(1827-1907), conservative statesman, professor and chair of civil law at Moscow University (1860-1865), senator, chief procurator of the Holy Synod (1880-1905).
Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev has often been seen as one of the primary conservative influences on Alexander III and Nicholas II. Although the “grey eminence” undoubtedly exerted influence upon domestic policy and was influential in bringing about a new version of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality,” historians have disputed the degree of his direct influence on policy formation.
Pobedonostsev, son of a Moscow University professor, grew up in Moscow in an atmosphere of scholarship, discipline, and close family ties. He was the youngest of eleven children, and his father closely supervised his early education before sending him off to the School of Jurisprudence from 1841 to 1846. Pobedonostsev graduated second in his class and upon graduation was assigned a position in the eighth department of the Senate in Moscow. He worked diligently in his position while also pursuing scholarly research and writing. Throughout his life Pobedonostsev remained a prolific writer, publishing articles on law, education, philosophy, and religion in book form and in journals such as Grazhdanin (The Citizen), Moskovskie Vedomosti (Moscow News) and Russky Vestnik (Russian Newsletter). In 1853 he became secretary of the seventh department of the Senate, and in 1855 he served as secretary to two Moscow departments. By 1859 he had received a lectureship in Russian civil law at Moscow University.
His scholarship, publications, translations, and reputation as an interesting and respected professor brought him to the attention of the court in 1861, and he was asked to tutor Grand Duke Nicholas Alexandrovich, heir to the throne. In that capacity he went on a tour of Russia with the heir and his entourage in 1863. According to several scholars, this journey profoundly influenced Pobedonostsev’s view of Russia and his ideas about its future. When Nicholas died in 1865, Pobedonos-tsev was asked to tutor Grand Duke Alexander and became executive secretary to the first department of the Senate. Although Pobedonostsev was honored by his appointments and felt bound by duty to accept them, he apparently missed Moscow and felt uncomfortable in court life. According to Pobedonostsev’s biographer, Robert Byrnes, this appointment “removed him from the library, the study, and the classroom and placed him in a position in which he was to develop a most inflexible political and social philosophy and to exert profound influence upon the course of Russian history” (p. 35). Pobedonostsev served in the senate from 1868 and in the State Council from 1872. He received his most important post, Ober Procurator of the Holy Synod, in 1880 and was to remain in it until his retirement in 1905.
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Pobedonostsev worked closely with education ministers as well and was instrumental in developing policies he hoped would prevent radicalism in the universities. Contemporaries and historians have usually felt that Pobedonostsev worked for the appointment of Ivan Delyanov (Minister of Education, 1882-1898) and that together they worked toward establishing a quota system in order to restrict the numbers of non-Russian and non-Orthodox students admitted to Russian universities. He also reestablished a separate network of primary schools, which came under the jurisdiction of the Holy Synod rather than the Ministry of Education. Despite concerns about the level of education that could be delivered in church schools, Pobedonostsev believed that the moral benefits of church schools would outweigh any intellectual deficiencies.
Pobedonostsev has been considered one of the “most baleful influences on the reign” of Nicholas II and the ultra-conservative and reactionary force behind many of Alexander III’s and Nicholas II’s manifestos. Peter Banks, minister of finance from 1914 to 1917, noted that Pobedonostsev was the teacher who had the most influence on the tsar. Despite Pobedonostsev’s reputation as an arch-conservative, he was actively involved in work on preparing the liberal judicial statute of 1861. He also read widely, communicated with Boris Chicherin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Slavophile thinkers, and was aware of the intellectual debates of his day.
The year 1881 was a significant one for Pobedo-nostsev and for Russia. After the assassination of Alexander II, Pobedonostsev became one of the strongest forces arguing against the Mikhail Loris-Melikov constitution and Western-style reforms. He was responsible for drafting the manifesto that Alexander III read in April 1881 pledging to “preserve the power and justice of autocratic authority . . . from any pretensions to it.” Pobedonostsev is usually assumed to be the writer responsible for Nicholas II’s “senseless dreams” speech in 1895 when he proclaimed “it is known to me that voices have been heard of late in some zemstvo assemblies of persons carried away by senseless dreams of the participation of zemstvo representatives in the affairs of internal government.”
If the height of Pobedonostsev’s influence was after the assassination of Alexander II, his influence had significantly waned by 1896. His last years were quiet ones. He had never enjoyed court life, and in his later years he went out even less frequently. He did not officially retire until 1905, but by then younger men had been appointed, Nicholas II had ascended to the throne, and many of Pobedonostsev’s policies were once again being disputed. Pobedonostsev died of pneumonia in 1907. By the time of his death, other statesmen had assumed power, and his funeral was little noticed, with only a few in attendance. See also: ALEXANDER III; HOLY SYNOD; NICHOLAS II; SLAVOPHILES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Byrnes, Robert F. (1968). Pobedonostsev: His Life and Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
(1903-1983), party and government leader.
Nikolai Podgorny rose to political prominence under Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, only to play a key role in his ousting in October 1964. Ukrainian by birth and an engineer by vocation, Podgorny started his career in the Ukrainian sugar industry in the 1930s. Throughout the war he held a number of posts responsible for food production, particularly in the Ukraine, where he developed close links with Khrushchev. After the war, his career path shifted to the party. By 1953, the year Josef Stalin died, he was Second Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party. Podgorny’s star rose as Khrushchev rose to power. In 1956, the year Khrushchev denounced Stalin, Podgorny was elected to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Central Committee. Khrushchev personally nominated him for Ukrainian Communist Party First Secretary in 1957 and for the powerful post of CPSU Central Committee Secretary in 1963, by which time he was also a full member of the CPSU’s leading body, the Presidium. While somewhat conservative, Podgorny was an enthusiastic supporter of some of Khrushchev’s more “hare-brained schemes” (the accusation used to justify his dismissal in October 1964), such as the division of the party into industrial and agricultural sections. Nevertheless, Podgorny, like almost all Khrushchev’s Ukrainian appointees, turned against his patron, colluding with Leonid Brezhnev in seeking Central Committee support to remove Khrushchev as party First Secretary. Podgorny went on to become Soviet head
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of state, but rivalry with party secretary Brezhnev saw his demise in 1977. See also: BREZHNEV, LEONID ILICH; CHANCELLERY SYSTEM; KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH
Taubman, William; Khrushchev, Sergei; and Gleason, Abbott, eds. (2000). Nikita Khrushchev. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Tompson, William J. (1995). Khrushchev: A Political Life. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan with St Antony’s College, Oxford.
The clerk (podyachy), who wrote, filed, and handled government documents of the seventeenth-century Russian central and provincial administration.
Little-known during the 1500s, chancellery clerks expanded: 575 in 1626, but 2,762 in 1698. After 1700, their numbers plunged. Divided in three salary groups (senior, middle, junior) by service record and seniority, clerks’ pay varied from 0.5 to fifty rubles; the mean decreased from 11.5 to 9.5 rubles. Most earned from one to ten rubles. Pay was also in service land and kind. Clerks could receive supplements for special assignments, holidays, and other needs, and resort to bribery. Signatory (pody-achy so pripisyuu) and document (podyachy so spravoy) clerks were elite senior clerks. Clerk novitiates between ages ten and fifteen learned skoropis (cursive longhand) and documentary formulae, and acquired office sense; many were washed out. During the 1600s, the number of clerks
