And this was one of the central goals of Bogoliubov's writing project: to argue in favour of an approach to missions that focused as much, if not more, on those who remained within Orthodoxy as on those who abandoned it for the sects. As Eugene Clay has suggested, like churchmen elsewhere in Europe in the modern period, Russian missionaries sought to convey the rationalized Orthodoxy of the theological academy in a popular milieu that was heterodox, susceptible to charisma, and, from the perspective of the missionaries, rife with superstition [27]. In the early 1890s, missionary practice was organized around formal debates and discussions with dissenters on points of theology. The missionary's goal was to win these public debates and expose the sectarian leaders as self-willed, mistaken, and ignorant. Bogoliubov did not deny that direct work with sectarians was important: indeed, he met one inspiring priest in a parish with many sectarians who had energized his flock with a mass of activities, yet had not converted a single sectarian because he feared entering into any sort of discussion with them. Bogoliubov learned from his time in that parish that success required both good parish work and active outreach to dissenters [28]. But he emphasized that these labours had as much to do with listening as with debating, with understanding the sectarians' perspective before countering it. Most importantly, his encounters with the Baptists, the evidence of the sense of community and purpose that they seemed to engender, made him come to a crucial realization about missionary work: that "in the first instance, [anti-sectarian missionaries] needed to do the boring, unnoticed, samely work known as Orthodox-church education of the people and forming among them lively and active missionary brotherhoods." At that time, he wrote, if a diocesan missionary had reported that he had spent his time working among the Orthodox rather than sectarians on his tours, he would have been disciplined. Yet this was precisely where the future of missionary work lay [29]. An obsession with theological "disputes" would not address the core of the problem.

Bogoliubov, perhaps not surprisingly, had self-serving motives in using his missionary experiences to prove his point about missionary debates. He had, in fact, lost his job in 1913 as the St. Petersburg diocesan missionary, where he had worked to develop precisely this approach. Indeed, his successor Ivan G. Aivazov, appointed by a conservative new metropolitan, had publicly attacked him for promoting sectarianism through the missionary brotherhood he had formed in the capital. According to Aivazov, Bogoliubov's methods did not recognize the need to launch an "offensive" against dissent [30].

This brief review of some aspects of Bogoliubov's memoir opens up for us the experiences of one of the new type of professional, lay missionaries that was emerging in the 1890s. In some ways, Bogoliubov's perspective on missions, as he looked back during the First World War, was not typical. Bogoliubov by 1914 was a controversial figure in the missionary movement, widely admired, but also regarded as a liberal and "soft" on dissent by his often right-wing colleagues. Moreover, his account differs in tone and style from the numerous descriptions that Bogoliubov and his colleagues wrote for missionary magazines as they sought to make sense of their encounters and provide one another with ideas of how best to counter sectarianism. Bogoliubov's memoir had the reflective quality of hindsight, as he sought to justify the approach to mission with which he had become associated. But his story of his struggle to reconcile the Slavophile image of the Russian people with the realities of the village surely conveys an important reality of missionary work: the internal missionaries shared with their fellow educated Russians an obsession with defining the nature of the Russian soul [31]. Their accounts of their visits to the village were part of this process of defining Russianness and the range of spiritual and political options appropriate to that people.

The Orthodox Church's struggle with Old Belief and