There is an excellent fairly recent study (2021) of the career and works of Konstantin Pobedonostsev that deserves attention from those interested in populist Christian conservatism, in Russian cultural history, and in Russian Orthodox Christianity.

Reflections on a Russian Statesman: The Populist Conservatism of Konstantin Pobedonostsev, by Thomas Calnan Sorenson, is a self-published book based on a 1970s-era Ph.D. dissertation that Sorenson (now a minister in the United Church of Christ) did in history with the late Donald Treadgold, a prominent Russian historian. Sorenson spent a year in Moscow and then-Leningrad researching Russian-language archives and writings related to the topic.

It far out-shines (although also supplements) the one other English-language study on this topic, Pobedonostsev: His Life and Thought, by Robert E. Byrnes (1968).

Below is an interview with the author of the newer study.

Pobedonostsev, like on a larger scale Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II whom he tutored, has been caricatured, largely as filtered through Soviet propaganda, as a villainous reactionary, while his actual work is virtually unknown today, and likewise differs significantly from the stereotype.

Sorenson’s book restores much of the nuance and complexity to Pobedonostsev’s thinking, which he demonstrates bears fascinating analogies to that of the English conservative Edmund Burke, influenced as the Russian thinker was by writers of the German historicist legal school and by Thomas Carlyle, who all bore parallels to Burke and in Carlyle’s case a direct influence.

Pobedonostsev, a legal scholar, ended up serving as Over-Procurator for the Russian Orthodox Church (an important national administrative office dating back to Peter the Great’s “reforms”), but also earlier had authored the important “Autocratic Manifesto” of Tsar Alexander III (as distinct from The Communist Manifesto!), resisting further Western-style liberalization of Russia.

He presented a dichotomy between Russian “society” (based in St. Petersburg), the obschestvennost of what in modern America might be called the “chattering classes” or cultural elite, and the narod or people (in Americanese the “silent majority” or “deplorables” perhaps!). My own take is that for Pobedonostsev the latter overlapped with the Russian sense of sobornost or mystical unity in the Church.

In any case, Pobedonostsev saw that for non-intellectual and non-abstract people, life was an intuitive experience of lived tradition, akin to what the American Anglican philosopher Charles Peirce called “abduction,” or the hunch mixing the inductive and deductive. That in turn parallels aspects of what Edmund Burke called the “sublime,” an embodied sense of a mix of terror and joy standing on the edge of experience of a larger sense of life overlapping into the personal.

Burke, as a crypto-Catholic Anglo-Irish thinker, and Pobedonostsev as a Russian Orthodox thinker in an intellectual culture where that faith involved (in late imperial Russia) virtually assured cancellation, shared common allegiance to what Burke called the prejudice and prescription of tradition–its value above abstract thinking, in his view. Burke was the most famous intellectual opponent of the French Revolution, which he identified with murderous ideology in a way similar to Pobedonostsev’s likewise correct view of revolutionary movements in Russia (which also marked the Russian writer’s kinship to Dostoevsky). Yet Burke was also a supporter of the American Revolution because he saw it as in line with Anglo-Saxon traditions of community, and Pobedonostsev likewise supported the ending of serfdom, whose systematic spread had been part of the influence of the remnants of Western feudalism on Russia (although Pobedonostsev also disagreed with the manner in which the end of serfdom had been handled).

Pobedonostsev, like Dostoevsky, accepted aspects of the Petrine Reforms in Russia, even while holding to aspects of Slavophile philosophy, and they shared a distaste for Westernization (which ironically had included Pobedonostsev’s position as Over-Procurator as well as the serfdom whose end he celebrated). In this they both reflected the “Back to the Soil” movement in Russia more than the unadulterated “Slavophile” movement, viewing Western influence as a type of soul-dstroying colonialism that required strategic resistance. In terms of the Church, Pobedonostsev’s care extended to the significant development of an important system of parish schools to raise literacy levels in Russia and encourage a more informed and deeper sense of faith, even as he felt the time had not yet come for a Church Council to re-establish the Patriarchate dissolved by Peter, given the revolutionary rumblings that he and Dostoevsky saw clearly and warned against. (In a sense, his attitude seemed to track what on the secular level in America has been caution among some conservatives with calling a new constitutional convention as a vehicle for getting the ideal of limited republican and federalist government re-established, due to concerns about it getting hijacked by revolutionary elements here.)

