“Two or twenty million” was the title of the opening chapter in a book by the Russian populist writer A. S. Prugavin published in 1904. It referred to an estimate of the Old Believer and sectarian population in the 1897 census. He deemed the figure of two million unreliable and proposed that the actual number of religious dissidents in the Russian Empire could be no fewer than 20 million.^[1] Nevertheless, he pointed out that the numerical strength of religious dissent continued to be as problematic as it was before the 1897 census because of persistent religious intolerance.
Any historian studying religious dissent has to deal with massive discrepancies in the statistical description of Russian religious dissent. Authoritative specialists have estimated the religious dissident population of the Russian Empire as 2%, 12-15%, one-sixth, or one-third of the population, which suggests that the study of religious dissent has been a rather speculative exercise.^[2] Nevertheless, the lack of precision and agreement on the number of religious dissenters raises interesting questions about the limits of the government’s knowledge of its population, the nature of religious identity in the Russian Empire, and the political and ideological underpinnings of statistical knowledge on religious dissent.
States use statistics to quantify specific phenomena of populations, including their shifts, customs, and activities. Statistics can also be used as an instrument to manage populations, and thus as a governmental technique through which the state exercises power. Although statisticians present themselves as disinterested parties, statistics are an important device for the operation of power. Statistics allows the mapping of the population in a similar way that cartography allows the mapping of territory.^[3] Statistics allowed the imperial polity to represent itself as an “imagined community” through the means of “objective” statistical data.^[4]
The shortcomings and failures of statistical knowledge may derive from a lack of technical and intellectual resources to provide an adequate picture, an absence or inadequacy of criteria used to describe the identity in question, or resistance by the population and particular actors to statistical description. There is often a discrepancy between the objectivity to which statistical science aspires and the end-result, which represents reality in congruence with particular ideological criteria (as in Soviet censuses). This suggests that governmentality is not monolithic, and that there is always a tension between the desire “to know” in order “to rule,” on the one hand, and the desire to achieve certain political and ideological ends through the statistical representation of reality (or statistical interpretation), on the other.
The statistical description of Russian religious dissent cannot be separated from the representation of religious heterodoxy. The official vocabulary of religious dissidence that emerged in the era of the Enlightenment served to draw boundaries between regular and irregular religious practices. The “irregular” sphere was classified and categorized according to its imaginary deviation from the “norm,” which was determined by the state and theologians. By defining what was irregular and deviant, the state also actively created its own vision of the self.^[5] The categories applied by the institutions of church and state to religious dissent had an ascriptive character. The observed population often did not understand these categories, appropriated the language of the dominant religion to describe their position in religious history, and actively resisted the attempts to be targeted as statistical objects. Therefore, the statistical description of religious dissenters was entwined with the clash between the official language and the self-understanding of the religious believers.
This article examines the meaning, intentions, management, and shortcomings of the statistical description of religious dissent. It focuses on the origins and development of the conceptual maps that informed the statistical methods applied by the state, and on different agencies that engaged in the production of this knowledge in Imperial Russia. Based on the thesis that statistical knowledge is not impartial, the article is concerned with the relations of power that operate through the state’s study of the religious diversity of the population. Presupposing that the problem of accurate statistics of religious dissent in the Russian Empire is practically unsolvable, we shall concentrate in the rhetoric and linguistic exercises of the rulers to construct a definition and classificatory hierarchy of Raskol.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCE BY THE PETRINE STATE

