PAUL W. WERTH
The following text is excerpted from a keynote lecture delivered by Professor Werth in Moscow in 2014. It relates some of the principal findings of his book, The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia, reviewed in this issue of the East-West Church Report. The East-West Church Report would like to thank Paul Werth, Alexander Agadjanian and Dmitry Uzlaner for permission to publish this extract. The full version may be found in State, Religion and Church, Vol. 2 (1), 2015, 7-18.
I would like to offer the fairly straightforward thesis that a distinct tradition of religious toleration appeared in Muscovy and the early stages of the empire. It is of course true that one can point to various examples of religious intolerance and even violence rooted in religious difference: the xenophobic statements of certain Orthodox bishops; mass conversions secured by elements of violence and coercion; the refusal to allow Jews into the country or the determination to expel them from it, and so on.
Yet at the same time the very fact of Muscovy’s considerable religious diversity (especially in the eastern and southeastern borderlands) created the conditions for a distinct kind of religious toleration in practice. To the extent that there was no effort in Muscovy, as far as I am aware, actually to develop a clear concept of religious toleration as such, one may even speak about the presence of religious toleration without a specific consciousness of it.
For example, most people at the time seem to have accepted the basic proposition that every people (narod) had its own faith that was entirely appropriate to it. One can see this even in the way that religions were sometimes named: the “Tatar faith” (Islam), the “Russian faith” (Orthodoxy), the “German faith” (Lutheranism), and so on. Even in the 19th century one encounters references to the idea of the “natural faith” (prirodnaia vera) of one or another community. I would venture to say that Muscovite authorities were more concerned about—and more hostile towards—“heresy” within the Orthodox community than they were about the adherents of other confessions.
“One may even speak about the presence of religious toleration without a specific consciousness of it.”
Beyond this, two important circumstances eventually compelled state authorities not only to effectuate religious toleration in practice (as it were, unconsciously), but also to articulate that ideal more explicitly. In the first instance, I have in mind efforts of the tsarist autocracy to attract foreigners to Russia in light of their knowledge and expertise. Such foreigners, whether technical experts or farmers, demanded certain guarantees for the inviolability of their faith before resettling to Russia. And despite some resistance from the Orthodox Church, state authorities in many cases proved willing to oblige.
An excellent example of this is the decree of Peter I in 1702, designed to attract foreigners with expertise to Russia. Among other things the decree declared: “By the power given to Us by the Almighty, We have no desire to compel the human conscience, and We readily grant to each Christian the responsibility of caring for his soul’s bliss.”1 I will add here that “mixed marriages” involving an Orthodox spouse marrying a non-Orthodox one also became legal at about the same time for essentially the same reason.
The second circumstance leading to more explicit statements about toleration concerns the annexation of new territories where the population was primarily non-Orthodox. The late Muscovite and early imperial period were of course times of tremendous territorial expansion, and to a growing degree the annexations in question involved populations that confessed non-Orthodox religions. Such annexations were a good deal easier to effectuate and were less likely to produce strife when the tsarist state openly granted new subjects the right to confess their historical faiths and refrained from the application of coercion to their spiritual affairs. Thus in declarations announcing the annexation of many territories— the Baltic provinces, partitioned Poland, Crimea, and so on— one encounters explicit recognition of non-Orthodox faiths and promises not to encroach on their beliefs.
“Tsarist religious toleration presumed the subordination of each imperial subject to clerical authority.”
These practical considerations—the need to recruit foreigners and imperial expansion—were reinforced by a series of ideological developments in the second half of the 18th century and the first part of the nineteenth. These included the Enlightenment, the “mysticism” and ecumenism that characterized the reign of Alexander I, and the famous triad of Minister of Education Sergei Uvarov. (The final of these—Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality [Pravoslavie, samoderzhavie, narodnost’]—actually placed its emphasis more on traditional religion than on Orthodoxy as such; the concern was that a religion—it did not matter so fundamentally which one from the standpoint of doctrine—had deep historical roots in a given community.) These, then, were the ingredients of the tradition of religious toleration that developed in early modern Russia—initially without much consciousness about the matter, and later in a more explicitly articulated fashion.
I will turn in a moment to the issue of religious toleration as an ideology of the tsarist regime, but before doing so, I would like to make three points about the situation that I just described and that formed a crucial element of life in Russia until the middle of the 19th century.
First, there remained numerous restrictions on nonOrthodox proselytism, certain forms of marriage, conversion from one religion to another, and so on. One could say that religious toleration in that early modern sense granted a certain degree of freedom to entire faiths and churches, but not to individual believers as such. On the contrary, tsarist religious toleration presumed the subordination of each imperial subject to clerical authority, which was itself in turn recognized by the autocracy and regulated by its laws and decrees. In short, there is little basis here to speak of the right of subjects to determine their own religious identity.
