“CHRISTIANIZATION WITHOUT CONVERSION”
Afinal word might be said about the relationship of the Orthodox Church to
other religions in the Muscovite period. On the one hand, despite the state’s
colonial policy of“tolerating” difference (ethnic, religious, cultural, linguistic,
administrative), neither state nor Orthodoxy ever espoused a policy of“religious
toleration.”As Gary Hamburg has chronicled, Russian religious writers rarely
raised the issue well into the eighteenth century. A lively discourse on this theme
developed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ukraine in the face of Protestant
and Catholic conversion campaigns, but Muscovy faced no such direct challenge
to its status as established Church. When confronted with Christian freethinking,
Church and state had no compunction about labeling it as heresy, and in the
spirited polemics surrounding the Schism, neither side (Polotskii, Avvakum)
argued for toleration of religious belief and practice, but rather declared the
superiority of their own beliefs.
On the other hand, religious diversity characterized the empire through the
Muscovite period for two reasons. First, the Russian Orthodox Church itself,
drawing inspiration from the Byzantine Church that was its origin, practiced
what might be called a religious version of“politics of difference”when it came
to conversion. Paul Bushkovitch points out that, while modern scholars often take
the Catholic Church (particularly the post-Tridentine Counter-Reformation) as
normative, that modern norm was not what shaped Russian Orthodoxy’s attitude
towards other faiths. It followed Byzantium’s more pragmatic aversion to imposing
conversion on non-believers or trying to create confessional unity across the empire.
Examining church writings on Islam, Bushkovitch observed that the Russian
Church did not develop a vocabulary or tradition of holy war or crusades against
Muslims; its rhetoric against Islam was based on tropes aboutfighting for the faith.
Far more virulent were Byzantine writings against Judaism.
Second, state policy allowing colonial subjects to maintain their religions was
practical politics. Michael Khodarkovsky makes the opposite argument (that con-
version was“an integral part of the government’s policies”), but admits that
conversion efforts rarely succeeded and were generally balanced by pragmatic
tolerance, especially on the borderlands. When Moscow conquered Kazan, it seized
Muslim religious property and transformed the city center into Christian space; it
welcomed those who wanted to convert and gave them land, military roles and
status. But it did not forcibly convert en masse. Russia did the same in Siberia, an
impulse that Valerie Kivelson calls“Christianization without conversion”: they
seized lands and built churches to demonstrate the glory of the tsar’s Christian rule,
“Christianizing the land and landscape in ways that did not necessarily rely on
conversion of the pagan populations.”Conversions were often superficial and the
whole process was shaped by instrumentalist state policy: across the sensitive
borderlands, the state directed governors not to antagonize theiasak-paying natives
with abuse, corruption, or interference of the sort that conversion campaigns
represented. Through the seventeenth century Russian Orthodoxy was not a highly
262 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801