity, is
not treated as a metahistorical process but as a mundane, garden-variety transmission
of texts, which is empirically verifiable. This approach is metaphysically agnostic and
ontologically nominalistic. The narrative is based not on the assumption of a national
essence or a primordial national character, but simply on an empirical tracking of
the suppression and re-emergence of written texts. In an Aristotelian and anti-Pla-
1
On the question of cultural transmission from the Bohemian Reformation into modern po-
litical culture, a major dispute developed in the Czech intellectual arena, starting in the 1890s.
The protagonists were on one side the philosopher and sociologist Thomas G. Masaryk and his
school, including historians like Jaroslav Vančura and Kamil Krofta, and on the other side the
historian Josef Pekař and his colleagues. See, for instance, Milan Hauner, “The Meaning of
Czech History: Masaryk versus Pekař,” in T. G. Masaryk, 1850–1937, 3: Statesman and Cul-
tural Force, ed. Harry Hanak (London: Macmillan, 1989), 24–42; Miloš Havelka, ed., Spor o
smysl českých dějin, 1895–1938 (Prague: Torst, 1995), especially 125–63; and Eva Broklová,
ed., Sto let Masarykovy České otázky (Prague: Ústav T. G. Masaryka, 1997), 47–65.
2
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); and
Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1992). For additional literature, see Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States:
An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (Boulder, CO: West-
view Press, 1977); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991); and Anthony D. Smith, National Identity
(Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991).
562 Zdeněk V. David
tonic manner, it eschews reification or hypostatization of abstract notions. Perhaps

the one overarching, connecting link in the process is the Gutenberg Revolution, the
power and effectiveness of the printed word, which spans centuries. With respect to
recent Czech historiography, the interpretation offered in this study is countercycli-
cal. In the post-Communist period, the prevalent tendency has been to integrate the
Counter Reformation as a positively constructive element into the virtually seamless
web of cultural development.3 This study tends to support the opposite view, that the
Counter Reformation was an intrusion interrupting an intellectual elite in its search
for universal liberal propositions and institutions. As this article seeks to demon-
strate, another group of intellectual pacesetters deliberately resumed this search once
the blockage was lifted.
To substantiate the claim that there was a transmission of political and cultural
values over a span of almost two centuries from the Bohemian Reformation to the
national revival, it is necessary to consider the mechanism of this transfer: (1) re-
printing sixteenth-century classics; (2) reproducing sixteenth-century writings in
school and university textbooks; (3) celebrating the Bohemian Reformation in history
and literature; and (4) embracing as a political program the historical rights of the
pre-1620 Bohemian state. It is possible to argue that the impact of sixteenth-century
writings was more significant in the beginning of the nineteenth century than in its
own time because of the greater spread of literacy and lower cost of printing, which
made literature more widely accessible. To concretize the process of transfer, it may
be helpful, although not necessary, to refer to R. G. Collingwood’s theory of re-en-
actment. The British historian and philosopher argued that in reading sources of the
past, the reader thinks the thoughts of the writer.4 The re-enactment, according to
Collingwood, brings the past to actuality in the present, and by being re-enactable
the past “is not something that has finished happening.” In other words, past thought
becomes alive in the present. The reader identifies in thought with the author, and
the author’s ideas are resurrected in the intellect of the reader.5 In the context of the
Czech national awakening, this would mean that the intellectual paradigms and value
3
Critical comments on the Counter Reformation are viewed as politically incorrect, if not a
sign of bad manners, as one may judge from the furor elicited by Jan Fiala’s Hrozné doby proti-
reformace (Heršpice: Eman, 1997), which, despite its acerbic style and flawed organization,
presents an essentially truthful account of the disruptive character of the Counter Reformation
in Bohemia. See Tomáš Knoz, review of Jindřich Matyáš Thurn, by Miloš Pojar Časopis
Matice Moravské 119 (2000): 306.
4
R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, rev. ed., ed. Jan van der Dussen (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1993), especially 215–19, 282–302, 441–50.
5
Quoted in Jan van der Dussen, “Editor’s Introduction,” in ibid., xxxviii. On Colling-
wood’s theory of re-enactment, see also Christopher Parker, The English Idea of History from
Coleridge to Collingwood (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000), 185–86, 201, 212; Jan W. van der
Dussen, History as a Science: The Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1981), especially 93–109, 312–24; and Rex Martin, Historical Explanation: Re-enact-
ment and Practical Inference (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 58–60.
A Modern Revival of Sixteenth-Century Czech Cultural and Political Values 563
systems of the sixteenth-century authors could re-emerge in the minds of the nine-
teenth-century awakeners.
Within the historiographical and methodological parameters just discussed, this
study aims at demonstrating that, after a major disruption caused by the Counter
Reformation, there was a linkage between the Bohemian Reformation and the Czech
national awakening. Like the Italian humanists in the fifteenth century, the Czech
awakeners at the turn of the eighteenth century felt that a cultural revival had to be
based on the achievements of an earlier age. The Italians looked back to Greco-Ro-
man antiquity for intellectual inspiration, the Bohemians to the Golden Age of the
sixteenth century, which was religiously nurtured by the Utraquist Church that rep-
resented the mainstream of the Bohemian Reformation.6 There was, however, a par-
adox in the revival process linked with the Bohemian Reformation. Eventually, the
Czech national awakening resurrected the Utraquist sixteenth century in its civic cul-
ture, but without its religious dimension. The world which the Bohemian Reformation
had created was revived as a secular order, not as a theological system. Two factors
help to illuminate this odd outcome. First, the Counter Reformation and the Refor-
mation alike worked, albeit from opposite directions, to destroy the credibility and
authenticity of a Christian via media which Utraquism theologically represented. For
the Counter Reformation, the mainline Bohemian religion had a deficiency, while for
the Evangelical and the Reformed an excess, of traditional orthodoxy. Second, Jose-
phin Catholicism, in the name of which the Counter Reformation was overthrown in
Bohemia, initially held out promise for a revival of Utraquism, which—like Josephin
Reform Catholicism—was a subspecies of liberal Catholicism. Starting in 1815 and
moving full speed ahead (or perhaps backwards) after 1848 toward the authoritarian
model, the Re-Tridentization of the Roman Church removed the possibility that the
Austrian renewal of Catholicism might provide a surrogate institutional basis for a
re-emergence of theological Utraquism.
Leapfrogging the Counter Reformation
Before examining the mechanism of transmission, it is important to address the ques-

tion why the Czech national movement turned for inspiration to a relatively distant
past. The national revival was not a uniquely Czech or Central European phenome-
non, neither was it limited to nations living under the hegemony of an outsider. In
Western Europe, for instance, the politically independent Dutch were experiencing a
similar breakthrough to a new national consciousness in the 1760s and 1770s, during
the Dutch National Enlightenment.7 This intellectual trend turned away from the
6
The other religious groupings deriving from the Bohemian Reformation were the radical
warlike Taborites and the Proto-Protestant Unity of Brethren. I owe the suggestion of the par-
allel between the Italian Renaissance and the Bohemian National Awakening largely to John
W. Brennan, who likewise helped to clarify other ideas and improve their formulation.
7
Margaret Jacob and Wijnand W. Mijnhardt, eds., The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Cen-
tury: Decline, Enlightenment, and Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).
previous Enlightenment, which was viewed as cosmopolitan and under the heavy
influence of the French. It emphasized the distinctiveness of the Dutch language and
cultural values in the spirit of the Herderian national relativization of individual cul-
tures, as well as external cultural boundaries vis-à-vis the Netherlands’ Gallic and
Teutonic neighbors.
Three main reasons may be cited why the Czech national awakeners, at the dawn
of the nineteenth century, to the revival—through reprinting, teaching, and other
dissemination—of the Utraquist literature of the sixteenth century. First, on the neg-
ative side, the imposed literature of the Counter Reformation appeared irrelevant.
Robert Pysent documents fully the condemnation of this legacy, observing that the
writers of the national revival dismissed “almost all of Czech literature, except for
a few historiographical and émigré works, between 1620 and the last decades of the
eighteenth century.”8 The dismissive judgment on Counter Reformation culture was
not based simply on advancing secularism, but also on confessional grounds of the
more or less imposed reform or liberal Catholicism by Emperor Joseph II, earlier
dramatized by the abolition of the Jesuit Order in the Habsburg Empire. The repudia-
tion of Tridentine Catholicism was symbolized by a statement of Wenzl A. Kaunitz,
the leading ideologue of Josephism. In a ruling of 21 June 1773, he agreed to barring
ex-Jesuits from teaching posts because all history had to be taught “purely from gen-
uine sources and without ideological prejudice.”9 This was the assessment (in 1791)
of the Counter Reformation’s intellectual heritage by Josef Dobrovský, the eminent
representative of the Catholic Enlightenment in Bohemia:
The two Indexes [of Prohibited Books] of Hradec Králové of 1729 and 1749,
as well as the 1767 Index of Prague, are telling proofs of the heresy hunters’
lack of wisdom, which exceeds all imagination. They tried for so many years,
albeit in vain, to suppress sound human reason in Bohemia. They wanted to
compensate for the damage wrought by allowing the publication and distribu-
tion of a few dozen booklets about miraculous sacred images. Nevertheless,
the larger part of the people did not find them to their taste.10
A generation of priests, following Dobrovský and educated in the spirit of Josephin

Enlightenment, believed—against the spirit of the Counter Reformation—in the
feasibility of reconciling theology with the advancement of knowledge and modern
progress, as well as in a positive tolerance toward other Christian churches.11 This
8
Robert B. Pysent, “The Baroque Continuum of Czech Literature,” Slavonic and East Euro-
pean Review 62, 3 (1984): 323 n. 5.
9
Franz A. J. Szabo, Kaunitz and Enlightened Absolutism, 1753–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge
10
Josef Dobrovský, Dějiny české řeči a literatury v redakcích z roku 1791, 1792 a 1818, ed.
Benjamin Jedlička (Prague: Melantrich, 1936), 54–55.
11
Vincenc Zahradník, Filosofické spisy, ed. František Čáda, 2 vols. (Prague: Česká akademie
pro vědy slovesnost a umění, 1907–08), 1: 76–79.
liberal Catholicism likewise adopted a skeptical stance toward asceticism, in particu-

lar priestly celibacy, monasticism, and the devotional exercises of Ignatius Loyola.12
A second reason for the Czechs’ turn to a relatively distant past for a cultural re-
generation was the relative weakness of the Czech cultural infrastructure, following
the national awakening, which impeded a filling of the literary void by an original
output of new Czech writings.13 It was one way of dealing with this cultural tabula
rasa that the government in Vienna had created within the Habsburg Empire when
it discredited and, in a way, proscribed the expressions and products of the Baroque/
Counter Reformation mentality and practice. The Dutch—to return to our earlier
counterexample—were not faced with such a sharp discontinuity in culture. The
Czech national awakeners, like Dobrovský, Josef Jungmann, Karel Vinařický, and
Vincenc Zahradník, all agreed that the revived culture needed the literature of the
sixteenth century as its foundation.14
Third, there seemed to be a pre-established harmony between the aspirations
of the Utraquist sixteenth century and those of the Enlightenment. Mikuláš Adaukt
Voigt (1733–87) saw the acme/pinnacle/highpoint of Czech culture in the sixteenth
century, as did František Faustin Procházka (1749–1809) and Ignác Cornova (1740–
1822).15 František M. Pelcl (1734–1801), who in 1792 became the first professor of
Czech language and literature at the University of Prague, recalled with reverence the
sixteenth century, “when learned men were writing in Czech in all areas of scholar-
ship.”16 However, it was primarily Dobrovský who defined the rationale of further ad-
vance through the return to the past. He commended the Utraquist sixteenth century
for its augmentation of Czech language and literature and for its spread of humanism
and printing as the culmination of Czech intellectual development. According to him,
“The entire nation was stimulated to read and summoned to think. The cultivated
part thought and wrote freely.”17 The Counter Reformation represented a period of
decline with the sad state of the Czech language and the imposition of medieval-like
12
Jaromír Plch, Antonín Marek (Prague: Melantrich, 1974), 99. In fact, Bishop Josef Hurdálek
of Litoměřice may have proposed the introduction of married clergy. See Zahradník, Filoso-
fické spisy, 1: 88–89. Some priests seem to have repudiated celibacy de facto, if not de jure.
Thus, Marek had three sons. See Plch, Antonín Marek, 100.
13
Josef Petráň et al., Počátky českého národního obrození: Společnost a kultura v 70. až 90.
letech 18. století (P.rague: Academia, 1990), 240.
14
Zahradník, Filosofické spisy, 1: 73–74.
15
Voigt expressed his view in Acta litteraria Bohemia et Moraviae, 2 vols. (1775, 1783), cited
by Bedřich Slavík in Od Dobnera k Dobrovskému (Prague: Vyšehrad, 1975), 115, 208–09,
282. Procházka likewise contributed to the Acta, concerning Bohemian humanism (ibid., 114).
16
F. M. Pelcl, Grundsätze der böhmischen Grammatik, 2nd ed. (Prague: F. Gerzabek, 1792),
introduction, 1–2.
17
“Die ganze Masse der Nation wird zum Lesen gereizt und zum Denken aufgefordert. Der
kultivirteste Theil denkt und schreibt frei.” See Dobrovský, Dějiny české řeči, 46; see also
148–49, 152.
intellectual darkness in Bohemia. In the literature of the Counter Reformation, Do-

brovský saw an instrument of obscurantism and superstition. According to him, “the
Battle of White Mountain in 1620 crippled and enfeebled the entire Bohemian nation
in both body and soul.”18 Hence, sixteenth-century culture and resumption of its ways
was the clearly implied direction of/for further progress.19 Similarly, Václav H. Thám
enumerated all the sixteenth-century classics as models for emulation in his patriotic
lecture of 1803.20 Dobrovský, in turn, inspired others, like Zahradník (1790–1836),
to regard the sixteenth-century literature as a model for future development.21 Jung-
mann shared in celebrating the sixteenth century and deploring the era of the Counter
Reformation, noting in no uncertain terms: “The Bohemian nation excelled above
all other Europeans in the arts during the beautiful age when it defied the papacy; it
never sank so low as when Jesuitism scored a victory over it.”22
In the spirit of Dobrovský and his colleagues in the Bohemian Enlightenment,
the restoration of the sixteenth-century tradition was not merely a way of filling a
void. On the positive side, the awakeners saw in the sixteenth century the authen-
tic national heritage, hitherto proscribed, but becoming newly accessible with the
passing of religious intolerance.23 Also, the age of Enlightenment perceived in the
heritage of the Bohemian Reformation a kindred spirit against rigid limits on the
freedom of thought and expression.24 Finally, in the spirit of Dobrovský and his col-
leagues, the return was not a religious one, although they themselves were not rabid
secularists, but by and large adherents of liberal Catholicism.25 Eighteenth-century
patriotism provided a secular basis for national self-definition, which made possible
a separation of the cultural, political, and social aspects from the religious milieu
which had originally nourished them. The Enlightenment was not necessarily hostile
to religion, but in the Czech case the situation was particularly complicated. A return
to the authentic religious ideas of the sixteenth century was made problematic, be-
cause both the Counter Reformation and the Reformation had in effect successfully
18
“Die Schlacht am weiszen Berge 1620 lähmte und entkräftigte die ganze böhmische Nation
an Leib und Seele” (ibid., 58, 160, 166); Jan Lehár et al., Česká literatura od počátků k dnešku
(Prague: Lidové noviny, 1998), 162; and Slavík, Od Dobnera k Dobrovskému, 264.
19
Dobrovský, Dějiny české řeči, 171; and František Kutnar and Jaroslav Marek, Přehledné
dějiny českého a slovenského dějepisectví, 2nd ed. (Prague: Lidové noviny, 1997), 164.
20
Karel Ignác Thám, Über den Karakter der Slawen, dann über den Ursprung, die Schicksale,
Volkommenheiten, die Nützlichkeit und Wichtigkeit der bömischen Sprache (Prague: Dies-
bach, 1803), 14–15.
21
Zahradník, Filosofické spisy, 1: 25.
22
Josef Jungmann, Zápisky, ed. Radek Lunga (Prague: Budka, 1998), 43.
23
Dobrovský, Dějiny české řeči, 167.
24
This aspect is emphasized in Zdeněk Kalista, Josef Pekař (Prague: Torst, 1994), 171–72.
25
Concerning Dobrovský’s adherence to Catholic Enlightenment, see Milan Machovec, Josef
Dobrovský (Prague: Svobodné slovo, 1964), 90.
collaborated to erase the collective memory of the specifics of Utraquist theology and
ecclesiology.26 Thus, Dobrovský extolled the Utraquist sixteenth century not for its
religious beliefs but for its adherence to the political and social values cherished by
the Enlightenment, in particular for its religious tolerance and freedom of expression.
The subsequent awakeners’ ignorance of Utraquist theology (combined by then with
secularist indifference to religion) is illustrated by Jungmann’s virtual equation of
Utraquism with Lutheranism.27
A Pre-Established Harmony
The elements which made the Utraquist century on a secular level particularly com-
patible with the century of the Enlightenment may be considered under the rubrics
of (1) liberalism, free discussion, and tolerance; (2) language preservation; and (3)
plebeianism. The cultural return to the sixteenth century tended to reinforce these
values in Czech society.
Liberalism, Free Discussion, Tolerance
Sixteenth-century Utraquist culture had a peculiar aura of modernity, with its stress
on free discussion and civil society. These characteristics were connected with the
fifteenth-century Bohemian revolt against the rigidity and authoritarianism of the
late medieval Church of Rome.28 The injunction to preach the Word of God freely,
raised by Jan Hus, among others, passed into the mainstream of Utraquism through
its incorporation into the basic Utraquist creeds, the Four Articles of Prague of 1419
(as Article One), and the Compactata of the Council of Basel (as Article Two).29 It
was reinforced by the Test or so-called Judge of Cheb (iudex in Egra compactatus,
soudce chebský) of 1432 which had adopted discourse based on Scripture, not by an
26
Zdeněk V. David, “White Mountain, 1620: An Annihilation or Apotheosis of Utraquism,”
paper delivered at the Czechoslovak Society for Arts and Sciences/Společnost pro vědy a
umění, Twentieth World Congress, Washington, DC, 10 August 2000.
27
Josef J. Jungmann, Historie literatury české, 2nd ed. (Prague: Řivnáč, 1849), 346. On the
incompatibility between Utraquism and Lutheranism, see Zdeněk V. David, “Utraquists, Lu-
therans, and the Bohemian Confession of 1575,” Church History 68, 2 (1999): 322–31. Jung-
mann also distanced himself from the Roman Church, even from representatives of liberal
Catholicism like Bolzano, Fesl, and Zahradník. See Zahradník, Filosofické spisy, 1: 28–29.
28
For a discussion of liberalism in sixteenth-century Utraquism, see Zdeněk V. David, “Cen-
tral Europe’s Gentle Voice of Reason: Bílejovský and the Ecclesiology of Utraquism,” Aus-
trian History Yearbook 28 (1997): 33–37; David, “Utraquists, Lutherans, and the Bohemian
Confession of 1575,” 331–35; and Josef Hanzal, Od baroka k romantismu: Ke zrození no-
vodobé české kultury (Prague: Academia, 1987), 100.
29
Rudolf Říčan, ed., Čtyři vyznání (Prague: Komenského Evangelická Fakulta Bohoslovecká,
1951), 39; and Ferdinand Hrejsa, Dějiny křest’anství v Československu, 6 vols. (Prague: Husova
československa evangelická fakulta bohoslovecká, 1947–50), 2: 271.
administrative fiat, as a way of resolving theological disputes. Tolerance was fostered

by the Peace of Kutná Hora of 1485, which prohibited accusations of heresy and mu-
tual vilification between the Utraquists and the adherents of the Roman Curia.30 Sub-
sequently, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Utraquists promoted
discussion and preserved a non-confrontational, even cordial tone toward Bohemia’s
Protestants, especially to the Unity of Brethren31 and the (largely German) Lutherans.
Civic virtue was taught by the ideals of antiquity, which the Utraquist townspeo-
ple cultivated in the spirit of sixteenth-century humanism and integrated into their
writings. This lore included, for instance, Aristotelian realism and the civic patrio-
tism of Plato, as witnessed by Daniel Adam of Veleslavín’s introduction to Kalendář
historický in 1578.32 Interest in other wisdom of the ancients, in particular in Sen-
eca and stoicism more generally, were transmitted to the nineteenth-century reading
public through the reprinting of sixteenth-century texts.33 The Utraquists’ concern
with human rights and representative institutions was reflected in published works on
contemporary political theory and political science, such as the translations of Jean
Bodin, Georg Lauterbeck, and Hieronymus Weller.34
Dobrovský recognized the liberalism of the Utraquist sixteenth century as a spe-
cial virtue, and, therefore, considered its culture superior to the earlier phases of
the Bohemian Reformation in which he deplored the manifestations of Taborite and
other religious radicalism and intolerance.35 He was attracted to the atmosphere of
30
Thomas A. Fudge, “The Problem of Religious Liberty in Early Modern Bohemia,” Com-
munio Viatorum 38, 1 (1996): 64–87.
31
The Unity was a relatively small but devout sect which had emerged in 1457. It revived
and perpetuated some of the radical tenets of so-called Taboritism, a distinct strand associ-
ated with the early Bohemian Reformation. On the Unity and its origins, see Rudolf Říčan,
The History of the Unity of Brethren: A Protestant Hussite Church in Bohemia and Moravia,
trans. C. Daniel Crews (Bethlehem, PA: Moravian Church in America, 1992); and Murray L.
Wagner, Petr Chelčický: A Radical Separatist in Hussite Bohemia (Scottsdale, PA: Herald
Press, 1983).
32
Daniel Adam z Veleslavína, Kalendář historický: To jest krátké poznamenání všech dnů
jednokaždého měsíce přes celý rok (Prague: Daniel Adam z Veleslavína, 1578), introduction,
f. 2a–3a.
33
Karel J. Erben, ed., Výbor z literatury české, 2: Od počátku XV až do konce XVI. století,
Nákladem Českého Museum 58 (Prague: Kronberger and Řivnáč, 1868), 647–62.
34
Mikuláš Dvorský, Jeronýma Wellera kniha o povinnostech všech úřadův duchovních i
světských (1591); Jan Kocín z Kocinétu, Ioannis Bodini Nova distributio iuris universi … ex-
plicata a Ioanne Cocino (Prague: J. Negrin, 1581); and Georg Lauterbeck, Politica historica:
O vrchnostech a správcích světských knihy patery, trans. Daniel Adam of Veleslavín (Prague:
Daniel Adam of Veleslavín, 1584; 2nd ed., Prague: Heirs of Daniel Adam of Veleslavín, 1606).
35
Kutnar and Marek, Přehledné dějiny českého a slovenského dějepisectví, 163. In the fol-
lowing generation, Antonín Marek also preferred the moderate spirit of the sixteenth century
to Taborite radicalism, which he considered almost as detrimental to Czech national interests
as the Counter Reformation. See Jakubec, Antonín Marek, 201.
sixteenth-century “free thinking and writing,” when the common people, too, were
drawn to reading and urged to think for themselves. The introduction of printing
made widely available the writings of authors ancient and contemporary, domestic
and foreign. For Dobrovský, “it was the beautiful or golden age of Czech literature”
(das schöne oder goldene Zeitalter der böhmischen Sprache).36 According to him,
Emperor/King Maximilian II instituted a practical religious freedom in 1567 which
das Selbstdenken befördert wird (encouraged independent thinking).37 The linking
of the national awakening with the liberal culture of a remote past was not uniquely a
Czech phenomenon; it has been recently discerned also in the case of the Icelanders.38
Initially in the 1780s, there seemed to be also a consonance between the liberal
and tolerant values of Utraquism and the prevailing Josephin ecclesiastical reforms.
In particular, Kasper Royko sought to clear Hus of the charge of heresy in his lengthy
critical history of the Council of Constance. The book was greeted by Dobrovský,
who directed the reformed Catholic seminary in Olomouc (1789–90), as a “thorough
and liberal” document in which the Czechs should take pride for saving the honor
of their outstanding countryman.39 Dobrovský’s liberalism was seconded by Josef
Hurdálek, who served as his counterpart, heading the reformed Catholic seminary
in Prague (1785–90). Under the sway of the Catholic Enlightenment, the Roman
clergy could participate in the liberal spirit of the national revival with relatively little
qualm.40 Subsequently, a divergence developed between the civic culture revived by
the awakening and the increasingly rigorous stance of the Roman Church returning
to the Tridentine spirit of rigidity and authoritarianism. Thus, the gradual conserva-
tive restorations within the Roman Church after the accession of Francis II in 1792
weakened the partial consonance between the civic culture of the awakening and
the prevalent official religion of the Habsburg Empire. Nevertheless, even in this pe-
riod, there still persisted a degree of symbiosis between liberal Catholicism and six-
teenth-century Utraquist literature. One island of such symbiosis was the seminary of
Litoměřice, where Hurdálek served as bishop (1815–22) and where Dobrovský could
36
Dobrovský, Dějiny české řeči, 46; and Jan Mukařovský, ed., Dějiny české literatury, 4 vols.
(Prague: Nakladatelství Československé akademie věd, 1959–95), 2: 114.
37
38
For the Icelanders, the “golden age” was placed even further back than in the Czech ex-
ample (to 930–1262), and the chronological framework may be compared with František
Palacký’s theory of the ancient Slavic democracy, in which the Czechs allegedly participated.
See Sigríđur Matthíasdóttir, “The Renovation of Native Pasts: A Comparison between As-
pects of Icelandic and Czech Nationalist Ideology,” Slavonic and East European Review 78, 4
(2000): 693, 701, 703.
39
Slavík, Od Dobnera k Dobrovskému, 178, and 177–83; Kašpar Royko, Geschichte der gros-
sen allgemeinen Kirchenversammlung zu Kostniz, 5 vols. (Graz, 1781–82; Prague: Widtman,
1784–96).
40
For a survey of relevant clergy, see Jaroslav Kadlec, Přehled českých církevních dějin, 2
vols. (Prague: Zvon, 1991), 2: 187–90; and Jan Jakubec, Antonín Marek: Jeho život a působení
i význam v literatuře české (Prague: Bačkovský, 1896), 202.
influence the seminarians during his periodic visits to his episcopal friend. For in-
stance, it was there that Zahradník was educated in the (albeit now waning) spirit of
Josephin reformism and became a devotee of sixteenth-century Czech writings.41
Dobrovský served as his mentor and supplied him with Utraquist literature, such as
Rokycana’s sermons.42 However, the partial congruity between the Utraquist spirit
and the Roman Church (on the basis of liberal Catholicism), suffered another severe
setback in 1819 with the persecution of Bernard Bolzano in Prague and Josef Fesl
in Litoměřice.43 Yet, Zahradník was still able in the 1830s, albeit cautiously, to give
a sympathetic assessment of Rokycana’s life, and address a poetic eulogy to John
Comenius, a leading figure in the last phase of the Bohemian Reformation.44 Any
possibility of a rapport between Utraquism and Rome came to an end after 1848,
with Rome’s uncompromising turn to the past, which amounted to a Second Counter
Reformation in intent, if not in result. Jan Neruda, the Czech writer and poet, would
ruefully reflect in the 1870s on the vanished species of Catholic clergy among the
awakeners to whom, according to him, Prague was closer than Rome, and the Crown
of Bohemia dearer than the papal tiara.45
The ultimate outcome of this disjunction was that the national awakening revived
the Utraquist culture without Utraquism as a religion. This led either to a religious
void or to a religious disharmony in Czech intellectual life, depending on the re-
jection or retention of post-Tridentine Catholicism, which the Counter Reformation
had forcibly imposed on Bohemia in the interval between the Utraquist age and the
national revival. Some of the divergence, of course, was due not only to the increase
in Roman rigidity, but also to the advance of secularism within the second generation
of the awakeners. Thus, Jungmann found even the liberal Catholicism of Zahradník
distasteful, and moreover suspected some of the Catholic liberals, particularly Bolz-
ano and Fesl, of indifference, if not hostility, to the Czech language.46 Jungmann felt
41
The significant intellectual influence on him at the theological school of Litoměřice in
the early 1810s was Michal Josef Fesl, an associate of the famous Bernard Bolzano, the lat-
ter-day apostle of reform Catholicism in Bohemia. Zahradník was inspired by the works of
Veleslavín, Koldín, Kocín, and Hájek and saw a model use of Czech language in the writings
and translations of the Bohemian Brethren. See Antonín Rybička, “Vzpomínka na Vincence
Zahradníka,” Časopis českého muzea 45 (1871): 29; and Zahradník, Filosofické spisy, 1: 8–10;
on Dobrovský’s visits, see ibid., 1: 98.
42
43
Ibid., 12–17, 105–18.
44
Ibid., 57 n. 3.
45
Jan Neruda, Národní Listy, 18 February 1877, cited by Jakubec, Antonín Marek, 241.
46
Zahradník, Filosofické spisy, 1: 27–29. For their part, the Catholic liberals, like Dobrovský
and Zahradník, felt that Jungmann and his associates were too aggressive in promoting the
use of Czech, and might thereby provoke the imperial government to suppress the language
entirely; see the correspondence between the two in late 1818 (ibid., 101, 103). On Zahradník’s
view of the relationship between faith and reason, see ibid., 82–84.
sympathy for Antonín Marek, another priest, who was much less deferential to his
ecclesiastical superiors, and shared Jungmann’s aversion to Bolzano.47
Language Preservation
While the liberalism of the Utraquist century provided a supranational guide for col-
lective behavior, the sixteenth century also offered an example for guarding the spec-
ificity of the national community. One might apply to the Czech awakening—some-
what tongue in cheek—the hoary dictum of Marxist-Leninist nationality policy that
a culture should be international in content, but national in form. A recurrent theme
in the literature of the sixteenth century was praise for the Czech language and the
desideratum of using it as a literary medium.
Such calls on behalf of the vernacular emerged early in the sixteenth century in
the writings of the Utraquist priest Jan Bechyňka, who urged parents to teach chil-
dren to know and love their native tongue, and to avoid communicating in an alien
speech.48 Later in the century the clamor for the rights of the Czech language inten-
sified, for instance in the prefaces in/to Josephus Flavius’s Historie židovská (Jewish
Antiquities) by Václav Plácel of Elbing (1592), and Flavius Magnus Cassiodorus’s
Historie církevní (Chronicon: Historia tripartita) by Jan Kocín of Kocinet (1594).49
The plea was expressed with particular force in Adam of Veleslavín’s preface to Eu-
sebius of Caesarea’s Historie církevní (Ecclesiastical History), also translated by
Kocín. Noting the use of the Czech language in official recordkeeping in Bohemia,
Adam praised the edict of the Bohemian king and Holy Roman emperor, Charles IV
(1346–78), to the inhabitants of Prague to teach their children Czech, and conduct
municipal affairs in that language. He also referred to Hus’s admonition to the Czechs
to value their language.50 The famous reformer had in fact drawn a parallel between
the situation of the Jews under the Persian Empire and the Czechs under the Holy
Roman Empire, with each nation defending its own language against alien encroach-
ments.51 Veleslavín further argued that foreigners lost respect for the Czech language
47
Plch, Antonín Marek, 100–01; and Jakubec, Antonín Marek, 200–01.
48
Jan Bechyňka, Děkování z večeře Dorotě Řéhové, cited in Noemi Rejchrtová, “Jan Be-
chyňka: Kněz a literát,” in Praga Mystica: Z dějin české reformace, Acta reformationem bo-
hemicam illustrantia, ed. Amedeo Molnár (Prague: Kalich, 1984), 3: 8, 23.
49
Flavius Josephus, Historie židovská: Na knihy čtyři rozdělená, trans. and with an intro-
duction by Václav Plácel z Elbingu (Prague: Daniel Adam of Veleslavín, 1592), f. (*) 2v; and
Flavius Magnus Cassiodorus, Historie cyrkevni, trans. Jan Kocín z Kocinetu (Prague: Daniel
Adam z Veleslavína, 1594).
50
Eusebius of Caesarea [Pamphilus], Historie církevní, trans. Jan Kocín z Kocinétu (Prague:
Daniel Adam z Veleslavína, 1594), f. A5v. See also Bedřich Spiess, “Jan Kocín z Kocinétu co
historik církevní,” Časopis českého muzea 46 (1872): 69–70.
51
Jan Hus, Výklady [Explications], Magistri Iohannis Hus Opera Omnia 1 (Prague: Aca-
demia, 1975), 188–89, referring to Nehemiah, 13: 23–25.
seeing that the Czechs themselves did not value it. He hoped that the situation could
be improved by making available books for solid erudition in the local tongue.52 The
noted editor maintained that all significant areas of knowledge should be available in
the Czech language and, on this ground, he justified his publication of a translation
of Georg Lauterbeck’s voluminous and learned tome of political science and admin-
istration, Regentenbuch … allen Regenten und Oberkeiten zu Anrichtung und Besse-
rung erbarer und guter Policey (Leipzig, 1567).53
The national awakeners were, of course, aware of, and valued, this aspect of six-
teenth-century political culture. Dobrovský noted with approval the Bohemian Diet’s
decree of 1530, which stipulated that proceedings before the zemský soud (court of
the land) had to be conducted in Czech, even if the parties were foreigners.54 The
Czech language was to serve as a means of extending Habsburg power over the Poles
and other Slavs during Rudolf II’s reign. Dobrovský applauded Karel of Žerotín’s
admonition to the city fathers of Olomouc in 1610 not to be ashamed of Czech, but
use it consistently in their official correspondence.55 He also called attention to the
1615 decree of the Diet which sought to curb the spread of German at the expense of
Czech among the nobles.56
Thus, Czech awakeners could find inspiration in sixteenth-century writers as
like-minded advocates of the revival, fortification, and preservation of the Bohemian
vernacular. Conversely, the sixteenth-century authors had already acted as awakeners
warning against the loss of national identity and clamoring for the use of Czech in lit-
erature and in public life. In addition, the very existence of advanced literature in the
sixteenth century showed that the Czechs had to their credit considerable cultural and
intellectual accomplishments which in turn entitled them to a resumption of scholarly
and cultural activities in their own language.57 Jungmann emphasized these themes
in a lead article, which he provided for the Czech-language scientific journal Krok
(Step) in 1821, dwelling especially on his countrymen’s right to make contributions to
the common cultural treasury of humanity in their own tongue.58
52
Eusebius, Historie cyrkevní, f. A5v.
53
Georg Lauterbeck, Politica historica: O vrchnostech a správcích světských knihy patery,
trans. Daniel Adam of Veleslavín, 2nd ed. (Prague: Dědici Daniele Adama z Veleslavína,
1606), f. 6v.
54
55
Ibid., 47–49.
56
Ibid., 159.
57
Josef Kočí, České národní obrození (Prague: Svoboda, 1978), 189.
58
Josef Jungmann in Krok 1 (1821): 7–9, cited in Jaromír Plch, ed., Antologie z české litera-
tury národního obrození (Prague: Státní pedagogické nakladatelství, 1978), 190–91.
Plebeianism
There was also a harmony between the plebeianism of the national awakening and
the character of sixteenth-century culture. In Utraquist Bohemia, cultural and schol-
arly creativity was carried on by the townspeople, and its products reflected primar-
ily their concerns and interests. By the mid-sixteenth century, the Utraquist Church
served primarily the urban and rural common folk, while the nobles turned mainly to
Lutheranism, with a minority adhering to the Unity or the Roman Curia.59 Starting
in the late fifteenth century and extending throughout the rest of the Utraquist period,
the urban middle classes established their leadership in the intellectual and literary
life of the country.60 Cities and towns, especially Prague, had at their disposal in their
chancelleries, schools, and churches impressive arrays of intellectuals, professionals,
and experts in law and the various academic disciplines.61 The latter’s sheer numbers
outweighed whatever intellectual establishments even the wealthiest of nobles could
assemble at their manors. Most telling is, perhaps, the fact that the University of
Prague was entirely in the service of the urban intellectual establishment.62
Similarly, the cultural revival of the awakening depended on individuals of urban
origin or status.63 The nobles did not directly engage in the cultural and scholarly
revival of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although they may have
contributed financially to several publication projects, their view of the awakening
seemed to be that it was something outside, or perhaps beneath, their personal con-
59
Zdeněk V. David, “The Plebeianization of Utraquism: The Controversy over the Bohemian
Confession of 1575,” in The Bohemian Reformation and Religious Practice, 2: Papers from
the Eighteenth World Congress of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences, Brno 1996,
ed. David and David R. Holeton (Prague: Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Main
Library, 1998), 131–35, 156–58.
60
Jaroslav Kolár, Návraty bez konce: Studie k starší české literatuře, ed. Lenka Jiroušková
(Brno: Atlantis, 1999), 25, 139–40.
61
See, for instance, Jiří Pešek, “Kultura českých předbělohorských měst, 1547–1620,” in
Česká města v 16.–18. století: Sborník příspěvků z konference v Pardubicích 14. a 15. lis-
topadu 1990, ed. Jaroslav Pánek (Prague: Historický ústav, 1991), 208–09; and Petr Čornej,
Rozhled, názory a postoje hisitské inteligence v zrcadle dějepisectví 15. století (Prague: Uni-
verzita Karlova, 1986), 5–6. Concerning Veleslavín’s particularly significant contribution, see
Josef Hejnic, “Daniel Adam of Veleslavín: Zu den gegenseitigen Beziehungen zwischen der
tschechischen und lateinischen Literatur im letzten Viertel des 16. Jahrhunderts,” in Stud-
ien zum Humanismus in den böhmischen Ländern, ed. Hans-Bernd Harder and Hans Rothe,
Schriften des Komitees der Bundesrepublic Deutschland zur Förderung der Slawischen Stud-
ien 11 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1988), 270–72.
62
Michal Svatoš, “Humanismus an der Universität Prag im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert,” in
Harder and Rothe, Studien zum Humanismus, 203–05; and Jiří Pešek, “Měšt’anská kultura a
vzdělanost v rudolfínské Praze,” Folia Historica Bohemica 5 (1983): 174–76.
63
Hanzal, Od baroka k romantismu, 32; and review by Pavel Bělina in Folia Historica Bo-
hemica 13 (1990): 503.
cern or involvement. Except for a few families (Šternberks, Kinskis, Choteks), the
nobles focused on their agrarian interests and reduced their scientific and artistic
interests to the collection of curiosities.64 The minimal level of nobles’ participation
is documented by the fact that an authoritative survey of the 135 most notable awak-
eners includes only three bluebloods.65
For their part, the awakeners were highly critical of the nobles’ indifference to-
ward the Czech language.66 Karel Havlíček, a member of the awakeners’ culminating
generation, would sum up the awakeners’ feelings in an article of 1850. The nobles
not only failed to help, but even became a hindrance both in public life and in their
private demeanor. He asked:
How could the Czech language flourish, if the higher estates did not use it
among themselves, when they neither wrote nor read anything in Czech,
when they considered and declared the cultivators of the national language as
fools and eccentrics?67
According to Havlíček, the aristocrats abdicated their duty of leading the nation,
leaving this task to be performed by the patriots-commoners, who then gained the
trust of their fellow citizens. Due to the limited means and modest social standing
of these people, the national awakening could not but advance slowly. Nevertheless,
the lowly patriots reached the goal of assuring the existence and perpetuation of the
national culture. In sum, the nation advanced without the assistance of the nobles, and
even against their will.68
Earlier in the same year, Havlíček had written that even those aristocrats who
opposed royal absolutism felt contempt for the vernacular culture and “publicly advo-
cated the Germanization of Bohemia as an inevitable condition of progress and civi-
lization.”69 A noble worthy of this name could not stand above the nation, much less
oppress the inhabitants or assist in their humiliation. Using this criterion, Havlíček
journalistically excommunicated the Bohemian aristocracy from Czech society.70
Half a century later, Thomas Masaryk largely agreed with Havlíček, whom he gener-
ally admired, in his own 1895 retrospective on the national awakening. While else-
64
Hanzal, Od baroka k romantismu, 89; and Bělina, review, 505.
65
František Josef Kinský, Kašpar Šternberk, and Karel Marie Drahotín Villani; see Jiří Fi-
ala, Chronologický přehled dějin české literatury národního obrození (Olomouc: Univerzita
Palackého, Filozofická fakulta, 1992), 51–54.
66
Karel Tieftrunk, Dějiny Matice české (Prague: Řivnáč, 1881), 5.
67
“Nynější postavení české šlechty,” Slovan, 26 October 1850, cited in Karel Havlíček, Poli-
tické spisy, ed. Zdeněk V. Tobolka, 3 vols. in 5 pts. (Prague: Laichter, 1900–02), 3: 429.
68
Ibid., 429–30.
69
“Česká šlechta,” Slovan, 1 June 1850, cited in Havlíček, Politické spisy, 71–72. See also
Kočí, České národní obrození, 451.
70
“Česká šlechta,” Slovan, 1 June 1850, cited in Havlíček, Politické spisy, 3: 72.
where the nobility eagerly participated in the national culture, in Bohemia the nobles
evidently could not make up their minds whether they were foreigners or Czechs.71
Although individual aristocrats provided some monetary support to Czech literary
work, there was virtually no creative contribution by the blue bloods to the awaken-
ing’s cultural renaissance.
The sixteenth century and the national awakening shared three interrelated char-
acteristics: the stress on the cultivation of the vernacular was connected to the plebe-
ian character of Bohemia’s culture; while the nobles could read in Latin or French, the
common people needed their literature in Czech;72 and, above all, while the use of the
Czech language was emphasized, it was not an aim in itself. It was, rather, to serve
primarily as a medium for expressing all-human values, transcending the national
community.73
The Shibboleths of Obfuscation
Next, it is pertinent to examine the reasons that have obscured the role of the six-
teenth century in the retrospective analyses and interpretations of the Czech national
awakening. Several factors can be suggested as barriers to a balanced appreciation
of this relationship. The images of (1) immorality, (2) literary primitivism, and (3)
intellectual limitation militated against the full recognition of the national awakening
as a sixteenth-century Renaissance.
Question of Ethics
Ironically, except for the legacy of the Unity of Brethren, the larger—mostly Utra-
quist—part of sixteenth-century literature has not received credit in Czech histo-
riography for its seminal, normative role in shaping the Czechs’ political culture.
The main reason for this blind spot was the relatively widespread view of the low
moral threshold of Czech Utraquism.74 A recent writer has still characterized the
71
Tomáš G. Masaryk, Česká otázka: Naše nynější krize. Jan Hus, Spisy 6 (Prague: Ma-
sarykův ústav, 2000), 76.
72
Jungmann signaled the cultural divorce between the awakeners and the aristocracy. For all
he cared, the nobility might adopt Chaldean as its language of communication. It would not
affect the attachment of his colleagues to the Bohemian tongue of the commoners.
73
If we return to the dispute about the antecedents and character of the Czech national awak-
ening, the transmission of the Utraquist ideals would favor Masaryk over Pekař (see note 1).
The main thrust of the national awakening seemed less consonant with Pekař’s image of the
celebration of national distinctiveness than with Masaryk’s image of a cultural mobilization to
serve the universal ideals of humankind.
74
Kamil Krofta, “Nový názor na český vývoj náboženský v době předbělohorské,” in Listy z
náboženských dějin (Prague: Historický klub, 1936), 381; and Krofta, Nesmrtelný národ: Od
Bílé Hory k Palackému (Prague: Laichter, 1940), 344–429.
period as one of “social and moral laxity and indecisiveness.”75 Although based on
misperceptions or unwarranted exaggerations, this jaundiced view tended to cast
aspersions on the participants in Czech humanist culture, and to render their role-
model function less credible. Kamil Krofta has traced this image of Utraquism to
nineteenth-century historians, particularly Tomek and Kalousek, who mistakenly as-
sumed that sixteenth-century Utraquism had become synonymous with Lutheranism,
and that Luther’s solafideism (salvation by faith alone) fostered immorality.76 This
view passed through the prestigious work of Ernst Denis to Thomas Masaryk and
his interpretation of the “Czech question.”77 For Masaryk, the Bohemian Reforma-
tion ended in a moral morass and chaos in the sixteenth century. In other words, the
revered Czech philosopher-statesman adopted the Tomek-Kalousek-Denis line about
the morally corrupt Bohemian quasi-Lutheranism.78 It is difficult to understand that
as an admirer of Dobrovský Masaryk could entirely overlook the latter’s high esteem
for the Utraquist century. This is all the more puzzling given that Masaryk considered
Dobrovský one of the key figures through whom the heritage of the Bohemian Ref-
ormation was transmitted as an ideal to the Czech political life of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Curiously, Masaryk seems to be deriving Dobrovský’s humanism from Herder
(about whom Dobrovský appears to have known very little)79 rather than from his
admiration for the humanitarianism of the Utraquist century, about which he had
written voluminous treatises.80 In other words, Dobrovský did not need Herder to
teach him about freedom of thought and tolerance; he saw these virtues clearly exem-
plified in Utraquism. Nevertheless, his preference for the Unity over the Utraquists
led Masaryk even further to an assertion that the sober-minded rationalist Dobrovský
was proclaiming the ideals of the sectarian zealots, the Bohemian Brethren. Although
Dobrovský was not devoid of sympathy for the Brethren as a persecuted minority, he
showed no sign of preference for their views over those of the Utraquists.81 In fact,
75
Zdeněk Rotrekl, Barokní fenomén v součastnosti (Prague: Trost, 1995), 129.
76
Ot. Josek, Život a dílo Josefa Kalouska (Prague: Nákladem Historického spolku, 1922),
292, cited by Krofta, Nesmrtelný národ, 350–51; and Jaroslav Čechura and Jana Čechurová,
eds., Korespondence Josefa Pekaře a Kamila Krofty (Prague: Karolinum, 1999), 87.
77
Tomáš G. Masaryk, Česká otázka, 6th ed. (Prague: Čin, 1948), 210–11. This dim view of
Utraquism led Masaryk to limit the influence of the Bohemian Reformation to the Unity and
to Taboritism, disregarding mainline Utraquism as a factor.
78
Broklová, Sto let Masarykovy České otázky, 54–55.
79
He did cite in 1806 from Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Menschheit about the
peace-loving nature of the Slavs. See Hugh L. Agnew, Origins of the Czech National Rena-
scence (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993), 218–19. The knowledge of Herder
came late (1791), after Dobrovský’s ideas had been formulated, and the reference was not to the
character of the Czech revival, but to the context of a wider Slav community. See Machovec,
Josef Dobrovský, 139.
80
Masaryk, Česká otázka: Naše nynější krize, 30.
81
the one image which can compete with Masaryk’s startling suggestion is the recent
portrait of Dobrovský as a forger of ancient Russia’s literary monuments.82 Contrary
to the Tomek-Kalousek-Denis line, which Masaryk echoed, Dobrovský took a dim
view of the Taborites and other left wingers of the Bohemian Reformation (for their
fanaticism and intolerance), and appreciated the Brethren for their linguistic skills,
not for their religious exclusiveness or moral rigor.83
Question of Aesthetics
The other reason for neglecting the legacy of Utraquism and the sixteenth-century
culture was the opinion of modernist esthetes of the late nineteenth and twentieth
century who, disregarding the didactic political, legal, and social values, looked
askance at the intellectual heritage for its alleged lack of literary sophistication, and
rejected the reverence shown to it by the national awakeners. Arne Novák in his
influential history of Czech literature trivializes the worth of sixteenth-century writ-
ings thus: “The real Renaissance spirit rarely penetrates this literature; mere practical
considerations prevail. There are very few works reflecting the creative poetic gifts
of observation, imagination, or expression.”84 He preferred the baroque esthetic qual-
ities of the Counter Reformation.85
From a somewhat different angle, the eminent historian Pekař joined the ranks of
the critics when he saw the cultural thrust of the Bohemian Reformation forsaking the
high level of the Romance-Catholic culture for the much lower Germanic-Protestant
one. This view attributed much higher achievements to the fourteenth century than
those of the two subsequent centuries.86 Curiously, the disdainful attitude toward the
literature of the Utraquist era found an echo in Czech historical writing of the Marxist
period.87
But voices to the contrary, although apparently less influential, were not entirely
silenced. Krofta, albeit Pekař’s disciple, was convinced that the image of the shallow-
82
Edward L. Keenan, “Was Iaroslav of Halych Really Shooting Sultans in 1185?” Harvard
Ukrainian Studies 22 (1998): 313–27.
83
Slavík, Od Dobnera k Dobrovskému, 280, 282.
84
Arne Novák, Stručné dějiny literatury české, ed. R. Havel and A. Grund (Olomouc: R.
Promburger, 1946), 61, cited by Eduard Petrů, Vzdálené hlasy: Studie o starší české literatuře
(Olomouc: Votobia, 1996), 227; for a mild dissent, see also Milan Kopecký, “Tradice a její žán-
rová modifikace,” in Speculum medii aevi: Zrcadlo středověku, ed. Lenka Jiroušková (Prague:
Koniasch Latin Press, 1998), 80–81. Some of the embarrassment over the modest level of
Czech culture is also reflected in Hanzal, Od baroka k romantismu.
85
Rotrekl, Barokní fenomén v součastnosti, 146–47.
86
Čechura and Čechurová, Korespondence Josefa Pekaře a Kamila Krofty, 86.
87
For instance, Zdeňka Tichá, Cesta starší české literatury (Prague: Panorama, 1984), 203–
05.
ness and poverty of sixteenth-century culture, which “has been taught and believed,”
was erroneous:
I have studied the fruits of this culture from various aspects … and I am con-
vinced that it is the peak of our cultural development, that at that time we, as
a nation, lived the fullest and richest life … and that this period is to us today
intrinsically much closer than what preceded and what followed…, and I am
firmly convinced … that this will be generally recognized, once these matters
become better known.88
While the esthetes and some others decried the low level of Czech belles lettres, the
defenders called attention to the sociopolitical literature which was inspired by a hu-
manist and humanitarian spirit that represented a worthy Bohemian contribution to
the intellectual development of civilization. There were even those brave souls who
took up the cudgels for a respectable esthetic status of belles lettres in the Utraquist
age. Thus, citing as an example “the fruitful encounter of Czech literature with the
work of Giovanni Boccacio,” Jaroslav Kolár has argued that the Bohemians had vir-
tually come to terms with the most advanced currents of contemporary Europe in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.89
Question of Provincialism
The third reason for deprecating the intellectual and cultural heritage of the Utraquist
era was the a priori assumption of the cultural isolation and consequent mediocrity
of Bohemia resulting from the wars of the Bohemian Reformation.90 In fact, although
couched in the vernacular idiom, the sixteenth-century Utraquist culture, like the cul-
ture of the national awakening, was open to outside influences, tolerant of intellectual
diversity, and pursued universal, not provincial, ideals.
Bohemian scholars and intellectuals maintained lively contacts with their coun-
terparts at the highest levels of European culture. The scope of educated townsmen’s
intellectual interest reached beyond practical knowledge of law, medicine, and tech-
nology to the sphere of pure science and scholarship in philosophy, classics, theol-
ogy, linguistics, and history.91 Erasmus knew what he was talking about when he
listed Bohemia among the few countries where the humanities were valued and flour-
ished.92 Utraquist Bohemia, indeed, showed considerable interest in the Christian
88
Čechura and Čechurová, Korespondence Josefa Pekaře a Kamila Krofty, 87.
89
Kolár, Návraty bez konce, 119, 121.
90
See, for instance, Dějiny zemí koruny české, 2 vols. (Prague: Paseka, 1992), 1: 289.
91
Jiří Pešek, Měšt’anská vzdělanost a kultura v předbělohorských Čechách, 1547–1620
(Prague: Karolinum, 1993), 26–28.
92
Desiderius Erasmus, The Correspondence, 11 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1974–92), 6: 174.
humanism of none other than Erasmus, which coincided with the Utraquist view of
Christian life, often in contradiction to current Roman ecclesiology. The translation
of his Praise of Folly into Czech as Chvála bláznovství by 1513 was the first in a ver-
nacular language. Two other important works became available in Czech early in the
sixteenth century: Enchiridion militis Christiani in 1519 in translation by Oldřich Ve-
lenský of Mnichov, and Výklad na Otčenáš (Explanation of the Lord’s Prayer) in 1526
by Jan Mantuan and Jan Pekk in Plzeň. In addition, eight more of Erasmus’s works
were published in Czech translations in Bohemia between 1519 and 1595, some in
several editions.93 Dobrovský in particular valued the 1542 translation of Erasmus’s
paraphrase of St. Matthew’s Gospel.94 A Bohemian humanist, Jan Šlechta of Všeh-
rdy, corresponded with Erasmus and invited him to visit Prague in 1519.95 In 1520,
another Czech correspondent, the nobleman Arkleb of Boskovice, assured Erasmus
of the popularity of his writings and the great weight his opinions carried in the coun-
try.96 The Utraquist author Řehoř Hrubý of Jelení translated works of Erasmus, as
well as those of Petrarch97 and the Greek Fathers. His son, Zikmund Hrubý of Jelení,
was a friend of Erasmus, whom he assisted in preparing editions of ancient authors
in Basel. He worked in the publishing house of Johannes Froben under the name of
Gelenius.98
On the level of personal contacts, the breadth of cultural horizons was exempli-
fied by two erudite Utraquist ecclesiastics, Jan Hortensius Zahrádka (1501–57) and
Jindřich Dvorský z Helfenberka (1505–82), each of whom held the top administrative
office in the Utraquist Church, in 1541 and 1572–81, respectively. Having studied in
Padua and Venice in the early 1530s, Hortensius was not only a distinguished theo-
logian (a specialist on St. Paul), but also the outstanding Czech mathematician of his
time.99 In the early 1540s, Dvorský had entered into scholarly discourse concerning
93
Kolár, Návraty bez konce, 120, 141, 175–77. See also Mirjam Bohatcová, “Erasmus Roter-
damský v českých tištěných překladech 16.–17. století,” Časopis národního muzea, Řada his-
torická 155 (1986): 37–58.
94
Desiderius Erasmus, Evangelium Ježíše Krista syna Božího podle sepsání Svatého Ma-
touše, trans. Jan Vartovský of Varta (Litomyšl: Ondřej Dušík, 1542); see Dobrovský, Dějiny
české řeči, 47.
95
Erasmus, Correspondence, 6: 321–23; see also 7: 89–95, 119–28.
96
“For pray take it as certain that, whatever opinion you come to, people in my country will
easily and gladly agree with you, and will value what you say far more than if one were to
confront them with decrees of the supreme pontiff or any thunderbolt of opposition launched
by men.” See Erasmus, Correspondence, 8: 75–76.
97
Francesco Petrarca, Knihy dvoje o lékařství proti štěstí a neštěstí (Prague: Jan Severýn
z Kapí Hory, 1501); see Knihopis českých a slovenských tisků. Vol. 2, in 9 pts., Tisky z let
1501–1800 (Prague: Nakladatelství Československé akademie věd, 1939–67), no. 7049.
98
Vladmír Forst et al., ed., Lexikon české literatury: Osobnosti, díla, instituce (Prague: Aca-
demia, 1985–2008), vol. 2, pt. 2, 339.
99
Ottův slovník naučný, 37 vols. (Prague: Otto, 1888–1908), 11: 642–43.
the Greek and Latin classics with no less a figure than the “praeceptor Germaniae,”
Philipp Melanchton himself.100 Bohemian editions of the Bible commanded interna-
tional respect for their attention to Greek texts in the mid-sixteenth century. Some,
like Sixt of Ottersdorf, traveled abroad to learn Greek.101 During the opening years
of the seventeenth century, Martin Bacháček, professor of astronomy and rector of
the University of Prague, was a respected colleague of such luminaries as Johannes
Kepler and Tycho de Brahe.102 This breadth of vision was not the purview of a few se-
lect top intellectuals, it applied also at lower levels. Thus, within the regular Utraquist
priesthood, Vavřinec Leander Rvačovský of Rvačov gained recognition for his “un-
usual linguistic, historical, and theological knowledge.”103 The tradition of learned
clergy continued into the early decades of the seventeenth century. In his Spis v němž
se obsahuje (Treatise … on events preceding the Advent of Christ; 1616), Matauš
Pačuda not only cited profusely from the fathers and doctors of the church, but also
displayed a working knowledge of Latin and Greek classical authors, such as Homer,
Herodotus, Euripides, Plutarch, and Plautus.104 The scope of educated townsmen’s
intellectual interest reached beyond practical knowledge of law, medicine, and tech-
nology to the sphere of pure science and scholarship in philosophy, classics, theology,
linguistics, and history.105
In addition to the charge of cultural isolation, the Utraquists’ relatively open
intellectual world, acknowledging the principles of questioning and discussion, cre-
ated a problem for themselves. So, whereas at the opening of the third millennium
the qualities of tolerance and freedom of expression would be considered distinct
virtues, in modern historiography the same were paradoxically held against them.106
The Utraquists’ intellectual orientation contributed to the harsh judgments passed
on Utraquism by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Czech and other Conti-
nental historians, who tended to expect a clear-cut, unambiguous categorization of
concepts or phenomena. From the vantage points of Hegelian rationalism, Comtean
positivism, or Marxist dialectics, the relatively open-ended intellectual outlook of
Utraquist theologians and other intellectuals would appear as something marked by
a lack of discipline or rigor, and by intellectual instability and indolence.107 This
100
Ibid., 8: 275.
101
102
Josef Hanzal, “Martin Bacháček z Nauměřic a městské školy ve středních Čechách před
Bílou Horou,” Středočeský sborník historický 10 (1975): 141–42.
103
Antonín Rybička, “Rvačovský Vavřinec Leander,” Časopis českého musea 45 (1871): 326.
104
Matauš Pačuda, Spis v němž se obsahuje které věci (z stran lidského pokolení) předešly
příchod a narození mesiaše pravého Krista (Prague: Matěj Pardubický, 1616), f. J3v, J4r, J5r.
105
Pešek, Měšt’anská vzdělanost, 26–28.
106
Dějiny české literatury, 2: 114.
107
Hanzal, Od baroka k romantismu, 100. On the stern critique aimed by historians at the
Utraquist Church, see David, “The Strange Fate of Czech Utraquism,” 644–52.
same line of thinking has also led to the criticism of Dobrovský as a person devoid of
firm principles for his admiration of the Utraquist century.108 From the present-day
viewpoint, the Utraquists’ intellectual openness or latitudinarianism, combined with
liberal ecclesiology, is likely to be perceived as a badge of honor rather than one
of degradation. In the sixteenth-century context, this outlook was a crucial mark of
distinction from the post-Tridentine Roman Church, with its relatively closed intel-
lectual world and institutional authoritarianism. This outlook made the Utraquists
resemble the Church of England with its germinating Anglicanism. It also tended to
distance them further from the Lutheran and Calvinist denominations, which evolved
in the direction of increasing dogmatization as confessionalization progressed during
the sixteenth century.109 At the opposite side of the ledger, the Utraquists’ attitude of
tolerance did not signify intellectual nihilism or a lack of commitment, as has been
charged. Rather it could, and did, coexist with firm adherence to specific religious
and ethical principles.110
The Infrastructure of Restoration
It was perhaps Pelcl who started in Prague the tradition of printing sixteenth-century
Czech literature, by issuing in 1777 Příhody Václava Vratislava z Mitrovic (The Ad-
ventures of Václav Vratislav of Mitrovice). He also defined the rationale behind the
project in the preface to this edition, (1) praising the standard of sixteenth-century
Czech literature and (2) excoriating the executors of the Counter Reformation, espe-
cially the Jesuit missionaries, for the work of destruction, exclaiming: “It is a wonder
that here and there a Czech book turns up.”111 Similarly, Dobrovský, in 1792, praised
the publishers who already in the 1780s, immediately after the abolition of the Index
in 1782, began to reprint hitherto proscribed Czech books. He cited as an example
Comenius’s Labyrint světa (The Labyrinth of the World), which appeared as early
as 1782.112 He also praised the bibliographic work, particularly by František Faustin
Procházka, that would identify the Czech-language publications of the Utraquist era
as a precondition for restoring them to the awareness of the public.113 Dobrovský him-
108
Lehár et al., Česká literatura, 162.
109
David, “Utraquists, Lutherans, and the Bohemian Confession of 1575,” 331–35.
110
Zdeněk V. David, “A Cohabitation of Convenience: The Utraquists and the Lutherans un-
der the Letter of Majesty, 1609–1620,” in The Bohemian Reformation and Religious Practice,
3: Papers from the Nineteenth World Congress of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sci-
ences, Bratislava 1998, ed. David and David R. Holeton (Prague: Academy of Sciences of the
Czech Republic, Main Library, 2000), 185–88.
111
Agnew, Origins of the Czech National Renascence, 117.
112
Dobrovský, Dějiny české řeči, 167; and Jan Amos Komenský, Labirynt světa a ráj srdce
(Prague: Jan Samm, 1782).
113
self contributed to the identification of the corpus of sixteenth-century Czech litera-

