25 March, 09:42
There is a rhetorical device that money cannot buy: when your argument is confirmed not by an ally, but by an enemy. Not by a liberal, not by a reformer, not by a Westernizer — but by the last person you would expect.
That is precisely why Konstantin Pobedonostsev's account of the Nicholas I era is worth more than entire volumes of critical commentary. This is not a prosecutor speaking about a defendant. This is a defense attorney who, believing he is describing the past, ends up signing a verdict on the present.
Pobedonostsev was the Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod, the architect of Alexander III's counter-reforms, a man who called parliamentarism "the great lie of our time" and sincerely despised any form of popular representation. To suspect him of liberal sympathies is to know nothing about Russian reactionary thought. And yet this arch-reactionary, writing about the Nicholas I era shortly after the tsar's death, produced the following:
"The idea of patriotism, which the late sovereign openly sought to transform into the concept of service to the government, seems to have entirely disappeared from the consciousness of our rulers, great and small; state service has almost universally become service to the person of the Superior, or service to Mammon."
Let us pause here. Even Pobedonostsev — for whom autocracy was sacred — was forced to acknowledge that Nicholas I had substituted patriotism with a cult of personal loyalty. Not to the state, not to the people, but to the Superior. This is the very essence of the regime we are dealing with in Russia today. Putin's "power vertical" is not a new governance model. It is an archaic system of personal allegiance elevated to the status of state ideology.
Pobedonostsev then describes the system's mechanics with surgical precision:
"A few favorites, who had no conception of law and legality and knew no limits to their autocratic power, seized the entire state authority of Russia into their hands. Under the guise of devotion to the throne, and without a thought for the Fatherland — from which they had long since separated themselves — these men systematically blocked the path of every sound idea, every truth that sought its way to the throne, systematically deceiving the sovereign, forever severing his immediate relationship with affairs and with the people, and turning all governance into a dead mechanism, for which the living human being means nothing, and whose entire purpose consists in the paperwork clearance and paper execution of orders."
"Under the guise of devotion to the throne." There is the key. Putin's elite — the Rotenbergs, the Sechins, the Patrushovs — are not statesmen. They are looters who have learned to speak the language of statecraft. They, too, long since "separated themselves from the Fatherland." They, too, "systematically blocked the path of every sound idea." Nothing has changed except the surnames and the figures in the offshore accounts.
Note also Pobedonostsev's portrait of Justice Minister Count Viktor Panin, whom he regarded as the personification of that era: "Panin's personality belongs among the most remarkable of the late reign. Only under Nicholas, only in this dark hour and dark domain, could such a man of darkness appear on the stage and become its principal actor." Replace "Nicholas" with "Putin" and you have an exact portrait of anyone in the current Kremlin circle. Medvedev with his nuclear threats. Patrushev with his conspiratorial screeds. Dyumin, Kovalchuk, Kadyrov. "Men of darkness," possible only in this dark hour — and superfluous to anyone outside it.
Panin's own dictum — that "one should not permit the legal profession in Russia, because it is dangerous to spread knowledge of the laws beyond the circle of those in service" — is not history. It is the operational manual by which Russia has spent the past twenty years dismantling independent courts, persecuting lawyers, and liquidating human rights organizations. The content has not changed by a single word.
This is precisely what makes the parallel "Putin equals Nicholas I" not a journalistic flourish but a structural diagnosis. Hitler was building something new. Monstrous and criminal — but new. He had an ideology of the future, a racial project, an ambition to rewrite the anthropology of the human species. Nicholas I built nothing. He preserved. His regime rested on three pillars — Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality — which amounted to freezing everything that might move. Every movement was a threat; every idea was a danger. And this is precisely what fills every line of Pobedonostsev's testimony:
"The darkness settled ever thicker and more hopelessly upon Russia, and the movement of thought, the expression of truth, became almost impossible."
Putin's Russia is that same darkness. Not the infernal malice of a Nazi regime, but something far less spectacular and far more durable: bureaucratic obscurity, institutional decay, the systematic suppression of every living thought. Fascism can be destroyed in battle — it is crystalline enough for that. The Nicholas system cannot be destroyed by a single blow. It dissolves, retreats, waits, and returns.
The end of Nicholas I, as Pobedonostsev described it with disarming candor, reads almost like a forecast: "With the death of Nicholas, the iron hand of the ruler was lowered, and rays of light began little by little to penetrate through the darkness of ignorance. Like small children we rejoiced at this unexpected phenomenon, long unexperienced in Russia; like small children, having begun to breathe a little more freely."
Pobedonostsev was describing 1855. But this is, in all probability, precisely what Russia will look like after Putin — if he ends as Nicholas did, having suffered defeat in his own Crimean War and dying under the weight of its consequences. Or as Stalin did — suddenly, leaving behind a system that hesitated for a moment, and then exhaled.
The difference between them is only this: Stalin left behind the Gulag and the atomic bomb. Nicholas left behind serfdom and a lost Crimean campaign. Putin will leave — what? A million dead in a senseless war, a deindustrialized economy, and a generation raised in the conviction that "patriotism" means service to the Superior.
But the most important lesson of Pobedonostsev — and this is the lesson that matters most — is that even the most zealous defender of that system, when it finally ends, breathes with relief: "like small children, having begun to breathe a little more freely."