Handmaiden of the State? The Church in Imperial Russia Reconsidered (original) (raw)
1985, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History
Handmaiden of the State ? The Church in Imperial Russia Reconsidered byG. L. FREEZE T he history of the Russian Orthodox Church, especially in the modern imperial period (1700-1917), has been a woefully neglected field of scholarly research. 1 That neglect antedates the collapse of the ancien regime in 1917, for pre-revolutionary historiography on the Church was neither abundant nor sophisticated; rarely did it produce more than myopic diocesan histories, fatuous accounts of the local seminary, or hagiographic paeans devoted to some prominent clergyman. 2 The reasons for this neglect of so fundamental an institution in 'Holy Rus' are many-restricted access to ecclesiastical archives, difficulties in publication because of vigilant censors, but above all the intelligentsia's indifference to an apparently moribund and state-controlled institution. Paradoxically enough, Catholic polemicists, Orthodox Slavophiles, anticlerical intellectuals and reform-minded clergy all concurred-from different motives, for different reasons-in believing that the Church had become a mere instrument of the secular state, and that this change derived from 'revolutionary' and 'Westernizing' reforms in the Church imposed by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century. 3 Postrevolutionary scholarship has been even less attentive to the Church, at least until very recently, and has tended to accept uncritically the