Alexander Golitsyn: A Homosexual Man at the Head of Church and Education in the Russian Empire

Alexander Golitsyn was one of the most influential and controversial figures of the era of Alexander I. The Russian emperor’s closest friend and confidant, he rose from secular freethinker to powerful Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod and Minister of Spiritual Affairs, promoting mysticism in Russia.

He entered history not only as a reformer and patron of the Bible Society, but also as a man whose homosexuality and private life became favorite subjects of gossip and political intrigue in the capital.

Childhood and Friendship with the Future Emperor

Alexander Nikolaevich Golitsyn was born in Moscow on December 8, 1773. His father, Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich, had once suffered under Biron’s persecutions and lived in exile in Yaroslavl. He died two weeks after his son’s birth, but had time to bless the infant with a family relic – a gold cross containing holy relics. Tsaritsa Natalia Kirillovna, the mother of Peter I, had presented this cross to their ancestor Boris Golitsyn for saving the young tsar during the Streltsy uprising. The relic accompanied Alexander Nikolaevich throughout his life.

Golitsyn’s mother, Alexandra Alexandrovna, soon remarried and was cold toward her son from her first marriage. Golitsyn recalled that in his parental home he was “kept in great fear.” His mother left him in the care of a German nanny, who mercilessly whipped the boy, and to prevent anyone from guessing about the beatings, “before each whipping, she wrapped his body in a wet cloth.”

A mystical family legend was associated with his mother’s fate: Prince Chegodaev once predicted that she would twice marry widowers, would herself be widowed, and that her son from her first marriage would rise to the heights of state power. The prediction came true to the letter.

Following the custom of the time, Golitsyn was enrolled as a sergeant in the Preobrazhensky Regiment while still an infant. He was educated at home until the age of 13, with a preference for history, French, and Italian. A decisive role in the future minister’s fate was played by his patron, the lady-in-waiting Maria Savvishna Perekusikhina. As the historian Ilarion Alekseevich Chistovich noted, she noticed and grew fond of him: “Golitsyn was a tiny boy, cheerful, sweet, lively, endowed with marvelous powers of mimicry and the art of imitating the voices, gait, and manners of people of every sex and age.”

Under her patronage and by Catherine II’s personal decree, the boy was enrolled in the Corps of Pages in 1783. The Corps and Catherine’s court shaped Golitsyn into an exemplary courtier: sharp-minded, skilled in small talk, and exceptionally gifted at imitating other people’s voices, a talent he often used for practical jokes. Contemporaries credited him with one especially bold prank: he allegedly tugged Paul I’s pigtail on a bet and excused himself by saying that it lay crooked.

During his studies, he came under the influence of the grand dukes’ tutors – the Swiss Enlightenment thinker Frédéric-César de La Harpe and their religious instructor, Archpriest Andrei Afanasievich Samborsky. The latter held liberal and ecumenical views, taught the pupils English, and corresponded with them about matters of faith in French.

Young Golitsyn witnessed the brilliant age of Catherine II. One historical anecdote tells how the commander Alexander Suvorov was invited to dine with the empress on Christmas Eve but refused food because the church rule required him to fast “until the first star.” The empress summoned a page, ordered him to bring a case containing a diamond order star, and presented it to Suvorov, saying that he could now join the meal. That page was Golitsyn.

On weekends and holidays, Golitsyn was brought to the Winter Palace to play with the young grand dukes Alexander and Konstantin Pavlovich. These games began his lifelong friendship with the future Emperor Alexander I. In 1806, for example, when Alexander I began to lose his hearing because of stress, Golitsyn and the emperor secretly learned sign language so that they could communicate.

P.S. Historians and publicists often confuse him with his cousin and full namesake, Alexander Nikolaevich Golitsyn-Moskovsky, nicknamed Casa rara – “a rare thing” – who became notorious for losing his wife, Maria Vyazemskaya, to Lev Razumovsky in a card game. They were two different people.

Early Career and Confidant of the Monarch

Golitsyn’s early career advanced rapidly: in 1791 he became a chamber page, and in 1794 a lieutenant in the Preobrazhensky Regiment. Having no inclination toward military service, he secured a transfer to the civil service and became a gentleman of the bedchamber at court. During these same years, he became the young Alexander’s confidant des amours – the trusted keeper of his romantic secrets and intrigues – which strengthened their friendship further.

From 1796 to 1798, Golitsyn performed an unusual duty at court: he attended an honored prisoner, the Persian prince Murtaza Quli Khan. After the prince’s death, Golitsyn inherited carpets and silver weapons from him and acquired a reputation in society as a “specialist in Persian affairs.” This reputation proved unexpectedly useful in 1807: after the Franco-Persian Treaty of Finckenstein was signed, Alexander I, preoccupied with war, entrusted Persian affairs specifically to Golitsyn.

At Paul I’s coronation in 1797, Golitsyn received the rank of chamberlain. His closeness to the heir to the throne, however, made his career under Paul I uneven. At the end of 1798, he was exiled to Moscow for unspecified “indecent conduct” – according to one account, because of intrigues by envious people stung by his sharp tongue – but was soon recalled and made a knight of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem. His second exile to Moscow is discussed below.

During his periods of exile in Moscow, the prince lived in seclusion, read extensively, and associated with the famous bibliophile Dmitry Petrovich Buturlin and Metropolitan Platon (Levshin), evidence of his early spiritual quest.

After Alexander I ascended the throne, Golitsyn returned permanently to the capital. As Alexander I’s trusted confidant, he proved an ideal courtier. Unlike the liberals of the Unofficial Committee, he did not weary the emperor with reform projects but respectfully awaited his orders. The committee’s members even gave him the ironic nickname Monarchique (“Monarchist”), since Golitsyn supported autocracy and considered liberal ideas “utter nonsense and a corruption of the spirit.”

Alexander I often used Golitsyn to convey refusals to dignitaries and thus avoid personal conflict, and the prince gladly played this political game. In 1801, for example, Golitsyn dissuaded the tsar’s former tutor, the “Jacobin” La Harpe, from attending the coronation in Moscow, sparing the court his presence. At the same time, he displayed his talent for intrigue by arranging the scandalous divorce of Razumovsky and Vyazemskaya through the ecclesiastical administration.

