This book, as its title suggests, examines the legislation on religion begun by the imperial government in February 1903 and concluded by the Provisional Government in October 1917. In his monograph, Aleksandr A. Safonov argues that these varied laws should be analyzed together from the perspective of freedom of conscience. This perspective leads him to suggest that early twentieth-century Russian legal opinion was caught between two tendencies: “progressive” secular Western ideas valuing the freedom of the individual and the “native” tradition of recognizing the dominant position of the Russian Orthodox Church (and the autocracy) in the religious life of Russian society. Through his study of religious reforms, Safonov seeks to reach larger conclusions about Russian political and legal culture at the beginning of the twentieth century.
This is a salutary endeavor. The liberal strains in pre-revolutionary Russia have been consistently identified, valued, and studied as such in the emigration and in non-Russian scholarship, but less so in post-Soviet Russian scholarship.^[1] More characteristic of Russian scholarship is to look at political and religious phenomena grouped either more broadly or institutionally.^[2] In this context, Safonov’s work is potentially very timely (particularly given the legislative reforms concerning religion Russia enacted from the mid 1980s to 1997). As Safonov notes, when it comes to religious reform in modern Russia, past experience is unusually resonant.
This book conveys some of that resonance. Safonov bases his research on extensive Russian-language sources published in Russia, including secondary sources from the last twenty years – but almost nothing from Western-language scholarship from the same period. While he cites such potentially valuable works as D. Iu. Arapov’s work on state regulation of Islam, for example, he does not include the essential and enormously influential work of Robert Crews.^[3] He mentions G. A. Kozlitin’s 2004 candidate dissertation from Rostov-on-the-Don on the legal position of Jews in the Russian empire, but lists none of the key works of Benjamin Nathans, Gabriella Safran, or Yuri Slezkine.^[4]The whole corpus of recent English-language (not to mention French or German) work on the problems of religion in the Russian empire – Nicholas Breyfogle, Robert Geraci, Paul Werth, Michael Khodarkovsky, Agnes Kefeli, Heather Coleman – all are missing.^[5] Gregory Freeze’s vast oeuvre is represented by a single title – a Russian translation of an article. There is nothing here of the works of Argyrios Pisiotis, Scott Kenworthy, Jennifer Hedda, or Vera Shevzov. All of them would have – and should have – inflected both Safonov’s methodology and his conclusions. Admittedly, it may be difficult to obtain these works in Tambov, where Safonov is based. But he also worked in RGIA and GARF: the Public Library or the Russian National Library own at least some of these books, and also subscribe to publications that review them. The few Western-language writers Safonov does cite include John S. Curtiss’ 1940 monograph on church and state.
In short, Safonov’s monograph suffers from an ailment plaguing a great deal of contemporary Russian scholarship on Russian history: in its methodology and source base, it reflects almost exclusively what is available in Russian. If this trend continues, one fears that a “two-tiered” model of scholarship may develop, with many Russian scholars providing useful raw material from provincial archives or the kind of insights that can come only from deep and long immersion in central archives, but little that is conceptually innovative. Even here, one might question Safonov’s limiting himself to the central state historical archives in Russia’s two capital cities. Rich as GARF and RGIA are, Safonov’s study might have been stronger had he consulted local diocesan or consistory archives to see how the processes he studies played themselves out on the ground. It is not enough to describe the legislation on the books (as in Ulozhenie o nakazaniiakh ugolovnykh i ispravitel’nykh); one should also look at Consistory archives to see how attempts to apply (or not apply) that legislation worked “on the ground.”
Having said that, let us consider how well Safonov accomplishes his task: using the notion of freedom of conscience to illuminate the process by which the legal position of Russia’s religious organizations became modernized.
The background to the subject is summarily sketched. Safonov informs us that before the seventeenth century, Muscovy stuck to a Byzantine church-state relationship, in which belonging to Orthodoxy was mandatory. (This is curious: was Orthodoxy mandatory in Byzantium itself, which was an empire and included non-Orthodox subjects including Armenian Monophysites and Jews, as well as resident Latins from Venice and Genoa?) He notes that the Ulozhenie of 1649 specified burning at the stake for religious crimes, but does not specify what those religious crimes were. Heresy and apostasy? Or such religiously-condemned activities as sodomy?^[6] He notes the domination exercised by the Russian emperor over all religious bodies on his or her territory from the eighteenth century onwards without considering the important limitations described by Gregory Freeze.^[7] Most originally in this early section, Safonov notes the coincidence of nationality and religious confession in imperial Russian religious legislation. That is, because confessional differences essentially coincided with national ones, in practice religious discrimination meant national discrimination; in the eyes of the imperial government, Safonov claims, Orthodox Christianity equated Russian nationality.