Religious statistics in Russia began with Peter I (1698-1725), when the state made an effort to construct the category of Raskol, which was defined by its imaginary difference from Orthodox belief (pravovernyi). In order to separate dissenters from the Orthodox body, Peter introduced in 1716 a double-size poll tax on religious dissenters, who also received the right to live openly in the city and countryside.^[6] The double-size poll tax collected from each male believer, and half of this amount from a female “schismatic” (Orthodox women were exempt from poll tax), had several functions and can be interpreted as a redemption fee for the souls of fallen Christians. The Office for Dissenters’ Affairs (Raskol’nich’ia kontora) and the Synod, which collected the tax, probably also treated it as a compensation for material loss, because dissenters failed to support the Orthodox clergy.
Although Old Believers objected to being identified as schismatics and criticized the registration procedure as the mark of the Antichrist, the double-size poll tax gave certain advantages to those well-off Old Believers who were exempt from the performance of church rituals.^[7] By 1726 there were 190,944 double-size poll tax payers, or “registered” (zapisnye) dissenters, in Russia.^[8]
Nevertheless, the attempt to tax religious dissenters proved unsuccessful. First, the state never intended to use the tax to allow the Old Believers to exist as a separate group. The double-size tax payers had no civil rights, they were subject to regular missionary efforts by the Church and to abuse by extortionate clerks, and many feared persecution. Registered schismatics could not marry Orthodox believers and had to baptize their children in the Orthodox church.^[9]
After 1721, however, with the introduction of metricheskie knigi (parish registers), the number of double-tax payers receded dramatically.^[10] Since Old Believers had no parish records of their own, the Orthodox parish priests registered the recognized dissenters in parish records alongside the “proper” parishioners who baptised, married, and confessed in the Orthodox Church.^[11] The registration as double-size tax payers was now in the hands of the parish priests, as well as clerks, and this proved unpopular with dissenters, who resented being registered in parish books. The parish priests transferred the number of double-size tax payers from one year to another with the exception of the dead, so that in 1744 there were only 36,831 officially registered schismatics in the Russian Empire.
The state was concerned with the “invisible” character of dissent. The schismatics, who were primarily ethnic Russians, did not differ from the rest of the peasant population by the color of their skin, dress, or language. The inventive tax on beards that Peter imposed on the urban citizens, who had to wear a special copper medal with an inscription that its owner had paid the beard tax, could only target Old Believer merchants in big cities, but not peasant Old Believers. The introduction of special dress for dissenters – though hardly successful – served to mark Raskol and make them visible.^[12]
The problem of crypto-dissenters was already present in the late seventeenth century, when some musketeers (Strel’tsy) and the members of nobility supported religion anathematized by the Church Councils of 1666-1668. In the Petrine era, crypto-schismatics who did not pay the double-size tax and may have attended church were the principal worry of the Petrine state. The failure to confess annually without a serious excuse became the main criterion for distinguishing an Orthodox believer from a schismatic.
While the clergy was aware of the internal differences between raskol’niki, the category of Raskol that emerged in the 1660s was all-embracing and included members of congregation who failed to perform their annual Christian duties. The system of penalties for failure to confess served to compensate for the lack of enthusiasm in the official double-size tax registration. The only difference the state made among the members of Raskol was between zapisnye (registered) and potaennye (crypto-schismatics). Both categories reflected the schismatics’ position vis-а-vis state bureaucratic practices: those who conformed to the demand of power, thus receiving certain spiritual autonomy, and those who resisted attempts to be categorized and marked as schismatics. It is self-evident that the title of Raskol’nik was imposed on those who presented themselves as righteous Orthodox Christians. In the Petrine era, Old Believers used the self-definitions of starovery and staroobriadtsy, and istinno-pravoslavnye khristiane, while Khlysty defined themselves as Christ-faith believers (khristovshchina).
The Petrine state inherited the categories of the previous era, using coercion and the medieval categories of heresy and Raskol in order to combat religious deviance from the state-sponsored Orthodox Church. The status of Raskol was similar to recusant Catholics in Elizabethan England, where recusancy was identified with treason. Yet, despite the severe limitations in economic and social life, Catholics survived as a minority due to aristocratic patronage and the lack of resources to impose religious uniformity.^[13]
The introduction of the double-size poll tax as a rational method to delineate religious dissidence, as an inferior but acceptable category in the reguliarnoe gosudarstvo was a new development that reflected the modernizing elements in Peter’s religious policy. It could be compared to the 1692 double land tax imposed on Catholics in England. Statistics was not the end in itself, but a reflection of the success or failure of fiscal policy. Peter’s successors failed to capitalize on the possibilities of fiscal autonomy for religious dissidence, which – in combination with emigration abroad, missionary efforts, and resistance to registration – led to a decline in zapisnye dissenters, and thus complicated the state’s attempt to determine their actual number.

RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE AND THE END OF “ZAPISNYE”

