Lieven D. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917
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Russian society, law and economy
byshev – author of a two-volume biography of Mozart published in Leipzig –
founded a musical circle at his house at the intersection of Bol’shaia and Malaia
Pokrovka, playing chamber music, and importing musicians for a symphony
orchestra from Moscow. The musical environment proved sufficiently rich to
nurture Milii Balakirev (1837–1910) up to the age of sixteen, when, Ulybyshev’s
recommendation in hand, he travelled to Moscow to study with Glinka, and
eventually to become a founder of the ‘Mighty Five’. In the second half of
the century, the musical tradition continued with the founding of a branch of
Anton Rubinstein’s Russian Musical Society through the efforts of V. I. Villuan,
who came to the town in 1873. Concerts and charitable recitals formed an inte-
gral part of cultural life, and musical instruction was available to students at
the local schools and institutes. The region also nourished a strong tradition
of choral singing, most notably in the knife- and lock-producing area around
Pavlovo.
Observation of the heavens was another local passion. If, in the 1840s, the
pages of the Gubernskie vedomosti were already filled with the meteorologi-
cal notes of local priests and teachers, by 1893 a province-wide network of
meteorological stations was established (there were forty-seven by 1912); they
drew on the efforts of the rural intelligentsia to chart average temperatures,
precipitation rates, cloud movements, the behaviour of snow masses on the
ground and so on. The Circle of Amateurs of Physics and Astronomy was
founded in 1888 and flourished up to the First World War. They proudly pro-
claimed Camille Flammarion as one of their honorary members (he actually
condescended to send them a letter acknowledging this honour), and counted
some 150 real members, including Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, then a resident
of Kaluga, by the turn of the century. The circle conducted meteorological
observations of their own (here, peasants and clergy were their most dedi-
cated contributors), as well as holding lectures and readings, conducting an
active correspondence with learned societies in the capitals and abroad, and
collecting a very respectable library of scientific works in French and German
as well as Russian.
If one were to speak of a ‘provincial culture’ distinct from that of the capitals,
one of the key loci for its emergence was the museum. For residents of provin-
cial Russia, the notion of a museum evoked not so much an art collection, as an
assemblage of historical, ethnographic, or natural-scientific artefacts. One of
the first natural-historical museums was founded in Nizhnii Novgorod in 1888
by the soil scientist Vasilii Dokuchaev; its aim was not only the display of soil
types, meteorological tables, examples of handicrafts, but also the education
of visitors. Eventually, a network of such museums became a means for the
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Nizhnii Novgorod in the nineteenth century
dissemination of information and creation of a local consciousness throughout
Russia. The major instrument for fostering historical consciousness became
the Provincial Archival Commissions, established (like the Gubernskie vedomosti
fifty years earlier) by decree from the central government in 1883.
61
Not only
did the Archival Commissions (NGUAK) undertake the daunting task of sifting
through mountains of ancient documents accumulated in one of the kremlin
towers (in the process, incidentally, destroying a significant amount of mate-
rials that did not interest them), but they also launched a plethora of research
expeditions, festivals and historical preservation efforts. Thus a tiny house
where Peter the Great had stayed a few days became a museum; Nizhegorodi-
ans gathered in 1889 to celebrate the birthday of the city’s legendary founder,
Prince Georgii Vsevolodovich (1189–1238); and preparations were already well
under way in the 1890s for the eventual jubilee of the rescue of Moscow from
the Poles, projected to be celebrated in 1912. The Archival Commissions had
published eighteen volumes (46 issues) of historical materials by 1914, includ-
ing contributions by Sergei Platonov who kept up an active correspondence
with commission members as part of his research on the Time of Troubles.
∗∗∗
Two themes emerge from the above discussion. First, it is clear that there was
nothing ‘typical’ or ‘representative’ about Nizhnii Novgorod in the nineteenth
century. Like every other provincial town, it pulsated to its own rhythms,
drawingon a richness of local environmentaland social circumstances to create
an individual personality. A thriving commercial life, the civic prominence of
the merchant estate, the distinct cultural flavour of the Old Belief were but
some of the particular characteristics of ‘Russia’s pocket’ – as popular wisdom
dubbed Nizhnii. A second theme is the importance of the Great Reforms
for provincial Russia. A demographic upsurge, the creation of entirely new
institutions like the zemstvo and the infusion of new energy into old ones,
and a burgeoning press and musical, scientific, and historical societies marked
the last third of the nineteenth century. The All-Russian Fair, held in Nizhnii
Novgorod in 1896, presented to the public not only the products of Russian
industry, commerce and agriculture, but a bustling and growing city poised to
enter the twentieth century with considerable pride, optimism, and energy.
