Diocese and parish in the Russian Empire: finances and bureaucracy, 1850–1917

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article describes financial and bureaucratic relations between the parish and the diocese in the Russian Empire. Throughout the imperial period, the parish clergy were obliged to send their dioceses significant financial contributions and bureaucratic paperwork. Compared to the pre-Petrine epoch, there was a significant expansion of the diocese’s powers over the parish during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The author concludes that the system of monetary fees and reporting established during the Synodal era was a consequence of the state’s utilitarian attitude towards the Church, which led to the disintegration of the dioceses and parishes and the discrediting of the clerical estate. In the early twentieth century, the system of parish dues was sharply rejected by parishioners, resulting in the “strikes of church elders” during the first Russian Revolution. The crisis was resolved by the “parish revolution” of 1917, when the relationship between the diocese and the parish was spontaneously restructured.