In the mid-eighteenth century, the Russian state and the Orthodox church initiated an aggressive campaign of baptism among the Muslim and “pagan” subjects of the Volga-Kama region, who had been brought under Russian rule in the mid-sixteenth century. Responding to a combination of material incentives and outright coercion, large numbers of Turkic and Finnic peasants were thus inducted into the Christian faith.^[1] To the extent that the church was preoccupied principally with the neophytes' mechanical fulfillment of “Christian obligations” subsequently, for decades indigenous adherence to Christianity remained weak and largely formal. Those baptized from “paganism” continued to conduct rituals in the forests, and by the nineteenth century many baptized Tatars openly petitioned the government for official status as Muslims. To the extent that “apostasy” from Orthodoxy was prohibited by imperial law, all such petitions were rejected and participation of baptized non-Russians in “pagan” gatherings was forbidden.^[2] The Russian state thus managed to transfer many non-Christians formally into Orthodoxy and barred their official return to non-Christian faiths, but was unable to instill anything more than a superficial and rudimentary allegiance to Orthodoxy.
By the 1860s, however, missionaries initiated a more nuanced project involving the promotion of native teachers and clergy and the extensive translation of religious works into native languages. By the early twentieth century, these practices had produced small native intelligentsias and a notable rise in indigenous Orthodox religiosity, at least among certain segments of the region's non-Russian population. While some of these educated non-Russians became more secular in outlook (and have thus been canonized in Soviet historiography), many retained an essentially religious orientation, serving as priests, deacons, and teachers in non-Russian villages. The activities and outlooks of these figures were fraught with deep tensions, however, for while Christianity had been made available to them in at least partially indigenous terms, the acceptance of Orthodoxy nonetheless required not only the complete rejection of indigenous religious practices and the recognition of Russian spiritual authority, but also, in line with prevailing political imperatives, at least a token commitment to what imperial authorities called “Russification” (obrusenie). While members of the emerging non-Russian intelligentsia were usually fervent advocates of Orthodox “enlightenment” among their kinsmen and tended therefore to exhibit strong attachments to the Russian world, they were also deeply committed to their own peoples and to the general cause of non-Russians (inorodtsy) in the Volga region.^[3] How then did these non-Russian clerics propose to negotiate the complex relationship between the indigenous world from which they had originated and the Russian world which for them constituted the source of Christianity and enlightenment?
The solution to this dilemma, I argue, lay in the notion of obrusenie itself. Although this term occupied a prominent place in official and unofficial discussions concerning state policy in the Volga-Kama region ever since the 1860s, there was no real consensus about the actual scope and nature of cultural change implicit in the term. This indeterminacy was heightened by the fact that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, secular conceptions of ethnicity and nationality were becoming as significant in officials' classification of the state's population as confessional and estate distinctions.^[4] It remained unclear, therefore, whether obrusenie should proceed along religious or ethno-linguistic lines, or what the relationship between those two variants actually was. Far from being straightforward, therefore, the issue of assimilation raised a series of complex questions about the relationship of non-Russian minorities to the core Russian culture and civilization. Particularly in Viatka diocese after 1905, non-Russian clerics were able to exploit the tensions in the concept of obrusenie in order to propose what I call a negotiated form of assimilation, which was compatible with their desire to promote indigenous ethnicities. For these clerics, Orthodox Christianity offered a basis for unifying representatives of different Turkic and Finnic ethnicities for political action and for fending off accusations that they were pursuing “separatist” goals. Thus in the dynamic context of late-imperial Russia, the concept of assimilation could in fact empower projects fundamentally at odds with the idea of making Russians out of inorodtsy.

The Volga-Kama Region: A Brief Historical and Ethnographic Sketch

Located between Moscow and the Ural mountains, the region around the confluence of the Volga and Kama rivers stood at the intersection of three cultural worlds–the Slavic-Orthodox, the Turkic-Islamic, and the Finnic-“pagan.”^[5] Most Tatars had been Muslims since the tenth century or so, while Maris and Udmurts (two Finnic peoples) and Chuvash (a Turkic people) engaged in broadly similar animist practices. Following the Russian conquest of the region in 1552, Russian peasants settled along the major waterways and roads, while the indigenous population was forced into the interior. Though in some areas populations became fairly mixed, even in the nineteenth century there remained significant concentrations of non-Russians in the region. By the mid-eighteenth century, the better portion of the region had been integrated into the Empire's administrative structure; most non-Russian inhabitants became state peasants and were subject to the same duties and obligations as their Russian counterparts.^[6]
Some Tatars had been baptized into Orthodoxy in the decades immediately following the Russian conquest and became known as “old-convert Tatars” (in Russian) and “Kräshens” (in Turkic).^[7] Those baptized in the eighteenth century earned the designation “new converts.” Between the mass conversions of in the 1740s and 50s and the late 1820s, the imperial government interfered comparatively little in the lives of even baptized non-Russians. No new missionary campaigns were initiated, and by all indications, as long as converts fulfilled their basic “Christian obligations“–that is, baptized their infants, were married by Orthodox ritual, supported their clergy materially in accordance with established norms, knew how to make the sign of the cross, etc.–they were left in relative peace. In 1826-27, however, several thousand baptized Tatars filed petitions requesting official recognition as Muslims, and shortly thereafter local authorities discovered two large-scale “pagan” prayers involving baptized participants from several different provinces. Spurred by the new Emperor Nicholas I (1825-55), who was less tolerant of dissent than his predecessor, the Holy Synod moved to establish new missions in several provinces in 1830 in order to encourage the conversion of the remaining non-Christians and to combat “apostasy,” “delusions,” and other forms of religious deviance.^[8] This renewed missionary activity had several different dimensions, but its principal model was one of itinerancy: those designated as missionaries – usually local religious superintendents [blagochinnye] and/or archpriests [protoierei] – traveled about the areas under their jurisdiction, aided local clergy in encouraging non-Russians to abandon their “delusions,” and proposed baptism to the unconverted.
While these missions succeeded in baptizing some “pagans” and a handful of Muslims, they struggled with difficulty to “reinforce” baptized non-Russians in Christianity. Indeed the problem of baptized-Tatar “apostasy” became more acute and stubborn in the 1840s. In the late 1860s, over ten thousand baptized Tatars once again filed petitions requesting formal Muslim status, and even some Maris, Udmurts, and Chuvash (both baptized and “pagan“) began to embrace Islam in areas of mixed settlement. It appeared to many Russian observers that Islam was winning the battle for non-Russian souls. In the context of the Great Reforms – when state authorities began to place heavier emphasis on obrusenie, and when peasant emancipation and new institutions of local self-government rendered more imperative rural inhabitants' internalization of norms and values of “civic-mindedness” [grazhdanstvennost'] – missionary reform became both possible and necessary.^[9]

