Tolstoy’s spiritual rebellion, then, did not arise in a vacuum, and should be seen in this important socio-religious context. Unceasing expansion had made Russia an enormous multi-ethnic empire, and by the time of the 1897 Missionary Congress thirty per cent of its population were Muslim, Jewish or belonged to other faiths. Nevertheless, only the Orthodox Church was allowed to engage in missionary activities within the borders of the empire. The first two Missionary Congresses, held in Moscow in 1887 and 1891, had mostly focused on ways to corral the Old Believers into coming back into the fold of Orthodoxy, but the third, held in Kazan, had focused on countering the influence in Russia of sects and Bible-based Protestant and Evangelist denominations. These, it found, were on the increase, despite missionary work and government initiatives. Metropolitan Melety of Ryazan won support at the Congress with his proposal that sectarians should be deported to special camps in the Siberian tundra. He also proposed that their property should be confiscated, and their children removed.113 Only fear of widespread protests from Baptists abroad apparently prevented Nicholas II from making this official policy. Confident that the peasantry would never follow political revolutionaries, he was far more worried about evangelical Christians and figures like Tolstoy. The liberal newspaper Russian Gazette reported that the 200 bishops, priests and ecclesiastical figures at the 1897 Missionary Congress had classified Tolstoyanism as a sect like any other:
The Congress placed the religious-moral views of Count Lev Tolstoy amongst the new sectarian faiths, asserting that his followers made up a ‘fully formed sect’. Asserting also that this sect fully conformed to the definition of sects which were ‘particularly dangerous to the Church and the state’, the Congress resolved to ask the Holy Synod to propose to the government that the law established with regard to ‘particularly dangerous’ sects be applied to its adherents.114
Tolstoyanism was seen as all the more pernicious for its potential to appeal simultaneously to the educated elite and the peasantry, and the influence of Tolstoy’s ideas on Pyotr Verigin and the dukhobors shows the reality of this threat.
Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who had become Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod in 1880, a post which he held for twenty-five years, regarded Tolstoy as his arch-enemy. Tolstoy had first antagonised him by asking him to pass on the letter he wrote in 1881 to Alexander III, in which he asked for clemency for his father’s assassins. Convinced from the time of reading that letter (which he had refused to pass on), that Tolstoy was intent on bringing down the government, Pobedonostsev had led a vigorous campaign to silence his opponent. This had resulted in Tolstoy’s religious teachings being regularly denounced by Church figures, and the constant, and often intrusive, surveillance of his private life (even the Yasnaya Polyana priest was obliged to send reports to the Bishop of Tula).115 The ambitious son of a Moscow priest, who rose to become a professor of law before occupying the post of Procurator, Pobedonostsev was devoted to his duty. The wonderfully named Hermann von Samson-Himmelstierna provides a vivid thumbnail portrait of him in the history of Alexander III’s reign which he published in 1893:
There are two classes of fanatics, the cold and the hot – that is, fanatics from reflection and fanatics by temperament. It is easy to know to which Pobedonostsev belongs. His looks betray him. He is old and of a spare build, his nose is pointed, his eyes are keen and penetrating, he wears spectacles, his forehead is fringed with a few grey hairs, his face is clean-shaven, and his expression is keen.116
Both Pobedonostsev and Tolstoy, who were almost exact contemporaries, felt Russian society needed to be healed, but they certainly differed in their diagnosis of its ailments.
When Tolstoy fell ill at the end of 1899, while he was completing Resurrection, the Holy Synod decided first to ban all prayers in his memory after his death, anticipating that he might not have much longer to live. When he regained his health it then pressed on with its ill-conceived excommunication plan. In his zeal to shore up the foundations of the Orthodox Church, Pobedonostsev had long ago clamoured for Tolstoy to be excommunicated, but it was Metropolitan Antony of St Petersburg who now took the initiative, motivated by fears that even the clergy might succumb to Tolstoyanism. There was some justification for this. In 1898 Grigory Petrov, a charismatic young priest in St Petersburg, had published a book called The Gospel as the Foundation of Life which focused on the Tolstoyan idea of the practical application of Christianity in everyday living; it went into twenty editions. In early February 1901 Petrov was reprimanded by Metropolitan Antony for discussing Tolstoy in a positive light at a meeting of the Religious-Philosophical Society: he had declared that Tolstoy was doing for Russian society what Virgil had done for dante, by leading people who had lost their way spiritually out of purgatory.117 The process to excommunicate Tolstoy was initiated the next day, and was announced ten days later. Nicholas II was apparently angry not to have been asked for his approval beforehand, and Pobedonostsev was forced to apologise.118
Metropolitan Antony had actually been keen to act earlier, so that the Synod’s edict could be announced on 18 February, which was the first Sunday of Great Lent. Until 1869 it had been traditional to pronounce an annual anathema in church against enemies of the state on the first Sunday of Lent, just before the ‘Victory of Orthodoxy’ week, and no doubt the Church would have liked to include Tolstoy in its roster of heretics at least in memory of the traditional proclamation:
To those who do not believe that the Orthodox monarchs have been raised to the throne by virtue of a special grace of God – and that, at the moment the sacred oil is laid on them, the gifts of the Holy Ghost are infused into them anent the accomplishment of their exalted mission; and to those who dare to rise and rebel against them, such as Grisha Otrepev, Ivan Mazeppa, and others like them: Anathema! Anathema! Anathema!119
Back in 1837 the German travel writer J. G. Kohl had the chance to witness the ‘cursing of the heretics’ first-hand at the Kazan Cathedral in St Petersburg, and so many believers wanted to attend, he claimed, that police had to be called to keep order. He described it as ‘the most extraordinary, incomprehensible, and terrible service of the Eastern Church’, the only one where cursing could be heard in a country where the people were generally more inclined to bless nearly everything:
The anathematizing began with a long service, with singing, reading, opening and shutting of doors; lighting of tapers, and burning of incense; coming and going, &c … [The Venerable Metropolitan] stepped forward and called down anathemas upon a number of people; on the false demetrius, on Boris Godunoff, Mazeppa, Stenka Razin and Pugatsheff; and after these political heretics followed the religious ones, but they were only mentioned in general terms. Each person or class was first characterized by a few introductory words, their names pronounced, and then followed two or three times, like thunder after lightning, the word: anafema, anafema …120