ture through his own research in the Bohemian bibliography and history of printing,
published in his Über Einführung und Verbreitung der Buchdruckerkunst in Böhmen
(1782) and several editions of his Geschichte der böhmischen Sprache und Literatur
(1791, 1792, 1818). Famous are his exhortations to Bohemian libraries, particularly
those in Prague, to prepare and publish catalogs of their collections. Ironically, he
found a major aid in the Index Bohemicorum Librorum Prohibitorum by Antonín
Koniáš, the third edition of which appeared in 1770.114 He also drew on the work of
his Enlightenment predecessors, such as Voigt’s Beiträge zur Buchdruckerkunst in
Böhmen (1772), and found his most important successor in Jungmann with his com-
prehensive Historie literatury české, first published in 1825.115
Characteristic of the transmission of sixteenth-century knowledge was Procház-
ka’s publication program.116 Aware of the Czech public’s eagerness to read and con-
cerned with the scarcity of reading materials, he conceived an ambitious publication
project, which would restore in new editions the materials that had perished through
the misguided destruction of the Counter Reformation. Launching his project in 1786,
he envisioned three series of reprints: (1) histories and chronicles of the Czechs; (2)
histories of other nations; (3) treatises on arts and sciences; and (4) non-polemical
religious literature. In the first series, he published the Dalimil or Boleslav Chronicle
and that of Pulkava; in the second, Oldřich Prefát of Vlkanov’s travelog and Hosius’s
Moscow Chronicle; in the third, Kopp’s treatise on health,117 the collection by Jan
Češka, Příkladné řeči a užitečná naučení vybraná z knih hlubokých mudrců (Exem-
plary Speeches and Useful Instructions, Selected from the Books of Wise Men),118
and Erasmus’s O připravení k smrti (Preparation for Death)119 and Enchridion; in
the fourth, the Pseudo-Augustinian Samotné rozmlouvání duše (The Soliloquies of
114
Index Bohemicorum librorum prohibitorum, et corrigendorum (Prague: Joan C. Hraba,
1770); and Josef Dobrovský, O zavedení a rozšíření knihtisku v Čechách (critical ed. in Ger-
man of Über Einführung und Verbreitung der Buchdruckerkunst in Böhmen, 1782) (Prague:
Nakladatelství Československé akademie věd, 1954), 10–11. The Index is still used for identi-
fication of Czech publications; see Bohuslava Brtová, Dodatky ke Knihopisu českých a slov-
enských tisků (Prague: Základní knihovna ČSAV, 1990), 141.
115
Dobrovský, O zavedení, 12; and Jungmann, Historie literatury české.
116
117
Johann Kopp of Raumenthal’s books had appeared in Prague in 1536 and 1542. See Kni-
hopis, 4314, 4315.
118
Jan Češka, Příkladné řeči a užiteãná naučení vybraná z knih hlubokých mudrců (Prague:
Jan J. Diesbach, 1786); virtually identical edition, Prague: Kašpar Widtmann, 1786; see Kni-
hopis, nos. 1785–86; originally published Plzeň: Jan Pekk, 1527, then Olomouc: Friedrich
Milichtaler, 1572, and Prague: Burian Valda, 1579; see Knihopis, nos. 1782–84; see also Jung-
mann, Historie literatury české, 143.
119
Knihopis, 2359; sixteenth-century editions appeared in 1563–64 and 1579. See ibid.,
2356–58.
the Soul). All were published in 1786, except Erasmus’s Enchiridion (1787),120 in the
preface of which Procházka defended his publication program against the rearguard
of the Counter Reformation, whose champions blamed him for disregarding the in-
dexes of libri prohibiti.121 The choice of Erasmus can be considered particularly sig-
nificant, inasmuch as the Dutchman’s Catholic humanism served as a bridge between
Utraquism and the Josephin Enlightenment. The followers in Procházka’s footsteps
were František Jan Tomsa (1753–1814), and Václav Matěj Kramerius (1753–1809) af-
ter him.122 An important republisher of sixteenth-century literature was Johan Fer-
dinand of Schönfeld, who issued reprints of, among others, Perlička dítek božích (A
Little Pearl of God’s Children; 1782) by Sixt Palma Močidlanský,123 the Pseudo-Au-
gustinian Samotné rozmlouvání duše (1784),124 Vzdychání nábožná (Pious Sspira-
tions; 1786) by J. A. Komenský, and above all the huge Kronika česká (Bohemian
Chronicle; serially, 1819–23), by Václav Hájek of Libočany.125 Schönfeld employed
the literary, editorial, and historical skills of Josef Linda (1789–1834).126 Much of the
republished literature came from the printing house of Daniel Adam of Veleslavín in
the reign of Rudolf II.127 Later, in 1829 and 1835, Zahradník praised the subsequent
labors of Václav Hanka (1791–1861) in republishing old Czech texts.128
The national awakening also involved the reestablishment of sixteenth-century
grammatical norms for the literary language of the national awakening. Relying on
old editions and manuscripts, Fortunát Durich and Faustin Procházka laid the founda-
tion by their republication of the Bible in 1778–80. In inventorying the sources for an
authoritative dictionary of the Czech language in 1793, František M. Pelcl character-
istically cited not the imprints of the Counter Reformation but the sixteenth-century
classics, such as the works of Hájek, Veleslavín, Sixt of Ottersdorf, and Comenius, the
translations of Kocín, and texts of parliamentary documents.129 The same view was
embraced by Jan Nejedlý, Pelcl’s successor as professor of Czech at the University
of Prague, by Václav M. Kramerius, publisher of books for general readers, and, of
120
Knihopis, 2354–55; sixteenth-century editions from 1519 and 1570. See ibid., 2351–52.
121
Jireček, Rukovět’, 2: 146–47.
122
Agnew, Origins of the Czech National Renascence, 122–23.
123
Knihopis, 6787; originally published in 1610 and 1619. See ibid., 6772, 6774.
124
Knihopis, 891; it preceded Procházka’s reprint of 1786 (ibid., 893) by two years. It had been
published three times in the sixteenth century (1543, 1583, 1600). See, ibid., nos. 887, 888, 889.
125
Originally published in 1541. See Knihopis, no. 2867.
126
Kolár, Návraty bez konce, 290, 294–95.
127
Mirjam Bohatcová and Josef Hejnic, “O vydavatelské činnosti Veleslavínské tiskárny,”
Folia Historica Bohemica 9 (1985): 291–388.
128
Letters, dated 17 November 1829 and 28 May 1835, in Zahradník, Filosofické spisy, 1:
118, 121.
129
Johanides, František Martin Pelcl, 232.
course, by Dobrovský. It is true that Jan V. Pól and Maximilian Šimek, the Counter
Reformation diehards, had voiced opposition in the 1770s and 80s against the new
wave. But their characterization of the old Czech language as “heretical” seemed
irrelevant and earned them the aura of mischievous, if not comical, busybodies.130
Voicing a consensus of the awakeners, the first modern Czech journal, Hlasatel český,
endorsed in its opening page (1806) the linguistic norms of Adam of Veleslavín, to
which Nejedlý, its editor, was entirely devoted.131 The introduction of new words,
particularly by Jungmann, exemplified in his translation of Milton’s Paradise Lost
(1811), proceeded within sixteenth-century language paradigms, not in violation of
them.132 Likewise, writers tended to readopt the style of sixteenth-century Czech,
most notably František Palacký in his literary work.133
The Reprinting of Classics
To establish the link between Utraquism and the awakening, it is essential to examine
the record of republishing the sixteenth-century classics during the period from 1781
to 1881. It was during this period that the Czech political culture was formed. Perhaps
the main reasons for reprinting and disseminating sixteenth-century Utraquist litera-
ture were (1) the lack of currently produced writings in Czech; and (2) the intellectual
or linguistic irrelevance of the literature of the Counter Reformation period.134 We
shall note the character and extent of this republication process, except for legal texts
and legal literature, which are considered in a separate section. This inventory is not
intended to be comprehensive or exhaustive, but rather suggestive of the variety and
richness of the reprints.
Important, for instance, is the transmission of a quintessential Utraquist text by
Josef Dittrich, namely Bílejovský’s Kronyka czeská (1537) (under the title of Kronyka
církevní) in 1816.135 Dittrich, an alumnus of the reformed Catholic Seminary in Vi-
enna in the 1780s and professor of church history at the University of Prague since
1803, also prepared in 1822 new editions of two works by Tomáš Bavorovský, an
irenic theologian, who advocated a symbiotic relationship between the Catholics and
130
Václav Zelený, Život Josefa Jungmanna (Prague: Matice česká, 1873), 47–49; and Do-
brovský, Dějiny české řeči, 167–68.
131
Zelený, Život Josefa Jungmanna, 65–68.
132
Ibid., 50.
133
Vladimír Macura, Znamení zrodu: České národní obrození jako kulturní typ, rev. ed.
(Prague: H & H, 1995), 19.
134
Petráň et al., Počátky českého národního obrození, 240. On the early republication of
Czech literary works, see also Agnew, Origins of the Czech National Renascence, 116–27.
135
Bohuslav Bílejovský, Kronyka církevní, ed. Josef Skalický [i.e., Dittrich] (Prague: Fetterl
z Vilden, 1816).
the Utraquists.136 Dittrich’s use of Slavonic pseudonyms, Skalský and Klíč, reflected
his association with the national awakening. Another example of religious literature
was John Chrysostom’s Kniha o napravení padlého (A Book about Correcting the
Fallen) translated and provided with an important patriotic preface by Viktorin Kor-
nelius of Všehrdy, originally published in 1495 (2nd ed., 1501), which reappeared in
1820 (Prague: Fetterlová).137 As mentioned, Oldřich Velenský of Mnichov’s Czech
translation of Enchiridion militis Christiani by Erasmus, originally published in
1519, and Erasmus’s O připravení k smrti, originally published in 1563–64, were re-
printed by Procházka in 1786–87.138 Reviving the religious and didactic literature of
the sixteenth century, Veleslavín’s work Čest a nevina pohlaví ženského (1585) with
an appended treatise by Kocín, Abeceda pobožné manželky a rozšafné hospodyně,
reappeared in 1823.139
The ideas of Veleslavín and Martin Kuthen likewise reentered the minds of Czech
readers through the republication of Dvě kroniky o založení země České by Václav
R. Kramerius in 1817.140 Procházka reissued in 1786 the chronicles of the so-called
Dalimil, and of Příbík Pulkava of Radenín.141 As noted earlier, Kronika česká (1541)
by Václav Hájek of Libočany was serially reprinted during 1819–23, by the publishing
house of Johan Ferdinand of Schönfeld.142 The playwright Václav K. Klicpera looked
in 1828 at Hájek’s chronicle as an inexhaustible source of themes for Czech poetry.
The famous Czech poet of the 1830s, Karel Hynek Mácha, praised Hájek’s work as
136
Tomáš Bavorovský, as Kázání na Evangelium, kteréž se čte v Církvi Boží na den Božího
Těla, new ed. partial by Josef Klíč [i.e., Dittrich] (Prague: Fetterlová, 1822), extracted from
idem, Postila česká 1557; and Tomáš Bavorovský, Zrcadlo onoho věčného a blahoslaveného
života (1561), new ed. by Josef Dittrich (Prague: Fetterlová, 1822).
137
Erben, Výbor z literatury české, 2: 1039.
138
Desiderius Erasmus, Ruční knížka o rytíři křest’anském, 2nd ed., ed. František Faustýn
Procházka (Prague: Jan J. Diesbach, 1787); and Erasmus, Kniha, v kteréž jednomu každému
křest’anskému člověku naučení i napomenutí se dává, jak by se k smrti hotoviti měl (Prague:
Jan J. Diesbach, 1786); see also Dobrovský, Dějiny české řeči, 420.
139
Erben,Výbor z literatury české, 2: 1657–58, Jan Kocín z Kocinétu, Abeceda pobožné
manželky a rozšafné hospodyně (Prague: Daniel Adam z Veleslavína, 1585); see also Kniho-
pis, no. 4159.
140
Dvě kroniky o založení země České … Jedna Eneáše Senenského … Druhá Martina Kuth-
ena z Krynsperku (Prague, 1817). Veleslavín’s edition had appeared as Kroniky dvě o založení
země České, Eneaše Sylvia a Martina Kuthena (Prague: Daniel Adam z Veleslavína, 1585); see
also Milan Kopecký, “Poznámky k vývoji české historické beletrie předobrozenské,” Sborník
prací Filozofické Fakulty Brněnské Univerzity D 14 (1967): 63.
141
Dalimil, Kronika boleslavská o posloupnosti knížat a králů českých (Prague: Jan J. Dies-
bach, 1786; virtually identical ed., Prague: Kašpar Widtmann, 1786; see Knihopis, no. 1811;
originally published, Prague: Daniel Karel z Karlspergka, 1620, see Knihopis, no. 1810);
Příbík Pulkava z Radenína, Kronika česká (Prague: Jan J. Diesbach, 1786; virtually identical
ed., Prague: Kašpar Widtmann, 1786; see Knihopis, nos. 14.697–98).
142
Kolár, Návraty bez konce, 289.
an outstanding piece of Czech belles lettres.143 Prokop Lupáč of Hlaváčov, Historie

o císaři Karlovi IV, originally published in 1584, was reissued by Hanka in 1848.144
Kronika Pražská, by Bartoš Písař, written in the 1530s, was published by Karel J. Er-
ben in 1851 (Prague: Kalve). All of Veleslavín’s original works would become avail-
able in a collected edition in 1853.145
From the rich geographic and historical literature of non-Bohemian countries, for
instance, Matouš Hosius’s translation of Kronika Moskevská by Aleksander Gwagnin
(Alessandro Guagnini), published in 1589 (2nd ed., 1602) was reissued as early as
1786 in Prague with an introduction by Faustin Procházka.146 Ladislav Bartolomeides
republished in Levoča in 1805 the translation of Flavius Josephus’s Jewish War by
Pavel Aquilinas (Vorličný), Flavia Jozefa o válce židovské knihy sedmery, originally
published in 1553.147 Another version, based on the edition by Mikuláš Stypacius of
1591, was published again by Kramerius in Prague in 1806.148 Jan Kocín of Kocinét’s
translation of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History (1594) was newly published under
the title Desatery knihy Eusebiovy církevní historie in 1855 in an edition by J. E.
Krbec.149 From the favorite genre of travel literature, one of the earliest publications
of literature from the sixteenth century, as mentioned earlier, was Příhody Václava
Vratislava z Mitrovic, prepared by Pelcl in 1777.150 The volume was published again
143
Ibid., 187, 283.
144
Erben, Výbor z literatury české, 2: 1537–38. The original edition appeared as Prokop
Lupáč z Hlaváčova, Historie o císaři Karlovi, toho jména čtvrtém (Prague: Jiří Nygrin, 1584);
see Knihopis, no. 5060.
145
Daniel Adam z Veleslavína, Práce původní (Prague: Bedrich Rohlícek, 1853).
146
Aleksander Gwagnin [Alessandro Guagnini], Vejtah z Kroniky Moskevské … Přidána jest
Zikmunda Herbersteina dvojí cesta do Moskvy, trans. Matouš Hosius, intro. František Faustýn
Procházka (Prague: Jan Diesbach, 1786; variant: publisher, Kašpar Widtmann, 1786); see Kni-
hopis, nos. 2799–80. The original edition was Aleksander Gwagnin [Alessandro Guagnini],
Kronika Moskevská: Wypsání predních zemí, krajin, národuw, knízestwí, mest, zámkuw, rzek
i jezer, Welikému Knizeti Mozkewskému poddanych … Též o neslýchaném Tyranství Ivana
Vasilovice Knížete Moskevského, kteréž on za paměti naší nad poddanými svými provozoval,
trans. Matouš Hosius z Vysokého Mýta (Prague: Daniel Adam z Veleslavína, 1589; 2nd ed.,
Kronyka Moskevská, Prague: Daniel Adam z Veleslavína, 1602); see Knihopis, nos. 2797–98.
Hosius’s version is apparently based on Sarmatiae Europeae descriptio (Cracow: Matthias
Wirzbieta, 1578).
147
Flavius Josephus, Flavia Jozefa o válce židovské knihy sedmery, trans. Pavel Aquilinas
[Vorličný] (Prostějov: Jan Günther, 1553; also Knihopis, no. 3627; 2nd ed., Levoča: Bartolo-
meides, 1805); see Erben, Výbor z literatury české, 2: 1481–90.
148
Krátká historie o válce židovské z knih Josefa Flavia vytažená léta 1595 od Mikuláše
Stypacia Strakovského, new ed. (Prague: Kramerius, 1806); see also Knihopis, no. 3626.
149
Forst et al., Lexikon české literatury, 2: 756.
150
Václav Vratislav z Mitrovic, Příhody, které on v tureckém hlavním městě viděl (Prague:
Jan M. Samm, 1777); see also Knihopis, no. 16.669.
by Kramerius in 1807.151 It was once again Procházka, who reissued in Prague in