He later resolved many delicate problems for the highest nobility: he quietly arranged divorces for Alexei Arakcheev and, in 1818, for Arakcheev’s adjutant Pyotr Andreevich Kleinmichel; confined the scandal-prone sons of Count Alexei Kirillovich Razumovsky in ecclesiastical prisons; and in 1812 skillfully hushed up the scandal surrounding the imperial favorite Maria Antonovna Naryshkina’s affair with Prince Grigory Ivanovich Gagarin. In 1820–21, he oversaw the prominent divorce cases of Generals Nikolai Mikhailovich Borozdin, whose wife openly bore a child by a captured French general, and Alexander Ivanovich Chernyshev.

From 1810, Golitsyn also managed the Imperial Cabinet, organizing, among other things, funerals for members of the imperial family and the formation of royal entourages, including that assembled for Empress Elizabeth Alexeevna’s journey to Europe in 1813. He was also responsible for the Imperial Theaters: for Alexander I’s return from the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Golitsyn recommended staging Catterino Cavos’s patriotic opera buffa Ivan Susanin and dissuaded the court from choosing darker plots reminiscent of the burning of Moscow.

Personal Life and Homosexuality

Golitsyn’s second exile to Moscow took place in 1800. He fell in love with the French actress Louise Chevalier, a favorite of Count Ivan Pavlovich Kutaisov in whom the future Emperor Alexander I also showed an interest. Golitsyn continually interfered in their relationship and even swore to the heir that he would shoot himself before his eyes if Alexander came between him and the actress.

The Swedish ambassador Curt von Stedingk reported ironically to Stockholm that love worked wonders, since the prince had previously shown no interest in women at all. He added sarcastically that several other people stood between the married actress and Golitsyn. Because of this scandal, Paul I again exiled Golitsyn to Moscow.

Emperor Alexander I then expelled Louise from Russia, recalled Golitsyn, and entrusted him with a delicate mission: to learn the details of her intrigues from the actress’s brother, the 21-year-old ballet dancer Auguste Poireau, who had remained in St. Petersburg. According to Stedingk, the 28-year-old Golitsyn, who only recently had been “dying of love” for the actress, was consoled with surprising speed and found happiness in a close friendship with her young brother.

In the upper class of the Russian Empire, marriage was considered the norm. At court, the personal life of influential dignitaries was perceived as a continuation of politics. However, Golitsyn remained a bachelor all his life.

Golitsyn was most likely indeed homosexual. Young men were often present in his circle, but these attachments may have remained purely platonic or were concealed so carefully that no criminal cases or documents survive apart from letters, memoirs, and rumors.

Historian Yuri Evgenievich Kondakov believed that “after overcoming the sin of sodomy, Golitsyn tried to erase from his life the entire period in which he had been subject to it. Hence the gaps in the story of his childhood and youth. Realizing that his inclination was morally wrong, he was able to renounce it. Unfortunately, his contemporaries did not appreciate this step, and the prince became a victim of homophobia.”

The historian Yevgeny Yuryevich Nazarenko also noted that, although Golitsyn was perceived in the public consciousness of the 1810s and 1820s as one of the capital’s best-known homosexuals, this scandalous reputation circulated chiefly as gossip in social and literary circles. The prince’s Orthodox opponents, with the exception of Photius, rarely used the allegation in open conflict because they did not consider it politically significant.

The memoirist Filipp Vigel was known for his homosexual inclinations, of which his contemporaries were aware. Nevertheless, he portrayed Golitsyn negatively in his Memoirs. For example, he quoted a description of Golitsyn attributed to the poet Denis Davydov:

“was distinguished by baseness, hypocritical intrigue, and vicious tastes so widespread in the East.”

– Denis Vasilyevich Davydov on Golitsyn (as retold by Vigel in his Memoirs)

In 19th-century European culture, male same-sex intimacy was associated with the East – the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and the Caucasus – as a marker of being “uncivilized.”

In the memoirs, this description appears alongside Pushkin’s epigram “Here Is Khvostova’s Patron…” For a long time, the poem was believed to have been written in the late 1810s, but modern researchers date it to the summer of 1824, when Golitsyn resigned. Its full text reads:

Here is Khvostova’s patron,
Here is a servile soul,
Destroyer of enlightenment,
Patron of Bantysh!
Press him, for God’s sake,
From every side!
Why not try from behind?
That is where he is weakest.

– Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin (epigram on Golitsyn)

“Here Is Khvostova’s Patron” refers to Alexandra Petrovna Khvostova, a friend of Golitsyn who was expelled from St. Petersburg in 1823 for organizing secret meetings influenced by the Khlysts. “Destroyer of enlightenment” assesses Golitsyn’s censorship policy. “Patron of Bantysh” alludes to his patronage of the historian and homosexual Dmitry Bantysh-Kamensky.

According to St. Petersburg rumors recorded in an 1824 letter by the poet Nikolai Yazykov, Bantysh-Kamensky compiled a list of prominent “sodomites” in the capital at Alexander I’s request – and Golitsyn appeared first:

“They say that Magnitsky formed a conspiracy with Arakcheev and the metropolitan against Golitsyn, had been working for some time, and finally succeeded! This includes one detail that, although not entirely decent, is very curious: the sovereign allegedly summoned the well-known sodomite Bantysh-Kamensky and ordered him to compile a list of everyone he knew in that regard; B.-K. presented such a list, beginning with the Minister of Education, followed by the chancellor, and so on; afterward he had another audience with the sovereign and swore to the truth of his report.”

– Nikolai Mikhailovich Yazykov on rumors about the list of “sodomites” (from a letter to Alexander Mikhailovich Yazykov, May 24, 1824)

This story from the letter is not documented, and no such list has yet been found in the archives, but it shows how gossip was framed as “written rumor” and how homosexuality was used as a tool of political intrigue.

