Church and State in Late Imperial Russia. Critics of the Synodal System of Church Government (1861-1914) (review)

This monograph examines contemporary discussion of Church-state relations from the mid-nineteenth century to the outbreak of World War I. The focus is not the actual interaction, but the discourse about these relations—primarily from the perspective of ecclesiastical, bureaucratic, and secular elites. The goal is to consider how these different groups regarded the existing system and what kind of changes they deemed essential. Behind this discourse was of course an escalation in church-state tensions, driven partly by clerical fears of dechristianization, by high officials seeking to mollify the non-Orthodox, and by the attempt of emperors (especially Nicholas II) who sought to resacralize and thereby relegitimize autocracy. This study provides a competent overview and reliable compendium of ecclesiastical, official, and intellectual views.

This monograph, while reviewing well-known territory (e.g., the views of Metropolitan Filaret and Konstantin Pobedonostsev) and making only nominal use of archival materials, does make some useful contributions. Certainly the most valuable is the exegesis of publications by canon lawyers, who confronted—and debated—the canonicity and legitimacy of the Synodal system and its subsequent evolution. Historians often cite this literature (on such issues as marriage and divorce); it is important to know how the writers' views on specific questions—which were extremely controversial and widely discussed at the time—fit into the larger discourse on canon law and the Church. The author is also careful to disaggregate "groups," such as bishops, and to show how they in fact differed substantially in their diagnoses of crucial problems and their prescriptions for reform. The author also provides a brief overview of the decade following the 1905 revolution, focusing on two issues vitally important for the Church and fiercely contested in the State Duma: religious toleration and primary education.

While this volume is a useful introduction, much remains to be done. Above all, it is critical to analyze not only the opinion of elites (ecclesiastical or secular), but also the lesser social orders—ordinary parish clergy and believers themselves. In post-emancipation Russia power was moving downward, not only in state and society, but also in the Church; what priests and parishioners had to say was affecting not only behavior but also discourse at the top. Hence one must analyze the "Church" in the broadest sense, not merely in terms of prelates and procurators; it is essential to reflect on the ecclesiology of Orthodoxy, especially as "Church" acquired an increasingly demotic, not narrowly hieratic, meaning. Hence we need to go beyond the traditional historiography, which focuses on the intellectual and legal history of church relations, not the quotidian; despite what top bureaucrats and bishops wrote, the everyday interaction is more important for understanding what Church-state relations really were, not how they were represented by elites. All this affects the source base: one must go beyond the printed sources, which, while important, have their limits, especially in an age of ecclesiastical censorship. To explore this subject (even for elites), it is imperative to draw on the personal and administrative archives.

While all that is on the agenda for future researchers, they will find here a reliable introduction to official elite views.