61 On the Archival Commissions, see V. P. Makarikhin, Gubernskie uchenye arkhivnye komissii
Rossii (NN: Volgo-Viatskoe knizhnoe izd., 1991).
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14
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 sub-
servient ‘handmaiden’. The Church’s history did not end in 1721; it did, how-
ever, inaugurate a new age – one that brought fundamental changes in its
status, clergy, resources, relationship to laity, and role in social and politi-
cal 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 r
´
egime 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 revo-
lution not only in state and society, but within its own walls – profoundly
affecting its capacity (and desire) to defend the ancien r
´
egime.
Institutionalising Orthodoxy
Although the medieval Russian Church had constructed an administration to
exercise its broad spiritual and temporal authority, it exhibited the same organ-
isational 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 cen-
tralised 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 secularisa-
tion thesis), see Hugh McLeod, Secularisation in Western Europe, 1848–1914 (New York:
St Martin’s Press, 2000).
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Russian Orthodoxy: Church, people and politics
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 North-
ern 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 admin-
istration and, in 1718, included the Church in his design for a new system of
administrative colleges (kollegii), then deemed the model of efficient adminis-
tration. 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 under-
way. 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 1767–8
4
and made a systematic reorganisation of
dioceses in the 1780s (an ecclesiastical counterpoint to her provincial reform
2 The classic study is P. V. Verkhovskoi, Uchrezhdenie Dukhovnoi kollegii i dukhovnyireglament,
2 vols. (Rostov-on-Don, 1916; Farnborough: Gregg, 1972).
3 Polnoesobranie postanovlenii i rasporiazhenii po vedomstvupravoslavnogoispovedaniia.Tsarstvo-
vanie Ekateriny Petrovny, 4 vols. (St Petersburg, 1899–1911), vol. I, p. 660 (Synodal resolution
of 18 July 1744).
4 See 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 dioce-
san reports in 1847.
10
All this brought tangible results – for example, in the
Church’s growing capacity to regulate marriage and divorce (which, in con-
trast to most of Western Europe, remained entirely in its hands). The Church
used its new power to prevent and detect illegal marriages (those which vio-
lated 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 Synod
12
)
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
M
¨
uller (ed.), ‘. . . aus der anmuthigen Gelehrsamkeit’. T
¨
ubinger Studien zum 18. Jahrhundert
(T
¨
ubingen: Attempto Verlag, 1988), pp. 155–68.
5 I. M. Pokrovskii, Russkie eparkhii v XVI–XIX vv., 2 vols. (Kazan, 1913), vol. II, appendix,
pp. 55–8.
6 By the 1760sand1770s, 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.)
7 See G. L. Freeze, The Russian Levites (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977),
pp. 46–77.
8 Ibid., pp. 78–106.
9 Ustav dukhovnykh konsistorii (St Petersburg: Sinodal’naia tip., 1841).
10 On 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.
11 G. L. Freeze, ‘Bringing Order to the Russian Family: Marriage and Divorce in Imperial
Russia, 1760–1860’, JMH 62 (1990): 709–48.
12 For the establishment of the chancellery, see RGIA, Fond 797,op.2,d.6122, ll. 1–18.
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Russian Orthodoxy: Church, people and politics
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 AlexanderII (r. 1855–81) also included the Church
and sought to transform the basic institutions of the Church – its administra-
tion, education, judiciary, censorship and parish. The reforms, largely under-
taken 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 crit-
icism, 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 shortcom-
ings. 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 corrup-
tion, 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
13 The 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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of diocesan rule increasingly evident. The critical dynamic was the deluge of
marital and divorce cases, which increased exponentially in sheer numbers and
became ever more complex – so that, by century’s end, they were completely
overwhelming diocesan and Synodal administration.
14
Indeed, it is not wholly
unfair to describe the final decades, marked by a gradual breakdown of eccle-
siastical administration, as an incremental de-institutionalisation – a reversal
of the process launched by the Petrine reforms in the early eighteenth century.
That was compounded by a sharp deterioration in Church–State relations
in the years before the 1905 Revolution. One impetus was K. P. Pobedonos-
tsev, the chief procurator (1880–1905) who engineered ‘counter-reforms’ (to
dismantle the reforms of the 1860s) in an abrasive, imperious way that put a
severe strain on Church–State relations.
15
Matters deteriorated further with
the accession of Nicholas II to the throne in 1894: to an unprecedented degree,
he personally intervened in strictly spiritual matters. Partly out of conviction,
partly out of his own (and others’) desire to ‘resacralise’ autocracy, Nicholas
launched an inquiry into the moral and religious condition of monasteries,
sought to shield ‘popular’ icon-painting from commercialisation and mass
production, and personally sponsored the canonisation of a popular religious
figure, Serafim Sarovskii, in 1903.