1786 Oldřich Prefát of Vlkanov’s Cesta z Prahy do Benátek (A Journey from Prague
to Venice), originally printed in 1563.152 V. M. Kramerius published in 1796 the trav-
elogue Jana Mandyvilly, znamenitého rytíře cesty po světě (The World Travels of
John Mandeville, the Illustrious Knight), originally published in Plzeň in 1510.153
Re-printings of popular sixteenth-century belles lettres, Historijí dvanácte o bra-
tru Janu Palečkovi (Twelve Stories about Brother Jan Paleček; 1567; 2nd ed., 1610)
appeared several times at the turn of the eighteenth century in various journals.154
In 1790, Kramerius republished Letopisové Trojanští, a book published three times
previously (1476, 1487, and 1603).155 František Jan Tomsa published in 1791 Tobolka
zlatá (A Golden Purse) of Šimon Lomnický of Budeč; Kramerius published in 1794
Krátké naučení mladému hospodáři (A Brief Instruction for a Young Householder)
by the same author.156 Dobrovský, with Antonín Pišely, published a collection of folk
sayings and proverbs by Jakub Srnec of Varvažov in 1804 under the title Českých
přísloví sbírka (A Collection of Bohemian Proverbs).157 Rada všelikých zvířat (The
Counsel from Divers Animals), originally published in Plzeň (1528, Jan Pekk) and
Prague (1573[?] and 1578, Melantrich), was republished in Prague in 1815 (Enders)
with an introduction by Dobrovský.158 Selections from Vavřinec Leander Rvačovský
of Rvačov’s Masopust (The Mardi Gras; Prague: Jiří Melantrich, 1580) were re-
printed several times, for instance, Klevetník (A Gossip) and Všetýčka (A Busybody),
151
Kočí, České národní obrození, 189.
152
Oldřich Prefát z Vlkanova, Cesta z Prahy do Benátek, a odtud potom po moři až do Pal-
estýny (Prague: Jan J. Diesbach, 1786; virtually identical ed., Prague: Kašpar Widtmann, 1786;
see Knihopis, nos. 14.354–55; original ed., Prague: Jan Kozel, 1563; see Knihopis, no. 14.353).
153
John de Mandeville, Cesta po světě, v kteréž vypisuje rozličné krajiny až města (Prague:
Kramerius, 1796); see also Knihopis, no. 5172. The original translation appeared in Plzeň in
1510, and other editions? in 1513, 1576, 1596, and 1600. See Knihopis, nos. 5167–71.
154
Erben, Výbor z literatury české, 2: 1339.
155
Letopisové Trojanští (Prague: V. Kramerius, 1790); see Jungmann, Historie literatury
české, 66. For the earliest editions, see Knihopis, Dodatky, vol. 1 (Prague: Národní Knihovna,
1994), nos. 14–15.
156
Šimon Lomnický of Budeč, Tobolka zlatá (Prague: František J. Tomsa, 1791); see Kni-
hopis, no. 4978; for original edition [1615], see Knihopis, no. 4977; and Šimon Lomnický of
Budeč, Krátké naučení mladému hospodáři (Prague: V. V. Kramerius, 1794); see Knihopis, no.
4943; for original edition [1597], see Knihopis, no. 4941.
157
Dějiny české literatury, 2: 116. The original appeared as Jakub Srnec of Varvažov, Dicte-
ria sev proverbia bohemica ad phrasim latinorum accommodata (Prague: Nigrinus, 1582; 2nd
ed., Prague: Nigrinus, 1599); see Knihopis, 15.642 and 15.644.
158
Jungmann, Historie literatury české, 64. For the early editions, see Knihopis, nos. 14.713–
15.
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.159 Václav Dobřenský’s didactic
work Vrtkavé štěstí (Fickle Fortune; 1583) was republished in Prague in 1824 in an
edition of Václav R. Štěpán.160 The play Historia o jednom sedlském pacholku a po-
běhlém židu (Story of a Peasant and a Wandering Jew) by Tobiáš Mouřenín of Lito-
myšl, originally published in 1604, was reissued at least eleven times for the last time
in 1877 (Uherská Skalice: Škarnicl). One of its central themes was used by Tyl in
his play Strakonický dudák (The Bagpiper of Strakonice).161 The story of Meluzína
(Mélusine), published in 1595, was converted into a play by V. K. Klicpera and pub-
lished in 1848.162
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the linguistic heritage of the sixteenth
century was retrieved most palpably by the reappearance of the thesaurus of the
Czech language, based on the work of Daniel Adam of Veleslavín. In 1805, Karel
Ignác Thám published the Neuestes ausführliches und vollständiges deutsch-böh-
misches synonymisch-phraseologisches National-lexikon oder Wörterbuch (Prague:
F. J. Scholl, 1805–07), based on Veleslavín’s Sylva quadrilinguis vocabulorum et
phrasium Bohemicae, Latinae, Graecae et Germanicae linguae (Prague: Daniel
Adam of Veleslavín, 1598). A second revised edition, also by Thám, appeared in 1814
under the same title (Prague: M. Neureutter, 1814). In line with the restoration of
Czech linguistic norms, Dobrovský printed in 1818 Václav Písecký’s letter of 1512 on
“The Merits of the Czech Language.”163 The only way to avoid writing the corrupted
language inherited from the early eighteenth century, claimed Zahradník, was for the
writer to immerse himself in the tongue of the old Czechs. He praised the linguistic
work of Jungmann and his associates in restoring the norms of the Golden Age.164
159
Vavřinec Leander Rvačovský of Rvačov, Klevetník (N.p., late eighteenth or early nine-
teenth century); and Vavřinec Leander Rvačovský of Rvačov, Všetýčka (N.p., late eighteenth
or early nineteenth century); see Knihopis, nos. 15.125 and 15.128. For Vavřinec Leander
Rvačovský of Rvačov, Masopust (Prague: Jiří Melantrich, 1580), see Knihopis, no. 15.127.
160
Václav Dobřenský, Vrtkavé štěstí (Prague: Martin Neureuter, 1824); see Erben, Výbor z
literatury české, 2: 1586; for original ed. (Prague: Jiří Černý, 1583), see Knihopis, 2005.
161
Kolár, Návraty bez konce, 14; see also Jungmann, Historie literatury české, 141.
162
V. K. Klicpera, Česká Melusina: Dramatická národní báchorka v pateru dějství (Prague:
Nákl. J.A. Gabriela, 1848); see Meluzína: An Edition of the Sixteenth-Century Czech Version
of the Mélusine Romance, ed. S. I. Kanikova and Robert B. Pynsent (London: KLP, 1996),
347. The original appeared as Kronika kratochvílná o ctné a šlechetné Panně Meluzíně (1595),
ibid., 1. For a list of other editions, see Jaroslav Kolár, Česká zábavná próza 16. století a t. zv.
knížky lidového čtení (Prague: NČSAV, 1960), 68–69.
163
Dobrovský, Dějiny české řeči, 409–12.
164
Rybička, “Vzpomínka na Vincence Zahradníka,” 34–35; Jungmann, Historie literatury
české, 359–60; also letter from Zahradník to Hanka, dated 28 May 1835, in Zahradník, Filo-
sofické spisy, 1: 121.
Not only the lexical side, but also syntax should observe the old norms.165 His exam-
ple and exhortation influenced other Catholic priests.166 According to him, the old
Czech could also express philosophical concepts more substantively and concretely
than present-day German.167
As a result of the program of reprinting, Czech readers in the period of the na-
tional awakening had available to them a large portion of the corpus of literature by
which their sixteenth-century ancestors were nourished. The process was aided by
cheaper printing and the spread of literacy, especially in the rural areas, under the im-
pact of the Enlightenment era. In particular, the decree of 6 December 1774 stipulated
an expansion and systematization of the school system in Bohemia.168
Transmission in Textbooks
The second approach to documenting the revival of sixteenth-century values is to

look at what nationally conscious Czech students studied and what formed their world
outlook. Already the first professor of Czech language and literature at the University
of Prague, František M. Pelcl, appointed in 1792, had his students read sixteenth-cen-
tury authors and parliamentary documents of that period.169 The same was true of his
successors Jan Nejedlý (1801–34), who was particularly insistent on the fidelity to six-
teenth-century norms of the Czech language, then František Čelakovský (1835–36),
Jan Vávra (1836–39), and Jan P. Koubek (1840–54). In the opening decades of the
nineteenth century, students depended on the reprinted work or original editions, for
instance, Zahradník, who studied among others Veleslavín, Kocín, Koldín, Plácel of
Elbing, Sixt of Ottersdorf, Hájek, and Comenius.170 Later, the reintroduction of six-
teenth-century modes of thought was facilitated by textbooks that provided relatively
easy access to a great variety of authors.
Perhaps the most notable transmission belt of literature from the sixteenth to the
nineteenth century was Josef J. Jungmann’s Slovesnost (Literature; 1820).171 There
was also Alois V. Šembera’s Dějiny řeči a literatury československé (History of Bo-
165
He criticized those writers who “use Czech words and correctly decline and inflect them,
but bind them together in such a way … that a sort of a third language is created, which is
neither German nor Czech.” See Rybička, “Vzpomínka na Vincence Zahradníka,” 33.
166
In particular, the later bishop of České Budějovice, Jan Jirsík. See ibid., 34.
167
168
Jungmann, Historie literatury české, 345.
169
Dějiny Univerzity Karlovy, 2: 1623–1802 (Prague: Karolinum, 1996), 132.
170
Rybička, “Vzpomínka na Vincence Zahradníka,” 29; and Zahradník, Filosofické spisy,
1: 73.
171
Josef J. Jungmann, Slovesnost; aneb sbírka příkladů s krátkým pojednáním o slohu
(Prague: I. Fetterlová, 1820).
hemian Slav language and literature; 1858–68).172 The second volume, covering the
period from 1409, was issued serially since 1861, so that the treatment of the six-
teenth century was available in the early 1860s, although the entire volume was not
completed until 1868. Characteristically, the author keynoted the second volume of
the textbook with a quote from Sixt of Ottersdorf embracing those values which the
Bohemian nineteenth century shared with the sixteenth: free discussion and toler-
ance.173 Among many others, Josef Kalousek, for instance, provides testimony of
the intensive use and deep influence of the two textbooks from the viewpoint of the
student youth in the 1850s.174 Another important reader of Czech literature was Výbor
z literatury české (Anthology of Czech Literature); volume 1 (1845), Od nejstarších
časů až do počátku XV. století (From Earliest Times until the Early Fifteenth Cen-
tury), was edited by Josef J. Jungmann with František Palacký and others, and vol-
ume 2 (1868), Od počátku XV až do konce XVI. století (From the Early Fifteenth to the
End of the Sixteenth Centuries), by Karel J. Erben.175 In his introduction to volume
2, Erben justified the focus on the Utraquist period on the merits of its literary attain-
ments, contrasted with the mediocrity and corrupted language of most of the writ-
ings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This volume started appearing in
installments in 1857, and was completed in 1868. The eleven-year hiatus between the
appearance of the first volume (1845) and the resumption of the work on the second
(1856) was caused by the revolutionary events of 1848 and their aftermath. According
to Erben, the main purpose of the textbook was to provide an inventory of Czech
literary achievement and to serve as a basis for further development of literature in
the Czech language.176
The Výbor z literatury české contained a rich and varied selection from the writ-
ers of the Bohemian Reformation. Already volume 1, published in 1845, excerpted
five works of Tomáš of Štítné, Rozmluvy nábožné (Discussions about Religion), Knihy
učení křest’anského (Books of Christian Teaching), Řeči sváteční (Holiday Sermons),
O sedmi stupních (Seven Steps), and Sv. Augustina samomluvenie (St. Augustine’s
Soliloquy).177 Volume 2 contained a plethora of the theological luminaries of the Utra-
quist Church, beginning with selections of Jan Hus’s Postilla (Homiliary), Dcerka (A
Daughter), and Listové ze žaláře (Letters from Prison), and of Jerome of Prague’s List
panu Lackovi z Kravař (A Letter to Lord Lacek of Kravaře).178 The textbook also
172
Alois V. Šembera, Dějiny řeči a literatury československé, 1 (Vienna: n.p., 1858), 2 (Vi-
enna: Nákladem spisovatelovým, 1868).
173
Ibid., 2: ii.
174
Otakar Josek, Život a dílo Josefa Kalouska (Prague: Historický spolek, 1922), 33.
175
Výbor z literatury české, 1: Od nejstarších časů až do počátku XV. století, ed. Josef J. Jung-
mann et al., and 2: Od počátku XV až do konce XVI. století, ed. Karel J. Erben.
176
Ibid., 2: v–vii.
177
Ibid., 1: 635–790.
178
Ibid., 2: 181–228.
presented the account of Poggio of Florence to Leonhard of Aretin about the trial and
execution of Jerome in 1416 in a translation by Daniel Adam of Veleslavín.179 The
revolutionary atmosphere following the death of Hus was captured in the proceed-
ings of the Diets of Prague (September 1415 and November 1423) and of Čáslav (June
1421), as well as in the records of the council meetings of the Old Town of Prague in
July 1420, July 1421, February and May 1422, and January 1429.180 Works by other
theologians of the fifteenth century included Jan of Příbram’s Život kněží táborských
(The Lives of Taborite Priests),181 Prokop of Plzeň’s Veřejné napomenutí Čechům i
Moravanům (A Public Admonition to the Bohemians and Moravians),182 and three
sections from the works of Peter of Chelčice, including his homiliary (Postilla).183
The two leading figures of fifteenth-century Utraquism are included: Jan Rokycana,
the archbishop elect, and the subsequent administrator, Václav Koranda the Younger.
Rokycana is represented by a List proti Pikartóm (A Letter against the Pikharts; 1468)
and sections of his homiliary (Postilla),184 and Koranda by Poselstvie krále Jiřího do
Říma k papeži (An Embassy of King George to the Pope in Rome; 1462).185 The
report O sněmu kutnohorském po smrti krále Jiřího (The Diet in Kutná Hora after
King George’s Death; 1471) captured the spirit of Utraquist resistance to the crusades
elicited by renewed papal anathemas.186 The student reader also contained selections
from three prominent fifteenth-century personages who were not professional theolo-
gians: Vavřinec of Březová, Jan Žižka,187 and Ctibor Tovačovský of Cimburk, whose
Hádání pravdy a lži (A Dispute between Truth and Falsehood; originally written in
1467, published in Prague, 1539) is quoted at considerable length.188
Volume 2 of Výbor z literatury české covered several of the prominent Utraquist
intellectuals involved in the Czech urban culture of the sixteenth century. The earliest
was Viktorin Kornelius of Všehrdy with the patriotic introduction to his translation
of John Chrysostom’s Kniha o napravení padlého (Correction of a Fallen Man).189
Among the historians of the early sixteenth century, the reader covered Mikuláš
Konáč of Hodiškov, Bartoš Písař, and Martin Kuthen of Šprinsberk. The sample of
Konáč’s writing was taken from his Czech adaptation of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini
179
Ibid., 1603–14.
180
Ibid., 365–402.
181
Ibid., 410–30.
182
Ibid., 430–38.
183
Ibid., 605–39.
184
Ibid., 733–42.
185
Ibid., 663–714.
186
Ibid., 849–62. The text was also printed in Časopis českého musea, pt. 2 (1847): 186–99.
187
Erben, Výbor z literatury české, 2: 271–82, 571–604.
188
Ibid., 793–804.
189
Ibid., 1039–48.
(Pope Pius II), Historia Bohemica (1510).190 Bartoš was represented by passages from
his Kronika pražská (Prague Chronicle; 1530s),191 and Kuthen by his inspirational
Kronika o Žižkovi (Žižka Chronicle; 1564).192 Pavel Aquilinas (Vorličný)’s translation
of Flavius Josephus’s Jewish War, under the title Flavia Jozefa o válce židovské knihy
sedmery (1553), was a fourth notable historical work of the mid-sixteenth century to
be included.193 The anthology featured two eminent Utraquist statesmen and authors,
Sixt of Ottersdorf and Pavel Kristián of Koldín. Sixt discussed the unsuccessful resis-
tence to Ferdinand I’s Schmalcaldic War in his Knihy památné o nepokojných letech
1546 a 1547 (Memoirs of the Troubled Years, 1546–47).194 The anthology offered an
opportunity to the student youth to savor the legal lore of Koldín from the preface of
his famous Práva městská království českého (The Municipal Laws of the Bohemian
Kingdom; 1579), as well as the section O spravedlnosti a právu (De justicia et jure)
from the same work.195
The textbook highlighted and devoted considerable space to the author and
printer, Adam of Veleslavín, who, as mentioned earlier, presided over the great Czech
literary flowering during the last quarter of the sixteenth century. The Výbor cred-
ited him with the authorship of more than twenty books in Czech, and with many
more Czech publications which he edited, revised, or printed. The presented excerpts
included his Život Eneáše Sylvia, a life of Pius II, which he published in his edi-
tion of Kroniky dvě o založení země české (Two Chronicles of the Foundation of the
Bohemian Land; 1585), containing Pius’s Kronika česká (Bohemian Chronicle) and
Kuthen’s Kronika o založení země české (A Chronicle of the Foundation of the Bohe-
mian Land). A specimen of events for 1 January was taken from Adam’s Kalendář
historický (A Historical Calendar; 1578; 2nd ed., 1590), which had arranged signifi-
cant occurrences of Czech and world history by the days of each month.196 Featured
were also two other scholars, Prokop Lupáč of Hlaváčov and Jan Kocín of Kocinét,
who had been involved in Adam’s publishing projects. Lupáč is introduced through
his Historie o císaři Karlovi IV (History of Emperor Charles IV), originally published
in 1584,197 and Kocín by an introduction to his translation of Ecclesiastical History
of Eusebius, Historia církevní Eusebia, published by Adam in 1594.198 Veleslavín
also revised and published the Czech translation of Aleksander Gwagnin’s Kronika
190
Ibid., 1189–1204.
191
Ibid., 1299–1312.
192
Ibid., 1511–22.
193
Flavius Josephus, Flavia Jozefa.
194
Erben, Výbor z literatury české, 2: 1377–94.
195
Ibid., 1550–58.
196
Ibid., 1593–1604, 1615–22.
197
Ibid., 1537–50.
198
Ibid., 1657–68.
Moskevská (The Moscow Chronicle) by Matouš Hosius, which appeared in 1589 (2nd
ed., 1602) and is represented in the Výbor.199
Independently of Veleslavín and his associates, the textbooks introduced two
authors of the last quarter of the sixteenth century, Václav Dobřenský and Vavřinec
Leander Rvačovský of Rvačov. It featured excerpts from Dobřenský’s didactic work,
Vrtkavé štěstí (1583). Rvačovský, a notable Utraquist priest, was represented by his
entertaining Masopust (1580).200
Exalting the Bohemian Reformation in History and Literature
A third way of linking the nineteenth with the sixteenth century was through a his-
torical interpretation, highlighting the period of the Bohemian Reformation and im-
plicitly, if not explicitly, condemning as inappropriate or damaging, unenlightened or
benighted, the heritage of the Counter Reformation period.201
Through a deliberate assault on the “darkness” of the Counter Reformation, Jo-
sephism had also facilitated the rearmament of the Czech national movement with
rehabilitating features of the distinctive past, reflecting the influence of the Bohemian
Reformation. The Josephin view of Czech history is documented, for instance, in an
official textbook from 1783 written by the first professor of history at the University
of Prague, Johann Heinrich Wolf, with the title Geschichte des Konigreichs Boheim.
Wolf interprets the events following the Battle of White Mountain as deplorable re-
sults of the intolerance of the times. Jan Hus and in a way also the Bohemian Utra-
quist king, George of Poděbrady (1458–71), were seen as victims of excessive, often
ruthless, religious zeal.202
An important protagonist in this field was Pelcl, who stated in his memoirs on
16 January 1781: “Every Czech who reads only Czech books and knows the history
of his country is already a bit of a Hussite.”203 In his study Lebensgeschichte des
römischen und böhmischen Königs Wenzeslaus (Prague, 1788–89), Pelcl established
a correspondence between Hus’s reformist critique and outlook, and the liberal reli-
gious and sociopolitical views of the Enlightenment. Hus’s sentencing for heresy by
the Council of Constance seemed an unjustified and imprudent act. The Bohemian
Enlightenment produced other vindications of the Bohemian Reformation and critical
assessments of authoritarian ecclesiology.204 Thus, Augustin Zitte (1750–85) wrote
199
Ibid., 1567–84; for Veleslavín’s editions, see Knihopis, nos. 2797–98.
200
Erben, Výbor z literatury české, 2: 1586–92, 1622–38.
201
For a brief survey, see Agnew, Origins of the Czech National Renascence, 31–50.
202
Johann Heinrich Wolf, Geschichte des Konigreichs Boheim zum Gebrauche der Studie-
renden Jugend in den K. K. Staaten (Vienna: Johann Thomas von Trattner, 1783), 128, 132,
152, 192.
203
Cited by Josef Johanides, František Martin Pelcl (Prague: Melantrich, 1981), 384; see also
Kamil Krofta, K pramenům českých dějin (Prague: Sfinx-Janda, 1948), 53–54.
204
Kutnar and Marek, Přehledné dějiny českého a slovenského dějepisectví, 156–57.
about Hus and his precursors in his Lebensbeschreibung des Magisters Johannes
Huss von Hussinecz (Prague, 1789, 1790). Kašpar Royko (1744–1819), professor of
church history at the University of Prague, displayed a liberal view of the Catholic
Enlightenment in his history of the Council of Constance supporting conciliarism and
opposing authoritarian tendencies (of the type that Hus criticized) which, according
to Royko, still persisted in the church.205 His magnum opus was published in Czech
translation by Václav Stach, a theology professor in Olomouc, as Historie velkého
sněmu kostnického (A History of the Great Council of Constance; 1785, 1786).
Perhaps most to the point for the thesis of this essay, Dobrovský in his Ges-
chichte der böhmischen Sprache und Literatur (Prague, 1792) praised the Bohemian
Reformation as coinciding with the flourishing of Bohemian literature, extolled the
Utraquist theologians for their discussions of the limits and misuse of ecclesiasti-
cal authority, and condemned the Counter Reformation for its cultural vandalism.206
Pelcl produced a new history of Bohemia, Nová kronyka česká (A New Bohemian
Chronicle; Prague, 1791), in which he stripped away the ideology of Counter Refor-
mation in the spirit of Wolf’s earlier history.207 Pelcl and Dobrovský paved the way
for the emergence of Palacký, whose monumental Dějiny národu českého v âechách
a na Moravě (History of the Czech Nation in Bohemia and Moravia), begun in 1832,
made the Bohemian Reformation the center piece and an acme of Czech history, but
in the spirit of the national awakening emphasized its tenor of liberalism, rather than
its theological characteristics. As late as 1833, Zahradník could write favorably about
Jan Rokycana from the standpoint of liberal Catholicism.208
Czech belles lettres of the national awakening cherished historical themes. Once
again the scenarios skipped back over the centuries of Counter Reformation to the
Utraquist fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Josef Kajetán Tyl typically glorified per-
sons, such as his plays Jan Hus and Žižka z Trocnova, or events, such as his story
Dekret kutnohorský (The Decree of Kutná Hora) of the period. The performance of
Jan Hus in 1848 aroused unusual enthusiasm within the theater-going public.209
While during the Enlightenment period the Bohemian Reformation could be
portrayed positively, during the repressive era of Metternich absolutism positive ref-
erences to Hus and to the Bohemian Reformation tended to be suppressed by cen-
sorship.210 On the other hand, historical texts were relatively immune to the censor’s
205
Kašpar Royko, Geschichte der grossen allgemeinen Kirchenversammlung zu Kostnitz, 4
vols. (Prague: Widtmann, 1780–85).
206
Josef Dobrovský, Geschichte der böhmischen Sprache und Literatur, cited by Josef Pekař,
“Masarykova česká folosofie,” in Spor o smysl českých dějin, 1895–1938, ed. Miloš Havelka
(Prague: Torst, 1995), 269–70.
207
208
Zahradník, Filosofické spisy, 1: 57 n. 3.
209
Mojmír Otruba and Miroslav Kačer, Tvůrčí cesta Josefa Kajetána Tyla (Prague: Státní
nakladatelství krásné literatury a umění, 1961), 363.
210
Ibid., 362.
whims, and the reprinting of sixteenth-century publications could continue even after
the shadow of Reaction replaced the era of Enlightenment within the Habsburg Em-
pire. The desire to disseminate prohibited notions probably supplied the incentive to
forge alleged historical texts containing ideas that would otherwise be unacceptable
to the censor. Thus emerged the poems of the Královédvorský and Zelenohorský
manuscripts “discovered” in 1817–18 but actually forged by Hanka and Linda. Ironi-
cally, these poetic collections, distinctly patriotic and libertarian, came to constitute
the first Czech romanticist works of lasting literary value. Although Dobrovský has
not been suspected of involvement in the Czech case, these shenanigans provided
some ground for Edward Keenan’s theory of Dobrovský’s authorship of the allegedly
twelfth-century Russian epic Slovo o polku Igoreve (The Igor Tale). He indeed had
journeyed to Russia in 1792–93.211
Historical Rights of the Bohemian State
Yet another (fourth) way of gauging the reintegration of sixteenth-century precepts

into the nineteenth-century context of Czech mentality and society is to examine
the emphasis, often ridiculed, on the historical rights of the Bohemian state. Bohe-
mian constitutional and municipal law of the sixteenth century once again reflected
a highly developed sense of political pragmatism and dedication to civic culture.212
While a tendency to look back at preabsolutist constitutionalism appeared elsewhere
in Europe in the early nineteenth century, in Bohemia it was particularly significant
because of the abrupt and arbitrary abrogation of the country’s traditional constitu-
tion as a consequence of the Battle of the White Mountain. Documents and treatises
of Czech sixteenth-century law, both administrative and constitutional, appeared
both in new editions and in early nineteenth-century textbooks and readers which, as
pointed out earlier, shaped the minds of Czech student youth.
Among the publications or republications of sixteenth-century legal texts be-
longed Viktorin Kornelius of Všehrdy, Z kněh o právích země české (From the Books
of Legal Rights in the Bohemian Land; 1515), which was published by Hanka with a
preface by Palacký in 1841 (Prague: Matice česká). Excerpts from five parts of this
fundamental treatise were also reprinted in Výbor z literatury české (vol. 2, 1868).213
The text of the St. Wenceslaus Day Contract concluded in 1517 by the three estates
of the Kingdom of Bohemia, Smlouva všech tří stavů Svatováclavského sněmu, was
reprinted in the journal Právník (1861), and also appeared in Výbor z literatury české
(vol. 2, 1868).214 As early as 1792–1803, Ignaz Cornova published in seven volumes
a German translation of the famous classic by Pavel Stránský, Respublica Boiema
211
Keenan, “Iaroslav of Halych,” 314–17.
212
Valentin Urfus, “Český historický stát: Od stavovství k absolutismu,” in VII. Sjezd českých
historiků: Praha, 24.–26. září 1993 (Prague: Historický ústav, 1994), 70, 78.
213
214
Ibid., 1217–44.
(first printed by Elzevier in Holland in 1634) as Staat von Böhmen.215 A brief extract,
Von den böhmischen Landständen, Landtagen und Landesämtern, had appeared in
1790.216
In addition, Výbor z literatury české (vol. 1, 1845) contained the first 42 of 100 ar-
ticles of the Řád práva zemského (The Rules of the Law of the Land), describing court
procedures and prepared between 1348 and 1355,217 a collection of Czech legal doc-
uments from 1380–1402, Nejstarší listiny české (The oldest Bohemian charters),218
as well as Výklad na právo země české (An Exposition of the Laws of the Bohemian
Land), prepared for King Wenceslaus IV by Ondřej of Dubá.219 Volume 2 (1868),
moving into the fifteenth century, contained the records of the Bohemian Diets of
1415, 1421, and 1423,220 and of the Diet of Kutná Hora in 1471 following the death of
King George of Poděbrady.221 As for law literature and documents of the sixteenth
century, the Výbor begins with the preface by Matouš of Chlumčany to the Zřízení
privilegií koruny a království českého (Privileges of the Crown and the Kingdom
of Bohemia), submitted to King Vladislav in 1501. Further, the student anthology
covered the articles adopted by the General Diet of the Kingdom of Bohemia held in
January 1547,222 and excerpts from the law code of the Kingdom of Bohemia, Práva
a zřízení zemská království českého (Constitutional laws and institutions of the King-
dom of Bohemia), adopted by the Diet in 1549 and printed in 1550.223
In the area of local and municipal law, the widely used fifteenth-century text
of Ctibor Tovačovský of Cimburk, the so-called Kniha Tovačovská (The Book of
Tovačov), written in the 1480s, was published in excerpts in Mährischer Magazin in
1789.224 The entire work was printed in Brno in 1858 in an edition of Karel J. Demuth,
and again in Brno by Brandl in 1868. Výbor z literatury české (vol. 2, 1868) also gives
lengthy citations from Kniha Tovačovská.225 Incidentally, Koldín’s Práva městská
království českého (The Municipal Laws of the Kingdom of Bohemia; 1579) was
available at the beginning of the nineteenth century from a relatively recent reprint
215
Pavel Stránský, Staat von Böhmen, trans., rev., suppl. Ignaz Cornova, 7 vols. (Prague: J. G.
Calve, 1792–1803); see Knihopis, no. 15.742. For earlier editions, see Knihopis, nos. 15.739–41.
216
Pavel Stránský, Von den böhmischen Landständen, Landtagen und Landesämtern (Prague:
Calve, 1790); see Knihopis, no. 15.738.
217
Výbor z literatury české, 1: 609–626. Also reprinted in Archiv český 2 (1842): 76–135.
218
Výbor z literatury české, 1: 1007–60.
219
Ibid., 963–1008. Also reprinted in Archiv český.
220
221
Ibid., 849–62.
222
Ibid., 1359–72.
223
Ibid., 1467–80.
224
225
(Prague, 1755).226 Concerning local and municipal law, Výbor z literatury české gives
samples of the proceedings of Prague city councils in the areas of public and private
law between 1418 and 1435. Aside from its attention to the Kniha Tovačovská and
samples of Koldín’s Práva městská království českého,227 the textbook also contains
the preface to Brikcí of Licko’s Práva městská (The Rights of Towns), originally pub-
lished in Litomyšl in 1536.228
A Reincarnation of Das schöne oder goldene Zeitalter
Thus, a way of assessing the Czech national awakening is to view it as an od-

yssey from the culture of the Counter Reformation to the culture formatted by six-
teenth-century Utraquism. The spirit of Utraquism celebrated its own resurrection
through the work and achievements of the nineteenth-century awakeners. It would
be the civic culture of Utraquism without its theology. In a special eulogy, Zahrad-
ník welcomed the new incarnations in Bohemia of authors like Koldín, Veleslavín,
Kocín, and other paragons of sixteenth-century literature and language.229 Although
the distinctiveness of the vernacular was emphasized, language was primarily an
instrument to advance—in analogy to the Bohemian Reformation and in the spirit
of the Enlightenment—universal human values, not to promote and celebrate ethnic
peculiarities and oddities.230
The obstacles to assessing fairly the role of the sixteenth century have been duly
noted. It may be argued that, leaving aside the aficionados of the Counter Reforma-
tion, the aspersions cast by a coalition of effete modernist esthetes on the one hand,
and intellectual and moral rigorists on the other, were stimulated by, and in turn re-
inforced, the unfavorable image of the age in Czech historiography as a civilization
doomed to annihilation. Already the traditional label for the historical period, doba
předbělohorská (pre–White Mountain era), implied that its significance. or, perhaps,
lack thereof, was predetermined (as something ephemeral or transient) by the denoue-
ment of the Battle of White Mountain in 1620. This premonition interfered with the
evaluation of its long-term role in Bohemia’s political and national culture. It obscured
the way in which the Bohemian society of the sixteenth century could be said to have
foreshadowed, and in its legacy fostered, the liberal values of the Czech national
awakening in its tolerance, constitutional politics, dominance of middle-class culture,
226
Pavel Kristián of Koldín, Práva městská království českého (Prague: František H. Kyrch-
ner, 1755); see Knihopis, no. 4573.
227
228
Ibid., 1315–26; for the original edition, Brikcí z Licka, Práva městská (Litomyšl: Alexandr
Plzeňský, 1536), see Knihopis, no. 1348.
229
See Rybička, “Vzpomínka na Vincence Zahradníka,” 38.
230
One may speculate that the universalist/universal aspirations of the Bohemians’ national-
ism had their historical roots in Czechs’ quasi-integration into the cosmopolitan entities of the
Holy Roman Empire and the Roman Church (albeit under the Utraquist guise).
and freedom of thought. Far from being doomed, these values proved imperishable
and indestructible. In view of the foregoing, a modest (or perhaps a bold?) suggestion
might be in order concerning historical nomenclature. It would involve replacing the
vacuous and even demeaning “Pre–White Mountain Era” with a more positive and
substantive designation, such as the “Age of Utraquism” (doba podobojí) or, perhaps,
even with Dobrovský’s earlier descriptor as the “Golden Age” (das schöne oder gold-
ene Zeitalter).231
231
Dobrovský, Dějiny české řeči, 46. Analogously, for the subsequent period, the term “Era of
the Counter Reformation” might be more expressive than “Post–White Mountain Era.”
The Barents Region: History Resurrected in Post-Soviet Europe
Kåre Hauge
History is bunk.
—Henry Ford
History
This is the story of a project combining the best ingredients (hopefully!) from history,
political science, and sociology. It will (again, hopefully!) show that Ford was wrong.
A few words of background are necessary to set the framework.1
The geographical area we are dealing with here is what is often referred to as
“the High North” of Europe, the area of Scandinavia and (European) Russia that lies
at and above the Arctic Circle. This includes the northernmost counties of Norway,
Sweden, and Finland, and, on the Russian side, the regions (oblasti) of Murmansk
and Archangel.
This part of Europe did not witness well-defined borders until the first half of
the nineteenth century. Even then, the people who lived in the region moved around
much as they pleased, paying scant attention to border markers put up by civil ser-
vants from the respective distant capitals. This was especially true of the Sami (Lapp)
population. By tradition nomads following their reindeer and related across borders,
the Sami spoke variations of the same language and considered themselves more or
less one nation, no matter the country in which they happened to be staying.
The first testimony to trade between Norwegians and peoples of this area is found
in a report to King Alfred the Great of England around 800 AD. The so-called Pomor
trade started around 1300, and became a permanent operation between northern Nor-
way and Archangel in the eighteenth century.2 It was very important: it was the main
provider of grain for northern Norway, which was not able to grow many foodstuffs
because of the climate. During the latter part of the nineteenth century and up to 1918,
around 350 Russian ships came to northern Norway annually. The trade consisted
1
As this is not a report on a research project, but “participatory history,” there will be no de-
tailed footnoting. After a few footnotes, the interested reader will find a bibliographical note.
2
From the Russian po more (on the sea).
600 K åre Hauge
basically in barter: Norwegians exchanged fish for Russian grain during the summer
months (Archangel harbor froze during the winter). A pidgin Norwegian-Russian lan-
guage evolved, consisting of terms from both languages for the purpose of handling
the merchandise in question. The towns in the area accepted each other’s currency.
There was regular boat service between towns in northern Norway and Archangel
before there were regular services going south along the Norwegian coast. Before
the end of the nineteenth century, a number of Norwegians had settled on the islands
along the Kola Peninsula, where the climate was harsh but fish plentiful, and where it
was possible to make a decent living.
Thus, the picture we see at the beginning of the twentieth century is one of ex-
change and commerce in very many areas. All of this changed when the Bolsheviks
took over Russia in 1917. Finland obtained its independence and a corridor out to the
Barents Sea as well. Finland continued to be accessible, but the Soviet border was
closed and remained guarded. The European trade with Archangel gradually dried
up, and the visits among the Sami population were cut short. The Sami on the Soviet
side were “advised” to give up their nomadic way of life and moved out of the imme-
diate border area. By World War II, the Norwegians still living within the northern
Soviet Union (including the settlers on the islands along the Kola peninsula), who had
not seen the writing on the wall and left, were rounded up by Stalin’s secret police
and sent off to labor camps. Most of them perished. After World War II, Finland lost
its corridor to the sea, Norway joined NATO, and the border to the Soviet Union was
totally sealed (barbed wire, minefields, no-man’s-land). The Iron Curtain did indeed
run from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea.
Even though a few cultural exchanges did take place across this frontier during
the Cold War, things really changed only with perestroika. In 1989 the Berlin Wall
came down, in 1990 Germany was reunified, and in 1991 the Soviet Union ceased to
exist. It then dawned on foreign ministries in the West that a window of opportunity
was opening up in relations with the former Soviet Union (FSU), now the Russian
Federation.
Most foreign ministries have a Policy Planning Staff (PPS; the name may vary).
The task of such a unit is to try to plan ahead and suggest adjustments of policy when
need be. I am sure that the reader has seen references to firms which have the lead-
ership philosophy that the staff should be composed of individuals with a variety of
backgrounds if the team is to be successful. The Norwegian PPS was a small unit,
some half dozen people, of whom four of us, a historian, an economist, a liberal arts
person, and a politician turned administrator, were doing the basic work on the Bar-
ents Region project. The combination must have worked!
But foreign ministries have a tendency to follow in previous foot tracks. This
is in the nature of things: diplomacy follows certain rules and traditions which are
broken only for very good reasons. As for Norway, it is a small country with a great
power neighbor. Through forty-five years of Cold War, Norwegians had learned to
be careful when approaching the Russian bear. And the country had unsettled issues
with its Soviet-Russian neighbor as well, especially the delimitation talks on the con-
tinental shelf in the Barents Sea.
The Barents Region 601
Important changes of policy in a foreign ministry have to start with some politi-
cian(s)—diplomats are rather more timid. Our politician was Foreign Minister Thor-
vald Stoltenberg. But foreign ministers are very busy, and the first task is to get their
attention and time, especially when we are talking about scenarios that do not seem
to imply imminent catastrophes. On the contrary: the difficult and threatening Soviet
Union seemed to be turning into recognizable Federal Russia, finally becoming a
civilized state and joining the family of nations as a normal member. Was there really
a need for dramatic action?
The PPS felt there was. This was our chance to get relations with the new Russia
off on a less confrontational footing than had been the case during the Cold War.
Besides, Russia had to be taken on its own word now that it wanted friendship and
cooperation. It had pronounced itself democratic in the Western meaning of the word
and needed a chance to prove it. Furthermore, the region in question was by Western
standards in bad economic and environmental shape. But we suspected that there
would be strong resistance by the apparatchiki—on both sides. If the idea of a new
cooperation with the former Soviet Union was to go ahead, the minister(s) had to
firmly endorse it.
The PPS got one and one-half hours of the minister’s time after normal working
hours and presented to him the “Barents Region Cooperation Project.” At the end of
the session, the minister said: “Go for it! Use as much time on developing it as you
need.”
The basis of the orientation with Stoltenberg was a memo of 115 pages worked
out by the economist in the PPS. Ministers do not read hundreds of pages if they can
avoid it—bureaucrats do. Before long, there was a movement afoot in the ministry,
led by some of the heaviest guns in the establishment, to stop the project. The secre-
tary general was a nice man, but he was still cross with me for “telling the Minister
before you told me.” He was later reported to have said in the canteen that “the PPS is
destroying everything I have worked for during twenty years”—obviously referring
to the delimitation talks on the continental shelf which had been going on for about
that long. Along with a number of directors general he signed a Prime Minister to
Stoltenberg strongly advising him not to follow up on the idea. All the heads of the
departments most heavily involved with Russia had signed the PM. It was a formida-
ble opposition.
The idea is to keep the Americans in, the Russians

out, and the Germans down.
—NATO joke
The Barents Region Project
What was stated in those 115 pages that so aroused the ire of the civil servants? The
short answer is that it ran counter to the old NATO saying quoted above: the Barents
Project brought the Russians in. The following points will summarize the idea:
602 K åre Hauge
• The general approach was one of cooperation and good neighborliness:

