His Kingdom Come: Orthodox Pastorship and Social Activism in Revolutionary Russia (review)

Particularly when viewed against its Catholic counterpart, the Orthodox Church produced comparatively little in terms of social thought, civic activism, and political engagement. In her monograph, however, Jennifer Hedda demonstrates that these trends were in fact present in Russian Orthodoxy—at least in the empire's capital—and might well have developed more robustly in different historical circumstances.

At the center of Hedda's account are the aspirations of the St. Petersburg parish clergy to build the Kingdom of God on earth—that is, to effectuate "the total transformation of the world through the application of the moral teachings of the gospel" (p. 72). Emerging at first in the 1860s, this new sense of mission proposed greater clerical engagement with society in the form of charity, education, temperance, and—for some priests by the early-twentieth century—participation in politics. Hedda nicely captures the transition involved by noting her protagonists' growing preference for the term pastor( pastyr'), with its clear implications of shepherding and care, over priest( sviashchennik), which emphasized clerical authority as well as liturgical and sacramental duties. These new ideals were embodied in several religious organizations in the 1870s to 1890s that drew substantial numbers of pastors and laypeople into civic action. The trend culminated in 1905, when Father Georgii Gapon, inspired "to establish a society governed according to the principles of divine truth and justice" (p. 144), led a large number of workers to the Winter Palace to petition the emperor for social reform. Hedda acknowledges that Gapon was atypical, but insists that he reflected the activist clerical values that had been brewing in St. Petersburg ecclesiastical life for several decades. Even despite the failure of Gapon's initiative—the workers were fired upon by tsarist troops, thus precipitating the Revolution of 1905—younger clerics devoted to the idea of church renovation continued to promote the realization of the Kingdom of God in both word and deed. In these developments Hedda discerns the beginnings of a Russian Christian Socialism, but asserts that the autocracy's refusal to countenance serious church reform stunted its emergence, while also exacerbating divisions within the Church, leaving it ill-equipped to deal with future challenges. For Hedda, then, this is a tragic story of lost opportunity.

Hedda writes clearly and has assembled an impressive quantity of source material for her investigation. Her reading of the sources is intelligent and compelling. She also does an admirable job of locating the origins of the new clerical outlooks in the Church's growing emphasis on education in the nineteenth century. Her book is thoroughly situated in a recent renaissance of religious history in Russia, but she is among the first to focus on the imperial capital, which has generally been neglected in favor of rural religion.

This focus does raise questions about whether these priests actually represented larger trends. The capital, Hedda notes, was in many ways unusual, for example in the high level of its priests' education and the ability of local hierarchs to resist state intrusions. Were these new clerical values anomalous? Did they have purchase elsewhere in the empire—at least in cities? If even in St. Petersburg the renovationist priests who carried on after Gapon "never did win many supporters from among the ordinary people" (p. 174), then what prospects did their "evangelical populism" have elsewhere? And if the Holy Synod could vilify and defrock a prominent activist priest like Grigorii Petrov (the protagonist of one chapter) and if Gapon himself was murdered in 1906 (an episode that Hedda does not address), how viable was Orthodox social activism in late-tsarist Russia? Hedda might also have done more comparative work to consider the St. Petersburg case against the Christian activism in Europe and the United States. The relative significance of the Russian statist tradition and of Orthodox theology and ecclesiastical organization would be most clearly revealed, it seems, through this kind...