Lutherans in Russia since 1990

Abstract

Origins Lutherans formed the most important Protestant group in the Russian Empire. As early as the mid-sixteenth century Tsar Ivan IV, 'the Terrible', called numerous weapon smiths, fortification designers, officers, artists and architects to Moscow from German lands, settling them in the 'German suburb' (Nemetskaya sloboda). With the tsar's permission the first Lutheran church in Russia was established in Moscow in 1576.' Baltic territories with a compact Lutheran population (Latvians, Estonians and Germans) fell to the Russian Empire with the annexation of the former lands of the German Teutonic Order of Knights: Estland and Livland in 171011721, Courland in 1796. Germans reached Central Russia (the lower Volga and Saratov region 1763-69: 23,000) and later Ukraine (the Black Sea region 1804-56: 54,000; Volhynia from 1863: 150,000) and the Caucasus (1814-17). Some three quarters of these immigrants were Lutherans. In the Russian Empire (excluding Poland and Finland) Lutherans numbered 3.3 million before the First World War: 1.1 million Latvians, 1.1 million Germans, 1 million Estonians, 140,000 Finns and several thousand Swedes. The Baltic Germans in Estland, Livland and Courland had built up a well-function­ ing church organisation that integrated the Estonian and Latvian peasant popUlation. In 1802 the German university in Dorpat/Tartu was established with a Lutheran theological faculty that became famous throughout Europe. In contrast to the Baltic Lutherans, the German colonists in Russia did not succeed in building up a church administration, and so in 1832 an imperial decree established the 'Evangelical Lutheran Church in Russia' (Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche in Russland) to oversee all Protestants in the country (including the few members of the Reformed faith). The church leadership, the 'General Consistory' (General-Consistorium), was of course located in St Petersburg. This Lutheran Church, whose official language was German, represented a state church with inferior legal rights to those of the Russian Orthodox Church; its spiritual and secular leaders and the heads of the church administration were appointed by the emperor personally and paid by the state treasury.2 Lutheran ministers, like Orthodox priests, were quasi-state officials who had to maintain state registers (births, marriages, deaths). The church's official language, as well as that of the university in Dorpat, was German. Germans always constituted the majority of the church leadership and of the clergy; Estonians and Latvians entered the pastorate in larger numbers only after 1850. 3