Il'minskii's Innovations and their Implications

The central figure in this rethinking was Nikolai Il'minskii, who had already established himself as an expert on Islam and the region's native peoples at the Anti-Muslim Division of the Kazan Ecclesiastical Academy in the 1840s and 50s.^[10] Il'minskii and his supporters rejected the itinerant model of missionizing in favor of one that emphasized education. Indeed, Kazan Archbishop Antonii captured the spirit of the times when he wrote in 1869, “The question of the mission in Kazan diocese is being transformed into the question of the education of non-Russians, or of non-Russian schools.”^[11] The essence of Il'minskii's approach was to employ native languages and native instructors for the transmission of the Christian message to non-Russians. Translation, schooling in non-Russian languages, and the promotion of non-Russians to positions as teachers and clergy were thus at the core of his “system.” The idea of using native languages was of course not entirely new. Some clerics had earlier seen the need for native languages and translations for the “reinforcement” of non-Russians in Christianity, and the Synod had actively promoted the training of Mari boys at the Viatka seminary for their eventual placement in clerical positions beginning in the late 1820s. But Il'minskii's efforts met with much greater success than earlier ones. He sought to translate texts in new ways, above all by using an idiomatic popular vernacular, verifying the texts with native non-Russians in order to ensure their coherence and intelligibility, and simplifying the Christian message down to its most basic elements. As he wrote in one instance, “With inorodtsy it is necessary to begin from the very beginning, and to look on the mass of inorodtsy as children, who have gathered to learn and to whom the instructor must teach elementary knowledge.”^[12]
Il'minskii based these conclusions on his earlier participation in a project to translate the liturgy into Tatar using the literary language and the Arabic script in the late 1840s and 1850s. Disappointed with the results of that endeavor, Il'minskii turned for help in his translation of a new Tatar-language primer to the Kräshen Vasilii Timofeev (1836-1896), who had joined the Kazan Ecclesiastical Academy in 1862 as a tutor of Tatar.^[13] Il'minskii soon concluded that a modified Cyrillic alphabet more accurately represented the phonetics of the Tatar language than did the Arabic and had the added advantage of restricting Kräshens' access to Islamic texts.^[14] By 1869 the Orthodox liturgy had been translated into Tatar using this new approach, as the Kazan diocesan authorities encouraged the use of native languages in religious discussions and for the most oft-used prayers and songs. In 1883 the Synod authorized the conduct of liturgy in non-Russian languages wherever there was “a more or less substantial population” of non-Russians.^[15]
Il'minskii not only promoted non-Russians into teaching and clerical positions far more energetically than had his predecessors, but also established a set of special institutions for their training. In 1863, building on Timofeev's effort to teach young boys from his native village in his spare time, Il'minskii established the Kazan Central Baptized-Tatar School, which became the cornerstone of his “system.”^[16] The school offered Kräshens a basic education in Tatar with a strong Orthodox-Christian component, and many of its graduates went on to serve as teachers in branch schools that were established one by one in Kräshen villages. After the Ministry of Education's endorsement of Il'minskii's principle of native-language instruction for the eastern portions of the empire in 1870, the Ministry created a non-Russian teachers' seminary with Il'minskii as its director in 1872.^[17] By 1867, Il'minskii had obtained from the Synod a directive that authorized the training and ordination of non-Russian clergy and exempted them from the normal seminary course.^[18] Il'minskii contended that in order to transmit Christianity to inorodtsy “in such a way that it might become the foundation for their thinking and life, for that one needs to adapt to their religious conceptions and moral convictions.”^[19] Non-Russians themselves were obviously in the best position to effectuate this cultural translation.
Il'minskii was able to secure for this emerging set of institutions a remarkable degree of autonomy, due in part to the Synod's desire, after the apostasy 1866 and the perceived failure of the Anti-Muslim Division, to minimize its direct involvement in missionary matters. Thus while the baptized-Tatar school began to receive a stipend from the Ministry of State Domains and the Synod, it was ultimately a private institution that relied on individual contributions and remained unsubordinated to official regulations.^[20] Likewise, the Brotherhood of St. Gurii, which was founded by Il'minskii and others in 1867 and essentially replaced the older mission, was a voluntary society consisting of church hierarchs, merchants, government officials, and educational specialists.^[21] Though the Brotherhood maintained ties with the government, as well as with the Orthodox Missionary Society in Moscow, it was in fact an independent organization that strove to maintain its autonomy and enjoyed the right of censorship over its own publications (mainly translations).^[22] True, as director of the teachers' seminary Il'minskii was officially an employee of the Ministry of Education, and he also maintained a correspondence with important officials in St. Petersburg.^[23] Nonetheless, the institutions under his direction retained an essentially “private” [chastnyi] character and served as a highly personalized regional bureaucracy.^[24] This independence allowed these institutions to minimize formalism and the associations with the state that constituted a substantial liability for missionary efforts.^[25] In general, this arrangement thus corresponded well to the spirit of the reform era, which valued initiative from society and active participation of the laity in religious affairs.^[26] The Synod, for its part, was content to allot a few thousand rubles a year to the Missionary Society, the school, and the Brotherhood, leaving them to conduct missionary affairs.
Il'minskii at times spoke of Russification, but his principal concern was nevertheless the salvation of non-Russians and the amelioration of their Christian spirituality, and it is his religious orientation that should be highlighted over any overtly political concerns.^[27] Indeed, although he claimed that Russification would be the ultimate result of his approach, the purpose of his system was at least temporarily to uphold ethnic difference, at least for the time being, in order to fortify baptized non-Russians within Orthodoxy and to protect them from Islamization. As Il'minskii had written at one point, if Christianity could be made available in native forms, “Tatars will be convinced that upon accepting the faith of Christ they can maintain their nationality [narodnost'], which is so dear to them.” Christianity, he later asserted, “does not encroach on ethnic [narodnyia] particularities, does not smooth them out in a formal or external way, [and] does not deprive a person of individuality.”^[28] Il'minskii was in fact absolutely committed to the retention by non-Russian teachers and clergy of the spirit, appearance, and simplicity of rural non-Russian communities, precisely in order to ensure the connection of his students with the village.^[29] The practical essence of the project was to create a kind of intermediate class of people, who would maintain significant ties with both the Russian Orthodox world (i.e., with Il'minskii and his colleagues) and the ethnicities from which they came.^[30] In short, whatever Il'minskii might have said about Russification, his principal and immediate goal was to convince non-Russians that they could confess Orthodoxy without becoming Russian.
Many observers credited Il'minskii and his indigenous disciples with instigating a spiritual revolution in the countryside. Non-Russians previously considered to have had virtually no sense of attachment to Orthodoxy now “throng in crowds” into the schools, which in effect served as houses of prayer. Enchanted by singing in native languages, adults learned about “truths of the Orthodox faith” through their children and visited the schools and increasingly the parish churches where the liturgy was conducted in native languages.^[31] Non-Russians were ever more willing to open schools in their villages, often themselves passing village resolutions requesting a teacher.^[32] To be sure, the Brotherhood's financial restraints limited its impact, and in part because Il'minskii's system was largely informal, we actually lack the kinds of sources that permit a fuller assessment of the system's impact. Undoubtedly, Il'minskii's supporters often succumbed to hyperbole, in particular exaggerating the contrast between “before” and “after.” Nonetheless it is difficult to gainsay that in the last few decades of the nineteenth century (though variously in different locales) some kind of profound spiritual transformation, clearly involving both Orthodoxy and Il'minskii's methods, was afoot.
