on missionary work with schismatics. Thereafter, local diocesan missionary committees made up of two or more clerics appeared in a few dioceses. It was only from 1853, however, that special missionary departments in seminaries and theological academies began to train professional missionaries [12]. By 1886, the Synod ordered all seminaries to establish, within three years, such departments to focus on the history and criticism of Old Belief and of the sects existing in each diocese [13]. And in 1887 and 1891, the first two congresses of the internal mission took place in Moscow. As a result of the first of these, in 1888, the Synod published a new set of rules for internal mission, which addressed not only the challenge of the Old Believers but also that of the new sects that were emerging in the post-emancipation period [14].
By the mid 1890s, the message that these missionaries had been developing about the political significance of the battle against sectarianism was beginning to be heard in government circles. Indeed, just before Bogoliubov set out on his first missionary tour of Tambov in the fall of 1894, the Council of Ministers had issued a resolution declaring the new sect of shtundists (a catch-all term for Ukrainian and Russian evangelicals) to be very harmful and banning their meetings - thereby fulfilling one of the requests of the 1891 missionary congress. Also in 1894, the Holy Synod appointed Vasilii Mikhailovich Skvortsov, a Kiev area seminary instructor and anti-sectarian missionary who had served as secretary of the 1891 missionary congress, as its first special advisor on non- Orthodox religious movements. Two years later, in 1896, he would found the official journal of the internal mission, Missionerskoe Obozrienie, based in Kiev [15]. Skvortsov would remain at the helm of the journal and the mission right up to 1917. He would be celebrated in some circles and reviled in others for his fierce advocacy of reactionary political views and of the responsibility of state institutions, including the police, to defend and preserve Orthodoxy.
But when Bogoliubov set out, in the autumn of 1894, much of this was in the future. He knew the Synod's instructions on missionary work and he had read various books on religious sectarianism and missions, but he had never actually tried out any of this knowledge on real dissenters. After filing the required itinerary with the board of the local Missionary Brotherhood that oversaw his work, he headed out in a springless carriage across bumpy and muddy roads to meet them.
What did he hope to find? In short, to reconcile his book learning about the Russian people s Orthodox mission with the reality of sectarianism. As he recalled, "I was almost ill with worry about the question of how it was that in various corners of our motherland the Russian people, a god-bearing people, revealed a tendency towards sectarianism. Why were our holy, Orthodox beliefs not treasured everywhere, as in the past, by Russian people?"
In his diaries, Bogoliubov finds his young self struggling to make sense of his theological education. Perhaps reflecting educated society's renewed populist sense of its need to serve the people on the heels of the famine of 1891-92, Bogoliubov repeatedly used the term "narodnicheskoe" to describe his outlook in 1894, evoking the radical populist movement. But mostly, he remembered being inspired by Slavophilism, and the conservative nationalist pochvenniki or enthusiasts of the soil, such as Fedor Dostoevskii and Nikolai Danilevskii. With some irony, he wrote of how, on his first trip to the village, "I felt myself to be a Slavophile among the people, the herald of profound and enlightened scholarly knowledge of Orthodox Christian truths. At the time, I imagined myself... literally as a 'walking theological academy' for priests" [16]. What he would soon find out, was that he didn't know much.
One of the central themes of Bogoliubov's account is the city boy's encounter with the village. "I knew the peasant and village life from my earliest childhood," he wrote, but now he "began to look at [the Russian village] not with the eyes of a 'cottager' [dachnika] and 'outsider,' but with the eyes of a Christian, himself experiencing the joys and sorrows of our village" [17]. Bogoliubov's life as a missionary was one of mud, bumpy roads, bedbugs, food poisoning, and sore throats from long hours of talking in cramped, smoky peasant huts. It was also a journey into an alien world, where local knowledge was often more important than an academy diploma. He set out with a map and an itinerary, only to discover that villages were called one thing on the map and another in the local dialect (govor). He thought he had waited until the