Marsden, Thomas The Crisis of Religious Toleration in Imperial Russia: Bibikov's System for the Old Believers, 1841–1855 (review)

Abstract

SEER, 95, 3, JULY 2017 566 Thanks to its tireless editors, this collection has finally appeared in English, thus making the efforts of these Balkan historians available to a wider readership. UCL SSEES Bojan Aleksov Marsden, Thomas. The Crisis of Religious Toleration in Imperial Russia: Bibikov’s System for the Old Believers, 1841–1855. Oxford Historical Monographs. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2015. xv + 280 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Selected Bibliography. Index. £60.00. Based on an impressive range of archival sources, this intriguing book probes an unfamiliar and revealing episode in Russia’s history: a two-year campaign at the end of the Nicholas I’s reign that featured ‘perhaps the most significant acts of religious repression in Russia in the nineteenth century’ (p. 28). In accounting for the origins and demise of the associated system of coercion, Thomas Marsden exposes profound tensions besetting Russia in the mid nineteenth century and offers new insights on the historical experience of a key group of religious dissenters. For decades before the 1850s Old Believers had enjoyed a basic toleration rooted in a grudging ‘condescension’ (sniskhozhdenie) reflecting the ideological and administrative impossibility of legalizing an alternative Orthodoxy. The first half of Marsden’s book recounts how even this paternalistic forbearance was eroded over the 1840s by a series of factors: the establishment of an OldBeliever hierarchy in neighbouring Austria; investigations by the interior ministry under Lev Perovskii into the civil significance of Old Belief; the discovery of seemingly subversive manuscripts at the Old-Believer Preobrazhenskoe Cemetery; and the work of statistical expeditions revealing an unexpected prominence of Old Belief in the provinces. All of this motivated Perovskii’s successor, Dmitrii Bibikov, to place the eradication of Old Belief at the heart of his political programme beginning in 1852. Indeed, a sense of emergency gripped the interior ministry, which moved energetically to persecute dissenters with fiscal penalties, the destruction of hermitages, the disruption of dissident gatherings and the curtailment of their civic life. Yet the assault proved short-lived for two principal reasons: the project generated opposition even within the autocracy itself, where many beyond the interior ministry became alarmed by its arbitrariness; and it depended almost entirely on the will of the emperor, so that when Nicholas died in 1855, his successor abandoned it — although without reversing most of its effects. Marsden thus concludes that in demanding a return to ‘the lawful order,’ Alexander II’s servitors ‘demonstrated that autocratic power was, itself, limited’ (p. 243). REVIEWS 567 Central to the ‘crisis of religious toleration’ in the book’s title was a critical shift in official thinking about religious dissidence. In the decade or so before the campaign, Old Believers were reconfigured as a political threat to the state rather than a spiritual challenge to the Church, not least because they were seen to inhibit the project of national unity that motivated many key statesmen connected with the interior ministry. In this regard, the campaign reflected a ‘secularization of the politics of toleration’ (p. 136) as well as an attempt ‘to replace imperial with national priorities’ (p. 243). The initiative thus came not from conservatives, who emerge in the narrative as proponents of lawful administrative procedure, but progressive officials who fretted that the persistence of Old Belief would render permanent and implacable a religious fissure between educated society and the people. Preventing this outcome, they thought, demanded urgent measures, and they therefore ‘compromised their progressive principles in the cause of national unity’ (p. 24) by identifying Old Believer leaders as political criminals and acting against them in an emergency mode. Ultimately, then, the crisis at the end of Nicholas’s reign ‘derived not primarily from the dying spasms of the unmitigated traditions of absolutism, but from newborn forces that struggled to realize themselves within a backward-looking political structure’ (p. 15). There is much to recommend in this book, starting with its very revelation of Bibikov’s system, which was unfamiliar to this reviewer. No less interesting is Marsden’s discussion of the campaign’s anti-capitalist dimensions, which were directed against eminent representatives of Russia’s emerging capitalist class who happened also to be dissidents. Marsden is especially good at...