The population policy and a new concept of the state as a non-ethical agent guided official policy toward the Old Believers from the early 1760s. Schismatics were no longer represented as villains but portrayed as victims of their own superstition. The central government prohibited secular authorities from interfering in religious matters, and responded to the complaints of dissenters about the arbitrariness of the local clergy. The Senate, while formally abiding by the principles of Peter I’s legislation, was less committed to support the missionary actions of the church.^[14] Peter III’s personal decree of 29 January 1762 was a turning point in religious legislation.^[15] Peter III indicated his intention to revise all existing legislation regarding Old Believers living abroad. He also made a statement about a new policy concerning dissenters, who would now be pursued by means other than “by force and assault.”^[16]
However, the government lacked the basic numerical evidence on the scale of religious dissent in the empire to carry out the new policy. Catherine II authorized the transfer of Old Believer registers from the Synod to Senate, perhaps in the hope that the Senate would be less biased against dissenters. Although the parish priests continued to enlist schismatics on their confession registers, the state now relied on the statistics compiled by the civil administration.
According to official statistics, the number of dissenters declined between 1726 and 1744. The decline was due less to demographic reasons, than to the inadequacies of the fiscal evidence as the basis for statistics. In the 1760s, when the population became the central focus of state’s policy, a new attempt was made to encourage the unwilling dissenters to register as double-size poll tax payers. The number of dissenters was taken into account for the first time not for fiscal and repressive purposes, but with the intent to put the population’s resources to good use. The government responded positively to Old Believer complaints, and took seriously their threats of mass suicide. The government valued Old Believers and Sectarians as a resource for its population program. Peter III dealt with the problem of the territorial dispersion of Nizhnii Novgorod’s Old Believers, while Catherine II organized the relocation of Old Believers from Polish territories (Starodub’e) to the Volga, Urals, and Siberia regions.^[17]
Guided by the enlightened principles of religious toleration, Catherine II proposed to abolish the term raskol’nik for those dissenters who performed church sacraments but retained loyalty to pre-Nikonian church rituals.^[18] These believers were to be called Old Ritualists (staroobriadtsy) and exempted from paying the double-size poll tax.^[19] The project of Edinoverie (United faith) that aimed to bring Old Believers into a union with the Orthodox Church created a new idiom, edinoverets, for describing a loyal Old Believer. In the nineteenth-century censuses, edinoverie became an ascriptive category, while edinovertsy were counted as Orthodox, thus making even more obscure the actual number of dissenters in Russia.
For the rest of the dissenters who avoided the Orthodox Church, the government retained the old practice of registration as double-size poll tax payers in order to account for secret dissenters and for those returning from abroad.^[20] Contrary to the expectations of the government, there was widespread enthusiasm among religious dissenters to be registered as double-size poll tax-payers. The government had reasons to suspect that the status of a registered schismatic had certain advantages.^[21] The zapisnye were relieved from burdensome public services imposed by the government on the urban population, as well as from church attendance.^[22] During the 1764 census, thousands of Old Believers registered as double-size poll tax-payers. Officials reported that registration took place in traditionally Orthodox areas.^[23]
Despite the protests of some groups, the double-size poll tax and registration of schismatics was abandoned as impractical after the 1764 census, ending the era of religious statistics based on fiscal status.

STATISTICS OF RELIGIOUS DISSENTERS IN ALEXANDER I AND NICHOLAS I’S RUSSIA

The ambivalence of imperial power about the status of religious dissent in the empire was clearly expressed during the reign of Alexander I, who initially was guided by the principle of religious toleration. A distinction was made between erroneous beliefs, which were to be tolerated, and “disturbances of the peace,” which were to be dealt with by civil authorities.^[24] Raskol’niki were to be tolerated to the extent that their actions did not disturb public order. The Orthodox Church, however, objected to the official use of the term staroobriadets. As Metropolitan Platon pointed out in 1801: “the Church has nothing new about it, and there are no novoobriadtsy (New Ritualists).”^[25] In 1826 the state made clear that dissenters had no right to call themselves starovertsy (Old Believers) or similar “inappropriate” names.^[26]
After the abolition of the special fiscal status for dissenters, the government had to find new methods to monitor religious dissidence. The systematic approach to religious statistics began in Nicholas I’s reign (1825-55). In 1826 the Police Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs ordered that local governments should organize and facilitate the collection of statistical data on religious dissenters in their constituencies. Although the primary institution responsible for statistical collection was the police, governors continued to rely on parish data that had preserved the pre-1764 lists of double-size poll-tax payers. The Ministry of Internal Affairs provided the local governments with the standard forms that outlined the main categories of religious dissenters to be surveyed (Table 1). The form used the Catherinian distinction between Old Ritualists (despite the objections of the church) and schismatics, but it also applied medieval categories of heresies constructed along the lines of ecclesiology (priesthood), icon-veneration, and the centrality of the sacrament of baptism. The classification reflected the government’s awareness of the diversity within the dissent community and called for differentiated policies to be applied to these groups.