Those methods had the greatest impact on Kräshens and Chuvash, and indeed Il'minskii's efforts were concentrated on these two peoples. Kräshens, as the most linguistically and culturally akin to Muslim Tatars, were seen to be in the greatest danger of apostasy, while Chuvash constituted the largest single non-Russian Orthodox ethnic group.^[33] We have already seen that Il'minskii's ideas grew out of his collaboration with the Kräshen Vasilii Timofeev and that the Central Baptized-Tatar was the first institutional incarnation of his new approach. Il'minskii cultivated a similar Chuvash protégé in the person of Ivan Iakovlev, who went on to head a special Chuvash Teachers' Seminary in Simbirsk beginning in 1875.^[34] As regards translations, schools, and clergy, by Il'minskii's death the Brotherhood had done far more for these two groups than it had for Maris and Udmurts, and their success was far greater in Kazan and Simbirsk provinces than elsewhere.^[35] Buoyed by native teachers and clergy and an extensive network of schools, and equipped with an impressive range of religious texts in their native vernacular, Kräshens increasingly developed an indigenous Orthodoxy and even began to assert that they, as Kräshens, constituted a people entirely distinct from Muslim Tatars.^[36] And by 1905, a religious superintendent in Simbirsk diocese could remark, “The present condition of the Chuvash, with the exception of a small number of the older generation who have had their day, almost in no way differs in a religious-moral respect from the condition of a Russian Orthodox Christian.”^[37]
Il'minskii's approach was not without controversy, however. His most vocal critics feared that his project would give native languages literary status and thus foster conscious ethnicities resistant to Russification. Already in the late 1860s, some observers contended that the Russian language should be the principal tool for cultural assimilation and that a focus on Orthodoxy in indigenous form was not sufficient.^[38] Il'minskii and his associates defended their position by stressing that the message–Christianity and associated values–was more important than the medium itself, and that their project was designed to serve a transitional function for non-Russians, preparing them for eventual instruction in Russian and also protecting them from the pernicious influence of “Mohammedan propaganda.” But the distinction between making Christianity accessible to non-Russians, on the one hand, and promoting ethnic particularism, on the other, was not so easy to draw. Il'minskii's methods accordingly came under ever greater fire, especially after his death in 1891. Already in the 1880s, the Brotherhood was forced to defend itself from growing attempts by the Kazan diocesan authorities to assert formal control over its staffing and activities. In 1898, the bishop managed to gain greater power of appointment over the Brotherhood's council and made membership mandatory for all diocesan clergy in 1900 in order to ameliorate the Brotherhood's finances.^[39] Several prominent figures, including Il'minskii's adoptive son and successor at the Teachers' Academy, Nikolai Bobrovnikov, resigned from the Brotherhood in response to this interference.^[40] At the same time, officials of the Ministry of Education began quietly to dismantle Il'minskii's methods on the grounds that, though successful from a missionary standpoint, they had failed to effectuate the linguistic “unification” of inorodtsy with the Russian population and were in fact too narrowly “religious-moral” in orientation. The Curator of the Kazan Educational District thus removed Iakovlev from his position at the Chuvash Teachers' Seminary in 1903, while also planning to transform the Kazan Teachers' Seminary into an exclusively Russian institution. Notably, however, even as these figures dismantled significant parts of Il'minskii's system, Il'minskii's stature prevented them from attacking him personally, leaving them instead to present their acts as modifications or “corrections” with which he would surely have agreed were he still alive.^[41]
Nor was the idea of itinerant missionaries entirely dead. In 1884, Archbishop of Kazan Palladii (Pisarev) sought to resurrect missionary activity on the basis of the provisions of 1830, though he was transferred to a new diocese before anything came of this proposal.^[42] The idea of resurrecting some kind of mission received new impetus towards the end of the 1890s, when a special commission in Kazan was formed to address the problem of baptized-Tatar apostasy. By 1901 a new mission in Kazan diocese had been created more or less on the traditional model, with Iakov Koblov at its head and with twelve missionary assistants from among the parish clergy. As before, these missionaries took trips to parishes in their jurisdictions, conducted discussions with inorodtsy, and tried to promote zeal among the local clergy. Not everyone was supportive of this new endeavor, however. Bobrovnikov argued that schools and liturgy in non-Russian languages were by far the most effective means of Christianization, and that the church should promote more non-Russian clergy, whose numbers were still inadequate.^[43]
Indeed, the issue of non-Russian clergy and teachers had by this time long been a source of particular acrimony.^[44] Convinced that non-Russians were especially well-suited for the transmission of Orthodoxy to their fellow villagers, Il'minskii aggressively supported their candidacy for such positions, even when their formal qualifications were low. As he wrote in defense of one Kräshen candidate whose knowledge of the catechism had been deemed insufficient for priestly status, “It seems to me that in a religious matter, during a struggle of heterodoxy [inoverie] with Orthodoxy, much more vital and important than theological knowledge are the moral and pastoral qualities of priests.”^[45] Exempted from the normal course of seminary study, non-Russians were instead trained in the less formalized Baptized-Tatar school, the Teachers' Seminary, and the Chuvash School in Simbirsk. As they went through these institutions and began to receive clerical appointments, opposition from Russian clergy grew. Il'minskii complained in 1881 that some members of the Brotherhood were inclined to see in his efforts to attract non-Russians “injury and censure for the Russian clerical estate.” Most notably, he began to detect in his long-time colleague E. A. Malov a “strong disinclination” to allow non-Russians to clerical status, which he understood to proceed from the latter's “jealous guarding of the rights and privileges of the Russian clergy.”^[46] Based in part on Malov's diary, Robert Geraci confirms that this was indeed the case: Malov saw Il'minskii's convictions about the absolute irreplaceability of non-Russians to be an “extreme view,” and he accordingly became a key figure in the attempt to modify aspects of Il'minskii's method after the latter's death.^[47]
Perhaps most damaging to Il'minskii's project, particularly in the increasingly nationalist reign of Alexander III, was the accusation of “separatism“–i.e., that non-Russians sought to isolate themselves and to develop independently of Russian tutelage. From this perspective, the promised Russification had failed to materialize, as non-Russians developed attitudes that appeared to some observers to be outright anti-Russian.^[48] For the most part these concerns were probably somewhat overdrawn, since many non-Russians seem to have been eager to hide their non-Russian origins and to blend as quickly as possible with Russians. One Mari teacher (writing to Il'minskii, no less) related that, “desiring to russify my descendants, [I] married a Russian girl of delicate upbringing in 1876,” adding that he was experiencing tremendous “woe” due to the fact that “I have left one shore behind but have not reached the other.”^[49] Particularly non-Russians who went through Russian schools, where designations like “Cheremis” and “Votiak” were used as terms of abuse, emerged shorn of attachment to their native milieu.^[50] Writing in 1907, the Kräshen David Grigor'ev contended that many “russified inorodtsy” “would gladly reject the designation of inorodets and consider themselves Russians.” However, he complained, even the most russified inorodets “remains for now an inorodets for the sole reason that he was born an inorodets, of inorodtsy parents.” Grigor'ev therefore proposed a remarkable new law–“on the conversion of Orthodox inorodtsy of Russia into Russians” [o perekhode Rossiiskikh pravoslavnykh inorodtsev “v russkie”]–according to which russified inorodtsy would have the right to call themselves Russians.^[51] From this perspective, if there was any foundation at all to accusations of “separatism,” this was because Russians “roughly push already russified inorodtsy away from the gates of Russianism” [russitsizm].^[52]
Yet despite the purported desire of inorodtsy to seek obrusenie, the worries of Il'minskii's critics were clearly not without some foundation. While the promotion of non-Russian ethnicities made a great deal of sense in terms of the perceived threat from Islam, Malov was not far off the mark when he complained that “soon the inorodtsy started to understand it [this promotion] in their own way.”^[53] As time went by–and especially after 1905–inorodtsy became more self-conscious and assertive, more convinced of their own self-worth (vis-à-vis both Russians and Muslim Tatars), and more insistent on their own version of assimilation and integration into the broader imperial polity. While claiming that they, too, were working towards their own eventual obrusenie, they sought to articulate a negotiated form of assimilation that eschewed “narrow” conceptions of obrusenie and permitted indigenous aspirations for the enlightenment and cultivation of their ethnicities. In an effort thereby to carve out a viable space for their indigenous cultural development by distinguishing themselves from Russians through their native languages, and from Muslim Tatars through their active promotion of Orthodoxy, these non-Russians articulated a kind of multi-ethnic, religiously based proto-nationalism. It is the perspective of this emerging indigenous religious and intellectual elite that I wish to address here, especially as it developed in Viatka diocese in the early twentieth century.

