RUSSIA AND THE BALKANS - Autocracy, despotism and democracy

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Autocracy, despotism and democracy
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bet | 17/46 | Sana | 01.04.2020 | Hajmi | 1,31 Mb. | | #9514 |
32. RUSSIA AND THE BALKANS
For both religious and historical reasons, Russia could never remain indifferent to, or detached from, events in the Balkans. In the tenth century Russia received her Orthodox faith from the Greeks of the New Rome of Constantinople. For nearly five hundred years, until the council of Florence in 1438-39 and the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the rulers of Russia, although de facto independent of, and much more powerful than, the Byzantine Emperor, considered themselves de jure only junior partners of the Emperor, while the huge Russian Church remained only a single metropolitan district of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. After the fall of Constantinople, the Balkan Slavs and Greeks looked to the Russians as potential liberators from the Turkish yoke, and in 1562 Tsar Ivan IV received a gramota from the Ecumenical Patriarch Joasaph calling him “our Tsar”, ascribing to him authority over “Orthodox Christians in the entire universe”, and applying to him the same epithets, “pious, God-crowned and Christ-loving” as had been applied to the Byzantine Emperors. Moscow “the Third Rome” been born…
The idea of the Third Rome has been subjected to much mockery and revilement as if it were just an excuse for nationalist ambition. But exactly the reverse is true: in acknowledging themselves to be the successors of the Byzantines, “the Second Rome”, the Russians took upon themselves an internationalist obligation: to fight for the protection of all Orthodox Christians throughout the inhabited world. This involved, on the one hand, defensive wars against aggressive powers that invaded her territory from the west, such as the Swedes, the Germans, the Poles and the French. On the other hand, since most non-Russian Orthodox lived within, or within the orbit of, the major Muslim powers of Ottoman Turkey and Persia, it also involved almost continuous war along her southern frontiers and, in some cases – Georgia, for example - the annexation of the threatened Orthodox land in order to protect it from the Muslims. In all cases, it involved the shedding of Russians’ blood for their fellow Orthodox Christians with no real gain for Russia, as in the liberation of Bulgaria from the Turks in 1877. To a large extent the history of Russia from the fifteenth century onwards can be seen as a slow, painful but inexorable advance to the fulfilment of the ideal of Christian Rome: the liberation of all fellow Orthodox Christians living under the yoke of heretical or pagan rulers.
The cost was enormous. It has been calculated that, quite apart from losses in terms of men killed, Russians taken into slavery by the Turks from the 15th to the 18th century inclusive numbered between three and five million, while the population of the whole of Russia in the time of Ivan the Terrible (16th century) numbered less than five million souls.380 And yet losses of men killed or driven into slavery abroad were only the beginning of the cost. Both the institution of serfdom, which so upset the liberals, and that of military service from youth until (virtually) death, were the results, not of the despotic cruelty of the tsars, but of sheer military necessity...
If the western nations’ cynical attitude to Russian expansion was only to be expected, it was less to be expected, and harder to take, from the very Balkan Orthodox who benefited from this expansion through the gradual weakening of Ottoman power. None of them saw in Russia “the Third Rome”, and so none of them felt obliged to coordinate their political and military initiatives with Russia, as the leader of the Orthodox world. Paradoxically, this was especially the case after the Russian advance to the gates of Constantinople and the Congress of Berlin in 1878, whose results, while in general galling to the Orthodox, and especially to Russia and Bulgaria, nevertheless established Serbia and Romania as independent states with increased territories.
The main problem with the Treaty of Berlin from the point of view of the Balkan Orthodox was that Austria-Hungary gained a protectorate in Bosnia, which infuriated the Serbs, and greater influence in the region as a whole. The Hungarian Foreign Minister, Count Julius Andrassy, was fearful of Russia and had already tried, in earlier years, to draw Serbia away from the Russian sphere of influence. Now he employed bribery – the offer of increased territory for Serbia in the south-east, at Bulgaria’s expense, - to draw Serbia into dependence on Austria.
