Religiozno-­politicheskoe sostoyanie pribaltijskogo dvoryanstva v ocenke rossijskih vlastej: epizody iz istorii ostzejskogo voprosa (40—80-e gg. XVIII v.)

Abstract

The article concentrates on the religious policy of the Russian Empire in the Early Modern Times. A study was carried out concerning the measures taken by the Russian supreme authority in the field of religion in the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire during the Russian-Sweden wars (1741-1743, 1788-1790). The base of research is unknown sources (unpublished documents, correspondence) from the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire and the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts. For the first time in historiography, the mutual relations of Baltic noble estate and the Russian crown were addressed in common context of two notable episodes from the regional social and political history - the persecution of the Moravian church under the Empress Elizaveta Petrovna and the reform of protestant spiritual governance during the reign of Catherine II. It has been determined what was the relationship for the monarchy between events separated from each other by more than forty years, the reasons for the monarchy’s attention to the spiritual sphere in wartime were revealed. As a result, the author states that religion and religious institutions were means for Russian autocracy to keep and develop principles and ideas of political loyalty in Baltic-German noble community, and the actions of the Russian monarchy to maintain religious unanimity of the Ostseeischer nobility contributed to the formation of the estate consciousness of the latter.