Yes and no. The trickiest aspect of this argument concerns, on the one hand, Old Belief and, on the other hand, Orthodox Christianity as practiced by non-Russians (most notably, Georgians). The Georgians were very clearly Orthodox (and had been so for six centuries longer than the Rus’) and just as clearly not Russian; the imperial government understood this.^[8] Safonov finds the persecution of Old Believers “inexplicable, whether from a general Christian or an Orthodox point of view, but it was explained by national policies” (P. 26). Just about every part of this sentence is wrong. As Boris Uspensky has shown, the persecution of Old Believers did make sense, insofar as any persecution of Christian dissent makes sense; as Georg Michels and others have shown, the national factor was only one of many.^[9] In any case, Old Believers would have been outraged at the thought of including flagellants (khlysty) or self-castrators (skoptsy) in their number, as does Safonov (Pp. 38-39).
Other assertions of Safonov are similarly puzzling. Did the international community show interest in the fate of Russian Baptists (the “shtunda”) because police persecution was so strong – or simply because, as Heather Coleman suggests, the Baptists’ international connections were?^[10] Is it that the Uniates were indifferent towards Orthodoxy – or simply that they were different, and thus had clear reasons not to embrace it?^[11]
Safonov claims that missionary work was welcomed (presumably by the government) because it was identified with Russification, and that religious legislation was aimed at overcoming national differences via Russification (P. 42). But was it? Paul Werth’s work on missionary work among the Tatars of Kazan, for example, shows clearly that the Orthodox mission became successful precisely only when it stopped linking Orthodoxy to Russianness; the lasting success of Orthodox missionaries in America similarly came from their immediate adoption of local languages.^[12] The collection of essays by Robert Geraci and Michael Khodorkovsky offers a broader array of evidence. Finally, Jane Burbank has argued for a more nuanced, subtle understanding of Russian imperial religious policies.^[13] Unfortunately, none of these important works seem to inform this one.
Safonov correctly points to the 1832 publication of the Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii and particularly articles 40-46 as a watershed moment in Russian state-church relations. They defined Orthodoxy as “gospodstvuiushchei i pervenstvuiushchei” and the emperor as the “supreme defender and khranitel of the dogmas of faith and the bliustitel of the right faith.” But did this, as he asserts, signal the de facto completion of the absorption of the Church by the government? As Freeze showed in his seminal essay, the Russian church retained more independence in the Synodal era than previous scholarship had allowed, or than Safonov allows. It is not true that the emperor was the “high priest” or that the ober-procurator had “practically unlimited power to influence church structures” (P. 46).^[14] Safonov asserts that “the state took entirely upon itself the whole burden of the struggle for the interests of the Orthodox Church in Russia” (P. 35). This is not entirely accurate. If Safonov had used Consistory archives, he would have seen the extent to which the Church itself struggled in defending its own interests, particularly with respect to Orthodox converts from Roman Catholicism or Islam who “lapsed” into their original faiths.
Safonov shows a puzzling lack of knowledge with respect to basic religious practices. In a section describing discrimination against non-Orthodox clergy, he notes that non-Orthodox clergy was forbidden to perform the sacraments over the Orthodox (P. 35). But the Orthodox clergy was similarly forbidden to perform the sacraments over non-Orthodox, whether confession, communion, or (particularly relevant in wartime) last rites. In other words, this is not a matter of state discrimination but of canon law. (The Russophile Anglican William Palmer ran into similar obstacles in the middle of the nineteenth century when he sought to partake of communion in Orthodox churches.) One may not sympathize with the belief of the Orthodox (or the Roman Catholics and the Lutherans) that they alone possessed the true faith, but the Russian state can hardly be blamed for acknowledging the confessions’ own rules and boundaries. Here a comparison to other contemporary independent Orthodox nations (say, Serbia or Bulgaria) would be useful. Similarly useful would be a comparison to other countries with regard to the public exercise of religion. Is it really damning, for example, that the police were responsible for maintaining order during services and processions held outside church buildings? Did not Catholics have to apply for police permits in, say, eighteenth-century Toulouse, and do they not have to do so in contemporary New York City?^[15]
In short, it is fair to say that there are limits to how Safonov approaches both Orthodoxy (with its claims to exclusive possession of truth) and imperial Russian government (which, like other contemporary European governments before 1905, privileged one religious confession over others). Why then should one nonetheless read, and profit from, this book?
Because the value of this book is not in the historical context in the first eighty-four pages. It is instead in what follows, when Safonov turns directly to the notion of freedom of conscience in late imperial Russian legal, political, and social thought. Here his contribution is both significant and original. He has looked at and compiled virtually every contemporary reference to “freedom of conscience.” If gathering all this information in one place were his only accomplishment, that in itself would have been a contribution to political and legal scholarship.
