move to control the spread of Buddhism here and proselytize Orthodoxy more
aggressively.
Mention should be made, however, of Russian efforts to forcibly convert animist
peoples in western Siberia and eastern Siberia in the 1780s and 1790s, a time when
Russian in-migration was increasing. In the 1780s whole animist groups—the
Ostiaks/Khanty, Voguly/Mansi, and Iakuts—accepted Orthodoxy; in the 1790s
peoples on the far eastern Pacific borders (Aleuts, Kamchadaly, Iukagiri) did so.
Kabuzan estimates that animists’percentage of the population of Siberia declined
from about 30 percent to about 20 percent in the second half of the century.
LUTHERANISM
Protestant faiths accounted for about 5.5 percent of the empire’s population at the
end of the eighteenth century, and Lutheranism had the strongest presence among
them. From the sixteenth century German Lutherans were resident in many central
Russian towns (as mercenaries, engineers, merchants, and other specialists) and
were allowed religious freedom; they often inhabited their own neighborhoods and
in the mid-seventeenth century in Moscow were directed to live in the“German
suburb.”This became a thriving community with its own Lutheran church, urban
government, and courts and other public services. In 1702 Peter I specifically
Figure 19.1Local Buriat builders might be responsible for the Buddhist stupas and motifs
on the façade of this eighteenth-century Church of the Transfiguration in Posol’skoe,
Buriatiia. Photo: William Brumfield.
402 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801