RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH

A bedrock institution in medieval Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church remained an important component of the political order and popular culture in imperial Russia. Despite the reforms of Peter the Great (r. 1689–1725) and the secularization of church property under Catherine the Great in 1764, the church remained distinct from the state, with its own administration and law, hereditary caste of servitors, and deep sense of special privilege and rights. Greater challenges, however, were to come in the nineteenth century—not only from unbelievers and other confessions but also from a secular state and lay believers intent on pressing their own respective interests. By the early twentieth century, the church was in the throes of profound crisis and openly acknowledged the urgent need of reform. During the final years of the old regime, however, it failed to resolve these problems and, as the country plunged into war and revolution, found itself ill-prepared to combat the new Bolshevik regime seeking to dismantle the church (as "counter revolutionary") and to excoriate popular belief ("superstition").

orthodoxy in the late eighteenth century

Despite attempts by eighteenth-century rulers to restrict the church's power, it remained juridically, economically, and socially separate. Peter the Great sought both to tame the church (by replacing the unruly patriarchate with a "spiritual college," soon renamed the Holy Synod) and to make it into an instrument of cultural change. More dramatic still was the decision in 1764 to sequester the church's lands and peasants, a step that greatly diminished its resources and power. Nevertheless, the church retained its operational autonomy, contested further encroachments, and defended its traditional prerogatives and privileges.

Indeed, the eighteenth-century incursions actually helped the church to enhance its functional role in the strictly spiritual domain. Thus, consonant with the Petrine reforms, the church attended increasingly to the religious needs of the folk, sought to instruct and enlighten, and enforced canons on such important spheres as marriage and divorce. Ironically, whatever the motive for the secularization of church property in 1764 (with the state's fiscal greed doubtless playing a major role), it freed the church from this-worldly administration of estates and enabled it to concentrate on the purely religious mission. Over the subsequent decades, the church expanded its administrative system, intensified efforts to "Christianize" a believing but ignorant folk, and sought to redefine and secure the place of Orthodoxy in a changing society and culture.

institutional orthodoxy in the nineteenth century

While the eighteenth-century rulers significantly altered the status of the church, the major assault of ecclesiastical privilege actually did not come until the nineteenth century. Only then did the chief procurator (a state official charged with overseeing the ecclesiastical domain) build a large apparatus and greatly expand his role in church decision-making and administration. In the judgment of ranking prelates, moreover, he did so in an effort to serve the interests of the state, not the church. Nor was he alone: state officials, in general, showed a growing sensitivity to the multi-confessional character of the empire and hence were less willing to uphold the special status of the church. That was especially apparent in the issue of religious freedom; on purely practical grounds, state officials showed a growing willingness to ameliorate the plight of religious minorities, especially those deemed politically loyal. Rebuffing the church's demand that apostates be prosecuted and punished, leading officials blamed such disaffection on the church's own shortcomings and argued that the clergy should rely only on suasion, not coercion, to combat the challenge of dissent and other confessions.

The church did indeed become more active, and aggressive, in defending and propagating Orthodoxy. By the late eighteenth century, it had significantly improved central and diocesan administration, achieving a marked increase in the volume and quality of its paperwork and documentation. The church gave tightened supervision over diocesan administration and systematized procedural rules for consistories (Ustav dukhovnykh konsistorii, 1841). As a result, the church substantially increased its control over religious life and, most notably, in such vital secular spheres as marriage and divorce. The church established an elaborate system of ecclesiastical schools, seminaries, and academies to train and "professionalize" the clergy. It succeeded in obtaining some state funding for parishes (initially for "poor" parishes, later for those in borderland provinces, and eventually for other areas as well) and for parish schools to serve the needs of the laity.

That institutional development brought significant changes in the clergy itself. The episcopate not only increased in size (accompanying the establishment of smaller, more manageable dioceses) but also changed in its social complexion. Drawn almost exclusively from the offspring of the parish clergy, it initially consisted mainly of "learned monks" but by the late nineteenth century promoted men with a more "practical" profile (as educators, missionaries, and widowed parish priests). Whatever their origin, these bishops had served in various dioceses across the empire and hence gained a close familiarity with the diverse problems facing the church in different parts of this far-flung realm. While radical priests were wont to castigate bishops as "bureaucrats in cassocks," most prelates were not only efficient administrators but also men fervently devoted to the church, its traditions, and its interests.

