Most historical research on Russia's noble families has focused on the domestic sphere, showing how their intimate “gentry nests” were both mainstays of social stability and incubators of political change. Alexa von Winning's study of the Mansurov family, meanwhile, emphasizes mobility and empire-building. In doing so, the author draws on studies about the involvement of the Russian nobility in imperial expansion to show how family networks enabled agents of empire to reach out into the world while staying connected with the metropolis.
Von Winning follows three generations of the Mansurovs on their peregrinations within and beyond the tsar's lands, tracing their “record in paper and stone” (6). For the Mansurovs were empire-builders in the literal sense, whose service to the imperial state and the Orthodox Church left a visible architectural legacy. The Mansurovs repeatedly managed to instrumentalize their family network to advance their political goals and their personal careers. In her analysis of the family's epistolary practice, von Winning shows that letter-writing was not only the organizational basis of the network, but also an emotional substitute for the intimacy of a common family home that these itinerant noblemen and -women lacked (32–38).
The descendant of a distinguished but not particularly wealthy lineage of Tatar origin, Boris Mansurov (1828–1910) found success as a war correspondent during the Crimean War. His career blossomed under the patronage of Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich and his reform-oriented naval ministry, but he also profited from his brother's promotion of his writings in the St. Petersburg salons. Turning to religion in the reform era, Mansurov made it his mission to improve the relationship of the Russian state and church with Orthodox populations abroad. He was a driving force behind the Russian Compound that was constructed outside Jerusalem's old town during the 1860s.
Mansurov's children continued his path of promoting Russian Orthodoxy. His son Pavel (1860–1932) was a diplomat in Constantinople and established the Russian Archaeological Institute there. A proponent of Byzantine studies in an Orthodox and imperial spirit, he saw scholarship as an instrument to assert Russia's primacy among the Orthodox nations. His sisters Ekaterina (1861–1926) and Natalia (1868–1934) were perhaps the most dedicated Christians in the family: beginning in 1889, they sponsored the construction of a convent in Riga, which they soon entered as nuns themselves, defying the will of their beloved father. More than a testament to the sisters’ devotion, the convent and the adjacent Holy Trinity Cathedral also served as visual reminders of Russia's imperial might in its borderlands.
All imperialists have their particular vision of the empire. The Mansurovs imagined Russia first and foremost as an Orthodox great power, a state that would use religion both to claim the loyalty of co-religionists abroad and to assert supremacy in its own territory. After 1905, Pavel Mansurov joined Moscow's Neo-Slavophile milieu that dreamed of remaking the empire in a traditionalist vein, based on estates rather than party democracy or bureaucracy. Needless to say, there was no place for such a vision after the Bolshevik revolution. The last generation of Mansurovs was left to fight for survival in a society that considered both religious believers and nobles to be “former people.”
Von Winning's decision to trace the entanglements between religion and empire through the lens of the Mansurov family was fortuitous. Not only does it allow her to tease out the substantial but hidden political agency of noble women, it also casts new light on elite men as emotional actors who were just as invested in the ideal of domestic intimacy as their wives and sisters. According to von Winning, the noble family and organized religion “could both empower and restrict female agency” (105): as noble daughters and as nuns in their Riga convent, the Mansurova sisters wielded considerable power; yet they always depended on the financial and emotional support of male mentors—the goodwill of fathers both in the genetic and the spiritual sense.
A microhistorical approach to a broad historical topic obviously leads to certain silences on issues not covered by the sources. While von Winning provides copious material on the religious and foreign-policy dimensions of empire-building, she says less about the effects of the empire's internal ethnic diversity. In her telling, imperial power was spiritual as much as political, with the church and the nobility as partners, not as handmaidens of the state. Her beautifully written and remarkably concise book offers deep insights into this complex and often conflicted relationship.