also, Norway should do its bit in the reconstruction of the FSU by helping
to bring it (back) into the community of nations. But Russia was much
too big for Norway alone, even for Scandinavia as a whole. Northwest
Russia, as part of a region, was something we might be able to handle.
• The way to do this was for Scandinavia and Russia to return to the open
borders and active cooperation and trade that characterized the area be-
fore the Communist takeover in 1917. In order to obtain this, an active
campaign of information on both sides of the former Iron Curtain ex-
plaining what used to be and what should be re-established was needed.
The name of the sixteenth-century explorer of the area was seen as a
unifying element and chosen for that reason.3
• The local administrations on both sides of the former Curtain should
become involved along with national capitals. The Barents Project thus
foresaw a so-called Regional Council that would be composed of politi-
cians from the elected assemblies of the counties involved. This council
would, among other tasks, propose projects of cooperation to the Barents
Council below.
• The Barents Council,4 which would meet and discuss, on the ministerial
level, cooperation in various fields: trade, environment, health, transport
and communications, cultural exchanges, Sami questions, etc. This na-
tional level would also finance those projects that received the go-ahead
on both levels. It was clear that the local level—especially on the Russian
side—did not have the financial resources needed to start concrete proj-
ects of cooperation. The memo was (on purpose) rather vague on delicate
matters where cooperation either did not exist (disarmament) or where
contacts were already well-established in other fora, such as fisheries and
continental shelf.
• The foreign policy element was taken care of by opening up cooperation
to all nations able and willing to join. “Confidence building” was part of
the idea. If the parties were to get anywhere with, e.g., the environmental
pollution in the Kola Peninsula, the resources of more countries other
than the Scandinavian ones had to be drawn in. In the end, the European
Commission signed up, but the United States, wary of the financial impli-
cations, did not but was more than happy to become an observer.
Today, well into the twenty-first century, this may not seem such a problematic ap-
proach to confidence building across former borders in Northern Europe. After all,
3
The Dutch navigator Willem Barents (1549–97) tried to discover the Northeast Passage to
Asia in the course of three expeditions north of Siberia. He never got to Asia, but (re)discov-
ered Spitzbergen (Svalbard) and gave his name to the Barents Sea.
4
Both these ideas were inspired by the mechanisms of the European Union: its Councils of
Ministers meetings and its approach to reconciliation through cross-border regionalization in
continental Europe, for instance in Alsace/Rhineland.
we have experienced a long period of cooperation with the FSU. Admittedly, cer-
tain recent Russian policies are heavily reminiscent of some Soviet reflexes, but such
reflexes were undeniably closer to Western minds in 1991 than they are today. To
professional diplomats in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, however, the Barents Co-
operation Project was a questionable undertaking at best. First, it extended the realm
of foreign relations to include participation by local, municipal bodies.5 Second, as
if this were not bad enough it became even more risky because, for the first time, it
was to be tried out across the former Iron Curtain. In other words, it was seen as dan-
gerous both because it would involve actors not normally playing in foreign politics
(municipal bodies) and because these bodies were to interact with similar bodies on
the Russian side (former Communist entities).
Since Stoltenberg was also a former diplomat, he knew that there was a limit
to how strong an internal opposition even a foreign minister could overrun, if the
bureaucratic machine was to work smoothly.6 At the same time his political (and hu-
mane!) instincts told him that this approach to post-Communist Russia deserved to be
tested. He came up with a compromise: take out those elements that created the most
concern within the establishment, the continental shelf and fisheries, and go with the
rest. And so it came about that the Barents Region, taking its name from the ocean,
“ended up on land,” as the saying in the ministry went.
Even if the PPS was given the green light to go ahead, opposition far from died
down in the ministry. An idea of this kind cannot be realized without money. A ma-
neuver was attempted high up in the hierarchy to limit the PPS’s budget to what had
already been on the books for the year 1992. If this attempt had succeeded, there
would never have been any Barents Region Cooperation. But it was rejected. Further-
more, it was decided that the PPS could draw on the allocations involved in two White
Papers “On Aid to Eastern Europe.” We could start putting our idea into practice.7
In view of the disputed start of the project, we realized that there would not be
too much help to be had from the regular departments of the ministry in working out
the project’s details. It was also out of the question that the PPS alone, with its limited
staff, could write up detailed memos on the potential for cooperation and interaction
with Russia within each of the many fields (see Barents Council above) envisaged as
possible fields of cooperation. We looked around for partners. First, we wanted the
weight and expertise of the academic community on our side.8 Second, it was neces-
sary to consult the governing bodies of the counties in northern Norway which were
heavily involved in the project. Obviously, the attitude of the various political parties
5
See n. 4 above.
6
As was written many years later in the staff bulletin of the ministry: outside the PPS only
three persons supported the Barents Project. Fortunately for the idea, one of them was the
foreign minister.
7
The White Papers in question put up serious money for assistance and investments in East-
ern Europe, some NOK 290 million, or about US $30 million, for the period 1991–93.
8
This may seem normal to an American reader, but intercourse and exchange between ac-
ademic and ministerial circles are much less common in Norway than in the United States.
604 K åre Hauge
should be kept in mind. Finally, but crucially, the attitude of the Russian authorities
needed to be ascertained—and all of this before anything was made public.
We had a meeting with the Fritjof Nansen Institute (FNI), the foreign policy
institute in Oslo that traditionally had the best expertise on the northern area. They
prepared six reports on various aspects from trade to the environment, concluding
that there was serious potential for cooperation in most fields, and that the project as
such ought definitely to go ahead. Not only was their contribution essential to make
the project a reality, but they also managed to complete all the reports without a single
word about what the ministry was up to leaking to the press—a formidable accom-
plishment in these days of total publicity.
Simultaneously, the PPS was also working with the Russian embassy in Oslo.
Most of the staff of the embassy had been replaced as a result of perestroika. Begin-
ning with the ambassador, they became very sympathetic toward the Barents Region
Project. One counselor was appointed as our contact and we quickly discovered that
he was as professional as any diplomat from a Western embassy. Various aspects of
the project and their interface with the Russian system were discussed freely with
the counselor. What was more, the embassy was able to have direct access to the
entourage of Foreign Minister Kozyrev, and responses were quickly received. For
Norwegian diplomats used to the indifferent reactions of the Soviet era, this was a
revelation—and very promising, although we realized that there was considerable
opposition on the Russian side as well.
The Labor Party, which was Stoltenberg’s party, dominated the elected bodies in
northern Norway. The minister consulted with his colleagues and found that the proj-
ect would be officially launched at the Annual General Assembly (AGM) of the Labor
Party in the county of Troms—one of the three Norwegian counties involved in the
project. Stoltenberg gave his speech on 24 April 1992—and the idea was a resound-
ing success in northern Norway. We received another confirmation that the idea of
closer contacts with the Russians had always been dear to the heart of the population
in northern Norway. But we knew this: all through the Cold War, the closer you got
to the Soviet border and the scarier it ought to have been to find the Red Army just
around the corner, the more friendly the population was to the Russians. Obviously,
both the pre-1917 situation and the favorable World War II experiences were not for-
gotten. Even though there was some grumbling on the political left because the re-
gional concept was a bit too close for their liking to European Union templates—and
on the political right because it was too conciliatory to Russia—Stoltenberg was sat-
isfied that it struck the right balance. Thus, the Barents Region Project never became
a party issue in Norwegian foreign politics.
Through the Russian embassy, we had cleared representatives of the authori-
ties of Murmansk and Archangel counties to take part in the AGM on 24 April. At
that time, there was still no regular communication across the border with the FSU.
We managed to get clearance from Russian authorities to fly in a small jet plane
to Murmansk airport.9 The agreement with the embassy was that the governors of
9
It may not be obvious to the reader what a giant step forward this flight represented for in-
tercourse in the North. The Kola Peninsula was heavily militarized (still is) and off limits to
Murmansk and Archangel would assemble there and we would take them back to the
AGM, which we did. A working group of governors’ aides on both sides was estab-
lished to develop the cooperation between Murmansk and Archangel on the Russian
side and the three northernmost counties on the Norwegian side. The seed of the
future Barents Region was planted.
From then on, it was a matter of following the schedule we had worked out for ex-
tending this basic agreement into a future Barents Region that would include Swedish
and Finnish counties as well. To make sure the project was followed up on the Rus-
sian side, a delegation headed by the PPS went to Archangel and Murmansk, inviting
five representatives from each oblast to participate in a senior officials–level “Expert
Meeting on Cooperation in the High North.” The conference took place in Kirkenes
(close to the Russian border) in the summer of 1992. The Russian participants were
to make their way to the border by their own means, and we would take them in hand
from that point—room, board, and transport included. At the agreed time—on the
dot—they came marching across the border, almost in step. And they had conscien-
tiously prepared all the papers they had been asked for and presented them to the con-
ference. It was also a promising sign when President Boris Yeltsin made a reference
to the Barents Region in his speech to the Helsinki OSCE (Organization for Security
and Cooperation in Europe) conference in June 1992.
The PPS commissioned a number of articles and books from the university and
institutes in northern Norway that would serve to remind those who needed it of the
former intercourse across the border. The Sami institutions were activated and the
National Sami Council was given a seat on the Regional Council. Thanks to their
international contacts, the isolated Sami communities on the Russian side sprung to
new life in the years that followed.
The foreign minister took in hand the Swedish and Finnish sides. The Swedes
were never a problem, but the Finns were not too happy to begin with. Traditionally,
they considered themselves the experts on “how to handle the Russians,” and they
had had their own ideas on how to start a cooperation scheme with the Russians in
the High North. Now, some people felt, the Norwegians had pulled a fast one on them.
But Stoltenberg, with some help from a sauna visit, managed to handle this matter
with his Finnish counterpart, and the Finns, too, came on board.
The preparations continued in the ministry for a formal Barents Convention to
be signed by the countries involved. Which were those countries to be? The four core
countries were obvious, but it was quite clear that we wanted as many countries to
participate as possible. In the end, all five Scandinavian countries and the European
Commission signed, in addition to Russia, while most of the other important Western
countries became observers.
Stoltenberg invited all his Scandinavian colleagues as well as his Russian coun-
terpart to the signing conference for the Barents Region Convention on 10 January
1993 in Kirkenes. A tremendous snowstorm almost prevented some of the partici-
foreigners (which it is no more). The plane was the VIP-plane of the government but formally
part of the Norwegian Air Force. This was thus the first NATO-flight with Russian consent
into the Kola Peninsula ever.
606 K åre Hauge
pants from landing, but they made it. At the last moment, it turned out that Moscow
still had problems with allowing the local bodies (oblasti) the kind of international
participation, which had also rung alarm bells in the Norwegian foreign ministry. In
the end, Kozyrev was able to iron that out, and the Regional Council made it into the
Barents Cooperation. The formal international convention establishing the Barents
Region was a reality.
What the Barents Cooperation Achieved
Norway opened a consulate general in Murmansk in 1993. Shortly thereafter, Russia

decided to do the same in Kirkenes, but that station survived only a few years because
of budget cuts. The Norwegian consulate general is still the only diplomatic station
within the Russian part of the Barents Region.
Establishing communication in the region was an all-important aspect. A new
digital telephone system established by the Norwegian Telephone Company began
operation the same year. International telephone calls were now at one’s fingertips.
This was pure bliss for anyone who had tried regular civilian telephone communi-
cation in Russia. Before long, the Russians agreed to open the (military) road going
from the Norwegian border to Murmansk, and another road from northern Finland
to Murmansk. Murmansk now enjoyed flights from Norway and Sweden, and sum-
mer boat traffic from Norway. A new trajectory for the Norway-Murmansk road was
opened some years later, both to make it easier to keep open during the winter and to
keep it out of some of the more sensitive military areas. New border control stations
have been built both on the Norwegian and Russian sides to expedite travel.
Some of these travel routes have proved not to be economically sustainable, but
that is what one would have to expect. The general impression is one of an almost
overwhelming desire for contact and exchange. The border station at Kirkenes (Stor-
skog), with 15,000 crossings in 1991, saw 81,000 in 1992, 92,000 in 1997, and over
100,000 in 1999. Exchanges in the political, social, and academic fields have multi-
plied with conferences and meetings of every kind. The authorities, especially intent
on creating youth exchanges,10 have supported collaboration programs between many
schools in the area.
The attraction of the regional cooperation soon became clear. More counties ap-
plied to join. This of course had something to do with the fact that central authorities
made funds available for the cooperation, but it also testified to a genuine desire for
intercourse with other parties in the region. The contracting parties were not all that
keen on allowing in newcomers, but in the end another county was taken in from
Sweden, Finland, and Russia each. Norway already had three counties and drew the
line at that.
The worst problem in the Barents Region is probably pollution. Chemical and
metallurgical factories of various kinds are bad enough. There are extended patches
10
In the PPS we wanted to create the “Barents Field Service”—with obvious overtones to the
similar American Field Service. I am afraid we never got quite there.
of desert land around several of the cities in the Kola Peninsula, which were the
industrial glories of the Soviet period. The health record of these cities is alarming,
with up to 50 percent of the newborns have some kind of birth defect. But the nuclear
potential for pollution is worse. There are around two hundred nuclear reactors, most
of them in obsolete submarines waiting to be decommissioned and very few of them
secured. The nuclear power station in Kola is beyond its sell-by date. There are inad-
equate facilities for treating radioactive waste. So the Scandinavian, European, and
American governments have become involved in various schemes for cleaning up. It
is a laborious process. The Russian capacity for interagency quarrel, administrative
chaos, and legislative contradictions is the same in the Barents Region as elsewhere
in the FSU. There are regular attempts to make various gifts from other countries,
whether food packs for the civilian population or safety equipment for power stations,
subject to “customs duties.” It has taken months and years to straighten out such
problems. There is the usual discussion between local and central authorities. Not the
least, there is the Northern Fleet, a state within the state, which sometimes chooses to
disregard civilian authorities and ignore outside pressure. Put succinctly by a member
of the local administration in Murmansk: “We have basically two problems up here:
one is Moscow, and the other is the Fleet.”
Looking back at the Barents Region Cooperation Project, I am reminded of a
1994 meeting in Murmansk, where two officers from the Northern Fleet were pres-
ent. Reproached by another Russian participant for not being very active in the dis-
cussion, one of them retorted: “Don’t be so impatient. A year ago we wouldn’t even
have been here.”
It is easy to fall into the trap of becoming impatient with the Russians in the
region. Trade has not developed to the extent hoped for, fisheries cooperation has
had its ups and downs, and cleaning up radioactive waste is far from finished. After
almost forty years of negotiations, however, the continental shelf delimitation talks
were finally concluded in 2010. One would like to think that almost twenty years of
established post-Communist cooperation played its role in arriving at an agreement.
A general summing-up could be that the Barents Cooperation Project has been
a success in “low politics” (people-to-people contacts) while it has had heavier going
in “high politics” (with the possible exception of the continental shelf agreement).
Border crossings are now running at around 200,000 a year, both at the Norwegian
and Finnish border. This is a formidable increase since Soviet times. There is even a
thirty-kilometer zone on both sides of the border where no visa is required. And there
is a permanent Barents Secretariat in Kirkenes that handles a number of concrete
exchange schemes for the region.
The strategic value of the Kola Peninsula to Russia remains unchanged. In spite
of this, nowhere else in Europe (and in Asia, to my knowledge) is there this kind of lo-
cal cooperation with the Russians across the former Iron Curtain. As such it remains
a unique experiment, and one made possible by the willed resurrection of history.
608 K åre Hauge
History may sleep for a long time.

—Proverb
Bibliographical Note
Most of the literature on the Barents Region is, naturally, in Norwegian. This note
will deal with what is available in English and therefore accessible to a wider public.
In our days of Google and Wikipedia, most information is but a mouse-click
away. Info on the Barents Region is no exception. There are a number of web sites that
will come up for the entry “Barents Region.” The web pages of the Barents Region
Secretariat in Kirkenes can be recommended: https://barents.no/ and http://barentsob-
server.com/en.
Defying our dependence on digital news, a small publishing company in Nor-
way, Pax, just recently put out a major encyclopedic work (two volumes, close to
1,200 pages, a number of authors) on the Barents Region, from the earliest times: The
Barents Region—A Transnational History of Sub-Arctic Northern Europe (Oslo: Pax,
2015) and Encyclopedia of the Barents Region (Oslo: Pax, 2016).
Belonging to the very foundation of the project are the six reports prepared by
the Fridtjof Nansen Institute for the PPS, as we have seen. Some of these have been
translated into English: Olav F. Stokke, The Barents Region: Concept and Dynamics,
RSN Report, no. 3 (Oslo: RSN Report, 1992); Rune Castberg and Olav S. Stokke,
The Barents Region: Environmental Problems in Murmansk and Archangel Coun-
ties, RSN Report, no. 4 (Oslo: RSN Report, 1992); and Arild Moe, RSN Report, no. 6
(Oslo: RSN Report, 1992).
However, the best place to start for an overview is the master’s thesis in political
science on the Barents Region presented at the University of Oslo by John Mikal
Kvistad. There is an abridged version in English: The Barents Spirit: A Bridge-Build-
ing Project in the Wake of the Cold War (Oslo: IFS, 1995). Kvistad interviewed a
number of officials in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for his work, in-
cluding this author. It is the most detailed account of the creation of the region and its
implications for Norwegian foreign policy.
Third, the main study in English is Olav S. Stokke and Ola Tunander, eds., The
Barents Region: Cooperation in Arctic Europe (London: Sage Publications, 1994),
with a number of articles on most aspects of the project. Security and economics are
dealt with in Jan A. Dellenbrant and Mats-Olov Olsson, eds., The Barents Region:
Security and Economic Development in the European North (Umeå: Cerum, 1994).
Security is more specifically dealt with in the proceedings from a conference in
Stockholm: Olof Palme International Center, Common Security in Northern Europe
after the Cold War: The Baltic Sea Region and the Barents Sea Region (Stockholm:
Olof Palme International Center, 1994).
As in this last collection, it is quite a common approach to discuss the Barents
Region together with similar projects like the Baltic Sea Region and the Black Sea
Region: Erik Hansen et al., Cooperation in the Baltic Sea Region, the Barents Region
and the Black Sea Region (Oslo: FAFO, 1997); and Jakub Godzimirsky, Russian Se-
curity Policy Objectives in the Baltic Sea and the Barents Area (Oslo: DNAK, 1998).
The Finns have also been active, both official institutions and researchers: Pertti
Joenniemi, Barents: The Barents Euro-Arctic Region (Helsinki: Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, 1996); as implied by the title, it was always Finnish policy to hook the Bar-
ents Region on to their greater European policy, especially after Finland’s joining
the European Union in 1994; Tero Lausala and Leila Valkonen, Economic Geog-
raphy and Structure of the Russian Territories of the Barents Region (Rovaniemi:
Arctic Centre, University of Lapland, 1999); Lassi Heininen and Richard Langlais,
eds., Europe’s Northern Dimension: The BEAR [Barents Euro-Arctic Region] Meets
the South (Rovaniemi: University of Lapland Press, 1997); Pauli Jumppanen et al.,
Economic Geography and Structure of the Russian Part of the Barents Region (Hel-
sinki: Finnish Barents Group, 1995); and Susanna Seppänen, The Barents Region: An
Emerging Market (Helsinki: Statistics Finland, 1995).
As for the European Community/Union aspect of the project, see S. Randa, “The
Barents Region in an EC Context,” Center for European Studies, NMS Working Pa-
per (Oslo: Center for European Studies, 1993); and Håken R. Nilson, Europeanization
of the Barents Region: Organizational Possibilities for a Regional Environmental
Cooperation (Tampere: Peace Research Institute, 1994). The Northern Sea route to
Japan was a secondary consideration of the project: Henning Simonsen, Proceedings
from the Northern Sea Route Expert Meeting, October 13–14, 1992, in Tromsø, Nor-
way (Oslo: Fridtjof Nansen Institute, 1993).
Finally, two publications indicating that the Barents Region is well established:
Geir Flikke, ed., The Barents Region Revisited (Oslo: Norwegian Institute of Interna-
tional Affairs, 1998); and Utenriksdepartementet Norge, The Barents Region: Coop-
eration and Visions for the Future (Oslo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1999).
BG: Conversations with Boris Grebenshchikov
Nick Hayes
From the 1970s, when an underground Russian rock-and-roll counterculture first took
shape, through the more permissive 1980s, when Gorbachev’s perestroika dared to
admit in public that, yes, Russia did rock and roll, the icon of the Russian rock scene
was Boris Grebenshchikov, the romantic lead vocal behind the musical and artis-
tic ensemble Akvarium.1 In the 1987 Assa (directed by Sergei Solovév), the young
counterculture hero, “Bananan,” played by “Afrika” (Sergei Bugaev), a member of
Akvarium, says to his nemesis, a Soviet-era mafia type, “Anyone who doesn’t know
Boris Grebenshchikov is an idiot.” This was certainly the case of the Russians I knew.
The Western press had already branded him as the “Russian Bob Dylan.” By the mid-
1980s, the streets of Leningrad were whispering rumors of major recording contracts
in the West for “BG,” his most common nickname. Rolling Stone wrote him into a
feature story. He was about to be, or so it seemed, the next “it” guy.
I first met him at his old flat in St. Petersburg in the early spring of 1987. Inside
the flat, BG sat at a table slowly turning the pages of a copy of Penthouse. He closed
it and flipped it onto a magazine stack, a cluster of blue exiles in Russia from the em-
pires of Bob Guccione and Hugh Heffner. A beautifully beguiling friend played the
role of his devadasi fluttering around the apartment like a Bollywood extra in a Hindu
dance routine. “Is this your first time in Russia, Nick?” he asked. I replied that I had
visited Russia more times than I could remember. “Oh, I have been in Russia only
twice,” he replied, “and unfortunately, the first time lasted thirty-six years.”
For the next decade, my trips to Russia always included a visit and conversation
with BG. A few ended up in magazine and newspaper articles or reports back to pub-
lic television or radio. One ended in a scene at a clandestine rock club in St. Peters-
burg in 1992 when police broke up the party and sent everyone to run and take cover
in the streets and a few to an overnight at the police station. By the late 1990s, how-
ever, my writing had taken me away from Russia and my friendship with BG lapsed.
We did not meet again until January 2010. I had come to St. Petersburg for re-
search on my book in progress, “Looking for Leningrad: My Soviet Life.” In our
1
“BG: Conversations with Boris Grebenshchikov” is an excerpt from my current book in
progress, “Looking for Leningrad: My Soviet Life.” An earlier version of the essay was pre-
sented to the annual meeting of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Stud-
ies, 20 November 2015, Philadelphia, PA.
612 Nick Hayes
earlier contact, we communicated and made arrangements by rumor. Now, BG texted

a reply to my text message and invited me to his studio for a long conversation. With
a little help from an iphone’s GPS, I found the place.
BG was late. I waited in the hallway. Although mutual friends had told me of his
health problems—a heart attack, chronic cardiac problems—I was unprepared for
what age had done to the onetime heart-throb of bohemian Russia. The old warehouse
elevator brought him to our floor. At first, I did not recognize the heavy, aged, wheez-
ing, and cautiously stepping man who walked out of the elevator and lumbered his
way up one flight of stairs. The smile was unmistakable. “Nick, I’m sorry,” he began,
“I’m late. My cardiologist insisted that I come into the clinic. It was unscheduled.”
We sat in a small room near the recording studio. A survivor of another era,
a console shortwave radio in the room reminded me of a time when international
communication was not so easy as today. His remarks on the stairway had opened
the door to a rather personal exchange. I expressed my concern and sympathy for his
health problems, which until then I knew only by rumor. I shared with him that the
doctors tell me that my expiration date was apparently going to be much earlier than
I had thought. A consciousness of death crept into our conversation. The thought
prompted us to make good use of our time together.
Speaking of his current music, BG made it clear that he had no part in the at-
tempts to revive the days of “tusovka” rock of the 1980s. “It’s an obscene word,” he
commented. “Besides,” he added, “I don’t do second-hand jokes.” What was Russian
rock is no more. “Russian rock is dead,” he said bluntly, “but I’m not dead yet.”2
Looking back to his part in the heady days of rock a generation ago, BG said, “Rock
and roll was our way of cutting through the bullshit.” Pointing to a laptop computer
in the room, he added, “Young people today have other ways.”
“I have never been political,” he stated in reply to my comments on political
protests and opposition activities in St. Petersburg. As for the art protest movement
Voina (“War,” which, not incidentally, is the group that produced Pussy Riot a few
years later), BG dismissed them as lacking in talent and exploiting pornography to
draw attention to themselves. Despite his disavowal of any political involvement, he
has few friends in high places. “Yes, I guess I am flattered,” he admitted, “that the
Russian president (Medvedev) has long liked my music and still does.” During the
afternoon of my visit, not coincidentally, BG received a telephone call from the office
of President Sergei Medvedev. The Russian president was offering his assistance in
arrangements for BG’s forthcoming concert in London.
What about his followers in Russia and the West who see in his music since the
Russian Album (1991) a Russian voice? I asked. “I don’t know that there is or that
there should be a Russian voice in music,” he replied. He distanced himself from
any revival of Russian nationalism in culture. This should be for Russians a time of
self-reflection. “Russia should sit under a tree and reflect for about a thousand years,”
he said, “before she comes forward to suggest an idea or direction for the world.”
2
BG had used the line in his concerts. See Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New
York: Basic Books, 1991), 171.
BG: Conversations with Boris Grebenshchikov 613
Grebenshchikov always complained that his critics, whether pro or con, never
understood his music. Although he admired both, BG in the 1970s and 1980s was
never a Russian Lou Reed or Bob Dylan. In the 1990s, he was not the bard of a lost
Russian national voice.
Looking back today on the last decade of BG’s work, it is clear that one thing he
is not. He disavows a sentimental retrospective on the heady days of Akvarium in the
1980s. He is not a retro-tusovik stuck in the past, the 1970s and 1980s, the heroic days
of the Russian counterculture.
Others from his generation are.
Public approval and acceptance is not healthy for rock and roll. The transition
in the early 1990s from the Soviet system to the new Russia did not go well for Ak-
varium or for most Russian rock artists. In 1993, “Afrika” approached me with a
project. Akvarium had just published the complete texts of its songs accompanied by
photographs covering the group from 1973 to 1993.3 “Afrika” hoped I could help in
finding a translator and American publisher for the volume. Flipping over the pages,
two things struck me. First of all, the mood of the images was nostalgic, a fond sense
of an era that was already gone. Secondly, the publication was rather academic.
The publication reminded me of an anecdote from twentieth-century American
literature. In 1943, Edmund Wilson, who for decades had been the dean of American
literary critics and the voice of his generation of the 1920s, had accepted an invitation
from his undergraduate alma mater, Princeton, to a program in his honor. Princeton
was celebrating a project to bring together a complete bibliography of Edmund Wil-
son’s work. Then, fifty-something, Wilson was bemused and ambiguous. He reflected
on the irony of a writer becoming the object of a bibliography. It was a sure sign that
his movement and literary generation were over as a vital creative force and were now
merely the subject of academic scholarship.4 The Akvarium publication, I feared, was
a sign that BG and the ensemble were now at best “retro,” their era receding into the
past and the history books.
For the last decade, BG has drawn on something else. Edward Said in one of
his last publications described the creativity of the “late style artist.”5 Too often, we
assume that an artist in late life, conscious of his or her mortality, finds a sense of
reconciliation, resolution, or serenity. Instead, Said argues that stronger creative force
often appears in “artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence,
difficulty and contradiction.” The late style artist severs ties to familiar routines and
audiences and emphatically seeks a new aesthetic.
Russian rock is dead, BG had said, but he is not. A late style artist, the premoni-
tion of death has crept into BG’s art. Since 2008, his project Aquarium International
has departed from virtually all his previous genres and experimented with the fusion
of international instruments, voices, and melodies. The apolitical BG in March 2014
3
14: Polnyi sbornik tekstov pesen “Akvariuma” i BG (Moscow: Experience, 1993).
4
Edmund Wilson, Thoughts on Being Bibliographed (New York: Noonday, 1950), 105–20.
5
Edward Said, “Thoughts on Late Style,” London Review of Books, 5 August 2004, 3–7.
614 Nick Hayes
produced and aired on You Tube a song of protest against the war in Ukraine, “Love
in Time of War”…
And I reach out with my hands, my hands,

But it is all the same as putting out fire with napalm.
Hand in hand, the abyss—I know this madness by heart.6
Late style art. Think of BG today as the voice that Shakespeare gave to Prospero
in the final scenes of The Tempest:
…But this rough magic

I here abjure, and when I have required
Some heavenly music—which even now I do—
To work mine end upon their senses, that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book. (The Tempest, Act V: 50–57)
The Tempest was Shakespeare’s last play. We want to hear and see in Prospero Shake-
speare’s own voice. In Prospero’s final monologue, Shakespeare’s hero still has the
power of enchantment over his audience and has not yet given up his “staff,” the
magic wand of his art. He will break the staff and bring the play and Shakespeare’s
career to an end. But not yet.
Today, Boris Grebenshchikov’s new music draws its creativity from a sense of
the imminence of the end. But he has not yet broken the wand of his art. To twist a line
from another late style artist closer to home, BG is still doing it his way.
6
Boris Grebenshchikov, “Liubov´ vo vremia voiny,” posted by Sergei Chaparin on 4 March
2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZBBgJvyFfg (accessed 24 April 2016).
Rethinking American Perspectives on Southeastern Europe
John R. Lampe
The start of a new century was an important time to address the American perspec-
tive on Southeastern Europe. The end of the twentieth century witnessed more doubt
than confidence about the US capacity to sustain a constructive presence across the
peninsula. The NATO intervention of 1999 in Kosovo lasted longer and disrupted
the region more than expected. Although the Milošević regime finally fell in Ser-
bia, the rule of law was slow to be established in Kosovo itself. A more promising
international presence than in Kosovo continued in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The
final results of both enterprises have remained uncertain, casting shadows over a
Southeastern Europe that is now best defined as extending from Slovenia to Turkey.
Their uncertainty has compounded the political problems of economic transition fac-
ing Croatia and Macedonia as well as Serbia, and the still comparable struggles of
Bulgaria and Romania as well as Albania. These regional travails have also hindered
the badly needed rapprochement, if not reconciliation, between Greece and Turkey.
Indeed, the fate of this large region has been called into sufficient question to make
it a matter of concern to the national interest of Hungary and Austria, even Germany
and Italy.
The national interest of the United States also demands that attention be paid
to the future of Southeastern Europe if “a Europe whole and free” is not to become
an empty slogan of the 1990s. To proceed wisely into the future, we must bear past
American attention to the region clearly in mind. Let me examine its evolution as a
historian rather than a policy-maker, as an observer of the long-term rather than a par-
ticipant in the short-term. If my title speaks of rethinking the American perspective
on the region, I must argue that there is indeed a history of previous thinking. I say
rethinking rather than “imagining” or “inventing” an understanding of the region. I
decline to use the participles with which the neo-Marxist perspectives on nationalism
of Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm have endowed so many titles in postmod-
ernist historiography. I avoid saying “imagining” or “inventing” for the American
perspective in part because they both suggest a one-sided Western manipulation of
the “other’s” image. Immigrants from the region to the United States as well as the
region’s own representation and scholarship have made the American perspective
more than a one-way “discourse.” I also avoid “imagining” or “inventing” because
the more historically appropriate phrases for American attention to the region are
616 John R. Lampe
“lack of attention” or “concentrating on one country.” The neglect may be uncon-

scious or conscious, as articulated by Patrick Buchanan’s neo-isolationist argument
that placed Bosnia and Kosovo among the “ridiculous little places around the world”
in which the United States should simply avoid involvement.
In order to return to where the mainstream of American public and academic
understanding of Southeastern Europe now stands, let us review the turning points in
that understanding across the twentieth century. That review is best divided into two
parts—the postwar decades up to 1989 and the lengthening period since the collapse
of Communist regimes across what Americans took the lead in calling “Eastern Eu-
rope.” I pay more attention to the period before 1989, in part because the majority of
American policy makers and academics formed their initial impressions of the region
during the longue durée of the Cold War. That is significantly the case for two major
figures who have straddled policy and scholarship—Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry
Kissinger. Their views remain relevant in the present period of rethinking, Brzezinski
favoring American engagement in the region from Bosnia forward and Kissinger
wary of commitment, especially if made in humanitarian haste.
We nonetheless begin with lack of attention. At the turn of the last century, there
was precious little official involvement or academic interest coming from the United
States. The region then consisted of several newly independent states wedged be-
tween Ottoman and Habsburg borderlands but known collectively as the Balkans.
After the Congress of Berlin in 1878, the United States had indeed established diplo-
matic relations with the newly independent states but did not see fit to go beyond ap-
pointing a single minister with virtually no staff to be a diplomatic representative to
all of them. There was a consular and commercial convention with Serbia in 1881 that
would be celebrated as starting the “centenary of Yugoslav-American relations” in
1981. But before World War I, it did not lead to remotely significant trade between the
United States and Serbia, any more than did a US protest to Romania’s government
in 1879 secure rights to citizenship for that large Jewish minority. Nor do we find
scholarly interest in the region among American universities. Their numbers were
indeed growing to include a number of public institutions after the Civil War and to
initiate graduate study on the German model from the 1870s. But history departments
concentrated on the American or West European experience, and the separate study
of ethnography then spreading through Central Europe was simply absent. Perhaps
ethnography would have stumbled too quickly on racial issues whose complexity or
mere existence American scholars wished to avoid.
We should also take note of the limited American connection or sympathy with
the two surrounding empires. They were far away, lacking in commercial interest,
and burdened, as citizens of the young republic saw it, with an outmoded form of
government headed by rulers that nobody had elected and an aristocracy empowered
by distant heredity. US diplomatic relations with Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman
Empire were further constrained by the very limited number and nature of represen-
tatives dispatched by what were then separate consular/commercial and diplomatic
services. No ambassadors were appointed anywhere until 1894, in part to avoid the
requirement that any ambassador to Great Britain kneel before the monarch in pre-
senting his credentials at the Court of St. James. US historians, moreover, paid what
Rethinking American Perspectives on Southeastern Europe 617
attention they did across the Atlantic to a short list of subjects—the English tradition
of civil liberties, bad relations with Britain and good relations with France during
and after the American Revolutionary War, and the liberal German ideals born in the
Frankfurt Parliament of 1848 and brought to the United States by Carl Schurz and
other 48ers.
We should acknowledge in addition the lack of sympathy for empires as a form
of government in general, let alone understanding them as a framework for offering a
diverse set of autonomous corporate rather than individual rights to minority groups.
These corporate rights were sufficient for Michael Walzer to list the multinational
empire as the first of his five “regimes of toleration” in his insightful essays.1 But
after the next two on his list, international and confederal regimes, come the two that
characterize the United States—a nation-state and an immigrant society. In both of
them, it has been the individual’s rights as a citizen that have provided toleration for
minorities. And also individual rights that have been used to deny citizens their due.
Recall the Jim Crow laws passed by Southern legislatures in the United States during
the 1880s to deny the right to vote to African-Americans on the basis of individual
inability to pass arbitrary tests on literacy and state government that their educational
opportunities gave them no chance to pass.
One American connection to Southeastern Europe was however in place by the
turn of the last century, a connection that might be considered a forerunner of perhaps
the most successful American connection of the 1990s—nongovernmental organiza-
tions, or NGOs. Around 1900, these were not secular but religious organizations, or at
least they started that way. Protestant missionaries had begun to come to the Muslim
and also Christian Orthodox peoples of the Ottoman Balkans by the early decades of
the nineteenth century. Soon abandoning their original emphasis on religious conver-
sion, they concentrated instead on education. The original site of Robert College in
Constantinople was already in operation by 1863. And, as Maria Todorova notes in
her invaluable pre-1914 chapters in Imagining the Balkans, there were some 25,000
students in 426 Protestant-sponsored schools across the region by 1900.2 In the last
prewar decade, moreover, they emphasized John Dewey’s new rationale for a more
practical and democratic, less classical and elitist curriculum that was emerging in
the United States at that time.
And then came wartime, the first two of five wars involving the United States
in Southeastern Europe, yes, but raising the question every time about whether
the American involvement was a primary concern, whether it involved the illusive
“national interest.” Before moving to World War II, the Cold War, and the wars of
Yugoslav dissolution, we must begin with the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 and World War
I, a six-year period of continuous conflict for Southeastern Europe. For the Balkan
Wars, Todorova’s volume emphasizes the importance of the 1913 report from the
new Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (established in 1910 as the first of
the modern NGOs, if you will, and one still active). She correctly identifies its con
1
Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
2
Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 104.
618 John R. Lampe
demnation of ethnic cleansing and civilian brutalization by all the victorious armies
of the independent Balkan states as the first hard evidence for American usage of
“Balkan” during the 1990s, not just as a pejorative synonym for irrational political
division but also for the “ancient ethnic hatreds” that prompted war crimes against the
adversary’s civilians. We may however doubt whether the report was influential in the
United States at the time of its publication, coming from a commission of nine that
included only one American. The greater immediate consequence of the Balkan Wars
was the return of recent immigrants from the independent Balkan states to serve in
their respective armies, a return aided rather than hindered by US policy.
World War I was far more fateful than the Balkan Wars for the American per-
spective. It was seen as a European rather than a specifically Balkan mess that the
Americans had come in to clean up (and then leave as quickly as they had come).
But interwar American historians were soon attracted to British revision of Germa-
ny’s war guilt and informed by the speedy German publication of its diplomatic dis-
patches. It was from this perspective that the road back to the Habsburg archduke’s
assassination in Sarajevo as the cause of the war seemed to lead further to Belgrade.
Was Serbia not the sort of renegade and uncivilized Balkan state that readers of the
Carnegie Report would recognize? Austrian historians advanced a thesis of official
Serbian responsibility for the assassination that persisted into the 1990s. In 1928, the
respected American historian Sidney B. Fay authored a persuasive analysis in The
Origins of the World War from just this perspective.3 His two volumes of diplomatic
history drew heavily on German and Austrian documents. Still conspicuous by its ab-
sence from interwar American scholarship, however, were specialists and programs
on Southeast Europe itself. Much of the prewar immigration from the region had
remained or returned, but they had no measurable academic presence throughout
the interwar period. Russian, Polish, and, to some extent, Austrian or Hungarian im-
migrant scholars made their presence felt at several universities. The University of
Wisconsin launched a fledgling program in area studies, but we find little coordinated
activity elsewhere.
As World War I was ending and then again as World War II was threatening,
official American interests did direct some specific attention to Southeastern Eu-
rope. The two approaches came forward at different times in 1918 from President
Wilson and his advisors on the region, primarily two law professors, Archibald
Cary Coolidge of Harvard and Charles Seymour of Yale. These two approaches
first charted the paths that US policy makers would later explore during the wars
of Yugoslavia’s dissolution during the 1990s. Into the summer of 1918, the first path
followed from a strict interpretation of two points in Wilson’s famous 14 Points of
that January. While the “independence and territorial integrity of the several Bal-
kan states” should be restored (Point 11), “the peoples of Austria-Hungary … should
be accorded the freest opportunity of autonomous development” (Point 10). What
did Wilson mean by “autonomous development”? I submit that he had some sort of
American-style federation in mind. As demonstrated by Magda Adam, that is exactly
what Charles Seymour proposed in May 1918, complete with a map for six federal
3
Sidney B. Fay, The Origins of the World War (New York: Macmillan, 1928).
states that would add “Jugoslavia” (Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina), Transylvania,