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Table 1. The Register (vedomost’) of Old Believers and schismatics (raskol’niki) of various affiliations and sects in the Year X (c. 1826)

The above scheme was replaced in the 1840s by a more rationalized classification of dissenters into three broad groups distinguished by the degree of their social and political damage. According to this classification, designed by Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov) at the request of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the first category represented “the most pernicious (vredneishie) sects” and referred to the priestless Old Believers, who rejected marriage and prayer for the ruler (some radical branches of pomortsy, Fedoseevtsy and Fillipovtsy) and included Judizers, Molokans, Dukhobors, Khlysty and Castrates (skoptsy). The second, considered simply as pernicious (vrednye) included those (for example, the majority of Pomortsy) who prayed for the tsar and embraced marriage, but who rejected the priesthood, the sacrament of Eucharist and had “a democratic spirit.” The priestly Old Believers (popovtsy) made up the third category and were said to be less harmful (menee vrednye).^[27] Despite its rationalized appearance, this tripartite classification resembled the Byzantine church’s distinction between three categories of heretics. The synodal classification was based on a combination of theological and political principles: the degree of harm was defined with regards to the teaching of the church and political loyalty.
Official knowledge about religious dissent was a secret subject in Nicholas I’s era. The government insisted on the non-public (neglasnyi) character of its decrees and circulars on religious statistics. It warned governors that data was to be collected discreetly and that the exchange between local and central authorities had to be arranged not through ordinary bureaucratic correspondence but from person to person, so that dissenters would not be aware that they were being observed.^[28] This precaution has to be understood in the context of the autocracy’s declarations about its commitment to religious toleration. The authorities also feared that by publicizing legislation on Raskol or introducing new forms of registration for dissenters, the latter would treat it as a kind of legal status.^[29] But while the non-public character of statistical knowledge on Raskol might have created an appearance of order and stability, it failed to provide reliable data or religious difference in the empire. The police continued to operate with the outdated registers of zapisnye raskol’niki from the eighteenth century, while the local government reported the same figures with a slight decrease to indicate the decline of dissent. The church, on the other hand, was eager to inflate the rates of conversion. The picture created by the tsarist bureaucrats in the years between 1826 and 1850 can only be described as “Potemkin statistics.”^[30]
The government soon realized that the existing system of data collection was faulty for all intents and purposes. The huge discrepancies between the reported numbers of schismatics and the alleged number of converts to Orthodoxy in the 1850s were alarming. In Perm province, for example, 112,000 schismatics were counted in 1826, and 100,000 converted to Orthodoxy in the 1830s, but 108,000 schismatics remained; in the 1840s another 100,000 schismatics converted to Orthodoxy, and yet 72,000 remained.31 The figures of dissenters in the entire empire presented by the ministries revealed a similar picture. According to official reports prepared by the Ministry of Internal Affairs to mark Nicholas I’s 25th anniversary on the throne, the number of dissenters in Russia in 1825 was 827,000, and while more than a million of them had converted to Orthodoxy by 1851, the total number of dissenters was 750,000.^[31]
In response to the tsar’s criticism, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) organised its own statistical expeditions in 1852. The expeditions, led by the experienced Ministry officials P. I. Mel’nikov, I. S. Sinitsyn, and I. S. Aksakov, went to Nizhnii Novgorod, Kostroma, and Iaroslavl’ provinces, regions that had a high proportion of dissenters. Although the expeditions relied on the support of the local administration, for the most part they had used their own methods of data collection. Some of the criteria used to distinguish dissenters from the Orthodox, such as the presence of copper icons in the interior, recitation of the Jesus prayer, and the use of special lamps and incense-holders were quite arbitrary. But the result only confirmed the government’s suspicions. The expeditions demonstrated that the actual number of dissenters in the surveyed provinces was 7-10 times higher than the official figures reported annually to the MVD.^[32] Applying these findings to the entire Russian Empire, Mel’nikov arrived at a figure of 10 million.^[33] The methods of data collection were unreliable: the officials imposed their own definitions of Raskol on the peasants. Moreover, the mathematical operation applied by Mel’nikov was certainly wrong: the three provinces under survey had one of the highest proportions of Raskol and this result could not be extrapolated to the entire empire.

