Rensselaer Journal, Volume 10, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 April 1901 — Pan-Slavism. [ARTICLE]

Pan-Slavism.

Lagowski, the provincial official who recently attempted to shoot M. Pobiedonostseff, procurator general of the holy synod of the Russian church, says ■he wished to avenge the excommunication of Count Tolstoi. Whether the would-be assassin tells the truth or not, such attempts as his may be expected whenever the Russian public mind is in any way disturbed. For Pobiedonostseff is the embodiment of Russian conservatism on the religious side and his policy has made him one of the most feared men in Russia. M. Pobiedonostseff is a learned lawyer and was one of the late czar’s tutors. He is pious, according to the primitive idea of Christianity, and in personal habits is an ascetic? His tastes led him into the ecclesiastical administration of the late czar made him virtually the executive head of the Christian church in Russia. Since the time of Peter the Great the government of the Russian orthodox church has been practically vested in a commission, on which the procurator rep-

resents the czar. The church in Russia as in England, is part of the state in a sense difficult for Americans to realize, and the spiritual power even more than the secular is committed to the Pan-Slavic idea. We are apt to think of Pan-Slavism as merely a political movement —as an attempt to bring under Russian rule the Slavic lands outside the empire. Really it is a great deal more. It is a revolt against the attempt to graft foreign forms of civilization upon Russia. It is summed up in Aksakoff’s famous words: “It is time to go home!” What Aksakoff meant was ■that it was time for the Slavs to £ive up trying to imitate foreign ideas, go back to the point from which Peter the Great started, and develop a civilization strictly and purely Russian. Of course this does not involve the discarding of foreign inventions in war and industry, but it does mean their adaptation to Russian ways, and not the changing of Russian social ideas to fit the foreign model. To accomplish this dream of Slavic unity it was necessary to repress religious dissent, and to this work Pobiedonostseff has devoted himself. Beginning with the exiling of Pashkoff in 1882 for holding Bible meetings among the fashionable people of St. Petersburg, he proceeded, as his power grew, to repression of dissenters of all kinds. To the southern European and American mind Pobiedonostseff appears a Torquemada, whose work may prove destructive to Russia. Then again it may prove Russia’s greatest aid in dominating the affairs of the eastern hemisphere.