But Safonov does more than this. He identifies two basic (and completely opposed) attitudes to religious freedom of conscience and tolerance. The first position was defensive/protective. It argued that existing Russian legislation provided adequate freedom for the non-Orthodox to practice their religion, and that any limitations respected/reflected the historical experience and current state of the Russian Orthodox. The second position may be termed liberal. It argued for the modernization of Russian legislation to reflect current European norms against inequality with respect to citizens’ or subjects’ religious affiliation. Particularly valuable here is Safonov’s account of the impact of the 1914 translation into Russian of Francesco Ruffini’s “Religious Freedom – the History of an Idea.” One gets a real sense of how closely Russian progressives read and responded to European thinkers. Similarly useful is Safonov’s comparison of contemporary European and North American legislation to that of Russia. This kind of international context gives a much better sense for how typical (or atypical) Russia was.
As Safonov notes, late imperial Russian legal thinkers agreed that neither freedom of conscience nor freedom of religion existed in Russia – there was only a limited degree of tolerance. On the other hand, their ostensible sympathy for the subservient position of the Orthodox Church does not sound disinterested. The arguments of S. P. Melgunov and M. A. Reisner would sound more effective coming from the mouths of Church hierarchy or clergy, whether from such episcopal liberals as Metropolitan Anthony of St. Petersburg or conservatives at Metropolitan Antonii (Khrapovitskii). Safonov describes the unanimous Synod support for a local council which would summon “the Church’s best forces from among both clergy and laity” without, however, clarifying that this meant laymen rather than lay men and women, as the gender-neutral “laity” would suggest.
Similarly rewarding is Safonov’s exploration of the development of Russian legislation on freedom of conscience in different stages – from 1904 to 1906 (Chapter II), the subsequent role of the Ministry of the Interior (Chapter III), and that of the Provisional Government (Chapter IV). The give-and-take of Russian lawmakers rarely appears in such lively detail. Every side is given its chance, from the vehement conservative responses to the important laws of 17 April 1905 (“On Affirming Toleration”), 17 October 1905, and 17 October 1906 (“On Old Believer and Sectarian Communities”) such as those of Bishop Ioann of Poltava (P. 136), to the characteristically caustic comments of Pavel N. Miliukov. This, the real meat of the book, is filled with Safonov’s subtle analysis, as when he notes, for example, “Maklakov’s use of the term veroterpimost’ (“toleration”) (and not “freedom of conscience”) was again indicative, testifying to the change in the governmental course” (P. 314). He brings to life the implications of changing the age of conversion from 21 to 18 to 14, of allotting 30 versus 40 days to convert from the time of first submitting a formal petition, and of noting that Christians could only convert to another Christian religion. Focusing as he does on freedom of conscience, he does not neglect to remind the reader of other political events as necessary (for example, the ministerial crisis of 1909, which nearly cost Stolypin his job). Perhaps most importantly, Safonov conveys the genuinely liberal nature of the Dumas – even the Third and Fourth, widely considered to have been conservative or even reactionary. All the Dumas from 1907-1917, he shows, imagined a Russia fundamentally different from the one they had known and, in fact, not only imagined it, but tried to bring it into being.
But their work was fundamentally blocked by the executive branch. As Safonov explains, at the core of the problem lay the two different conceptions of confessional reform. The executive and upper house continued to uphold the principle of the confessional government, in which the Orthodox Church would have maintained its primacy; the lower house favored a system of parity, in which all religions would have been equal in the eyes of the law. Neither side was willing to budge, and as a result none of the reforms saw the light of day.
What then happened under the Provisional Government? Safonov correctly dismisses the opinion of some other scholars that re-animating the church-state undermined the credibility of the Provisional Government, noting instead that maintaining stable and positive relations with the Orthodox Church strengthened the Provisional Government’s political weight (P. 326). Similarly, all other confessions were granted full autonomy. Thus, Safonov argues, the Dumas laid the groundwork for the liberal model; the Provisional Government brought it into practice (P. 329). This included full freedom of conscience and religion, the legal recognition of belonging to no religion at all, and removal of limits. Sadly, he notes, the country could not handle the rapid shift from a severe/rigid autocracy to a liberal political system. It was left to Soviet power to revise the liberal religious platform in its own way, as they sought to establish an atheistic government.
This is an eloquent section and Safonov tells it well. Indeed, students of Russian law, of the Dumas, and of Russian institutional history 1900-1917 will all find much of value in Safonov’s examination of the evolution of the notion of freedom of conscience. Students of religion would find it useful to augment this study with other sources.