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Table 2. Data from the MVD statistical expeditions, 1852.^[34]

The official statistics of religious dissent did not become public until the Great Reforms. In 1863 religious statistics were included in the Statistical Tables of the Russian Empire compiled by Artur Bogdanovich von Bushen, a member of the Central Statistical Committee. The MVD commissioned the bright von Bushen, a graduate of St. Petersburg University, to study statistics in Western Europe. On his return to Russia, von Bushen was perhaps one of the best specialists in administrative statistics and a proponent of Alexander II’s modernization of the MVD. According to von Bushen, the statistics of religious groups were predominantly important for administration, yet there was also a moral element (for example the ratio of non-Christians to Christians in the empire had significance for successful governance).^[35] Therefore, in his view the theological differences between Christians (i.e., the problem of dissent) were not as important as their numerical preponderance vis-а-vis other faiths in a modern state. This impartial attitude to religious dissent was shared by a minority of MVD officials, who downplayed religious differences between the Orthodox in favor of their Russian or Christian identity.
By 1891, von Bushen’s Tables were regarded as the only scientific attempt to assess the number of religious dissenters in the Russian Empire.^[36] The Tables contrasted the official figure of dissenters, 875,382, with the figure extracted from the annual reports of the Over-Procurator of the Holy Synod. Von Bushen considered those who failed to perform annual confession, and those who confessed but not take communion as secret dissenters. According to him, more than 6 million people (10% of the population or 1/6 of the entire Orthodox body) were religious dissenters.^[37] Following the findings of Mel’nikov, Aksakov, and Sinitsyn, he believed that 88.5% of the alleged dissenters were practicing their beliefs in secret. The statistician produced an elaborate classification of dissenters based on their attitude to sacraments and the degree of their self-disclosure. The secret dissenters were divided into the following groups: first, the former zapisnye; second, the semi-open (poluotkrytye) who attended church and confessed but did not take Holy Communion; third, the indifferent (neradivye) ones, who avoided Communion and confession under different pretexts; fourth, the absentees; and, finally, the formal Orthodox who performed religious sacraments like marriage and the Eucharist only as civil duties.
The method applied by von Bushen was an ingenious attempt to apply the data of sacrament performance to the statistics of religious dissent. Von Bushen unwittingly challenged the ascribed character of religious identity that was used as the method of administering religious difference.^[38] According to von Bushen, the annual performance of sacraments such as confession, marriage, and the Eucharist did not necessarily signify an Orthodox identity. Despite its impartial character, Bushen’s statistical exercise raises several questions. For example, there is no evidence that dissenters regularly observed the sacrament of confession but avoided communion. The failure to take communion had complex causes that had to do with the restrictive attitude of the Orthodox Church to the sacrament of Eucharist rather than with religious dissidence.^[39] The complexity of the picture presented by von Bushen also suggested that vernacular religion has always been in tension with the institutionalized forms of church practice and officially-designed categories that served to distinguish a righteous believer (pravovernyi) from a dissenter.