The Viatka Inorodtsy Mission and the Critique of Obrusenie

If Il'minskii's project had its greatest results in Kazan province, for several decades its impact was rather more limited in some of the other provinces of the region. In 1881 Il'minskii himself complained that in Ufa diocese “there are almost no people who are soundly acquainted with the matter of inorodtsy and mission,” and in Viatka diocese “apparently incomprehension reigns.”^[54] Virtually no missionary work of any kind was undertaken in Ufa province until the founding of a local committee of the Orthodox Missionary Society in 1879, and it was really only when apostasy began to appear there in the early 1880s that bishop Nikanor (Brovkovich) began to promote non-Russians into clerical positions (which, as elsewhere, antagonized the Russian clergy).^[55] The situation was similar in Viatka diocese. Only in the early 1880s did the first few native priests, principally Kräshens, make their debut in the diocese, and there was still only a handful of such priests by the early 1890s.^[56] In 1900, a correspondent wrote that Il'minskii's precepts were not prevalent in Viatka province: there was no liturgy in Mari or Udmurt, and some missionaries did not know these languages. Russian was the language of instruction in most schools, and some of the so-called non-Russian schools were ironically located in predominantly Russian areas.^[57] Sofia Chicherina, who traveled extensively in the Volga region in 1904, concurred that despite official reports, the Il'minskii system was in effect only in a few places in Viatka province, and that the Mari and Udmurt languages were for the most part disregarded in local schools.^[58]
Moreover, Viatka province also remained an important center of animism, especially among Maris.^[59] Nearby Russians called the village Kuprian-Sola (Urzhum uezd) the “Cheremis Jerusalem,” because it was the center of animist religious life in the region, and drew Maris from Viatka, Kazan, and Ufa provinces to participate in large collective prayers.^[60] One grove there was even known as Tünia-küs-oto (worldwide prayer grove), which underscores the geographic breadth of its appeal.^[61] Maris were convinced of the legality of these prayers and even claimed that the Emperor had sent them funds for the construction of a stone wall around the sacred site. They sent petitions and even telegrams to the governor in defense of their animist practices and made explicit references to the laws of the Russian empire on religious tolerance and freedom of conscience.^[62] Nor was this all simply a matter of Maris blindly following tradition, for in the 1870s a group of baptized Maris began a reformation of animism, involving a systemization of indigenous conceptions, the rejection of blood sacrifice, and the abandonment of polytheism in favor of a more abstract monotheism. These reformers, who later became known as the Kugu-Sorta (or “Big Candle“) sect, even brought artifacts from their religious rituals to Kazan and presented their faith to the public at the Kazan Scientific and Industrial Exhibition in 1890.^[63] As one insightful observer remarked, the sectarians “wish to place their religion, despite the absence of books, on the same level as organized Mohammedanism and the true Christianity.”^[64] Thus even as apostasy among baptized Tatars remained relatively limited in Viatka province, animism was being energetically maintained and even reformed.
Nonetheless, by the early twentieth century a vocal and energetic core of non-Russian Orthodox clerics was emerging to promote a special Viatka “inorodtsy mission” and to defend the legacy of Il'minskii, as well as their own ethnicities, from the proponents of “narrow” and “rapid” obrusenie. In the 1870s there was at least a handful of Kräshen schools in Viatka diocese, staffed by graduates of the Kazan Baptized-Tatar school,^[65] and a new mission for Kräshens was established in 1881, evidently in response to a few cases of apostasy that had occurred there in the 1870s.^[66] In 1902 a diocesan congress of clergy called for the creation of “missionary inorodtsy courses,” which were duly opened in 1904. Unlike the Kazan missionary courses on which they were partially modeled, the Viatka courses were designed exclusively to train “native-born inorodtsy” for clerical positions with special missionary functions. Assuming the knowledge of native languages on the part of the students, the organizers sought to focus on theology in the courses, thereby strengthening non-Russians' qualifications for clerical posts.^[67] In short, Viatka diocese now had its own, multi-ethnic version of the Baptized-Tatar school. With a diocesan directive calling for the placement of inorodtsy as clergy in non-Russian parishes and the resultant loss by Russians of “many good parishes,” the diocese acquired its own conflict between Russians and inorodtsy similar to the one that had appeared earlier in Kazan province.^[68] With the appointment of a native Mari to head the courses in 1907, the “Viatka Inorodtsy Mission” became an institution run predominantly (if not exclusively) by and for inorodtsy.^[69] In contrast to Kazan diocese, where it was often sympathetic Russians like Bobrovnikov who articulated inorodtsy interests, in Viatka diocese inorodtsy were able to express themselves more directly, without substantial Russian mediation, above all in the pages of Viatskiia eparkhial'nyia vedomosti.
