39 The Society for the Restoration of OrthodoxyChristians who fell away from the faith were those who neglected
their tradition, which was the unforgivable sin of the western half of
the Roman Empire. Latin Christians, wrote Khomiakov, were the
“schismatics” whose deviant tenets, practices, and popes were fol-
lowed by the continuing disintegration fostered by Luther and Calvin
at the Reformation, when every individual took it upon himself to de-
fine the faith “according to his own taste.”^4
The Slavophiles were profoundly critical of foreign borrowing and
“imitation” (podrazhanie), which left them in an antagonistic relation-
ship to the Petrine state and its Westernized nobility. Because Peter
the Great “destroyed a lot that he shouldn’t have touched,” as
Khomiakov put it, and saddled Russians with a “foreign way of look-
ing at things,” in the words of Iurii Samarin, contemporary educated
Russians hardly recognized their own indigenous cultural past.^5 The
situation was not hopeless, however. The eastern half of the empire
outlasted the Latin West, and Russia was its heir. In depicting the col-
lapse of the vast and powerful Roman Empire in the West as a prod-
uct of spiritual weakness rather than military disintegration in the
face of Germanic tribes, Khomiakov must have also had in mind the
expansive but secular empire founded by Peter the Great and his suc-
cessors.^6 The contrasting endurance of Byzantium was not a product
of favourable physical geography or commercial networks but was
“purely spiritual” and a “fruit of its previous spiritual life.”^7 “The
East was for centuries rich in intellectual and original [samobytnoiu]
activity.”^8 This contrast was also emphasized strongly in the polemi-
cal “Letter to the Serbs, sent from Moscow,” signed by Khomiakov
along with Mikhail Pogodin, Iurii Samarin, Konstantin and Ivan
Aksakov, and others. “The spiritual pride of the Greeks corresponds
to the intellectual pride of all the western people,” the Russians told
the Serbs.^9 “Christianity was transformed into an institute [in the
West],” while genuine personal belief endured in the East.^10
Russia as the heir to Byzantine Christianity also seemed to inherit
the historic struggle with Islam. The preservation of the past and the
respect for tradition and “originality,” mixed with a dose of Greek
pride, recounted Khomiakov, allowed the Byzantine Greeks to fortify
themselves in the struggle with the “Muslim conquerors.”^11 Khomia-
kov’s depiction of the deleterious impact of the Mongol invasions
upon Russian historical development was hardly unique, of course,
but his continuing hostility to the “remnants of the former Tatar
power” had disturbing temporary implications.^12 Ivan the Terrible’s
taking of Kazan and Astrakhan in 1552 was a moment of “glory” for
Russia: “Russia took for itself all of the Volga, seized the Muslim tsar-
doms, and extended its hand to its fellow Christian believers in