As Ian Armour writes, Andrassy “would only promote Serbia's territorial claims at the Congress if [the Serbian Prime Minister] Ristic accepted his conditions. These were formalised in a preliminary convention on July 8th, 1878: Serbia agreed to complete a railway line to its southern frontier within three years; and to conclude a commercial treaty with the Monarchy.
“The realisation of these goals took somewhat longer. The railway treaty, for instance, came a year and a half later, largely because Ristic had to overcome heavy opposition in the national assembly. This was due to the understandable fear that, if Serbia were connected by rail to Austria-Hungary in advance of the commercial treaty, it would rapidly be made totally dependent on exports to the Monarchy. The railway convention was nevertheless ratified in the course of 1880.
“With the commercial treaty the determination of the Austro-Hungarian government to bend Serbia to its will became painfully apparent. Andrassy by this time had stepped down as foreign minister, but his successor, Baron Haymerle, was a colourless Austrian diplomat groomed in the Andrassy stable; and, as his right-hand man in the foreign ministry, Haymerle had the Hungarian, Kallay. Ristic's attempts to wriggle out of the terms they wanted now prompted Haymerle and Kallay to activate Austria-Hungary's secret weapon – Prince Milan. By threatening economic reprisals they had little difficulty in winning over the Austrophile Milan, and Ristic was forced to resign in October 1880.
“The commercial treaty was thus signed on May 6th, 1881. By this instrument, Austria-Hungary was given what amounted to preferential treatment in Serbia: the treaty assured Serbian produce of a readier market in the Monarchy, but it also ensured the domination of the Serbian market by Austro-Hungarian manufactured goods. The overall effect was to stunt Serbia's economic growth for a generation. With the trade treaty went an even subtler form of control, a veterinary convention. Livestock, especially pigs, were Serbia's principal export, and the country possessed no processing plant of its own. Almost all these animals marched to their fate in Austria-Hungary. The veterinary convention contained a 'swine fever clause', which enabled the Monarchy to close the Hungarian frontier to Serbian oxen and swine on the slightest suspicion of infection. It was a powerful lever, to which the Austro-Hungarian government was to resort nine times between 1881 and 1906.
“The final touch was the secret political treaty of June 28th, 1881. This showed the extent to which the Hungarians' paranoia about Russian influence in Serbia had become the stock-in-trade of Habsburg policy since the Ausgleich [the creation of the Dual Monarchy in 1867]. As Haymerle put it to the Serbian foreign minister during the negotiations, 'we could not tolerate such a Serbia on our frontier, and we would, as a lesser evil, occupy it with our armies'. The treaty bound Serbia not to tolerate 'political, religious or other intrigues... against the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy', including Bosnia. It obliged both states to observe benevolent neutrality if either was involved in war with a third party. Most startlingly, Serbia undertook, in Article IV, neither 'to negotiate nor conclude any political treaty with another government', unless Austria-Hungary approved…”381
These restrictions grated on the increasing national feeling of the Serbs… Nevertheless, the international recognition of the independence of Serbia and Romania (with increased territory), together with the virtual independence of Bulgaria (even if shorn of much of her territory), was something to rejoice at. The Balkan Orthodox could now look forward to final liberation from the old enemy, Turkey, in the not so distant future. The question was: could they unite into some kind of federation or commonwealth that would bring that joyful event forward, and perhaps also help to reduce the power and influence of their other old enemy, Austria-Hungary?
There were several possibilities. One was “Yugoslavism”, a federation of Slavic peoples stretching from the Croats in the West to the Bulgarians in the East, in which Serbia would serve as the geographical core and magnet, “the Piedmont of the South Slavs”. Of course, this presupposed the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which Russia had opposed in 1848 even while rescuing the Habsburg Slavs from the Hungarian counter-revolution.
Another was “Illyrianism” – that is, Yugoslavism without Bulgaria, Surprisingly, perhaps, in view of later, twentieth-century century history, there were many Catholic Croats and Slovenes – including the famous Catholic Bishop and opponent of papal infallibility, Strossmaier - who were enthusiastic about joining such a State. The Bulgarians were not part of this idea because of their frequent wars with Serbia over Macedonia.
