33 Freeze, Parish Clergy, pp. 389-97.
34 By i900 the Synod limited outsiders (youths from non-clerical estates) to i0 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) to 273,289 (1825) to 648,359 (1850). RGIA,
This 'reformation from above' had a twofold thrust. One was traditionaclass="underline" 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,38 parish priests found it difficult to comply, with most offering a sermon three or four times per year (if at all).39 They proved more energetic about catechisation;40 by the middle of the nineteenth century, a small but growing number of priests - especially in urban parishes - offered some form of catechism instruction.41 With the initial campaign to open village schools (first by the Ministry of State Domains in 183842 and later by the Church itself), the clergy had yet another venue to teach religious fundamentals. 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 ofwhom, 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 raznykhpouchenii na vse voskresnye i prazdnichnye dni, 3 vols. (Moscow: Sinodal'naia tip., 1776). The publication came at the direct initiative of Catherine II; see the memorandum from the chief procurator, 15 March 1772, in RGIA, Fond 796, 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.-ii, 18 ob-19.
40 For the development of catechism texts, see Peter Hauptmann, Die Katechismen der Russisch-Orthodoxen Kirche. Entstehungsgeschichte und Lehrgehalt (Gottingen, 1971).
41 Stung by reports that few parishes offered catechism instruction, in the mid-i840s 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', StudiaSlavicaFinlandensia 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.
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 religious practice. Thatmeant, forexample, anew view oficon 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.[123] 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.'[124] 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[125] and religious associations, such as societies of believers who bore religious banners during processions.[126]
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.[127] 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, on the eve of 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
Russian Orthodoxy: Church, people and politics 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 |
123
For a typical application, which still required Synodal approval, see 1872 files from Riazan and Suzdal in RGIA, Fond 796, f. 153, g. 1872, dd. 601 and 707.
124
Derzhavnyi arkhiv Zhitomirskoi oblasti, f.f-i, op. 30, d. 423, l. 31 (dean's report from
i902).
125
For measures in 1886 to improve church singing, see RGIA, Fond 797, op. 56, otd. 2, st. 3, d. 11).
126
For a typical file, which involves the establishment of a society of banner-bearers
127
Measuring'piety' is, at best, a perilous undertaking; data on confession and communion do, however, provide hard numbers on rates ofreligious