Catherine's secularization of ecclesiastical land and peasants not only expropriated the vast wealth of monasteries but also brought a massive reduction in the number of monasteries and monastic clergy. Monasticism languished for several decades (with strict obstacles to the tonsure of new monastics and opening of new institutions) but finally began to grow again in the 1830s and 1840s and, by 1914, had even recovered its pre-sequestration level. More important, the social profile of monasticism also underwent a significant translation, with much of the increase being concentrated in female monasticism. No less important was a spiritual renaissance, reflected most dramatically in the phenomenon of "elderhood" (starchestvo), whereby individual monks acquired extraordinary fame and influence for their spiritual power and guidance. This revival of monasticism—intellectual, spiritual, economic—naturally provoked a rise in anti-monastic sentiment, not only among the secular intelligentsia but also among married white (secular) clergy.

The secular clergy (composed of priests, deacons, and sacristans) manned the forty thousand parishes that dotted the Russian landscape. Required (by custom, not canon) to marry prior to ordination, the priesthood thus had a substantial population that demanded material support (in contrast to the celibate Catholic clergy), including a plethora of male offspring who naturally tended to follow in the footsteps of their fathers. In the eighteenth century that predilection turned into a rigid caste-like order, with virtually no outsiders gaining entry to the clergy, for three main reasons: state policy (above all, a poll tax that impeded the transfer of townspeople and peasants to the tax-exempt clergy), specialized ecclesiastical education in schools open only to the clergy's sons, and the clergy's own vested interest in ensuring positions for their own sons. While this hereditary status ensured a steady rise in the educational qualification of ordinands (with virtually all new ordinands in the mid-nineteenth century holding a seminary degree), it produced far too many candidates (for a parish system that grew only marginally) and too few with a genuine sense of vocation (with many becoming priests out of inertia, not choice). To rejuvenate the secular clergy, the Great Reforms of the 1860s sought to facilitate the education and recruitment of male youths from other social estates. The reforms, however, served mainly to promote the exodus of priests' sons and did little to attract qualified ordinands from other social groups—in large measure, because of the failure to improve the social and material status of secular clergy. As a result, by the late nineteenth century the church faced a shortage of qualified candidates and had to ordain candidates with an incomplete seminary education.

popular orthodoxy

The post-Petrine church sought to carry out an "Orthodox reformation"—that is, to standardize parish religious practice, raise the believers' comprehension of Orthodoxy, and combat superstition and heresy. In part, the church relied on better administrative control at the central, diocesan, and local levels to identify and combat religious deviance. But no less important was the vision of "enlightened Orthodoxy," whereby the church (in emulation of the German Aufklärung) endeavored not only to regulate but also to instruct and thereby help the faithful to understand, not merely blindly believe. It therefore expanded the publication of religious literature (sermons and catechisms) and intensified demands that parish clergy preach and catechize. To be sure, even zealous priests met with such obstacles as irregular attendance (because of the difficulties of attending distant churches in bad weather and because of distractions during peak times in the agricultural cycle), lack of public and parish schools, and the cultural gulf between the well-educated priest and his illiterate flock. Nonetheless, the church gradually made headway, first in the towns and eventually in the villages, after the expansion of schools to rural areas in the second half of the nineteenth century. While the local deans and bishops still bewailed the ignorance of the pious folk, they increasingly attested to signs of substantial improvement.

The Russian Orthodox Church also reported phenomenally high rates of religious observance.

Most impressive were the official statistics on confession and communion, an annual obligation that provided a common (if crude) measure of religious practice. Although such data may tell more about conformity than piety, they do indicate the willingness of the laity to perform—or flout—these two key sacraments. And, compared to western Europe, where such indices plummeted in the course of the nineteenth century, the rates for Russia remained extraordinarily high and showed no significant decline even in the tumultuous decades leading up to the revolution of 1905–1907, with the vast majority—well over 80 percent for men as well as women—continuing to perform these annual rites.

