Compared with Leont'ev, Katkov and Pobědonoscev were mere bunglers, the hired condottieri of reaction. Leont'ev was the born reactionary, the predestined self-made reactionary. The Katkovs and Pobědonoscevs enjoyed his approval, but he regarded them as compromisers, and considered that they availed themselves of petty expedients. Nevertheless Leont'ev defended Katkov against Turgenev and other adversaries who at the Puškin festival had refused to be reconciled with the great Russian publicist. Katkov had defended the might of Orthodox Russia and of the tsar, and on this ground Leont'ev esteemed him highly. Leont'ev would have liked to see Katkov "politically canonised during his lifetime." If the Russians possessed only a spark of moral courage, they would erect a statue to Katkov in Moscow near the Puškin monument. "It is time we should learn how to make a reaction." The reactionaries should be as pitilessly logical as the nihilists.
In theological matters Leont'ev had an untrained mind, but was well read in philosophy and literature. Whilst he accepted official Russia, his penetrating understanding made clear to him the futility and distintegration of the reactionaries no less than of the liberals, and made him, in his longing for unity and integrality, wish for the restoration of prepetrine Old Moscow.
In his philosophy of religion, Leont'ev took the slavophils as his starting point. Kirěevskii, Homjakov, Konstantin Aksakov, Samarin, and Ivan Aksakov, facilitated for him the transition to orthodoxy, whilst the philologian T. I. Filippov fortified him in his Byzantinism. Danilevskii, he tells us, disclosed to him the true meaning of slavophilism. Katkov, finally, was for him the Puškin of civic activities. For Leont'ev, the development of slavophilism into Asiaticism was comparatively easy. In this matter, as in others, Leont'ev anticipated the actualities of tsarism. Prince Uhtomskii officially announced the panasiatist policy shortly after the death of Leont'ev (see § 33).
Critical theologians can hardly fail to recognize that Leont'ev was in essentials no Christian (cf. Aggeev's monograph on Leont'ev, 1909). Leont'ev's faith, even, is suspect to theologians, and with good reason, for the will to believe is not yet belief. In the later years of his life, Leont'ev was profoundly impressed by Solov'ev's philosophy of history and of religion, and Solov'ev's ideas shook Leont'ev's Byzantinism. Solov'ev