Though the courses were initiated in 1902, the revolutionary turmoil of 1905 was central to strengthening the position of inorodtsy clergy and teachers throughout the Volga-Kama region. First, partly in response to the intervention of traveler Sofia Chicherina, who became an ardent convert to the “Il'minskii system” during her visit to the region in 1904 and energetically urged St. Petersburg to save it from destruction,^[70] the Ministry of Education organized a special conference consisting almost exclusively of Il'minskii's supporters in order to shore up the system in the spring of 1905.^[71] The principle of native-language instruction accordingly received an unequivocal re-endorsement from the imperial capital. Secondly, in April 1905 the government decreed new laws on religious tolerance, which introduced substantial freedom for conversion from Orthodoxy to other religions. The most dramatic consequence of this law was the official return to Islam of almost 50,000 baptized Tatars, who in some cases had been seeking Muslim status for several generations.^[72] Less well-known are the attempts of some Maris in Viatka province to receive official recognition as pagans, although their requests were almost always rejected.^[73] Though these attempts were almost universally unsuccessful, the new context reinvigorated non-Christian religious communities and raised the willingness of Orthodox authorities to adopt measures that appealed to them.^[74] Finally, the revolutionary sentiment of 1905-06 did not leave inorodtsy untouched, as a segment of non-Russian students at the Kazan Teachers' Seminary became radicalized and demanded that the Seminary become an institution exclusively for inorodtsy.^[75] All of these forces suggested that some kind of accommodation with restless inorodtsy would have to made. While much of imperial Russian society seemed to be gripped by religious indifference and lawlessness, the proponents of the Viatka Inorodtsy Mission at least had the advantage of being committed to Orthodoxy, one of the central institutions of the old regime.
Beginning in 1907, the head of the mission was Pavel Glezdenev (1867-1923), a Mari with a rather remarkable biography. Born as a pagan in a village of Mari Bashkirs in Ufa province,^[76] he graduated from the Birsk school for inorodtsy in 1887, served as a teacher (while still a pagan) in Belebei district, and converted to Orthodoxy in 1892.^[77] After graduating from the Ufa Seminary in 1900, he served as a deacon and then a priest in a Mari village in Birsk district, and then audited missionary subjects at the Kazan Ecclesiastical Academy and taught at the Kazan Teachers' Seminary and the Kazan Women's School (for the preparation of female teachers), until requesting a transfer to Viatka in 1907.^[78] Conversant in Russian, Mari, Chuvash, Tatar, and Udmurt, Glezdenev energetically headed the Viatka mission and promoted the interests of inorodtsy in the diocese. In 1916 he received permission to publish a newspaper, War News, in Tatar (Kräshen), Udmurt, and Mari,^[79] and in 1917 he wrote brochures in Mari explaining the various political parties and the different possibilities for Russia's future political development.^[80] Over the course of 1917 he became increasingly critical of the old regime's refusal to allow inorodtsy to develop in accordance with their own aspirations, and after the October Revolution he obtained a position in a regional research institute in Viatka, where he advocated scholarly study of the Finnic languages.^[81]
Though Il'minskii would likely not have approved wholeheartedly of the direction that the Viatka mission took – he expected non-Russians to be subordinate to Russian guidance and had justified preferential access to positions by inorodtsy as a matter of efficacy rather than in terms of rights of self-expression and individual advancement^[82] – nonetheless the Viatka missionaries very explicitly cast themselves as the executors of Il'minskii's project in practice. They underscored Il'minskii's insistence that formal educational qualifications were by no means the only concern in promoting candidates to positions. “He considered faith, the ability to read and write impeccably in inorodtsy and in Russian, the aspiration to self-perfection, diligence, sobriety, modesty, and other mental qualities of an inorodets sufficient for recommendation to a bishop as a candidate as a priest among his fellow ethnics.”^[83] The Kräshen David Grigor'ev, who was to be the most prolific of the inorodtsy authors in Viatka diocese,^[84] rhetorically addressed Il'minskii, “Rejoice: your affair has not died, your ideas are being incarnated: your worthy successors are also on the alert and will not allow the enemy to sow 'weeds amidst the wheat'...”^[85] The Viatka missionaries described a virtual cult of Il'minskii among inorodtsy, who regarded him as “their friend and brother” and proudly told stories of how they had drunk tea with him and washed with him in the bathhouse. Though tens and hundreds of years might pass, wrote one missionary, and others would be forgotten, “in the hearts of inorodtsy the dear and unforgettable name of Nikolai Ivanovich Il'minskii – an inorodtsy apostle – will live forever.” Other accounts describe how the graves of Il'minskii and Timofeev became the objects of pilgrimages and popular veneration, and when non-Russians were shown the graves “they inevitably get down on their knees and cry.”^[86]
Yet if the Viatka missionaries invoked Il'minskii in order to legitimize their project, they also strove to demonstrate that their methods were sound and effective on their own merits. The liturgy in non-Russian languages – sometimes in four different languages in a single parish – simply did more to attract inorodtsy to church, they claimed, and even brought Russians from neighboring parishes, “because every right-thinking Russian person understands perfectly well that the Christian faith is not just for Russians, but for the whole people.”^[87] Glezdenev provided accounts of “missionary excursions,” during which he and students of the inorodtsy courses traveled throughout the countryside, singing and performing the liturgy in non-Russian languages, leading discussions, and answering the “tens of questions” on religious matters that inevitably arose from local non-Russian parishioners. “Imagine,” wrote Glezdenev of sermons delivered in native languages, “a huge crowd of women, girls, men, and children listen to the preacher. Neither sound nor din–all around, complete silence.” Encountering such excursions for the first time, many non-Russians were astounded and could not at first understand where the missionaries had come from and where they had learned to sing and read in non-Russian languages, and they asked in disbelief, “Is one really allowed to pray in Votiak [Udmurt]?“^[88] To bolster their claims to efficacy, missionaries even published a letter from Mari parishioners thanking the bishop for sending them a native priest in 1902. With an endearing disregard for Russian syntax and orthography, the parishioners wrote,

