God, Tsar, and People: The Political Culture of Early Modern Russia

I went through a monarchist phase in my youth, and still have something of a soft spot for various royalist and monarchist movements and histories. Though related to them by inter-marriage, the Romanov monarchs of Russia seem to have singularly and tragically lacked the ruthlessly pragmatic streak that their Windsor cousins used to survive the Great War and down to the present day. Nevertheless, there was a great deal of change and upheaval in Russia before this period, some of it told in this new book: Daniel B. Rowland, God, Tsar, and People: The Political Culture of Early Modern Russia (Northern Illinois University Press, 2020), 420pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us this:

God, Tsar, and People brings together in one volume essays written over a period of fifty years, using a wide variety of evidence―texts, icons, architecture, and ritual―to reveal how early modern Russians (1450–1700) imagined their rapidly changing political world.

This volume presents a more nuanced picture of Russian political thought during the two centuries before Peter the Great came to power than is typically available. The state was expanding at a dizzying rate, and atop Russia's traditional political structure sat a ruler who supposedly reflected God's will. The problem facing Russians was that actual rulers seldom―or never―exhibited the required perfection. Daniel Rowland argues that this contradictory set of ideas was far less autocratic in both theory and practice than modern stereotypes would have us believe. In comparing and contrasting Russian history with that of Western European states, Rowland is also questioning the notion that Russia has always been, and always viewed itself as, an authoritarian country. God, Tsar, and People explores how the Russian state in this period kept its vast lands and diverse subjects united in a common view of a Christian polity, defending its long frontier against powerful enemies from the East and from the West.

Reforms in the Late Romanov Period in Russia

Like periods before the French or American revolutions, it has been customary in some quarters to portray the period before the Russian Revolution as totally revanchist and reactionary. No wonder they revolted, we are told, since conditions were so unutterably awful. But recent scholarship has been chipping away at this for some time, highlighting several ante-revolutionary reform movements and their mixed success, challenging received notions of reactionary monoliths. One recently published book continues this work: The Lawful Empire: Legal Change and Cultural Diversity in Late Tsarist Russia by Stefan B. Kirmse (Cambridge UP, 2020), 310pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

The Russian Empire and its legal institutions have often been associated with arbitrariness, corruption, and the lack of a 'rule of law'. Stefan B. Kirmse challenges these assumptions in this important new study of empire-building, minority rights, and legal practice in late Tsarist Russia, revealing how legal reform transformed ordinary people's interaction with state institutions from the 1860s to the 1890s. By focusing on two regions that stood out for their ethnic and religious diversity, the book follows the spread of the new legal institutions into the open steppe of Southern Russia, especially Crimea, and into the fields and forests of the Middle Volga region around the ancient Tatar capital of Kazan. It explores the degree to which the courts served as instruments of integration: the integration of former borderlands with the imperial centre and the integration of the empire's internal 'others' with the rest of society.

We are also given the table of contents:

Introduction
1. Minority rights and legal integration in the Russian empire
2. Borderlands no more: Crimea and Kazan in the mid-nineteenth century
3. Implementing legal change: new courts for Crimea and Kazan
4. Images and practices in the new courts: the enactment of monarchy, modesty, and cultural diversity
5. Seeking justice: Muslim Tatars go to court
6. Confronting the state: peasant resistance over land and faith
7. Dealing with unrest: crime and punishment in the 'crisis years' 1878–79
Conclusion.

Asceticism in the Twilight of the Romanov Dynasty

Finding the proper place for asceticism has long been a challenge. Applied too harshly it quickly veers into a kind of crypto-gnostic self-loathing and disdain for the flesh; applied via heavy-handed social and political pressure, it quickly becomes a tool of abuse designed to inculcate a kind of escapist eschatology at the expense of pursuing earthly justice and reconciliation; applied too leniently or not at all, and Christians become flabby both physically and spiritually.

That tension is clearly at work in the last century of the Romanov dynasty in Russia, as a new book by Patrick Lally Michelson argues: Beyond the Monastery Walls: The Ascetic Revolution in Russian Orthodox Thought, 1814–1914 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017), 288pp.

Here is the publisher's blurb:

During Russia's late imperial period, Orthodox churchmen, professionally trained theologians, and an array of social commentators sought to give meaning to Russian history and its supposed backwardness. Many found that meaning in asceticism. For some, ascetic religiosity prevented Russia from achieving its historical destiny. For others, it was the means by which the Russian people would realize the kingdom of God, thereby saving Holy Russia and the world from the satanic forces of the West.