Another quotation from Vigel’s Memoirs is frequently repeated online and in popular literature:

“One cannot speak of him without blushing. I shall say no more: I will not stain these pages with his stupidity, baseness, and vices.”

However, in the original text, these words are addressed not to the prince, but to the official of the Collegium of Foreign Affairs Bantysh-Kamensky.

At the Head of the Ecclesiastical Administration

Appointment as Chief Procurator of the Synod

In September 1802, Golitsyn was appointed Chief Procurator of the Senate’s First Department. On October 21, 1803, he became Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod – the secular official appointed by the emperor to oversee the Russian Orthodox Church, in effect a “minister for church affairs.” On learning of the appointment, Golitsyn exclaimed:

“How can I be Chief Procurator when I do not believe in anything!”

At first, the new position filled him with “sepulchral gloom,” while the bishops with whom he worked seemed like frightening “black figures in their darkest cassocks.” The tsar nevertheless insisted and simultaneously made him a state secretary – one of the emperor’s personal reporting officials, with the right to address him directly and bypass the ministers. Golitsyn could therefore submit reports personally to the emperor without going through the Prosecutor General, which became the basis of his immense influence.

Golitsyn accompanied the emperor on major diplomatic journeys. At the celebrated Congress of Erfurt in 1808, he spoke personally with Napoleon. On hearing Golitsyn’s name, the French emperor asked, “The one at the Synod?” (Celui du Synode?), then discussed Peter I’s church reforms with him and expressed admiration at the Russian tsar’s success in subordinating the clergy to state power.

Golitsyn proved an effective administrator as Chief Procurator: he quickly calmed the passions that had raged under his predecessor Yakovlev, brought the Synodal Chancellery under his authority, and established control over the secretaries and finances of the consistories (ecclesiastical courts). For approximately 14 years, he controlled the personnel, finances, and administration of the Russian Orthodox Church — this was the longest tenure of a Chief Procurator in the entire history of the department.

Among Golitsyn’s first decisions were the transfer of the famous prophetic monk Abel from the Peter and Paul Fortress to the Solovetsky Monastery, permission to print a book by the Old Believer abbot Sergius that conservatives viewed as a threat, and the approval of the Statute of the Lutheran Church in Russia in 1804.

Contemporaries noted that the prince was hardworking but fiercely protective of his authority: he tolerated neither outside interference nor unsolicited advice. A telling episode involved Yakovlev, his predecessor as Chief Procurator, who tried to lecture the young prince. Golitsyn cut him short. When Yakovlev later protested that Golitsyn had received an order ribbon that he considered rightfully his, the prince replied coldly: “How is it my fault that the tsar awarded it to me rather than to you?”

Together with Mikhail Speransky, Golitsyn developed a large-scale reform of theological schools. To fund poor seminary students, he devised a financial measure that transferred to the Church the exclusive right to print and sell prayers of absolution and funeral bands (paper ribbons placed on the forehead of the deceased during the funeral service). These had previously been printed and sold privately. The monopoly brought the ecclesiastical administration an enormous income for the period – about 100,000 rubles a year.

Golitsyn’s financial management was so successful that by 1817 the Commission of Theological Schools had accumulated substantial capital. The prince himself proposed relinquishing the annual state subsidy of 2 million rubles and supporting the schools entirely from the income generated by Church funds. Alexander I was delighted and issued a special rescript thanking Golitsyn for saving public money.

Golitsyn’s policy toward the Old Believers was ambivalent. In February 1812, he obtained permission for them to have their own priests. After the fire of 1812, he reported to the tsar that the Old Believers were the most active group in rebuilding Moscow and constructing new chapels across the country. In response to complaints from Orthodox bishops, Alexander I, acting on Golitsyn’s advice, allowed the Old Believers to retain all the buildings they had constructed and ordered only that their bells be removed. Yet in June 1812, the minister secretly circulated instructions to the governors requiring them to keep covert records of the Old Believer population in preparation for possible domestic unrest during the war.

Spiritual Turning Point

According to his own memoirs, religion became “hateful” to him while he studied in the Corps of Pages, and he often mocked Christianity. These Enlightenment enthusiasms were superficial, however: during his disgrace under Paul I, while living in Moscow from 1797 to 1801, the young prince devoted considerable time to self-education and associated with Metropolitan Platon, evidence of his early spiritual quest.

During his first years as Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod, Golitsyn was in no hurry to change his habits. The prince later recalled this period with irony:

“Sometimes, amid the haze of youthful revelry and in the intimate company of the beauties of the day, I inwardly enjoyed laughing at my strange situation. I found it very amusing that those venal ladies-in-waiting had no idea that on this occasion their guest was the Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod.”

His knowledge of the Church was limited at the time. Genuinely puzzled as to why only monks could become bishops in the Orthodox Church, for example, Golitsyn declared: “Some drunken patriarch must have established that.” The prince later admitted that during his first years he governed the Synod with “pagan conscientiousness.”

His encounter with mysticism then began. The person credited with inspiring this interest was Rodion Koshelev – a Freemason and mystic who had served as ambassador to Denmark under Paul I. Pre-revolutionary and some modern historians, including Alexander Nikolaevich Pypin and Kondakov, asserted that in 1810 Koshelev introduced the prince to a para-Masonic circle of followers of the “Avignon Society,” also known as “New Israel,” and described Golitsyn as a Freemason.

Modern researchers, Zazulina in particular, dispute this account and note that no documentary evidence proves Golitsyn’s membership in any lodge. His visits to aristocratic salons reflected social fashion more than genuine participation in secret societies. Moreover, in 1807 Golitsyn himself, acting on the emperor’s orders, investigated the Polish occultist Tadeusz Grabianka, who claimed to head the “Avignon Society.” Grabianka was accused of espionage and magic and died in the Peter and Paul Fortress, after which Golitsyn ordered his discreet burial in the Catholic Church of St. Catherine.

Koshelev nevertheless brought the ideas of so-called “inner Christianity,” or the “religion of the heart,” to St. Petersburg high society. This movement placed personal mystical experience and ecstatic religious feeling above the outward rites of the official Church.