A third possibility was Great Serbia, the union of all the South Slavs, including those in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but excluding Bulgaria under the Serbian king.382
In the long term, however, what mattered most was not the precise form of the relationship between the South Slav states as how truly Orthodox the resultant unitary state or confederation of states would be. And here the signs were not encouraging.
First of all, a truly Orthodox state required or a strong “symphony” between King and Church. But this was nowhere to be found in the Balkans, imbued as the region was increasingly becoming with western ideas of democracy and constitutionalism. Moreover, both Romania and Bulgaria were ruled by Catholic Germans imposed on them by the great powers, while the Greek King George was Lutheran – and there could be no symphony between them and the Orthodox Church. Thus Protopriest Benjamin Zhukov writes: “In Austria-Hungary the Orthodox Serbs and Romanians did not pray for their emperor Franz-Joseph, who was not Orthodox. In exactly the same way the names of King George, a Lutheran, and King Ferdinand, a Catholic, were not commemorated in Orthodox Greece and Bulgaria. Instead their Orthodox heirs to the throne were commemorated. This attitude to the authorities sometimes led to conflict with them. Thus in 1888 the Bulgarian Synod was dismissed by Ferdinand of Coburg, and the members of the Synod were expelled by gendarmes from the capital because they refused to offer prayer in the churches for the Catholic prince, who had offended the Orthodox Church by many of his actions. After this the government did not allow the Synod to assemble for six years…”383
Serbia was the only Balkan state ruled by native Orthodox kings – but they had the unfortunate habit of being killed by rival dynastic factions…
Another major problem was the disunity among the Orthodox Balkan states, especially over Macedonia, where Serbs, Bulgars and Greeks fought for possession of the minds, hearts and territories of the native inhabitants. Peace could have been achieved between them if they had recognized Russia as mediator in their quarrels. But nationalist pride would not allow any of them to recognize the Russian tsar as having the status of the Pan-Orthodox Emperor.
The indiscipline of the Balkan Orthodox was illustrated in 1885, when a band of rebels seized control of Plovdiv, capital of Eastern Rumelia, thereby violating one of the articles of the Treaty of Berlin. Prince Alexander von Battenburg of Bulgaria, who had been threatened with “annihilation” by a Macedonian secret society if he did not support the coup, promptly marched into Plovdiv (Philippopolis), took credit for the coup, and proclaimed himself the ruler of a united North and South Bulgaria. Now from a narrowly nationalist point of view, this was a triumph – one of the most galling decisions of the Treaty of Berlin had been reversed, and Bulgaria, though formally still not completely free of Ottoman suzerainty, was now de facto independent and united (if we exclude the disputed territories of Northern Dobrudja and Macedonia). However, from the point of view of the preservation of international peace, and still more of Pan-Orthodox unity, it was a disaster. The Bulgarians’ violation of the Treaty of Berlin gave the Turks – still a formidable military power – a good legal excuse to invade Bulgaria, which would have dragged the Russian armies back into the region only eight years after the huge and costly effort of 1877-78, which in turn may have dragged other great powers into a major European war.
