The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths

The Russian Empire was a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional polity. Paul W. Werth’s study convincingly shows that religion and religious policy are no less central for the understanding of the workings of the Russian imperial state than nationality. The scope of the book is limited to the ‘foreign confessions’—that is, non-Orthodox religious groups across the spectrum. Rather than a social history of religion, this is a story of political management of religious diversity and of the historical application of philosophical concepts such as religious toleration and freedom of conscience. Werth points out that, since Catherine II, Russia had developed the ‘multiconfessional establishment’—that is, the system which ‘granted a series of significant collective rights to recognized religious groups and rendered the foreign confessions state religions entitled to certain forms of government patronage and protection’ (p. 4). Even though Orthodoxy had been declared as the foundation of imperial order, Werth insists that the tradition of toleration to non-Orthodox faiths prevailed, even throughout the most conservative periods of Russia’s political history, constituting ‘a core attribute of the Russian Empire’s identity’ (p. 105). Toleration was a kind of social contract between the state and ‘foreign’ religious groups, which enjoyed spiritual freedom as long as they did not proselytise outside their traditional flock, remained loyal to the state and stayed away from politics (which was precisely what the Catholic Church failed to do during the Polish insurrection in 1863). Since the concept of religious toleration was quite fuzzy, it could take different meanings and be used for different purposes. In the mid-nineteenth century, two forces began actively to undermine some of the central principles of Russia’s ‘multiconfessional establishment’—the idea of freedom of conscience and nationalism. As religious institutions became resources in emerging nationalist projects, a tension emerged between the intention to liberalise Russia’s religious order and the fear of politicised religion. Yet, despite the crisis caused by the Polish insurrection of 1863, the situation had stabilised in the 1870s, and even with respect to most ‘politicised’ confessions, such as Roman Catholics and the Armenian Church, the state continued to maintain the multi-confessional establishment that was increasingly coming into conflict with the modern idea of freedom of conscience. Despite the conservatism of the tsarist regime, and the bureaucratic paralysis, there were three social forces that shaped the change in the last decades of the system: first, the increasing engagement of lay people in religious life and secular lifestyles, second, new ideas of religious freedom, and thirdly, the chronic problem of apostasy. Werth traces the intellectual evolution of the idea of freedom of conscience, pointing out the Slavophile Aksakov’s prominent role in demanding such freedom for the Orthodox believers. The application of the concept was riddled with contradictions, as freedom of conscience for the non-Orthodox sometimes involved the violation of this principle for Orthodox believers. On the other hand, the problem of apostates—especially the Tatars, the Uniates and the Baltic Lutheran converts to Orthodoxy—had become a thorny issue in Late Imperial Russia. The international pressure, individual complaints and practical administrative problems arising with the status of the apostates and their offspring, as well as the worries about the spiritual harm caused by the prohibition to opt out of the ‘ascriptive’ Orthodox identity had already led the autocracy to revise the existing law on apostasy in the last decades of the nineteenth century. These attempts faced the opposition of the Orthodox Church under the leadership of K.P. Pobedonostsev. It was only with the pressure of Russia’s first revolution in 1905 that the autocracy proclaimed its commitment to religious freedom in two decrees issued in April and October of 1905. Yet the legislative proposals that explicated the declaration of freedom of conscience had provoked such contentious discussions in the Duma that none of those bills was carried through to become law. Either due to the conservative turn under Stolypin’s leadership, or due to the opposition within the Duma, the attempts to bring the declaration of freedom of conscience into legislation and legal practice ultimately failed. If, even within the multi-confessional establishment, toleration had often been more of a declaration than a category of political and legal practice, the modern category of freedom of conscience was even more difficult to achieve. One of the main obstacles for this achievement, according to Werth, was the commitment of the state to defend the interests of Orthodoxy and protect it from any diminution of its flock. At the same time, the separation between the political and spiritual was often used partially as an exercise of power by the state. Looking at post-Soviet Russia’s management of religious issues, Werth believes that there are many parallels with the pre-1917 Imperial religious conundrum

Confessional · Empire · Political science · Politics · Polity · Sociology · State (computer science · Toleration · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious studies