Lieven D. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917

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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 actu-

ally 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 conse-

quences 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.

But this ‘educational revolution’ applied

only to priests, not deacons and especially sacristans, who had scant formal

26 Handbooks 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’.

That educational gap, compounded by disputes over

the sharing of parish revenues, was a ubiquitous bane of parish life.

Education also played a role in transforming the secular clergy into a hered-

itary 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.

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).

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, butnot necessarilyzealous, committed servitors.

27 RGIA, 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.

28 See, 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).

29 In 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.

30 For 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.

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, wed-

dings and burials) and holiday processions.

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

31 Complaints 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).

32 In 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 con-

stant 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 eighteenth-

century 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 measuresdid 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 hered-

itary 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 dif-

ﬁcult. 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 with-

out 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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promised so much and gave so little. Little wonder that some proved increas-

ingly receptive to ‘clerical liberalism’ and even revolutionary causes.

Con-

servatives were no less disenchanted. That dim view of the reforms propelled

Pobedonostsev’s ‘counter-reforms’, including a reversal of parish reorganisa-

tion as well as measures to limit the matriculation of outsiders and to impede

the ‘ﬂight’ of seminarians from church service.

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 disper-

sion of population, the heterogeneity of local cultures, and the institutional

backwardness of the medieval Church, Russian Orthodoxy was actually Rus-

sian 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.

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 cen-

tury.

The issue was not disbelief, but deviant belief – the welter of unautho-

rised, sometimes heretical customs and practices that pervaded local religious

life, such as sorcery and black magic, unofﬁcial saints and relics, and ‘miracle-

working 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.

33 Freeze, Parish Clergy,pp.389–97.

34 By 1900 the Synod limited outsiders (youths from non-clerical estates) to 10 per cent

(RGIA, Fond 179,g.1898,d.415).

35 See, for example, ‘1651 g. oktiabria 20. Ustavnaia gramota temnikovskogo sobora pro-

topopu o proizvodstve suda i tserkovnoi rasprave’, Izvestiia Tambovskoi uchenoi arkhivnoi

komissii 8 (1886): 71–6.

36 A. 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.

37 Ofﬁcial data, notorious for understating the number of Old Believers, none the less

showed a steady increase – from 84,150 (1800)to273,289 (1825)to648,359 (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,

parish priests found it difﬁcult to com-

ply, with most offering a sermon three or four times per year (if at all).

They

proved more energetic about catechisation;

by the middle of the nineteenth

century, a small but growing number of priests – especially in urban parishes –

offered some form of catechism instruction.

With the initial campaign to

open village schools (ﬁrst by the Ministry of State Domains in 1838

and later

by the Church itself ), the clergy had yet another venue to teach religious fun-

damentals. 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 mid-

century prelates warned increasingly of the ‘semi-schismatics’, who, while nominally

Orthodox, in fact simultaneously observed the Old Belief.

38 To 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 publi-

cation came at the direct initiative of Catherine II; see the memorandum from the chief

procurator, 15 March 1772,inRGIA,Fond796,op.53,g.1772,d.19,l.1–1 ob.

39 The 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.

40 For the development of catechism texts, see Peter Hauptmann, Die Katechismen der

Russisch-Orthodoxen Kirche. Entstehungsgeschichte und Lehrgehalt (G

ottingen, 1971).

41 Stung 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).

42 For 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 reli-

gious practice. That meant, for example, a new viewof 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.

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.’

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 choirs

and religious

associations, such as societies of believers who bore religious banners during

processions.

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.

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,ontheeveof

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

43 For a typical application, which still required Synodal approval, see 1872 ﬁles from Riazan

andSuzdalinRGIA,Fond796,f.153,g.1872, dd. 601 and 707.

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

1902).

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

3,d.11).

46 For a typical ﬁle, which involves the establishment of a society of banner-bearers (kho-

rugvenostsy) 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.

47 Measuring ‘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)

Neither confession nor communion

Confession and

communion Confession only Excused Indifference

Year Male Female Male Female Male Female Male Female

1797 85.25 86.31 9.03 8.22 1.33 1.24 1.43 1.37

1818 85.07 86.76 8.09 8.13 0.47 0.12 5.38 4.72

1835 83.70 86.17 6.78 6.23 0.53 0.10 8.99 7.50

1850 84.18 85.84 5.98 6.06 2.33 1.09 7.51 7.01

1900 87.03 91.03 0.52 0.45 5.76 2.58 6.69 5.94

and communion.

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 indiffer-

ence. 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

48 The 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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Russian society, law and economy

offspring. In the post-emancipation era, parishioners increasingly sought to

assert their rights over both the localclergy andthe local revenues, an aspiration

that erupted into full view as revolution shattered authority and emboldened

parishioners to reclaim their rights.

Worldly teachings: from ‘reciprocity’

to social Orthodoxy

Parallel with the ‘re-christianisation’ of the folk, the Church began to develop

and articulate its social and political teachings. To be sure, it reafﬁrmed the

traditional teaching that the existing order was divinely ordained (applying that

principle even to the Mongol suzerainty in the thirteenth to ﬁfteenth centuries)

and that ‘subordinates’ should obey their superiors – a paradigm that applied to

ruler and ruled, masters and serfs, husbands and wives.But, under the inﬂuence

of Western thought, the ‘enlightened prelates’ of Catherinean Russia added

an important theme of ‘reciprocity’: duties and responsibilities were bilateral,

not reducible to a mere commandment to ‘obey and submit’. Power and

wealth conveyed responsibilities, not merely the right to demand obedience;

the superior had a moral obligation to care for those in his charge. In turn,

subordinates were not only to obey, but to perform their duties faithfully and

energetically. Hence the existing order was a kind of divinely ordained social

contract, entailing hierarchy but also reciprocity in social relationships.