Bohemia, and “Poland Ruthenia” (Galicia) to Austria (including Istria and the Tyrol)
and Hungary (including Slovakia and the entire Banat).4 Then, as the war was end-
ing with the proclamation of an independent Hungary and a much larger Yugoslavia
centered on Serbia, Wilson and his advisors turned onto a second path. The president
barely sketched that path with his cryptic reference to national self-determination as
the basis on which to secure “a democratic peace.” But for one newly created state in
Southeastern Europe, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, Seymour took the
lead in sketching out another federal structure. And when Irish and Zionist represen-
tatives raised the issue of self-determination for Ireland and Palestine, Wilson and his
advisors backed away from the notion of new states on demand more quickly than is
sometimes appreciated.5
The American disposition to apply its own federal experience to this multieth-
nic first Yugoslavia may be seen again in the one enduring scholarly study of its
experience during the 1920s. This is The Balkan Pivot, coauthored by the renowned
historian of the American economy, Charles Beard, and George Radin.6 They fo-
cused on several statements from the new kingdom’s political leadership espousing
a desire to proceed on federal lines and then proceeded themselves to find no basis
in what was being done or even discussed that followed the US or Swiss examples.
The issue of minority rights within any of the new or enlarged states ratified by the
peace treaties meanwhile attracted little American attention. The treaties that the
League of Nations sought from all of these states were after all intended to guarantee
group rights, including use of a separate language. These were rights not dissimilar
to those offered in the best of Habsburg and Ottoman times but quite different from
the individual rights that were synonymous with freedom and democracy to (and for)
white Americans.
The official American retreat from the region persisted through the interwar
years until the late 1930s, after a brief military intervention in 1921 to prevent an
Italian naval attack on the Yugoslav kingdom’s Dalmatian coast. During the course of
the 1930s, however, American trade and especially direct investment in Yugoslavia
and Romania had become important enough to prompt the upgrading of commercial
reporting and diplomatic representation. More significantly for the future, the Nazi
set of bilateral clearing agreements negotiated with all the states of the region had
raised the specter of a closed trading bloc that was anathema to the Roosevelt ad-
ministration. It was not ready of course to abandon the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930
that had raised already protectionist US duties on imports even higher. But some
ground for the US commitment to low tariff as well as free trade that would emerge
with Republican support after World War II had been laid. So was the groundwork
4
Magda Adam, The Little Entente and Europe, 1920–1929 (Budapest: Akademiei Klado,
1993), 21.
5
See Arthur Walworth, Wilson and His Peacemakers: American Diplomacy at the Paris
Peace Conference 1919 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 462–84.
6
Charles Beard and George Radin, The Balkan Pivot (New York: Macmillan, 1929).
620 John R. Lampe
for high-level diplomatic attention to Yugoslavia. With the dispatch of the respected
Arthur Bliss Lane to Belgrade as American ambassador in the late 1930s, the United
States first recognized the position that would reemerge after the Tito-Stalin split—
that Yugoslavia was indeed the pivotal country in the region. The designation of the
region itself as Southeastern Europe ironically suffered during the 1930s, as Maria
Todorova points out, by the Nazi use of the term in general and especially in connec-
tion with plans for Grossraum Wirtschaft that would incorporate it into an autarkic
bloc to serve the German economy. The interwar Western disposition to rely on the
by now pejorative designation of the region as the Balkans thus received further en-
couragement even before the early 1940s bloodied the peninsula with civil war as
well as Hitler’s war.
The Cold War would however count for more in shaping the American perspec-
tive on Southeastern Europe than World War II. The region was after all a British
responsibility throughout the war. Toward the end, US supplies to Tito’s partisans
became important but received little Communist credit, especially after an ill-con-
ducted mission to rescue US fliers sheltered by rival Chetniks. In 1944, Anglo-Amer-
ican bombing raids on Belgrade, Sofia, and Bucharest went ahead for reasons related
to cutting Nazi lines of communication rather than to the region. But as soon as the
war was over, official American interest first in “Eastern Europe” and soon after-
wards in Greece and Turkey became intense, far greater than it had ever been before.
Both the Truman administration and the US representatives who were on the ground
as part of Allied Control Commissions in Bulgaria and Romania balked at accepting
Churchill’s percentages agreement with Stalin. It had given the Russians an upper
hand there in return for a British advantage in Greece.
US confrontations with Yugoslavia went even further, especially when Tito sup-
ported the Communist side in the Greek civil war that re-erupted in 1946. This re-
newed warfare created a threat to a noncommunist Greece that British aid alone could
no longer contain. Hence the Truman Doctrine in 1947, declaring support for Greece
and Turkey in moralistic terms that confronted the entire Soviet bloc. Then Yugosla-
via went from being the bloc’s most aggressive member to its first defector in 1948.
The frame of official American reference for the next fifty years was now set. First
aid and then large and able diplomatic representation went to Yugoslavia, pulling it
into the Fulbright and other scholarly exchanges by the 1960s and connecting it to the
World Bank and other sources of international credit. Trade, direct US investment,
and military cooperation seemed initially promising but never amounted to much.
Still, the Belgrade embassy became the State Department’s prize assignment in all of
Eastern Europe, as may be seen from the prior service there of the last four American
ambassadors to Yugoslavia. And persisting from 1950 to 1990, and echoing Wilson’s
Point 11, was the cardinal principle of US policy toward Yugoslavia—to support its
unity, independence, and territorial integrity.
Relations with the rest of the region were disparate, none at all with Albania and,
at least for the 1950s, none with Bulgaria. They resumed with Bulgaria in 1960 but led
to few commercial or cultural contacts until the 1980s; even then, political relations
remained minimal. Romania’s rebuff of Soviet economic plans by the mid-1960s and
objection to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 led to the ill-fated US as-
sumption that Romania would follow the Yugoslav road internally as well as in foreign
policy. During the 1970s, high-profile ambassadors beginning with Harry Barnes and
flourishing cultural and scholarly exchange made it seem that the Ceausescu regime
might be an example to the rest of Eastern Europe, rather than the cautionary tale that
it turned out to be by the 1980s. Relations with Greece, the one country in the region
with an influential domestic constituency in the United States, and Turkey, the more
valuable of the two as a military ally in the Cold War, became embroiled by the 1960s
in their dispute over Cyprus. And they stayed embroiled through the 1990s.
My point in this brief review of official perspectives from 1948 to 1989 is that no
two countries in the region, let alone any larger grouping, fit together in American
policy. The division of offices and hence assignments in the State Department did
not help. Yugoslavia’s diplomatic representatives won their case for separation from
Eastern Europe, which kept Bulgaria and Romania together with Poland, Hungary,
and Czechoslovakia. Greece and Turkey were attached to the Middle East. Now, since
1994, Greece and Turkey have become Southeastern Europe and the rest of the region
with the exception of Romania, South Central Europe. Romanian representations
won it designation as North Central Europe.
Meanwhile, in academia, Southeastern Europe more conventionally defined was
receiving just as much attention but with almost as much disparity. More disserta-
tions were written and more scholarly books were published on Yugoslavia than on
all the other countries combined. Albania was virtually ignored. Officially supported
programs for language study and graduate research in Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union began in the 1960s and quickly escaped any sort of political monitoring. But
none of them applied to noncommunist Greece. The largely American-born students
passing through these programs were often trained by the largely immigrant first gen-
eration of postwar US specialists. Their expertise in language and knowledge from
their native areas included some political biases, but they typically sought to stand
above them. Those who did not, typically tied to communities of recently arrived im-
migrants from the region that saw scholarship as a platform for political pressure, did
not find places at the American research universities that were training the successor
generation of regional specialists. Nor did pressure groups of immigrants from any
area of the former Yugoslavia have the national political influence that they sought or
their adversaries assumed.
Still, a wider regional perspective was not easy to acquire for a successor gener-
ation of scholars who typically learned one language, and perhaps Russian as well,
and did their dissertation research in one country. An Austrian and a Hungarian im-
migrant scholar, the geographer George Hoffman of the University of Texas and the
historian Peter Sugar of the University of Washington, pushed their own scholarship
and their students to study Southeastern Europe as a whole. So has my initial mentor
in Balkan history, Theofanis Stavrou of the University of Minnesota. Special rec-
ognition is due his subsequent broadening of the Modern Greek Studies Yearbook
that he launched in 1985 to be a journal responsible for the entire region. And in all
of this scholarship, while the region has more often been described as the Balkans
(minus Turkey, by the way), the pejorative use that moved Todorova to write her book
is rarely if ever found. Instead, national self-assertion was respected, up to but not
622 John R. Lampe
including the right of secession. Much of this work emphasized the pursuit of political
and economic modernization, as defined by the originally Bulgarian political scien-
tist Cyril Black of Princeton University. It sometimes judged communist efforts by a
standard that now seems too generous, and seemed too generous to Black at the time.
“Now” began with the 1990s. For Southeastern Europe, the first years meant the
collapse of communist regimes in Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania, followed shortly
by the wars of Yugoslavia’s dissolution. At the same time, the advancing pace of Eu-
ropean integration merged with the American disposition to see the same process of
political and economic transition as imminent in every former communist country.
Together they created the official US expectation that transition and integration would
follow quickly. Never mind the absence of any assistance remotely resembling the
Marshall Plan of the late 1940s in Western Europe.
When it did not follow in a Southeastern Europe also facing warfare in the for-
mer Yugoslavia, in what had been the region’s largest economy, and when the now
Central European countries to the north did in fact turn the corner on their respec-
tive transitions, the region invited pejorative or remedial attention. The pejorative
attention focused on the former Yugoslavia in general and on Serbia in particular.
The “ancient ethnic hatreds” misidentified as the major source of misdeeds by Rob-
ert Kaplan’s widely read Balkan Ghosts provided a handy political excuse to revive
the tradition of minimal attention.7 Better not to get involved, as President Clinton
and then secretary of state Warren Christopher concluded in backing away from the
Vance-Owen plan for a confederal Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1993. For those seeking
remedial action from the international community, the first official thought was to
let the Europeans intervene. When that failed to do so effectively, the second thought
was to choose sides with the successor states and their allies such as Albania and to
a lesser extent Bulgaria. Strongly in the second vanguard were the then ambassador
to the United Nations, Madeline Albright, and also her doctoral mentor, the former
national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. For them, the earlier experience of
confrontation with the Soviet Union over their birthplaces, Czechoslovakia and Po-
land respectively, seemed to resonate. Whatever the case, they demanded that Serbia
be faced down by force. Yet, most Congressional advocates of facing Serbia down by
“lift and strike” (lift the arms embargo on the Bosnian government in Sarajevo and
carry out NATO air strikes against the Bosnian Serb forces) saw the policy primarily
as a guarantee that no US ground troops would be required. But because of the threat
that lift and strike would have posed to the isolated units of UNPROFOR troops from
NATO allies scattered across Serb-held territory, and hence to the alliance itself, it
was never implemented. For further details and path to the Dayton Agreement, I
leave you to consult the superb volume by Steven Burg and Paul Shoup.8 I do however
wish to date the current American concern with the region as a whole, the first such
sustained concern in our experience, from the arrival of Richard Holbrooke in the
7
Robert Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993).
8
Steven Burg and Paul Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ethnic Conflict and Interna-
tional Intervention (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999).
State Department to address the Bosnian war in 1994. His first act was to call back
the American ambassadors from all of Southeastern Europe and discuss a regional
strategy. He also reached out to an academic community that had previously been
neglected and then weighed its wider set of views.
Some years and NATO’s 1999 intervention in Kosovo have now passed since
the Dayton Agreement established an essentially confederal framework for keeping
Bosnia-Herzegovina together. Neither the American academic community nor the
NGO sector, nor the Clinton administration nor the Congress, turned away from the
former Yugoslavia. But there was an official turn to look at the successor states and
Southeastern Europe as a single entity. Not so in academia, where the concentration
on the war zone in the former Yugoslavia persists. The bibliography to the revised and
updated second edition of my Yugoslavia as History lists forty books published since
the first edition in 1996, twenty for the new chapter on 1991–99 alone.9 Most are from
the younger generation of American and German scholars already experienced in
the region before 1991 and also drawing on the often first-class Yugoslav scholarship
from the 1980s, especially in sociology. Among the NGOs, the attention to the wider
region is much better. Witness the activities of the Open Society Institute and the
Bertelsmann Foundation, the respective American and German leaders. The Clinton
administration and the Congress at least came to recognize the dangers of choosing
sides too precipitously, first in Albania and Croatia under leaders since departed,
and now in Kosovo. At the same time, that same administration abandoned arbitrary
short-term limits for a Bosnian commitment and prepared to stay a longer course.
In the process, USAID, the World Bank, and various other international agencies in
Sarajevo, with the unfortunate exception of the EU’s PHARE program, learned to
work quickly and constructively together. Their efforts suggested that among Mi-
chael Walzer’s five regimes for toleration, some combination of the international and
the confederal may be possible.
For Southeast Europe as a whole, the American perspective still seems divided,
except on the agreed reluctance to commit ground troops to combat. That division
extends from the Congress into academia. For the latter, it divides along the original
lines that led Wilson and his advisors first to the side of multiethnic connection and
then to national self-determination. Senior Balkan historian Gale Stokes and Philip
Roeder, a younger political scientist, have argued independently for reemphasizing
the central role of national self-determination in creating any stable and democratic
regime. In “Containing Nationalism,” Stokes suggested remapping the Balkans in
order to create “compact, ethnically homogeneous states for the major Balkan peo-
ples.”10 This would mean, he admitted, a large Albanian state and a small Bosnian
Muslim one, with the rest of Bosnia-Herzegovina going to Croatia and Serbia. As for
remaining ethnic minorities, and for other border changes in the region, he did not
9
John R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000).
10
Gale Stokes, “Containing Nationalism: Solutions in the Balkans,” Problems of Post-Com-
munism 46, 4 (1999): 3–10.
624 John R. Lampe
say. Roeder went further and maintained that this is indeed the proper way to proceed
across all of the former Eastern Europe, in an essay titled “Incomplete National Rev-
olutions” in the Slavic Review, a special issue on ten years after 1989 that he edited.11
He called for “erring in the direction of national self-determination when this can be
achieved as easily as denying it.” He cited the Bosnian Serbs as a Balkan candidate,
although not specifying whether they should have a separate state or be allowed to
merge with Serbia.
I side with the one-time federalists, now better seen as confederalists with inter-
national support. Not just Bosnia-Herzegovina, but also Croatia, Serbia, and Mace-
donia—and, I venture to say, Albania—would be better off if that confederal and
international combination continued in Bosnia and even got a chance in Kosovo. That
was surely the thrust of official US support for the Stability Pact for Southeastern
Europe as proclaimed in July 1999. It extended beyond Bosnia and Kosovo to pursue
the proper connection of Southeastern Europe to the rest of the Continent. Its primary
advocates, the European Commission and the World Bank, rightly assumed that this
could never take place without the closer interconnection of all the states of South-
eastern Europe. This was not to expect their trade with each other to rise much above
the limited historical levels of about 10 percent, or to project some sort of political
federation or even confederation. But it was to recognize that one set of constructive
regional connections would lead to more. In the apt words of an observer on the eve
of the First World War,
Never was a lesson clearer and more brutal. United, the peoples of the Balkan
peninsula, oppressed for so long, worked miracles that a mighty but divided
Europe could not even conceive.… Disunited, they were forced to come to a
standstill and to exhaust themselves further in their effort to begin again, an
effort infinitely prolonged … there is no salvation, no way out either for small
states or for great countries except by union and conciliation.
I quote from the introduction by Paul d’Estournelles de Constant to the 1913 Carnegie
report on the Balkan Wars.12
11
Philip Roeder, “Peoples and States after 1989: The Political Costs of Incomplete National
Revolutions” in “Ten Years after 1989: What Have We Learned?,” ed. Roeder, special issue,
Slavic Review 58, 4 (1999): 854–82.
12
International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars, The
Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect, with an introduction
by George Kennan (Washington, DC: The Carnegie Endowment, 1993), 19.
Epilegomena
Writings of the Eighteenth-Century Archbishops of Canterbury
Stanford Lehmberg†
It is difficult for a historian working outside the fields of Greek and Russian history
to know what to offer in appreciation of the distinguished scholarship and teaching
of Theofanis G. Stavrou. Because of his keenness on church history, it may be that a
study of religion in England will prove of interest to him and his friends. This modest
contribution will discuss the writings of the archbishops of Canterbury, the heads of
the Church of England, during the eighteenth century. It is in a way complementary
to my earlier accounts of the writings of clergy who held positions in the cathedrals
of England and Wales during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.1
There were eight archbishops of Canterbury during the years from 1700 to 1799.
Three of these, Thomas Tenison (in office 1698–1715), William Wake (1716–37), and
Thomas Secker (1758–68), were men of considerable stature who produced important
theological works, sermons, or popular religious tracts. The remaining archbishops,
John Potter (1737–47), Thomas Herring (1747–57), Matthew Hutton (1757–58), Fred-
erick Cornwallis (1768–83), and John Moore (1783–1805), are now largely forgotten,
but they too published works, primarily sermons, that were favorably received in their
own time.2Lehmberg, “Writings of English Cathedral Clergy (1600–1700):
1
Stanford E. Lehmberg, The Reformation of Cathedrals: Cathedrals in English Society,
1485–1603 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 241–48; Lehmberg, Cathedrals
under Siege: Cathedrals in English Society, 1600–1770 (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1996), 111–38; and Lehmberg, “Writings of English Cathedral Clergy (1600–
1700): Devotional Literature and Sermons,” Anglican Theological Review 75, 1 (Winter 1993):
63–82; Lehmberg, “Writings of English Cathedral Clergy (1600–1700): Poetry, Polemic, The-
ology, History, and Science,” Anglican Theological Review 75, 2 (Spring 1993): 188–217. The
present essay is based in part on a list of writings of clergy associated with Canterbury Cathe-
dral in the eighteenth century compiled by my former research assistant Dr. Glen Bowman,
whose work I am glad to acknowledge.
2
Bibliographical information for writings before 1700 is taken from D. G. Wing, Short-Title
Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and
of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700, 3 vols. (New York: Index Society,
1945–51). Since there is no comparable source for the eighteenth century, we have used the
Eureka search of the Research Libraries Group. For general studies of the church during this
period, see Norman Sykes, Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century (Cam-
bridge: The University Press, 1934); E. G. Rupp, Religion in England, 1688–1791 (Oxford:
628 Stanford Lehmberg
It may be a sign of the decline of the church as the century progressed that the
first two archbishops of the period, Tenison and Wake, were the finest scholars and
most influential politicians. Tenison’s career spanned the reigns of Charles II (1660–
85) and his Roman Catholic brother James II (1685–88), the Glorious Revolution of
1689, and the age of the later Stuarts, William and Mary (1689–1702) and Queen
Anne (1702–14). Because of the unsettled state of the church when he was at Cam-
bridge—Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans still controlled the government—he orig-
inally intended to study physics rather than religion, but just before the Restoration
of the monarchy he was privately ordained, and in 1665 he became vicar of St. An-
drew’s Church in Cambridge. He was one of the chaplains to Charles II, who in 1680
presented him to the rectory of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, one of the most important
of the London churches. From 1686 to 1689 he was also minister at St. James’s, Pic-
cadilly, another fashionable parish. In 1691, on the suggestion of Queen Anne, he was
named bishop of Lincoln, a post he held until he was promoted to Canterbury in 1698.
Tenison’s early writings deal with theological controversies. His first book, The
Creed of Mr. Hobbes examined: In a feigned conference between him and a student
in divinity (1670), took issue with the religion of reason proposed by that great politi-
cal thinker. John Tillotson argued that such views were little better than atheism. He
attacked somewhat similar Socinian beliefs, especially the denial of Christ’s divinity,
in a Discourse concerning a guide in matters of faith, which was published anony-
mously as part of a volume called The Difference betwixt the Protestant and Socinian
methods (1687).3 Turning his attention to the Catholics, he then took on the Jesuit
Andrew Poulton, whose doctrines were refuted in A true and full account of a confer-
ence held about religion, between Dr. Tho. Tenison and A. Pulton one of the masters
in the Savoy (1687). When Poulton defended himself, Tenison replied with a second
tract, Mr. Pulton considered in his sincerity, reasonings, authoritives: or a just an-
swer to what he hath hitherto published. Other anti-Catholic writings of this period
included Of idolatry (1678); A discourse concerning a guide in matters of faith: in
respect, specially, to the Romish pretence of the necessity of such a one as is infallible
(1683); and A friendly debate between a Catholick and a Protestant: concerning the
doctrine of transubstantiation (1683). The expulsion of James II and the Glorious
Revolution are reflected in Popery not founded on scripture, An answer to the letter
of a Roman Catholic souldier, and A continuation of the present state of controversy,
between the Church of England, and the Church of Rome, being a full account of the
books that have been of late written on both sides, all of which appeared in 1688.
Clarendon Press, 1986); and J. R. H. Moorman, A History of the Church in England (London:
A. and C. Black, 1953). I was privileged to study with Professor Sykes at Cambridge Univer-
sity in the 1950s.
3
The Socinians took their name from the Italian humanists Lelio (1525–62) and Fausto Sozz-
ini (1539–1604). Anti-trinitarians who were especially influential in Poland, the Socinians re-
jected orthodox Christology, although they were willing to honor Christ and invoke his name
in prayer. See H. John McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-century England (London:
Oxford University Press, 1951).
Writings of the Eighteenth-Century Archbishops of Canterbury 629
Political controversies engaged Tenison as well. In 1683 he advocated closer ties

between Anglicans and dissenters in An argument for union, taken from the true in-
terest of those dissenters, who profess, and call themselves Protestants. He opposed
James II’s revival of the Ecclesiastical Commission in a discourse delivered before
the clergy meeting in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey and published in
1689. Shortly before his death, he joined in denouncing the Jacobite uprising of 1715
in A Declaration of the Arch-Bishop of Canterbury, and the Bishops in and near Lon-
don, testifying their aborrence of the present Rebellion. This pointed out the danger
to the church which would ensue from the accession of a popish prince like the Old
Pretender.
Tenison was a close friend of the diarist John Evelyn, who called him “one of the
most profitable preachers in the church of England, being also of a most holy conver-
sation, very learned and ingenious. The pains he takes and care of his parish”—this
was in 1683, before he became a bishop—“will, I fear, wear him out, which would
be an inexpressible loss.”4 At least nine of Tenison’s sermons were published during
his lifetime. A number of these had been preached at court. These included Concern-
ing doing good to posterity (delivered at Whitehall in 1690); Concerning the folly of
atheism and Concerning the wandring of the mind in God’s service (both preached
before the Queen at Whitehall, 1691); Concerning holy resolution (before the King at
Kensington, 1694); and Concerning the celestial body of a Christian, after the resur-
rection (Easter 1694). In June 1689 he preached a fast-day sermon Against self-love
before the House of Commons, “imploring the blessing of God upon their Majesties
forces.” He ministered to both Queen Mary and King William on their deathbeds
and preached a funeral sermon for Queen Mary which was severely criticized by the
non-juror Thomas Ken.5 In 1702 he crowned Queen Anne in Westminster Abbey, but
the new ruler did not favor Tenison as William and Mary had done, perhaps because
he was known to support the Hanoverian succession. He took active measures to se-
cure the accession of George I and, in one of his last public acts, presided at George’s
coronation in 1714.
One of the founders of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign
Parts, Tenison unsuccessfully urged the appointment of bishops to serve the estab-
lished church in the American colonies. He also supported societies for the reform of
manners and preached before at least one of the annual gatherings of the sons of the
clergy. He was often regarded (by James II and Jonathan Swift, for instance) as being
dull,6 and according to Edward Calamy he was “more honoured and respected by the
4
John Evelyn, Diary, under 21 March 1683. The best edition is that by E. S. de Beer, The
Diary of John Evelyn, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955).
5
A believer in the divine right of kings, Ken was never able to accept the diversion of the
monarchy to William and Mary or swear the oath of loyalty to them.
6
Jonathan Swift said he opposed all levity among the clergy, including the game of whist
(quoted in Dictionary of National Biography [hereafter DNB], life of Tenison).
dissenters than by many of the established church.”7 Dying without direct heirs, he
left most of his estate to charity.
The greatest churchman of the century was without question William Wake.8
Born into a family of Dorset gentry in 1657, he was educated at Christ Church, Ox-
ford. When only twenty-five years old, he went to Paris as the chaplain to Rich-
ard Graham, Viscount Preston, an old Christ Church man who had been appointed
ambassador to the French court. Here, Wake became fascinated by the situation of
the Gallican church. The Catholic Church in France had long considered itself to be
largely independent of the papacy. In 1682, the year in which Wake went to Paris,
the French clergy issued a declaration of four articles which included statements that
the power of rulers is entirely independent from the power of the church and that in
matters of religion a church council is superior to the Pope. This suggested to Wake
that the Gallican church was in many ways similar to the Church of England, and he
devoted substantial efforts to seeking some sort of union between the two establish-
ments. He continued to discuss the matter with leading Gallican clerics, primarily
doctors of the Sorbonne, for a number of years. In 1718 he engaged in a serious cor-
respondence with Louis Ellies Du Pin, a French ecclesiastical historian who ardently
desired union. For a time, it appeared that they were in general agreement and might
compromise their differences, but after Du Pin’s death in 1719 the negotiations were
dropped. Because of later ecumenical concerns, these letters have proved of continu-
ing interest and have received at least two recent twentieth-century editions.9 Wake
had expressed his goal in a sermon preached before William and Mary at Hampton
Court in 1689 when he asked,
[W]ho would not wish to see those days, when a general Reformation and
true Zeal, and a perfect Charity passing through all the World, we should All
be united in the same Faith, the same Worship, the same Communion and
Fellowship with one another?10
He was also interested in closer ties with churches in Germany and Switzerland.
7
Edmund Calamy, Abridgement of Mr. Baxter’s History of his life and times, together with
a particular account of the ministers ejected after the restauration, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London:
J. Lawrence, 1713), 2: 334. Calamy was himself a non-conformist who spent much of his life
compiling this biographical dictionary of dissenters forced out of the established church fol-
lowing the Restoration.
8
Wake is the subject of a magisterial biography by Norman Sykes: William Wake, 2 vols.
(Cambridge: The University Press, 1957).
9
Jacques Gres-Gayer, ed., Paris-Cantorbery 1717–1720: Le dossier d’un premier oecu-
menisme (Paris: Beauchesne, 1989); and Leonard Adams, ed., William Wake’s Gallican Cor-
respondence and Related Documents, 1716–1731, 7 vols. (New York: P. Lang, 1988–93). The
correspondence is analyzed in Sykes, Wake, 1: 252–314.
10
Quoted in Rupp, Religion in England, 77.
Several related French projects interested Wake. He lamented the case of French
ministers who had fled to Germany because of persecution in France, translating their
letters and preaching on their plight.11 He entered into an extended controversy with
the French bishop J. B. Bossuet of Meaux, publishing An exposition of the doctrine
of the Church of England which refuted Bossuet’s Exposition of the doctrine of the
Catholic church in 1686 and A second defence of the Exposition of the doctrine of
the Church of England: Against the new exception of Monsieur de Meaux in 1687.
Both works proved popular and ran through several editions. Smaller pieces of an-
ti-Catholic writing by Wake included a refutation of the doctrine of transubstantiation
(1687) and A brief history of the several plots contrived and rebellions raised by the
papists: Against the lives and dignities of sovereign princes since the Reformation
(1689, 1692). A collection of several discourses against popery, made up of nine tracts
by Wake, was published in 1688. It included a discussion of purgatory and prayers
for the dead.
Together with Lord Preston, Wake returned to England in 1685. Following the
Glorious Revolution, he entered on a career in which he served as chaplain to William
and Mary, preacher of Gray’s Inn (one of the Inns of Court and a center of the legal
profession, 1688), canon of Oxford (1689), rector of the London St. James’s Church,
Westminster (1693), and dean of Exeter (1703). He particularly valued his work at
St. James’s; his decade as a highly successful parochial minister seems to have been
the happiest time of his life, and when he left he told his people that he did not think
“there was ever any Christian church in any age that came nearer to perfection than
you do.”12 He was appointed bishop of Lincoln in 1705 and promoted to Canterbury in
1716. It was inevitable that the holder of such episcopal posts should become involved
in political issues. Wake argued against the repeal of the Test Act, which excluded
non-Anglicans from political offices,13 published A Vindication of the Realm, and
Church of England, from the charge of perjury, rebellion, & schism, unjustly laid
upon them by the non-jurors,14 and opposed the attempt of the Tories to reinstitute
meetings of Convocation. This assembly of clergy, important in the medieval and
Tudor periods, had been in abeyance since 1664, but in the 1690s a number of high
churchmen led by Francis Atterbury began to argue for its revival. Wake responded
with a treatise on The authority of Christian princes over their ecclesiastical synods,
11
A Letter of several French Ministers fled into Germany upon the account of the Persecution
in France to such of their brethren in England as approved the King’s Declaration touching
Liberty of Conscience: Translated from the Original in French, trans. William Wake (London:
n.p., 1688); and The Case of the exiled Vaudois and French Protestants stated, and their relief
recommended to all good Christians, especially to those of the reformed religion (London: R.
Sare, 1699).
12
Quoted in Sykes, Wake, 1: 58.
13
A discourse concerning the nature of idolatry (1688). This was a reply to a tract by Bishop
Samuel Parker.
14
Second ed. (1717).
printed in 1697;15 despite its learning it was difficult reading and failed to gain sup-
port. The Convocation of Canterbury did meet in 1701. Wake’s views appeared to be
vindicated when the Convocations (in J. R. H. Moorman’s words) “became centres of
storm and controversy, the Canterbury Convocation being little more than a cockpit
in which a group of discontended clergy sparred with the House of Bishops.”16 In
1703 Wake published a larger study, The state of the Church and Clergy of England
in their councils, synods, convocations, conventions, and other Publick Assemblies,
historically deduced, a work which was more than a topical polemic. This is often
considered to be his most important piece of historical and theological writing. It cer-
tainly confirmed his involvement in politics, as he became the darling of the Whigs
and the bête noire of the Tories. In the end, his party won out; Convocation met only
once after 1717 and remained inactive for a century and a quarter.17
Wake was also involved in the prosecution of Dr. Henry Sacheverell, an eloquent
but quarrelsome fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, who espoused increasingly vi-
olent high church and Tory principles in a number of sermons preached at Oxford and
in London. It was his Guy Fawkes’ Day sermon, delivered at St. Paul’s on 5 November
1709, that, as Daniel Defoe said, raised “the bloody flag and banner of defiance.”18
The outraged Whigs brought Sacheverell to trial before the House of Lords, the Com-
mons also attending the court specially set up in Westminster Hall in 1710. As bishop
of Lincoln, Wake denounced Sacheverell in a speech that was widely circulated.19 As
expected, Sacheverell was found guilty, but his punishment was minor (burning the
sermon and a three-year moratorium on ecclesiastical advancement) and he became
a popular hero, as common people demonstrated with bells and bonfires. In 1714,
Queen Anne, who shared some of his views, rewarded him with the rich living of St.
Andrew’s, Holborn.
Of greater lasting value is Wake’s edition of The genuine epistles of the apostolic
fathers. A major work of biblical scholarship, this “compleat collection of the most
primitive antiquity for about CL years after Christ” includes translations of the writ-
ings of St. Barnabas, St. Ignatius, St. Clement, St. Polycarp, and the Shepherd of Her-
mas, together with eyewitness accounts of the martyrdoms of Ignatius and Polycarp.
First printed in 1693, it went through several early editions, the third being published
in 1719. The quality of its scholarship is suggested by the fact that it was reissued in
1820, 1832, 1860, and 1909, sometimes in volumes including additional works by the
early fathers.
15
Wing, Short-Title Catalogue, W230.
16
Moorman, History of the Church in England, 271.
17
On the controversy over Convocation, see Sykes, Wake, 1: 80–156.
18
Rupp, Religion in England, 65; on the whole episode, see Geoffrey Holmes, The Trial of Dr.
Sacheverell (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973).
19
The Bishop of Lincoln’s and Bishop of Norwich’s speeches in the House of Lords, March the
17th, at the opening of the second article of the impeachment against Dr. Sacheverell (1710).
Wake was well known as a preacher. His earliest sermon to be printed was de-
livered at the ambassador’s chapel in Paris on 30 January 1685.20 The date was often
commemorated as the anniversary of the execution of Charles in 1649. Upon his re-
turn to England, Wake preached at what was described as the “reviving of the general
meetings of the gentlemen and others of the county of Dorset” held at St. Mary-le-
Bow in London on 2 December 1690.21 In 1694, while at Gray’s Inn, he preached “Of
our obligation to put our trust in God, rather than in men,” on the occasion of the
death of Queen Mary.22
Sermons commemorating Guy Fawkes’ Day continued to be preached through-
out the earlier years of the century. Often, these offered an opportunity for refuting
Catholic doctrines or denouncing Catholic plots. Wake’s sermon preached for the
House of Lords at Westminster Abbey on 5 November 1705, immediately after he
first took his seat in the Upper House, made reference to the dual anniversary of the
gunpowder treason of 1605 and the landing of William III at Torbay in 1688. In 1708
Wake was asked to preach for the Lords on the anniversary of Charles I’s martyrdom,
and in 1716, shortly after the accession of George I, he delivered another commem-
orative sermon before the king at St. James’s Chapel. He had already been asked to
preach for the new monarch on 1 August 1715, celebrating the first anniversary of his
accession. Earlier, Wake had preached before the House of Commons gathered at St.
Margaret’s, Westminster, on 5 June 1689, a fast day for the Glorious Revolution.23
While at St. James’s Church, he delivered an oration of public thanksgiving for the
preservation of William III during his war with France (1696)24 and a notable sermon
on “The false prophets try’d by their fruits” (1699).25 Upon leaving the parish in 1706,
he published a farewell sermon, but he returned in 1710 to preach on “The danger
and mischief of a misguided zeal.” As royal chaplain, he preached before William
and Mary on 10 May 1690, and before the queen on 10 May 1691;26 in 1690 he was
asked to preach for the mayor and aldermen of London at St. Sepulchre’s Church on
the Wednesday of Easter week. He returned to St. Sepulchre’s in June 1715 to preach
at an anniversary meeting of children educated in charity schools.
A volume of Wake’s Sermons and discourses on several occasions was published
in 1690,27 with later editions in 1716 and 1722. As this suggests, Wake’s activity as a
preacher dates mainly to the period before his appointment as bishop, and his belief in
the importance of preaching is almost certainly one of the reasons he rejected several
20
21
Ibid., W267.
22
Ibid., W251.
23
Ibid., W263.
24
Ibid., W270.
25
Ibid., W246.
26
Ibid., W266, W268.
27
Ibid., W271.
offers of episcopal office before accepting Lincoln. His comments on preaching are
interesting: in his autobiography, he wrote that while in France he made a point of
speaking without a text, but in later years he came to realize that it was
very unequal, as my health, my rest, nay the very weather, favoured me. A
thousand accidents distracted my mind and influenced the performance. I
usually (when in a good disposition especially) preached over long; and some-
times, though I bless God not often, in my heat of preaching dropped such
expressions as caused me some trouble after.
Thus he resolved to write out his sermons in full, taking care in composing them.
This meant that they were ready to print, as the demand for them grew, and that they
could be repeated subsequently, if occasion so directed.28
A final, small category of Wake’s writings includes several popular tracts, of
which the most important was The principles of the Christian religion explained
(a commentary on the catechism, 1700). Actually a significant work dealing with
no fewer than 594 questions of faith, it ran through several editions and was trans-
lated into French and German. Wake also published A practical discourse concern-
ing swearing (1696), A letter from a country clergyman to his brother in the neigh-
bourhood, touching some reproaches cast upon the bishops (1702), and a moving
Preparation for death: Being a letter sent to a young gentlewoman in France, in a
dangerous distemper of which she died (1687).29 As bishop of Lincoln, he conducted
three visitations of the diocese (1706, 1709, and 1712); his interrogatories and articles
were published and continued to be used widely as models of their kind. Once at
Canterbury, Wake was less active. Plagued by ill health and political opposition, he
virtually withdrew from public activities for the last six years of his life. The jibe that
he did nothing but attend two dinners a week and sign dispensations was unfair, but
contained an element of truth.30
Wake was succeeded by John Potter. Educated at Oxford, Potter originally estab-
lished himself as a classical scholar. In 1694, when he was barely twenty, he published
a volume of notes and variant readings of Plutarch’s treatise Quomodo adolescens
poetas audire debeat. This was followed by a two-volume study of the antiquities of
Greece, Archaeologia graeca, which appeared in 1697–98. A major work, this went
through a number of editions and was translated into German. A commentary on
Lycophron’s Alexandra was also published in 1697, and a two-volume edition of the
works of Clement of Alexandria was issued at Oxford in 1715. An original Discourse
of church government, wherein the rights of the church and the supremacy of Chris-
tian princes are vindicated and adjusted, first published in 1707, received a second
edition in 1711 and a third in 1724. It was included in Potter’s collected theological
28
Quoted in Sykes, Wake, 1: 53–54.
29
30
Sykes, Wake, 2: 149.
works, issued at Oxford in 1753–54, together with Praelectiones habitae in schola

theologiae apud Oxonienses.
Potter’s earliest venture into ecclesiastical politics came in 1704, when he was
made domestic chaplain to Archbishop Tenison. Despite his humble background—
his father was a linen draper in Wakefield, Yorkshire—Potter rose through the pa-
tronage of the duke of Marlborough, who approved his unusual combination of Whig
politics and high church theology. He was named Regius Professor of Divinity at Ox-
ford in 1707, bishop of Oxford in 1715, and archbishop of Canterbury in 1737. Queen
Caroline is said to have been responsible for this last appointment. On 1 August 1715,
the anniversary of George I’s accession, he preached before the House of Lords, and
on 11 October 1727, he delivered the sermon at the coronation of George II. His only
other published sermon appears to have been that preached for the Assizes at Taunton
in March 1712. As bishop of Oxford, he issued visitation articles and charges to the
clergy in 1716 and 1719. A charge promulgated in 1720 aroused opposition and drew
Potter’s response, A defence of the late charge. Upon becoming archbishop, he sent a
circular letter, later published, to the bishops of his province.
The slender publications of Thomas Herring, archbishop from 1747 to 1757, con-
sisted primarily of sermons preached on the ceremonial occasions we have noted
earlier. In 1738, he spoke at the anniversary meeting of the Society for the Propaga-
tion of the Gospel at St. Mary-le-Bow. Two years later, he preached for the mayor,
aldermen, and governors of the London hospitals on the Monday in Easter week.
A sermon commemorating Charles I’s martyrdom was offered before the House of
Lords in 1740, and an annual sermon for the governors of the London infirmary was
delivered in March 1747. More important than these, or at least more controversial,
was the sermon preached in York Minster on 22 September 1745, at the time of the
Jacobite rising in Scotland. This led to a “grand meeting of the County of York” held
at York castle and the formation of an association to support and defend King George
against the forces of the Pretender. Despite some opposition, this group successfully
raised £40,000; Herring’s role helped pave the way for his advancement from York
to Canterbury.
Herring’s sermons were collected and published by his friend William Dun-
combe in 1763. Letters from Herring to Duncombe dating from 1727 to 1757 were
published in 1777. Additional correspondence with such men as Philip Doddridge,
Thomas Birch, Nathaniel Forster, and John James Majendie reveals his personality
more fully than his sermons. Herring was not interested in theological niceties but
concerned himself almost exclusively with the practical side of religion and the exten-
sion of toleration. He claimed that he had confirmed more than thirty thousand people
during his initial progress through the Yorkshire.31 Like Wake, he was ill during most
of his years as primate and made little impact at Canterbury; he never fully recovered
from a fever which attacked him in 1753 and died (it was said of dropsy) in 1757.
Publications of the later archbishops continued to consist almost entirely of ser-
mons. Matthew Hutton, who followed Herring in 1757 only to die in 1758, had earlier
been a chaplain to George II, bishop of the Welsh diocese of Bangor (1743–47), and
31
Cited in Herring’s life in the DNB.
archbishop of York (1747–57). He was a descendant of the Matthew Hutton who had
been bishop of Durham and archbishop of York during the reign of Elizabeth I. All of
the younger Hutton’s published sermons were preached during the 1740s. The earliest
was delivered before the House of Commons on 30 January 1741, commemorating
the death of Charles I. He memorialized this anniversary again before the House of
Lords gathered in Westminster Abbey in 1744. Most of his surviving sermons reflect
his concern for education and poor relief. In 1744 he preached before the mayor and
aldermen of London and the governors of the several hospitals in the City on the Mon-
day of Easter week (a customary date), reporting on the great number of poor chil-
dren maintained during the previous year, and he spoke at the yearly meeting of the
children educated in charity schools. In 1745 he was the preacher for the anniversary
meeting of the Society promoting English Protestant Working-Schools in Ireland.
Similar addresses were delivered in 1746 at the anniversary meeting of the Society
for the Propagation of the Gospel (21 February), the gathering of the governors of
the London Infirmary (20 March), and the House of Lords (11 June). His only other
publication was a circular letter to the bishops in the province of Canterbury issued
just before his death.
A much more important figure was Thomas Secker, archbishop during the de-
cade from 1758 to 1768.32 His father was a pious dissenter who held a small estate
in Nottinghamshire. Secker himself was educated at dissenting academies and for a
time, while under the influence of Isaac Watts, intended to enter the dissenting min-
istry. When he abandoned this plan, he studied medicine both in London and in Paris.
He was granted the M.D. by the University of Leyden, having submitted a thesis, De
Medicina Statica, which was published in 1721. After returning to England, he was
ordained to the Anglican priesthood in 1723 by William Talbot, bishop of Durham
and father of one of Secker’s close friends, by then deceased. He was given a doctor-
ate in canon law by Oxford, having been judged unqualified for the D.D. He became a
chaplain to George II and Queen Caroline in 1732, rector of St. James’s, Westminster,
the church that Wake had served, in 1733, bishop of Bristol in 1734, bishop of Oxford
in 1737, dean of St. Paul’s (an office he held concurrently with his poor bishopric) in
1750, and archbishop of Canterbury in 1758. While at Oxford he became a good friend
of Sarah, duchess of Marlborough, whose residence at Blenheim was nearby. George
II had been impressed with Secker’s sermon on the death of Queen Caroline and
asked Secker to attempt reconciliation between the king and his estranged son. When
this failed, Secker was for a time out of favor with the monarch, but the disaffection
eventually blew over, and Secker was subsequently supported by George III, whom
he baptized, confirmed, crowned, and married. A typical eighteenth-century cleric
in his distrust of “enthusiasm,” he advocated rationality, enlightenment, toleration,
and charity. Like Wake, he favored granting the episcopacy to the church in America,
32
In the absence of a good biography of Secker, one may turn to the article in the DNB;
Norman Sykes, From Sheldon to Secker: Aspects of English Church History 1660–1768 (Cam-
bridge: The University Press, 1959); and The Autobiography of Thomas Secker, Archbishop
of Canterbury, ed. John S. Macauley and R. W. Greaves (Lawrence: University of Kansas
Libraries, 1988).
then an unpopular proposal, and he supported repeal of anti-Jewish legislation. De-

spite his limited academic study of theology, his learning was considerable; he read
Hebrew and wrote elegant Latin. Even Horace Walpole, who disliked him personally,
admitted that he was “incredibly popular in his parish” of St. James’s.33
Secker’s sermons may not rank among the finest in the history of the English
church but, according to contemporaries, they were preached by a man of command-
ing presence with a fine voice and style of delivery. More than 140 of them were print-
ed.34 Many were prepared for ceremonial occasions such as we have noted earlier.
The earliest sermon to be published was preached at Oxford University in July 1733,
on what was known as Act Sunday. Secker preached for the mayor, aldermen, and
governors of the London hospitals on Easter Monday in 1738; for the House of Lords,
commemorating the Restoration of the monarchy, on 29 May 1739; for the Society
for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) in February 1741; for the children educated
in London charity schools in May 1743; for the governors of the London hospital in
February 1754; and for the society promoting English Protestant Working-schools
in Ireland on 27 April 1757. At St. James’s, he delivered a fast-day sermon “on the
occasion of the present war with Spain” in February 1741, and a denunciation of the
Jacobite Rebellion in October 1745. In his case, as in others we have noted, most of
his sermons published separately were written before his promotion to Canterbury,
but several collections did appear while he was archbishop. In 1758, Nine sermons
preached in the parish of St. James, Westminster, on occasion of the late war and
rebellion were published in London.35 Fourteen more, “preached on several occa-
sions,” appeared in 1766 with a second edition in 1771. Shortly after Secker’s death,
his friend and domestic chaplain Beilby Porteus, later bishop of London, published
seven volumes of Sermons on several subjects, together with a short life of Secker
(1770). Five sermons against popery were printed in Dublin in 1772, with six sermons
on the liturgy of the Church of England appearing (again in Dublin) in 1773.36
Secker did not involve himself in academic issues and left no works of theoret-
ical theology. His most important piece of popular writing was his Lectures on the
catechism of the Church of England; with a discourse on confirmation. Like his col-
lected sermons, this was edited by Porteus and another of Secker’s chaplains, George
Stinton. Originally printed in 1769, it went through at least fourteen editions in Lon-
don, two in Dublin, and two in America;37 it was translated into Welsh in a volume
printed at Shrewsbury in 1778. A number of short tracts by Secker were published in
33
Quoted in DNB, 172.
34
According to Rupp, Religion in England, 513–14, England was a “nation of sermon addicts”
and sermons were “a staple of edifying reading” during this period.
35
These ran through a fourth edition in 1795.
36
The sermons against popery were reprinted in Vermont by the American Antiquarian Soci-
ety in 1827. A shortened form of them had been prepared and published by Porteus for his use
in the diocese of Chester in 1781.
37
The second American edition was published in Columbus, Ohio, in 1843.
Dublin under the auspices of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. These
included On the relative duties between parents and children, and between masters
and servants (1787); Against evil-speaking, lying, rash vows, swearing, cursing, and
perjury (also 1787); and Of the Lord’s supper (1788). Four discourses on self-exam-
ination, on lying, on patience, and on contentment were also printed in Dublin.38
Secker’s remaining publications consisted of visitation charges and articles. His
charge to the clergy of the diocese of Oxford was issued in 1738 and reprinted the
following year. After becoming archbishop of Canterbury he sent Articles of visi-
tation and inquiry to the ministers, church wardens, and sidesmen of every parish
in the diocese in 1758. There were also fresh charges for a subsequent visitation in
1762, reprinted by Porteus and Stinton in a number of editions issued in London and
Dublin. Secker was unusually efficient in compiling a lengthy Speculum or digest of
the returns submitted to him as part of his primary visitation of the diocese and pe-
culiars of Canterbury during the summers of 1758 to 1761. These have recently been
published by the Church of England Record Society and are of considerable interest
for students of local history.39
Frederick Cornwallis, archbishop from 1768 until his death in 1783, was the sev-
enth son of Charles, fourth lord Cornwallis. That his twin brother Edward became a
general illustrates the fact that younger sons of the aristocracy often found careers
in the church or the military establishment. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, he
was a fellow of Christ’s College, dean of Windsor, and prebendary of Lincoln before
advancing to the episcopate. He was named bishop of Lichfield and Coventry in 1749
and dean of St. Paul’s in 1766. Soon after Secker’s death he was appointed archbishop
of Canterbury. Although less learned than many of his predecessors, it was said that
no one was more beloved at Cambridge; Hasted, the contemporary historian of Kent,
wrote that “he gives great satisfaction to everybody [at Canterbury]; his affability
and courteous behaviour are much taken notice of, as very different from his prede-
cessors.”40 His publications consisted almost entirely of sermons, preached before he
became archbishop on the occasions generally graced by senior clergy: the commem-
oration of Charles I’s martyrdom before the House of Lords, 1751; the annual sermon
for the president and governors of London Hospital, 1752; the anniversary sermon
for the SPG in 1756; and the address at the yearly meeting of children educated in
charity schools, 1762. As archbishop he sent a letter advocating religious tolerance to
the archbishops, bishops, and clergy of France in 1776; it was published in London as
Le cri de la tolerance.
After Cornwallis’ death, the archbishopric was offered to Robert Lowth, bishop
of London, and Richard Hurd, bishop of Worcester, both of whom turned it down. In
the end John Moore was translated from the Welsh see of Bangor to fill the vacancy.
Notably less aristocratic than his predecessor—his father was said to be a butcher at
38
Published in 1777, they ran to sixty pages.
39
The Speculum of Archbishop Thomas Secker, ed. Jeremy Gregory (Woodbridge, UK: Boy-
dell Press, 1995).
40
Quoted in DNB, life of Cornwallis, 241.
Gloucester but was more likely a grazier and member of the minor gentry—he had
earlier been a prebendary of Durham, canon of Christ Church, Oxford, and dean of
Canterbury (1771–75). His slender publications, again predating his appointment as
archbishop, consist of three sermons, two preached before the House of Lords (30
January 1777 and 21 February 1781, a fast day) and one offered to the SPG (15 Feb-
ruary 1782).41
The careers of Cornwallis and Moore seem to validate Moorman’s judgment that
“as the eighteenth century advanced, the number of outstanding men in the church
grew less.”42 The most significant works were the theological treatises and popu-
lar tracts written by Tenison and Wake, John Potter’s Archaeologia graeca, Wake’s
study of Convocation, and his Gallican correspondence. Sermons were clearly the
writings most likely to be published, but here, too, it should be noted that most were
delivered on routine ceremonial occasions before groups of prominent persons; they
were a far cry from the popular preaching of Wesley and Whitefield or the moving
hymns of Isaac Watts. If one compares the works of our eighteenth-century archbish-
ops with the writings of cathedral clergy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
it becomes clear that there was less interest in serious theology, which accounted for
a tenth of the publications of the seventeenth century and a quarter of the writings of
the sixteenth, and that there was less academic writing in fields like history and ge-
ography. Interest in liturgy and in poetry also virtually disappeared. If we can accept
the publications of the archbishops of Canterbury as a valid sample of the work of the
cathedral clergy, we may conclude that although a number of the eighteenth-century
writings still repay reading, they do not match the quantity or quality of those from
earlier or later periods.
41
It may be of interest that Moore’s first wife was a daughter of Robert Wright, chief justice
of South Carolina. See Moore’s life in DNB, 365.
42
Moorman, History of the Church in England, 281.
Carlism and Nationalism
Stanley G. Payne
No other political force in modern Spain—not even anarchism—seems so uniquely

