19. Confessionalization in a Multi-ethnic Empire
Although the Russian empire had contained non-Christian faiths since at least the
conquest of Kazan, the eighteenth century presented the regime with multi-
religiosity multiplied. New confessions were added with expansion westward and
into the steppe—Lutherans, Catholics, Baptists, Jews, and more. As always, Russia’s
policy was to give other religions the institutional autonomy to administer and
police their communities at the local level, hoping in that way to prevent inter-ethnic
or inter-confessional conflict. Each community was required to deal directly with
the tsar’s courts for the criminal law, and encouraged to use them in lieu of local
courts where it suited litigants.
Official policy should not be confused with true“religious toleration.”The issue
was rarely even addressed by church ideologues through the eighteenth century; they
continued to have little patience with any deviations within Orthodoxy (which they
labeled heresy). Orthodoxy remained the state religion and the presence of different
faiths in the empire a reality to be reckoned with, not a situation to be desired. As
Gary Hamburg has noted, the vaunted religious toleration of Catherine II’sInstruc-
tionwas really quite measured, shaped both by Montesquieu’s concept of cultural
difference and a clear assertion of the primacy of Christianity:“In so vast an empire
which extends its dominion over such a variety of people, the prohibiting, or not
tolerating their respective religions would be an evil very detrimental to the peace
and security of its subjects. And truly, there is no other method than a wise toleration
of such other religions as are not repugnant to our own Orthodox faith and policy,
by which all these wandering sheep may be reconducted to the trueflock of the
faithful.”In other words, Catherine understood theoretically that different cultures
merit the“laws”and practices that by nature are“best suited”to them, but holds up
Orthodox Christianity as the moral foundation of her realm. That is a theme she
strikes repeatedly through theInstruction. In practice, she proceeded therefore to
develop what became the modern empire’s“confessional”policy of regularizing
relations with each major faith, often restricting and limiting faiths in the course of
defining their privileges.
Enlightenment thought did, however, encourage Russian educated society to
accept religious diversity, grounded in a universalist interest in knowledge of all
mankind and human differences. Patriotic sermons of Enlightened bishops in time
of war in her reign, for example, did not label Catholic and Protestant European rivals
in religious terms as heretics; rather, these bishops fostered an ecumenical attitude,
preaching on just and unjust wars, rather than religious hostility. Very late in the
eighteenth century a few Russian writers, influenced by French free-thinking and