S.Uvarov’s Imperial Ideology as a Principle of Modernization of the Educational Environment

Анотація

The purpose of the study. The relevance of the topic has been caused by the fact, that for many years researches on S.Uvarov’s ideological heritage were done mainly within the Marxist paradigm from the standpoint of social and class competition. The Soviet historical science argued that imperial education had served the interests of autocracy, therefore it had adopted the idea of Official Nationality. At the same time, historians quite carefully omitted the fact that S.Uvarov had laid the ideological tool for organising the linguistic and cultural assimilation of the peoples of the Russian Empire.

Scientific novelty. There has recently been a tendency to study a complicated bureaucratic and intellectual heritage of S.Uvarov. Such attention has been related to a growing interest of contemporaries in the philosophy of conservatism with the intensification of national processes.

The purpose of the research is to clarify the content and objectives of S.Uvarov’s conservative and ideological doctrine, which became “an intellectual weapon” of modernisation of the educational sphere and part of the domestic imperial national policy. The object of research is the ideological system of the Russian autocracy, the subject is S.Uvarov’s intellectual heritage, and specifically his programme of Official Nationality, which provided an algorithm for “evolutionary” correlation of the ideological foundation of the Russian educational environment for many years.

Conclusion. Hence, S.Uvarov took his place in the history of the empire not just as a talented bureaucrat and reformer of the educational environment, but as a politician who tried to emancipate the Russian national consciousness against the background of the imperial ideology, in the key of loyalty to the autocracy. His Triad served the purpose of ideologising society in order to maintain control over the public. S.Uvarov’s proclamation of the Official Nationality programme contrasted the uncontrolled spread of materialistic and liberal ideas with a conscious conservative barrier in the form of strengthening bureaucratic regulation in the sphere of education. Within the framework of the domestic policy of state nationalism, the minister combined public education with “the spirit of Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality”.