THE CHURCH AS SERVANT OF THE STATE
that the monasteries were to forward to the Treasury all their revenues in return for fixed salaries.
Peter's church policies culminated in a general charter called Ecclesiastical Regulation {Dukhovnyi Reglament), prepared under Peter's personal supervision and issued in 1721. It provided in the minutest detail for the operations of the parish and monastic clergy, laying down what they could and could not do, and even what they were required to do. The Regulation was a veritable bureaucratic constitution of the Russian church. Among its most important provisions was the formal abolition of the office of the Patriarch, vacant since 1700, and its replacement with a bureaucratic institution called initially Ecclesiastical College and later the Most Holy All-Ruling Synod. The Holy Synod was nothing more nor less than a ministry of religious affairs; its head, called Chief Procurator, need not have been a cleric and indeed in the course of the eighteenth century he was usually a military man. Until 1917, the Synod assumed full responsibility for administering the Russian church. With its establishment, the Russian church lost its distinct institutional existence and merged formally with the state apparatus.
The extent to which the church became politicized under Peter can be seen from some of the obligations which the Regulation imposed on the clergy. Ordained priests were required to take an oath in which they pledged to 'defend unsparingly all the powers, rights and prerogatives belonging to the High Autocracy of His Majesty' and his successors. Members of the Spiritual College (Holy Synod) swore an oath in which the following words appear: 'I swear by Almighty God that I resolve, and am in duty bound, to be a faithful, good, and obedient slave [rab] and subject to my natural and true Tsar and Sovereign..,'13
Beyond this generalized promise, parish priests had to pledge they would denounce to the authorities any information prejudicial to the interests of the sovereign and his state which came their way even at confession:
If during confession someone discloses to the priest an unfulfilled but still intended criminal act, especially [one] of treason or rebellion against the Sovereign or the State, or an evil design against the honour or health of the Sovereign and the family of his Majesty... the confessor must not only not give him absolution and remission of his openly confessed sins... but must promptly report him at the prescribed places pursuant to the personal decree of His Imperial Majesty... in virtue of which, for words reflecting on the high honour of His Imperial Majesty and prejudicial to the State, such villains are commanded to be apprehended with all dispatch and brought to the designated places [i.e. the tsar's Privy Chancellery and the Preobrazhenskii Prikaz]."
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Subsequent to the Regulation, Russian priests regularly collaborated with the police. For example, towards the end of Peter's reign, when the government struggled to compile a national census preparatory to the imposition of the soul tax, the rural clergy were commanded to help in uncovering any evasions under the threat of 'merciless whipping' and exile to Siberia. In the nineteenth century, denunciation of political dissidents was considered a regular part of a priest's obligations. The striking feature of the Ecclesiastical Regulation is not only that it should have been issued but that it met with no resistance. Peter simply sent high prelates copies of the document with instructions to sign; they duly complied, even though it must have been evident they were sealing the fate of their church. There are on record no cases of active opposition to the Regulation such as had been common during the Schism when ritual had been at stake. All of which suggests that in the Russian church it was the magic element in religion that mattered the most; and since Peter could not care less about liturgy, sacraments or any of its other rituals, the church was content to go along with whatever else he wanted. Knowing this, one is not surprised to learn that the actual expropriation of church holdings also evoked no resistance. This was carried out in 1762 by Peter m who ordered all land belonging to churches and monasteries to be incorporated into state properties. Catherine 11 confirmed this ukaz two years later. At that time (1767) approximately one million peasants living on ecclesiastical lands were taken over by the state, and all the parish and black clergy placed on government salary. Of the several million rubles' annual income which the crown henceforth drew from secularized church properties it returned to the clergy only some 400,000, and kept the rest. Landless abbeys which brought the state no income were ordered to be shut down, with the consequence that the total number of monasteries in Russia decreased by more than half: of the 954 active in 1764, 569 were closed. Nor were all of those remaining allotted government funds; out of the 385 monasteries which survived secularization, only 161 were put on the government payroll, the remaining 224 had to fend for themselves. These measures too aroused no opposition. The secularization of ecclesiastical land - perhaps the most powerful single factor in the European Reformation - was in Russia carried out as calmly as if it were a mere book-keeping operation. Once the state had assumed responsibility for supporting the clergy, it had to make certain that its payrolls were not padded by pseudo-clerics or priests who, although properly ordained, performed no duties for want of a parish. The government now began to draft regular personnel lists {shtaty) for clerical appointments such as it had for its civil service. Peter 1 issued instructions that 'superfluous' priests - that is, those without a parish of their own - either be conscripted in the army
THE CHURCH AS SERVANT OF THE STATE
or included in the tax-paying estate. The principle was not strictly enforced, however, in the eighteenth century, for want of the required personnel. It was only in the 1860s that regular lists of the clergy were drawn up, and the state made certain that the number of paid clergymen corresponded to the number of active parishes. Catherine 11 took another step towards the full integration of the clergy into the state bureaucracy in the 1790s when she ordered the boundaries of bishoprics to be aligned with those of the provincial administration, to make it easier for the governors to control the church. As a result of all these measures, the Russian clergy was transformed in the eighteenth century into something very close to chinovniki.
The Orthodox church might have been able to improve its fortunes had it been able to command the loyalty of the population. This, however, it lacked. Peasants with a more than perfunctory concern for religion gravitated towards the Old Believers and Sectarians. The educated classes either had no interest in the church or felt themselves drawn to foreign religions, especially those of a secular (ideological) kind, in which history served as a surrogate for God. The Orthodox church never found a common language with the educated because its conservative outlook made it pronouncedly anti-intellectual. Following the medieval Russian precept, 'all evil comes from opinions', it showed little interest even in its own theology to which it resorted mainly when compelled to defend itself from heretics or foreigners. It met all attempts to revitalize it with instinctive suspicion which turned into hostility, sometimes accompanied by denunciation to the authorities and excommunication, whenever it felt that independent judgement was being brought to bear on its dogmas or practices. One by one, it pushed away from itself the country's finest religious minds: the Slavophiles, Vladimir Solovev, Leo Tolstoy and the laymen gathered in the early 1900s around the Religious Philosophical Society. It also showed little interest in educating its flock. The Russian Orthodox church first began to involve itself in elementary schooling on any scale only in the 1860s, and then on orders of the state which was becoming alarmed over the influence of intellectuals on the masses.