The Church also applied that precept to serfdom.

Although formally

excluded from ‘meddling’ in matters of the secular domain, prelates and priests

none the less sought to apply the reciprocity principle, both to protect sacra-

ments like marriage from violation and to uphold the Ten Commandments

(broadly construed). Such injunctions were explicit in sermons and other writ-

ings that admonished squires to fulﬁl their responsibilities and, speciﬁcally, to

attend to the spiritual needs of their serfs.

Some turned to deeds, not words,

49 See G. L. Freeze, ‘“All Power to the Parish”? The Problem and Politics of Church Reform

in Late Imperial Russia’, in Madhavan Palat (ed.), Social Identities in Revolutionary Russia

(London: Macmillan, 2001), pp. 174–208.

50 For a classic statement, see the discussion of the ‘ﬁfth commandment’ (and its extrapola-

tion to masters and slaves, husbands and wives in the ‘Short Catechism’ (Sokrashchennyi

katekhizis) appended to the three-volume Synodal collection of sermons distributed to

clergy throughout the empire: Gavriil and Platon, Sobranie raznykh poucheneniia, vol. III,

folio 147–47 verso.

51 For a discussion of the clerical attitudes and role with respect to serfdom, see G. L.

Freeze, ‘The Orthodox Church and Serfdom in Pre-Reform Russia’, SR 48 (1989): 361–87.

52 See, for example, the work of a prelate later canonised: Tikhon (Zadonskii), Nastavlenie

o sobstvennykh vsiakogo khristianina dolzhnostiakh (St Petersburg: Sinodal’naia tip., 1789),

pp. 10–12.By1870, this work had been reprinted forty-eight times.

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Russian Orthodoxy: Church, people and politics

and became embroiled in social unrest – most dramatically in the Pugachev

rebellion of 1773–5,

but on a regular basis in villages in the ﬁrst half of the

nineteenth century.

Signiﬁcantly, by the 1840s and 1850s even some prelates, more accountable

and conservative, came to disparage serfdom not only for its abuses, but for

the harm it dealt to the serfs’ spiritual needs. Whereas bishops had earlier

counted on nobles to provide parish churches and ensure peasant religious

observance, some prelates began to send reports chastising the squires for

neglecting this duty. Indeed, in the Western Provinces, where the squire was

non-Orthodox, bishops suspected the non-Orthodox squires of deliberately

subverting religious practice: ‘The chief cause [of the serfs’ unsatisfactory

religious condition] is the indifference of the Roman Catholic squires, who,

because of their hostility toward Orthodoxy, are unconcerned about the spir-

itual beneﬁt of the peasants and even try to disseminate religious indifference

among them.’

That accusation gained momentum and even began to pen-

etrate the reports from central dioceses. The bishop of Penza, for example,

attributed the serfs’ religious ignorance to the ‘excessive use of serf labour

during fasts and sometimes holidays’.

By the 1850s, the clergy openlycame to espouse the need to engage temporal

questions. In part, that derived from the impending emancipation of serfs –

who would need the active assistance and guidance of their parish priest in

navigating the rights and perils of citizenship. Theology helped legitimise the

engagement, as new currents in Christology counselled the Church to ‘enter

into the world’,just as Christ had done, and underlined the connection between

Orthodoxy and contemporaneity.

The profusion of new clerical periodicals,

with their close attention to secular issues, reinforced the new engagement.

Drawing on earlier practices (which encouraged priests to disseminate ‘useful’

53 For the large complex of ﬁles on clerical involvement in the Pugachev rebellion, see the

‘secret section’ of the Synodal archive (RGIA, Fond 796,op.205, dd. 76–99); for a Soviet

summary of these ﬁles, see I. Z. Kadson, ‘Krest’ianskaia voina 1773–5 gg. i tserkov’’,

unpublished candidate dissertation, Leningradskoe otdelenie instituta istorii (1963).

54 See Freeze, ‘Orthodox Church and Serfdom’, 375–8.

55 RGIA, Fond 796,op.127,g.1846,d.1881,l.15 ob. (1847 annual report from the bishop

of Polotsk). For the famous case of the Baltic provinces in the 1840s, when diocesan

authorities battled Lutheran squires over the serfs’ religious needs, see G. L. Freeze,

‘Lutheranism and Orthodoxy in Russia: A Critical Reassessment’, in Hans Medick and

P. Schmidt (eds.), Luther zwischen Kulturen (G

ottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht,

2004), pp. 297–317.

56 RGIA, Fond 796,op.137,g.1856,d.2398,l.68 ob. (annual report for 1855).

57 G. L. Freeze, ‘Die Laisierung des Archimandriten Feodor (Buchaev) und ihre kirchen-

politischen Hintergr

unde’, Kirche im Osten 38 (1985): 26–52; G. L. Freeze, ‘A Social Mission

for Russian Orthodoxy’ in Marshall Shatz and Ezra Mendelsohn (eds.) Imperial Russia,

1700–1917 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1988), pp. 115–35.

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