Golitsyn’s views were influenced both by Catholic Quietism – the doctrine of complete and passive submission to God’s will, represented in the works of François Fénelon and Jeanne Guyon – and by Protestant mysticism, particularly Jacob Boehme and Emanuel Swedenborg. The prince grew skeptical of the powers of human reason, asserting that “where the Almighty has placed a barrier, one must simply believe.” He described his attitude toward God as follows: “One must turn one’s heart to God without reflection and ask for His mercy, as a child who sees a monster throws itself into its mother’s arms.”

In 1812, Golitsyn rebuilt his house at 20 Fontanka Embankment. At the prince’s request, the architect Alexander Vitberg gave its private chapel a mysterious atmosphere: no daylight entered, the prayer rooms contained coffin-like structures of black marble, and the lamps took the form of hearts made from ruby glass.

The house’s gloomy atmosphere gave rise to a macabre urban legend. Golitsyn allegedly held Khlyst rituals there – ecstatic sectarian ceremonies involving wild dances, whirling, and prophecies uttered in a trance. When spies working for Metropolitan Ambrose, who was in conflict with Golitsyn, supposedly learned of them, the prince allegedly ordered the Khlyst elder who led the rites to be buried alive in the basement, from which moans were later heard at night. These were only legends.

His official duties required him to read the Gospel and study Church affairs. Gradually, he became conscious of his own failure to meet Christian ideals. The prince later changed his way of life: he stopped attending the theater, discarded his soft featherbed, began sleeping on a narrow wooden bench, and deliberately chose the dampest room as his bedroom.

In the autumn of 1812, amid panic over Napoleon’s occupation of Moscow, Alexander I visited Golitsyn while deeply fearful for his life and throne. During their meeting, a French Bible fell to the floor and opened at Psalm 90 of King David: “He who dwells in the help of the Most High shall abide under the protection of the God of heaven…”

Golitsyn fervently interpreted the event as a sign from above and convinced the tsar that the psalm was read in times of danger. The episode made an immense impression on Alexander, and the Bible became his constant companion. To commemorate the miracle, Golitsyn commissioned a painting of an angel in a purple cloak reading Psalm 90. The canvas would later appear in the background of his famous portrait by Karl Bryullov.

Golitsyn also became interested in eschatology, the expectation of the imminent end of the world. Based on the calculations of the German mystic Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling, he seriously believed that the Second Coming of Christ would take place between 1816 and 1836.

Golitsyn also became a staunch ecumenist: he believed that all Christians were united in an invisible “inner church” and that traditional denominations (“outer churches”) were only of secondary importance. He formulated his credo as follows:

“As long as we live on earth and are clothed in an outer shell, we must outwardly belong to one of the Christian churches until we have one shepherd and become one flock.”

The historian Chistovich noted that Golitsyn’s mysticism was not theoretical but a mysticism of “moral feeling and the heart.” The prince did not deliberately wish the Orthodox Church harm, yet by placing it on the same level as every other denomination, he objectively diminished its status in conservative eyes. Chistovich nevertheless acknowledged the minister’s achievement: Golitsyn awakened high society’s interest in matters of faith and prompted the aristocracy to turn from formal ritual toward an inner spiritual quest.

Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov) of Moscow later characterized the minister’s religion as “a vague sentimental-mystical coloration mixed with Orthodox dogmas and various heretical and sectarian teachings.”

Historian Mikhail Yakovlevich Moroshkin gave the minister an even sharper assessment:

“This strange and apparently kind man, who had studied the science of court life down to its finest details, a cunning courtier capable of skillfully and safely navigating between the Scylla and Charybdis of the court through three reigns… was a complete child in religious matters, almost wholly ignorant of Orthodoxy, and a pitiful plaything of every sectarian… In this soul, which had no firm religious underpinning or foundation, every religious belief quietly found room and coexisted, however contradictory they might be.”

– Mikhail Yakovlevich Moroshkin on Golitsyn (from the book Jesuits in Russia)

Contemporaries evaluated the sincerity of Golitsyn’s religious transformation differently. However, writer and official Vladimir Ivanovich Panayev, who served under Golitsyn, insisted on the authenticity of his faith in his memoirs:

“…this worthy man, with the kindest and most trusting heart, naturally inclined by his character toward contemplation and the miraculous, acted from inner enthusiasm; this may be why he crossed the line and knew no bounds to his zeal, why he believed in the false piety of others and, unfortunately, submitted to their harmful influence.”

– Vladimir Ivanovich Panayev on Golitsyn (from his Memoirs)

Golitsyn often fell victim to religious fraudsters and careerists who feigned sanctity to obtain money and appointments from the minister. Mikhail Magnitsky was one such careerist. According to Panayev, while serving as governor of Simbirsk, Magnitsky founded a local Bible society to ingratiate himself with the minister and once even leaped from his carriage into mud and cold to receive the blessing of a local holy fool – solely in the hope that reports of his “piety” would reach Golitsyn. Later, when Magnitsky disgraced himself as governor, Golitsyn saved his career by transferring him to the education administration.

This ideological contrast – a former freethinker heading the administration that governed the Church and education – explains why the conservative Orthodox clergy never regarded Golitsyn as one of their own. The memoirist Vigel described this paradoxical transformation as follows:

“Completely ignorant of theological learning, Golitsyn belonged to every sect and to none. It was strange to see a mild man become a cruel persecutor over questions that he could neither explain nor even understand. Meanwhile, the most eminent victims fell beneath his blows.”

– Filipp Filippovich Vigel on Golitsyn (from his Memoirs)

A striking example was the “Stanevich affair.” When the writer Evstafy Ivanovich Stanevich wrote A Conversation at an Infant’s Grave, criticizing government-sponsored mysticism, the censor Archimandrite Innokenty (Smirnov) approved it for publication. Golitsyn was furious. As Metropolitan Filaret later recalled, the prince summoned him and angrily threw a copy of the book onto the table, its pages covered with indignant annotations.

