sixteenth century the state, not the Orthodox Church, was responsible for approv-
ing the construction of new mosques, which it did in pragmatic cultivation of stable
communities.
In thefirst half of the eighteenth century policy temporarily shifted with
forcible conversion campaigns of Muslims and pagans in the Middle Volga and
Siberia, as well as prosecution of Old Believers elsewhere. There are several
interpretations of this break with Russia’s tradition of relative religious tolerance.
Paul Bushkovitch argues that these virulent prosecutions were influenced by the
Ukrainian background of most of the bishops. Shaped by Ukrainian Orthodoxy’s
energetic defense against Protestantism and Catholic Counter-Reformation in the
seventeenth century, Ukrainian bishops in Russia approached conversion much
more aggressively than their native-born predecessors. Ricarda Vulpius introduces
two more perspectives: in the international arena Peter I and his successors Anna
Ioannovna and Elizabeth were nervous that Jesuit Catholic conversion efforts on
the Chinese border would tilt that area towards China, while domestically the
Petrine project of Europeanization demanded that Russia forcibly bring its
animist, and to a lesser extent, non-Orthodox populations into the fold of more
educated, civilized religious communities. One might also add pragmatically that
economic and political motives cannot be denied, as forcible conversion was
directed at areas where Russian in-migration and political control was intensify-
ing, as in the Middle Volga and around the oldest Siberian fortresses. All these
factors undoubtedly played their role.
From the 1680s through thefirst quarter of the eighteenth century two waves of
conversion hit the Middle Volga, Bashkiria, and the Kalmyks, thefirst coercive and
forcible, the second in the 1720s using education and preaching. Landholders were
forced to convert or were dispossessed and demoted into peasant status. At the same
time, in Siberia thousands of animists (Ostiaks/Khanty, Voguly/Mansi) and Tatar
Muslims were forcibly baptized; a particularly aggressive missionary archbishop in
Tobolsk in the 1720s forcibly converted non-Muslim and Muslim natives and
destroyed twenty-five mosques in Tobolsk alone, to the protests of the Siberian
Chancery. Meanwhile, in the southern Urals Bashkir uprisings (1681–3, 1704–11)
held off the most coercive measures. Even so, conversion“proceeded slowly,”in
Michael Khodarkovsky’s observation, and was generally superficial.
The Orthodox Church was ineffective in conversion; it did not develop mis-
sionary societies of clerics or monks, as Catholic, Protestants, and Buddhists did. It
did not put resources into training priests in native languages or into pietistic or
liturgical texts or establishing schools, monasteries, or parishes. Conversion was
always a joint state–Church affair, usually carried out with material incentives or
force, not by the hard work of teaching and integrating the converts into the faith.
Nevertheless, the state pushed conversion again in the 1740s in these same areas to
advance regional assimilation. During and after a major Bashkir revolt (1735–40)
in which the Russian army killed some 12–14 percent of the Bashkir population
and destroyed many mosques, the state moved aggressively. In 1740 it created a
Commission for Conversion for the Middle and lower Volga and Urals, aimed
specifically at animists and Muslims. Conversion was enticed by material incentives
398 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801