No Romantic nationalist,  Uvarov didn't like his country very much. (He wrote a flowery 18th-century French, as if Russian was beneath him). But in his younger years he was ambivalent. The arch-conservative Joseph de Maistre, in St Petersburg as Sardinian ambassador, advised him to get out of that weakness or he'd never succeed, but for a decade he hung on. He would be a gradual moderniser. Everything changed when Alexander I's relative openness to the West (as the architect of the Holy Alliance of 1815) collapsed into an era of repression fomented by revolutionary fears, in Europe and in Russia itself. Uvarov saw his first achievements (including founding the country's first academic departments of philosophy) undone while he was transferred to a backroom job at the Ministry of Finance. After the Decembrist insurrection of 1825, Alexander's abdication and the succession of his more severe brother Nicholas I, Uvarov, perhaps remembering de Maistre's advice, turned realist. He crawled his way back to power, finally getting back to the Ministry of Enlightenment, yet where, un-Maistre-like, he had some small window on the West and still a small chance to make a difference.

Until 1917 the French Revolution was the biggest shock to the Russian status quo since the westernising reforms of Peter the Great. Uvarov worked out a way of dealing with that fear. After 1917 Lenin, who ought to have been Uvarov's exact opposite, followed the same prescription in different words. He too never intended the Soviet Union to be "free" in a Western sense. Russia's path to 20th-century industrialisation and mass literacy had to be managed. Where autocracy was once the instrument, now it was the Communist Party was.

I often thought about Uvarov when I was a Reuters reporter in Soviet Russia in the late 1970s, when the people from the Foreign Ministry we got to talk to were neither fools nor ignorant of the Western freedoms and pleasures they were missing. They would have been unfamiliar with Uvarov's story, because the pretence then was that Soviet Russia had nothing in common with the tsarist past. Western historians tended to agree.

But in fact the two regimes were continuous in so many ways. Substitute for Uvarov's Orthodoxy, Marxist-Leninism; for autocracy, the Communist Party; and for official nationality, Soviet pride and you get a very workable summary of how that totalitarian society worked, and of what many of its loyal citizens actually felt allegiance to. The Russia I lived in back in 1978 even fulfilled Uvarov's highest ambition, to see his country held back 50 years, compared with the post-1789 West.

Whenever I think of the end of Uvarov's career, too, the Soviet Union comes to mind, although my Minister of Darkness was lucky to have been born a century earlier. In 1848, when once again revolutions broke out across Europe, and young nationalisms threatened old empires, Uvarov was simply not conservative enough, with his plea to keep the university in Kiev open, and the following year he lost his job.

He retired to his estate and died a natural death a few years later, much mourned in the bureaucratic circles he frequented and even visited by Balzac, although with a black mark beside his name in any history of Russian liberalism waiting to be written.

You can see how an Uvarovian formula still underpins Moscow conservatism today – state authoritarianism, coupled with the authority of a church that is far from unpopular, and managed ways of individual self-expression. But it's also the reason why tens of millions of western-looking Ukrainians don't want to be Russian – and who can blame them?