Russian popular utopia, social order and the religious world of the peoples of Asia and Africa in the context of Russian foreign policy of the late nineteenth - early twentieth century

The article deals with Russia’s foreign policy of the late nineteenth - early twentieth century, its attempts to establish contacts with some Asian and African peoples, such as the Assyrians of North Persia, Ethiopians, and ethno-confessional groups in the Far East. Stimulated mostly by pragmatic reasons, these attempts were also determined by certain ideological and religious factors. Russians hoped to find in the remote regions an untouched patriarchal order, a nest of true religiosity. The interrelation with these lands and peoples would permit to resolve some problems of Russia’s contemporary development. The moral qualities of the remote regions’ inhabitants and the Church and social order which existed in these lands were sometimes perceived as a model for imitation. The motives of the movement in the remote countries were to some extent close to the ideas and subjects of the popular utopias, such as the legend about the Belovodie land and the Cossack tale about the city of Ignat.