Spanish, as Carlism. The Carlists were staunch defenders of tradition and of es-
pañolismo generally, which might be considered basic ingredients of a Spanish na-
tionalism, and indeed Carlists have thus been sometimes considered the most extreme
of Spanish nationalists. Yet Carlists very rarely called themselves nationalists and,
though the modern term “nation” did enter their vocabulary during the middle of
the nineteenth century, self-references to “nationalism” were normally absent from
their discourse. Carlists constantly invoked the defense of the patria—ultimately the
leitmotiv of Carlist doctrine—and an implicit distinction between patriotism and na-
tionalism would seem to lie at the heart of Carlist political thought.
This is of course related to the debate over the relationship between tradition,
essence, and nationalism in contemporary studies of nationalism. If modern nation-
alism does not rest on deeper, premodern historical and cultural roots,1 then those
such as Benedict Anderson who understand nationalism to be primarily a product of
modernity and the modernist politico-cultural imagination would presumably be cor-
rect.2 It might then be inferred that Carlism was reluctant to embrace the terminology
of nationalism because the latter would have been viewed as a modernist heresy of
españolismo.
Tradition is always something of a problem for nationalists, who are faced with
the issue of how they are to interpret, reinvent, and make use of tradition, and sim-
ilarly it is probably a mistake to try to divide interpretations of nationalism too rig-
idly into opposing camps, for most of the modernists readily agree that there is a
relationship between tradition and nationalism, even if fanciful and fictive. In the
1
Anthony Smith, it may be remembered, does emphasize the premodern institutional and cul-
tural roots of nationalism in his Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Martin Robert-
son & Co., 1979) and The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). This is
also developed by Josep R. Llobera, The God of Modernity: The Development of Nationalism
in Western Europe (Oxford: Berg, 1994); and in more historical terms by John A. Armstrong,
Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982).
2
There is a tendency in all the “modernist” and “modernizationist” theories to discount any
significant traditional basis for nationalism, as evidenced by such contrasting theorists as Er-
nest Gellner and Liah Greenfeld.
642 Stanley G. Payne
case of Spain, as in most others, there was always the problem of which tradition,
or which aspects and institutions of tradition, were to be accepted as national and/or
españolista. The first Spanish system of the Trastámaras and Habsburgs was after two
centuries replaced by the reformed system of the Bourbons, even though it retained
key institutions of the former. This produced a situation in which the institutions of
the reformist and rationalist eighteenth century are those which, mutatis mutandis,
have been embraced by Catholic and anti-rationalist traditionalists, though this was
not done without criticism of the decay of tradition even in the eighteenth century and
proposals for rectification. Traditionalists in the lands of the former Crown of Ara-
gon, particularly, would refer to the institutional structure which existed prior to 1716.
The affirmation of Spanish tradition in general first developed during the eigh-
teenth century itself, in opposition to incipient changes and the criticism of modern
rationalist thought. This first took the form of vigorous endorsement of the old order
of Spanish institutions and culture,3 and secondly, during the latter part of the cen-
tury, incorporated the further rationale and new discourse of foreign traditionalists,
primarily French, which denounced the Enlightenment critique.4 It should be further
noted that this was also the time of the first modern studies and eulogies of the re-
maining structures of traditional particularism in Spain, in the cases of the Basque
provinces and of Navarre. The first major panegyrist of Basque institutions, the Gui-
puzcoan Jesuit Manuel de Larramendi, was also a staunch defender of españolismo,
the Spanish monarchy, and of Spanish institutions in general, considering them the
finest and most Catholic in the world.5 Larramendi and other Basque writers de-
nounced the Valencian polymath and moderate decentralist reformer Gregorio May-
ans Síscar, and by the close of the century Basques had gained a reputation as among
the most extreme partisans of the traditionalist position.
If we follow the most common interpretation, we find the concept of “la nación
española”—smaller than the empire but larger than Castile, including all the penin-
sular territories as well as the Balearics and Canaries—emerging during the course
of the eighteenth century.6 In 1732 the Real Academia’s Diccionario de la Lengua
defined nación as “la colección de los habitadores en alguna Provincia, País o Reino”
3
See Francisco Puy, El pensamiento tradicional en la España del siglo XVIII (1700–1760)
(Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Políticos, 1966).
4
Aspects of this have been studied in Javier Herrero, Los orígenes del pensamiento reaccio-
nario español (Madrid: Editorial Cuadernos para el Diálogo, 1988).
5
Manuel de Larramendi, Autobiografía y otros escritos (San Sebastián: Sociedad Guipuz-
coana de Ediciones y publicaciones, 1973); Larramendi, Corografía o Descripción general
de la Muy Noble y Muy Leal Provincia de Guipuzcoa (San Sebastián: Sociedad Guipuzcoana
de Ediciones y Publicaciones, 1969); and Larramendi, Sobre los fueros de Guipuzcoa (San
Sebastián: Sociedad Guipuzcoana de Ediciones y Publicaciones, 1983).
6
Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, La sociedad española en el siglo XVIII (Madrid: Instituto
Balmeo de Sociología, Departamento de Historia Social, 1955), 41–43; and José Antonio Mar-
avall, “El sentimiento de nación en el siglo XVIII: La obra de Forner,” La Torre (Puerto Rico)
15, 57 (1967): 25–55, the latter cited in Javier Fernández Sebastián, La génesis del fuerismo:
Carlism and Nationalism 643
(the collectivity of inhabitants in a given province, country or kingdom), but the ap-
plication to Spain remained incipient, and the alternate traditional usages of the term
might refer to other entities smaller than Spain. Without the slightest intention of
invoking any new political change, Larramendi had referred to Guipuzcoa as a “na-
cioncita” and the Basque writer Manuel de Aguirre in 1780 used the term “naciones
vascas” in defense of the foral (provincial) privileges of the three Basque provinces.7
The invocation of the “nación española” first became standard with the liberal
reformers of the Cortes de Cádiz, and a common interpretation credits the doceañis-
tas with having developed the first project of a modern Spanish nationalism, involv-
ing the transformation of the state into a new centralized civic structure of common
representation and participation for a common Spanish citizenry. The traditional
term for the homeland in Castilian had of course been patria, and the terms patria
and nación were used interchangeably by the Cádiz liberals. Conversely, the term
nacionalismo will rarely be found, and will remain rare throughout the nineteenth
century, probably because the builders of the liberal nation in Spain were internally
focused and not directed in terms of chauvinism or ethnocentrism against the exter-
nal world. La nación figured most prominently of all in the language of the Exaltados
of 1821–23, probably because their more radical liberalism involved a somewhat more
extreme form of modern nation building. Nineteenth-century liberalism nonetheless
came to be dominated by the Moderates, repressing any Jacobin pattern of a radical
and totally centralized nation.
Traditionalist spokesmen at Cádiz sometimes followed what was becoming stan-
dard usage in speaking of “la nación” and “la nación española,” but the neologism had
come to have more specific political overtones and in the future would generally be
avoided by traditionalists. In the years that followed they would regard the language
of “la nación” as modernist and afrancesado, devoted to the destruction of traditional
institutions, “national sovereignty” being an innovative and radical concept as op-
posed to “royal sovereignty.” Thus, traditionalists came to employ almost exclusively
the terminology of “patria” and “patriótico,” as consistent with past usages and op-
posed to modernist heresies.8
By the time that Carlism took full form in the 1830s, it was devoted simply to
the defense of those institutions and cultural practices which currently existed, or at
least had existed prior to 1833. Within only a few years this became concretized in
the slogan “Dios, Patria y Rey” (God, Fatherland and King) to which might later be
appended the term Fueros (provincial rights). “Nation,” by contrast, was the modern-
Prensa e ideas políticas en la crisis del Antiguo Régimen (Pais Vasco, 1750–1840) (Madrid:
Siglo XXI de España, 1991), 213.
7
This speech has been published among the Cartas y discursos del Militar Ingenuo al “Correo
de los ciegos,” ed. Antonio de Elorza (San Sebastián: Patronato José María Quadrado, 1973),
253–66.
8
This difference in terminology has best been studied in the work by Fernández Sebastián
cited above.
ist discourse of liberalism, and Carlism was opposed to this concept of “nation” and,
hence, of modern nationalism.9
During the middle third of the century liberalism became more fully established
and hesitantly sometimes even tried to elaborate a sort of nationalist project, though
this remained feeble in practice. Carlism, by contrast, could no longer simply stand
for the defense of the existing order, since the latter had to an increasing extent dis-
appeared. By the 1860s, Carlism was much more in the position of liberalism thirty
years earlier, now advancing a new project of its own against the newly established
order. It had to develop its own ideology more fully, and thus a new Carlist ideologue
such as Magín Ferrer would propose a more elaborate new framework, with a re-
formed Cortes based on a more innovative corporatist structure, in a decentralized
royalist system which would also feature a regional Cortes in each major region. With
the beginning of the Catholic revival, Carlism was also reinforced by the spokesmen
and publicists of “Neo-Catholicism,” by the end of the 1860s incorporating such fig-
ures as Juan Aparisi Guijarro and Cándido Nocedal.10
Thus, in the rebellion against the democratic monarchy (and subsequently the
anticlerical Federal Republic), which began in 1872, the ideological appeal of Carlism
had incorporated further characteristics. This made much more use of the term na-
cional—though not nacionalista—as it emphasized as much or even more than in the
past that Carlism was the ultimate in españolismo. In 1873 the Asturian Rosas hailed
it as “el glorioso movimiento nacional,”11 while three years later the Catalan Alier
y Sala declared that Carlists were the only real Spaniards.12 Other Catalan Carlists
insisted that Carlism was the only truly Spanish national movement, just as the Viz-
cayan Jesuit Goiriena defined it as the all-out struggle against foreignism.13
By the 1860s and ’70s Carlism had begun to define a broader Spanish neotradi-
tionalist project, a new “nacionalidad” based on “la idea católica.” National talent had
to be fostered and cultivated in order to rid Spain of destructive foreign influences,
9
The literature on Carlism is massive, but normally ignores the issue of Spanish “national-
ism” per se. The best exposition of Carlist thought is Alexandra Wilhelmsen, La formación
del pensamiento político del Carlismo (1810–1875) (Madrid: Actas, 1995); and the most recent
one-volume general history, that of Gabriel Alférez, Historia del Carlismo (Madrid: Editorial
Actas, 1995). Alfonso Bullón de Mendoza, La primera guerra carlista (Madrid: Actas, 1992),
supersedes preceding accounts of the first and most important of the liberal/traditionalist civil
wars, but see also Las guerras carlistas, ed. Alfonso Bullón de Mendoza (Madrid: Editorial
Actas, 1993).
10
Begoña Uriguen, Orígenes y evolución de la derecha española: El Neo-Catolicismo (Ma-
drid: Centro de Estudios Históricos, C.S.I.C., 1986).
11
La Reconquista (16 January 1873), quoted in Vicente Garmendia, “Carlismo y nacionalis-
mo(s) en la época de la última guerra carlista,” in Bullón de Mendoza, Las guerras carlistas,
104.
12
In the pamphlet El partido carlista y la revolución española, cited in ibid., 103.
13
Antonio Pirala, Historia contemporánea: Anales desde 1843 hasta la conclusión de la úl-
tima guerra civil, 6 vols. (Madrid: F. Gonzalez Rojas, 1876–79), 4: 205.
which meant not merely a strong new protective tariff for the protection and devel-
opment of the national economy, but attention to the more modern forms of culture
as well, the Almanaque Carlista of 1871 calling for the creation of a national opera in
Madrid to overcome the spell of the French and Italian schools.
Carlism was not merely strongly imperialist in the standard Spanish sense of pre-
serving the Antilles and the Philippines, but expansionist as well. It now encouraged
the direct recovery of Gibraltar and military conquest in northwest Africa, as well
as the restoration of hegemony over Portugal, which one Guipuzcoan Carlist termed
in 1873 “esa nación liliputiense que ha sido y debe ser una provincia española” (that
Lilliputian nation that has been and ought to be a Spanish province).14 At one point
the Carlist leadership offered the liberal government a truce in the civil war until the
Cubans had been defeated.
For Carlos VII, the new pretender, the significance of Carlism extended well
beyond Spain itself, for Carlism bore a mission for Europe and indeed for the entire
world. Admittedly, such rhetoric became overblown, and Carlos VII particularly con-
centrated on the role of Carlism in Latin Europe. He became a strong advocate of the
concept of “la raza latina,” which he believed should recover the dominant role in Eu-
rope. Don Carlos was less impressed by nineteenth-century ideas of nationalism per
se than by the newer concepts of racial development and struggle that were emerging
in the second half of the century, writing in his diary that “ha pasado el tiempo feudal;
se acaban las naciones y de las razas es el porvenir” (the feudal era is over, the nations
are finished and the future belongs to the races).15
But Carlism was locked in constant struggle with the liberal system and had
little opportunity to advance such grander ambitions. Its concept of Spain was indeed
more traditional, not in the eighteenth-century, but in the sixteenth-century sense,
in which Spain led a broader Christendom and a broader empire. Though Carlism
strongly emphasized the ethnically Spanish, its sense of Spain transcended that of
the ethnic nation per se. Mere national Spain was held to be the project of liberalism,
whose fatal flaw was to concentrate on a reductionist and centralized concept of a
foreshortened national Spain dominated by a Madrid gripped by destructive foreign
doctrines of the modern liberal and centralized nation-state, tyrannical, godless, and
not truly Spanish.
In this sense, Carlism was opposed to modern nineteenth-century “Madrid proj-
ects,” whence flowed all of Spain’s ills. It was quintessentially an anti-Madrid move-
ment in the modern sense, absolutely opposed to all modern, centralized, Jacobin
nationalism, and this made it impossible to embrace any direct form of modern na-
tionalism. True Spanish government was monarchist, foralist, and the realm of decen-
tralized, concrete liberties. Spain was no statist monolith on the French pattern, but
the land of decentralized, regional, and foralist institutional freedom. Carlism mir-
rored Federal Republicanism in the sense that it held absolutely to a pluralist concept
of a national Spain. Well after mid-century, when Spanish coins had ceased to use
14
Quoted in Garmendia, “Carlismo y nacionalismo(s),” 105.
15
Diario y memorias de Carlos VII, quoted in ibid., 106.
the monarchist inscription of “Rex Hispaniorum,” Carlos VII would still call himself
“Rey de las Españas.”
Foralism and the defense of regional liberties had been part of the Carlist creed
from the very beginning. At the start of the First Carlist War, little was made of this
issue per se even in the Basque provinces and in Navarre, for it was simply under-
stood that foralism formed part of the traditional system. As the first war had contin-
ued and Carlism became politically more self-conscious, foralism was increasingly
made an official and strongly emphasized part of the political program.16
The foralist banner became even more prominent in the final war of 1872–76,
as a particular appeal was made in the Basque provinces on the basis of Carlism’s
staunch defense of foral institutions. Basque Carlists raised the banner of foralism
to, if possible, even a higher level than before, and embraced all the myths of Basque
history and institutions that had been developed since the sixteenth century, exag-
gerating the “perfection” of Basque institutions and the complete “liberty” which
allegedly obtained under the traditional Basque systems. At that time, of course, the
only real “Basque party” were the Carlists, and Basque Carlists eagerly sacralized
Basque institutions, while accusing Madrid of “aggression” and “invasion” of the
Basque Country in its prosecution of the current civil war, sometimes claiming that
the goal of the central government was to “destroy” the Basque provinces. This par-
ticularist rhetoric had reached the point of occasionally threatening a declaration of
Basque “independence” even during the final Basque phase of the First Carlist War
in 1838–39, and such flourishes reappeared from time to time in the final conflict.
It was alleged in 1870 that Basque Carlists sought to make of the three provinces
“una nacionalidad casi independiente” (an almost independent nationality)17 and D.
Alfonso Carlos, younger brother of the Pretender, at one point even obliquely raised
the question of separatism. Between 1873 and 1876 the embryonic Carlist state18 was
in fact little more than a sort of Basque state, and it was very easy for the majority of
Basques who supported Carlism to see the civil war in its major phase as essentially
a war of Spain against the Basque provinces and Navarre. The extreme terms and
rhetoric of the last Carlist war thus played an important role in preparing the way for
the birth of Basque nationalism a decade later, though this was far from the actual
intentions of Carlos VII and the main Carlist leaders.19
16
The most objective discussion of this issue will probably be found in John F. Coverdale, The
Basque Phase of Spain’s First Carlist War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
17
Quoted in Garmendia, “Carlismo y nacionalismo(s),” 108.
18
The principal study of the state in the final war is Julio Montero Díaz, El Estado carlista:
Principios teóricos y práctica política (1872–1876) (Madrid: Aportes XIX, 1992).
19
The main treatment is Vicente Garmendia, La ideología carlista (1868–1876): En los orí-
genes del nacionalismo vasco (Zarautz: Diputación Foral de Guipúzcoa, 1985). See also José
Extramiana, Historia de las Guerras carlistas (San Sebastián: Haranburu, 1979–80), vol. 2;
and Extramiana, “Originalidad y papel del carlismo vasco en la España del siglo XIX,” in
Estudios de historia contemporánea del País Vasco, ed. J. C. Jiménez de Aberásturi (San
Sebastián: Haranburu, 1982), 27–50.
Politics and ideology played a more prominent role in Carlism during the 1870s
than in the 1830s, religion on the one hand and decentralization and fueros on the
other being major themes. Conversely, the Pretender himself, though a much more
charismatic and effective leader than his grandfather, was rather less the center of the
movement ideologically than in the earlier war. Though Carlist leaders were sincere
in their stress on decentralization, there was no interest in encouraging the most ex-
treme statements of Basque Carlist foralism, which were normally not echoed by the
top leadership.
After the final defeat in 1876, followed by the loss of most fuero privileges soon
afterward, Carlist political groups in the Basque Country advanced the slogan “Jaun-
goikua eta Foruak” (God and the fueros), emblematic of the two most salient aspects
of the Carlist creed. They won the Spanish Cortes elections of 1880 in the three prov-
inces, despite the restoration of liberal caciquismo (boss-rule), returning twenty-eight
deputies to twenty-two for the liberals, but in the years that followed were unable to
sustain this position. Those Basque Carlists whose primary concern was foralism
later joined other groups, while those Basques who remained Carlist in the later years
of the century ceased to give foralism the same prominence. Though Carlism would
in general remain foralist to the end, Basques still loyal to the traditionalist banner
invoked foralism only in conjunction with the other Carlist principles, and largely
ceased to participate in the accelerated folklorist activities and protonationalist poli-
tics of the last part of the century.20 When Arana Goiri founded the Basque Nationalist
Party in 1895, he would regard Carlists as among his primary foes, precisely because
there was so much overlap ideologically between Carlism and the highly clerical,
culturally conservative nationalists, and because both forces competed primarily for
the support of the same social sectors: the rural population and the urban- and small-
town lower-middle classes. Arana Goiri was unable to improve on the basic Basque
Carlist slogan, but changed the wording to differentiate Basque nationalism, invoking
“Jaungoikua eta Lagi-Zarra” (God and the old laws), in place of “God and the fueros.”
As Carlism weakened and shrank in the last years of the century, it confronted
two other major formulations of españolismo: the dominant one was the quasi-nation-
alism of the elitist liberalism and imperialism of the Restoration, as defined and led
by Cánovas del Castillo, and the other the sense of Catholic Spain that was parallel to
but not synonymous with Carlism, stemming from the Catholic revival and, among
others, from the writings of the polymath Menéndez Pelayo. Canovite españolismo
by the 1890s was founded almost exclusively on the status quo, bolstered by official
A leading non-Carlist Moderado foralist such as the Alavese Ramón Ortiz y Zárate had
by 1870 begun to make quite a different kind of proposal for federation of the three provinces.
The most extreme position, however, was taken by the heterodox sometime Carlist Juan de
Tellitu Antuñano, who moved from advocating the creation of an autonomous super-region of
the three provinces and Navarre to proposing in 1873 the creation of an “Estado independiente
vasco-navarro.” His letters are quoted in Mikel Urquijo Goitia, Liberales y carlistas: Revo-
lución y fueros vascos en el preludio de la última guerra carlista (Bilbao: Servicio Editorial,
Universidad del País Vasco, 1994), 361–62.
20
See Javier Real Cuesta, El carlismo vasco, 1876–1900 (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno, 1985).
religiosity, and in some respects found itself in a situation analogous to that of the
original D. Carlos and his followers in 1830.21 Right-wing Catholic españolismo was
a diffuse sentiment, on the other hand, that might take several different forms. On the
one hand, it overlapped with Carlism, and on the other, with the right wing of Cano-
vism. Alternately, it might take an apolitical pietist form or even prefer a new kind of
right-wing Catholicism more modern and flexible than Carlism but more conservative
yet than Canovism.
Carlism’s prospects were further dimmed by the schism between orthodox Carl-
ists and Integrists (ultra-Catholics) in 1885, followed by the second schism during
World War I between the orthodox jaimistas (followers of Don Jaime, the next Pre-
tender) and the ultra elements, who rallied around Juan Vázquez de Mella y Fanjul.
The latter became the leading ideologue in the movement, playing an active role from
1889 on. For Vázquez de Mella, the Spanish nation was a “federación histórica,” for
“la Nación primero y el Estado central después han sido la resultante de la unión de
varias regiones que antes eran independientes” (first the nation and then the central
state have resulted from the union of various regions that were formerly indepen-
dent).22 He was not reluctant to refer to the Spanish nation and the “central state,”
though never in a centralist way. Spain was an organic and indissoluble union, but
formed of regions which possessed their own “subsidiary” sovereignty, which must
be protected and never abridged by the sovereignty of the crown and the Spanish state.
Subsidiary sovereignty was based on the federation of municipalities, districts (co-
marcas), and regions, paralleled by other natural institutions such as guilds, schools,
and universities, which also possessed “subsidiarity” of their own. Beyond royal sov-
ereignty and secondary subsidiarity lay the highest sovereignty, which pertained to
God. He insisted, like Aparisi, that there was nothing “absolutist” about Carlism,
whose ruler possessed no right to modify any of the prerogatives of the regions with-
out their consent. Spain indeed exerted a “national will,” but this was based on the
traditions created by many successive generations of Spaniards, who had developed
the traditional constitution of Spain.
The emergence of Vázquez de Mella coincided with the last generation of old-
style Carlism, from 1897 to 1907, during which the last small military partidas
formed, and were as quickly abandoned. In 1898, as during the last civil war, the
Carlists stood staunchly for the integrity of the empire, and even temporarily offered
their support to the Regency, even as they also vainly conspired to replace the Resto-
ration monarchy in the event of disaster. By this time Basque Carlists had even begun
to cooperate with the oligarchic liberals (themselves increasingly españolista) in the
Basque provinces, in the face of the Basque nationalists.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Carlists still refused to embrace a
Spanish nationalism per se, for nationalism remained a radical cause, a typical mod-
21
The best treatment of the concept of nation and nationalism in Cánovas is Carlos Dardé,
“Cánovas y el nacionalismo liberal español,” in Nación y Estado en la España liberal, ed.
Guillermo Gortázar (Madrid: Editorial Noesis, 1994), 209–38.
22
Juan Vázquez de Melia, Discursos parlamentarios (Madrid: Junta de Homenaje a Mella,
1928), 1, 40.
ernist heresy that ignored true, historically founded subsidiarity. Carlist economics
encouraged if anything a tariff even steeper than the duties which already existed—
one of the highest in the world—but Carlism was uncomfortable with modern, large-
scale capital. Together with corporative regulation, it continued to support the resto-
ration of the communal properties confiscated by liberalism in earlier decades.
If Carlism had played a crucial role in the pre-development of Basque nation-
alism, the same might be said to a lesser degree of its role in the genesis of Catal-
anism.23 The Catalan movement soon proved more powerful, and in 1907 Catalan
Carlists participated fully in the Solidarity movement of regionalists and republicans.
The Carlist leader Miguel Junyent was one of the governing triumvirate of the Cat-
alan Solidarity coalition, which swept the parliamentary elections of 1907, breaking
forever the dominance of the Spanish oligarchic liberal parties in Catalonia. Carlists,
as usual, were not the ultimate beneficiaries, for the hegemony of the all-Spanish par-
ties was replaced by that of the Catalanists, whose own liberal regionalism was ulti-
mately unacceptable to Carlists. Even so, as late as 1919 young Carlist activists might
occasionally be found joining forces with radical Catalanists in street demonstrations
and affrays against centralist españolistas in Barcelona. As Carlism split in three
between Integrists, moderate jaimistas, and more doctrinaire mellistas (followers of
Vázquez de Mella), unity of action or even of doctrine had disappeared.
The most unique Carlist offshoot in the years after World War I was the Sindi-
catos Libres of Barcelona. This non-leftist trade union movement was initially or-
ganized at a Carlist center in the Catalan capital but was never officially allied with
Carlism, though it was always friendly toward Carlism and many of its original lead-
ers and militants were of Carlist background. The Sindicatos Libres were formed
in opposition to anarcho-syndicalist domination of the Confederación Nacional del
Trabajo (CNT) in Catalonia. Contrary to the propaganda of their enemies, the Libres
were never merely a scab or yellow union, but represented a worker force determined
to preserve Catholic and other values challenged by the anarchists.24
The Libres reflected the ambivalence toward Catalanism of the region’s Carlists,
who by the beginning of 1920 were “dividing into españolista and Catalanist cur-
rents.”25 Their stand in favor of genuine worker economic interests in 1921 attracted
the Joventut Nacionalista Obrera, a group of dependientes or commercial employees
organized by the Lliga Regionalista, the main Catalanist political group. They “quit
that party and joined the Libres, complaining that right-wing Catalanists were still
23
Among the most recent work on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Catalan Carl-
ism, see Jordi Canal, ed., El Carlisme: Sis estudis fonamentals (Barcelona: Societat Catalana
d’Estudis Històrics, 1993); Josep Ma. Solé i Sabaté, ed., El Carlisme com a conflicte (Bar-
celona: Columna, 1993); and Solé i Sabaté, ed., Literatura, cultura i carlisme (Barcelona:
Columna, 1995).
24
The key study of the Libres is Colin M. Winston, Workers and the Right in Spain, 1900–
1936 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
25
Ibid., 161.
preaching Christian resignation as the remedy for all social ills.”26 The Libres in
fact rejected any direct political cooperation with Catalan nationalists, proclaiming
nationalism in general to be “the greatest religious and civil heresy of the twentieth
century,” “deleterious to the cause of both proletarian and Catholic internationalism,”
an anti-Christian innovation of “despots” and “Nietzschean supermen.”27
The establishment of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship created a new challenge
in 1923, though one that was initially embraced by many Carlists. Within two years,
however, Don Jaime publicly broke with the dictatorship, declaring that a system of
centralized authoritarianism could never be accepted by Carlists. When his followers
began to engage in a certain amount of opposition activity in 1927, they were vigor-
ously repressed by the regime.
Conversely, the mellistas and the Sindicatos Libres directly collaborated with the
dictatorship, the latter becoming, after the Socialist UGT, the second most important
labor force to participate in the regime’s system of labor arbitration. Reorganized
into a Confederación Nacional de Sindicatos Libres (CNSL) in December 1923, the
Libres released a “Fundamental Declaration” which declared their opposition to stat-
ism and centralization, and their affirmation of corporatism and obrerismo (worker-
ism)28 At this point, however, the Libres began to move decisively toward a form of
españolismo, their core leadership in Barcelona proclaiming the Hispanic identity of
Catalonia and decrying the radical turn taken by political Catalanism in 1922. They
defined themselves as “the sole worker organization of autochthonous seny or ‘com-
mon sense,’ corresponding to the old racial spirit of Catalonia.”29
Under the dictatorship the Libres swelled briefly to their peak membership of
200,000, and increasingly championed Spanish unity. The initial outspoken leader
of a pro-Fascist orientation, Augusto Lagunas Alemany (the Libres’ Secretario de
enlace from 1922 to 1924), espoused a position of revolutionary national syndicalism,
but proved emotionally unstable and soon dropped out of the movement altogether.30
By the latter part of the decade, however, a significant sector of the movement began
to adopt this orientation, speaking of permanently eliminating the domination of the
liberal system and of unregulated capitalism through a populist, cross-class national
syndicalism. The more radical sector of the Libres insisted that they were not opposed
to the purely economic principles of socialism and communism, but to the latter’s
rejection of Catholicism and Spanish cultural values. Between 1929 and 1931 they
adopted more and more of the trappings of fascism, affirming charismatic leadership,
virilism, youth, and violence in terms similar to Italian Fascism.31 This in turn cre-
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid., 160.
28
Ibid., 258–64.
29
Ibid., 243.
30
Ibid., 161–62.
31
On 1 April 1931, one of their organs insisted: “We love violence for the love we have for
life” (ibid., 281).
ated a contradiction with the Libres own Catholic religious and cultural values which
they could not resolve.
With the coming of the Second Republic, the CNSL virtually collapsed, and
was severely repressed by the FAI-CNT (Federación Anarquista Ibérica-CNT). The
remnants of the Libres then aligned themselves with the monarchist radical right
(Renovación Española) and the military organization of the Unidad Militar de Emer-
gencias (UME) making a clear choice for right-wing corporatism and in opposition to
the genuine Spanish fascism which emerged in 1933 with the organization of Falange
Española. The Libres, in turn, were scathingly denounced as mere right-wing, yellow
syndicates by José Antonio Primo de Rivera and other Falangists. They tended to
follow the orientation of José Calvo Sotelo and added to the earlier “national syndical-
ism” (the standard labor principle of their Falangist rival) terms such as “totalitarian
corporatism” and “totalitarian syndicalism,”32 which in turn added to the cognitive
dissonance of the movement, but by this time it had ceased to have any importance.
Just as the introduction of a democratic monarchy followed by an anticlerical Fed-
eral Republic had stimulated Carlism in the 1870s, the establishment of the anticler-
ical Second Republic in 1931 revived a movement which many had considered mor-
ibund. Not merely did Carlism gain new vigor, but it was fully reunified for the first
time in nearly half a century when jaimistas, mellistas, and Integrists joined forces to
form the Comunión Tradicionalista in January 1932. The new political situation was
much more complex than in the past, not merely because the introduction of effective
democratic suffrage resulted in the emergence of numerous competing forces, but
also because the Carlists no longer held a monopoly of the anti-liberal right, as had
been the case for a century. By the following year, the largest single political party in
Spain was the Catholic Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA), a
largely anti-Republican but nonetheless not officially monarchist party which stood
for the introduction of a corporatist regime, rather like the nascent Estado Novo of
Salazar in Portugal. Supporters of the exiled Alfonso XIII also moved sharply to the
right, and by 1932 the main sector had abandoned the parliamentary-type monarchy
which had governed Spain for a century in favor of “neotraditional” monarchy, an
authoritarian and corporative system. Thus, the alfonsinos claimed that they had ba-
sically accepted the historic doctrines of Carlism, and urged the latter to join them in
unified support of the “neotraditional” restoration of the exiled king.33
This shift to the right by alfonsino monarchists was welcomed, but failed to con-
vince the vast majority of Carlists. Attempted dynastic reunification quickly broke
down as each branch once more claimed primacy. Carlists had no high opinion of D.
Alfonso and claimed that his nominal conversion could not necessarily be trusted,
while purists doubted that alfonsino neotraditionalism fully embraced Carlism, ques-
tioning its postliberal, centralized authoritarianism.
32
Ibid., 312–22.
33
The principal study of the neotraditional viraje of the alfonsino monarchists is Julio Gil
Pecharromán, Conservadores subversivos: La derecha autoritaria alfonsina (1913–1936)
(Madrid: Eudema, 1994).
By this point the strongest Carlist base lay in Navarre, where Navarrese, together
with Basque, Carlists temporarily joined forces with the Basque nationalists of the
three provinces in 1931–32 to defend beleaguered Catholic interests and create a new
system of Basque-Navarrese autonomy. This limited alliance broke down in 1932
when it became clear that the Republican regime would not permit a conservative and
Catholic system of autonomy and the Basque nationalists demonstrated their willing-
ness to work with Madrid under the liberal democratic Republican system.
As early as 1918, it had become noticeable that the interests of Basque nation-
alists and Navarrese Carlists did not really coincide on the autonomy issue, and this
had led to the emergence of what would later be called el navarrismo político. Na-
varrese Carlism was strongly autonomist but also politically españolista to the extent
of ultimately embracing a rightist and traditionalist Spanish nationalism.34 By Octo-
ber 1932 the Navarrese Carlist Junta had decided to support an autonomy statute for
Navarre alone, though subsequent conditions made it very hard to pursue this goal,
which soon became secondary to overriding Carlist concerns.35
At this point the main leadership of the Comunión Tradicionalista lay in the
hands of the relatively pragmatic and possibilist Conde de Rodezno and the former
jaimistas of Navarre, together with their allies in other parts of the country. They
formed a beneficial alliance with the alfonsino monarchists for the parliamentary
elections of 1933, and in March 1934 a small delegation of Carlist and alfonsino lead-
ers signed an agreement in Rome by which the Italian government pledged financial
aid, military equipment, and training facilities to support a monarchist overthrow of
the Republic.36
Practical opportunity for such a blow was lacking, however, while any agreement
with the alfonsinos was far from complete. The more intransigent former mellistas
and Integrists were increasingly critical of the tendency of the pragmatic Rodezno
leadership to ally with the alfonsino right. The neotraditionalists had clearly adopted
the banner of a right-wing Spanish nationalism, but their new emphases made them
only slightly more palatable to hard-core Carlists than the liberal quasinationalists
of the past century. In mid-April 1934, D. Alfonso Carlos awarded power to the in-
transigents, appointing the latter’s leading figure, a forty-year-old lawyer from Se-
34
Martin Blinkhorn, the chief student of Carlism under the Republic, concluded that in the
case of the Navarrese Carlists “over the years it became clear that clericalism, monarchism and
a broad social conservatism were the principal ingredients of what was actually a particular
form of Spanish nationalism.” See Carlism and Crisis in Spain 1931–1939 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1975), 35.
35
On the relations of Navarrese Carlism with Basque nationalism, see Stanley Payne, “Na-
varrismo y españolismo en la política navarra bajo la Segunda República,” Principe de Vi-
ana 166–67 (1982): 895–905; and Payne, “Navarra y el nacionalismo vasco en perspectiva
histórica,” Principe de Viana 171 (1984): 101–13.
36
The most thorough account of Mussolini’s policy toward the Carlists and other Spanish
political forces will be found in Ismael Saz, Mussolini contra la II República: Hostilidad,
conspiraciones, intervención (1931–1936) (Valencia: Edicions Alfons el Magnànim, Institució
Valenciana d’Estudis i Investigació, 1986).
ville, Manuel Fal Conde, secretary general of the Comunión, a status raised to that of
Jefe-Delegado within Spain at the close of the following year.
For the new Carlist leadership, neither a modernizing radical right in the form
of alfonsino neotraditionalism nor the extremist fascist nationalism of the nascent
Falange could become more than circumstantial allies. The semiclandestine training
of thousands of new Requeté militia volunteers in Navarre and elsewhere made the
Carlists extremely desirable civilian auxiliaries, as General Emilio Mola developed
his military conspiracy to overthrow the government during the spring of 1936. Fal
Conde, however, remained obdurate, refusing to commit Carlists to a politically plu-
ralist revolt, however nationalist in rhetoric, that did not have as its principal goal
the installation of a Carlist monarchy. As conditions deteriorated and Spanish affairs
became increasingly tense and violent, Rodezno and other Navarrese leaders took the
initiative in breaking the impasse, negotiating a compromise more on the terms of
Mola than of Fal Conde. The new successor to the dynasty, François-Xavier de Bour-
bon-Parme, nephew by marriage of Alfonso Carlos and after the sudden death of the
latter the acting regent of Carlism, accepted this agreement, though Fal Conde sought
to the very last to improve its terms.37
In the Civil War which followed, the supporters of the military rebels soon be-
came known as “los Nacionales,” though the precise political character of what was
called “Nationalist Spain” for several months remained in doubt. Fal Conde and his
collaborators formed their own Junta Nacional Carlista, which during the first six
months of the conflict sought to build what Javier Tusell has termed a “Carlist Pro-
to-State.”38 General Franco esteemed both Carlist doctrine and Carlist military valor,
but after he became generalisimo and chief of state on 1 October 1936, he found
Fal Conde’s initiatives increasingly intrusive, exiling him from the Nationalist Zone
early in December.
The two largest and most active politico-military forces on the Nationalist side
were the Carlists and the Falangists, and in the early months of 1937 it became in-
creasingly clear that Franco would not tolerate for much longer the de facto political
pluralism within his territory. Despite their deep differences, Carlists and Falangists
found some common ground in their mutual militancy and in certain common prin-
ciples of antiliberal and antileftist nationalism. Nonetheless, mutual negotiations be-
tween the traditionalists and the much larger Falangist organization failed, and this
left the initiative to Franco, who in April 1937 merged the two groups into his new
state party, the Falange Española Tradicionalista (FET). Nearly all Carlists accepted
37
The most complete account by a participant is Antonio Lizarza Iribarren, Memorias de la
conspiración (Pamplona: Editorial Gómez, 1969). See also Francisco Javier de Lizarza Inda,
“La conspiración antirrepublicana de 1936: El general Mola y la Comunión Tradicionalista,”
in Bullón de Mendoza, Las guerras carlistas, 259–76; Jaime del Burgo, Conspiración y guerra
civil (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1970); and Tomás Echeverría, Como se preparó el alzamiento: El
general Mola y los carlistas (Madrid: n.p., 1985).
38
Javier Tusell, Franco en la guerra civil (Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 1992), 46–49. This
is the best single political history of the Nationalist zone, as well as of Carlist politics during
the Civil War.
this forced marriage in violation of their basic principles, out of deep patriotic dedi-
cation to the war effort, but many had increasing misgivings.
It soon became clear that there was very little Carlist about the new partido
único, for the FET adopted the fascist program of the original Falange as its own, and
veteran Falangists dominated most of the positions of leadership. Carlist figures were
awarded control of the party leadership only in Navarre and a few other provinces.
Rodezno became minister of justice in Franco’s first regular government, formed in
January 1938, where he worked effectively to eliminate the Republic’s anticlerical
legislation, but became disgusted with his collaborators in the new regime. As he
bluntly complained to Franco in a personal conversation of 1938, “My general, Tradi-
tionalist doctrine is not that of fascism.”39
The Civil War of 1936–39 was the first which the Carlists won militarily, but they
came increasingly to feel that they had lost the peace and any opportunity for political
leadership. Both the prince-regent and the Jefe-Delegado had been expelled from the
Nationalist zone by Franco, and Falangists dominated the FET. When Carlist leaders
complained to Franco, he blandly replied that they and the Falangists should simply
work out their differences.
The sense of alienation was most pronounced among the top leaders, particularly
the regent D. Javier (as this Franco-Belgian aristocrat had been known since 1936)
and Fal Conde. In 1939 the former, appalled by the increasingly fascist orientation
of Franco’s political, economic, and diplomatic policies, conferred with an official
of the British Foreign Office to express his sharp disagreement. The Carlist leaders
believed that Franco had betrayed the genuine tradition of Spain and its national in-
terests. Don Javier would have preferred a pro-British orientation in both diplomatic
and economic affairs, but drew little sympathy from his British interlocutor, who was
inclined to dismiss the Carlists, as he put it, as “medieval reactionaries.”40
A large number—though far from all—Carlists felt increasingly oppressed by
a new and more radical form of Spanish nationalism, whose content they believed
was in fact much more central European than Spanish. The high point of Carlist
dissidence during the Franco regime occurred between 1940 and 1942, as Carlists,
other rightists, and many army officers challenged the increasingly prominent role
of the Falange. This conflict culminated in a lengthy series of street incidents during
the spring and summer of 1942, climaxed by the “Begoña affair,” in which Falangists
threw two hand grenades into a crowd of participants in a Carlist religious service in a
suburb of Bilbao. The anti-Falangist cause was championed by Lt. Gen. José Enrique
Varela, since 1939 minister of the army and the only important Carlist in the cabinet.
Though Varela was forced out, the radically fascist sector of the FET was checked,
and steadily waned further with the course of World War II.
The Spanish dictatorship drew somewhat nearer Carlism with the political meta-
morphosis of the regime initiated by Franco in 1945. Its semi-fascist structure was
theoretically transformed into a system of Catholic corporatism, supposedly based on
39
Quoted in ibid., 298.
40
See the references in ibid., 359–60.
the “subsidiary” institutions of Catholic society a little along the lines of the doctrine
of Vázquez de Mella. Franco even wrote an enthusiastic prologue to a new edition of
El Estado nuevo, the most sophisticated summum of Carlist ideology ever written,
first published by Víctor Pradera in 1935. Most Carlists rallied to the regime amid
the international ostracism which followed World War II, and their ranks were also
divided by the effort of one sector to promote one surviving member of the dynasty
as “Carlos VIII.” Since 1936 the direct male line was at an end, but regime leaders
sought to exploit the transitory candidacy of a Carlist pretender of uncertain legiti-
macy to lessen pressure from the main sector of non-Carlist monarchists.
But the form of monarchist succession established by Franco was the very oppo-
site of traditional legitimism, and the authoritarianism of his regime introduced only
limited features of the Carlist program. Though Carlist Navarre and Alava enjoyed
limited autonomy, this regime was the most centralized and for long the most des-
potic in Spanish history.
Though Carlism was in some respects the most españolista movement in modern
history and came to develop by the late nineteenth and twentieth century its own form
of a nationalist project, it was largely at odds with all the primary forms of modern
Spanish nationalism. All forms of liberal nationalism, from the most moderate to the
most radical, were anathema, and modernist rightist centralism was not attractive,
either. The entente with Falangism was only briefly accepted because of extreme
national emergency.
Nationalism is a typical form of political modernity which has normally tended
toward juridical and political leveling, and a new centralized structure of leadership.
It has taken a variety of different forms, but because of these inherent features none
was really acceptable to Carlism. The traditionalist movement had more than a lit-
tle influence in modern Spain, but its principles precluded acceptance of any of the
standard forms of nationalism, and its own strength and appeal were too limited for it
to replace the dominant forces. Without Carlism modern Spain would probably have
been rather less Catholic, and would have been institutionally and politically less
conservative, but the movement’s role was that of resistance, without the capacity to
effect a project of modern transformation of the kind which usually lies at the heart
of nationalism itself.
Islands as a State of Mind: A Circuitous Reconnaissance
Tom Clayton
Islands of the mind are my subject.1 Or I am theirs. A state of mind is a little world
where recollection, recognition, and reverie rule. There is no such place in workaday
reality, but out of it are worlds of such a kind, island upon island among them, all
of a permanence and stability set by their conceivers and description. Islands as an
imaginative state constitute in themselves “a particular form of polity” (OED 28a)
governing the mind while it reflects (upon) them, reversing or at least modifying
the relationship of Andrew Marvell’s “Garden,” where the mind creates “Far other
Worlds, and other Seas; / Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green
shade.” Even there, the mastermind is half mastered by the matter of its contempla-
tion, creative as well as reflective. The island holds a special place in all creation made
of astronomers’ island universes as they strive to find our way to outer reaches, while
closer in, the first island we encounter sews a seed, takes root, and bears fruit when
our eyes come to see, recognize, appreciate, and value others as many as may be,
and still more of such islands as the mind’s eye by its own mode of invention brings
to make whole archipelagoes—Cycladic, Dodecanese, Sporadic—everywhere where
islands are convoked, concatenate, concert: the South Pacific, Lake Saganaga, or the
Mississippi, say.
It takes a real island to make one realize what an island is. The British Isles don’t
feel like islands from any point within, even on the coast, because they are too big. If
an island were limited to 3200–3600 square miles, perhaps (the range from Crete to
Cyprus), anything larger, including the British Isles, would be a continent—or pair
of continents connected by the Isthmus of Hadrian. But a continent is much larger,
by definition: how else could it be a continent? So, by definition, Australia is a con-
tinent because it is such a very large island, far bigger than Tasmania, definitely an
1
This reconnaissance began in London in August 2000 and ended in St. Paul, Minnesota, on
Easter Sunday 2001, with some revisions thereafter, an “island” in time that has since closed
over it in rising and moving on to present and future. We are not who we were then, but I have
no doubt that Theo will recognize the Tom and Theo that were at the time by contrast with who
we are now and will be hereafter.
I am indebted to Elizabeth Belfiore—my long-time friend and colleague in Classical
Studies and the Classical Civilization Program, and a friend also of Theo—for a reading of
this essay before submission that left it less vulnerable for her corrections but much as it was
by her indulgence.
658 Tom Clayton
island—of 26,250 square miles. And then there is the peninsula, the paen(e) insula,
or near-island; an island except as connected at one end to a larger body of land,
whatever that might be; if not just a larger island, then a continent at some distance
and level of abstraction. We speak of peninsulas as being connected not to continents,
however, but to the mainland, a relative term we can readily make sense of, “A large
continuous extent of land, including the greater part of a country or territory and
excluding outlying islands, peninsulas, etc.” (OED 1a).
Everyone knows an island when he sees one, and islands are everywhere to be
seen, ubiquitous.
A desert island is the ultimate escape, the place of confinement, where salt tears
swell the sea, and Desert-Island Discs are heard, provided one has thought to fetch
along a player.
Survivors’ Island today, can Temptation’s be far behind, or II (this time no island)?
An island is a hill or a mountain with a high water level, immobile. Except, of
course, for Delos, the floating island, so long as it was. At highest tides and lowest,
islands are no more they occupy the isthmus of a middle and conceptual space.
King Kong’s island, the ultimate Lonely Planet off-the-beaten-tracker.
Oasis, the island where camels come to harbor.
St. Lucia, home of Omeros.
John Donne’s “No man Is an Island” (Meditation 17) is the best known and most
paraphrased utterance in English about islands.
One of the most popular turns of late is “no island is an island,” a globalizing
projection. For example, Heidi Brown, “No Island Is An Island” in Forbes Global (7
August 2000): “Ten years ago it would have been unthinkable to run your market-
ing operations from the U.K., farm out your R&D to India, and raise your capital in
the U.S.—all while living in luxury in New York and on a sun-drenched Mediter-
ranean island. But that’s just what Roys Poyiadjis and Lycourgos Kyprianou, two
entrepreneurs from Cyprus, have achieved. And they’ve made a pile of money in the
process.”2 In the Warwick University Caribbean Studies Series, there is No Island
Is an Island: Selected Speeches of Sir Shridath Ramphal, “Many of the speeches”
which, “delivered between the late 1980s and the late 1990s, reflect Ramphal’s con-
cern for Caribbean unity, a concern which dates back to the short-lived Federation
of the West Indies (1958–62).”3 His Excellency Carlston Boucher’s No Island Is an
Island “describes the importance of tourism in making the economies of small island
states outward looking. Small island developing states must orientate their national
development policies outwards to the rest of the world. This is an imperative, not an
option.”4 And in “No Island Is an Island” in the Weekend Express (14 January 2001),
the author begins, “‘No man is an island.’ First uttered by a great quotation in the last
2
www.forbes.com/global/2000/0807/0315064a.htm (www.forbes.com – search “no island is an
island”) (accessed 18 May 2016).
3
www.macmillan-caribbean.com/books/noisland.htm (accessed 18 May 2016).
4
www.ourplanet.com/imgversn/101/boucher.htm (accessed 18 May 2016).
Islands as a State of Mind 659
century [sic, a bit late: Donne, 1624].”5 Finally, No Island Is an Island: Four Glances
at English Literature in a World Perspective, by Carlo Ginzburg.6
Not so soon to be repeated, “In the New Physics, No Quark Is an Island,” the
conceptual complement more or less of island universes.7
Or is “No man Is an Island” about No-man (οὕτις), that non-entity feigned by Od-
ysseus to cover his escape with confusion? And asking, after murdering the framed
murderers of the king whom he himself had murdered, “Who can be wise, amazed,
temperate and furious, / Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man”—he might as well
have said “Macbeth,” the growing no-man.
Donne knew something of islands, having lived all of his life on one and seen
another few, as on his ventures at sea to Cádiz with the earl of Essex in 1596, and
with Sir Walter Raleigh to the Azores in 1597 (“The Storm” and “The Calm” doc-
ument poetically the titular events). He also knew something of man, and preached
and versed it all his life, leaving a canon worthy of a secular sainthood as fit for poets
as for his lovers in “The Canonization.” Actually, Donne’s memorable phrase runs
rather deeper than its paraphrases, as may be seen with its context:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a