RELIGIOUS STATISTICS IN POST-EMANCIPATION RUSSIA

The post-emancipation period marked a significant shift in the organization of demographic statistics. The shift was characterized by the emergence of new institutions in civil society that had used statistics as an important instrument of social and economic management. These institutions – zemstvo, city governments, and scientific societies – had developed a new discourse of “service to the people” with which they opposed the traditional authorities’ claims to knowledge and power. This attitude manifested itself in their statistical work. At the same time, there was a change in the application of statistics by the authorities, which manifested itself in the transition from the eighteenth-century fiscal census and Nicholas I’s police census, to a modern census.
Religious dissent statistics ceased to be the domain of the church, central government, and police. Zemstvos, city governments, and scientific societies, such as the Imperial Geographic Society, expressed an interest in the religious diversity of the population. These agencies were guided not by concerns of religious conversion and public order but by considerations of research and policy-formation. The zemstvo statistical committees burgeoned in the 1880s. Although the number of statisticians in the zemstvos was relatively small (two-three people per province), they were better equipped to collect local statistical data such as household surveys than tsarist administrators.^[40] The zemstvos employed enthusiastic, self-motivated, and well-educated staff who possessed skills, professionalism, and an unbiased attitude toward peasants. Although the zemstvo activists were primarily concerned with the economic and social parameters of their areas, many of them had an interest in the religious diversity of the population. Partly this had to do with the presence of the Populists – who were generally very sympathetic to dissenters – among zemstvo activists, and partly this was the awareness of the links between culture and economics.^[41] A statistician from the Perm statistical bureau, E. Krasnoperov, in his analysis of the household observation of Urals peasants, examined the economic, social, and demographic patterns of behavior among Old Believer/Sectarian and Orthodox peasants. According to his analysis sectarian communities differed from Orthodox ones in the following respects: there were 1.6% fewer families that had no male workers, while the rate of injections against smallpox was four times lower, but that of literacy was twice as high. Sectarian families had half as many disabled persons, one-fourth the number of absentee family members, and one-sixth the number of beggars.^[42] However, in making the distinction between Orthodox and dissenting peasants, Krasnoperov had little interest in the religious affiliation and internal divisions of religious dissenters. Nevertheless, the household surveys represent a unique source for evaluation of demographic and economic patterns of Sectarians and Old Believers.
Zemstvo statisticians worked independently from the traditional branches of statistical data collection, such as the church, provincial administrations, and the police. By presenting themselves as being “in the midst of the narod” – in contrast to tsarist bureaucrats who were seen as alienated from the people – the zemstvo statisticians believed that they produced statistics that better reflected the character of the narod, including its religious identity.^[43] The criticism of rural zemstvos for presenting the peasantry as a more or less undifferentiated mass seems to be unjustified.^[44] Many members of the rural zemstvos, like Krasnoperov, observed and commented on the differences in the economic and social behavior of peasants in connection with their religious affiliation.
In parallel to the rural zemstvo statistical survey of the peasantry, city governments with the participation of public organizations conducted the mapping of urban population. Between 1861 and 1916, more than 110 local surveys were produced by city government statisticians, and many of these surveys included religious statistics. The censuses in Moscow and St. Petersburg, for example, indicated the literacy levels, occupations, and language groups of religious dissenters.^[45] For example, according to the 1882 Moscow census, Old Believers and Sectarians prevailed in retail, textile, and clothes production, as well as among domestic servants. However, a large proportion of dissenters (21%) were not part of any category, suggesting that these were inhabitants of Old Believer communes in the Rogozhsk and Preobrazhensk cemeteries, who could not be officially classified either as the clergy.^[46] According to the 1902 Moscow census, the majority of Old Believers were Russian speakers; only a tiny portion spoke Estonian, Finnish, South Slavic, or some “unknown” language.^[47] The ratio between priestly and priestless Old Believers in Moscow was 10:1.^[48]

THE 1897 CENSUS: MORE “POTEMKIN STATISTICS?”

The first All-Russia Census of January 28, 1897, revealed the controversies that were already present in the statistical exercises of the Russian state. The census, which covered the entire territory of the Russian Empire with the exception of Finland, sought to provide accurate religious statistics on the population. But the government launched preparations for the census without attracting the expertise and advice of the zemstvo or academic specialists on religious dissent. In 1895 as part of the preparation for the census, the Minister of Internal Affairs prohibited local governments from carrying out any statistical work that would entail questioning and surveying the local population. Moreover, after January 28 the central government turned down zemstvo requests to use census forms for their own local needs.^[49] Hence, the central government demonstrated not only its extensive powers over the statistical control of the population (which the local governments did not possess), but also its unwillingness to share its instruments of power with competing agencies.
The method of collecting data on religious affiliation purported by the government did not seem to be the most effective. Unlike the British Religious Census of 1851, the data on religious affiliation was collected not from places of worship, but on the basis of personal statements. The data on religious affiliation was received from two sources: a) preliminary forms compiled by the tellers in the villages and by landlords in the towns, and b) the census lists corrected by the population. The preliminary forms, compiled by the clerical experts on sectology, represented an elaborate map of all existing religious groups in the Russian Empire, including the most obscure, such as the Dyrniki, Netovtsy, and Stranniki. However, the final results revealed that the outsiders and the surveyed population rarely identified themselves with the titles used by the experts. Although Old Believers (staroobriadtsy) were defined separately from Sectarians and raskol’niki, the state was unclear where the line between an Old Believer and a Sectarian was. The specialists on Raskol distinguished between “rational” and “mystical” sects, but in the census many off-shoots of Old Believers, such as Stranniki, Spasovtsy, and Samokreshchentsy, were counted as Sectarians. The census, however, had a legitimating power, allowing dissenters to claim an identity and status that was denied to them by the imperial state. Thus – as Pobedonostsev feared – Old Believer clergy, unrecognized by the state, could identify themselves as such, thus competing with the officially recognized members of clerical profession.^[50]
According to the 1897 census, the total number of Old Believers and Sectarians in Russia was 2,173,738. The educated Russian public, which for several decades questioned the reliability of official statistics, criticized the census, pointing out that the figure was a heavy underestimate of the real number, which was about 5-10 times higher. The government responded to the criticism by arguing that the official figure showed only openly practicing followers of religious dissent, while the number of secret dissenters could not possibly be determined.^[51] At the same time, the official statisticians were quite proud of their results, which were published as a separate volume.^[52] Kotel’nikov suggested that the government was quite content with the figure of 2 million, which accounted for 2.5% of the population: it created the appearance of a socially homogenous society in which religious dissent occupied a small niche and could be dealt with by centrally guided missionary and educational effort.^[53] Yet, one should also take into account the government’s awareness of the existence of an indefinite number of secret dissenters over whom it had no control. The producers of the statistical report of the Over-Procurator of the Holy Synod in 1903-04 admitted that “to define the exact number of dissenters in the Russian Empire is very difficult and practically impossible because of the secretiveness of the schismatics.”^[54]
Unfortunately, we do not have sufficient evidence to measure adequately the popular response to the census. Some local communities unanimously signed themselves up as Old Believers and Sectarians, or, at least, did not dispute their ascribed identity, but others perceived the procedure as signing up with the Antichrist. In some places the populace perceived the census as a police operation and resorted to traditional practices of resistance. It was also the case that many practicing Old Believers were baptized as Orthodox, and were subject to legal persecution for apostasy should they have admitted their falling off from the church. The most extreme response to the census was the collective suicide of a group of Tiraspol sectarians, who buried themselves alive in order to avoid being listed in the Antichrist’s files.^[55]
The 1897 census demonstrated incongruence between the rationalized categories imposed on the population and local practices of self-identification. According to the census, self-identification varied: in some places dissenters qualified themselves simply as Old Believers, but in others they showed a high level of confessional self-identity, describing themselves as Pomortsy or Chasovennye. The sense of confessional awareness depended on various factors: proximity to other religious groups, urbanization, literacy, and activities by Old Believer and Orthodox missionaries.^[56] It is also not quite clear in which cases religious identity was ascribed from outside (by tellers), and in which cases it was produced by dissenters themselves. It is quite possible that in some cases the census compilers had to negotiate between the definitions suggested by the TsSK Instruction and the self-definitions of the surveyed populace.
The data from local surveys provide insight into the confusion that existed in the attempts to systematize the Raskol on the local level. In Zlatoust the tellers recorded various denominations of Old Believers, including the Austrian (belokrinitskaia) hierarchy, Pomortsy and Chasovennye, as well as undifferentiated bespopovtsy, “Old Believers without distinction,” and raskol’niki. The final results, however, excluded all internal categories, recognizing only two official ones: Orthodox-cum-Edonovertsy and Old Believers and Sectarians.

