The Russian Revolution полностью

The Russian regime was not “Caesaropapist,” in the sense of combining secular and spiritual authority, for the Tsar had no say in matters of dogma or ritual: his power was confined to the administration of the Church. Nevertheless, it is true that since the time of Peter the Great, the Russian Orthodox Church was to an extreme degree dependent on the state. By abolishing the Patriarchate and confiscating Church properties (a task completed by Catherine II) Peter made the Church beholden to the monarchy administratively as well as financially. The highest body regulating its affairs, the Holy Synod, was since Peter’s day chaired by a secular person, often a retired general, who functioned as a de facto Minister of Religion. The administrative structure of the Church paralleled that of the civil administration, in that the boundaries of the dioceses coincided with those of the provinces (gubernii). As was true of the bureaucracy, clergymen could be promoted, in this case from bishop to archbishop and then to metropolitan, without regard to the responsibilities entrusted to them, clerical title being treated like chin—that is, as a personal distinction rather than as an attribute of office.⁹³ The clergy were duty-bound to report to the police any information of conspiracies against the Emperor or the government, including that obtained during confession. They also had to denounce the appearance of suspicious strangers in their parishes.

The Orthodox Church was financially dependent on the government for salaries and subsidies, but derived most of its revenues independently.⁹⁴ All bishops and higher ecclesiastical dignitaries received generous salaries as well as living allowances, which they supplemented with incomes from Church and monastic properties. The parish clergy, too, was on state pay. In 1900, state appropriations to the Church amounted to 23 million rubles. This sum provided approximately one-fifth of the Church’s income—a respectable amount but hardly an explanation why the clergy stood by the monarchy in the 1905 Revolution.⁹⁵

The principal political responsibility of the Church was indoctrination. The Imperial Government eschewed in schools and the military establishment anything resembling national or ideological propaganda from fear that arguments used to justify the status quo would invite counterarguments. The fact that the country was a multinational empire also inhibited appeals to nationalism. The government preferred to act as if the existing political and social arrangement were a given. Only religious indoctrination was permitted, and that was the function the Orthodox clergy, especially in the classroom.

The Orthodox Church became first heavily engaged in popular education in the 1880s, after a decade of revolutionary turmoil. To counteract the influence of both radical propagandists and secular teachers on the rural population, the government charged the Church with operating a network of primary schools. At the turn of the century, slightly more than one-half of the grade schools in the Empire, with approximately one-third of the pupils, were under Church supervision.⁹⁶ Heavy stress was placed on ethics as well as language training (Church Slavonic and Russian). Their teachers, however, were so miserably paid compared with those employed by secular schools that they had difficulty competing and kept losing pupils to their rivals.

Students of the Orthodox faith in all primary and secondary schools were required to take courses in religion, usually taught by clergymen. (Pupils of other faiths had the option of having religion taught by their own teachers.) The instruction stressed, along with moral precepts, loyalty to and respect for the Tsar. These feeble efforts were the best that the Imperial Government had to offer in the realm of political indoctrination.

In times of internal unrest, the Church played its part in support of law and order through sermons and publications. The Church depicted the Tsar as the vicar of God and condemned disobedience to him as a sin. In this connection, the Orthodox Church frequently resorted to anti-Semitic appeals. The most anti-Semitic of all the Christian churches, it played a major part in excluding Jews from Russia prior to the partitions of Poland in the eighteenth century and keeping them confined to the provinces of what had been Poland (the “Pale of Settlement”) afterward. The clergy blamed Jews for the crucifixion of Christ, and without endorsing pogroms, did not condemn them either. In 1914, the Synod authorized the construction of a church to commemorate the victim of Beilis’s alleged “ritual murder.”⁹⁷ In 1905 and after, Orthodox publications placed on Jews responsibility for the revolutionary ferment, accusing them of conspiring to destroy Christianity and take over the world.

The last decade of the Imperial regime saw developments within the Church that from the government’s point of view augured ill for the future.