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promised so much and gave so little. Little wonder that some proved increasingly receptive to ‘clerical liberalism’ and even revolutionary causes.33 Conservatives were no less disenchanted. That dim view of the reforms propelled Pobedonostsev’s ‘counter-reforms’, including a reversal of parish reorganisation as well as measures to limit the matriculation of outsiders and to impede the ‘flight’ of seminarians from church service.34 By the 1890s the failure to improve the clergy’s material and legal status, compounded by the attempt to imprison sons in church service, only fuelled growing discontent within the secular clergy.

Believers

‘Christianisation’ was not an event in 988, but a complex, incremental process that slowly worked its way across the great Eurasian plain. Given the dispersion of population, the heterogeneity of local cultures, and the institutional backwardness of the medieval Church, Russian Orthodoxy was actually Russian Heterodoxy, with kaleidoscopic variations in local customs, superstitions and religious practice. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Church undertook to standardise and purify popular religious practice, but as yet lacked the instrumentalities to make a fundamental ‘reformation’ in popular religious practice.35

It was only in the eighteenth century that the Church launched a full-scale campaign to reshape popular Orthodoxy. The Petrine reform fired the initial salvo, but a sustained effort began only in the middle of the eighteenth century.36 The issue was not disbelief, but deviant belief – the welter of unauthorised, sometimes heretical customs and practices that pervaded local religious life, such as sorcery and black magic, unofficial saints and relics, and ‘miracleworking icons’. A further concern was the Old Belief, especially from the early nineteenth century, as the number of registered ‘schismatics’ – and, reports of ‘semi-schismatics’ (poluraskol’niki) – steadily increased.37

33Freeze, Parish Clergy, pp. 389–97.

34By 1900 the Synod limited outsiders (youths from non-clerical estates) to 10 per cent (RGIA, Fond 179, g. 1898, d. 415).

35See, for example, ‘1651 g. oktiabria 20. Ustavnaia gramota temnikovskogo sobora protopopu o proizvodstve suda i tserkovnoi rasprave’, Izvestiia Tambovskoi uchenoi arkhivnoi komissii 8 (1886): 71–6.

36A. S. Lavrov, Koldovstvo i religiia v Rossii (Moscow: Drevlekharnilishche, 2000); G. L. Freeze, ‘Policing Piety: The Church and Popular Religion in Russia, 1750–1850’, in David L. Ransel and Jane Burbank (eds.), Rethinking Imperial Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 210–49.

37Official data, notorious for understating the number of Old Believers, none the less showed a steady increase – from 84,150 (1800) to 273,289 (1825) to 648,359 (1850). RGIA,

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This ‘reformation from above’ had a twofold thrust. One was traditional: repression. Peter’s Spiritual Regulation specified the superstitious and deviant behaviour that the clergy were to combat, and subsequent decrees continued the attack. In the 1740s the campaign was broadened to include behaviour in the Church and the performance of religious rites; the Church also took the first steps toward creating a new official to ensure this ‘good order’. The second thrust was ‘enlightenment’ – the attempt to inculcate a basic understanding of Orthodoxy by requiring priests to catechise and preach, not merely perform rites. This broader pastoral vision, to be sure, was slow to take effect. Despite the dissemination of printed sermons,38 parish priests found it difficult to comply, with most offering a sermon three or four times per year (if at all).39 They proved more energetic about catechisation;40 by the middle of the nineteenth century, a small but growing number of priests – especially in urban parishes – offered some form of catechism instruction.41 With the initial campaign to open village schools (first by the Ministry of State Domains in 183842 and later by the Church itself ), the clergy had yet another venue to teach religious fundamentals. The Church also expanded its publication of religious literature for the laity, which was initially aimed at the educated but later targeted at a less privileged readership. The result was a gradual confessionalisation that sought to make the folk more cognitively Orthodox, to be not only ‘right-praising’ but also ‘right-believing’.

Church policy toward popular Orthodoxy underwent a significant shift in the middle of the nineteenth century. Although the Church continued to

Fond 138, g. 1857, d. 549, ll. 4–5; Fond 797, op. 25, otd. 2, st. 1, d. 105, ll. 16 ob., 23 ob. By midcentury prelates warned increasingly of the ‘semi-schismatics’, who, while nominally Orthodox, in fact simultaneously observed the Old Belief.

38To encourage and facilitate such preaching, the Church published and distributed model sermons that parish priests (few of whom, until the early nineteenth century, had formal schooling) could simply read aloud to parishioners. For the fundamental three-volume collection, compiled by Platon (Levshin) and Gavriil (Petrov), Sobranie raznykh pouchenii na vse voskresnye i prazdnichnye dni, 3 vols. (Moscow: Sinodal’naia tip., 1776). The publication came at the direct initiative of Catherine II; see the memorandum from the chief procurator, 15 March 1772, in RGIA, Fond 796, op. 53, g. 1772, d. 19, l. 1–1 ob.

39The rarity of sermons is evident from the service records; see, for example, the Kursk files in Gos. arkhiv Kurskoi oblasti, Fond 20, op. 2, d. 10, ll. 2–2 ob., 10 ob.–11, 18 ob.–19.