Table 3a. Confessional Distribution of Population in Zlatoust uezd of Ufa province.^[57]

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Table 3b. Old Believers.

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In the period that followed the 1897 census, confession was losing its relevance as the central criterion for the imperial taxonomy of the population, while nationality was gaining the upper hand.^[58] The manifesto on religious toleration in 1905 and the “Law on Religious Community of 1906” granted full legal rights to religious communities of Old Believers and Sectarians.^[59] From 1907 the registers of marriages and baptisms (metricheskie knigi or metriki) became the legal documents for dissenters.^[60]
In 1912 the Department of Spiritual Affairs at the MVD published the census of Old Believers and Sectarians on the basis of data from Old Believers who had applied for the legal registration of their communities. Their total number was 2,206,621, of which 1,807,056 were Old Believers, and 399,565 were Sectarians.^[61] The census incorporated not only the data of registered communities but also non-registered ones, the prevalence of which was an indication of the ineffectiveness of the laws on religious toleration.^[62]

Table 4. Statistics on Old Believers and Sectarians in the Urals and Siberia (by 1 January 1912).^[63]

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The new figure was very close to the one in the 1897 census. Why, despite the opportunity to practice one’s true faith openly, even under the rubric of conversion to Old Belief, were the secret Old Believers and Sectarians not in any hurry to test their new freedom of conscience? Did the alleged 18 million religious dissenters continue to resist official attempts to count them for fear of new persecutions? Or did the government again use its privileged access to statistical information to distort the real picture?
There is no sufficient evidence to prove that the 1912 census dramatically distorted the picture of religious difference in imperial Russia. Prugavin based his criticism of the 1897 census on data produced by MVD expeditions in 1852, which challenged the statistics of their time produced on the basis of police and church estimates. However, the criteria used by statistical expeditions to differentiate between dissenters and Orthodox do not stand up to criticism; the extrapolation of the coefficient of error to the entire country was a faulty calculation. Moreover, the expeditions were deliberately sent to areas that had large proportions of dissenters, and they then applied their observations to the entire empire. Second, the argument put forward by von Bushen and used subsequently by other critics of the official statistics is valid only insofar as it reflects the degree of popular indifference to church sacraments rather than the strength of religious dissent. Despite all their shortcomings, the 1897 and the 1912 censuses provide the only available survey of religious diversity that covers the whole territory of the empire (with the exception of Finland).

