Yuri Fyodorovich Samarin (Russian:Ю́рий Фёдорович Сама́рин; 3 May 1819,Saint Petersburg – 31 March 1876,Berlin) was a leadingRussianSlavophile thinker and one of the architects of theEmancipation reform of 1861.
He came from a noble family and befriendedKonstantin Aksakov from an early age. An ardent admirer ofHegel andKhomyakov, Samarin attended theMoscow University, where his teachers includedMikhail Pogodin. He came to believe that "Orthodoxy, and Orthodoxy alone, is a religion which philosophy can recognize" and that "the Orthodox church cannot exist apart from Hegel's philosophy".[1] Samarin's dissertation was a study ofFeofan Prokopovich's influence on theRussian Orthodox Church.
He later joined the government service and settled inRiga, where the well entrenched influence ofBaltic German nobility exasperated him to such a degree that he urged the government to step upRussification activities in the region. This outburst ofchauvinism led to his brief imprisonment in thePeter and Paul Fortress. (Samarin's Slavophilism passed forPan-Slavism, which was viewed byNicholas I as a "rebellious doctrine").
In his latter years, Samarin continued to write copiously on national and "peasant" questions, advocating the step-by-step abolition ofserfdom.[2] After theJanuary Uprising he advisedNikolai Milyutin to support Polish peasantry as the embodiment of "the Slavic soul" of Poland at the expense of "the forces of Latinism",[3] i.e., rebellious nobility andCatholic clergy. He died in Berlin ofsepsis and was buried next to Khomyakov in theDanilov Monastery.
