SUMMARY:

Mikhail Dolbilov explores the broad state-led campaign of conversion to Orthodoxy in the Western borderlands after the January uprising of 1863. The author situates his research in the context of recent studies of religion and confession in the Russian empire that highlight the secular and etatist approach of the imperial government to the Orthodox Church and conversion to Orthodoxy. Focusing on middle-rank bureaucrats who were in charge of confessional policy in the Western borderlands, Dolbilov argues that the development of popular Catholicism (as a pan-European phenomenon of moving toward a more visceral and mystical mode of religiosity) brought about a perception of Catholicism as ill-suited for the collective identification of subjects with the sovereign. The author analyzes in detail the growing desire of middle and high ranking functionaries to engage in an interventionist policy by way of using police and administrative coercion in the process of converting of the local Catholic population to Orthodoxy. The author further analyzes the details of the conversion campaign with accompanying misdemeanors, violence, and fraud. He notes that this large scale social engineering effort to link political allegiance with confessional status brought about unexpected consequences. It exacerbated conflicts between local functionaries and high-ranked bureaucrats, as well as those between the Orthodox community in the Western borderlands and newly converted Orthodox lay people. The article concludes with an analysis of the failure of the state-led conversion campaign, the key to which was the growing concern with the spread of atheist ideas and concomitant rise of political radicalism. The author infers that the Western borderlands’ campaign demonstrated the limits of mass proselytizing and interventionist policy in a confessional state and suggests that it ushered imperial bureaucrats toward the path that ultimately resulted in the acceptance of freedom of conscience in 1905.