THE RUSSIAN PARTITION 631843, after ten years in an office whose aim, as he saw it, was to turn the Tsar's
subjects 'into worthy tools of the government', Uvarov surveyed the achieve-
ments of the decade in a report to the Tsar:
In the midst of the rapid collapse in Europe of religious and civil institutions, and at a
time of the general spread of destructive ideas ... it has been necessary to establish our
Fatherland on firm foundations, on which the well-being, strength, and life of the people
can be based. It has been necessary to find those principles which form the distinctive
character of Russia, and which belong only to Russia: to gather into one whole the sacred
remnants of Russian Nationality and to fasten them to the anchor of our salvation.
Fortunately, Russia has retained a warm faith in the sacred principles without which she
cannot prosper, gain in strength, or live. Sincerely and deeply attached to the Church of
his fathers, the Russian has traditionally considered it to be the history guarantor of
social and family happiness. Without a love for the faith of its ancestors, a people, no less
than an individual, must perish. A Russian devoted to his Fatherland, will agree as little
to the loss of single dogma of our Orthodoxy as to the theft of a single pearl of the Tsar's
Crown. Autocracy constitutes the main condition of Russia's political condition. The
Russian giant stands on it, as on the cornerstone of his greatness... Together with these
two principles, there is a third, no less important, no less powerful: the principle of
Nationality...^2
For his services, Uvarov was made a count, and received the words 'ORTHO-
DOXY, AUTOCRACY, NATIONALITY' as his heraldic motto. But his ideas
were far from original. They were a reformulation in more glowing terms of
principles which had existed in Russia long before him, and which were to sur-
vive long afterwards.
The principle of Orthodoxy was derived from the special position given to
Orthodox Christianity in the Russian political system. In Muscovite days, when
the native population was overwhelmingly Great Russian and Orthodox, the
Church had not been identified completely with the state. But in the later seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, when large non-Russian and non-Orthodox
communities were being absorbed, the Church was consciously turned into a
department of state and used as an agency of political coercion. A religion which
had traditionally stressed the virtues of calm, contemplation, and tolerance, was
systematically perverted, and put to work in the interests of uniformity and
non-toleration. Indeed, its own code of spiritual submissiveness made it an easy
victim to the designs of political manipulators, whilst the deep and mystical
piety which permeated the highest circles of Court and bureaucracy, caused its
most fervent adherents to be genuinely offended by the incidence of religious
plurality. From 1721, when the old Patriarchate was abolished, the supreme
organ of the Church, the Most Holy Synod, was directly subordinated to the
Tsar, and to the Tsar's Ober-Prokurator. Henceforth, the purposes of God and
Eternity were inextricable from those of the Russian Empire. Religious dissent
was equated with treason. Stubborn schismatics or recalcitrant atheists were to
be struck down and rooted out in the name of Charity, not merely as heretics,