A new priest came to us a Mari from among us to teach everywhere in the church and in homes in Mari in an intelligible language, to baptize, marry, and bury in Mari, and all of us like this. Now glory to God we know about what is prayed during mass, now we understand which gospel is read, and what holiday it is, now, we know why children are baptized, about what is prayed during marriage and burial, before we didn't understand any of this.^[89]

Just beneath the surface of these claims for efficacy – and sometimes breaking through – was a more radical argument that the desires of non-Russians themselves mattered as much as any other concern. Grigor'ev argued that inorodtsy themselves should be asked who they wanted as their priest and queried rhetorically as to whether Russians would appreciate having a Greek priest who knew no Russian. “It's time to consider the opinion of inorodtsy, since they after all have the same religious needs and requirements as do Russians.”^[90]
In the prevailing political climate–even after 1905–it appears that small peoples like Maris, Udmurts, and Kräshens could not afford to disavow the notion of their own obrusenie, and the Viatka missionaries accordingly made many statements to the effect that obrusenie was indeed the ultimate goal of their activities. Yet they also became ever more openly skeptical of the notion that Russians – and in particular Russian peasants – actually represented such a desirable model for them to emulate. Among the most critical was Grigor'ev, who in seeking to explain why Tatarization seemed to occur so much more easily than obrusenie despite the official advantages enjoyed by Orthodoxy, came to the stark conclusion that “Tatars, in their general mass, are much more enlightened, developed, and moral than are Russians.” Whereas few Tatars, and especially women and mullahs, partook of alcohol, “With us [!] everybody drinks everywhere and always.” Russian marriage rituals were disgraceful – the habit of yelling “bitter” in order to induce lengthy kisses between newlyweds constituted “blasphemy of the sacred sentiment of mutual love.” Among Tatars there was nothing comparable. Having all received a basic education, the Tatar masses attained a certain religious and moral preparation and energetically propounded their beliefs in almost all contexts of social interaction. Other inorodtsy were unconsciously attracted to Tatars, who “seem to them higher and better than the other peoples around them.”^[91] Though similar arguments had at times been made by Russians themselves, albeit reluctantly, it surely must have been disconcerting to hear them coming directly from an inorodets.^[92]
Glezdenev, too, began to question openly the benefits of obrusenie. He noted that non -Russian youth, in particular, had begun to emulate the worst aspects of their Russian counterparts, especially drinking and nocturnal revelry, while a Mari ethnographer argued that sexual promiscuity among Maris tended to be greater in villages along big roads, around bazaars, and near towns – in short, where the population was “mixed.”^[93] Glezdenev further contended and that inorodtsy living near Russians were much more likely to swear and to drink, so that some Udmurts, “having begun to russify, become worse than they were prior to Russification.” With the advent of native-language texts and liturgies, Glezdenev contended, inorodtsy actually understood the liturgy and prayers far better than did Russians, and that in many cases the Russian peasant was simply inferior to non-Russians in moral, religious, and intellectual terms. In short, “the obrusenie of Votiaks that occurs only under the influence of the Russian peasant is not something one should be delighted about.”^[94] Others pointed to the condescending and sometimes hostile attitude of Russians towards inorodtsy, thus insisting that one of the principal obstacles to obrusenie was in fact Russians' refusal to accept inorodtsy as equals.^[95]
If the benefits of obrusenie were so questionable, and yet statements in support of this process were politically necessary, then it made sense for non-Russians to develop a particularistic understanding of this concept, which emphasized the internal, gradual, and implicitly voluntary character of inorodtsy's assimilation to the larger Russian world. But despite their claims that inorodtsy would acquire a “Russian soul” through their native languages, clearly discernible in their articulations were the aspirations for independent development and the creation of genuinely non-Russian Orthodoxies, which of course implied the indefinite postponement of obrusenie in its more “narrow” conception. There was thus a good deal of truth – if also a healthy dose of condescension – in the remarks of one (notably anonymous) Russian critic, who wrote that by relying exclusively on the native language and by creating a literature in translation, “we in this way put off into the far future the matter of obrusenie and the inclusion of the inorodets in general Russian cultural life, and he will be condemned to remain isolated in his half-savage condition, with his pitiful, childish language for a very, very long time.”^[96]
The foundations for this particularistic notion of obrusenie probably came from Kazan, where in 1904 Bobrovnikov had openly criticized ideas of obrusenie that emphasized external agency in favor of a version that stressed the voluntary and self-directed character of the process.^[97] This distinction was taken up in Viatka province by an anonymous author, who asserted a “strict” distinction between two verbs: “to russify” [obrusit'] and “to become Russian” [ruset'], or put differently, to unite inorodtsy and Russians “from the top – through the study of the Russian language,” on the one hand, and “from the root – through the adoption of the principal element of the Russian people – Orthodoxy,” on the other.^[98] Many non-Russians were accordingly careful to characterize explicitly their specific use of the term obrusenie. Thus one author, in justifying native-language liturgies as a principal tool of obrusenie, wrote,