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

The statistical description of religious dissidence revealed the intense interest of Russian officialdom in religious dissent. According to Etkind, the Orthodox Church and the state actively constructed religious dissent as “the other” (anti-culture and anti-religion), and used the pejorative Raskol as a collective name for diverse religious groups that had separated from the church. The presence of Raskol within the empire created problems for the official conceptualization of Russians as Orthodox, which subverted the linearity of imperial policy and complicated (or made “more complex”) the binary opposition “Orthodox Russians” versus “unorthodox foreigners”.^[64] The state tried to rationalize dissent by providing classifications and hierarchies of what in reality were fluid and loosely connected vernacular practices and beliefs.
The statistical description of Raskol, however, was far from the rationalized and objective bureaucratic practice that would aim at making religious differences visible and comprehensible. The state constantly faced a dilemma “between denying visibility and knowing, between assimilating and segregating.”^[65]
Religious dissent posed practical problems to the position of the dominant Orthodox faith. Through statistics, the state attempted to draw boundaries and assess the numerical strength of religious dissent. In the first half of the nineteenth century, fiscal methods of religious ascription were replaced with police ones. Although the church continued to report the number of those “clinging to Raskol,” it had little interest in providing accurate figures of dissenters in apprehension of Synodal reprimand. From the late 1850s, the imperial government adopted new scientific and internationally tested statistical methods. In contrast to the earlier attempts to hide and diminish the existence of religious dissent in the empire, now the government tried to make it visible through statistical presentation. Statistics provided a sense of security: the fact that religious dissent could be measured meant that it could be managed. I disagree with the critics of official statistics who suggest that there was an intent to downplay the numerical strength of religious dissent.^[66] On the contrary, it is clear that between the 1880s and 1917, better statistical methods for representing dissent were developed. The government managed to mobilize professional statisticians and local government to central tasks. The political shift toward religious toleration in 1860-1905 in many ways facilitated the advance of religious statistics. However, the state continued to act as an ethical agent, promising protection to the Orthodox against the alleged threat of religious dissidence. The growth of the sectarian movement in the late imperial period was counteracted by restrictive legislation and police repression. Statistics thus were important for the location of threats and the mobilization of the forces of rescue, such as the police and missionaries.
The criticism of official statistics generated by the Russian intelligentsia was directed primarily against the coercive and intolerant attitude of officialdom toward religious dissenters. However, Russian populists and democrats perceived religious dissent in social terms, as a popular protest against the tsarist regime. The radical critics of autocracy believed that a large proportion of the Russian narod was in the opposition to the regime.
The estimates suggested by the radical intelligentsia matched those suggested by the Synod.^[67] Contrary to the populists, for the Synod the presence of the army of secret dissenters was, in a way, a comforting explanation for the failure of the church to persuade a large part of the nominal Orthodox to the systematic performance of their Christian duties, such as annual communion and confession. But was “secret dissenter” the correct term for describing the millions who identified themselves as Orthodox but ignored the practical aspects of their identity?
The mapping of religious diversity in Imperial Russia was a difficult, if not impossible, project. The statistical exercise demonstrated that the official categories of religious ascription were ill-suited for describing the Russian population. The descriptive categories produced by educated clerks and clergymen reflected the official view of dissenters as deviant schismatics. The majority of dissenters in various confessions, however, never saw themselves as schismatics but as Orthodox Christians and people of God. According to Old Believers, it was the established Orthodox Church, the Nikonians, or the laic church (mirskie) that had separated themselves from the apostolic succession in the course of seventeenth-century reforms. That many peasants failed to define themselves in the categories of the official language was hardly surprising. They continued identifying themselves in terms of their traditional local community.
Thus the problem of crypto-dissenters (skrytye raskol’niki) was of the state’s own making. The failure of these non-recusant dissenters to come out after the Manifesto of Religious Toleration in 1905 (as the 1912 data demonstrate) suggests that the religious self-identity of a large section of the Russian people was conforming neither to the official norms of the Orthodox church nor to the attempts of Old Believers, Baptists, and others to organize their flock. The failure of Russian imperial practices to map religious dissent and impose religious uniformity affirms that religion was never an integrative force for the dominant national group in the empire.