part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as
well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine
own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in man-
kind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
The bell is the passing bell, which “rings at the hour of departure, to obtain prayers
for the passing soul.”
To begin to think about islands is to be overwhelmed by thought, because there
are so many of them in physical space, even before one turns to the world of analogy
and figure, or vice versa.
Islands are resorts for all but the residents, who have to leave for theirs. For other
islands? Peninsulas? Mainlands? Continents? Planets? A mote to trouble the mind’s
eye, except for those who have to leave wherever it is for wherever else there must
be. Then it becomes a beam indeed, whether by island-hopping, country, or whole
continent. Home is where the heart is, and wherever it goes, it always stays where it
was, and is. What is less accessible than an island for all but the inhabitants? Which
is doubtless what doubly made an island home in the first place, with ever such a
megalo-moat.
The universe itself is islands and whirlpools—lately with new and vasty deeps
on the bare surface of which the island stars and galaxies in archipelagoes are scat-
tered—in varying relations, whatever the magnitude down to the smallest and up
5
www.is.lk/spot/sp0527/clip4.html (accessed 18 May 2016).
6
Carlo Ginzburg, No Island Is an Island: Four Glances at English Literature in a World Per-
spective (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
7
New York Times, 20 March 2001, D4.
660 Tom Clayton
to the largest, upon neither of which we can safely pronounce for the day, let alone
much longer. And our solar system is like a mobile constellation of Cyclades around
Delos—the sun, but long before, the earth and still so in some poetry as the spiritual
and imaginative center, Ptolemaic without a vengeance.
If a man were an island, he should be sufficient unto himself alone. But seldom
is so. And how many islands are without their peers or subjects, like Delos and its
Cyclades? Cyprus comes to mind. Very curious but absolutely true: just as I reached
the “mind” of the previous sentence, I inadvertently struck a combination of keys
that blackened the screen of this new superlaptop at the desk in room 316 of my place
of resort in London WC1N 2AB where I look up from the laptop out of the window
at the heights of oaks that block all of the urban view but flickers of Guilford Street
with its endless daytime din of cars, lorries, motor scooters, motorbikes, bicycles,
foot-powered scooters, feet, beating their way as fast as they can to destinations near
or far or nowhere. “The dogs bark, but the caravan passes” (actually, dogs in London
almost never bark, being exceedingly well-mannered). And a patch of Coram’s Fields
lies unhurried by children playing at their own pace on track or green or sand or
court. The island of Coram’s Fields would mock the traffic of Guilford Street but for
its being so far removed in spirit, indifferent to the busyness all around, including
mine, islanded and island in my own remove and free to see green and think in colors
or black and white here as almost nowhere else, except on an(other) island. And at my
age I have loved a few.
In the absence of airborne warfare, the defensive strength of an island comes
from a moat of the first magnitude, as noted. Add a homogeneous population and a
few fortifications on the seaside like Othello’s castle in Famagusta, and the inhabi-
tants are safe as houses, up to a point. And so long as the inhabitants are not divided.
When they are, the danger from within exceeds the danger from without, and mis-
trust and fear become as pervasive as security was without a house divided. The
perfect imaginary instance of a land more fearful within than the sea without is King
Kong’s—but only in one direction.
Islands raise consciousness, not only but certainly of islands. No one on or of
an island knows his place as other than his home surrounded by water, like one in a
moated grange or Maidstone Castle, the more protected and the more himself as free
of grasping mainlands bent to peninsulize. This is not to imply ignorance otherwise
than all men share it of themselves and the place they know their own.
No authority on islands I, but a friend to them now for love of a few. The islands
I first saw and knew were those in lakes and rivers in Minnesconsin, and my favor-
ite was the sand bar, which was we knew for the sole purpose of giving us pleasure
in a property ours alone for the time we held it—to swim to and from, and take the
sun and be the lovers on. The Mississippi near Winona in my years twelve–sixteen
abounded in such summer sandbars, and I miss them never to be recovered as I miss
the bluffs along the river valley that I can still see and visit and climb, and the golden
dark-eyed girl Bea G. now gone forever. Never more the seasons and careless inti-
macy of half a century gone down the river and out to sea.
Those were the magic islands youth makes such and its own: as one matures,
they are made over to memory and geologize into partly knowable places, no more
wholly known possessions, any more than time past is ever less than so.
One met many a literary island in one’s youth, the isles of Greece among the first
through children’s storytellers’ tales of the Odyssey and the Iliad. Among the islands
of the mind floating into view of the horizon-stretching world of post-World War II
America is a raft of films made abroad (“foreign”) including one made for my meta-
phor, Tight Little Island, a witty but unnecessary retitling of the apter original, Whisky
Galore!, since there was indeed “whisky galore,” owing to the miraculous shipwreck
of a vessel bearing a wartime-drought-slaking cargo of Scotch, which the natives
liberated, libated, bibulated, and sequestered everywhere: the very taps in kitchen
sinks ran whisky, deorum fontes. Wonderfully amusing and whimsical film that was
also a tacit introduction to “multiculturalism” in the form of frugal, resourceful, and
high good-natured Scots far remote from Chicago, where I saw it in 1950, whom I
longed to meet and in due course did—though not on the real island of Barra in the
Outer Hebrides where it was filmed. Keith Younie of Moffat, Dumfriesshire, and I
hitchhiked to Rome from Wadham College, Oxford, for Easter—tomorrow as I write
in 2001—in 1955.
The first time I saw the White Cliffs on the south coast of this sceptered isle
was earlier, 1947, when the troop ship carrying a thousand American Boy Scouts
to the first World Jamboree near Moisson, France, had to sail on without stopping,
because the British could not guarantee adequate food for this lot—a sobering les-
son for young Americans scarcely inconvenienced enough to know there had been
a war—were it not for relatives, neighbors, and friends in “the service”—not a few
of whom never came back, like my paternal-Aunt Dorothy’s only child and son, “Ju-
nior,” shot down over France early in the war while piloting a B17 called “Madam
Pisonya,” or “Madam [unprintable]” as the papers of the day said. As soon as we
landed in the Netherlands we saw the after-war in many places, and what appeared to
us to be little more than the beginning of the process of rebuilding. About the White
Cliffs I very well knew from the morale-building wartime song White Cliffs of Dover,
which figured prominently in the equally patriotic wartime film Mrs. Miniver. As a
charter member of the first talkie-film generation who came to theater relatively late
in life (twenties), from the age of three or four I saw seldom less than a film a week;
and from ten or so at least two films and as many as I had access to, not seldom by the
necessary expedient of backdooring—in Viroqua, Wisconsin, which rejoiced in two
cinemas in the pre-television 1940s that gave us our visual news as well as previews,
cartoon, and main feature(s).
In short, my island-consciousness was raised unawares and my appetite whetted
for further acquaintance—or so it is easy to say in retrospect.
The world is awash or frozen up with islands in every kind of measure, some
grown so great as to be continents—Antarctica, Australia—or pairs of continents—
North and South America—or multiples, except for Africa, of the remaining four
substantially on its own. But what does it matter? “Continents” are as arbitrary and
expedient as they need to be for coherent geographical discourse.
662 Tom Clayton
The Tempest, the last play of Shakespeare’s sole authorship (1610–11; he died
in 1616), is set as well as played on an island. There, Prospero, the sometime Duke
of Milan—and subsequent mage with supernatural powers exercised in many ap-
plications to make him a kind of demigod and several sorts of archetype—finds a
neglected vocation to statesmanship and rule that balances doing with the learning
that he once had treasured above all else and consequently lost his dukedom to his
usurping brother Antonio, to whom he had delegated authority. Prospero’s account
has the ring as much of testament as Will in a play that sounds very like a farewell to
his art and the stage that no amount of rationalizing skepticism can refute. The speech
is expository for the theater audience, informative for his fifteen-year-old daughter
Miranda (“O you wonder,” says Ferdinand Adamwise intuiting her name from her
person as he falls in love at first sight with her Eve), didactic as well as powerfully
expressed for all who hear or read.
[My brother,] he whom next thyself

Of all the world I lov’d, and to him put
The manage of my state as at that time
Through all the signorie it was the first,
And Prospero the prime duke, being so reputed
In dignity, and for the liberal arts
Without a parallel; those being all my study,
The government I cast upon my brother,
And to my state grew stranger, being transported
And rapt in secret studies. Thy false uncle—
Dost thou attend me?
Mir.
Sir, most heedfully.
Pros.
Being once perfected how to grant suits,
How to deny them, who t’ advance, and who
To trash for overtopping, new created
The creatures that were mine, I say, or chang’d ‘em,
Or else new form’d ‘em; having both the key
Of officer and office, set all hearts i’ th’ state
To what tune pleas’d his ear, that now he was
The ivy which had hid my princely trunk,
And suck’d my verdure out on’t. Thou attend’st not!
Mir.
O, good sir, I do.
Pros.
I pray thee mark me.
I, thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated
To closeness and the bettering of my mind
With that which, but by being so retir’d,
O’er-priz’d all popular rate, in my false brother
Awak’d an evil nature, and my trust,

Like a good parent, did beget of him
A falsehood in its contrary, as great
As my trust was, which had indeed no limit,
A confidence sans bound. He being thus lorded,
Not only with what my revenue yielded,
But what my power might else exact—like one
Who having into truth, by telling of it,
Made such a sinner of his memory
To credit his own lie—he did believe
He was indeed the Duke, out o’ th’ substitution,
And executing th’ outward face of royalty
With all prerogative. Hence his ambition growing—
Dost thou hear?
Mir.
Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.
(1.2.68–105)
Miranda’s dutiful answers (this last one wry) mark the difference between late
and early Shakespeare in the way of lengthy exposition, as in The Comedy of Errors
(1594; Shakespeare was born in 1564), where Egeon goes on to explain his presence
in Ephesus for sixty-five lines (1.1.31–95). And yet the speaking fits the character and
context in both places, and the differences are merely relative.
The Tempest itself is an island in the canon, like no other play including the Late
Romances it ended—being most closely akin to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595),
in a 1980s production of which the “fairies” were changed to (The Tempest’s) “spir-
its,” lest Shakespeare’s green-world term give anachronistic offense to hypothetical
members of the audience. The plot and some central concerns are handily summed up
near the end by the kindly old Milanese courtier Gonzalo:
Was Milan thrust from Milan, that his issue

[Miranda’s male descendants-to-be]
Should become kings of Naples? O, rejoice
Beyond a common joy, and set it down
With gold on lasting pillars: in one voyage
Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis,
And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife
Where he himself was lost; Prospero, his dukedom
In a poor isle; and all of us, ourselves,
When no man was his own.
(5.1.204–12)
The Tempest is Shakespeare’s roar-shock text par excellence. It makes much of

the special properties of his island in diction and action, above all in an astonishing
first scene that leaves no predictable action to follow, since in a tempest a ship sinks
664 Tom Clayton
with all hands aboard and nothing else whatever in sight—until the second scene
opens with Prospero and his daughter Miranda surveying the sea-site from their very
different perspectives. We learn at once that there was more to this than met the eye,
but we could not discern it without context and assistance: the tragedy of a single
chain of events may be a comedy seen in the dark, the inception of a miracle in larger
perspective.
Mir.
If by your art, my dearest father, you have
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.
The sky it seems would pour down stinking pitch,
But that the sea, mounting to th’ welkin’s cheek,
Dashes the fire out. O! I have suffered
With those that I saw suffer. A brave vessel
(Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her)
Dash’d all to pieces! O, the cry did knock
Against my very heart. Poor souls, they perish’d.
Had I been any God of power, I would
Have sunk the sea within the earth or ere
It should the good ship so have swallow’d, and
The fraughting souls within her.
Pros.
Be collected,
No more amazement. Tell your piteous heart
There’s no harm done.
(1.2.1–16)
Everyone knows that all the world’s a stage, or at least that someone said so
(Shakespeare and Jacques in As You Like It 2.7.139). Prospero says in the Epilogue
(last line before the Epilogue: “Please you [audience] draw near”),
Now my charms are all o’erthrown,

And what strength I have’s mine own,
Which is most faint. Now ‘tis true,
I must be here confin’d by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got,
And pardon’d the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell,
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,

Unless I be reliev’d by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon’d be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
Prospero is and is not still Prospero,8 since now the actor directly addresses an
audience previously invisible by convention—but hardly in fact: exhibitionistic lords
could be seated on the stage itself at the private, candle-lit Blackfriars; and the public
Globe would have a pit full of persons in daylight like its descendant facsimile on
Bankside in the Liberty of the Clink now. The audience was bound to be in some
degree a part or periphery of the action, but the convention stands, notwithstanding.
The physical “island” of Shakespeare’s Globe stage was actually a peninsula, like any
other thrust stage, theater-in-the-round offering the obvious modern “island” coun-
terpart as the orchestra of the Greek theater, though not in the round, would have done
in classical antiquity. The “bare island” is both the island of the fiction and the island
of the Globe’s thrust stage, a metaphorical island. The world that is a stage is also
the world as island, on which the actor of Prospero now appeals for applause while
at the same time Prospero himself extends the sense and kindred feelings of the play
by the particular terms that Shakespeare used to express the request for applause, the
lowest common denominator of the epilogue as a genre (Roman: Plaudite). Terms of
theological force and spiritual significance resonate throughout,9 but the sentiments
are primary and akin to those expressed by Miranda in the opening lines of 1.2: “O!
I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer,” a dramatic expression in effect of the
Golden Rule applied—familiarity with which can no longer be counted on from per-
sons under forty or so: “do unto others as you would have others do unto you”; or in
older usage, “whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them”
(Matthew 7:12); this is or was the Golden Law (as early as 1674), Principle (1741), then
Rule (1807). What “Prospero” says compounds this sense and emphasis but goes fur-
ther, to the absolute of divine mercy itself, which human generosity and forgiveness
reflect. His deliverance from “this bare island” depends upon the charity, the caritas,
of his audience; and the essence is reciprocity between performers on and performers
off the stage, each with his role to play as such. It is noteworthy that the theme is ex-
8
As I wrote, Vanessa Redgrave was playing Prospero at Shakespeare’s Globe (2000), where
the year before Mark Rylance had played Cleopatra (1999). The trend has continued with vari-
ations and may be seen on DVD with Helen Mirren playing “Prospera” in an adaptation (2010)
receiving some of the worst possible ratings by both critics (30/100%) and viewers (28/100%).
See http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/tempest/ (accessed 18 May 2016).
9
And much has been made of them, sometimes in connection with the continuing dispute
about whether Shakespeare was Roman Catholic or Anglican, and to what extent. By practice,
at least, he was a conforming Anglican, but that, as many insist, is hardly the end of the matter.
The Anglican Church then as now countenanced a range of possibilities. One thing is clear,
that Shakespeare was no puritan, in the senses of his place and day.
666 Tom Clayton
pressed in terms that are strikingly at once similar and different in the Epilogue to A
Midsummer Night’s Dream. In performance such profundities are usually muted, but
they cannot be suppressed so long as the language expresses them.
So, as Prospero leaves—or will leave—his island to return to the scene of his
most intensive study and once-neglected duty to resume his role and authority as
Duke of Milan, Shakespeare left the “bare island” of the Globe to resume his life as a
prominent citizen of Stratford, where he may in fact have been for much of the time
long before he came to write The Tempest; he may have been resident there once again
as early as 1600—three years after he had bought New Place, the grand and sec-
ond-best house in Stratford, the very best house for the ever-enigmatic, syntactically
ambiguous “second best bed” he specifically left to his wife in his will.
Myths, archetypes, and transformations abound in The Tempest as a “most ma-
jestic vision, and / Harmonious charmingly,” as Ferdinand says of Prospero’s wed-
ding masque in act 4. They include self-revelation and psychological and ethical, even
spiritual, rebirth or renewal. And this is a strangely mystical as well as eminently
performable and audience-pleasing play—unless it is misplayed, frequently in the
past thirty years as the obverse of itself with Prospero as the abusive patriarch and
colonizer, and Caliban as the colonized and oppressed native whose attempt to rape
Miranda is treated as healthy natural instinct suppressed by colonialist force—a view
not unlike the freshmen’s I first taught the play to in undergraduate-all-male Yale
in 1961. If this play was not by Shakespeare’s design his farewell to the stage as
sole or primary playwright—and it may well not have been—it is hard to imagine
what a better and more apt would be if he had designed it. He had a hand in two or
three subsequent plays, written after his certain retirement to Stratford-upon-Avon,
Warwickshire, in collaboration with John Fletcher: Henry VIII, 1612; The Two Noble
Kinsmen, 1613–14; and possibly a lost Cardenio, 1612–13, based on Cervantes, which
first appeared in English translation in 1612—and wouldn’t one give a very great
plenty to recover this? Neither surviving play is anything like The Tempest, which is
unique and a nonpareil, a source of enlightenment, invigoration, and delight for any
who read it with an open mind. Shakespeare probably should have left well enough
alone, for one kind of posterity’s sake, because at a performance of Henry VIII in
1613 a discharge of cannon set fire to the thatched roof and the first Globe burned to
the ground.
The Tempest is a uniquely marvelous, not to say miraculous, dramatic and poetic
expression of the island as a state of mind, one that, visited, will not be soon forgotten.
Or ever really left: time past is contained in time present, as time present was implicit
in time past.
In Minnesconsin we have our own majestical isles, or islets, Isle Royale (843
square miles) in northwest Lake Superior; Madeline Island, largest of the Apostles
south by Bayfield, off Wisconsin’s north coast (42 square miles). These have a mys-
tique like all others, Royale for its non-human denizens, Madeline for its human:
resident Ojibwe were visited there by French explorers at about the same time the
Pilgrims were landing at Plymouth Rock; and, nearer the present connection, the late
Regents Professor William A. McDonald, the classical archaeologist, was a part-time
resident for years, when he was not at the University of Minnesota or excavating at
Messene in Greece. Grampa Tony’s Pizza Restaurant—in time past a rarity of its
kind—in St. Paul originated on the Island.
Islands are so much a part of the popular culture of the West that they come to
mind and use at the rise of a thought and the drop of a word, as a metaphor or a fact,
without special bidding: today’s—then, now yesterday’s—Temptation Island, the
“reality-based” seduction drama doubtfully suggested by the Sirens, is nevertheless
reminiscent of them and their isle’s flowery meadow.10 Failure all around, this time
around. Such islands were the first I knew, as a boy in village Wisconsin through tales
from the Iliad and Odyssey. These I longed to know better and even see, and they
prepared me for other islands I should have to wait for and sometimes failed to think
of as islands. The mythical and historical isles of Greece were our first, and both cap-
tivate the imagination still, Delos afloat until, when Leto came, it came to be anchored
on the capitals of four pillars springing from the earth below (Pindar fr.). To Byron
and Don Juan those were “The isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece! / Where burning
Sappho loved and sung, / Where grew the arts of war and peace, / Where Delos rose,
and Phoebus sprung!”
A far hue and cry from King Kong’s island, about as scary a place as one could
hope to see as a child—but one could, especially if one was born only a month before
King Kong sprang fully haired from the imagination of Marien C. Cooper (story) and
James Creelman the writer, and the equally inspired direction of Cooper and Ernest
B. Schoedsack. Cooper may have contributed as much as any to the survival if not
the classic status of this film by what he took out, “a clip … in which four sailors,
after Kong shook them off a log bridge, fall into a ravine where they are eaten alive
by giant spiders because, when previewed in January 1933, audience members either
left in terror or talked about the ghastly scene during the entire movie.”11 He told Faye
Wray that she was “going to have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood.”
Those were the days of innocence in horror on the screen: not much gore, much more
for imagination’s realizing.
Islands have circumferent and the widest horizons—after unconnected conti-
nents (Australia and Antarctica, if continents, and, more or less, Africa). Often they
confer them on their inhabitants, especially those with capacity who wander and see
those horizons from all directions inside and out. Odysseus is—he never was, or was
he? He always is, in any case—the archetype of the kind, πολύτροπος, many-wayed
(Odyssey 1.1). The most evident wandering is physical, geographic, from here to there
and there, where measures may be taken, military and otherwise. Napoleon of Cor-
sica comes to mind, and then of Elba, with the non-French palindrome, “able was I
ere I saw Elba.” As soon as one begins to think of islands and their islanders, waves
of recognition and recollection wash up and roll over the consciousness, and distances
shrink to the point of observation: ubiquity is either a divine attribute or a function of
imagination, which like love “makes one little room an everywhere” (Donne, “The
10
Odyssey 1. Sirens survive from at least as early, in art, as eighth-century BCE bronze at-
tachments to cauldrons.
11
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0178260/bio (accessed 18 May 2016).
668 Tom Clayton
Good Morrow”). If real and imaginary men and women of might and main make the
matter of epic wanderings, none would have its memory and record were it not for
historians, biographers, and ultimately poets, ποιηταί, makers, as Aristotle insisted
makers not of verses but of plots, imitations—μιμήσεις—enacted by actors, agents,
πράττοντες. A treatise on medicine or physics in verse—there are few to none such
today—is not a poem but a work of medicine or physics. We may have lost some-
thing in the cultural evolution that did away with verse as a medium of argument
and demonstration. At least the value of poetry for physicians (even) may be seen in
Margaret Edson’s W;t (sic, 1999).
Homer was an islander of Chios—if he was of that place, and if there was a
Homer. If there was not, he had to be invented, for no lesser poet could have written
the Iliad and the Odyssey—except as member of a committee of creating rhapsodes
never since convoked, perhaps the nearest being those who rendered the King James/
Authorized Version of the English Bible in 1611—who themselves borrowed much
from sixteenth-century translations.
Everyone knows an island when he sees one, so long as he can see it is an is-
land—by what measures? No problem aside from impressions, there it is in the great
Oxford English Dictionary, “1. a. A piece of land completely surrounded by water.”12
Island was “[f]ormerly used less definitely, including a peninsula, or a place insu-
lated at high water or during floods, or begirt by marshes”; and also, “b. In Biblical
lang., after the corresp. Heb. word, applied to the lands across the sea, the coasts of
the Mediterranean: cf. isle n. 1 b.” Islands are victims—or beneficiaries—of etymol-
ogy as well—and as much—as of geology (island has also been used as a verb). Is
a continent an island? “Formerly”—again—“two continents were reckoned, the Old
and the New; the former comprising Europe, Asia, and Africa, which form one con-
tinuous mass of land; the latter, North and South America, forming another. (These
two continents are strictly islands, distinguished only by their extent.)”13 So “islands”
and “continents” evolved linguistically as well as geologically: islands and continents
are what we make them, or what they become by the lapses and inattention of casual
usage. In the absence of an académie americaine, an unthinkable anomaly, usage is
practically determined by television, the Internet, one’s peers, and descriptive dictio-
naries that are prescriptive only politically. At present islands are by far the smaller,
perhaps to be known as such by the maximum distance from the surrounding body of
water at any point. If water can be seen at all 360°, it is an island—and a small one.
Or a tall one.
Even in the villages of Minnesconsin as a youth I must have encountered an is-
land or so for real, if only in the creek of Sidie Hollow near Viroqua, before the ones
I seem to remember best and as first, but which of the two I came to first I cannot
12
“This entry has not yet been fully updated (first published 1900)” (OED online, 14 May
2016).
13
“5. a. One of the main continuous bodies of land on the earth’s surface.… Now it is usual to
reckon four or five continents, Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, North and South; the great
island of Australia is sometimes reckoned as another, and geographers have speculated on the
existence of an Antarctic Continent.”
recall, whether Huck Finn’s Jackson’s Island or Telemachus’s and Odysseus’s Ithaca. I
have never visited either, but the images of both are so vivid and familiar that they are
often present to the corner of my eye and permanent residents of my recollection. And
I count among friends in Greece the host and hostess of Ithaca’s taverna (c. 1987–),
the Koutsouvelis of Patras, whose summer home was so much a place of social resort
for neighbors and visitors that it comfortably became a taverna, a Greek pub, as a
public house is every inch a taverna. And who could forget that fateful first meeting
on Jackson’s Island when the late Huckleberry Finn, reports of whose death had been
much exaggerated, “says: ‘Hello, Jim!’ and skipped out” of hiding, frightening Jim as
much as he would any who knew him to be dead. Jim “bounced up and stared at me
wild. Then he drops down on his knees, and puts his hands together and says: ‘Doan’
hurt me—don’t! I hain’t ever done no harm to a ghos’. I awluz liked dead people, en
done all I could for ’em. You go en git in de river agin, whah you b’longs, en doan’ do
nuffn to Ole Jim, ’at ’uz awluz yo’ fren’ ” (chap. 8). A stereotype, as some have said,
but Jim is every inch as much a man and friend as he is black and frightened as who
wouldn’t be and ingenious as plenty of whites wouldn’t be? Jim is not a stereotype
made and marred by mocking, he is a man made normal, dialectally individual, and
highly imaginative by Twain.
It was a white and milky way from those earlier experiences of place and deed,
when I was read to, to the cosmic sort of “island” of Shakespeare and Cleopatra’s
various manufacture (1606), when, to Dolabella, us, and the cosmos, she says she
dreamt there was an Emperor Antony.

