Görres, Gentz, and the various other theorists of the anti-revolutionary restoration and reaction.
All independent thought was to be inexorably suppressed; higher education was to be reduced to the minimum of essential knowledge; philosophy and literature, attempts at general culture and at the attainment of a philosophic outlook upon the universe, were to be stifled in the germ. Count Uvarov, minister for education from 1833 to 1849, addressing the governing committees of the schools, announced his advent to ovvice in the following terms: "It is our joint task to secure that the culture of the nation shall be carried on in the unified spirit of Orthodoxy, autocracy and patriotism." Yet more thoroughly did Uvarov, in the course of the same year formulate this trinitarian doctrine as "the main principle of the social stem of education," writing as follows: "Amid the rapid decay of religious and civil institutions in Europe, amid the widespread diffusion of revolutionary ideas, it becomes our duty to establish the foundations of the fatherland so firmly that they cannot be shaken. We must find a basis from which right conduct can spring; we must discover energies which will develop the distinctive characteristics of Russia, and will ultimately enable our country to assemble the sacred heritage of nationality into a compact whole, to which we must anchor our salvation. How fortunate is it that Russia has preserved ardent faith in those saving principles in default of which right conduct is impossible, without which an energetic and worthy life is unknown. A Russian devoted to his fatherland is as little willing to permit the subtraction of a single dogma from our Orthodox faith as he would be to allow the theft of a pearl from the crown of Monomachus. Autocracy is the main condition of Russia's political existence. In conformity with these two national bases is the third basis, equally important and equally strong—patriotism."
The official program of reaction—Orthodoxy, autocracy, and patriotism—had thus been formulated. To the present day this program constitutes the alpha and omega of official political wisdom; it is the program of the Russian theocracy, which declares the tsar's will a divine revelation, and deduces bureaucratic politics and administration from God's will thus revealed. In the first section of the fundamental law of 1832 (it became section 4 when the law was re-edited in 1906), autocracy is defined in the following terms: "The tsar of all the
