The Russian Orthodox religion gained in importance as a legitimation theory for Russian
expansion, when, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Russia began its southward
expansion into the territories of the Ottoman Empire. There Russia was no longer confronting
“fellow Christians,” such as the Protestant Swedes or the Catholic Poles, but a non-Christian,
Muslim power. The peoples over whom the Ottomans ruled, Greeks, Bulgarians, Romanians,
and Serbs, shared the Orthodox faith of the Russians, a faith of which the Russian
tsar considered himself to be the official defender. Consequently Russian imperialist
expansion in the south took place under the banner of a defense of the Orthodox religion.
The Crimean War, for instance, started with a conflict with the Ottoman Empire and
France over Russia’s role as a protector of the Orthodox Christians and the Holy Places
in Jerusalem. The Orthodox religion could play its role of legitimation theory for
imperial expansion better than other religions in Europe because it was, in the most
literal sense, a state religion. Tsar Peter the Great had subordinated the Church to bureaucratic state control when
he introduced the lay function of Ober Procurator (Ober Prokuror) of the Holy Synod, which was a state official who exercised ultimate authority over
the episcopal body.[30] Tsar Peter, the Westernizer, wanted to dominate the Church, which he considered, in his heart, a reservoir of primitive beliefs. His
successors, however, wanted to use the Church and from the middle of the eighteenth century we can witness a growing
symbiosis of the Church and the state. At the end of the eighteenth century, under
the enlightened tsarina Catherine the Great, this symbiosis was still progressive
in nature: she appointed modern, educated bishops who shared her ideas. But under
the rule of the reactionary tsar Nicholas I (1825–1855), who was called the gendarme of Europe, the Church became the instrument of a repressive state. The right hand of Nicholas
I, his deputy minister of Public Education, Sergey Uvarov, coined the ideological
triad Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationhood,[31] which was to become Russia’s official state ideology. Priests were paid by the
state and had the status of civil servants. They were spied upon: “The church itself
was firmly under the control of the state so that even sermons were vetted by the
police.”[32] In their turn the priests themselves were used as informants. They reported irregular
behavior and the emergence of subversive ideas in their local parishes to the police,
acting as unofficial spies for the state. “The doctrine of the Church provided Tsarism
with a powerful ideological justification, and its priests acted as instruments of
police rule in rural areas.”[33] They had also “to report confessions which revealed ‘evil intent’ towards the State.”[34] The iron grip of the state on the Church was further strengthened under tsar Alexander
III (1881–1894), who made his tutor, the reactionary Pan Slavist Konstantin Pobedonostsev,
Ober Procurator of the Holy Synod.
A New Legitimation Theory: Pan Slavism
However, with the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century there emerged, alongside
Orthodox religion, a new legitimation theory. National expansion was no longer the
exclusive domain of ruling dynasties. It became increasingly a concern for the populations
as well. This growing popular interest in national politics found expression in the
Pan Movements that aimed to bring peoples of the same language and culture together within the
framework of a single nation-state. In Germany this took the form of Pan Germanism. In Russia it led, first, to Slavophilia, a romantic movement that ascribed unique ethnic and spiritual qualities to the Slavic
peoples, and, then, to Pan Slavism, a political movement with the goal of uniting all Slavic peoples under the Russian
aegis. The reaction of the tsarist government to this movement was in the beginning
somewhat reserved. The reason for this was that the movement gave a quasi-mystical
importance to narodnost—a word derived from narod, which means “people.” Narodnost is usually translated as “nationality,” but, in fact, it was more. It referred to
a supposed quasi-mystical “essence” of the Russian people, its unique character that
would express itself in a supposed inborn, natural goodness, in its patience, in its
childlike faith, in its capability to suffer, and its quiet subservience to “father”
tsar.[35]
