14 - Russian Orthodoxy: Church, people and politics in Imperial Russia

Summary

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. Like the ancien régime 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 régime.

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 and precipitated schism and the Old Belief.