Political portrait of S. S. Uvarov (1786-1855): “No Russian Empire without the Russian Church”

Abstract

Abstract. This essay outlines the political portrait of Sergey Uvarov, one of the outstanding statesmen of the Alexander’s and Nicholas’s epochs. It so happens that until modern times the historical literature fight with Sergey Uvarov’s shadow rather than studied his works. Only the gradual reconstruction and comprehension of the conservative component of the historical process in the Russian science and literature made it possible to confidently discuss Uvarov as a politician. He had laid the foundations of an integral and fullfledged system of domestic education, on the basis of which sociocultural changes had grown in the society, serving as the initial and necessary ground for all real achievements of the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries in the field of the state-building and the development of civil society, science, literature and art. Uvarov’s worldview was close to conservative European romanticism, which attached an extremely important cultural significance to the national religion. At the same time, the object of his personal studies had been Russia and its past and present. Uvarov managed to fundamentally strengthen and expand this component in domestic education, which, in keeping with the spirit of the policy of Emperor Nicholas I, had grown into a full-fledged system under Uvarov’s direct participation and leadership. Upon reconsideration of his official and political experience during the reign of Emperor Alexander I, Uvarov suggested that his successor used the national enlightenment in its conservative model as a strategic preparation for the abolition of the serfdom in Russia. The new generation was to become “primarily Russian in spirit rather than European in education”, to study “Russian things in Russian” unlike its Westernized predecessors, and to have a moral need to free their serfs, just as the latter had to be prepared to take their freedom responsibly. The essay introduces to the academic community one of the later handwritten works by Uvarov, devoted to relations between the state and the Church in Russia, which was heretofore little or completely unknown and is important for understanding Uvarov’s historical significance as a political notionalist and statesman.