Religious Minorities in the Russian Empire
The Russian Empire was a multi-confessional state, and the various religious minorities played an important role in its history. Muslims, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, and members of various other confessions constituted a substantial part of the population, and their relations with the dominant Russian Orthodox Church and the autocratic state were a central feature of imperial history. How the minorities fared depended heavily on the era and the place — the spectrum ran from pragmatic accommodation to outright persecution — and religious freedom ranked among the great political controversies of the imperial period.
The diversity of religious life in the Russian Empire was one of the consequences of the empire’s vast territorial expansion. As Russia absorbed the Tatar khanates of the Volga region in the sixteenth century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the eighteenth century, the Caucasus and Central Asia in the nineteenth century, and various other territories, it incorporated large numbers of people who were not Orthodox Christian. Governing this confessional patchwork posed a standing test for the imperial system.
The Muslim population
Islam claimed more adherents than any other non-Christian faith in the empire — roughly 11% of all subjects by 1917. Far from forming a single bloc, the empire’s Muslims ranged from the Tatars of the Volga and the Urals and the Tatars of Crimea to the peoples of Central Asia and the Caucasus, with smaller communities scattered through Siberia and the Volga lands.
The treatment of the Muslim population varied considerably over time. Early Russian rule was often comparatively accommodating: Tatar khans and other Muslim elites were frequently incorporated into the Russian administration, and the Muslim religious establishments were generally allowed to continue their activities. Catherine the Great went furthest in this direction, creating a system of religious administration that left Muslim religious authorities a measure of self-governance.
The late imperial period saw an intensification of restrictions on the Muslim population. The Russian authorities were concerned about the growth of pan-Islamic and pan-Turkist movements, which they saw as threats to the unity of the empire, and they imposed various restrictions on Muslim religious practice, education, and publishing. The Jadids, whose program of renewing Islamic schooling and thought ran up against repeated official obstruction, were among those affected, and various Muslim religious and political leaders were subjected to persecution.
Muslim cultural and intellectual life flourished nonetheless. Bukhara’s madrasas, Kazan’s publishing houses, and Crimea’s religious schools anchored a wide network of learning, and the reformers of the late imperial era — the Jadid leaders and the Tatar and Central Asian modernizers — did much to forge modern national identities and to renew Islamic thought.
The Jewish population
Nowhere in the world did more Jews live than in the Russian Empire, and few aspects of imperial policy drew more controversy than their treatment. Jewish communities had been rooted for centuries in the lands of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and became Russian subjects through the partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth century; under Catherine the Great the government’s posture toward them was at first comparatively tolerant.
That early tolerance gave way in the early nineteenth century. Restrictions on where Jews could live and study were introduced in 1804, and conditions deteriorated steadily over the following decades. Above all there was the Pale of Settlement: created in 1791 and enlarged in the early nineteenth century, it confined Jewish residence to the empire’s western provinces. Detailed rules governing residence, travel, and occupation kept the system in force, and settlement in most of the rest of the empire was closed to Jews.
Life inside the Pale carried a long list of disabilities: limits on buying land and on entering certain trades, special taxes, and conscription quotas heavier than those imposed on other groups. Worse still were the pogroms — waves of anti-Jewish mob violence that swept the empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, above all in 1881-1882 and 1903-1906.
Out of these conditions grew Jewish intellectual and political movements of world-historical consequence. The Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, worked to modernize Jewish culture and draw Jews into Russian society; the Bund and other Jewish socialist parties mobilized Jewish workers in the twin causes of Jewish rights and social revolution; and Zionism, the movement to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, took shape in significant part as an answer to the conditions of Jewish life under Russian rule.
The Catholic and Protestant populations
Catholicism and Protestantism were faiths of the empire’s western borderlands and Baltic provinces. The Catholic Church’s stronghold lay in the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth absorbed in the eighteenth century, where the position of the Uniate Church — a body that joined Orthodox ritual to Catholic allegiance — became a charged religious and political question. In 1839 the imperial government dissolved the Uniate Church and forcibly converted its members to Russian Orthodoxy, a measure taken as part of the wider Russification drive in the western provinces and bitterly resented there.
