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.In his younger years he was close to the Slavophils.Thenhe moved away from them, denouncing their Russian nationalism, and alsoleaning from Orthodoxy towards Catholicism.In this second period he developedhis theocratic utopia , the idea of the unity of humanity through the unity ofChristianity, under the spiritual leadership of the Pope and the politicalleadership of the Russian Tsar.The role of Russia in this unity represented a newdevelopment in Russian messianism.Towards the end of his life he realized theimpracticality of his plans, and became concerned in this last period with what hesaw as the threat to Christian civilization from the East.As a young man, Solovyov s view of Russia s role was developed not inrelation to Catholicism and Protestantism, as in the Slavophils, but in relation tothe West and the Muslim East.His major article of 1877, Three Forces ,marked his closest approach to Slavophilism.86 It spoke of the Orthodox Slav,and especially Russian, mission to reconcile the Muslim East, with its despoticunity and acceptance of an inhuman God , and the West, which aspired toindividual egoism and its product, economic socialism, with its Godless PRO-TSARIST FORMS OF RUSSIAN MESSIANISM 45human .The mission involved humanizing God and turning people towards God;the Russians had to mediate between the divine world and humanity, throughdivine revelation, and were suited to this task by their religiosity and lack ofexclusiveness.Like Ivan Aksakov and Dostoevsky, he believed that the waragainst Turkey would raise the Russian people to their mission.For Solovyov,the Russian conquest of Constantinople was linked directly not only with thereconciliation of East and West, but with reconciliation between God andhumanity.This trend was taken further in his Lectures on God-humanity (Bogo-chelovechestvo, also translated as Divino-humanity , God-manhood ;1877 81).Here, Western and Eastern Christianity are absolutely necessary foreach other and for the spread of Christ s teaching throughout all humanity .87By the early 1880s Solovyov s desire to reconcile the Christian churchesbecame linked with the belief, which had attracted Chaadaev fifty years before,that Catholicism was superior to Orthodoxy.The Catholicization of Russiawould overcome what Solovyov saw as the religious root cause of the divisionsin Slavdom, both outside Russia, and, in the case of Poland, within the Empire.88Although Solovyov never became a Catholic, in the late 1880s he was willing toaccept Papal supremacy.He attributed to the Russian Tsar a divine role in thereunification of Christianity on the basis of Catholicism.In La Russie et l égliseuniverselle (1889), published in France, Solovyov wrote: the historical task ofRussia consists in supplying the church universal with political might, which isnecessary to it in order to save and regenerate Europe .89 Russia s contribution toChristianity, then, was primarily her coercive power.The Tsar was to obey thewishes of the Pope, thereby creating the conditions for a universal theocracy andthe regeneration of Christianity.Russia, said Solovyov, would be free to fulfilits great universal vocation, to unite around itself the Slavic nations and found anew truly Christian civilization .90Solovyov, who always defended the Jews against persecution, accused theSlavophils of subordinating Christianity to their idealization of the Russianpeople.As he wrote in 1891:The sin of Slavophilism was not that it ascribed to Russia a highervocation, but that it insufficiently insisted on the moral conditions of thisvocation& let them proclaim still more decisively the Russian people as thegathering Messiah, so long as they remember that the Messiah must alsoact like a Messiah, and not like Barabbas.91The unreality of Solovyov s plans for universal unity became clear to theirauthor.The last period of his life, from about 1891, represented hisdisillusionment with the possibility of world theocracy.He had found interestfrom Roman Catholics but none from the Tsar or Russian society.In politicalterms, he became still more hostile to the Russian conservatives, accusing themof imitating Chinese ancestor-worship in their cult of the past.The consequence 46 PRO- TSARIST FORMS OF RUSSIAN MESSIANISMof this would be to weaken Russia and lay her open to conquest from Asia.Hebecame obsessed with the yellow peril :O Russia! & Which is the East you desire to be:The East of Xerxes or of Christ?he had written in ªEx oriente lux in 1890.His poem Pan-Mongolism of 1894,accusing Russia of deluding itself that it was the Third Rome, saw a Chineseconquest of Russia as the end of history.This is taken further in his ThreeConversations of 1899.Cast in prophetic terms, this described the conquest ofEurope by the combined forces of Asia, the appearance of Antichrist in Europe,and the unity of the Christian churches as a prelude to the millennium and theresurrection of the dead
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