Yu.F. Samarin was the true founder of the "Russian school” of the 1860s - 1890s and in a way of the whole of Russian political modernism. His intrinsical "German” rational consistency deterred him from opposition, determined his peculiar tactics of political struggle and the no less peculiar style of polemics. One of the most striking examples of the latter is his correspondence with baroness von Raden, illustrating the dialogue between not only supporters of different views on the Russian question, but also of followers of the similar type of religion. While not being a Protestant, Samarin still was bent to exactly Protestantism. At the same time, the Protestant tendencies in Samarin's religiousness were dictated precisely by his conservatism: "formally correct syllogism” for him always required testing by "real life”, and a significant part of conservative contemporaries turned out to be latent revolutionaries. The main object of his criticism was the birth privileges of the Baltic Germans, who served the emperor, but not the Russian people, and who with the unification of Germany received another center of attraction. Samarin was the person, who more fully than many of his contemporaries studied the question of the connection between the estate and the national principles. His views were most succinctly expressed in his polemics with the conservative-aristocratic "Vest” journal. Yury Fedorovich strongly denied the possibility of building a state on the basis of supranational aristocratic elite. On the other hand, his anti-aristocratic pathos logically led Samarin to a certain tolerance towards the serving bureaucracy. Some of Samarin's theses in the early 1860s were accepted by M.N. Katkov.