Seeing the dangers, Tsar Alexander III, - who is not undeservedly called “the Peacemaker”, - decided not to support his irresponsible nephew, Prince Alexander, and to withdraw the Russian officers from the army of his ungrateful ally. This was undoubtedly the right decision, but it cost him much - both in terms of an estrangement between Russia and Bulgaria, and in terms of his discomfiture at the hands of the British, who cynically decided to support the coup…
But this was not the end of the sorry story. The Serbian King Milan now invaded Bulgaria, boasting that he was going “on a stroll to Sofia”.384 Barbara Jelavich explains why this conflict took place: “Since the unified Bulgarian state would be larger and more populous than Serbia, Milan felt that he was entitled to compensation. He thus launched an attack in November 1885. Despite widely held convictions that the Bulgarian army, deprived of its higher officers by the Russian withdrawal, would be crushed, it in fact defeated the invaders. The Habsburg Empire had to intercede to save Milan. Peace was made on the basis of the maintenance of the former boundaries; Serbia had to accept the Bulgarian unification. The entire episode was an enormous blow to the king’s prestige.”385
All this was caused by the Balkan States’ refusal to accept the leadership of Russia, “the Third Rome”. This was, regrettably, to be expected of the Romanians, who resented the Russians’ possession of Southern Bessarabia, and were always fearful of a return of the Russian protectorate. And it was to be expected of the Greeks, who accused the Russians, absurdly, of “Pan-Slavism”, and who in any case were dreaming of a resurrection of Byzantium… But it was less expected of the Slavic states, who, proud of their newly acquired independence, decided to have completely independent – that is, egoistic, shortsighted and foolish - foreign policies that completely ignored the existence of the “batyushka-tsar” to the north, who alone, among Orthodox leaders, had the interests of the Orthodox Christian commonwealth as a whole at heart. Their behaviour confirmed Leontiev’s thesis that there was little to choose between Greek and Slavic nationalism. And their failure to work more than intermittently with Russia was to lead to the most disastrous consequences over the next seventy years…
33. VLADIMIR SOLOVIEV
The philosopher Vladimir Soloviev was, for good and for ill, the most influential thinker in Russia until his death in 1900, and for some time after. In 1874, at the age of 23, he defended his master’s thesis, “The Crisis of Western Philosophy”, at the Moscow Theological Academy. Coming at a time when the influence of western positivism was at its peak, this bold philosophical vindication of the Christian faith drew the attention of many; and his lectures on Godmanhood in St. Petersburg were attended by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Unfortunately, his philosophy of “pan-unity” contained pantheistic elements; there is evidence that his lectures on Godmanhood were plagiarized from the works of Schelling386; and his theory of Sophia, the Wisdom of God, was both heretical in itself and gave birth to other heresies.387
As regards his social and political teaching, we find in Soloviev a mixture of Slavophilism and Westernism. On the one hand, he believed fervently, with the Slavophiles, in the Divine mission of Russia. But on the other, as we have seen, he was fiercely critical of the nationalism of the later Slavophiles, he admired Peter the Great and did not admire Byzantium. He felt drawn to Roman Catholic universalism and became an early “prophet” of Orthodox-Catholic ecumenism. The main problem with the Slavs and the Orthodox, Soloviev believed, was their nationalism. Thus in 1885 he wrote with regard to the Bulgarian schism: "Once the principle of nationality is introduced into the Church as the main and overriding principle, once the Church is recognized to be an attribute of the people, it naturally follows that the State power that rules the people must also rule the Church that belongs to the people. The national Church is necessarily subject to the national government, and in such a case a special church authority can exist only for show..."388
Generally speaking, Soloviev was most convincing and Orthodox in his earlier articles. Thus in “Three Forces” (1877), he identified three basic forces as having determined the whole of world history, which were at present incarnate especially in Islam, Democracy and the Orthodox Autocracy. Soloviev characterized Islam as being under the dominating influence of what he called the first force, which he defined as "the striving to subject humanity in all its spheres and at every level of its life to one supreme principle which in its exclusive unity strives to mix and confuse the whole variety of private forms, to suppress the independence of the person and the freedom of private life." Democracy he characterized as being under the dominating influence of the second force, which he defined as "the striving to destroy the stronghold of dead unity, to give freedom everywhere to private forms of life, freedom to the person and his activity; ... the extreme expression of this force is general egoism and anarchy and a multitude of separate individuals without an inner bond." The third force, which Soloviev believed was incarnate especially in the Slavic world, is defined as "giving a positive content to the two other forces, freeing them from their exclusivity, and reconciling the unity of the higher principle with the free multiplicity of private forms and elements."389
As N.O. Lossky writes, expounding Soloviev: “The relation between free theocracy and the past history of mankind can be established if we examine the ‘three fundamental forces’ which govern human evolution. One of these forces is centripetal: its purpose is to subordinate humanity to one supreme principle, to do away with all the manifoldness of particular forms, suppressing the freedom of personal life. The second force is centrifugal; it denies the importance of general unifying principles. The result of the exclusive action of the first force would be ‘one master and a dead multitude of slaves’: the extreme expression of the second force would be, on the contrary, ‘general egoism and anarchy, a multitude of separate units without any inner bond.’ The third force ‘lends the positive content to the first two, relieves them of their exclusiveness, reconciles the unity of the supreme principle with the free multiplicity of particular forms and elements and thus creates the wholeness of the universal human organism giving it a peaceful inner life.’
