Theological Academy. "At that time, I burned with a religious-populist [narodnicheskoe] mood," wrote Bogoliubov. "And I tried in every possible way to organize my life in order to be closer to the people - in order to see [the people's] true life, its joys and sorrow." "How could I," he wondered, "... not yet tied up with the worries of daily life, be useful to my native Church, my native people, and the parish clergy in the battle against sects...?" [6]. Driven by this passion to serve, Bogoliubov had signed on as a diocesan missionary in Tambov diocese, an area known for its large population of religious sectarians [7]. He left the Academy, he recalled, full of ambition but with no formal training in missionary work and no real preconception of what experiences lay ahead.
In a series of articles from 1914 to 1917, Bogoliubov recounted for readers of the Riazan-based journal, Missionerskii sbornik, how his encounters with the sectarians in the first year of his ministry had transformed his understanding of mission and his understanding of the village. The kind of thoughtful, evolving, passionately spiritual encounter that Bogoliubov described bears no resemblance to the public image of the Orthodox anti- sectarian missionary in the 1890s. Bogoliubov's memoir serves as an example of the potential of the missionaries' narratives of their work among sectarians for exploring a form of religious "going to the people", one that was coloured by conservative nationalist views but not limited by them. Like other missionaries, Bogoliubov's story had a strong didactic quality: a central goal was to provide models of how to engage in religious disputes with followers of various non-Orthodox faiths. But as they explored how best to correct sectarians' "errors," they also became studies of the psychology of the religious dissident and the character of village life. Through the story of his early mission, Bogoliubov made a series of arguments about the place of Orthodox faith in Russian society, about the nature of the challenge presented by sectarianism, and about the best methods for meeting that challenge.
When Bogoliubov began his career as a evangelist, the anti-sectarian mission of the Orthodox Church was still in its infancy. Indeed, a few years later, when Nikolai Ivanovich Ivanovskii, a renowned specialist on work with Old Believers, welcomed delegates to the Third All-Russian Missionary Congress in Kazan' in July 1897, he was hardly exaggerating when he observed that, "Some 15-20 years ago there was nothing like this, there was not even a thought of any conventions at all, because there was no one to convene" [8]. As a sympathetic commentator in the right-wing journal Russkii Viestnik [Russian Herald] pointed out, until the Kazan' meeting, the word missionary was associated in the Russian public mind with those who worked among non-Christians both in and beyond the Russian empire. But the conference demonstrated that "before our eyes" a new kind of mission was being born, aimed at protecting the "church and fatherland from internal, more evil enemies than paganism - Old Believers and sectarians" [9].
Certainly, proselytization among the various non-Orthodox ethnic groups living under the sceptre of the Russian tsar had gone hand in hand with imperial expansion since the sixteenth century; since 1869, a semiofficial lay association, The Imperial Orthodox Missionary Society, had worked to raise awareness about and money for such missions [10]. The internal mission, by contrast, served as the Orthodox Church's instrument against religious dissidence among the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian populations that the church considered naturally its own. Of course, missionary work in this sense had always been among the duties of the parish priest. The emergence of a more formal structure for the internal mission had its roots in the rising concern, from the 1820s onwards, that the schismatic Old Believers might actually be recruiting Orthodox parishioners to their fold. A major inquiry on religious education launched by the Synod in 1818 revealed local bishops' concern about such influence. At the same time, new statistical data seemed to confirm this threat by demonstrating a substantial increase in the numbers of dissenters, both among the Old Believers and the various sects. In response, the Synod launched measures to improve the Orthodox population's knowledge of its faith and thus its ability to counter the arguments of dissenters [11].
Progress in developing sustained Christian education and anti-schismatic programmes was halting. However, under Nicholas I, the groundwork for an anti-Old Believer mission, focussed both on returning Old Believers to the Orthodox church and on preserving the Orthodox from Old Believer influence, was laid. In 1828, at the time of the formation of the first formal anti-Old Believer mission in Perm' diocese, the Synod issued a general set of instructions