A History of Confession in Russia

In the late 1990s I worked as research assistant to a professor, David Perrin, who was writing an historical and philosophical analysis of the sacrament of confession. It was a fascinating summer spent researching one sacrament whose practice has changed so dramatically across time and place. 

Some of those differences will be on display mid-year in a forthcoming book. This is very advanced notice for a book I definitely want to get my hands on when it comes out, as much for the topic as the author, whom I've met once or twice at conferences over the years and who has always impressed me with the caliber of her exacting scholarship: Nadieszda Kizenko, Good for the Souls: A History of Confession in the Russian Empire (Oxford University Press, June 2021), 336pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us this:

From the moment that Tsars as well as hierarchs realized that having their subjects go to confession could make them better citizens as well as better Christians, the sacrament of penance in the Russian empire became a political tool, a devotional exercise, a means of education, and a literary genre. It defined who was Orthodox, and who was 'other.' First encouraging Russian subjects to participate in confession to improve them and to integrate them into a reforming Church and State, authorities then turned to confession to integrate converts of other nationalities. But the sacrament was not only something that state and religious authorities sought to impose on an unwilling populace. Confession could provide an opportunity for carefully crafted complaint. What state and church authorities initially imagined as a way of controlling an unruly population could be used by the same population as a way of telling their own story, or simply getting time off to attend to their inner lives.

Good for the Souls brings Russia into the rich scholarly and popular literature on confession, penance, discipline, and gender in the modern world, and in doing so opens a key window onto church, state, and society. It draws on state laws, Synodal decrees, archives, manuscript repositories, clerical guides, sermons, saints' lives, works of literature, and visual depictions of the sacrament in those books and on church iconostases. Russia, Ukraine, and Orthodox Christianity emerge both as part of the European, transatlantic religious continuum-and, in crucial ways, distinct from it.

If I can, I'll arrange an interview on here with Dr Kizenko.

Russian History

With all the recent focus on and discussion of Russia, including of course its annexation of Crimea and continued threats to Ukraine, a recent volume helpfully provides a much wider picture of Russian history, including chapters on the relationship to the Byzantine empire, and the development of (and schisms within) what we today call the Russian Orthodox Church, this latter article being written by Nadieszda Kizenko: Abbott Gleason, ed., A Companion to Russian History (Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 568pp.

About this book we are told:

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, substantial changes have transformed the way historians have interpreted Russia’s past. This companion provides an overview of Russian history, from the earliest appearance of the Slavs in history to the present day. It features 28 provocative essays written by both prominent and emerging international scholars covering major problems in Russia's history.
The book is structured chronologically, yet reflects the weight of interest in Russia’s recent history by giving its greatest coverage to the twentieth century. It offers a balanced review of both traditional and cutting-edge topics, demonstrating the range and dynamism of the field.

This companion comprises 28 essays by international scholars offering an analytical overview of the development of Russian history from the earliest Slavs through to the present day.

• Includes essays by both prominent and emerging scholars from Russia, Great Britain, the US, and Canada

• Analyzes the entire sweep of Russian history from debates over how to identify the earliest Slavs, through the Yeltsin Era, and future prospects for post-Soviet Russia

• Offers an extensive review of the medieval period, religion, culture, and the experiences of ordinary people

• Offers a balanced review of both traditional and cutting-edge topics, demonstrating the range and dynamism of the field

Secularism and Religion in Russia and Ukraine

Scott Kenworthy, author of the splendid history of Trinity-Sergius Lavra which I discussed here, just alerted me that he has a chapter in a new book edited by Catherine Wanner that is supposed to be released later this month: State Secularism and Lived Religion in Soviet Russia and Ukraine (Oxford UP, 2013 [paperback]), 304pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

State Secularism and Lived Religion in Soviet Russia and Ukraine is a collection of essays written by a broad cross-section of scholars from around the world that explores the myriad forms religious expression and religious practice took in Soviet society in conjunction with the Soviet government's commitment to secularization. The implementation of secularizing policies invariably shaped the forms of religious expression that emerged in Soviet Russian and Soviet Ukraine. Religious practices across confessional groups over time reflect the waves of intensification and relaxation of repressive practices. During the post-world War II period, which most of the essays in this volume address, repressive tactics shifted from raw coercion and violence to propaganda and agitation as the main means to suppress religious practice and belief in the public sphere. Unlike other studies that have focused on such forms of repression, the authors in this volume consider how some communities and individual believers were able to adapt their practices and beliefs to the social, political, and ideological constraints of Soviet society so as to pursue their beliefs. The volume thus offers a new perspective on Soviet secularization that moves beyond the formation of policies and decrees to consider two additional dimensions. First, the essays engage how governing mandates to suppress religion and promote a secular society were experienced by believers. Second, this approach allows the authors to illustrate the variety of secularizing polices and how they were invariably implemented across regions, over time, and in response to perceptions of local religious practice. By considering the intersection of religious practice and Soviet secularizing policies, this collection expands our understanding of religiosity in the region and illustrates how specific denominations and the believers within them adapted to the conditions set by socialist modernity.

This book reads something like a who's-who, featuring some of the most prominent names in East-Slavic historiography today, many of whom have been featured on here before: 

Introduction - Catherine Wanner

1. Subversive Atheism: Antireligious Campaigns and Religious Revival in Ukraine in the 1920s - Gregory L. Freeze
2. GPU-NKVD Repressions of Zionists: Ukraine, the 1920s - Olga Bertelsen
3. Christianity and Radical Nationalism: Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky and the Bandera Movement - John-Paul Himka
4. The Revival of Monastic Life in the Trinity-Sergius Lavra after World War II - Scott Kenworthy
5. ''They burned the pine, but the place remains all the same'': Pilgrimage in the changing landscape of Soviet Russia - Stella Rock
6. Confession in Modern Russia and Ukraine - Nadieszda Kizenko
7. Time and Space of Suffering: The Soviet Past in the Memoirs and Narratives of Evangelical Christian Baptists - Olena Panych
8. Preaching the Kingdom Message: Jehovah's Witnesses and Soviet Secularisation - Zoe Knox
9. The Revival before the Revival: Popular and Institutionalized Religion in Ukraine on the Eve of the Collapse of Communism - Victor Yelensky