“’The third force, which is called upon to give the human evolution its absolute content, can only be a revelation of the higher divine world; the nation which is to manifest this force must only serve as an intermediary between mankind and the world and be its free and conscious instrument. Such a nation must not have any specific limited task; it is not called upon to work out the forms and elements of human existence, but only to impart a living soul, to give life and wholeness to disrupted and benumbed humanity through its union with the eternal divine principle. Such a people has no need for any special prerogatives, any particular powers or outward gifts, for it does not act of its own accord, it does not fulfil a task of its own. All that is required of the people which is the bearer of the third divine force is that it should be free from limitedness and one-sidedness, should elevate itself over the narrow specialized interests, that it should not assert itself with an exclusive energy in some particular lower sphere of activity and knowledge, that it should be indifferent to the whole of this life with its petty interests. It must wholly believe in the positive reality of the higher world and be submissive to it. These qualities undoubtedly belong to the racial character of the Slavs, and in particular to the national character of the Russian people.’
“Soloviev hopes, therefore, that the Slavs and especially Russia, will lay the foundations of a free theocracy. He also tries to prove this by the following arguments of a less general nature. ‘Our people’s outer form of a servant, Russia’s miserable position in the economic and other respects, so far from being an argument against her calling, actually confirms it. For the supreme power to which the Russian people has to introduce mankind is not of this world, and external wealth and order are of no moment for it. Russia’s great historical mission, from which alone her immediate tasks derive importance, is a religious mission in the highest sense of this word.’”390
Moving still more in a westernizing direction, Soloviev feared that Russia’s political ambitions in the Balkans and the Middle East were crudely imperialist and did not serve her own deepest interests, but rather the petty nationalisms of other nations. Thus in “The Russian Idea” (1888) he wrote: “The true greatness of Russia is a dead letter for our pseudo-patriots, who want to impose on the Russian people a historical mission in their image and in the limits of their own understanding. Our national work, if we are to listen to them, is something that couldn’t be more simple and that depends on one force only – the force of arms. To beat up the expiring Ottoman empire, and then crush the monarchy of the Habsburgs, putting in the place of these states a bunch of small independent national kingdoms that are only waiting for this triumphant hour of their final liberation in order to hurl themselves at each other. Truly, it was worth Russia suffering and struggling for a thousand years, and becoming Christian with St. Vladimir and European with Peter the Great, constantly in the meantime occupying its unique place between East and West, and all this just so as in the final analysis to become the weapon of the ‘great idea’ of the Serbs and the ‘great idea’ of the Bulgarians!
“But that is not the point, they will tell us: the true aim of our national politics is Constantinople. Apparently, they have already ceased to take the Greeks into account – after all, they also have their ‘great idea’ of pan-hellenism. But the most important thing would to know: with what, and in the name of what can we enter into Constantinople? What can we bring there except the pagan idea of the absolute state and the principles of caesaropapism, which were borrowed by us from the Greeks and which have already destroyed Byzantium? In the history of the world there are mysterious events, but there are no senseless ones. No! It is not this Russia which we see now, the Russia which has betrayed its best memories, the lessons of Vladimir and Peter the Great, the Russia which is possessed by blind nationalism and unfettered obscurantism, it is not this Russia that will one day conquer the second Rome and put an end to the fateful eastern question…”391
In 1889, in his work Russia and the Universal Church392, Soloviev argued in favour of a union between the Russian empire and the Roman papacy (he himself became a Catholic, but returned to Orthodoxy on his deathbed). The Roman papacy was to be preferred to the Orthodox Church as the partner to the Russian empire because, in Soloviev’s opinion, the Orthodox Church had become a group of national Churches, rather than the Universal Church, and had therefore lost the right to represent Christ.
