Religion in the Russian Empire
In 988, Prince Vladimir of Kiev ordered the baptism of his people and the conversion of Rus to Byzantine Orthodox Christianity. The act defined the religious identity of the eastern Slavic world for the next thousand years. By 1917, the Russian Empire still defined itself as the defender of Orthodoxy, and the autocratic tsar was the head of the Christian Russian people, in a multi-confessional state that included substantial Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and Buddhist populations. The management of that diversity was one of the central political problems of the imperial period.
The dominant religious institution of the empire was the Russian Orthodox Church, which served as an arm of the imperial state and played a central role in Russian culture, education, and political life. The Orthodox Church was closely tied to the autocracy, and its leaders were expected to support the policies of the state. The Church was also an important institution in its own right, with its own hierarchy, traditions, and spiritual teachings, and the relationship between Church and state was often a source of tension.
The religious minorities of the empire occupied a complicated position. The official ideology was based on Orthodoxy, and non-Orthodox religious communities were subject to various disabilities. At the same time, the imperial government often recognised the practical need to accommodate the religious diversity of its subjects, and the actual treatment of religious minorities varied considerably over time and from one region to another.
The Russian Orthodox Church
The Russian Orthodox Church traces its origins to the Christianization of Kievan Rus in 988, when Prince Vladimir the Great accepted baptism and ordered the baptism of his people. The Church developed over the centuries as a central institution of Russian life, with its own hierarchy, its own monasteries, and its own distinctive liturgical and spiritual traditions. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Russian Church came to see itself as the guardian of true Orthodoxy, and Moscow developed the doctrine of the “Third Rome,” the idea that Moscow was the spiritual heir of the fallen Byzantine and Roman empires.
The Church was closely tied to the Russian autocracy. The metropolitan of Moscow, later raised to the rank of patriarch in 1589, was an important figure in the Russian state, and the Church provided religious legitimation for the autocratic order. The relationship was not always smooth, however. In the seventeenth century, the patriarch Nikon attempted to assert the Church’s authority over the state, leading to a serious conflict with Tsar Alexis, but Nikon was eventually defeated and deposed. In 1721, Peter the Great abolished the patriarchate and replaced it with a state-controlled body called the Holy Synod, headed by a lay procurator. This arrangement effectively made the Church an arm of the state and remained in place until 1917.
The Church was the major landowner in Russia before Peter the Great, and the secularization of Church lands in the eighteenth century was one of the major changes in the relationship between Church and state. The Church also played an important role in education, with a network of parish schools and seminaries that served the bulk of the population, and in charity, with monasteries and convents providing social services throughout the empire. The Church was also a major patron of the arts, supporting the construction of churches, the production of icons, and the development of religious music.
The Old Believers and the schism
One of the most important religious events in Russian history was the Raskol of the seventeenth century, the schism of the Old Believers. In 1653, Patriarch Nikon launched a sweeping reform of Russian Orthodox liturgical practices to bring them into closer alignment with contemporary Greek Orthodox practice. The reforms included changes to the sign of the cross, the spelling of “Jesus,” and other practices, but they were seen by traditionalist Russian Orthodox as a betrayal of the true Russian faith.
The opponents of Nikon’s reforms, called Old Believers, refused to accept the new practices and were subjected to severe persecution by the state. The Old Believers were forced to flee to the most remote regions of Russia, including the northern forests, the southern steppes, and Siberia, where they established communities that preserved the pre-Nikonian traditions. Among the most dramatic episodes of the schism were the armed uprising of the Solovetsky Monastery, which withstood a siege by tsarist troops from 1668 to 1676 before its defenders were massacred, and the mass self-immolations elsewhere, in which Old Believers chose to die rather than submit to the new practices.
Despite the persecution, the Old Believers survived and even flourished. By the late imperial period, the Old Believers were a significant economic and cultural force, especially in Moscow and the Volga region, where they were known for their trading and commercial skills. The Old Believers also developed a rich spiritual and literary tradition, including important theological works and a distinctive iconographic style. The schism remained an important feature of Russian religious life, and the Old Believers were finally granted legal tolerance in 1905.
The Muslim communities of the empire
The Russian Empire included a large and growing Muslim population, especially after the conquest of the Tatar khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan in the sixteenth century, the Crimean Khanate in the eighteenth century, and the Central Asian khanates in the nineteenth century. By 1917, Muslims constituted approximately 11% of the population of the empire, making them the largest non-Christian religious group.
The Muslim communities of the empire were diverse. They included the Tatars of the Volga and the Urals, the Crimean Tatars, the Central Asian Muslims of the khanates and the steppes, the Caucasian Muslims of the eastern Caucasus, and smaller groups in Siberia and the Volga region. The imperial government’s treatment of Muslims varied considerably over time and by region. Catherine the Great, who had close ties to the Muslim Tatars and was herself a patron of Islam in some respects, generally pursued a relatively tolerant policy. The late imperial period, however, saw increasing restrictions on Muslim religious practice and education.
The Muslim communities of the empire developed a rich cultural and intellectual life, including important centers of learning such as the madrasas of Bukhara, the press of Kazan, and the publishing houses of Crimea. The Jadid movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which sought to modernize Islamic education and thought, was an important force for reform despite significant obstacles from the imperial authorities, and it played an important role in the development of modern national identities among the Muslim peoples of the empire. The Muslim deputies to the State Duma formed an important political bloc, and the pan-Turkist and pan-Islamic movements of the period had a significant impact on the politics of the late empire.