Patrick Lally Michelson's intellectual history of asceticism in Russian Orthodox thought traces the development of these competing arguments from the early nineteenth century to the early months of World War I. He demonstrates that this discourse was an imaginative interpretation of lived Orthodoxy, primarily meant to satisfy the ideological needs of Russian thinkers and Orthodox intellectuals as they responded to the socioeconomic, political, and cultural challenges of modernity.

I noted one of Michelson's earlier works here.

Socialist Churches in Petrograd

More than a decade ago we published in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, a groundbreaking article based on archival research in Russia of the socialist views of clergy in the twilight of the Romanov era. The author showed just how many parish clergy in particular were far more socialist in their views that has often been alleged by those who portray the Church as a monolithic agent of reaction and conservative bourgeoisie hanging on to their privileged positions.

A book set for release next month takes us further into exploring this time and these political views: Catriona Kelly, Socialist Churches: Radical Secularization and the Preservation of the Past in Petrograd and Leningrad, 1918–1988  (Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), 440pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

In Russia, legislation on the separation of church and state in early 1918 marginalized religious faith and raised pressing questions about what was to be done with church buildings. While associated with suspect beliefs, they were also regarded as structures with potential practical uses, and some were considered works of art. This engaging study draws on religious anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and history to explore the fate of these “socialist churches,” showing how attitudes and practices related to them were shaped both by laws on the preservation of monuments and anti-religious measures. Advocates of preservation, while sincere in their desire to save the buildings, were indifferent, if not hostile, to their religious purpose. Believers, on the other hand, regarded preservation laws as irritants, except when they provided leverage for use of the buildings by church communities. The situation was eased by the growing rapprochement of the Orthodox Church and Soviet state organizations after 1943, but not fully resolved until the Soviet Union fell apart.

Based on abundant archival documentation, Catriona Kelly’s powerful narrative portrays the human tragedies and compromises, but also the remarkable achievements, of those who fought to preserve these important buildings over the course of seven decades of state atheism. Socialist Churches will appeal to specialists, students, and general readers interested in church history, the history of architecture, and Russian art, history, and cultural studies.

I Spy Strangers

Given the events of this year, the question has been regularly asked: is Putin trying to recreate the Soviet Union in today's Russia or does he have an earlier model? Does he aspire to be Stalin redux or a new tsar? And what happened to those minorities who lived under the last tsar, Nicholas II? A book set for release in May sheds welcome light on these questions: Paul W. Werth, The Tsar's Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia (Oxford, 2014),320pp.

The publisher highlights the virtues of this book thus, saying it:

• Covers almost 150 years of Russian history, spanning the entire tsarist empire
• Offers the only broadly comprehensive religious history of the Russian Empire, addressing such diverse traditions as Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism
• Draws on materials from some fourteen archival repositories in five different countries
• Places the evolution of religious freedom in Russia in a broader framework encompassing other European states
• Integrates the secondary scholarship on particular cases, religious traditions, and locales to produce a unified synthetic account

About this book we are further told:

The Russian Empire presented itself to its subjects and the world as an Orthodox state, a patron and defender of Eastern Christianity. Yet the tsarist regime also lauded itself for granting religious freedoms to its many heterodox subjects, making 'religious toleration' a core attribute of the state's identity. The Tsar's Foreign Faiths shows that the resulting tensions between the autocracy's commitments to Orthodoxy and its claims to toleration became a defining feature of the empire's religious order.

In this panoramic account, Paul W. Werth explores the scope and character of religious freedom for Russia's diverse non-Orthodox religions, from Lutheranism and Catholicism to Islam and Buddhism. Considering both rhetoric and practice, he examines discourses of religious toleration and the role of confessional institutions in the empire's governance. He reveals the paradoxical status of Russia's heterodox faiths as both established and 'foreign', and explains the dynamics that shaped the fate of newer conceptions of religious liberty after the mid-nineteenth century. If intellectual change and the shifting character of religious life in Russia gradually pushed the regime towards the acceptance of freedom of conscience, then statesmen's nationalist sentiments and their fears of 'politicized' religion impeded this development. Russia's religious order thus remained beset by contradiction on the eve of the Great War. Based on archival research in five countries and a vast scholarly literature, The Tsar's Foreign Faiths represents a major contribution to the history of empire and religion in Russia, and to the study of toleration and religious diversity in Europe.