THE BEGINNINGS 5century Russia and the neglect the Church was suffering at the hands
of the government. Peter the Great's religious policy had made of the
Church a handmaid of the state, the state department for religious
affairs.^1 Peter wished to see the clergy's educational facilities used
for the benefit of the state, hence his endeavors to attract the more
able seminary students into government service, leaving the mediocre
to care for the souls. Although the Reformer's successors were not as
energetic and consistent in pursuing this policy, they were not overly
enthusiastic about promoting the Church either, as they shared the
anti-clerical scepticism of the Enlightenment. Finally, Catherine II
deprived the Church of its last independent economic support by
secularizing its land holdings. Under these conditions, the Church had
great difficulty in maintaining adequate educational facilities for its
future members.
The secularization of ecclesiastical property forced the state to take
over the financial burden of the Church's activities, including the
schools. The government set the budget for the Church schools every
year. But that budget was ridiculously small, even allowing for the
greater purchase value of money at the time. For instance, between
1764 and 1796 the total budget for all episcopal seminaries and other
religious schools in Russia varied between 38,000 and 70,000 rubles a
year. In 1797, thanks to the generosity of Paul I, the budget was fixed
at 180,000 rubles. What this meant in terms of the resources of an
individual school appears from the 1797 budget of the seminary of
Vladimir, Speransky's school: with a student body of 1,200 students,
the seminary received 8,000 rubles for all its expenses. 2 Little wonder
that the physical facilities of the schools were deplorable, that the
teachers received such low wages that the better ones preferred to go
into private tutoring or government service. Descriptions of the
provincial seminaries in the 18th century, and even down into the 19th
if we are to judge by N. G. Pomialovskii's Sketches of the Bursa, read
like the accounts of the English poorhouses in Charles Dickens' times.
The buildings, dirty and in disrepair, remained practically unheated
throughout the long and harsh Russian winter months, and the poor
students huddled around embering stoves, wrapped in ,all their miserable
clothes, in a vain attempt at keeping one another warm. The food was
1 On the other hand - and probably as a reaction to the subordinate role of
the official Church - the second half of the 18th century witnessed a remarkable
revival of religious life and thought, both monastic and secular. See: G. Florovskii,
Puti russkogo bogosloviia; V. V. Zen'kovskii, Istoriia russkoi filosofii, vol. I, (Parizh
1948), part I, ch. 2; G. P. Fedotov (ed.), A Treasury of Russian Spirituality, N. Y.,
1948, chapters on St. Tychon and St. Seraphim (pp. 182-279).
2 Titlinov, Dukhovnye shkoly v XIX st., p. 14-15.