Despite Filaret’s attempts to contain the scandal and have the disputed sheets reprinted, Golitsyn immediately reported everything to the emperor and secured the censor’s effective exile: he was sent to Orenburg as bishop and then to Penza. The minister explained that he was outraged because the author had dared to prefer John Chrysostom to Saint Augustine “only because he belongs to the Eastern Church.”

Minister of Spiritual Affairs and Public Education

In 1816, Golitsyn received the post of Minister of Public Education, and in 1817, when the management of religion and education was united in one department, he headed the new Ministry of Spiritual Affairs and Public Education. He remained in these posts until 1824.

The ministry’s structure was unprecedented. As the publicist Alexander Skarlatovich Sturdza observed, “the garment was cut to his height and his relationship with the sovereign”: the ministry had been created specifically for Golitsyn. A single department combined authority over the Orthodox Synod, Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, and even pagans, placing them all under one secular official. After Golitsyn’s resignation, the ministry was divided again.

In 1820, Golitsyn secured the establishment of a unified Evangelical Lutheran Church in Russia and appointed the Finn Zacharias Cygnaeus as the first Lutheran bishop of St. Petersburg. This caused strong discontent among the Baltic German nobility, but the minister firmly suppressed the opposition.

Another office deserves particular attention: from 1819 to 1842, Golitsyn headed the Postal Department. This gave him control over perlustration – the covert opening and reading of private correspondence. A man who read other people’s letters for 23 years remained an object of fear and concealed hatred even after leaving his ministerial posts.

Bible Society and Scripture Translation

Golitsyn did not merely have a personal interest in mysticism; he actively promoted it with administrative resources. To launch Alexander Labzin’s journal The Herald of Zion – Labzin was, in the minister’s view, Russia’s finest spiritual writer – Golitsyn became its censor himself and approved every item for publication.

In 1820, Golitsyn instructed officials to translate works by Western mystics, including Stilling, Guyon, and Tauler, and circulated recommendations that diocesan bishops purchase them. Eager to please the all-powerful minister, bishops bought hundreds of copies and compelled their subordinate clergy to acquire them at inflated prices: a pamphlet by Guyon, for example, cost the enormous sum of 6 rubles. The fashion for mystical literature was thus imposed from above.

In 1813, he became president of the Russian Bible Society. In August 1814, the Imperial Philanthropic Society, the empire’s largest charitable organization, was established at his proposal, with Golitsyn as its chief trustee.

Golitsyn’s principal project remained the Russian Bible Society. Its creation was accelerated in the autumn of 1812 by the British pastor George Paterson and General Robert Wilson, who arrived in St. Petersburg and found an ardent supporter in Golitsyn.

The first meeting of the society took place on January 11, 1813, in the house of the prince himself, bringing together representatives of the Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed churches. Initially, the society was created to publish the Bible in the languages of the non-Orthodox peoples of the empire, but in February 1816 Alexander I instructed Golitsyn to organize the translation of the Holy Scriptures into contemporary Russian as well, in order to make it accessible to ordinary people.

During Golitsyn’s tenure, Scripture was translated and published in 41 languages. The combined print run of texts issued in this period exceeded 500,000 copies.

The Orthodox clergy’s real cause for outrage was not mass publishing itself but the translators’ methodological choice: the Old Testament was translated into contemporary Russian from the Hebrew Masoretic Text. For the Russian Orthodox Church of the period, this was unacceptable. Orthodox doctrine, liturgy, and patristic tradition all rested on the Greek translation of the Bible – the Septuagint. Conservatives perceived a turn to the Hebrew source that bypassed the Greek tradition as a covert Protestantization of Russia and a Masonic conspiracy against Orthodoxy.

Golitsyn’s reformist course was nevertheless consistent with the wider European context. After the Napoleonic Wars, Alexander I regarded himself as an instrument of Providence. In 1815, Europe’s monarchs signed the Holy Alliance – a pact conceived not merely as a diplomatic agreement but as the realization of a project for Christian unity across the continent. Golitsyn was one of the chief ideologues of this policy.

Another of the minister’s utopian projects was the “Committee for the Guardianship of Israelite Christians,” created in 1817. In a burst of religious enthusiasm, Golitsyn resolved to convert Jews to Christianity en masse and resettle them in special agricultural colonies. The government allocated 24,000 desyatinas (about 26,000 hectares) of fertile land on the Sea of Azov, appointed well-paid officials, and promised settlers extensive privileges. Yet in the project’s 20 years of existence, exactly one Jewish family moved to the colony – and even that family, contemporaries said, did so only to speculate in land. The treasury wasted tens of thousands of rubles, and the land was returned to the state in the 1830s.

The introduction of Lancastrian schools was far more successful. Golitsyn headed the committee established to organize them in 1818. This system of mutual instruction was ideally suited to the Bible Society’s principal goal: teaching ordinary people to read and write quickly and cheaply so that they could read the Gospel themselves. One teacher directed older, more advanced pupils known as monitors, who in turn taught the younger children. The method made it possible to educate hundreds of pupils simultaneously at minimal cost.

In 1820, Golitsyn also supported the establishment of a Russian vice-consulate in Jaffa, Palestine, whose principal task was to assist Russian pilgrims traveling to venerate the holy places in Jerusalem. Reports from the vice-consulate were sent directly to the Minister of Spiritual Affairs.

Education Administration and Censorship

Golitsyn’s department governed education by harsh methods. Officials he appointed – Magnitsky, Dmitry Pavlovich Runich, and Mikhail Alexandrovich Kavelin – imposed strict controls on the universities. Professors were dismissed for a “lack of piety.” The purge of St. Petersburg University in 1821, when Runich dismissed several leading professors, was initiated by Golitsyn on Alexander I’s personal instructions. The emperor had been alarmed by student unrest in Europe, particularly the murder of the writer August von Kotzebue by a German student. Magnitsky even proposed closing Kazan University entirely because of its freethinking.

Nevertheless, no one else can boast that three universities were opened at once during their tenure — Warsaw, Kharkiv, and St. Petersburg (the latter was founded in 1819 on the basis of the Main Pedagogical Institute), as well as the Richelieu Lyceum in Odessa.

