Werth, Paul W. The Tsar's Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 545 Geographers should concentrate on understanding the laws involved in solar radiation, the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the lithosphere and the biosphere in this view. While Grigor´ev explicitly saw his project as developing physical geography in a Marxist direction, he ended up being displaced by rivals from his position at the top of the disciplinary hierarchy in 1951. His ouster belonged to a larger set of ideological battles that shook Soviet scientific communities in the final years of Stalin’s reign. The final innovative concept of Soviet geographers came from Vsevelod Anuchin, who proposed the idea of a geographical environment. Anuchin was responding to a long-standing question about the relationship between nature andsocietyamongSovietgeographersandproposed‘geographicalenvironment’ asawaytounifyphysicalandeconomicgeography.Ageographicalenvironment entailed the increasingly large portion of the physical-geographical envelope that had been modified by humans. Though this idea was controversial when it was first suggested, initial opponents such as the Innokentii Gerasimov, who directed the Institute of Geography of the Soviet Academy of Sciences from 1951 to 1985, came around to the cause of a unified geography and offered their own avenues for achieving this aim. Oldfield and Shaw have done a great service by parsing out these geographical concepts, explaining their distinctions and elaborating their relationship to broader trends in the country’s history. The volume is indispensible for scholars of Russian environmental thought. Department of History Andy Bruno Northern Illinois University Werth, Paul W. The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia. Oxford Studies in Modern European History. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2014. xv + 288 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. £65.00. In this erudite and deeply-researched book, Paul Werth explores the curious paradoxofastatethatidentifieditselfalmostentirelywithonereligion—Russian Orthodoxy — and yet not only tolerated other faiths, but provided them with a measure of protection and state recognition. This can be partly explained as a pragmatic adjustment of state policy to the reality of the empire’s diversity, what Jane Burbank has described as an ‘Imperial Rights Regime’. However, tsarist toleration of ‘foreign faiths’ was based on more than just grudging necessity: religious toleration was seen as a positive and laudable characteristic of Russian statecraft. In this book Werth is engaging with a growing literature on SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 546 the interaction between non-Orthodox religious hierarchies and communities and the Russian Imperial State, most notably weighty monographs by Robert Crews and Mikhail Dolbilov, but his agenda is at once more comprehensive and more cautious than theirs. Werth’s study is organized both thematically and chronologically, but his approach is comparative throughout, looking at how shifts in official policy might simultaneously affect the Armenian and the Catholic Churches, or the repercussions of an event such as the Polish Revolt not just for the Empire’s Catholics, but for its Muslims. While, as he modestly says, he does not analyse Central Asia, the Grand Duchy of Finland or the Kingdom of Poland in as much depth as he would have liked, Werth’s attempt to see tsarist religious policy ‘in the round’, and to chart changes over a very long nineteenth century (c.1760–1917) largely succeeds, and allows him to make connections, see patterns and draw conclusions in ways that studies focused on a single region or confession could not. Werth is not pursuing a grand thesis — he uses Crews’s concept of the ‘confessional state’, but carefully differentiates Russian policy towards Islam in time and place. He also draws telling comparisons with other Imperial and European States, notably the equally multi-confessional Habsburg and Ottoman domains, showing that it was change in this wider sphere, and in particular the evolution of the concept of ‘freedom of conscience’, which transformed perceptions of Russia’s regime of ‘religious toleration’. When initiated by Catherine the Great this had stood up well to comparison with Europe’s other religious regimes (Catholics, for instance, were in many ways better off in Russia than they were in Britain until emancipation in 1829), but by the early 1900s contextual change made it seem like another aspect of tsarist Russia’s backwardness and oppressiveness (pp. 122–27). What provides the book with a focus...