way theyfit Norman Cohn’s model of millenarianism; he connects anti-rational,
messianic religious movements with social distress. By offering hope in the coming
of the messiah and a kinetic form of worship accessible to all, such beliefs often
attract the poor, the outsider, and in this case the rural Jew, persecuted in the
warfare of the seventeenth century and suffering disproportionately from the
economic stagnation the Commonwealth suffered in the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries.
When Poland-Lithuania’s Jews, Rabbinical and Hasidic, entered the Russian
empire in the second and third partitions, Russia began to develop its confessional
policy towards the Jews more systematically and harshly. A double poll tax on Jews
was instituted in 1794 and a full policy was enunciated in the Statute of 1804, as
discussed in Chapter 5. It defined a Pale of Settlement that restricted Jewish
mobility geographically, socially, and economically. It maintained the kahal struc-
ture, rather than integrating Jews into municipal self-government as had been the
trend of the 1775 administrative reforms. The empire made no effort to eliminate
Hasidism as a sect, but recognized it, allowing Hasidic communities to establish
their own places of worship. But the Statute unrealistically expected Hasids to
participate in local kahals dominated by Rabbinical Jews. The statute of 1804
defined a place for the Jews in the empire that was perhaps more segregated than for
any other group.
CONFESSIONALIZATION ACROSS EMPIRE
Controlling subject religions was a prime challenge of empire. Imperial rulers need
a dominant institutional religion, and social control over other religious commu-
nities. Orthodoxy was always the dominant religion of the Russian empire, consti-
tuting 85 percent of the population in 1719 and about 72 percent in 1795;
including Catholics and other Christian groups, about 92 percent of the empire
was Christian by 1795. Other groups were represented in small percentages—
Muslims about 5 percent, Jews about 2 percent. Nevertheless, Russians tended to
be less literate than many other groups in the empire: Lutherans, Catholics,
Muslims, and Lamaists all had better school systems in the eighteenth century.
Orthodoxy had been less successful in confessionalization, which was intimately
connected with literacy. Confessionalization’s efforts to standardize religious prac-
tice relied heavily on pietistic education based on reading of texts that had been
revised to exemplify the faith.
We have seen many efforts at confessionalization in the Russian empire and
lands that it acquired. Catholicism and Lutheranism had undergone such religious
and social disciplining in the sixteenth century in the Polish-Lithuanian Common-
wealth. Various Orthodox communities joined in thereafter: the Uniate reform of
1596; the revitalization of Ukrainian Orthodoxy, particularly led by Metropolitan
Peter Mohyla in the mid-seventeenth century; Nikon’s reforms. In Chapter 20 we
encounter Peter I’s religious reorganization of Orthodoxy; the Vyg fathers and
communities of Pomorians and Theodosians creating a textual corpus for the Old
406 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801