Here I understand “obrusenie” not in the sense that an inorodets dresses and fluently speaks like a Russian: that will not be obrusenie.... I understand “obrusenie” in the sense that an inorodets loves the Russian, that is the Orthodox, faith and the Russian people. And that is achieved through hearing Christian truths and liturgy in his native language.^[99]

Glezdenev similarly contended that the kind of “russianization” [obruselost'] that so pleased the proponents of “rapid obrusenie” in fact represented the adoption of Christianity “in a purely external and mechanical way“ – the performance of rituals without comprehension of their significance.^[100] Noting that there were many Jews and Muslims who spoke the Russian language but were hostile towards Russians, and that the Mari movement to return to paganism was led by Mari graduates of Russian-language schools, inorodtsy called ever more insistently for obrusenie of only an “internal” kind. And though some were willing to express the hope that “external obrusenie will certainly follow spiritual obrusenie,”^[101] Grigor'ev took a more radical position that bordered on the complete exorcism of obrusenie once and for all:

Above all it is necessary lock up the artificial idea of the obrusenie of inorodtsy and throw away the key [zaperet' v dolgii iashchik pod zamok], so that it does not impudently go where it doesn't belong, so that it doesn't impede a more attractive idea – the idea of pure enlightenment in the spirit of Christian freedom – from achieving its deeply humane and highly moral goal – the salvation of souls exclusively.^[102]
Here, then, was Il'minskii's effort to disentangle Russianness and Orthodoxy taken to its logical conclusion: Christianity and enlightenment, while historically made available to inorodtsy through Russian agency, were universal creeds, and the interests of the Russian state and the Russian people had no place hindering their dissemination among the non-Russian population.
This is not to say that the Viatka missionaries were hostile to Russia. In fact, their claim was precisely that through “spiritual obrusenie” based on indigenous languages, non-Russians would come to love the Russian people. And Glezdenev acknowledged that one could expect the “appropriate success” not only from inorodtsy clergy, but from Russians who knew non-Russian languages well.^[103] Moreover, as the Great War unfolded inorodtsy exhibited a notable degree of patriotism. An Inorodtsy Missionary Congress in 1915 called for “the organization of ceremonial patriotic demonstrations with the goal of drawing together apostates and the Orthodox population.”^[104] In a similar vein, Glezdenev's leaflet War News was intended to cover various aspects of the war, including “[f]acts from the war experience illustrating the sacrifice, valor, sense of duty, and so on of the Russian soldier.” And when Glezdenev petitioned for a reduced postal rate for the distribution of War News, the governor of Viatka gave his approval, “since the named leaflet is without any undesirable political slant whatsoever.”^[105] In short, the promotion of inorodtsy interests was entirely compatible with Russian patriotism and, it would seem, the prevailing political order.
With the ultimate goal of salvation in mind, the Viatka missionaries increasingly set about providing the tools for further enlightenment and shoring up their ethnicities to ensure that “narrow” and “rapid” obrusenie did not take its toll. In 1907, Glezdenev published a new and more substantial primer for meadow Maris, from which he eliminated eight Cyrillic letters (ф, x, щ, ц, e, ё, ю, я) that had already made their way into Mari orthography, in an effort to preserve the purity of the language. In 1909 an Inorodtsy Translation Committee was established in Glazov uezd for the publication of books and brochures in Udmurt.^[106] Meanwhile, Grigor'ev became a major proponent of Kräshen particularity, aggressively promoting the notion that Kräshens should no longer be considered “baptized Tatars” and even openly requesting the bureaucracy to drop the latter designation from its official paperwork in favor of “Kreshchen.”^[107] While distinguishing Kräshens from Muslim Tatars and thus preventing their apostasy, this notion of Kräshen particularity also marked Kräshens off from Russians more distinctly.
But despite these efforts on behalf of individual ethnicities, the Viatka missionaries' efforts were notable above all for their supra-ethnic orientation. Unified by Orthodoxy and their collective origin in Il'minskii's project, evidently conscious of the limits that their small numbers put on their potential political influence, and aware that more focused efforts on behalf of individual ethnicities would give greater weight to already heavy accusations of “separatism,” the non-Russian religious intelligentsia in Viatka (and elsewhere, it would seem) decided that it made the most sense to pursue their interests in concert. Thus the Viatka missionaries spoke almost always of the interests of inorodtsy as a whole rather than those of specific groups. To be sure, Grigor'ev promoted Kräshen particularity, but he also spoke out vocally on behalf of inorodtsy as a whole. And when Glezdenev sought permission to publish the newspaper War News in 1916, he did so not only in his native Mari, but in the three major non-Russian languages of Viatka diocese – Mari, Udmurt, and Tatar (Kräshen). Religiously oriented inorodtsy thus continued to see Orthodoxy as a unifying force that could accommodate ethnic diversity under its umbrella.
The strength of this position, as well as its limitations, was revealed in the course of 1917. Soon after the February Revolution, representatives of the region's non-Russians established a Society of the Small Peoples of the Volga Region with the goal of “education of the small peoples on the basis of new civil life, proceeding from the national particularities of each group.”^[108] At the Society's first congress in May, non-Russian clerics and figures with a strong religious orientation, including Glezdenev, played prominent roles. While arguing for the eventual desirability of federalism, most of the almost five hundred delegates agreed that the small peoples “have not yet developed to the point of adopting a federal republic” and thus called for “the widest possible local self-government” within a democratic republic.^[109] Although unable to resolve the “agrarian question” due to its “extreme complexity,” the participants nonetheless adopted a set of principles broadly consonant with the platform of the Socialist Revolutionary party (above all the transfer of land to peasants). Regarding religious issues, the congress was able to make a series of more concrete and unanimously accepted resolutions. Seeking to confirm and deepen the trends that had been developing over the past fifteen years or so, they insisted on native-language liturgies and the creation of “pastoral inorodtsy courses” for the preparation of church servitors, and declared that any non-Russian teacher or sexton who had served at least ten years and had demonstrated a high degree of religious activism could be ordained and assigned to a parish without examination. But the congress also went quite a bit further:

For us inorodtsy, the original [korennye] inhabitants of the Great Russian land, there must be our own national bishops [narodnye episkopy], able to teach the word of truth in the native language of their flocks. Then Chuvash will not become Tatarized, Maris and Udmurts will not return to paganism, and Mordvins will not stagnate in their religious ignorance.

