Soslovie and the “Foreign” Clergies of Imperial Russia

Abstract

AbstractThis essay addresses a significant imperial dimension of the soslovie question by analyzing the estate status of the religious servitors of Russia’s non-Orthodox faiths (the “foreign confessions”). Its goal is to ascertain the extent to which one may discern a clerical estate (dukhovnoe sostoianie) for the foreign confessions, the standards by which individuals were recognized as belonging to non-Orthodox clergies, and the rights and privileges to which these religious servitors were entitled. Drawing on a distinction offered by Vasilii Kliuchevskii between “estate rights” (soslovnye prava) and “service rights” (dolzhnostnye prava), the author argues that Christian servitors, beginning with the Orthodox clergy, gradually acquired estate rights, while non-Christian servitors were generally able to acquire only service rights. The reasons for this outcome should be sought in a combination of practical and ideological concerns having to do with the state’s limited knowledge about non-Orthodox servitors, its commitments to the privileging of (Orthodox) Christianity in Russia’s social order, and broader shifts in the state’s soslovie policies.