On the History of Religious Education in Russia in the Second Half of the Late 19th — Early 20th Century (Pobedonostsev, Rachinsky, Ilminsky)

The article examines the views and the work of S. A. Rachinsky and N. I. Ilminsky, the prominent religious enlightenment fi gures in the second half of the 19th century. The former had created a network of church schools for the common people in his estate Tatevo in Smolensk province and its environs, and spent a number of years teaching there. The latter in 1872–1891 held the position of a Director in Kazan Seminary for Teachers of Non-Russian Origin — the central educational institution of the missionary type in the Volga region, aimed at maintaining Orthodoxy among the Christianized peoples of the area. Both educators received the support of K. P. Pobedonostsev, the prominent statesman, publicist and notionalist, one of the leaders of the conservative camp and the chief prosecutor of the Holy Synod. The activists of the religion-based primary education shared the views of specifi c conservative populism based on the idea of common people possessing a set of values that could potentially prevent the society from social upheavals (such as simplicity, patriarchal relations, loyalty to traditions, true religiosity). Rachinsky’s and Ilminsky’s initiatives were aimed at preserving such qualities among the Russian peasantry and the “smaller” nations of the Volga region — social groups that, according to the educators, had managed to stay most aloof from the destructive tendencies of ideological and political development of the second half of the 19th century. Such views in many respects corresponded to the ideas of Pobedonostsev. The famous conservative shared the belief of Rachinsky and Ilminsky that the cause of upheavals that engulfed the post-reform Russia had been the excessive development of individualism and the desire to reconstruct the historically established way of life according to abstract theoretical principles, and that the counterbalance to these phenomena could only be found in the moods of the common people. Rachinsky’s and Ilminsky’s work became a noticeable phenomenon of public life in Russia in the second half of the 19th — early 20th century, and refl ected its important features.

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