The Orthodox Church had a wealth of mystical contemplation, which must be preserved. “In Eastern Christendom for the last thousand years religion has been identified with personal piety, and prayer has been regarded as the one and only religious activity. The Western church, without disparaging individual piety as the true germ of all religion, seeks the development of this germ and its blossoming into a social activity organized for the glory of God and the universal good of mankind. The Eastern prays, the Western prays and labours.”
However, only a supernational spiritual power independent of the State could be a worthy partner of the State, forming the basis of a universal theocracy. For “here below, the Church has not the perfect unity of the heavenly Kingdom, but nevertheless she must have a certain real unity, a bond at once organic and spiritual which constitutes her a concrete institution, a living body and a moral individual. Though she does not include the whole of mankind in an actual material sense, she is nevertheless universal insofar as she cannot be confined exclusively to any one nation or group of nations, but must have an international centre from which to spread throughout the whole universe…
“Were she not one and universal, she could not serve as the foundation of the positive unity of all peoples, which is her chief mission. Were she not infallible, she could not guide mankind in the true way; she would be a blind leader of the blind. Finally were she not independent, she could not fulfil her duty towards society; she would become the instrument of the powers of this world and would completely fail in her mission…
“If the particular spiritual families which between them make up mankind are in reality to form a single Christian family, a single Universal Church, they must be subject to a common fatherhood embracing all Christian nations. To assert that there exist in reality nothing more than national Churches is to assert that the members of a body exist in and for themselves and that the body itself has no reality. On the contrary, Christ did not found any particular Church. He created them all in the real unity of the Universal Church which He entrusted to Peter as the one supreme representative of the divine Fatherhood towards the whole family of the sons of Man.
“It was by no mere chance that Jesus Christ specially ascribed to the first divine Hypostasis, the heavenly Father, that divine-human act which made Simon Bar-Jona the first social father of the whole human family and the infallible master of the school of mankind.”
For Soloviev, wrote Lossky, “the ideal of the Russian people is of [a] religious nature, it finds its expression in the idea of ‘Holy Russia’; the capacity of the Russian people to combine Eastern and Western principles has been historically proved by the success of Peter the Great’s reforms; the capacity of national self-renunciation, necessary for the recognition of the Pope as the Primate of the Universal Church, is inherent in the Russian people, as may be seen, among other things, from the calling in of the Varangians [?]. Soloviev himself gave expression to this characteristic of the Russian people when he said that it was ‘better to give up patriotism than conscience’, and taught that the cultural mission of a great nation is not a privilege: it must not dominate, but serve other peoples and all mankind.