Secular censorship under Golitsyn also assumed a restrictive character. The prince treated imaginative literature with contempt. When the director of the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum proposed creating a poetry circle for its pupils, Golitsyn forbade it, declaring that young men “should listen more to the opinions of those with greater knowledge and experience than express their own thoughts.” He considered novels “utterly insignificant and harmful reading,” while fairy tales served “to corrupt taste and mind.”

Golitsyn’s censors banned books on natural law, including a work by Alexander Petrovich Kunitsyn, and found fault with poems by young writers such as Pushkin, prohibiting even innocuous expressions like “god of love.”

There were other examples, however. In 1823–24, Golitsyn had to address the prominent “Vilna University affair” concerning the Philomaths and Philarets, secret student societies. The investigation was initiated by Nikolai Nikolaevich Novosiltsev, who sought to advance his career through it. Unwilling to strengthen Novosiltsev’s position, Golitsyn ridiculed his reports before the emperor and reduced the matter to harmless philosophical disputes about Immanuel Kant. Thanks to Golitsyn’s intervention, most of the convicted students, including the poet Adam Mickiewicz, escaped Siberia and were instead exiled to Russia’s central provinces.

In August 1828, Golitsyn joined the commission investigating the authorship of the blasphemous poem The Gabrieliad. The principal suspect was Pushkin, who had previously written several scathing epigrams about Golitsyn. The prince had an ideal opportunity to take revenge and send the poet into prolonged exile. Yet Golitsyn, who despised denunciations – especially those by the household servants who betrayed Pushkin – unexpectedly saved him by burying the matter in bureaucratic delays. Pushkin ultimately escaped with only a private conversation with Nicholas I.

Patronage of Sects and Fascination with Magnetism

The minister’s mystical quest led him ever farther from mainstream Orthodoxy. Golitsyn showed remarkable tolerance even toward extreme sects. Only in 1819, after a major scandal caused by the conversion of a nephew of St. Petersburg Governor-General Mikhail Andreevich Miloradovich to the Skoptsy, a radical sect that practiced castration to rid itself of carnal sins, was the prince forced to agree to exile the sect’s leader, Kondraty Ivanovich Selivanov, to a monastery in Suzdal.

Golitsyn later became close to the “spiritual union” of Ekaterina Filippovna Tatarinova, née Buxhoeveden, a convert from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy. The sect’s ecstatic devotions, ritual dances, and chants resembled the practices of the Khlysts and Skoptsy. Its meetings were notably held in the Engineers’ Castle, also known as the Mikhailovsky Castle, where the emperor himself had permitted Tatarinova to live. Alexander I also patronized the sect and even granted a 14th-class rank to one of its principal figures, the former Cadet Corps musician “Nikita” (Nikita Fyodorov), a kind of “Rasputin” of the period. Panayev, a contemporary, left a vivid description of these practices:

“Tatarinova established there a special form of worship that consisted of whirling around a vat of water until one dropped; whoever whirled was said to receive the gift of prophecy. Inclined toward the miraculous, Prince Golitsyn attended her gatherings.”

– Vladimir Ivanovich Panayev on Tatarinova’s sect and Golitsyn (from his Memoirs)

When Nicholas I personally ordered the suppression of Tatarinova’s sect in 1837 and its members were sent to monasteries and prisons, the former favorite appealed to Golitsyn for help. The prince, however, cowardly replied through Vigel that he “barely remembered knowing the lady.”

After his resignation, the prince became interested in animal magnetism. In the late 1820s, he became an ardent admirer of Anna Petrovna Zubova, née Turchaninova. Unlike the marginal sectarians, she was a high-society lady and the aunt of St. Petersburg Chief of Police Sergei Alexandrovich Kokoshkin; her séances were extremely popular among the capital’s nobility. Turchaninova claimed that a single “look” could heal paralytics and hunchbacks by drawing vital force from nature. Golitsyn wrote enthusiastically about her in 1829:

“The girl Turchaninova truly is a phenomenon. She heals with her gaze: she began with hunchbacks and now treats paralytics, nervous disorders, eye diseases, and even deaf-mutes… I asked Turchaninova about the force acting upon these children, and she replied that she could be compared to a pump that draws vital force from nature in order to transmit it through her gaze to the sick…”

Golitsyn attended Turchaninova’s séances for ten years, from 1830 to 1840, sometimes three times a week. He even kept a detailed Journal of Magnetic Crises recording all her advice and recommendations. Turchaninova not only attempted to treat Golitsyn, including his developing blindness, but also claimed to connect him with the other world, offered political advice, and dictated religious prophecies. The treatment failed, and the prince went blind. Shortly before his death in the 1840s, Golitsyn also fell under the influence of a certain “Miss Maurer,” who predicted a great future for the Eastern Church.

The Fall of the All-Powerful Minister: Conflict with Photius

Golitsyn’s chief accuser was Archimandrite Photius (Spassky), although Golitsyn initially treated him with respect. Their surviving correspondence from 1822 reveals the all-powerful minister’s mystical submission to the young monk. Golitsyn called him “Abba” (spiritual father), asked him to interpret strange dreams – one involved pulling a long bristly brush from his forehead and feeling divine grace – obediently followed the prayer rules Photius prescribed, including full prostrations morning and evening, and reverently ate the “holy bread” sent by the monk, sharing it with the poor. Photius initially spoke of the minister with equal enthusiasm:

“Golitsyn was like an angel of God… I love him with all my heart and in Christ.”

Panayev, a contemporary, described a telling scene at an examination at the Theological Academy: when the minister entered the hall, he deliberately sought out Photius, who was sitting apart, and bowed respectfully to him, while the monk pointedly ignored the high-ranking dignitary and continued fingering his prayer beads.

