The Orthodox Church was financially dependent on the government for salaries and subsidies, but derived most of its revenues independently.94 All bishops and higher ecclesiastical dignitaries received generous salaries as well as living allowances, which they supplemented with incomes from Church and monastic properties. The parish clergy, too, was on state pay. In 1900, state appropriations to the Church amounted to 23 million rubles. This sum provided approximately one-fifth of the Church’s income—a respectable amount but hardly an explanation why the clergy stood by the monarchy in the 1905 Revolution.95
The principal political responsibility of the Church was indoctrination. The Imperial Government eschewed in schools and the military establishment anything resembling national or ideological propaganda from fear that arguments used to justify the status quo would invite counterarguments. The fact that the country was a multinational empire also inhibited appeals to nationalism. The government preferred to act as if the existing political and social arrangement were a given. Only religious indoctrination was permitted, and that was the function the Orthodox clergy, especially in the classroom.
The Orthodox Church became first heavily engaged in popular education in the 1880s, after a decade of revolutionary turmoil. To counteract the influence of both radical propagandists and secular teachers on the rural population, the government charged the Church with operating a network of primary schools. At the turn of the century, slightly more than one-half of the grade schools in the Empire, with approximately one-third of the pupils, were under Church supervision.96 Heavy stress was placed on ethics as well as language training (Church Slavonic and Russian). Their teachers, however, were so miserably paid compared with those employed by secular schools that they had difficulty competing and kept losing pupils to their rivals.
Students of the Orthodox faith in all primary and secondary schools were required to take courses in religion, usually taught by clergymen. (Pupils of other faiths had the option of having religion taught by their own teachers.) The instruction stressed, along with moral precepts, loyalty to and respect for the Tsar. These feeble efforts were the best that the Imperial Government had to offer in the realm of political indoctrination.
In times of internal unrest, the Church played its part in support of law and order through sermons and publications. The Church depicted the Tsar as the vicar of God and condemned disobedience to him as a sin. In this connection, the Orthodox Church frequently resorted to anti-Semitic appeals. The most anti-Semitic of all the Christian churches, it played a major part in excluding Jews from Russia prior to the partitions of Poland in the eighteenth century and keeping them confined to the provinces of what had been Poland (the “Pale of Settlement”) afterward. The clergy blamed Jews for the crucifixion of Christ, and without endorsing pogroms, did not condemn them either. In 1914, the Synod authorized the construction of a church to commemorate the victim of Beilis’s alleged “ritual murder.”97 In 1905 and after, Orthodox publications placed on Jews responsibility for the revolutionary ferment, accusing them of conspiring to destroy Christianity and take over the world.
The last decade of the Imperial regime saw developments within the Church that from the government’s point of view augured ill for the future.
The formal monopoly of the Established Church on the dogmas and rituals of the Orthodox religion had long been challenged by two heresies, that of the Old Believers and those known collectively as Dissenters or Sectarians. The Old Believers (staroobriadtsy as they called themselves or raskol’niki—“splitters”—as they were labeled by the official Church) descended from those Russians who in the seventeenth century had rejected the ritualistic changes introduced by Patriarch Nikon. Although persecuted and discriminated against, they held their own and even managed, surreptitiously, to make converts. They developed a strong spirit of cohesion and, as is often the case with persecuted minorities, became successful at business. The Sectarians divided into numerous branches, some of which resembled Protestant sects, others of which reverted to pre-Christian practices, accompanied by all kinds of sexual excesses. Official censuses placed the number of Old Believers and Sectarians at 2 million (1897), approximately one-half of them Old Believers, but their actual number was certainly much higher, for the government, treating adherents of these groups as apostates, did not hesitate to falsify statistics. Some estimates place their memberships as high as 20 million. If correct, this would mean that at the turn of the century approximately one out of four Great Russians, Belorussians, and Ukrainians was outside the official Church. Not surprisingly, the Church was in the forefront of those urging the persecution of the Old Believers and Dissenters, who were making serious inroads on its membership.
There also developed within the Church, especially among the parish clergy, dangerous oppositional trends. Enlightened clergymen pressed for reforms in the status of the Church: worried about too close an identification with the monarchy, they demanded greater independence. After 1905, the government was disturbed to see some clergymen elected to the Duma take their seats alongside liberal and even radical deputies and join in criticizing the regime.
But the clerical hierarchy remained staunchly conservative, as became evident every time lay Christians wanted the Church to pay less attention to ritual and more to good works. In 1901, the Synod excommunicated Leo Tolstoy, the most influential religious writer in Russia, on the grounds that he incited the population against social distinctions and patriotism.
The close identification of the Orthodox Church with the state proved a mixed blessing. While it gave the clerical Establishment all kinds of benefits, it linked its destiny too closely to that of the monarchy. In 1916–17, when the Crown would come under assault, the Church could do very little to help: and when the monarchy sank, it went down with it.
In the eyes of foreign observers Russia of 1900 was a mixture of contradictions. A French commentator compared her to “one of those castles, constructed at different epochs, where the most discordant styles are seen side by side, or else those houses, built piecemeal and at intervals, which never have either the unity or convenience of dwellings erected on one plan and at one rush.”98 The Revolution of 1905 was an explosion of these contradictions. The fundamental question facing Russia after the October Manifesto was whether the settlement offered by the Crown would suffice to calm passions and resolve social and political conflicts. To understand why the prospect for such a compromise was poor, it is necessary to know the condition and mentality of the two main protagonists, the peasantry and the intelligentsia.