“Soloviev’s Slavophil messianism never degenerated into a narrow nationalism. In the nineties he was looked upon as having joined the camp of the Westernizers. In a series of articles he violently denounced the epigons of Slavophilism who had perverted its original conception. In the article ‘Idols and Ideals’, written in 1891, he speaks of ‘the transformation of the lofty and all-embracing Christian ideals into the coarse and limited idols of our modern paganism… National messianism was the main idea of the old Slavophils; this idea, in some form of other, was shared by many peoples; it assumed a pre-eminently religious and mystical character with the Poles (Towianski) and with some French dreamers of the thirties and forties (Michel, Ventra, etc.). What is the relation of such national messianism to the true Christian idea? We will not say that there is a contradiction of principle between them. The true Christian ideal can assume this national messianic form, but it becomes then very easily pervertible (to use an expression of ecclesiastical writers); i.e., it can easily change into the corresponding idol of anti-Christian nationalism, which did happen in fact.’…
“Soloviev struggled in his works against every distortion of the Christian ideal of general harmony; he also struggled against all the attempts made by man to satisfy his selfishness under the false pretence of serving a noble cause. Such are for instance the aims of chauvinistic nationalism. Many persons believe, Soloviev tells us, that in order to serve the imaginary interests of their people, ‘everything is permitted, the aim justifies the means, black turns white, lies are preferable to truth and violence is glorified and considered as valor… This is first of all an insult to that very nationality which we desire to serve.’ In reality, ‘peoples flourished and were exalted only when they did not serve their own interests as a goal in itself, but pursued higher, general ideal goods.’ Trusting the highly sensitive conscience of the Russian people, Soloviev wrote in his article, ‘What is Demanded of a Russian Party?’: ‘If instead of doping themselves with Indian opium, our Chinese neighbors suddenly took a liking to the poisonous mushrooms which abound in the Siberian woods, we would be sure to find Russian jingos, who in their ardent interest in Russian trade, would want Russia to induce the Chinese government to permit the free entry of poisonous mushrooms into the Celestial empire… Nevertheless, every plain Russian will say that no matter how vital an interest may be, Russia’s honor is also worth something; and, according to Russian standards, this honor definitely forbids a shady deal to become an issue of national politics.’
“Like Tiutchev, Soloviev dreamed of Russia becoming a Christian world monarchy; yet he wrote in a tone full of anxiety: ‘Russia’s life has not yet determined itself completely, it is still torn by the struggle between the principle of light and that of darkness. Let Russia become a Christian realm, even without Constantinople, a Christian realm in the full sense of the word, that is, one of justice and mercy, and all the rest will be surely added unto this.’”393
Soloviev was undoubtedly right in his critique of chauvinist nationalism – although it applied more to the Balkan Orthodox than to Russia. But in his admiration for Rome he went too far in the opposite direction.
As we have seen, Dostoyevsky disagreed with his friend on this point, considering the papacy to be, not so much a Church as a State. Nor did he agree with the doctrine of papal infallibility, which Soloviev also supported. As Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) wrote in 1890, in his review of Soloviev’s book: “If a sinful man cannot be accepted as the supreme head of the Universal Church without this bride of Christ being completely dethroned, accepting the compatibility of the infallibility of religious edicts with a life of sin, with a wicked will, would amount to blasphemy against the Holy Spirit of wisdom by admitting His compatibility with a sinful mind. Khomiakov very justly says that besides the holy inspiration of the apostles and prophets, Scripture tells us of only one inspiration – inspiration of the obsessed. But if this sort of inspiration was going on in Rome, the Church would not be the Church of Christ, but the Church of His enemy. And this is exactly how Dostoyevsky defines it in his ‘Grand Inquisitor’ who says to Christ: ‘We are not with Thee, but with him’… Dostoyevsky in his ‘Grand Inquisitor’ characterised the Papacy as a doctrine which is attractive exactly because of its worldly power, but devoid of the spirit of Christian communion with God and of contempt for the evil of the world…”394
As a warning against the dangers of a Russian nationalism lacking the universalist dimension of the early Slavophiles and Dostoyevsky, Soloviev’s critique had value. But his attempt to tear Russia away from Constantinople and towards Rome was misguided. And it had an unhealthy influence on other writers, such as D.S. Merezhkovsky. Thus Merezhkovsky, according to Sergius Firsov, “found it completely normal to compare Roman Catholicism headed by the Pope and the Russian kingdom headed by the Autocrat. Calling these theocracies (that is, attempts to realise the City of God in the city of man) false, Merezhkovsky pointed out that they came by different paths to the same result: the western – to turning the Church into a State, and the eastern – to engulfing the Church in the State. ‘Autocracy and Orthodoxy are two halves of one religious whole,’ wrote Merezhkovsky, ‘just as the papacy and Catholicism are. The Tsar is not just the Tsar, the head of the State, but also the head of the Church, the first priest, the anointed of God, that is, in the final, if historically not yet realised, yet mystically necessary extent of his power – ‘the Vicar of Christ’, the same Pope, Caesar and Pope in one.’”395
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