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 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.[99]Like the ancien regime 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 regime.
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. 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.[100] 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 Northern 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 administration and, in 1718, included the Church in his design for a new system of administrative colleges (kollegii), then deemed the model of efficient administration. 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 underway. To improve diocesan administration, the Synod tightened its oversight and reorganised the mammoth Patriarchal (now 'Synodal') Region into several smaller, more manageable dioceses.[101] This process gained new impetus under Catherine the Great (r. 1762-96), who first vented ecclesiastical questions in the Legislative Question of 1767-8[102] and made a systematic reorganisation of dioceses in the 1780s (an ecclesiastical counterpoint to her provincial reform 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 diocesan reports in 1847.10 All this brought tangible results - for example, in the Church's growing capacity to regulate marriage and divorce (which, in contrast to most of Western Europe, remained entirely in its hands). The Church used its new power to prevent and detect illegal marriages (those which violated 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 chiefprocurator, above all, duringthe tenure of Count N. A. Protasov (183655). Protasov established his own chancellery (parallel to that of the Synod12) 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
Muller (ed.), '. . . aus der anmuthigen Gelehrsamkeit'. Tiibinger Studien zum 18. Jahrhundert (Tubingen: 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 1760s and 1770s, 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.
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.[103]
99
For a comparative perspective (and summary of the recent critique of the secularisation thesis), see Hugh McLeod,
100
The classic study is P. V Verkhovskoi,
101
102
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
103
The classic critique came in A. N. Murav'ev, 'O vliianii svetskoi vlasti na dela tserkovnye' (RGIA, Fond 796, op. 205, d. 643).