Church, Regime, and Society in Russia (1880-1895)

Abstract

The fifteen years near the end of the nineteenth century, before the period of wars and revolutions at the beginning of the twentieth, turned out to be the last part of the long "lull" that gave the Russian Empire the chance to solve many of the problems caused by modernization. These problems definitely included the Church's role in society and its relations with the state. Our scholarly literature contains quite a few studies on this question. Until 1917 most published works were official, semiofficial, and descriptive;1 afterward this topic was long relegated to the fringes of research interests. Soviet authors treated the Church as an archaic institution that was entirely subordinate to the autocracy and played a purely reactionary role throughout the postreform period.2 Not until the end of the 1980s did a different approach emerge in church history: questions were raised about church reforms and counter-reforms in the second half of the nineteenth century, about conflicts between secular and religious authorities, and about the specific ways in which the Church influenced public consciousness.3