Religious Freedom in Modern Russia by Poole Randall A. (review)

Abstract

SEER, 98, 2, APRIL 2020 372 ‘distinguished past from present’ — ‘what was acceptable in the sixteenth century was not acceptable today’ (p. 42). He may have accepted that Ivan IV’s centralization of Muscovy was progressive and therefore the bloodletting ‘necessary historically’, but this did not ‘justify it morally — not in the past and not in the present’ (p. 42). Strengthening Muscovy and defeating its enemies was a profound achievement, but at what cost? The violence of Ivan’s reign, and Stalin’s, could not ultimately be justified historically. Ivan the Terrible was Eizenshtein’s grand endeavour to ‘dissect totalizing power as immoral and inevitable’ (p. 239), inevitable it would seem in ‘authoritarian societies’, be it Ivan’s Muscovy or Stalin’s Soviet Union. By asking the viewer ‘“Am I right in what I am doing”?’, Eizenshtein’s Ivan ‘gives us the kind of individual moral accounting that we need in order to understand a society […] of “permanent moral compromise”’ (p. 346). Neuberger’s account of the making of Ivan the Terrible contributes significantly to our understanding of what constitutes Stalinist civilization. Department of History Steven A. Usitalo Northern State University, Aberdeen, SD Poole, Randall A. and Werth, Paul W. (eds). Religious Freedom in Modern Russia. Russian and East European Studies. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 2018. 314 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Index. $50.00. How did subjects of the Russian Empire define ‘religious freedom’ and particularly ‘freedom of conscience’? Religious Freedom in Modern Russia — an anthology with eight contributions — continues the discussion begun in the 2012 forum on freedom of conscience in the journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History (vol. 13, no. 3), which, editor Randall A. Poole states, ‘served as the foundation’ for this volume (p. 8). In fact, two of the original articles of that forum, by G. M. Hamburg and Victoria Frede, are reprinted here. The six new chapters redirect the discussion so that ‘[t]he focus of this volume is not religious policy […] but rather the various meanings that religious freedom, toleration, and indeed freedom of conscience had in Russia among nonstate actors’ (pp. 7–8). This new focus yields a remarkably coherent anthology that reveals the intellectual and philosophical vitality around a concept that was contested and, at its core, Poole argues, ‘incompatible with autocracy’ (p. 42). The first two chapters provide thoughtful introductions to the intellectual history of tolerance and the concept of freedom of conscience. Hamburg’s REVIEWS 373 essay (chapter 2) traces the evolution of views on toleration from Muscovite and Polish-Lithuanian sixteenth-century texts through Decembrist manifestos, highlighting ‘the impact of the European Enlightenment’ (p. 45) on the Russian thinkers. Hamburg finds an inherent tension throughout between promoting greater toleration and proposing limits. Poole’s chapter one serves double duty asanintroductiontothevolumeandasascholarlycontributioninitsownright. He ties the development of the concept of ‘freedom of conscience’ in Russia to the religious revival over the long nineteenth century — renewed hesychasm and monasticism, the veneration of icons, and the pastoral movement of parish priests — that ‘provided the experiential basis and then the philosophical articulation of freedom conscience’ (p. 43). The inherent tension here was with autocracy itself, which was ‘inimical’ to the concept and ‘continued to resist it’ (p. 43). Chapters by Patrick Lally Michelson and Victoria Frede reveal that in the early 1860s, neither clerical nor revolutionary intellectuals promoted ‘freedom of conscience’ in the modern sense of the term. Michelson deftly traces the ecclesiastical genealogy of the concept as it was understood by Orthodox churchmen, culminating in the first use of the term by an ecclesiastical scholar, Archimandrite Ioann (Sokolov) in 1864–65. For Ioann, ‘freedom of conscience’ meant choosing with free will devotion to Christ as the source of salvation, and he condemned any coercion in faith (p. 99). Turning to the early revolutionaries in the organization Land and Freedom in 1861–64, Frede argues ‘they found they could only promote freedom of confession, not freedom of conscience, worrying that they would alienate potential supporters’ (p. 106). The revolutionaries themselves embraced the liberal concept, but they understood the tensions against it in Russian society, particularly among the peasants. Two chapters explore perspectives from outside the Russian core of the empire...