Toward "Freedom of Conscience": Catholicism, Law, and the Contours of Religious Liberty in Late Imperial Russia

Toward "Freedom of Conscience"

Catholicism, Law, and the Contours of Religious Liberty in Late Imperial Russia

Officials of the Russian empire most often used the term "religious toleration" to describe the regime's policy with respect to the empire's non-Orthodox religious groups. By this conception, adherents of the so-called "foreign confessions" enjoyed the right to practice their religions within distinctly prescribed limits and received autonomy in certain areas of social life. At the same time, the imperial government remained committed to upholding specific privileges for the "predominant" Orthodox faith and exercised a sustained vigilance against the use of religion for "political" purposes by the regime's opponents. The tension between the desire to create the conditions for fulfillment of the religious needs of the empire's non-Orthodox populations, on the one hand, and the necessity of protecting the interests of the Orthodox Church and the state itself, on the other, represents a central theme in the history of Russia as an imperial entity.

The books reviewed here illuminate a series of crucial manifestations of this tension in the late tsarist era. The profound entanglement of religious identity with emerging national sentiment and state initiatives of Russification substantially deepened the politicization of religious affairs in Russia and accordingly eroded official commitments to "religious toleration." Already following the Poles' November uprising of 1830, but to an even greater degree after the January insurrection of 1863, the government imposed heightened restrictions on the Catholic Church and clergy, including the secularization of church property, a dramatic reduction in the numbers of monasteries and monastic clergy, limitations on the movement of Catholic religious servitors, and the closing of numerous Catholic houses of worship. Restrictions appeared in the case of other religions as well. The political crisis of the early 20th century pushed the regime to re-assess these restrictions on non-Orthodox religious life, while the revolutionary events of 1905 compelled the autocracy to grant the empire's population "freedom of conscience" in the October Manifesto. The works reviewed here examine different aspects of this complex (and incomplete) transition from "religious toleration" to "freedom of conscience" and demonstrate the degree to which religious issues were deeply implicated in a wide range of other areas of state policy and practice. The two books on Catholicism also offer insights as to how some of these religious issues played out in the early years of Soviet rule. (In this essay, I use the term "Catholic" to refer specifically to the Roman Catholic confession, while explicitly specifying the Greek Catholic [Uniate] and Armenian Catholic confessions.)

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With two books published in rapid succession, Aleksandra Dorskaia has made a substantial contribution to our understanding of both the religious sources of tsarist...