16
This unprecedented intrusion offended
hierarchs and did little to resacralise autocracy. Particularly ominous was the
February Manifesto of 1903 (‘Plans for the Improvement of the State Order’)
with hints of further concessions to religious minorities that posed a direct
challenge to the Church’s privileged position. By 1905 clergy, lay activists and
conservative prelates had come to demand an end to state tutelage, realisation
of ‘conciliarism’ (sobornost’), even re-establishment of the patriarchate.
The clergy
The ‘clerical estate’ (dukhovnoe soslovie) that served the Church consisted of
three categories: the ruling episcopate, celibate monastic clergy and married
secular clergy. All underwent profound changes, some positive and some neg-
ative, that significantly recast their profile and mentalit
´
e.
14 See G.L. Freeze, ‘Matrimonial Sacrament and Profane Stories: Class, Gender, Confession
and the Politics of Divorce in Late Imperial Russia’, in M. Steinberg and H. Coleman
(eds.), Sacred Stories (forthcoming).
15 See G. L. Freeze, The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1983), pp. 409–48; A. Iu. Polunov, Pod vlast’iu ober-prokurora (Moscow:
Aero-XX, 1995).
16 See G. L. Freeze, ‘Subversive Piety: Religion and the Political Crisis in Late Imperial
Russia’, JMH 68 (1996): 308–50.
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Episcopate
The hierarchy (comprised of three descending ranks – metropolitan, arch-
bishop and bishop) still came exclusively from the ranks of monks but exhib-
ited substantial change in the imperial era. The total size increased steadily,
rising from 26 prelates under Peter the Great to 147 by 1917, partly through
the establishment of additional dioceses but mainly through the appointment
of suffragan bishops to assist in larger, less manageable dioceses. There were
equally striking changes in their social and education profile.
17
To overcome
opposition from tradition-bound Russian prelates, Peter chose prelates from
Ukraine, not because of their ethnicity, but because of their superior educa-
tion (often in Catholic institutions in the West), which, he presumed, would
incline them to support his reforms. From the middle of the eighteenth cen-
tury, however, prelates came primarily from central Russia, partly because
of suspicion of Ukrainian prelates, but chiefly because of the growing net-
work of seminaries in central dioceses (which could now supply qualified
Russian candidates). The social origin of bishops also changed: whereas only
half of the Petrine prelates came from the clerical estate, by the nineteenth
century this quotient had climbed to more than 90 per cent. Bishops from
other groups, notably the nobility, virtually disappeared. The critical factor
here was education: elevation to the episcopate required a higher ecclesias-
tical education which was only accessible to members of the clerical estate.
Indeed, most bishops held advanced degrees, published extensively and earned
the sobriquet of ‘learned monks’. Education also shaped their careers prior
to consecration: many served as rectors in seminaries and academies, earn-
ing their spurs as scholars and administrators, and then rising quickly – at an
early age – to choice episcopal appointments. Only in the late imperial era did
this career-line change, chiefly because fewer students in the elite ecclesias-
tical academies were willing to take monastic vows. As a result, by the early
twentieth century over half of the new prelates had come from non-academic
careers in the secular clergy (widowed priests who had taken monastic vows)
and in missions. They too, however, were of clerical origin and held a higher
academic degree.
18
After consecration, an episcopal career proved highly volatile, with bishops
moving rapidly up (or down) the diocesan hierarchy, as their merits and luck
17 For details see Jan Plamper, ‘The Russian Orthodox Episcopate, 1721–1917: A Prosopog-
raphy’, Journal of Social History 60 (2001): 5–24.
18 See G. L. Freeze, ‘L’episcopato nella chiesa ortodossa russa: crisis politica e religiosa
alla fine dell’ancien r
´
egime’, in Adalberto Marinardi (ed.), La grande vigilia (Magnano:
Comunita Monastica di Bose, 1998), pp. 30–4.
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would have it. The rate of transfers steadily accelerated; under Alexander III
the average tenure in a given diocese shrank to a mere 2.4 years. In theory,
mobility gave prelates a broader, national perspective and a strong incentive for
zealous performance. But rapid turnover also denied them a chance to develop
spiritual bonds with local clergy and laity; it also generated accusations that
prelates were careerists with no real interest in the spiritual needs of their flock.
Tensions between prelates and priests, while hardly new or unique to Russia,
increased markedly in post-reform Russia as priests and parishioners became
ever more aggressive in asserting their rights and prerogatives. This challenge
from below, compounded by the pressure from the secular state, made prelates
increasingly protective of canons (and their prerogatives), deepening the divide
within the clergy itself.