To be sure, the clergy did discern signs of dissent and disbelief. The erosion of piety seemed particularly evident among the young and, above all, migrant laborers. As the latter left their villages to work, seasonally or permanently in the ever growing complex of factories and plants, they often left their "local Orthodoxy" behind and proved highly susceptible to the new mores and religious indifference of the city. No less important was the surge in religious dissent: not only disbelief, but also other faiths came to pose an ever growing challenge. In addition to the growing population of Old Believers (schismatics who rejected the seventeenth-century liturgical reforms and the official church that embraced them), the church now also had to combat a plethora of sects—from the infamous self-castrators (skoptsy) to various evangelical sects. In that sense, Russia was undergoing not so much a "secularization" as "sectarianization"—the formation of vigorous, energetic movements seeking not to inculcate Unbelief but rather New Belief and Old Belief.

Significantly, however, the challenge to the Orthodox Church also emanated from its own ranks of stalwart lay believers, who, especially from the mid-nineteenth century, became increasingly restive and intent upon asserting their own rights and prerogatives. Over the previous century or so, the church had gradually established tight control over the parish, claiming the right not only to regulate religious practice but also to appoint clergy and to siphon off parish assets for "general" church needs. The issue of parish finance was particularly intense: as the church diverted parish revenues to finance the church's bureaucracy and clerical seminaries, it deprived the laity of an opportunity to renovate their church and to appoint extra clergy—steps that, for the laity, were critical in enhancing the aesthetics of the liturgy. In the new atmosphere that emerged after serf emancipation in 1861, parishioners—like others in society—became increasingly assertive in claiming their rights and resisting traditional authority.

orthodoxy in an age of revolution

By the early twentieth century, the Orthodox Church—like the rest of imperial Russia—found itself in the throes of profound crisis. The strains in church-state relations reached a new level of intensity under the chief procurator, Konstantin Pobedonostsev (1880–1905); attempts by the last emperor, Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917), to reinforce the eroding foundations of autocracy with religion (most notably, in the controversial canonization of Serafim of Sarov in 1903) only deepened clerical resentment. The final blow came amid the revolution of 1905–1907: the imperial manifesto of 17 April 1905 (Old Style), granting freedom of conscience and decriminalizing conversion from Orthodoxy, shattered any remaining illusions about the willingness of the secular state to defend the vital interests of the church. The Duma monarchy (a hybrid of monarchy and parliamentarianism) that emerged in 1906 only aggravated resentment and distrust among prelates and priests; it did nothing to address key issues and enable reform in the church. After 1914, as the country plunged into war and revolution, the church suffered a sharp fall in its administrative control, material resources, and popular confidence. In 1917, after the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty, the church council made a desperate attempt to embark on reform and convoke a church council to address a broad range of issues. But it was too late: a new—Bolshevik—regime would soon come to power and wage a relentless campaign against "reactionary" clergy and "superstitious" folk.

See alsoCatholicism; Jews and Judaism; Protestantism; Russia.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Belliustin, Ioann S. Description of the Clergy in Rural Russia: The Memoir of a Nineteenth-Century Parish Priest. Edited and translated by Gregory L. Freeze. Ithaca, N.Y., 1985.

Hauptmann, Peter, and G. Stricker, eds. Die Orthodoxe Kirche in Russland: Dokumente ihrer Geschichte (860–1980). Göttingen, Germany, 1988.

Secondary Sources

Freeze, Gregory L. The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform. Princeton, N.J., 1983.

——. "Policing Piety: The Church and Popular Religion in Russia, 1750–1850." In Rethinking Imperial Russia, edited by David L. Ransel and Jane Burbank, 210–249. Bloomington, Ind., 1998.

——. "A Pious Folk? Religious Observance in Vladimir Diocese, 1900–1914." Jarbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 52, no. 3 (2004): 323–340.

Kivelson, Valerie A., and Robert H. Greene, eds. Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice under the Tsars. University Park, Pa., 2003.

Smolitsch, Igor. Geschichte der russischen Kirche, 1700–1917. 2 vols. Leiden, Netherlands, and Berlin, 1964–1991.

Gregory L. Freeze