Masonry (Nikolai Novikov, Alexander Radishchev, Prince M. M. Shcherbatov,
N. M. Karamzin), even argued in favor of true toleration of belief. Both Peter III
and Catherine II in the early 1760s ended some policies of religious discrimination
and conversion, and religious minorities including Old Believers and Jews responded
to the change in emphasis by submitting cahiers to the 1767 Legislative Commission
asking for affirmation of rights (liturgical and social) based on religion. Enlighten-
ment thinking helped to shape a more defined“confessional”policy for empire that
considered all formal religious confessions a force for political stability if drawn into
the administrative oversight of the state and controlled in ways beneficial to the state.
Such a confessional policy treated each confession differently within an over-
arching structure of administrative regularity. The state continued to treat deviance
from Orthodoxy (the Old Belief, the Uniate faith) harshly, as discussed in
Chapter 20. Lutherans in the Baltics were respected because Russian officials
admired the administrative order and economic progress of these German border-
lands. But other faiths posed some international anxieties. For example, the Russian
state distrusted Catholicism’s international allegiance to the Pope and potential
loyalties to European Catholic states. The same anxieties were all the more tangible
with Islam (fear of the potential of Muslim subjects to ally together or with other
Muslim powers, Ottomans, Crimeans, Kazakhs, Nogais, etc.) and Buddhists on the
eastern steppe frontier with Mongolia and China. Smaller Christian groups, such as
Greeks, Armenians, and Baptists, raised fewer concerns. All were drawn into a more
bureaucratic relationship with the state over the century.
ISLAM
Islam was thefirst major religion“of the book”that Russia brought into the empire.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the Russian empire expanded into an arc of
nomads and native tribes from the Black Sea steppe to Siberia, many of whom had
been Sunni Muslim since the time of the Mongol empire or earlier. Surrounding
them to the south were Islamic powers—the Ottoman empire and Crimean
khanate (Sunni) and Safavid Iran (Shi’ite). Fearing Muslims’potential to ally
among themselves, the empire approached its Islamic subjects with great self-
consciousness, wielding policies that varied from privilege to coercion.
The grand princes of Moscow integrated Muslim peoples of the Middle Volga
politically and as“service Tatars”into their armies from the late fourteenth century
(the Mishars or Meshcheriaki); in thefifteenth century they created the Kasimov
khanate (1452 till 1681) to support Chinggisid princes contesting for the Kazan
throne. There, on the Oka River near Riazan’, mosques and Islamic lifeflourished.
With the conquest of Kazan in 1552, as noted in Chapter 3, Russia cleared
Muslim residents and destroyed mosques in the city, but not in the suburbs.
Around Kazan a vibrant Muslim community remained where Russia maintained
Tatar and Muslim elites, religious courts, and local institutions. Tatar elites
ambitious to rise in Russian service converted to Orthodoxy, but many service
Tatars did not; the mass of the population was not forced to convert. From the late
Confessionalization in a Multi-ethnic Empire 397