It was only gradually from the eighteenth century that this religious base of tsarist power was replaced by a secular one. Peter the Great sought to reform the relations between Church and state on Western absolutist lines. In an effort to subordinate it to the state, the Church’s administration was transferred from the patriarchate to the Holy Synod, a body of laymen and clergy appointed by the Tsar. By the nineteenth century its secular representative, the Procurator-General, had in effect attained the status of minister for ecclesiastical affairs with control of episcopal appointments, religious education and most of the Church’s finances, although not of questions of theological dogma. The Holy Synod remained, for the most part, a faithful tool in the hands of the Tsar. It was in the Church’s interests not to rock the boat: during the latter half of the eighteenth century it had lost much of its land to the state and it now relied on it for funding to support 100,000 parish clergy and their families.fn4 Still, it would be wrong to portray the Church as a submissive organ of the state. The tsarist system relied on the Church just as much as the Church relied on it: theirs was a mutual dependence. In a vast peasant country like Russia, where most of the population was illiterate, the Church was an essential propaganda weapon and a means of social control.35
The priests were called upon to denounce from the pulpit all forms of dissent and opposition to the Tsar, and to inform the police about subversive elements within their parish, even if they had obtained the information through the confessional. They were burdened with petty administrative duties: helping the police to control vagrants; reading out imperial manifestos and decrees; providing the authorities with statistics on births, deaths and marriages registered in parish books, and so on. Through 41,000 parish schools the Orthodox clergy were also expected to teach the peasant children to show loyalty, deference and obedience not just to the Tsar and his officials but also to their elders and betters. Here is a section of the basic school catechism prepared by the Holy Synod:
Q. How should we show our respect for the Tsar?
A. 1. We should feel complete loyalty to the Tsar and be prepared to lay down our lives for him. 2. We should without objection fulfil his commands and be obedient to the authorities appointed by him. 3. We should pray for his health and salvation, and also for that of all the Ruling House.
Q. What should we think of those who violate their duty toward their Sovereign?
A. They are guilty not only before the Sovereign, but also before God. The Word of God says, ‘Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God.’ (Rom. 13: 2)36
For its part the Church was given a pre-eminent position in the moral order of the old regime. It alone was allowed to proselytize and do missionary work in the Empire. The regime’s policies of Russification helped to promote the Orthodox cause: in Poland and the Baltic, for example, 40,000 Catholics and Lutherans were converted to the Orthodox Church, albeit only nominally, during the reign of Alexander III. The Church applied a wide range of legal pressures against the dissident religious sects, especially the Old Believers.fn5 Until 1905, it remained an offence for anyone in the Orthodox Church to convert from it to another faith or to publish attacks on it. All books on religion and philosophy had to pass through the Church’s censors. There was, moreover, a whole range of moral and social issues where the Church’s influence remained dominant and sometimes even took precedence over the secular authorities. Cases of adultery, incest, bestiality and blasphemy were tried in the Church’s courts. Convictions resulted in the application of exclusively religious, not to say medieval, punishments, such as penance and incarceration in a monastery, since the state left such questions in the Church’s hands and abstained from formulating its own punishments. Over divorce, too, the Church’s influence remained dominant. The only way to attain a divorce was on the grounds of adultery through the ecclesiastical courts, which was a difficult and often painful process. Attempts to liberalize the divorce laws, and to shift the whole issue to the criminal courts, were successfully blocked in the late nineteenth century by a Church which was becoming more doctrinaire on matters of private sexuality and which, in upholding the old patriarchal order, forged a natural alliance with the last two tsars in their struggle against the modern liberal world. In short, late imperial Russia was still very much an Orthodox state.37
But was it still holy? That was the question that worried the leaders of the Church. And it was from this concern that many of the more liberal Orthodox clergy called for a reform in Church–state relations during the last decades of the old regime. After 1917 there were many shell-shocked Christians — Brusilov was a typical example — who argued that the revolution had been caused by the decline of the Church’s influence. This of course was a simplistic view. Yet there is no doubt that the social revolution was closely connected with the secularization of society, and to a large extent dependent on it.
Urbanization was the root cause. The growth of the cities far outstripped the pace of church-building in them, with the result that millions of workers, having been uprooted from the village with its church, were consigned to live in a state of Godlessness. The industrial suburb of Orekhovo-Zuevo, just outside Moscow, for example, had only one church for 40,000 residents at the turn of the century. Iuzovka, the mining capital of the Donbass, today called Donetsk, had only two for 20,000. But it was not just a question of bricks. The Church also failed to find an urban mission, to address the new problems of city life in the way that, for example, Methodism had done during the British industrial revolution. The Orthodox clergy proved incapable of creating a popular religion for the world of factories and tenements. Those who tried, such as Father Gapon, the radical preacher of St Petersburg who led the workers’ march to the Winter Palace in January 1905, were soon disavowed by the Church’s conservative leaders, who would have nothing to do with religiously inspired calls for social reform.38
The experience of urbanization was an added pressure towards secularization. Young peasants who migrated to the cities left behind them the old oral culture of the village, in which the priests and peasant elders were dominant, and joined an urban culture where the written word was dominant and where the Church was forced to compete with the new socialist ideologies. One peasant who made this leap was Semen Kanatchikov during his progress through the school of industry and into the ranks of the Bolsheviks. In his memoirs he recalled how his apostasy was slowly nurtured in the 1890s when he left his native village for Moscow and went to work in a machine-building factory where socialists often agitated. To begin with, he was somewhat afraid of these ‘students’ because ‘they didn’t believe in God and might be able to shake my faith as well, which could have resulted in eternal hellish torments in the next world’. But he also admired them ‘because they were so free, so independent, so well informed about everything, and because there was nobody and nothing on earth that they feared’. As the country boy grew in confidence and sought to emulate their individualism, so he became more influenced by them. Stories of corrupt priests and ‘miracles’-cum-frauds began to shake ‘the moral foundations with which I had lived and grown up’. One young worker ‘proved’ to him that God had not created man by showing that, if one filled a box with earth and kept it warm, worms and insects would eventually appear in it. This sort of vulgarized pre-Darwinian science, which was widely found in the leftwing pamphlets of that time, had a tremendous impact on young workers like Kanatchikov. ‘Now my emancipation from my old prejudices moved forward at an accelerated tempo,’ he later wrote. ‘I stopped going to the priest for “confession”, no longer attended church, and began to eat “forbidden” food during Lenten fast days. However, for a long time to come I didn’t abandon the habit of crossing myself, especially when I returned to the village for holidays.’39