Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia

7. Arbiters of the Free Conscience: State, Religion, and the Problem of Confessional Transfer after 1905

7 Arbiters of the Free Conscience: State, Religion, and the Problem of Confessional Transfer after 1905 Paul W. Werth Among the many prerogatives the Russian autocracy arrogated for itself was the right to ascribe confessional affiliation to its subjects. For the most part, of course, the government accepted its subjects’ own declarations concerning their religious allegiances and, although establishing incentives for conversion to Orthodoxy, generally considered that believers would naturally remain in the faith of their parents and ancestors. Nonetheless, for the purposes of upholding the predominance of Orthodoxy over other faiths—and also of Christianity over heterodoxy—in certain instances the government felt justified in rejecting believers’ declared religious allegiances. And because the state sternly prohibited the interference of the representatives of one foreign faith in the affairs of another, even conversion among non-Orthodox faiths usually required the state’s permission.1 In short, in order both to maintain the existing hierarchy of religious confessions and to regulate their interaction, the state implicitly proclaimed itself the ultimate arbiter of religious identity in the Russian Empire. By the late nineteenth century the state was finding it more and more difficult to exercise this prerogative. While growing numbers of formally Orthodox subjects sought to return to the religions from which they or their ancestors had been converted earlier, new religions began to draw ever more adherents from the ranks of the Orthodox. Compelled by the state’s civil and criminal law to remain in Orthodoxy against their convictions, such believers became, simultaneously, ever more frustrated with their position and ever more hopeful that full legal recognition of their religious beliefs would soon be granted. Many state officials themselves became increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of deploying secular law and police power for the purpose of 179 180 Paul W.Werth maintaining religious discipline, arguing that this was both incompatible with modern values and, ultimately, ineffective. In response to these difficulties, and in line with these growing doubts, in April 1905 the autocracy substantially liberalized religious legislation and, in October, explicitly granted “freedom of conscience” to the empire’s population. This article examines the repercussions of this dramatic reform for the definition of religious affiliation in Russia. Focusing principally on the legal and administrative adjudication of believers’ requests for “confessional transfer” in the years after 1905,2 I argue that if the state made important concessions to the religious aspirations of the empire’s subjects, it nonetheless refused to relinquish its prerogatives as the ultimate arbiter of their confessional status and thus remained deeply implicated in their religious affairs. Even as some officials such as Sergei Witte and Petr Stolypin promoted religious reform as part of a larger project of eroding particularism in favor of Russia’s civic transformation and the establishment of a “national politics,” the state’s fundamentally confessional foundations placed profound limits on both the ability and inclination of most officials to construe religious identity purely as a matter of individual choice.3 Thus even as believers became more self-aware of their beliefs and conscious of their dignity as individuals, their religious experience remained conditioned to a significant degree by state imperatives. From “Religious Toleration” to “Freedom of Conscience” The religious reform of 1905 was clearly a product of the revolutionary crisis of that same year, but there were crucial antecedents to the idea of freedom of conscience in the years and even decades leading up to 1905. Already by the 1880s the refusal of many putative “converts” to Orthodoxy from earlier eras to make peace with their formal Orthodox status provided compelling proof that religious convictions were not reducible to bureaucratic ascription and that the law’s blanket prohibition on “apostasy” from Orthodoxy required modification.4 By the early twentieth century issues of religious freedom became prominent in intellectual and scholarly circles. Legal scholars more openly condemned existing statutes as being outdated, motivated primarily by political expediency, and confused in their equation of nationality and confession.5 Religion, ecumenism , and individual freedom became central issues for a vibrant segment of the Russian intelligentsia in the Silver Age, while the Orthodox Church’s condemnation of Lev Tolstoy in 1901 raised the question of religious freedom to a broader public.6 By the early twentieth century issues of religious liberty and freedom of conscience, albeit in various forms, occupied a prominent place in public discourse. Arbiters of the Free Conscience 181 Even the autocracy itself, which...