In the end, the Russian Patriarch of Moscow was re-established in the Church in 1917, after the atheist Bolshevik takeover of the country, about a decade after Pobedonostsev had left office and following his death. Patriarch-Confessor Tikhon bravely stood against Communism and was hounded to death, and then the Patriarchate lay fallow, despite its formal restoration during World War II by a Stalin desperate for religious support against the Nazis, only to flower again after the collapse of Communism.

Pobedonostsev’s work can be studied in tandem with Dostoevsky’s novels and journalism. Both were influenced by Tsar Nicholas I and his administration’s upholding of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality,” a slogan developed by his Education minister Sergey Uvarov. Dostoevsky as a young man had been a radical writer who nonetheless, from a lower middle-class background, was uncomfortable with other revolutionary hipsters. Apprehended for circulating what the tsarist regime considered seditious literary material, Dostoevsky was sentenced to death by Nicholas I in an elaborate charade that ended in a reprieve traumatically and years of imprisonment and Army service. Yet Dostoevsky, who renewed his Christian faith on the way, saw this as a necessary corrective personally. Pobedonostsev less dramatically excelled at legal studies and helped developed technical aspects of Tsar Alexander II’s legal reforms, while opposing the liberalism surrounding them, an attitude shared by Dostoevsky as seen in the great courtroom scenes of the latter’s novels. Dostoevsky published articles by Pobedonostsev in a journal he edited, and Pobedonostev commented positively on his development of The Brothers Karamazov. Both men helped tutor members of the royal family.

Pobedonostev as he aged became known for a frosty style, according to the Russian philosopher Konstantin Leontʹiev (1831–1891), who wrote in a letter: “He is a helpful person; but how? It is like frost: it prevents further rotting, but nothing will grow with it. He is not only not a creator, but not even a reactionary, not a restorer, not a reconstructor, he is only a conservative in the closest sense of the word; frost, I say, a watchman, an airless tomb, an old ‘innocent’ girl and nothing more!!” (Letter to T.I. Filip’ev, Pamiati K.N.Leont’eva [Remembering K.N.Leont’ev], Saint Petersburg, 1911; translated here).

But, more substantively, the Pobedonostev-Dostoevsky approach to populist Christian conservatism from an Orthodox standpoint is often missed by Western commentators fixated on Catholic and Anglican conservatism, represented by Joseph de Maistre (himself influenced by his experience of Russia) and Burke respectively. However, Orthodox Christian tradition drew on a different Byzantine civilizational zone, including its distinctive emphasis on sobornost (related to Orthodox theology of the uncreated energies or grace as the source of natural law), and the symphonia of Church and state, their harmonizing rather than the Caesaro-papist model seen in different ways in Anglicanism and Catholicism, by which the ecclesiastical spirit transferred into the secular administrative state, claiming the mantle of “divine right” of rule atheistically. The Orthodox mystical unity of hierarchy and conciliarity in the uncreated grace of sobornost helps explain the different emphasis of the “Dostoevsky-Pobedonostev school” from the Western “divine right of kings” conservatism that translated into a rationalistic sense of natural law. “Blood and soil” and “altar and throne” in the West, from an Orthodox perspective, morphed into the technocracy of globalism’s neocolonialist administrative state (entwining the “public” and “private” realms). Reading up on Pobedonostsev and Dostoevsky’s views may help illumine that “multipolar” perspective on conservatism.

In any case, Sorenson’s study provides a fresh view of an often neglected aspect of what is really more a traditional than a conservative vision of human life, in Russian Orthodox culture, as articulated separately and relatedly by Pobedonostsev and Dostoevsky shortly before the disappearance of imperial Russia, seen by many Orthodox Christians as the “third Rome” or heir to the hidden Christian legacy of Byzantium. This “non-Western” take differs from Rev. Sorenson’s emphasis on relating Pobedonostsev’s views to Western Burkean conservatism, but does not have to contradict it, in the sense of an overlapping sensibility of human community as organic, resistant to transhumanist systems today. From an Orthodox perspective, the system of Church government over which Pobedonostsev presided was flawed in a canonical sense; he was far from right in his especially older rigidity, perhaps most notably when he opposed the canonization of St. Seraphim of Sarov, on which the Tsar-Martyr rightly insisted; but at the same time he arguably drew on a rich vein of traditional thinking in Russia, which is often lost in the history written by the Communist victors.

Glory to God for all things!

Note: In addition to the Sorenson and Byrnes studies, an English translation of some of Pobedonostsev’s writings has been reprinted and is available on this link and in other editions.