They also called for a new Metropolitan of the Kazan region, who would act “as the manager of the activities of the national inorodtsy bishops not as a boss, but as a first among equals.” Acknowledging their debt to Russian mentors, the representatives elected Bobrovnikov chairman of the meeting, designated that Ufa Bishop Andrei should become the Metropolitan, and called for the continuation of a state pension for Il'minskii's widow, Ekaterina Stepanova.^[110] Thus even as the delegates became willing to sanction more radical solutions to socio-economic problems, the Society sought to maintain Orthodoxy as a basis for the unification of the “small peoples” in a single organization for the advancement of their collective interests as inorodtsy.^[111] Notably, because their sense of particularity was by now well-developed, Kräshens apparently felt greater attraction to the Society than to concurrent Tatar associations, which were for the most part of explicitly Muslim orientation.
Yet centripetal forces were also at work. The Society had provided for the establishment of individual national sections under its auspices, and it appears that these increasingly became the primary bases for political mobilization. Chuvash held their own national congress by June, while an all-Russian Mari congress met in Kazan by July, followed by a second Mari congress in Birsk (Ufa province). By October even Kräshens had established their own national society. To be sure, these more particularistic organizations were by no means incompatible with the broader association envisioned by the Society of Small Peoples, and many figures, including Glezdenev, participated on both “levels.” Moreover, the general association of the national societies with the SRs, whose platform concerned peasant interests and did not include national self-determination, to some degree restrained aspirations for anything beyond cultural autonomy.^[112] But in general, like a certain a “nationalization” of politics observable among Muslims,^[113] the tendency over the course of 1917 was towards the narrowing of the functions of the Society of Small Peoples as each national organization took on more aspects of organized political life. By August the Society accordingly became merely a “Union” (with a new statute), a shift that underscored its increasingly loose character.
But not everyone was willing to allow the supra-ethnic project of the Society to die so easily. In the Kräshen-language version of War News in September, Glezdenev lamented that the second meeting of the Union of Small Peoples had not been well attended and made an impassioned argument for the notion, as the very title of his article suggested, that “in unity there is strength.”^[114] He maintained that the freedoms inaugurated by the February Revolution had in large measure either failed to mobilize the population (still paralyzed by the “timidity” that officials had long instilled in them) or produced an elemental, destructive outburst among segments of the “dark people.” This very circumstance made clear why those few “rational and thinking people” [akylly, isiable kesheliar] who had taken the middle ground between these two extremes were obligated to join forces and to articulate a vision for the future at meetings like the ones organized by the Society/Union. Glezdenev noted with admiration the efforts of individual peoples to mobilize politically, but added, “Then all of you, like children of one family, like relatives, come together and unify” [i.e., in a supra-ethnic sense]. The importance of unity was clear in light of upcoming elections to the Constituent Assembly and local organs of administration, where it was necessary to have “our own people” [üz kesheliarebez] to defend inorodtsy interests. Yet in keeping with Glezdenev's earlier outlooks, these aspirations were directed against neither Russia nor Russians: “We small peoples are the children of Great Russia,” he proclaimed, and “[o]ur good affairs will bring very great support to Great Russia, our developed motherland [tugan-üskian ilibez], and our Russian friends will also not be left without assistance.”^[115]
Unfortunately for Glezdenev, the climate in Russia, as well as the bases for self-identification and political mobilization, were changing. Collective affiliations were increasingly construed in specifically ethnic national terms. The October Revolution only accelerated this process, since the Bolsheviks' acceptance of the principle of federalism (national self-determination on a territorial basis) as a means of garnishing popular support induced non-Russian populations to articulate their interests in a national, as opposed to regional, religious, or supra-ethnic idiom. Indeed, as Yuri Slezkine has documented, the early years of Soviet practice generated “a scramble for national status and ethnoterritorial recognition.”^[116] In this context, the supra-ethnic religious nationalism that had emerged in the Viatka Inorodtsy Mission could hardly fare well.

Conclusion

For many inorodtsy, wedged between the Orthodox Russian and Muslim Tatar worlds, the promotion of Orthodoxy in an indigenous register offered the best way to achieve simultaneously enlightenment and the preservation of native particularity. Orthodoxy also allowed representatives of different non-Russian ethnicities to unify in order to have more weight than they might otherwise have had. Moreover, the emerging religious intelligentsia gained the opportunity to become a new social elite, empowered by their education and knowledge of Russian to speak on behalf of their own ethnic communities and for inorodtsy as a whole. Much like the Greek Catholic clergy in Austrian Galicia, they were also now well-positioned to transmit to the villages ideas of ethnic consciousness.^[117] From this perspective, conversion offered not just spiritual salvation, but also new possibilities for status, upward mobility, autonomy, and expression. What remains unclear is the extent to which this emerging elite actually articulated the aspirations of rank-and-file inorodtsy, or whether their articulations resonated at all with those people.
Our account here suggests the need to problematize the very notion of assimilation and its relation to conversion. It may be that in the longer term the “spiritual obrusenie” about which the Viatka missionaries spoke would indeed have led eventually to “external obrusenie,” and that in fact there was little to negotiate in the process of assimilation. But there are grounds for doubting this proposition. In a recent work on faith and modernity, Gauri Viswanathan has questioned the proposition that conversion necessarily represents a mode of assimilation to a predetermined reality, identity, or system of thought, arguing instead that “conversion is a dynamic process that creates the ideal system to which the convert aspires.” Assimilation “may be accompanied by critique of the very culture with which religious affiliation is sought,” and thus conversion opens up the possibility for “multiple affiliations.” From this perspective, “the blurring between objects to which the convert assimilates and those he (or she) challenges – with a free crossover between assent and dissent – is precisely the source of the power of conversion.”^[118] In short, conversion is potentially far less restricting and deterministic than one may be inclined to suppose.
The case of the Viatka missionaries provides much empirical support for these contentions. While some inorodtsy accepted Orthodoxy in ways consonant with the expectations of imperial officials, others clearly placed their conversion in the service of rather different objectives. The emerging non-Russian religious intelligentsia refused to subordinate the goal of Orthodox enlightenment of their communities to the larger project of Russification, and in promoting non-Russian ethnicities and languages in the spirit of Orthodoxy, they contributed to a growing – though never complete – separation of Orthodoxy and Russianness. Moreover, by censuring the Russian peasantry that represented inorodtsy's supposed model in the matter of obrusenie, they provided a substantial critique of the culture with which they sought religious affiliation. In the dynamic situation in Russia after 1905, inorodtsy were able to engage in this critique openly and to achieve substantial success in the promotion of non-Russian clergy. In short, conversion had the potential to empower small peoples who otherwise remained marginalized in the Russian imperial order.