Church and Society in Modern Russia: Essays in Honor of Gregory L. Freeze ed. by Manfred Hildermeier and Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter (review)

To honor the seventieth birthday of Gregory L. Freeze, the outstanding American historian of the Orthodox Church in Russia, some of his colleagues and students have put together this Festschrift on various aspects of Russia’s religious and social history. At the end of the volume, Scott M. Kenworthy, one of Freeze’s former graduate students provides an excellent overview over his teacher’s scholarly output and impact (Pp. 211–229). Kenworthy argues that Freeze’s impact goes beyond merely deepening the knowledge about religious aspects of Russian history in that he challenged and overturned ingrained tropes of the irrelevancy of religion to Russian modern history. He emphasized the importance of religion to Russian developments since the eighteenth century so that serious historical scholarship cannot ignore the church anymore.

Kenworthy then goes on to succinctly summarize Freeze’s research, which always was based on previously untapped archival and printed sources, often from regional archives, in innovative ways. Thematically, Freeze pursued two main themes in his research: one is the changing role and scope of the parish and its clergy, and the other is the relationship between religious actors and logics and society at large. In his two books and countless articles, Freeze has tried to cover the eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century developments, producing a continuous narrative that took into account revolutionary upheavals and mass-scale societal changes. The eight pages of Freeze’s bibliography closing the book (Pp. 231–238) testify to this wide and productive research output.

In my opinion, Kenworthy’s chapter should have been placed in the beginning, to provide the reader with an overview of the themes that Freeze grappled with and to give a better appreciation of the relationship between Freeze’s work and the subjects of the other chapters in this Festschrift. As it is, the first chapter of the book, written in a highly sophisticated German by Manfred Hildermeier (Pp. 1–15) is likely to discourage some Anglophone readers from reading the book. This first chapter is also the only chapter not dealing with religion, since it problematizes the notion of “backwardness” (Rückständigkeit), which has plagued the historiography of Russian history since the outset of modernity. Although it is no longer en vogue to talk about Russian backwardness since the cultural turn of the 1970s, Hildermeier argues that it is an important aspect of Russian historical consciousness. However, instead of the pejorative connotation that resounds with “backwardness,” Hildermeier proposes to conceive of Russian modernization as a process of “productive integration,” happening in a “complex network of functional relations.” Instead of the concept “backwardness,” which is but one aspect of the relationship between Russia and the modern West, Hildermeier suggests the notion of “progressive interweaving.” This rather abstract chapter at times reads as an entangled polemic with Alexander Gerschenkron’s theory of relative backwardness formulated sixty-five years ago, only without ever explaining this theory or even mentioning Gerschenkron in the footnotes. Gregory Freeze or his work is also never mentioned in the text, which is surprising, given that this is the opening chapter in a Festschrift for this eminent scholar.

The second chapter, by Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter is much more explicit in this regard (Pp. 17–34). Wirtschafter, who started her academic studies with a BA under Freeze’s guidance and writes in English, presents Freeze as a sole figure in “the West,” whose research has acquired “paradigmatic weight.” Her rather theological contribution on a specific type of sermon, delivered by Metropolitan Platon (Levshin) at the end of the eighteenth century, shows how Platon “articulated an understanding of the church and life in the church that made sense with reference to the social and cultural conditions of eighteenth-century Russia” (P. 22). Wirtschafter sees Platon as a core representative of Russian Enlightenment, who championed a well-ordered world without...