Photius was generally known for extreme fanaticism and behaved insolently toward the empire’s highest dignitaries, who were openly afraid of him. According to Panayev, another incident at the same examination involved the prominent statesman Speransky:

“Speransky… approached Photius… ‘Father Photius,’ said Speransky, ‘bless me.’ Photius raised his head and said in a muffled voice: ‘I do not know you.’ These words struck Speransky so forcefully that he staggered, blushed, and replied in embarrassment: ‘I am Speransky.’ ‘Ah, you are Speransky?’ Photius exclaimed. ‘May the Lord bless you,’ and made a sweeping sign of blessing over him.”

– Vladimir Ivanovich Panayev on Photius and Mikhail Speransky (from his Memoirs)

Golitsyn’s fall in May 1824 resulted from a carefully planned conspiracy by the conservative party: Arakcheev, Metropolitan Seraphim (Glagolevsky), Archimandrite Photius, and Magnitsky. The chief instigator was the all-powerful Count Alexei Andreevich Arakcheev. He regarded Golitsyn as a political rival who belonged to the emperor’s innermost circle. Although he had little understanding of religious affairs, Arakcheev recruited Church hierarchs and officials as allies, many of whom owed their careers to Golitsyn.

Photius played the decisive role in the minister’s fall. In denunciations addressed to Alexander I, he called Golitsyn’s circle “a sect of whirling Khlysts.” An accusation of Khlyst affiliation automatically implied sexual promiscuity. In Photius’s discourse, religious heresy and sexual deviance were links in the same chain: both destroyed the “bridle” of social order. It was no coincidence that the same denunciations called Golitsyn and his associates “debauchees.”

The relationship reached its denouement in April 1824. According to Photius’s own memoirs, when Golitsyn came to ask for his blessing, the monk flatly refused. He accused the minister of protecting heretics and publishing books hostile to the Church, particularly works by Pastor Gossner, and called him the “beast” from Jeremiah’s prophecies.

Golitsyn tried to invoke the emperor’s will, then turned away contemptuously and ran out of the cell, slamming the door. Photius shouted after him: “If you do not repent of the evil you have done to the Church and the state… you will not see the Kingdom of Heaven and will descend into hell!” Exactly twenty days after this scene and the denunciations that Photius subsequently sent to the emperor, Golitsyn was dismissed.

According to Panayev, the conspirators behaved like genuine spies. Magnitsky’s agent, Collegiate Assessor Platonov, secretly purchased printed sheets of Gossner’s book from the printing house, paying the typesetters one grivennik (10 kopecks) per sheet. As soon as the book was complete, it was bound before its official publication and presented to the emperor. Metropolitan Seraphim secured an extraordinary audience with Alexander I, as Panayev relates:

“The metropolitan fell at his [the emperor’s] feet and demanded the removal of Prince Golitsyn, whose administration, he said, was shaking the Orthodox Church.”

– Vladimir Ivanovich Panayev on the conspiracy against Golitsyn (from his Memoirs)

Golitsyn did not miss the opportunity for revenge. The conservative Alexander Semyonovich Shishkov was appointed the new Minister of Public Education. As Vigel recalled, Golitsyn persuaded the emperor to appoint the young Dmitry Nikolaevich Bludov – who had written caustic epigrams about Shishkov in his youth – as the minister’s deputy. According to Vigel, Golitsyn “found it amusing to assign a comparatively young tutor to an elderly child, the very man who as a boy had written epigrams about the old man and whose name the latter could not hear with indifference.”

Life After Resignation and Influence Under Nicholas I

Golitsyn’s political intuition and loyalty also appeared in dynastic affairs. In the summer of 1823, he personally copied and prepared three copies of Alexander I’s secret manifesto naming Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich as heir, based on Konstantin Pavlovich’s letter of January 14, 1822, renouncing his rights to the throne. Sealed in envelopes marked “To be opened after the death of the emperor,” the copies were delivered by Golitsyn to the State Council, the Senate, and the Synod on October 15, 1823.

During the dynastic crisis of 1825, after the death of Alexander I, when the State Council insisted on taking the oath of allegiance to Konstantin Pavlovich, Golitsyn was the only one who opposed it, referring to this secret will of the late emperor (however, Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich then decided to swear allegiance to his brother).

As soon as Golitsyn lost his ministerial post, Magnitsky treacherously defected to Arakcheev and immediately ordered Golitsyn’s portrait removed from the conference hall of Kazan University. He had previously forced the entire educational district to contribute toward the portrait in order to ingratiate himself with the prince. Later, when Nicholas I instructed Golitsyn to sort through the papers in the late tsar’s study, the first document he encountered was another denunciation by Magnitsky against Golitsyn himself. On seeing it, the new emperor decided that so audacious an intriguer was dangerous in the capital, leading to Magnitsky’s exile. Golitsyn had his revenge on him as well.

Although Golitsyn’s influence on state affairs dwindled under Nicholas I, he retained the imperial family’s complete trust. During the Decembrist uprising on December 14, 1825, he was in the palace guarding the imperial family. That evening, Golitsyn personally went under escort to the home of Count Ivan Stepanovich Laval, the father-in-law of Sergei Petrovich Trubetskoy, and found torn and partly burned papers, including a plan for the uprising written in Trubetskoy’s own hand. These documents became decisive evidence.

During the investigation of the Decembrists, Golitsyn, a member of the Special Investigative Commission, demanded the death penalty for 39 participants in the uprising. At the same time, he showed Christian mercy: according to the memoirs, during an interrogation he fed the remains of his lunch to one prisoner who had eaten nothing for a day.

The Decembrist Trubetskoy recalled that during the investigation Golitsyn had a cordial conversation with him and Kondraty Fyodorovich Ryleev: “The thought occurred to me that Prince Golitsyn probably knew that our case would not end so badly; that a religious person, as he had long been regarded, could not talk so cheerfully and almost joke with people doomed to death.” Others, however, judged Golitsyn negatively, calling him a typical Jesuit who used gentleness and kindly treatment to lure people in.

Two of Golitsyn’s nephews, Alexander and Valerian, were also implicated in the Decembrist case; Valerian was sentenced to exile in Siberia. The prince did not help them, apart from securing Valerian’s confinement separately from the other prisoners.

