Russian society, law and economy

Secular (‘white’) clergy

The secular clergy served primarily in parish churches, but they also staffed cathedrals, institutional churches, cemetery chapels and the like. The secular clergy consisted of two distinct groups: ordained clergy (sviashchennosluzhiteli) and sacristans (tserkovnosluzhiteli). The former included mainly priests (a small number of whom held the honorific title of archpriest) and deacons (d’iakony); only the priest could conduct the liturgy and dispense sacraments. If funding permitted, a parish preferred as well to have the optional deacon, prized for his voice and role in enriching the aesthetics of the liturgy. More numerous were the unordained sacristans (earlier diachok and ponomar’, retitled psalomshchik in 1869), who assisted the priest in performing rites and rituals, read the divine liturgy, and helped maintain the church and keep order during services.

The secular clergy increased in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but at a far slower pace than the population. Thus, although the number of clergy more than doubled between 1722 and 1914 (from 61,111 in 1722 to 117,915), the population of Orthodox believers grew nearly tenfold (from 10 to 98 million). That meant, of course, a substantial rise in the ratio of parishioners to secular clergy, from 1,008 in 1824 to 1,925 in 1914. In many cases, the situation was actually worse: rural parishes often embraced numerous hamlets scattered over a broad, untraversable area, while some urban parishes swelled to gargantuan size (with tens of thousands of ‘parishioners’). While this process also affected Western churches, especially Protestants, it had particularly negative consequences for Russian Orthodoxy: because the priest had to perform myriad daily rites, he found it exceedingly difficult to perform the new duties of pastor and preacher, not merely dispense various rituals and sacraments.

Yet those newer duties gained steadily in importance and underlay the Church’s drive to educate and ‘professionalise’ the clergy. Whereas earlier priests had lacked formal education, the new educational network – which took root and expanded steadily after the middle of the eighteenth century – soon made formal seminary study and, later, a full seminary degree a sine qua non for the priesthood. Thus, 15 per cent of the priests had a seminary degree in 1805, but that quotient had jumped to 83 per cent in 1860 and reached 97 per cent by 1880. That superior education also generated growing emphasis on a pastoral, not just liturgical, role.26 But this ‘educational revolution’ applied only to priests, not deacons and especially sacristans, who had scant formal

26Handbooks on pastoral service became commonplace, following the seminal volume by Parfenii (Sopkovskii) and Georgii (Konisskii), O dolzhnostiakh presviterov prikhodskikh (St Petersburg: Sinodal’naia tip., 1776).

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schooling. As the bishop of Saratov observed in 1850, the priests are well educated, but ‘the deacons and sacristans, almost without exception, do not know the catechism’.27 That educational gap, compounded by disputes over the sharing of parish revenues, was a ubiquitous bane of parish life.28

Education also played a role in transforming the secular clergy into a hereditary social estate (dukhovnoe soslovie). Whereas the Church in Muscovy had no educational barriers to the appointment of clergy (who were chosen by parishioners and merely confirmed and ordained by the bishops), educational requirements became a major obstacle to choosing clergy from other social groups: first, because the seminary was open only to the sons of clergy (to avoid wasting the Church’s scarce resources on those who would not serve); and, second, because the bishop insisted that the best students (regardless of parish wish) receive appointments. A further obstacle to outsiders was the new poll tax: since the clergy had a privileged exemption, the state was loath to release poll-tax registrants (peasants and townspeople) to the clergy and thus diminish its revenues. While exceptions were possible (if the registrant’s community agreed to pay the poll tax), that became increasingly rare after the middle of the eighteenth century.29 A final factor was the vested interest of the clergy, who preferred to have kinsmen in the same parish. That was partly to avoid the presence of outsiders (deemed more likely to report misconduct or malfeasance), partly to ensure positions for relatives, and partly to provide dowries for daughters and support for elderly clergy (the new cleric agreeing to support his retiring predecessor). Although the Church tenaciously resisted kinship ties within the same parish, these nevertheless persisted and appear frequently in the clerical service registers (klirovye vedomosti).30

The formation of a closed estate was fraught with significant consequences. First, it had a negative impact on the quality of pastors and their ties to the laity. On the one hand, the hereditary order ensured a sufficient number (indeed surfeit) of candidates, but not necessarily zealous, committed servitors.

27RGIA, Fond 796, op. 132, g. 1851, d. 2357, l. 311 (Saratov annual report for 1850). Such assessments figure frequently in the parish service records (klirovye vedomosti); see, for example, the disparaging assessments from Kursk in 1840 in Gos. arkhiv Kurskoi oblasti, Fond 20, op. 2, d. 10, ll. 2–2 ob., 7 ob.–8.

28See, for example, the disparaging comments by I. S. Belliustin in his Description of the Rural Clergy, ed. G. L. Freeze (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).

29In 1784, only 667 of the 86,671 clergy in the Russian Empire had come from poll-tax origins (0.8 per cent). See RGIA, Fond 796, op. 65, g. 1784, d. 443, ll. 71–85.

