The 'Grand Inquisitor' who made autocracy a creed
To Nicholas II he is reported to have said: "The prolongation of the existing order depends on keeping the country in a frozen state. The slightest warm breath of spring, and everything will collapse."
The chief conservative ideologue of Alexander III's Russia and Ober-Procurator of the Most Holy Synod from 1880 to 1905. He drafted the Manifesto on Unshakeable Autocracy of April 1881, which killed Loris-Melikov's constitutional reform and inaugurated reactionary counter-reforms: parish school expansion, tighter censorship, and repression of religious minorities. A formidable jurist who wrote the three-volume Course of Civil Law, in Reflections of a Russian Statesman he denounced parliamentarism as 'the great lie of our time.' Tutor to Alexander III and Nicholas II, he was in office when the Synod excommunicated Tolstoy in 1901, and resigned after the October Manifesto of 1905; the autocratic order he spent his life defending was precisely what the revolutionary generation set out to destroy.
Career Timeline
- 1846Graduates Imperial School of Jurisprudence; enters Senate service
- 1860–1865Professor of civil law, Moscow University
- 1861Appointed law tutor to Tsarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich
- 1865Becomes law tutor to the future Alexander III
- 1868–1880Publishes 3-volume Course of Civil Law; doctorate in civil law
- 1872Member of the State Council
- 1880–1905Ober-Procurator of the Most Holy Synod; de facto head of Russian Orthodox Church
- 1881.4Drafts Manifesto on Unshakeable Autocracy; Loris-Melikov reforms scrapped
- 1884Drives parish school reform (273 schools to 43,696 by 1902)
- 1896Publishes Moscow Collection, attacking parliamentarism and democracy
- 1901Survives assassination attempt; Synod excommunicates Tolstoy during his tenure
- 1905.10Resigns after the October Manifesto; retains only State Council and Senate seats