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Russian Orthodoxy: Church, people and politics in Imperial Russia

gregory l. freeze

The Orthodox Church, which had possessed enormous property and power in medieval Russia, underwent profound change in Imperial Russia. It was not, as traditional historiography would have it, merely a matter of the Petrine reforms which purportedly turned the Church into a state agency and subservient ‘handmaiden’. The Church’s history did not end in 1721; it did, however, inaugurate a new age – one that brought fundamental changes in its status, clergy, resources, relationship to laity, and role in social and political questions. All this reflected the impact of new forces (and the Church’s response): state-building, territorial expansion, growth and transformation of society, and the challenges posed by secularisation and religious pluralism.1 Like the ancien regime´ itself, Russian Orthodoxy faced an acute crisis by the early twentieth century, affecting both its capacity to conduct internal reforms and its relationship to the regime and society. The Church thus faced revolution not only in state and society, but within its own walls – profoundly affecting its capacity (and desire) to defend the ancien regime´.

Institutionalising Orthodoxy

Although the medieval Russian Church had constructed an administration to exercise its broad spiritual and temporal authority, it exhibited the same organisational backwardness as did the secular regime. The patriarchate, established in 1589, presided over a vast realm called the ‘patriarchal region’ (patriarshaia oblast’) and nominally supervised a handful of surrounding dioceses. Despite the resolutions of church councils and the patriarch, the Church had no centralised administration to formulate and implement a standardised policy. Attempts to do so, like the liturgical reforms of the 1650s, provoked resistance

1 For a comparative perspective (and summary of the recent critique of the secularisation thesis), see Hugh McLeod, Secularisation in Western Europe, 1 848–1 91 4 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000).

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and precipitated schism and the Old Belief. At the diocesan level, ecclesiastical governance was nominal; Russian bishops simply could not exercise the kind of control found in Reformation and post-Reformation Europe.

These shortcomings in ecclesiastical administration, compounded by the sharp conflict between the tsar and patriarch, provided the primary impetus for the church reforms of Peter the Great.2 When the conservative patriarch, Ioakim, died in 1700, Peter left the position vacant and appointed a locum tenens as acting head of the Church. Faced with the fierce exigencies of the Northern War, Peter was more interested in the Church’s material resources and promptly re-established, in 1701, the ‘Monastery Office’ (monastyrskii prikaz) to siphon off income from monastic estates. That order was followed by others imposing new levies and restrictions on the Church and clergy. Only when the Northern War abated did Peter turn his attention to ecclesiastical administration and, in 1718, included the Church in his design for a new system of administrative colleges (kollegii), then deemed the model of efficient administration. For the Church, that meant replacing the patriarchate with a ‘spiritual college’ of bishops (later renamed the ‘Holy Synod’). In 1721 Peter issued the ‘Spiritual Regulation’ (with a supplement in 1722) to serve as its governing charter and to set the agenda for ecclesiastical and religious reform. In 1722 he also established the office of chief procurator to serve as his ‘eyes and ears’ in ecclesiastical affairs. Peter also issued a plethora of other decrees, such as those restricting the construction of churches and limiting the number of monastic and secular clergy. But his death in 1725 came during the initial stages of implementation; his immediate successors either deferred or dismantled further reform.

From the 1740s, however, the project of ‘church-building’ (the ecclesiastical counterpart to state-building) and religious reform was once again underway. To improve diocesan administration, the Synod tightened its oversight and reorganised the mammoth Patriarchal (now ‘Synodal’) Region into several smaller, more manageable dioceses.3 This process gained new impetus under Catherine the Great (r. 1762–96), who first vented ecclesiastical questions in the Legislative Question of 1767–84 and made a systematic reorganisation of dioceses in the 1780s (an ecclesiastical counterpoint to her provincial reform

2The classic study is P. V. Verkhovskoi, Uchrezhdenie Dukhovnoi kollegii i dukhovnyi reglament,

2 vols. (Rostov-on-Don, 1916; Farnborough: Gregg, 1972).

3Polnoe sobranie postanovlenii i rasporiazhenii po vedomstvu pravoslavnogo ispovedaniia. Tsarstvovanie Ekateriny Petrovny, 4 vols. (St Petersburg, 1899–1911), vol. I, p. 660 (Synodal resolution of 18 July 1744).