O, such another sleep, that I might see
But such another man!
Dol.
If it might please ye—
Cleo.
His face was as the heav’ns, and therein stuck
A sun and moon, which kept their course, and lighted
The little O, th’ earth.
Dol.
Most sovereign creature—
Cleo.
His legs bestrid the ocean, his rear’d arm
Crested the world, his voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,
There was no winter in’t; an autumn it was
That grew the more by reaping. His delights
Were dolphin-like, they show’d his back above
The element they liv’d in. In his livery
670 Tom Clayton
Walk’d crowns and crownets; realms and islands were

As plates dropp’d from his pocket.…
(Antony and Cleopatra 5.2.76–92)
Cleopatra’s speech here—it is not quite finished—is a monologue, a virtual so-

liloquy, made before, not to, Dolabella, who guards her for Caesar, whose desire and
design is to lead her in triumph in Rome as a trophy. It is a masterpiece of anamorphic
motivation—or in plainer terms mixed motives and multiple expression: Shakespeare
writes—partly from sheer artistry and vision, but by design—to express Cleopatra
speaking to herself, as deeply moved by recollecting Antony; and for Dolabella, to
move him to inform her very complex speech-act. Thus it ranges all the way from
a stunning piece of verbal collage and panegyrical catasterism to down-home mes-
merism, depending upon the perspective taken on the speech. Editors and critics are
strangely diffident about its deliberately manipulative dimension, but Shakespeare
was not, as Dolabella’s fessing shows. They are also prone to see Antony and Cleop-
atra as fading and failing if not mocked and satirized in their play; but demi-deities
are not diminished and belittled but made so by language that can only monumen-
talize and inanimate, like so very much lavished on Antony and Cleopatra in this
play, which makes them both far larger than life and Antony with Cleopatra’s verbal
art a constellation, by contrast with that which diminutes Caesar to his moral and
anthropic measure. As Cleopatra had earlier said, “My desolation does begin to make
/ A better life. ‘Tis paltry to be Caesar; / Not being Fortune, he’s but Fortune’s knave,
/ A minister of her will” (5.2.1–4); she goes on to demonstrate herself a match and
surrogate for Fortune. Art may readily do what history hadn’t time for.
When Cleopatra concludes her epic reverie, the dialogue continues,
Dol.
Hear me, good madam:
Your loss is as yourself, great; and you bear it
As answering to the weight. Would I might never
O’ertake pursu’d success, but I do feel,
By the rebound of yours, a grief that smites
My very heart at root.
Cleo.
I thank you, sir.
Know you what Caesar means to do with me?
Dol.
I am loath to tell you what I would you knew.
Cleo.
Nay, pray you, sir.
Dol.
Though he be honorable—
Cleo.
He’ll lead me then in triumph?
Dol.
Madam, he will, I know’t.
(Ant. 5.2.99–109, italics added)
“I thank you, sir” is gracious with a tacit hint of self-congratulation in thanking
Dolabella for admiring her performance, in effect; Dolabella under her spell, she
abruptly asks the crucial question that will lead to her knowing what to do to make
“great Caesar ass unpolicied” (5.2.307), as she shortly after does.
And what has all this ado to do with islands? As much as is needed to show the
magnetic power of a shimmering image in a larger picture that demands attention
when it comes so near “realms and islands … / As plates dropp’d from his pocket” as
a man Orion-sized.
Islands of the mind metamorphose imperceptibly into islands of the heart, as
though that were all along their natural design and end. Such are the places and spaces
where reflection comes to repose in absence, and there in person one engages all
that is with all one’s observation and senses to the fullest as time permits. Islands
of the mind are legion, an ever-expanding archipelago for contemplating anytime,
anywhere. Those of one’s geographic life on foot are finite as such but islands of the
mind thereafter and infinite in possibility like those on which foot has never trodden,
or has trodden symbolically, as on “this bare island” of Shakespeare’s identifying so.
An occasional visitor can only guess at the depth of special feeling of those
whose growing-up experience was island-based, the more so when the main islands
of one’s own youth were no larger than those of the Mississippi. But sometimes a
little island may become a continent for its comforts and all the dry land one could
pray for. Among the fragments one shores against one’s ruins is bound to be the
memorial residue of islands passed on the way to the vale of the isle of Avalon or the
like. For me comes nearest that Avalon an islet in the middle of long Lake Saganaga
off the end of the Gunflint Trail in far northern Minnesota.14 I was not far past the
halfway point of the allotted biblical span of threescore and ten but for a while felt
far past it. Roger Hargreaves, an Englishman and bosom mate from Wadham, who
had never canoed before except occasionally on gentle waters, and I, who had not
canoed seriously in twenty years, beginning a canoe trip in the Boundary Waters of
Minnesota bound eventually for the Quetico Park of Ontario, decided on the spur of
the moment to abandon our original itinerary eastward to Northern Lights Lake and
on such a spectacularly fair day go with the east-wind west, straight down the middle
of the main channel of “the deepest and largest lake in the Boundary Waters Canoe
Area Wilderness with a maximum depth of 280 ft (85 m) and surface area of 13,832
acres,”15 and a shore length of 194 miles. It is a big lake.
How were we to know what a sudden tempest, brewing out of sight, had in store
for us in the area well named Thunder Bay? We learned soon enough and all too well
14
The name is “Probably derived from Sagaiganan, the Ojibwe for ‘inland lakes.’” Or, ac-
cording to another authority, Saganaga, “lake of many islands” (289, officially). Sounds like
plausible guesswork in both cases, though either or both could be right (or wrong?).
15
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saganaga_Lake (accessed 18 May 2016).
672 Tom Clayton
when the storm broke over us at mid-lake in sheets blown almost horizontal. Five–
ten minutes’ crazed paddling, Roger impressive in the bow, I straining at the stern,
brought us to the islet that deserves for us forevermore the epithet Blessed, small as it
was with sides at about a 50° angle but a cake-walk to the danse macabre we thought
we were on the way to. We lashed the canoe to a rock and struggled up with our gear
weighing like anchors, and reached the top, 25–30 feet up, to see a rabbit inspecting
us quizzically and the sun break through receding showers in rainbows. Allelulia! For
me a quintessentially blissful island-deliverance. It seems that most of my close calls
have come in the way of death by water, some unbidden, some as a consummation to
be wished. Sometimes one knows with Keats what it means to be “half in love with
easeful death” (“Ode to a Nightingale”).
All of my islands have come to be mine by different kinds of chance, two of them
Greek, Crete and the Island of Aphrodite; and two not, the British Isles and the island
of The Tempest, partly as synecdoche of Shakespeare. Crete my late wife Ruth and
I visited, to see the Minoan antiquities and more, in May 1986, during the last term
of my second of three sabbatical leaves. Much about Crete affected me, two or three
moments lingering indelibly and coming to mind catalyzed by a glance at a shiny
aqua-colored earthenware vase we bought in Chania, or on their own at any tranquil
moment. Two I shared with Ruth, watching her befriend a goat on a road-stop in the
mountains not far from Kissou Kambos, and eating grilled octopus at a candle-lit,
harbor-inlet table at a taverna in Rethymno where we also had some of the finest
home-distilled Raki we experienced in Crete. For me a defining moment for then
and for all came while Ruth was sensibly resting during the height of the midafter-
noon heat as I stood alone, sweating in the sun on a hill above Iraklion where Nikos
Kazantzakis is buried and I experienced an epiphany. It is not in the nature of an
epiphany, for me at least, to say what kind of thing it was, but it came by slow degrees
as I gazed now at Cretan distances, now out to sea, now at the intense-purple bougain-
villea in the otherwise barren garden, now and again at Kazantzakis’ tombstone. The
sun cast the shadow of the slender wooden cross upon the stone, first obscuring, then
revealing, the laconic inscription from Kazantzakis’ Odyssey:
Δεν ελπίζω τίποτα I hope for nothing

Δε φοβούμαι τίποτα I fear nothing
Είμαι λέφτερος I am free
The natural paradox of mingled sun and shadow, sign of faith and word of indepen-
dence, moved me deeply at the time and marked me forever since. No more of that,
but some of my chiaroscuro reflections owe themselves to that experience—Aegean
sunstroke, perhaps, or the phantom bite of a mad dog or Englishman.
All along I have of course been thinking of Cyprus and of Theo, to whom I owe
my bonding with the Island, a kind of celibate love affair renewed by visiting trysts
over the 1990s. As one of the University of Cyprus’s founding fathers, he proposed
me for membership on a committee of five to select members of the faculty of the
Department of Foreign Languages (notably English! the other members were two
Brits and two Greeks, one of them Cypriot) aborning in 1990 along with the Univer-
sity itself, which is now well established and growing from strength to strength. He
must have done this partly if not mainly out of kindness after Ruth died on the day
after Christmas 1989 and left me numb and devastated. Not three weeks earlier, it is
most pleasant to recall, when we were returning to St. Paul from a visit to her mother
in Hayward, east of Albert Lea, Ruth was helping me prepare for my final exam in
Modern Greek (in Theo and Soterios’ night course). Driving west on U.S. 90 to con-
nect with 35 north, we went thirty miles further west, past 35, because we were both
concentrating on my reviewing at the expense of attention to the road signs, before
we discovered, laughing, how far off we were and why, almost to Blue Earth—out of
which I drove a pea truck for Green Giant in the summer of ’52, just months before
I fell in love with her at first sight in the Varsity Inn across University Avenue from
Folwell Hall. What was coming down another road she knew but I did not, until hours
before the end of thirty-six years together.
For my first visit I was quartered in the Hotel Philoxenia (“Hospitality”) up in the
hills some way from the center of Nikosia but not far from the University’s temporary
quarters. One evening, after a long meeting, I set out on foot for the Philoxenia, even-
tually getting well and truly lost in almost total darkness in residential hills but hesi-
tant to knock on doors of lighted houses to ask my way. When a young woman came
out of her house and walked toward her car, I threw caution to the winds and spoke to
her from a distance—feeling like Odysseus hailing Nausikaa—expecting her to flee
to house or car, while raising an outcry all the way and bringing the wrath of Cyprus
down on me for sundry heinous crimes I must have been bent on committing. Instead,
she approached me with fearless warmth. When I explained my plight, she said she
was going to pick up her husband and would drop me off at the Philoxenia—all this
in excellent English—as she did. An early lesson in Southern Cypriot bilingualism,
hospitality, and trust that I marveled at until I recognized it as the norm—with less
bilingualism in the villages, but not a jot less of the rest.
Theo I remember well in all his roles official and personal, most vividly on those
social occasions when the committee was entertained by the Interim Committee of
which he was an indispensable member or at other such events, including one in a
Nikosia taverna when after all the food and drink I found myself promoted into danc-
ing à la grecque with the hostess. Mirth in abundance and invariable good nature
with seriousness of purpose were his qualities everywhere I saw him, and I clearly see
us together, now, having a late dinner (even by Greek measures) in a restaurant in the
almost deserted Laiki Yitonia and on a talking, walking tour he gave me of the intra-
mural city. Faces and places, and goings to and fro, come back to me constantly and
fill my consciousness with affectionate reminiscences of otherwhere all over the Is-
land, North as well as South, from the Zephyros in Larnaka (grilled octopus matched
nowhere else but in Rethymno) to the jewel of Kyrenia in the North, and the Baths
of Aphrodite in the west to Salamis in the east, I found everywhere much to love and
wonder at—not least and with more than passing regret why the Island still remains
divided. To go from prosperous twenty-first-century South to a North living if not lost
in an earlier time, however, forced a painful awareness of differences not easily rec-
onciled, differences of religion, ideology, and culture exacerbated by political, ethnic,
and military factors of enormous complexity. Some mixing of Greek and Turkish
674 Tom Clayton
Cypriots there is, according to the Rough Guide, but surreptitious and fraught with
unwelcome consequences if detected. My last visit drove home the sadness of the
separation that extends even to what in 2000 were the only two remaining bi-ethnic
villages on the Island, both in the South: Potamia near Nikosia; and Pyla, in the buffer
zone, where my friend Jay Halio guest-teaching at the University of Cyprus nearly
had his innocent camera confiscated by a UN soldier. And we seemed to cross a far
greater distance than across the village square when we walked from the Petros Tro-
hos Taverna to the Turkish coffee house not a hundred yards away but a world apart.
All along I have been reflecting on islands and everything else from the per-
spective of Cyprus, not as a Cypriot looks but as one intermittently transplanted—or
temporarily trans-spirited—there, where one’s sense and senses can be wholly taken
up and redirected by diversity of persons and ever-fresh experience. I never landed
without the thrill of expectation I felt when I landed there first in 1990, last in 2000.
Never was the expectation not fulfilled by more than I expected, and something of the
Island has stayed with me and grown, uncultivated, of its own nature, that compels
me to care what happens to it and its inhabitants east and west, and North and South,
past, passing, or to come, in Yeats’s phrase, aptly from “Sailing to Byzantium.”
Pilgrimage, Connection, Community
I first presented these comments at the 44th Annual Convention of the Association for
Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (New Orleans, November 2012), as part
of a roundtable discussion that honored Theofanis G. Stavrou’s fifty years of service
to Mediterranean, Slavic, and Eastern Orthodox Studies. With a few alterations and
updates, these words stand as an appropriate conclusion to this volume of essays ex-
ploring the main topical interests—Eastern Orthodox Church history, Modern Greek
literature, Russian history and culture, the history of Cyprus, and several other ar-
eas—in the truly outstanding scholarly career of Theo Stavrou.
We all thank Theofanis for his profound and permanent impact on our profes-
sional development in the field he founded and nurtured: Greek-Slavic relations in
modern times, a natural extension of his passion for Slavic, Mediterranean, and East-
ern Orthodox studies. He has shaped our intellectual transformation, encouraged our
scholarly projects, and remained our dear friend over the decades. We have all ben-
efited enormously from his guidance, commitment, and inspiration—and from his
unique vision that created a dynamic, exciting, and challenging program of study. All
of us, in different ways, have used our scholarship to bridge diverse regions and is-
sues, to locate points of contact and interaction across cultural frontiers, and to honor
his enduring influence. And it was fitting that we got to celebrate his wonderful career
at a conference that highlighted “Boundary, Barrier, and Border Crossing.” He has,
after all, practiced this throughout his life.
His achievements as an exemplary teaching and publishing scholar have been re-
markable and far-reaching. He has received honors and awards, including a Fulbright,
from various institutions such as the Ford Foundation, IREX, the Smithsonian, the
Academy of Athens, the University of Athens, the University of Minnesota, Indi-
ana University, and the Greek Ministry of Culture. Thus far, he has supervised the
publication of twenty-seven volumes in the Nostos series on Modern Greek History
and Culture, thirty-one volumes of the international scholarly journal Modern Greek
Studies Yearbook: A Publication of Mediterranean, Slavic, and Eastern Orthodox
Studies, and twenty monographs in the Minnesota Mediterranean and East Euro-
pean Monograph series. He has directed the Modern Greek Studies Program at the
University of Minnesota, under whose auspices he initiated the annual Celebration
of Modern Greek Letters and the Annual James W. Cunningham Memorial Lecture
on Eastern Orthodox History and Culture. And when did he find the time to be-
come one of the founders of the University of Cyprus? Since 1964, he has served as
executive director of SPAN (Student Project for Amity among Nations), a program
that contributed immensely to the globalization of the curriculum at the University
of Minnesota, and he currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Museum of
Russian Art in Minneapolis. He has delivered countless lectures on the history of
modern Russia and the Near East, the intellectual and cultural history of modern
Greece, the history and culture of Eastern Orthodoxy, and Modern Greek writers to
thousands, probably tens of thousands of students. He has organized superb symposia
and conferences on such topics as “Russia under the Last Tsar,” “Russian Orthodoxy
under the Old Regime,” “Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” and “The
Mediterranean and Its Seas.” Lastly, he has mentored and supervised to completion
approximately fifty Ph.D. dissertations, many of them published as monographs or
as articles in scholarly journals. By any measure, this is a staggering and impressive
array of accomplishments.
So many aspects of his impact stand out among his former students. His lectures
made Russian history and culture come alive with dramatic force and energy, intro-
ducing us to the likes of Chichikov, Bazarov, and Stavrogin, and he assigned map ex-
ercises based on the shifting frontiers of the Russian Empire. His courses touched on
virtually every poem by Cavafy and Seferis; and nearly every work by Kazantzakis,
including The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, 33,333 lines of verse picking up the story
where Homer left off. Several generations of students met in his office cloister every
week to discuss this classic and Kazantzakis’s insightful travel account of Russia
during her momentous upheaval in the 1920s. But more was to come: Professor Stav-
rou brought engaging speakers to campus and made sure his students spent time with
them. For most of us, his direction aroused curiosity to probe the interactions between
the various peoples who resided, traded, and traveled in the Greek or Orthodox East,
that expansive domain encompassing Eastern Orthodox lands and communities from
the Neva to the Nile. He advised the imperative of investigating these intersections
through primary sources left by observers, especially those eyewitnesses who con-
veyed their experiences in a lively, interesting, and generally reliable manner. His
enthusiasm, dedication, and relentless confidence in our success have enriched us all.
We all emerged from Theofanis’s “Overcoat,” spun from the trinity of pilgrimage,
connection, and community.
Pilgrimage, because he has journeyed tirelessly across the spacious terrain of the
Eastern Orthodox world, firmly convinced that travel offered limitless horizons of
learning and that all students must figure out their own distinct paths. He traversed in-
tellectual boundaries and academic disciplines, promoting and disseminating knowl-
edge in multiple settings. He asserted that pilgrimage to sacred shrines in the Greek
East represented “the most visible expression of Orthodox religious behavior,” and
he emphasized the importance of pilgrimage and travel reports as “an underutilized
source” for excavating the history of Russian ties with the lands and seas of the Le-
vant.1 He certainly prompted our own pilgrimages, not just to Mount Athos, Cyprus,
1
Theofanis G. Stavrou, “Russia and the Mediterranean in Modern Times,” 2: 400. This essay,
summarizing the conference presentations of an international group of scholars, appears in the
Pilgrimage, Connection, Community 677
and Sergiev Posad but to the archives and libraries of Russia, Ukraine, Greece, Brit-
ain, and other lands.
Connection, because he connected the Greek and Slavic worlds with his ideas,
lectures, publications, and conferences. He linked, to name just a few, Russia and
the Levant, the Russian and Ottoman Empires, Dostoevsky and Kazantzakis, May-
akovsky and Ritsos, Papadiamantis and Solzhenitsyn. He connected seemingly dis-
parate regions of the globe; bridged the social sciences and humanities; and brought
together scholars and students from North America, Western and Central Europe,
Greece, and Russia. Indeed, with today’s fashion of “cross-cultural,” “transnational,”
and “comparative” history, he must feel perfectly at home, because cross-cultural
and transnational connections have characterized his approach to the study of Greek-
Slavic relations for decades.
Community, because he has underscored the channels of Greek-Slavic contact
and interaction, the interplay of encounters and exchanges that generates a sense of
community between the Greek and Russian wings of the Orthodox realm. Indeed, if
he did not actually coin the phrase “Orthodox commonwealth,” after Dimitri Obo-
lensky’s innovative notion of a Byzantine commonwealth for the Byzantine era, he
undoubtedly did the most to endorse and popularize this thought-provoking concept.
It perfectly describes the community of shared interests and challenges that define the
Greek-Slavic arena from the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople to the outbreak of
World War I. Equally crucial, he has fostered a worldwide community of scholarship,
a network of researchers, teachers, specialists, and students centered in Minneapolis
and extending outward to other parts of North America, to Britain and Greece, and
to Russia. One of his most important accomplishments, the Modern Greek Studies
Yearbook, definitely epitomizes this global community of learning. Since its found-
ing in 1986, the Yearbook has provided an international forum for established schol-
ars and new voices, offering an extraordinary variety of articles, essays, translations,
archival descriptions, and reviews. His pathfinding role in creating the 1995 Moscow
Exhibit on Russian Travelers in the Greek World, and his leadership in organizing
the 2005 Athens Conference on Russia and the Mediterranean, further attest to the
international community of scholarship which he has stimulated. In all these ways,
the trinity of connection, pilgrimage, and community has framed and guided his stu-
dents’ teaching and scholarly careers in Slavic, Eastern Orthodox, and Mediterranean
studies.
Thanks to Theofanis’s guidance and supervision, scholarship on a broad spec-
trum of Greek-Slavic history and culture found a home at Minnesota. The Minne-
sota Project, as we like to call it, focusing on the multifaceted relations between the
Orthodox East and Russia, inspired and trained five cycles of graduate students to
explore these rich and varied links, part of a two-way process of communication and
published proceedings of the First International Conference on Russia and the Mediterranean.
See Olga Katsiardi-Hering et al., eds., Ρωσία και Μεσόγειος, Πρακτικά Α΄ Διεθνούς Συνεδρίου
(Αθήνα, 19–22 Μαΐου 2005) [Russia and the Mediterranean. Proceedings of the First Inter-
national Conference, Athens, 19–22 May 2005], 2 vols. (Athens: National and Kapodistrian
University, 2011).
collaboration between the Greek and Slavic worlds. Just a sampling of these topics
affirms his central place in a field he has designed and shaped for well over half a
century. Greek enlightened churchmen traveled to Muscovy and imperial Russia,
contributing to Eastern Orthodox culture and education. Russian-Ottoman wars and
treaties forged opportunities for Russian-Greek cooperation in naval, military, and
commercial endeavors. Greek merchant centers flourished in Odessa and New Rus-
sia, while Greek émigrés served in the diplomatic corps and other areas of tsarist
officialdom. Russian travelers and pilgrims crisscrossed the Greek East, drawn to the
holy shrines of Mount Athos, Constantinople, and Palestine, while Russia’s govern-
ment and public launched enterprises of religious, educational, and cultural philan-
thropy in the Near East. With the help of Greek educators and translators, classical
and Byzantine studies flourished in late tsarist Russia. And Russia’s state and society
responded to Balkan stirrings for liberty and autonomy, most notably the Greek War
of Independence, and involved themselves in the intricate but messy realities of Bal-
kan nation-state building. Fault lines in the Orthodox commonwealth, such as the
disruptive forces of ethnic nationalism, secular modernity, and ecclesiastical rivalry,
also attracted scholarly attention and research.
All of these themes in Greek-Slavic affairs not only opened new perspectives
in Russian history and culture but also redefined the Eastern Question, Europe’s di-
lemma over what to do with the receding or regressing Ottoman Empire. By under-
lining the religious, cultural, and commercial dimensions of the Eastern Question, he
encouraged students to widen their views beyond the confines of diplomatic, naval,
and military history. The contours of our Eastern Question today, a more complex
and dynamic subject because of his efforts, include not just great power rivalries,
treaties, and conflicts but also mentalities, perceptions, and images. The teaching and
research activities of all those who profited from the Minnesota Project testify to the
long-term success of Theofanis’s initiatives.
Current and future prospects for scholarship in the Greek-Slavic field he pio-
neered look promising indeed. The resurgence of Orthodoxy in Russia has encour-
aged a younger generation of talented historians to conduct research on Russian reli-
gious and cultural ties with Greece, Palestine, and other parts of the Near East. Travel
across the Orthodox commonwealth has become more common, as has broader
participation in international conferences. A wealth of newly available archival and
manuscript documents on philanthropy, diplomacy, pilgrimage, piracy, commerce,
education, and culture awaits researchers poised to make their own discoveries. The
Universities of Athens and Minnesota have inaugurated an exchange program, a re-
sult of their longstanding partnership in promoting research on Hellenism, Eastern
Orthodoxy, and Greek-Slavic relations. And we can continue to celebrate his unstint-
ing service to Mediterranean, Slavic, and Eastern Orthodox studies with the publi-
cation of his Eastern Orthodox Christianity: The Essential Texts, a joint endeavor
coauthored with Bryn Geffert.2 This attractive and engaging volume is no doubt a
fitting tribute to Theofanis Stavrou’s lifetime of contributions and achievements. The
2
Bryn Geffert and Theofanis G. Stavrou, Eastern Orthodox Christianity: The Essential Texts
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).
Pilgrimage, Connection, Community 679
field is thus thriving, resonating with his lasting imprint and epic spirit. And it was
fitting that we got to celebrate his wonderful career at a conference that highlighted
“Boundary, Barrier, and Border Crossing.” He has, after all, practiced crossing/criss-
crossing throughout his life.
Notes on Contributors
Josef L. Altholz was Professor of History at the University of Minnesota from

1959 to 2002. He specialized in the history of the British Isles, chiefly religious, in
modern times, and Irish history. His books include The Liberal Catholic Movement in
England (1962), The Churches in the Nineteenth Century (1967), The Religious Press
in Britain, 1760–1900 (1989), and Anatomy of a Controversy (1994). He also edited
Selected Documents in Irish History (2000), and coedited with Damian McElrath The
Correspondence of Lord Acton and Richard Simpson, 3 vols. (1971–75).
Achilles Avraamides (b. 1934, Arsos Limassol, Cyprus) is Professor Emeritus,

Department of History, at Iowa State University. A faculty member from 1965 until
his retirement in 2000, he taught ancient Near Eastern, Greek, and Roman history.
His special interest is the history of ideas, and his research focuses on Hellenistic
Cyprus, Christian heresies, and Plotinus and Neoplatonism.
Heather Bailey is Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois

Springfield, where she teaches courses in modern European and Russian history. Her
research concerns Franco-Russian intellectual, religious, and cultural relations—
themes she explored in her book Orthodoxy, Modernity, and Authenticity: The
Reception of Ernest Renan’s “Life of Jesus” in Russia (2008).
Stephen K. Batalden is Professor Emeritus of History and founding Director of the

Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies at Arizona State
University. A frequent exchange scholar to Russia and southeastern Europe, he is a
specialist in the field of religious and cultural history. His most recent monograph,
Russian Bible Wars (2013), won the 2014 Reginald Zelnik Prize of the Association for
Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.
Marjorie W. Bingham taught at St. Louis Park Senior High School and Hamline
University. She has contributed to thirteen books on international women’s history.
Her other books include An Age of Empires, 1200–1750 (2006) and Silla Korea and
the Silk Road: Golden Age, Golden Threads (2006).
Michael Bitter is Professor of History at the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo, where he

teaches European and world history. His research focuses on Anglo-Russian relations
and interactions during the 1730s. He has written on several aspects of Russia, the
Russian court, and St. Petersburg during this period. He is currently working on a
682 Notes on Contributors
history of the diplomatic mission of George, Lord Forbes, to St. Petersburg as envoy
and minister plenipotentiary of George II of Great Britain.
Gregory Bruess is Associate Dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences
and Associate Professor of History at the University of Northern Iowa. His published
work consists of articles and a monograph, Religion, Identity and Empire: A Greek
Archbishop in the Russia of Catherine the Great (1997).
G. William Carlson was Professor Emeritus of History and Political Science at Bethel
University. He served as editor of the Baptist Piety Clarion and published numerous
articles on Baptist General Conference history, Swedish Pietism, Christianity in the
United States, religion in the Soviet Union, and comparative evangelical political
thought. He coauthored with Diana Magnuson Persevere Läsare and Clarion:
Celebrating Bethel’s 125th Anniversary (1997).
Tom Clayton, Regents Professor of English Language and Literature, Emeritus, at the
University of Minnesota, was sometime chair of the Classical Civilization Program in
the College of Liberal Arts. He has published extensively on Shakespeare and other
literary subjects, especially the poetry of England in the early seventeenth century,
one of the most creative periods in English literary history. Not unrepresentative titles
and subjects include: “Aristotle on the Shakespearean Film; or Damn Thee William,
Thou Art Translated” (1974) and “Symmetreciprocity, etc., in The Tempest” (2012).
David Connolly, born in Sheffield, England, spent all his adult and professional
life in Greece, where he taught translation at the undergraduate and post-graduate
level at a number of university institutions in Greece. His last position was Professor
of Translation Studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He has written
extensively on the theory and practice of literary translation and on Greek literature
in general and has published over forty books of translations featuring works by
major Greek poets and novelists. His translations have received awards in Greece,
the UK, and the USA.
Van Coufoudakis is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Dean Emeritus of the
College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University-Purdue University. Following his
retirement from the Indiana University system he became Rector of the University of
Nicosia, the first private university in the Republic of Cyprus. From 2012 through the
end of October of 2014 he served as President of the Hellenic Quality Assurance and
Accreditation Agency, an independent agency of the Government of Greece. He is the
author of three books, the coeditor of four books, and the author of some 100 book
chapters and articles in refereed academic journals published in the US, Canada,
Great Britain, Belgium, Italy, Greece, and Cyprus.
James Cracraft is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

He has published several volumes on Peter the Great’s cultural revolution, which are
summarized in a book for students and general readers, The Revolution of Peter the
Notes on Contributors 683
Great (2003). His most recent book is Two Shining Souls: Jane Addams, Leo Tolstoy,
and the Quest for Global Peace (2012).
Zdeněk V. David is a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center

for Scholars, where he served as librarian from 1974 to 2002. His major publications
include The Peoples of the Eastern Habsburg Lands, 1526–1918 (with Robert A.
Kann) (1984), and Finding the Middle Way: The Utraquists’ Liberal Challenge to
Rome and Luther (2003). Currently he is completing a manuscript on Thomas G.
Masaryk, a Scholar and a Statesman: Philosophical Background of His Political
Views.
K eith P. Dyrud, an independent scholar, has edited and contributed to The Other
Catholics (1978). He is the author of The Quest for the Rusyn Soul: The Politics of
Religion and Culture in Eastern Europe and in America, 1890–World War I (1992)
and the coeditor with Grace Dyrud of the posthumous publication of James W.
Cunningham, The Gates of Hell: The Great Sobor of the Russian Orthodox Church
1917–1918 (2002).
Thomas A. Emmert is Professor Emeritus of History at Gustavus Adolphus College,

St. Peter, Minnesota. A specialist in medieval Balkan history, his major publications
include Serbian Golgotha: Kosovo, 1389 (1990), Kosovo: Legacy of a Medieval
Battle (1991), coedited with Wayne S. Vucinich, and Confronting the Yugoslav
Controversies: A Scholars’ Initiative (2012), coedited with Charles Ingrao.
Lucien J. Frary is Associate Professor of History at Rider University. He is the author

of Russia and the Making of Modern Greek Identity, 1821–1844 (2015) and coeditor
with Mara Kozelsky of Russian-Ottoman Borderlands: The Eastern Question
Reconsidered (2014). His current project is about the culture of cosmopolitan
aristocrats and the making of Russian foreign policy in the first decades of the
nineteenth century.
Bryn Geffert is the Librarian of the College at Amherst College and Lecturer in
the Department of History. He is the author of Eastern Orthodox and Anglicans:
Diplomacy, Theology, and the Politics of Interwar Ecumenism (2010), and coauthor
with Theofanis G. Stavrou of Eastern Orthodox Christianity: The Essential Texts
(2016).
David Goldfrank is Professor of History and Director of Medieval Studies at

Georgetown University, where he has been on the faculty since 1970. His works
include The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky (1983, rev. ed. 2000), The Origins of
the Crimean War (1993), and A History of Russia: People, Legends, Events, Forces,
coauthored with Catherine Evtuhov, Lindsey Hughes, and Richard Stites (2003). His
most recent book is Nil Sorsky: The Authentic Writings (2008).
K risti A. Groberg is Associate Professor of Art History at North Dakota State

University, where she received the Outstanding Research Award in 2009. She
has published in Alexandria, ARTMargins, Canadian-American Slavic Studies,
Explorations, Modern Greek Studies Yearbook, Modern Judaism, Russian Review,
Slavic Review, Theosophical History, and Women: East-West. She coedited with
Avraham Greenbaum, A Missionary for History: Essays in Honor of Simon Dubnov
(1998). At present her research focuses on the study of sacred space.
Catherine Guisan is Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science

at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Un sens à l’Europe: Gagner la
Paix (1950–2003) (2003) and A Political Theory of Identity in European Integration:
Memory and Policies (2011). She has taught in five European universities and was a
Fulbright scholar in Russia, 2013.
Elizabeth A. Harry has taught world history at the University of St. Thomas for
many years. Her publications include articles on Russian, Soviet, and world history.
Her monograph on the early Soviet state, from which the present essay is taken, is
forthcoming from the Minnesota Mediterranean and East European Monograph series,
published by the Modern Greek Studies Program at the University of Minnesota.
Evanthis Hatzivassiliou is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of

Athens. He is the author of Britain and the International Status of Cyprus, 1955–59
(1997), The Cyprus Question, 1878–1960: The Constitutional Aspect (2002), Greece
and the Cold War: Frontline State, 1952–1967 (2006), and NATO and Western
Perceptions of the Soviet Bloc: Alliance Analysis and Reporting (2014).
K åre Hauge, ambassador (ret.), resides in Oslo, Norway, Ph.D. thesis on “Alexandra
Mikhailovna Kollontai; the Scandinavian Period,” University of Minnesota, 1971.
Nick Hayes is a professor, author, and commentator for the media. He is currently
working on his next book, “Looking for Leningrad: My Soviet Life,” a collection
of his memoirs, personal essays, and profiles of figures in Soviet and post-Soviet
life from the late 1970s to the present. He is a Professor of History and holds the
University Chair in Critical Thinking at the College of Saint Benedict/Saint John’s
University in Minnesota.
Timothy J. Johnson is Curator of Special Collections and Rare Books, and the E.
W. McDiarmid Curator of the Sherlock Holmes Collections, at the University of
Minnesota. His publications include chapters in the following volumes: Amicus Dei:
Essays on Faith and Friendship (1992), Swedish American Life in Chicago: Cultural
and Urban Aspects of an Immigrant People (1992), Managing the Mystery Collection:
From Creation to Consumption (2006), Cabinet of Curiosities: Mark Dion and the
University as Installation (2006).
Kostas K azazis taught linguistics at the University of Chicago for thirty-five years.
His course list included “Afrikaans for Linguists,” “Albanian,” “Ancient Greek,”
“Estonian,” “History of the English Language,” “Italian,” “Modern Greek,” and
“Rumanian.” He studied political science at the University of Lausanne. In 1959,
he completed an M.A. in political science, from the University of Kansas, with “An
Inquiry into the Problem of American Recognition of the Soviet Government.” He
began formal training in linguistics at Indiana University, where he earned a Ph.D.
with a dissertation on “Some Balkan Constructions Corresponding to the Western
European Infinitive.” On the day he died he was studying Japanese.
John R. Lampe is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Maryland and a

Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His books
include Balkans into Southeastern Europe, 1914–2014 (2nd ed., 2014) and Yugoslavia
as History: Twice There Was a Country (2nd ed., 2000). He coauthored with Marvin
Jackson From Imperial Borderlands to Developing Nations (1982), which won
the first annual Wayne S. Vucinich Prize from the American Association for the
Advancement of Slavic Studies.
Stanford Lehmberg taught British History at the University of Texas at Austin from
1956 to 1969, when he moved to the University of Minnesota. His books include
The Reformation Parliament, 1529–1536 (1970), The Reformation of Cathedrals:
Cathedrals in English Society, 1485–1603 (1988), The Peoples of the British Isles,
from Prehistoric Times to 1688 (1991), and Cathedrals under Siege: Cathedrals in
English Society, 1600–1700 (1996).
Peter Mackridge is Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek at the University of Oxford.

His books include The Modern Greek Language (1985), Dionysios Solomos (1989), and
Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976 (2009). He has cowritten two
grammars of Modern Greek and coedited Ourselves and Others: The Development
of a Greek Macedonian Cultural Identity since 1912 (1997) and Contemporary Greek
Fiction in a United Europe: From Local History to the Global Individual (2004). He
has translated The History of Western Philosophy in 100 Haiku by Haris Vlavianos
(2015) as well as stories by Vizyenos, Papadiamandis, and Yorgos Ioannou.
Donald E. Martin has taught Classical languages and literatures for forty years
at Rockford University and has translated several works by George Theotokas and
Georges Philippou-Pierides.
John A. Mazis is Professor of History at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota.

He is the author of The Greeks of Odessa: Diaspora Leadership in Late Imperial
Russia (2004) and A Man for All Seasons: The Uncompromising Life of Ion Dragoumis
(2015).
Aaron N. Michaelson completed his Ph.D. dissertation in history titled “The Russian
Orthodox Missionary Society, 1870–1917: A Study of Religious and Educational
Enterprise” (1999) at the University of Minnesota.
Matthew Lee Miller is Associate Professor of History at the University of Northwestern

in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of The American YMCA and Russian Culture:
The Preservation and Expansion of Orthodox Christianity, 1900–1940 (2013). His
most recent publications are “The American YMCA and Russian Politics: Critics and
Supporters of Socialism, 1900–1940,” in William Benton Whisenhunt and Norman
E. Saul, eds., New Perspectives on Russian-American Relations (2015) and “Eastern
Christianity in the Twin Cities: The Churches of Minneapolis and St. Paul, 1989–
2014,” Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 30/31 (2014/2015).
K arl F. Morrison is Gotthold Lessing Professor of History and Poetics, Emeritus, at

Rutgers University. He has published studies on Western medieval intellectual history
and wider-ranging, interdisciplinary investigations on such subjects as conversion,
the art of interpretation (hermeneutics), and empathy.
J. K im Munholland is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Minnesota.

He is the author of Origins of Contemporary Europe, 1890–1914 (1970) and Rock of
Contention: Free French and Americans at War in New Caledonia (2005). His essays
include “The French Army and Intervention in Southern Russia, 1918–1919,” Cahiers
du monde russe et soviétique 22, 1 (1981) and “The French Colonial Mind and the
Challenge of Islam: The Case of Ernest Psichari,” in Martin Thomas, ed., The French
Colonial Mind (2009).
Norma Noonan is Professor Emerita of Political Science and Leadership Studies at

Augsburg College. She is the coeditor and coauthor of Russian Women in Politics
and Society (1996), Encyclopedia of Russian Women’s Movements (2001), Emerging
Powers in Comparative Perspective: The Political and Economic Rise of the BRIC
Countries (2013), and Challenge and Change: Global Threats and the State in 21st-
Century International Politics (2016).
Thomas S. Noonan was an American historian, Slavicist, and anthropologist who

specialized in early Russia history and Eurasian nomad cultures. Educated at Indiana
University, Noonan was, for many years, a Professor of History at the University of
Minnesota. He was the author of dozens of books and articles and one of the leading
authorities on the development of the Kievan Rus´ and the Khazar Khaganate.
Stanley G. Payne is Hilldale-Jaume Vicens Vives Professor of History Emeritus at

the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of some twenty books on
Spanish and modern European history, most recently (with Jesus Palacios) Franco:
A Personal and Political Biography (2014), Niceto Alcala-Zamora y el fracaso de la
Republica conservadora (2016), and El camino al dieciocho de julio (2016).
Theophilus C. Prousis is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North

Florida in Jacksonville. His books include Russian Society and the Greek Revolution
(1994), Russian-Ottoman Relations in the Levant: The Dashkov Archive (2002),
British Consular Reports from the Ottoman Levant in an Age of Upheaval, 1815–1830
(2008), and Lord Strangford at the Sublime Porte: The Eastern Crisis, 3 vols. (2010–
14), a multivolume collection of British embassy documents from Constantinople in
the early 1820s. He is currently completing the last volume of the Strangford quartet.
John L. Scherer taught at the University of Minnesota, the University of Iowa, the
University of South Florida, and the College of Visual Arts of St. Paul, MN. He
published widely as an independent scholar on Soviet and Russian history and in
recent years he wrote on terrorism. His last published piece was a book called China
and the World: 200 Country Reports (2011), available on Kindle.
Susannah Lockwood Smith is Managing Director of the Institute for Advanced

Study at the University of Minnesota, a position she has held since the Institute
was established in 2005. She is the author of “From Peasants to Professionals: The
Socialist-Realist Transformation of a Russian Folk Choir,” Kritika: Explorations in
Russian and Eurasian History 3, 3 (2002). She is also featured on the recordings
Sayuk: Together in Harmony (Indonesian Performing Arts Association of Minnesota,
2007) and The Face of the Deep (Book of Sand, Mouthbreaker Records, 2014).
Carol Urness is Professor Emerita at the University of Minnesota, where she was
the Curator of the James Ford Bell Library. Her academic specialty is Russian
expansion across Siberia to America. Her most recent book in history is The Journal
of Midshipman Chaplin: A Record of Bering’s First Kamchatka Expedition, with
Peter Ulf Møller, Tatiana Fedorova, and Viktor Sedov (2010).
Peter Weisensel is Professor Emeritus of History at Macalester College, St. Paul,

Minnesota. He has worked extensively on Russian connections with the Levant. His
publications include Russian Travelers to the Christian East from the Twelfth to the
Twentieth Century (1985), an annotated bibliography, coauthored with Theofanis G.
Stavrou, and Prelude to the Great Reforms: Avraam Sergeevich Norov and Imperial
Russia in Transition (1995). Currently his research focuses on the theme “Central
Asia through Russian Eyes.”

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Thresholds into the Orthodox Commonwealth

Bloomington, Indiana, 2017

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stavrou, Theofanis G., 1934- honouree. | Frary, Lucien J. editor.

Slavica Publishers [Tel.] 1-812-856-4186

In Praise of Ignorance ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 3

The Travels of Brand and Isband ��������������������������������������������������������������������� 23

Theofanis G. Stavrou: Bookman ����������������������������������������������������������������������� 35

Bridge-Building as Humanism and Scholarly Adventure ������������������������������� 45

Surviving Exile: Augustine of Hippo’s Version of Psalm 136

The Evergetian Motif in Russian Monastic Reform ����������������������������������������� 71

The Petrine Church Reform Revisited �������������������������������������������������������������� 91

A Russian Pilgrim in Ottoman Jerusalem ������������������������������������������������������ 101

Alexander Lycurgus, An Ecumenical Pioneer ������������������������������������������������ 127

The Septuagint Challenge to Russian Old Testament Translation:

Russian Interpretations of Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus ��������������������������������� 147

Between the Cross and the Eagle:

Recreation of Seventeenth-Century Tile Forms on

Matthew Lee Miller

Looking East: The American YMCA’s Interaction with

“Bolshevik Bishops” and the Russian Orthodox Mission in

Understanding Evangelical/Fundamentalist Approaches to

Greece and Cyprus

Alexander the Great’s Invincibility: Fact and Myth ��������������������������������������� 253

Psichari Father and Son: A Generation at Odds ��������������������������������������������� 265

George Seferis and the Prophetic Voice ���������������������������������������������������������� 281

Translation of George Philippou Pierides, “The Thoughts and

The Cyprus Question: International Politics and the Survival

Economic Reform and the Rise of Political Forces in Early

Using Humor to Cross the Greek Tu/Vous Line:

Poetry Translation Reviews Reviewed:

Russia and Eastern Europe

Khazaria, Kiev, and Constantinople in the

Preparations for Travel to St. Petersburg in

Battling Bishops in Catherine II’s Russia ������������������������������������������������������� 393

Europe’s Bellicose Periphery: Russia and the

The Greek Benevolent Association of Odessa (1871–1917):

Sir Arthur Evans in the Balkans: A Romantic Crusade ��������������������������������� 431

Identifying “the Asian” in Russian Colonial Writing:

“A Link with Time”: Anna Akhmatova’s Poetry for

Rethinking Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata and Dostoevsky’s

From Scylla to Charybdis: Discontent with Employment

Susannah Lockwood Smith

Folk in Soviet Music in the 1930s ������������������������������������������������������������������� 537

“The Soviet Experiment” and Women:

Back to the Future: A Modern Revival of Sixteenth-Century

The Barents Region: History Resurrected in Post-Soviet Europe ����������������� 599

BG: Conversations with Boris Grebenshchikov ��������������������������������������������� 611

Rethinking American Perspectives on Southeastern Europe ������������������������� 615

Writings of the Eighteenth-Century Archbishops of Canterbury ������������������ 627

Carlism and Nationalism ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 641

Islands as a State of Mind: Circuitous Reconnaissance ���������������������������������� 657

Pilgrimage, Connection, Community ������������������������������������������������������������� 675

The publication of this volume is the result of collaborative commitment, effort,

Below the dawn-flushed sky, where the green billow lies

The Origins of Folk Tales

Life should be lived in a mythopoeic sense, incorporating poetic imagination and

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

This little story is in honor of Professor Theofanis G. Stavrou, a teacher, an advisor,

ervation, cataloging and dissemination of post-1400 collections in Greek libraries and

Minnesota was represented by Mariann Tiblin, bibliographer in the Libraries’ Collec-

• Cleveland Public Library

experience.4 According to information available on the internet, the collection “was

Slavica Publishers [Tel.] 1-812-856-4186

In Praise of Ignorance �� 3

The Travels of Brand and Isband �� 23

Theofanis G. Stavrou: Bookman �� 35

Bridge-Building as Humanism and Scholarly Adventure �� 45

The Evergetian Motif in Russian Monastic Reform �� 71

The Petrine Church Reform Revisited �� 91

A Russian Pilgrim in Ottoman Jerusalem �� 101

Alexander Lycurgus, An Ecumenical Pioneer �� 127

Russian Interpretations of Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus �� 147

Alexander the Great’s Invincibility: Fact and Myth �� 253

Psichari Father and Son: A Generation at Odds �� 265

George Seferis and the Prophetic Voice �� 281

Battling Bishops in Catherine II’s Russia �� 393

Sir Arthur Evans in the Balkans: A Romantic Crusade �� 431

Folk in Soviet Music in the 1930s �� 537

The Barents Region: History Resurrected in Post-Soviet Europe �� 599

BG: Conversations with Boris Grebenshchikov �� 611

Rethinking American Perspectives on Southeastern Europe �� 615

Writings of the Eighteenth-Century Archbishops of Canterbury �� 627

Carlism and Nationalism �� 641

Islands as a State of Mind: Circuitous Reconnaissance �� 657

Pilgrimage, Connection, Community �� 675