The Protestants included German and Scandinavian colonists invited to Russia by Catherine the Great and her successors, the Baltic Germans, and the Finns, Estonians, Latvians, and other peoples of the empire’s northwest. Of these the Baltic Germans stood out: they dominated the social, economic, and political life of the Baltic provinces and supplied many senior figures to the imperial administration.
Imperial policy toward these Christian minorities was never uniform. The relative tolerance of Catherine the Great’s day hardened in the late imperial decades into intensified Russification: pressure on non-Orthodox worship grew, conversion to Orthodoxy was promoted through a variety of inducements, and the printing and circulation of religious texts in non-Russian languages was at times curtailed.
The Buddhist, shamanist, and other religious communities
The empire’s eastern reaches were home to faiths beyond the Orthodox, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian worlds. Several peoples practiced Buddhism — the Buryats of Siberia, the Tuvans, and the Kalmyks of the steppe between the Volga and the Don — and though these communities were small in number, their cultural and political weight was considerable.
The Kalmyks were a particularly important Buddhist community. They had migrated from Dzungaria in the seventeenth century and had established a major khanate on the steppe between the Volga and the Don. The Kalmyk khanate was eventually absorbed into the Russian Empire, and the Kalmyks preserved their distinct identity and their Buddhist religious traditions throughout the imperial period. (The later Soviet deportations of 1943-1957 were a catastrophe of a different era, and lie beyond the scope of this article.)
Among many of Siberia’s smaller indigenous peoples — the Khanty, Mansi, and Evenki among them — religious life took the form of shamanism in its many local variants. Imperial policy here was inconsistent, at times backing missionary campaigns to bring indigenous peoples into the Orthodox Church and at other times leaving local practice alone. The encounter produced syncretic movements among Siberia’s native peoples that wove together Christian, Buddhist, and shamanist elements.
The role of religious minorities in the imperial economy and culture
The religious minorities of the Russian Empire played an important role in the imperial economy and culture. The Muslim Tatars were a presence in the trade of the Volga region, and the Central Asian Muslims were a presence in the trade with China, Persia, and the Indian subcontinent. The Jews were a presence in the commercial life of the western provinces, and they played a particularly important role in the development of the Russian financial system. The Baltic Germans were a presence in the imperial administration and the Russian army, and the Protestant missionaries and the various Christian communities played an important role in the development of Russian education.
The religious minorities also made important contributions to Russian culture. The Jewish communities produced major writers, including Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Babel, major musicians, including Anton Rubinstein, and artists such as the painter and designer Sonia Delaunay. The Muslim communities produced important poets and thinkers, including Abdurauf Fitrat and Mahmudkhoja Behbudiy. The Baltic German community produced an important contribution to the development of Russian science, with the Nobel-prize-winning chemist Wilhelm Ostwald and the various other Baltic German scientists of the imperial period.
The legacy of religious minorities in the imperial period
The treatment of religious minorities in the Russian Empire was a major issue throughout the imperial period, and it has continued to be a major issue in the post-Soviet period. The pogroms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in particular, have remained an important source of grievance, and they have shaped the relationship between Russia and the Jewish people to the present day. The Russification policies of the late imperial period, which sought to impose Russian language and culture on the non-Russian minorities, have also remained an important source of grievance, and they have shaped the relationship between Russia and its various non-Russian nationalities.
The legacy of the religious minorities of the imperial period is thus complex and contested. The Russian Empire was a major multi-confessional state, and the religious minorities made important contributions to its development. At the same time, the treatment of the religious minorities was often marked by discrimination, persecution, and violence, and the legacies of these policies continue to shape the post-Soviet world.
The question of how to manage the religious diversity of the Russian Empire was one of the central political problems of the period. The experience of the imperial period offers a number of lessons about the management of religious diversity, but it also serves as a warning about the dangers of authoritarianism and ethnic nationalism, and the question of religious freedom remains a live issue in Russian politics today.