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, but not necessarily zealous, committed servitors.
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. [121]
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, weddings and burials) and holiday processions.[122] 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 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 constant 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 measures did 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 hereditary 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 difficult. 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 without 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 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 '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.37
121
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, Fond796, op. 132, g. 1851, d. 2357, ll. 191 ob-192).
122
In rare cases, the clergy derived income from other sources - such as a stipend