40For the development of catechism texts, see Peter Hauptmann, Die Katechismen der Russisch-Orthodoxen Kirche. Entstehungsgeschichte und Lehrgehalt (Gottingen,¨ 1971).

41Stung by reports that few parishes offered catechism instruction, in the mid-1840s the Synod collected systematic data that showed a modest, but rising, percentage of churches giving catechism instruction: 7.8 per cent in 1847, 8.7 per cent in 1850 and 11.6 per cent in 1855 (G. L. Freeze, ‘The Rechristianization of Russia: The Church and Popular Religion, 1750–1850’, Studia Slavica Finlandensia 7 (1990): 109–10). Compliance varied considerably – from 12 parishes in Vladimir to 504 in Podolia (RGIA, Fond 797, op. 14, d. 33764, ll. 94–6).

42For the ministry’s appeal for clerical participation, see the 1838 memorandum in RGIA, Fond 796, op. 119, g. 1838, d. 1178.

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intensify the clergy’s didactic role (uchitel’stvo), it began to revise its view of popular Orthodoxy and now endeavoured to incorporate, not repress, lay religious practice. That meant, for example, a new view of icon processions; earlier derogated as useless and even harmful, the Church now tended to encourage such public displays of piety – both to satisfy the demands of believers and to demonstrate the power of Orthodoxy.43 As one dean in Volhynia diocese explained: ‘Such icon processions develop in the people a feeling of religious sensibility, arouse a profound reverence toward things sacred, instil piety in the souls, and protect them from superstition.’44 The Church also sought to involve the laity directly in religious life, not only through the parish councils described above, but also through the development of choirs45 and religious associations, such as societies of believers who bore religious banners during processions.46

To be sure, the Church had to fight an uphill battle against forces inimical to traditional religious life, not so much the intellectual challenges of disbelief and science, as the urbanisation and industrialisation that uprooted people from their community and its embedded traditions and beliefs. But it was not only ‘sociological de-christianisation’ that threatened Orthodoxy; the Church also faced serious challenges from religious pluralism – from the Old Believers, sectarians and other confessions seeking to convert the Orthodox. In the face of all this, did the Russian Church, like its peers in the West, experience a decline in religious observance?

That is a complex issue, but one conventional measure of religious practice is the data on confession and communion.47 Significantly, especially when compared with Western Europe, observance among the Russian Orthodox remained extraordinarily high, with relatively modest fluctuations over the course of the entire nineteenth century (see Table 14.1). In 1900, on the eve of the revolutionary upsurge, Church data show that 87 per cent of the male and 91 per cent of the female believers performed their ‘spiritual duty’ of confession

43For a typical application, which still required Synodal approval, see 1872 files from Riazan and Suzdal in RGIA, Fond 796, f. 153, g. 1872, dd. 601 and 707.

44Derzhavnyi arkhiv Zhitomirskoi oblasti, f. f-1, op. 30, d. 423, l. 31 (dean’s report from

1902).

45For measures in 1886 to improve church singing, see RGIA, Fond 797, op. 56, otd. 2, st. 3, d. 11).

46For a typical file, which involves the establishment of a society of banner-bearers (khorugvenostsy) in Vladimir in 1903 (with the charter specifying the duties to ensure good order during processions and in the church itself ), see Gos. arkhiv Vladimirskoi oblasti, Fond 556, op. 1, d. 4366.

47Measuring ‘piety’ is, at best, a perilous undertaking; data on confession and communion do, however, provide hard numbers on rates of religious practice and the laity’s fervour or, at least, desire to uphold tradition or willingness to conform.

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Table 14.1. Confession and communion observance: Russian Empire (in per cent)

and communion.48 Little wonder that, before the 1905 Revolution, the bishops’ annual reports to the Holy Synod routinely exuded such complacency and confidence about popular piety. The data do, however, also reveal a darker side. Whereas the non-compliants had consisted primarily of semi-confessors in 1797 (i.e. people who made confession, but not received communion), that category all but disappeared in the nineteenth century. As local archival materials show, they did so for various reasons: some because they fell ill or encountered other impediments, others because they simply lacked the zeal to return for communion, and still others because of ‘the counsel of their spiritual father’ (for failing to observe the Lenten requirements of abstinence, especially from sexual intercourse). In lieu of the semi-observants, there emerged a larger pool of non-compliants who were either ‘excused’ (mainly because of absenteeism associated with trade or migrant labour) or ‘unexcused’ (for ‘indifference’). In short, Russia showed signs of religious differentiation: an overwhelming mass of the population remained observant, while a tiny but distinct minority neglected or outright rejected their ‘spiritual duty’.

Significantly, in the late nineteenth century church authorities were more inclined to complain about the parishioners’ assertiveness, not their indifference. Ever since the Petrine reform, ecclesiastical authorities had increasingly violated traditional parish prerogatives, above all, in the appointment of clergy and expenditure of parish funds. The latter was particularly sensitive: the earnings from the sale of votive candles, a prime source of parish revenues, were diverted to finance the ecclesiastical schools open only to the clergy’s

48The data include a large number who missed confession and communion because they were too young (under age seven); these have been omitted from the calculations here.

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