Monastic (‘black’) clergy
The monastic clergy became the object of a full-scale onslaught in the eigh-
teenth century.
19
In medieval Russia they had been the backbone of Orthodoxy,
monopolising high religious culture, attracting large numbers to take vows
and acquiring vast tracts of populated land. Those material assets, long a temp-
tation for the resource-starved state, became an irresistible target for Peter the
Great as he desperately searched for the wherewithal to wage the Northern
War. In 1701 he therefore re-established the ‘Monastery Office’ (monastyrskii
prikaz), so unpopular with churchmen in the seventeenth century, to admin-
ister monasteries and divert their revenues to the state. After Peter, policy
fluctuated between retreat and renewed attack, yet always short of fateful
secularisation until an abortive attempt by Peter III in 1762. Catherine at first
retreated, but in 1764 carried through the long-sought secularisation. Seeking
primarily to pad state coffers (but also to end the mounting unrest among
the Church’s peasants), Catherine justified sequestration for liberating the
Church from worldly cares so that it could focus upon its spiritual mission.
20
The state not only confiscated lands and peasants: it also closed two-thirds of
the monasteries and forbade the tonsure of new males and females until the
existing surfeit disappeared.
21
Once the surplus monks and nuns were elim-
inated, the Church found it difficult to attract new recruits; by the 1780s the
19 For overviewssee Igor Smolitsch, Russisches M
¨
onchtum:Entstehung, EntwicklungundWesen
988–1917 (W
¨
urzburg: Augustinus-Verlag, 1953); P. N. Zyrianov, Russkiemonastyri i monash-
estvo v XIX i nachale XX veka (Moscow: Verbum-M, 2002).
20 See A. Zav’ialov, Vopros o tserkovnykh imeniiakh pri Imp. Ekateriny II (St Petersburg, 1900);
A. I. Komissarenko, ‘Votchinnoe khoziaistvo dukhovenstva i sekuliarizatsionnaia
reforma v Rossii (20–60-gg. XVIII v.), unpublished PhD dissertation, Moscow (1984).
21 See RGIA, Fond 796,op.55,g.1774,d.62.
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Russian Orthodoxy: Church, people and politics
surfeit had turned into a general shortage of monks and nuns.
22
As a result,
by 1825 the number of monks, nuns, and novices (11,080) was less than half its
size a century earlier (25,207).
By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, that crisis gave way to
a renaissance of monasticism.
23
Most obvious was the sheer increase in the
number of monasteries, as the state approved their establishment if they had
sufficient financing and, especially, if they could bolster Orthodoxy in minority
areas. Hence the number of monasteries, which had fallen to 476 by 1825,
climbed to nearly 1,000 by 1914; resident monks, nuns and novices rose about
8.5 times (from 11,080 to 94,629).
24
Newrecruits came from increasingly diverse
social backgrounds, especially in the case of women. No less important was the
spiritual renaissance in the monastery, above all, the emergence of elderhood
(starchestvo) as the quintessence of Orthodox religiosity.
25
But the most remarkable feature of the monastic renaissance was the grow-
ing predominance of women. Once a minority, by the early twentieth century
nuns and female novices had come to constitute a majority of the monastic
clergy (77.5 per cent). This process was hardly unique to Russia, occurring as
well in the contemporary West. The key factors in the Russian case included
a heightened (and ascribed) sense of religiosity among women, breakdown
of the patriarchal family (giving women greater autonomy and freedom of
choice), the positive role of female cloisters (as hospitals, schools and homes
for the elderly) and the Church’s growing recognition of women’s potential
role in combatting dissent and de-christianisation.
Although monasticism was regaining its erstwhile status (and much prop-
erty as well), it also elicited growing criticism. It was a favourite target of
anticlericals, who accused it of harbouring indolence and gluttony, failing to
perform useful worldly service, and associating with right-wing forces. Such
criticism was also to be heard within the Church, especially among parish
clergy, who resented the monastic monopoly of power in the episcopate and
ecclesiastical schools. Even among the laity, despite the popular veneration of
the monastery’s religious significance, there was mounting resentment over
monastic landholding amidst the ‘land hunger’ of late Imperial Russia.
22 RGIA, Fond 796,op.63,g.1782,d.285,l.4.
23 For a case study, with attention to the larger context, see Scott Kenworthy, ‘The Revival
of Monasticism in Modern Russia: The Trinity-Sergius Lavra, 1825–1921’, unpublished
PhD dissertation, Brandeis University (2002).
24 Pravoslavnaia entsiklopediia: Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’ (Moscow, 1998), p. 132.
25 See Robert L. Nichols, ‘The Orthodox Elder (Startsy) of Imperial Russia’, Modern Greek
Studies Yearbook 1 (1985): 1–30.
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