The Orthodox Church and Religious Life in Imperial Russia

Abstract

Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a multinational, multiconfessional empire, and the Orthodox Christian autocrats who ruled it could shape religious policy more forcefully than many of their European counterparts. Peter I’s Spiritual Regulation of 1721 and his replacement of the Patriarch with the Holy Synod, and Catherine II’s secularization of monasteries, are only the best-known examples. However, ecclesiastical structures (the liturgy, the legally required sacraments of confession and communion, legislation, monasteries, theological academies, Consistories, the Holy Synod) and individual actors apart from the sovereign (bishops, spiritual elders and eldresses, publishers and writers, priests, educated laypeople) provided a framework allowing both continuity and evolution in Russian Orthodox religious life. Church art, architecture, and music reflected religious trends, as did representations of religion in contemporary literature. For the non-Orthodox absorbed into the empire as a result of military conquests or diplomatic negotiations, these centuries marked a time of renegotiation with new state structures and policies and a new self-articulation, sometimes as a direct result of their contacts with Russian imperial authorities, and sometimes independently. Their collective interaction shaped Russian religious life.