4See the discussion and references in G. L. Freeze, ‘Church, State and Society in Catherinian Russia: The Synodal Instruction to the Legislative Commission’ in Eberhard

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of 1775).5 The new dioceses, operating under strict oversight of the Synod,6 not only administered smaller territories and populations but also acquired new administrative organs – above all, the dean (blagochinnyi) as overseer for ten to fifteen parish churches. As a result, the bishop could now collect systematic information and tighten control over the clergy and, increasingly, the believers themselves.7 At the same time, the Church expanded its network of seminaries to train clergy. Although mandated by Peter the Great, these existed only on paper until the Catherinean era and now steadily increased their enrolments and developed a full curriculum based on Latin.8

Reforms in the first half of the nineteenth century brought further institution-building. This included the formation of a ‘system’ of ecclesiastical schools in 1808–14, publication of the Charter of Ecclesiastical Consistories in 1841 (to direct diocesan administration)9 and the introduction of annual diocesan reports in 1847.10 All this brought tangible results – for example, in the Church’s growing capacity to regulate marriage and divorce (which, in contrast to most of Western Europe, remained entirely in its hands). The Church used its new power to prevent and detect illegal marriages (those which violated canon or state law) and to thwart divorce. As a result, by the middle of the nineteenth century, marital dissolution – which had once been easy and informal – had become virtually impossible.11

The pre-reform era also marked an unprecedented expansion in the role of the chief procurator, above all, during the tenure of Count N. A. Protasov (1836– 55). Protasov established his own chancellery (parallel to that of the Synod12) and used the diocesan secretary (the main lay official assisting the bishop) as his own agent in diocesan administration. Protasov even assumed a decisive role

Muller¨ (ed.), ‘. . . aus der anmuthigen Gelehrsamkeit’. Tubinger¨ Studien zum 1 8. Jahrhundert

(Tubingen:¨ Attempto Verlag, 1988), pp. 155–68.

5I. M. Pokrovskii, Russkie eparkhii v XVI–XIX vv., 2 vols. (Kazan, 1913), vol. II, appendix,

pp.55–8.

6By the 1760s and 1770s, the Synod demanded – and received – systematic data on a wide variety of matters; see RGIA, Fond 796, op. 48, g. 1767, d. 301; op. 55, g. 1774, d. 534, ll. 9–10 ob. Previously, as the chief procurator (I. Melissino) complained to the Synod on 31 October 1764, such reporting was sporadic or non-existent (op. 45, g. 1764, d. 335, l. 1–1 ob.)

7See G. L. Freeze, The Russian Levites (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977),

pp.46–77.

8Ibid., pp. 78–106.

9Ustav dukhovnykh konsistorii (St Petersburg: Sinodal’naia tip., 1841).

10On the standardised annual reports (otchety), essential for the chief procurator’s own annual reports, see: RGIA, Fond 797, op. 14, g. 1844, d. 33752, ll. 1–54.

11G. L. Freeze, ‘Bringing Order to the Russian Family: Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia, 1760–1860’, JMH 62 (1990): 709–48.

12For the establishment of the chancellery, see RGIA, Fond 797, op. 2, d. 6122, ll. 1–18.

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in setting the Synod’s agenda, framing its resolutions, and controlling their implementation. Nevertheless the bishops deeply resented the intrusion, the spirit of ill-will steadily mounting during his decades as chief procurator.13

The ‘Great Reforms’ under Alexander II (r. 1855–81) also included the Church and sought to transform the basic institutions of the Church – its administration, education, judiciary, censorship and parish. The reforms, largely undertaken at state initiative, applied the general principles and policies of the secular reforms to the Church. Above all, that meant measures to encourage society to help plan, finance and implement reform. In the case of the Church, this entailed a limited ‘democratisation’ (for example, by allowing priests to elect deans and hold diocesan assemblies) and even ‘laicisation’ (by allowing the laity to assume a greater role in parish affairs). The hope was to revitalise the Church and to bring it into greater accord with society and state.

These hopes were soon dashed. The ‘democratisation’ elicited strong criticism, chiefly on the grounds that the dean was now the agent of the clergy, not the bishop, and therefore lax and lenient in the face of grievous misdeeds and malfeasance. Nor did the diocesan assemblies perform as hoped, partly because of the bishops’ hostility, partly because of the clergy’s own shortcomings. In any case these changes failed to solve the needs of the clergy and seminary and to provide a forum for pastoral interaction and co-operation. The parish reforms were no less disappointing. The 1864 statute (establishing parish councils to raise funds for charity, schools, clergy and the parish church) ran into a wall of popular indifference: few parishes availed themselves of the opportunity to establish a council and, of those that did, they raised scant funds (which, for the most part, went mainly to renovate and beautify their church). By 1869 the reform resorted to an older strategy of ‘reorganising parishes’, i.e. merging them into larger units and reducing resident clerical staffs, with the expectation that a higher parishioner:priest ratio would enable more ample material support. That too failed: parishioners resisted and withheld support (by cutting the voluntary gratuities), while the clergy found that they had to serve many more parishioners for the same income.

Reform in ecclesiastical administration and judiciary failed even to pass from draft to law. Already the butt of lay criticism for red tape and corruption, ecclesiastical administration suffered from hyper-centralisation at the top and under-institutionalisation at the base. And time did not stand still: the workload rose sharply in the post-reform period, making the deficiencies

13The classic critique came in A. N. Murav’ev, ‘O vliianii svetskoi vlasti na dela tserkovnye’ (RGIA, Fond 796, op. 205, d. 643).

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