Religious Freedom in Modern Russia ed. by Randall A. Poole and Paul W. Werth (review)

The essay collection Religious Freedom in Modern Russia arose out of a 2012 forum on freedom of conscience in the journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and includes two of the contributions to that forum (by Gary Hamburg and Victoria Frede). It is also indebted to The Tsar's Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia (Oxford University Press, 2014) by Paul W. Werth, one of the collection's editors, whose intellectual presence here is pervasive, though not overt. There are seven essays by historians of religion and ideas in Russia, both established and emerging scholars, and a long introductory essay by Werth's coeditor, Randall A. Poole. The overall quality of the essays is extremely high, as is the editorial standard. The editors have ensured a pleasing balance in terms of historical focus: the weight of the volume falls in late imperial Russia (1861–1917), while Gary Hamburg's prize-winning essay, in first position, surveys thinking about religious toleration from 1520 to 1825, and Eugene Clay's, in final position, assesses the post-Soviet situation. Still more satisfying is the balance of perspectives on religious freedom represented by the analytical foci of the essays: the Russian Orthodox Church (Poole, Hamburg, Patrick Michelson, Daniel Scarborough); Islam (Norihiro Naganawa); Buddhism (Clay); the Reformed traditions (Heather Coleman, Clay); Russian sectarianism and Old Belief (Frede, Coleman); monarchs and state officials (Hamburg); and Russian revolutionary activists (Hamburg, Frede).

In Poole's words, the volume "explores the complex contours and contested meanings of religious freedom in Russia" (4), with a focus not on state religious policy, but on "the various meanings that religious freedom, toleration, and … freedom of conscience had in Russia among nonstate actors" (7–8). In fact, state religious policy features often as the determining context of Russian discourse about religious freedom. The fundamental reality was (and is now again) the Russian empire as a "multiconfessional Orthodox state—that is, a polity that established several religions while constituting only one of them as dominant" (Werth, 2014, cited by Poole, 26). As several of the contributors point out, such a reality, particularly in an authoritarian state, dictates that religious freedom is both highly qualified and precarious, liable to be used as an instrument of control and subject to arbitrary revocation to suit the needs of the state.

Specifically, a major distinction that emerges in the volume is that between "freedom of religion" (svoboda very) and "freedom of conscience" (svoboda sovesti). The first of these two best describes the imperial Russian (and Russian post-1997) legal position of allowing people to practice the religion into which they were born but not to proselytize (unless they are Orthodox), and not to change religions (unless they are converting to Orthodoxy). The second, notwithstanding its use in legal formulations, was related in the eyes of certain critics of state policy to philosophical and political liberalism, and properly related to humans' natural right to exercise their capacity for ideal self-determination, their free will in matters of belief. "Freedom of religion" applies to groups, while "freedom of conscience" applies to individuals.

In his introductory essay, Poole argues that we should understand the nineteenth-century movement of religious renewal (within Orthodoxy) as a process that from the start placed individual religious experience at its center and developed from there into philosophical neo-idealism and political liberalism, and thence to the demand for church and state reform to allow for the full exercise of freedom of conscience. In this way, he indicates a trajectory for the volume, but it is not certain that the essays that follow bear him out. The Russian Orthodox Church had various faces. Scarborough argues persuasively that its diocesan missionaries (established in 1884) vigorously worked to undermine the spirit of toleration that had begun to flourish in Orthodox communities in the postreform era and effectively neutralized the 1905 decree "On Strengthening the Principles of Religious Toleration." Michelson...