“Religious toleration was... not so much a value or principle in its own right as it was an instrument of rule.”
Second, this religious toleration by no means signified the equality of all religions in Russia. On the contrary, aside from a brief period during the so-called Dual Ministry (1817 – 24), the Orthodox Church consistently retained its “ruling and predominant” status, which otherwise remained unquestioned.
Finally, in my view the early modern Russian tradition of religious toleration was based on practical considerations to a much greater degree than it was on moral ones. One is indeed struck by the largely utilitarian character of proclamations of even prominent figures of the European Enlightenment. Consider Montesquieu, who at one point wrote that “it is not so much the Truth or Falsity of a Doctrine which renders it useful or pernicious to Men in civil Government, as the Use or Abuse of it.”2 In this regard Russian tsars and tsarinas were excellent students of the philosophes. In other words, religious toleration was at this point not so much a value or principle in its own right as it was an instrument of rule.
The last observation leads, in turn, to two others. First, precisely because toleration represented an instrument for ruling the country, its contours remained vague. Its precise meaning depended a good deal on the concrete situation at hand, and there was little effort to provide a concrete articulation of its nature. To my knowledge, the expression did not appear in the empire’s Fundamental Law (Osnovnoi zakon) or even in the statutes on the foreign confessions in the Law Digest (Svod zakonov), though there were a few references to it elsewhere in the Digest. In effect, the presumption seems to have been that the meaning of religious toleration was somehow self-evident or could be derived from the specific situation to which it might apply.
And yet at the same time—and this is the second point—this concept gradually became part of the identity of the tsarist regime. By this I mean that tsarist statesmen and their allies in the public convinced themselves that “religious toleration” was a core characteristic of Russia and its history; and that Russia granted its non-Orthodox confessions an appropriate degree of religious freedom—that is, liberty consistent with the historical conditions that had appeared over the decades and centuries.
“One author remarked in 1826, ‘Russia has always distinguished itself before all states by its sensible and prudent religious toleration.’”
In this context I cannot resist citing an example of the term’s usage from the 1806 Dictionary of the Academy of Sciences: “Before all others, Russia alone may boast of its religious toleration.”3 Many commentators likewise insisted that religious toleration had a long history in Russia. Thus one author remarked in 1826, “Russia has always distinguished itself before all states by its sensible and prudent religious toleration.”4 Officials in general tried to prevent situations that would produce “justified censure” (spravedlivye narekaniia) in response to the government’s violation of toleration. And in specific situations non-Orthodox subjects themselves referred to this principle in their attempts to secure the expansion of religious freedom on their behalf. To take just one example, in 1875 two dissident Mennonites in Saratov province wrote to the governor with a request that they be exempted from military service with the following appeal: “We dare to think that Your Excellency, as a representative of our enlightened age, will stand up for the idea of religious toleration.”5
In time the degree of religious freedom in Russia began to look inadequate in comparison to what had been obtained in other countries of Europe. The concept of “religious toleration” in Europe gradually gave way to the idea of “freedom of conscience,” according to which religious freedom represented not a privilege bestowed by the state but rather a natural right existing independently of it. From this standpoint, the state represented not the source of religious freedom but rather its guarantor. And the freedom in question pertained not so much to entire churches or communities but rather to individual subjects or citizens. Against this background, the degree of religious freedom in Russia appeared less impressive.
How, then, should we describe that development of religious freedom in the last half-century or so of the tsarist regime? In my view, we may identify two contrasting tendencies that simultaneously drew Russia in different directions—one backward and one forward. These two tendencies coexisted in a rough equilibrium, which brought Russia to an impasse in its religious policy by the early twentieth century.
“The concept of ‘natural faith’... meant that religious rituals... acquired ‘political significance with ever greater frequency as nationalist aspirations grew.”
In the case of the first tendency, the principal factor in question was the national question. One of the main “limits on religious toleration,” about which statesmen and commentators spoke with some frequency, was the proposition that under no circumstances should toleration extend to any “political” manifestation of religion. But if in one sense this principle—the non-interference of religious institutions in “politics”—was fairly straightforward, the situation became a good deal more complicated in the context of rising nationalism. The concept of “natural faith”—the tight connection between faith and ethnicity—meant that religious rituals, confessional institutions, the actions of clergies, and so on, acquired “political” significance with ever greater frequency as nationalist aspirations grew.
