A minister and a journalist: The relationship between Dmitry Tolstoy and Mikhail Katkov

The article examines the relationship between Dmitry Tolstoy, who served as Minister of Public Education (1866-1880) in the government of Alexander II and as Minister of Internal Affairs and Chief of Gendarmes (1882-1889) during the reign of Emperor Alexander III, and Mikhail Katkov, an authoritative journalist, editor-publisher of the influential conservative newspaper Moskovskiye Vedomosti. The main thing that united the interests of the high-ranking official and the influential journalist was the reforms in the field of education in the 1870s and 1880s. Both contemporaries and historical researchers evaluated the activities of Tolstoy and Katkov in this area very ambiguously and quite contradictorily. The problem of the study consists in the uncertainty of ideas about the contribution of each of them to the reform of Russian education in this period. On the basis of archival materials, diaries, letters and memoirs of contemporaries, the article considers the nature of the relationship between Tolstoy and Katkov, the degree of their mutual influence, the role of each in transformation of secondary and higher education during this period. The relevance of the stated problem is due to the ongoing reforms of the modern system of Russian education and the growing interest in the history of this issue, as well as the increasing role of the media in covering these processes. The novelty of the research consists in the introduction into scholarly discourse of new, previously unexplored material, in particular, the letters of Dmitry Tolstoy, Mikhail Katkov, Boleslav Markevich, Evgeny Feoktistov, Aleksandr Georgievsky, and others, stored in the archives of the Department of Manuscripts of the Russian State Library. The analysis of correspondence, the study of memoirs and diary entries of contemporaries allow concluding that the leader in this union was Katkov, whose publications not only provided “information support” for the reforms undertaken by the Minister of Public Education, but in many ways initiated and directed Tolstoy’s activities. Having a strong and resolute character, perseverance in achieving the set goals, unshakable confidence in his own rightness, the journalist for many years successfully defended before Tolstoy those measures that he considered right and correct. For his part, Tolstoy, being able, by virtue of his positions, to report almost daily to the emperor, was a kind of a representative of the journalist, first to Alexander II, and then to Alexander III. At the same time, the minister often acted as Katkov’s “hidden opponent”, repeatedly tried to get rid of his dependence on the journalist, to demonstrate independence in decision-making, but, as a rule, the last word was always left to Katkov. The history of the relationship between Tolstoy and Katkov is a very illustrative example of the increasing influence of the press on the power structures of the Russian Empire in the 1860s-1880s. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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