30For example, see similar records from Moscow in 1854 (GIAgM, Fond 203, op. 772, d. 279), 1861 (op. 766, d. 241), and 1880 (op. 766, d. 229), Tver in 1830 (Gos. arkhiv Tverskoi oblasti, Fond 160, op. 1, d. 1672), Irkutsk in 1830 (Gos. arkhiv Irkutskoi oblasti, Fond 50, op. 1, d. 3840), and Kiev in 1830 (Tsentral’nyi derzhavnyi istorichnyi arkhiv Ukrainy, Fond

127, op. 1009, d. 275).

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Critics argued that ordinands simply followed in their father’s footsteps and lacked real commitment or vocation. On the other hand, the hereditary estate weakened the ties between priest and parishioner. That meant, in the first instance, few kinship ties: given that marriage into the disprivileged poll-tax population was undesirable, the clergy predictably showed a strong propensity for endogamous marriages. That endogamy was compounded by a growing cultural rift between the seminary-educated priest and the mass of illiterate parishioners. Not only did the priest find it difficult to communicate with his flock, but parishioners resented the diversion of scarce parish revenues to finance seminaries serving only the clergy’s offspring.

The second problem was demographic imbalance. Given the slow rate of expansion in parishes and their personnel, the clerical estate simply produced far more progeny than the ecclesiastical domain could absorb. While the regime did ‘harvest’ the clerical estate periodically (through conscript of ‘idle’ sons into the army and enticement of seminarians into the civil service), these outlets proved insufficient. The result was a surfeit of unplaced clerical sons, including large numbers of seminary graduates, who became the focus of growing concern by the middle of the nineteenth century. This backlog of ‘idle’ seminary graduates steadily increased, rising from 430 in 1830 to 2,178 in 1850. Thus by mid-century – within the span of two or three generations – the Church had gone from a chronic shortage of educated candidates to a chronic surplus.31

In one important respect, however, the secular clergy experienced little change: in the form and amount of their material support. Financially, the parish was an autonomous unit: it provided land (for the clergy to cultivate themselves) and voluntary gratuities from various rites (such as baptism, weddings and burials) and holiday processions.32 With the exception of a few prosperous parishes, support was marginal and left the clergy poor if not destitute; predictably, it was difficult to find candidates willing to come – and especially stay – in the poorer parishes. Even worse than the penury was the pernicious form of the support. Cultivating the parish plot, complained the priests, inevitably distracted them from spiritual duties, rendered the advanced

31Complaints of a surfeit appeared as early as a report from Riazan in 1826 (Fond 796, op. 107, g. 1826, d. 460, ll. 87–88 ob.); by mid-century, they were ubiquitous. For example, in 1850 the bishop of Tula reported that 672 students had left diocesan schools (251 graduates; 421 with incomplete education), but that the diocese had no new openings (RGIA, Fond 796, op. 132, g. 1851, d. 2357, ll. 191 ob.–192).

32In rare cases, the clergy derived income from other sources – such as a stipend (ruga) from a local magnate, salary from an institutional chapel, rental income from real estate, and the like.

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education irrelevant, and diminished their status in the eyes of the privileged (and perhaps even the disprivileged). The ‘voluntary’ gratuities were even more problematic: they left the clergy feeling like beggars and triggered constant disputes, as the two sides haggled over the fee – with such disputes often ending in charges of ‘extortion’.

Although the Petrine reform raised the question of clerical support, it had other priorities and left the problem unresolved. About all that the eighteenthcentury state could do was to ensure that the parish staff had a full allotment (33 desiatiny) and to set guidelines for gratuities in 1765. The first to take concrete measures was Nicholas I, first by providing a small budget to subsidise clergy in the ‘poorest’ parishes (1829) and then by attempting to prescribe parish obligations (land and labour dues) and provide small subsidies in the politically sensitive western provinces (1842). But these measures did not apply to the mass of parish clergy, their economy remaining unchanged from pre-Petrine times – even as their expenses, above all, for educating sons, rose dramatically.

The ecclesiastical ‘Great Reforms’ sought to address the issues of the hereditary order and material support, but without success. As noted above, the parish reforms of the 1860s aimed at improving the clergy’s material support – first by establishing parish councils, then by the reorganisation of parishes and reduction of parish staffs, but neither measure proved effective in alleviating the clergy’s financial needs. Dismantling the hereditary estate also proved difficult. The reforms did abolish hereditary claims to positions (1867), assigned clerical offspring a secular legal status (1871) and opened ecclesiastical schools to outsiders, but the results proved very disappointing. By 1914 only 3 per cent of the secular clergy came from other social estates. And that 3 per cent came at a high cost. Abolition of family claims to positions simply eliminated the traditional form of social security; alternative schemes for pensions proved ineffective, forcing elderly clergy to remain in service and doomed retirees to destitution. Opening diocesan schools proved counterproductive: not only did few outsiders choose to matriculate (hardly surprising, given the failure to improve clerical income), but many of the clergy’s sons used their right of exit to flee to secular careers. Hence the Church – after decades of a surfeit of candidates – suddenly faced a dearth of qualified candidates. To fill vacancies, bishops had to ordain inferior candidates and, increasingly, even those without a seminary degree. The result was a decline in the clergy’s educational standards, with the proportion of priests with a seminary degree plummeting from 97 per cent in 1880 to 64 per cent in 1904.

Disenchantment with the reforms was intense and universal. The ostensible beneficiaries, the parish clergy, came to loathe the very word ‘reform’ – which

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