Likewise, the autocracy’s own efforts to deal with the national question in Russia, for example by promoting “Russification” (obrusenie), compelled it to intrude with ever greater frequency into the spiritual affairs of the “foreign confessions,” for example by imposing regulations on parish schools and requiring the use of Russian in confessional administration. The January Insurrection of 1863 in the Kingdom of Poland and the western provinces occupied a particular place in this process, but the dynamic in question appeared in other cases as well—in the Volga region, in relations with the Armenian Church, and so on.
But as already noted, there was also a second tendency, one that pulled Russia in a different direction. Here I would point to three principal factors serving to produce this tendency. The first took the form of growing activism on the part of believers in Russia, both Orthodox and nonOrthodox. True, some people in Russia began to incline towards unbelief and even atheism, but others now aspired to more conscious and active participation in the confession of the faith of their ancestors, while still others engaged in various forms of religious innovation. Some adopted confessions that were non-traditional to Russia—the Baptist faith, Methodism, and so on. Others transferred to other recognized confessions, thus repudiating the faith of their ancestors, and in some cases people even created new religions. In all these cases, believers sought to define their relationship to God more consciously. (This was even true, albeit in a negative sense, in the case of unbelief and atheism.) The question accordingly arose: Was Russia’s confessional system—based as it was on suppositions about “natural” faiths, on the custodial role of the state over religious affairs, and on the absence of any mechanism for the recognition of new faiths—really in a position to deal with this dynamic religious situation?
“By the early 20th century, [freedom of conscience] was being invoked... also by conservative circles.’”
The second factor pushing the regime to expand religious freedom was an intellectual one and concerned the appearance and development of more robust conceptions of religious freedom. We noted already that in Europe “religious toleration” was giving way gradually to the ideal of “freedom of conscience.” The latter idea also began to occupy its place in Russian discourse, first in the 1860s and then again, with even greater force, on the eve of the Revolution of 1905. Most strikingly, by the early 20th century this ideal was being invoked not only by the liberal intelligentsia but also by conservative circles and by defenders of the regime.
A third factor, finally, was the problem of chronic “apostasy” from Orthodoxy. By the end of the 19th century there were various groups of people who had been converted to Orthodoxy in the past but now sought to return to the religion of their ancestors. These were Tatar converts from the 18th century whose descendants aspired to confess Islam legally; former Greek Catholics (“Uniates”) who had been forcibly “reunited” with Orthodoxy (especially the communities in the Kingdom of Poland, “reunited” in 1875) who wished to become Catholics; and finally Latvians and Estonians in the Baltic provinces who had abandoned Lutheranism in the 1840s for material incentives and now desired to return to that faith.
By the laws of the empire, neither the converts themselves (if they were still alive) nor their descendants could leave Orthodoxy legally. The presence of such large numbers of “apostates” and “recalcitrants”—they numbered in the tens if not hundreds of thousands—created all kinds of practical complications and eventually a certain moral malaise among administrators. On both practical and ethical grounds, then, there were good reasons to embark on a reform of Russia’s religious order.
“Post-Soviet Russia’s embrace of certain attributes of the old tsarist confessional order signals the continued need to study the imperial past.’”
Such a reform indeed began in 1905, when “freedom of conscience” appeared in the October Manifesto and became the touchstone for debates about this issue in the era of the State Duma. Russia’s religious order was substantially liberalized, and yet even so significant contradictions within it remained. In its last decade the autocracy proved unable to decide whether it preferred to close ranks with all traditional religions for the purposes of combatting liberalism and radicalism, or whether it made more sense to close ranks with the Orthodox Church and the forces of Russian nationalism against heterodoxy and non-Russians. Unable to choose definitely between the two, the tsarist regime hesitated and wavered in its last decade. Even today, these tensions seem still only partially resolved, and post-Soviet Russia’s embrace of certain attributes of the old tsarist confessional order signals the continued need to study the imperial past.
Notes
- Preobrazhenskii, A. A. (ed.), Zakonodatel’stvo Petra I, Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1997, 536. 2 Montesquieu, Baron de, Spirit of the Laws, vol.
- (trans. Thomas Nugent), New York: Hafner, 1949, 38.
- Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoi, po azbuchnomu poriadku raspolozhennyi, vol. 1, St. Petersburg: Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk, 1806, 1046.
- A. L. [Andrei Leopol’dov], “O veroterpimosti v Rossii,” Vestnik Evropy, 147 (12) 1826, 260, 263.
- Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Saratovskoi Oblasti, f. 1, op. 1, d. 2429, ll. 73–73 ob., petitions of Wilhelm Weber and Johannes Permlauer, 7 February 1878.
Paul W. Werth is a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