Whenever Nicholas I later left the capital for an extended period, he entrusted his family to Golitsyn’s care. In 1826, Golitsyn joined the secret “Committee of December 6, 1826,” created to propose a way out of the domestic political crisis. He also obligingly advised Nicholas I to burn the late Empress Elizabeth Alexeevna’s diaries so that they would not fall into unintended hands.

Despite the loss of ministerial posts, Golitsyn continued to influence religious and educational policy. In 1826, when the conservative Shishkov advised Nicholas I to close the famous Voltaire Library to visitors, Golitsyn persuaded the emperor to create a new censorship commission that simply excluded Shishkov, leading to his resignation.

Golitsyn played a special role in the fate of the empire’s Western confessions. In 1828, he helped draft a charter for the Evangelical Lutheran Church. His policy toward Greek Catholics, or Uniates, proved disastrous. After the suppression of the Polish uprising of 1830–31, Golitsyn submitted a memorandum to Nicholas I proposing the forced conversion of Uniates in the western provinces to Orthodoxy, arguing that Orthodox Christians were more loyal to the tsar. At his initiative, Uniate churches began to be forcibly remodeled in the Orthodox style, and infants were baptized only with names from the Russian Orthodox calendar of saints. This hard line culminated in the Council of Polotsk in 1839, which abolished the Union but laid the foundation for prolonged religious conflict.

At the same time, Golitsyn opposed closing Vilna University and the Volhynian Lyceum, where rebellious Polish students studied, but the emperor ignored him. In 1833, Golitsyn was also among the first to support composer Alexei Fyodorovich Lvov’s new anthem, “God Save the Tsar!”, for which the emperor presented him with a diamond-set portrait.

Despite the betrayal of his associates, particularly Magnitsky, for whom Golitsyn had previously secured the enormous allowance of about 200,000 rubles, the prince tried to practice Christian ideals until the end of his life. Years later, the exiled Magnitsky wrote from Reval begging Golitsyn for forgiveness and transfer to a healthier climate. The prince replied: “I knew very well how deeply you had wronged me, and I forgave you at once.” He secured further funds for his persecutor and helped arrange his transfer to Odessa.

In the winter of 1840, Golitsyn met the artist Karl Bryullov, who was going through a scandalous divorce from Emilia Timm. Since Lutheran divorce cases were decided by the ecclesiastical administration headed by Golitsyn’s relative and protégé Count Nikolai Protasov, friends brought the artist to the elderly prince to seek his protection.

During the séances, Golitsyn served raspberry tea and herbal infusions to the painter, who had caught a cold while working on the scaffolding of St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Bryullov repaid him by flattering and rejuvenating the 67-year-old prince in the famous portrait. Golitsyn appears in a simple gray frock coat on which the empire’s highest orders, including the blue sash of the Order of St. Andrew the First-Called, are barely visible. The artist emphasized that the decorations were inseparable from the man himself and were not displayed for effect. Behind the prince hangs the same painting of the angel reading Psalm 90.

Final Years in Crimea

In 1829, Golitsyn bought land in Crimea, where the Alexandria Palace – now known as Countess Panina’s palace in Gaspra – was built for him to designs by the architects Philip Elson and William Gunt.

In 1842, the prince became completely blind because of cataracts. He resigned all his posts, retained a pension of 12,000 rubles, and withdrew to his Crimean estate. His sister Elizaveta Kologrivova cared for him there, while his neighbors Princess Elizabeth Vorontsova and Baroness Sophia Berkheim read the Bible aloud to him in French. He also listened to secular novels by Eugène Sue, George Sand, and Honoré de Balzac – authors whose work he had treated with such hostility during his years as minister.

In the autumn of 1844, a seeming miracle occurred: the Kyiv surgeon Vladimir Afanasievich Karavaev performed a brilliant operation in only 28 seconds and restored the elderly prince’s sight. Golitsyn agreed to the operation only after the “somnambulist” who treated him – a medium with whom he had communicated in his final years – gave her consent.

Golitsyn was able to enjoy the beauty of Crimea once more, but soon suffered an apoplectic stroke and died on November 22, 1844. In a striking historical coincidence, the former all-powerful minister and his chief persecutor Magnitsky died only one day apart.

Shortly before his death, Golitsyn destroyed most of his personal archive. He bequeathed his principal relic – the same gold cross associated with the rescue of Peter I – to Emperor Nicholas I, whom Golitsyn himself had blessed with it before the Turkish campaign of 1827, as the rightful property of the imperial house.

In accordance with his will, Golitsyn was buried without ceremony at St. George Monastery on Cape Fiolent near Sevastopol, and the money saved on the funeral was distributed among the poor of Simferopol. In his will, he requested:

“The coffin must by no means be made rich, for my sinful body is not worthy of it. It should be wooden, neatly made, and varnished, without silver or gilding. Neither hat nor sword is to be placed on the lid; I would wish a crucifix to be affixed to it.”

The Fate of Auguste Poirot

As for the young dancer Auguste Poirot, after his sister’s exile, no one demanded that he leave St. Petersburg. He remained in Russia, where his career developed quite successfully. At first, he performed as a dancer, and later became a ballet master, staging over 30 ballets, some of them in collaboration with Ivan Ivanovich Valberkh and Charles Didelot.

The historian of Russian ballet Yuri Alekseevich Bakhrushin called this period extremely significant, noting that from 1790 to 1805, “a solid foundation was laid for the self-determination of Russian ballet.”

Contemporaries highly praised Poirot’s talent. Ballet master Adam Pavlovich Glushkovsky called Auguste an “excellent, first-class dancer” who became especially famous for performing national dances, and he performed the Russian dance “like a real Russian.” The Biographical Encyclopedia also gave him a high characterization: “Auguste was not only a good dancer, but also an excellent ballet master… he was inimitable in dances, especially in performing the Russian dance.” In addition to the stage, he taught at the St. Petersburg Theater School and served as a court dance teacher for some time.

Versions of his death differ among researchers: according to some sources, he died in 1832 in St. Petersburg; according to others, he left the stage in 1833 and died in 1844 — the same year as Prince Golitsyn.

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