Imperial Rule

Schism Once Removed: Sects, State Authority, and Meanings of Religious Toleration in Imperial Russia

Schism Once Removed: Sects, State Authority, and Meanings of Religious Toleration in Imperial Russia PAUL W. WERTH1 If Orthodoxy occupied an explicitly privileged place as the “preeminent and predominant” faith of the Russian Empire, the imperial state nonetheless forged important ties of co-operation with other confessions and its representatives. Indeed, the American historian Robert Crews has argued recently that the state in Russia served as a patron of recognized confessions , “committed to backing the construction and implementation of ‘orthodoxy ’ within each recognized religious community.” By assuming this obligation, “the state became deeply enmeshed in intraconfessional disputes as the guardian of religious ‘orthodoxy’ for the tolerated faiths” in Russia. In this respect, imperial Russia represented a “confessional state,” for which connections with clergies and pious activists offered not only a basis for deepening its regulatory and disciplinary reach into nonOrthodox communities, but also a source of cohesion for a large and diverse realm.2 Crews astutely identifies the confessional foundations of the imperial Russian state, which indeed conditioned many of the state’s interactions with its subjects. Moreover, by elucidating patterns of interdependence and mutual penetration between religious communities and the state, he provides a crucial corrective to a simplistic nationalist historiography that portrays the state as intrinsically hostile to the so-called “foreign confessions”3 and construes non-Orthodox religiosity as a refuge from the government’s intrusion. My goal in the present essay is nonetheless to propose that in practice the state’s attitude towards the ‘orthodoxy’ of foreign confessions was more ambivalent than Crews’ account allows, especially when we move beyond the reign of Nicholas I (1825–55). Undoubtedly, the state sometimes deployed police power for the purposes of suppressing dissidence within recognized non-Orthodox religions and in general regarded new religious teachings and “sects” with a healthy dose of suspicion. Likewise , the state’s laws made no provision for the recognition and institutionalization of new confessions and sects.4 Yet, when it came to the question of whether it was the state’s job to guarantee the purity of non-Orthodox religions and to protect them from “schism,” the government often answered in the negative and in its actions exhibited uncertainty and inconsistency. IMPERIAL RULE This article seeks to assess the state’s commitment to the foreign confessions by analyzing its actions and statements when “schism” and “sects” threatened those confessions with division and fragmentation.5 Such situations confronted the government with serious dilemmas in light of its selfproclaimed adherence to “religious toleration” (veroterpimost), a principle that could be applied either to entire confessions and religions, as Crews’ account suggests, or to individual believers, which implied considerable deference to their religious convictions. The cases considered below accordingly reflect the state’s effort to balance these alternative visions of toleration , rather than its being committed unequivocally to one of them. In regulating cases of “schism” and “sects,” the state also faced important political dilemmas, deriving from the perceived relationship of the confession in question to Russia’s interests both at home and abroad, as well as practical ones, deriving from the fact that it was almost in all cases religious figures who maintained the empire’s most basic civil records. On the whole, while determined to uphold the legally defined rights of non-Orthodox confessions , the state nonetheless proved willing to provide administrative regulation and legal recognition for a number of dissident religious groups in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. THE FOREIGN CONFESSIONS AS STATE INSTITUTIONS Even before they were explicitly characterized as “foreign” in 1810,6 nonOrthodox religious institutions were being integrated into the empire’s system of state administration. From roughly 1770 to 1840 the state imposed on foreign confessions most of the obligations, rights, and institutional structures that it had already imposed on Orthodoxy. Thus, just as Orthodoxy received its “Spiritual Regulation” in 1721, so Roman Catholicism received a comparable statute in 1769, as did the Evangelical Lutheran and Reformed Churches in 1832, and most of the other recognized confessions later in the 1830s.7 These statutes and related decrees typically established a collegial body akin to Orthodoxy’s Holy Synod—for example, the Evangelical -Lutheran General Consistory, although the state also recognized or established singular heads for most of the same confessions—Muftii, Catholicos, Gakham, etc.8 The application of the system of Orthodox regulation to the foreign confessions also entailed the creation of “clergies” for the nonChristian religions, or at least the elevation of figures like mullahs, rabbis, and lamas to...