The Jewish population and the Pale of Settlement
The Jewish population of the Russian Empire was the largest in the world, and the treatment of the Jews was one of the most controversial aspects of imperial policy. Jews had lived for centuries in the territories that Russia acquired through the partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth century, and the Russian government, particularly under Catherine the Great, initially had a relatively tolerant attitude toward them.
This changed dramatically in the early nineteenth century. In 1804, the government imposed restrictions on Jewish residence and education, and the situation worsened throughout the century. The most important restriction was the Pale of Settlement, established in 1791 and expanded in the early nineteenth century, which confined the Jewish population to the western provinces of the empire, including parts of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland. Jews were forbidden to live in most of the rest of the empire, including the Russian interior, and the Pale of Settlement was enforced by strict regulations on residence, travel, and occupation.
The Jewish communities of the Pale faced a range of disabilities. They were subject to economic restrictions, especially on the purchase of land and on the practice of certain trades. They were required to pay special taxes and were subject to conscription at higher rates than other populations. They were also subject to periodic pogroms, violent anti-Jewish riots that broke out in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in 1881-1882 and 1903-1906. The pogroms caused thousands of deaths, displaced hundreds of thousands of people, and contributed to a massive wave of Jewish emigration from the Russian Empire to the United States, Western Europe, and Palestine.
The Jewish intellectual and political movements that developed in response to these conditions had a profound impact on world history. The Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, sought to modernize Jewish culture and integrate Jews into Russian society. The Bund and other Jewish socialist movements organized Jewish workers and fought for both Jewish rights and social revolution. The Zionist movement, which sought to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, was in significant part a response to the conditions of Jewish life in the Russian Empire, and many of its leading figures, including Leon Pinsker, Chaim Weizmann, and Nahum Goldmann, came from the Russian Empire.
The Catholic and Protestant minorities
The Catholic and Protestant populations of the empire were concentrated in the western and Baltic regions. The Catholic Church was particularly strong in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which was incorporated into the empire in the eighteenth century, and the fate of the Uniate Church, which combined Orthodox and Catholic elements, was a major religious and political issue. The Uniate Church was suppressed by the imperial government in 1839, when its members were forcibly converted to the Russian Orthodox Church. The suppression was part of a broader policy of Russification in the western provinces and was deeply resented by the local population.
The Protestant population included the German and Scandinavian settlers who had been invited to Russia by Catherine the Great and later rulers, the Baltic Germans of the Baltic provinces, and the Finns, Estonians, Latvians, and other peoples of the northwestern empire. The Baltic Germans were a particularly important group, forming the social, economic, and political elite of the Baltic provinces and playing an important role in the imperial administration.
The imperial government pursued a complex policy toward the Catholic and Protestant minorities. Catherine the Great had been relatively tolerant, but the late imperial period saw an intensification of Russification and restrictions on non-Orthodox religious practice. The conversion of non-Orthodox subjects to Orthodoxy was encouraged by various means, and the publication and distribution of religious texts in non-Russian languages was sometimes restricted.
The Buddhist, shamanist, and other religious communities
The eastern parts of the empire included a number of religious communities that fell outside the Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, and Jewish categories. Buddhism was the religion of several of the peoples of Siberia and the Russian Far East, including the Buryats, Kalmyks, and Tuvans. The Buddhist communities of the empire were relatively small but had important cultural and political significance, especially in the case of the Kalmyks, who had migrated from Dzungaria in the seventeenth century and had preserved their distinct identity throughout the imperial period.
Shamanism, with its various local forms, was the religion of many of the smaller indigenous peoples of Siberia, including the Khanty, Mansi, and Evenki. The imperial government’s approach to shamanism was mixed, with some official support for the conversion of indigenous peoples to Orthodox Christianity and some accommodation of local religious practices. Various syncretic religious movements, combining elements of Christianity, Buddhism, and shamanism, developed among the indigenous peoples of Siberia.
Themes in the religious history of the empire
Four patterns recur across the imperial period.
Orthodoxy and the autocratic state. From the Christianisation of Kievan Rus onward, the Russian Church was closely tied to the state, and the autocrat was understood to be the defender of the true faith. The relationship shaped the development of Russian Orthodoxy in distinctive ways: the absence of papal authority, the close connection between religious and political authority, and a specifically Russian form of Orthodoxy in which the tsar was the protector of the faith.
Managing religious diversity. The Russian Empire was a multi-confessional state, and the imperial government had to balance the privileged position of the Orthodox Church with the practical need to accommodate the religious diversity of its subjects. The treatment of religious minorities varied considerably over time and by region, and the question of religious tolerance was an important political issue throughout the imperial period.
Religion, nation, and opposition. The religious institutions of the empire were important supports of the autocratic state, but religion also provided a basis for resistance and opposition. The Old Believers developed a distinctive identity that preserved traditional Russian religious culture. The Muslim Jadid movement sought to reform Islamic education and develop modern national identities. The Jewish intellectual and political movements developed in response to the conditions of Jewish life in the empire. In each case, religion was closely tied to the development of social and national movements that would eventually challenge the imperial order.
Religion in cultural life. The Orthodox Church was a major patron of the arts, and religious themes were central to Russian literature, music, and art. The great Russian writers — Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy — engaged deeply with religious themes, and the great Russian composers — Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and others — drew on Orthodox liturgical traditions. The religious diversity of the empire also contributed to its cultural richness, with the architectural, musical, and literary traditions of the various religious communities adding to the overall cultural heritage.