State and Orthodox Church cracked down on those they regarded as Orthodox
dissenters (Uniates, Old Believers, sectarians).
As for non-Orthodox confessions, the state consolidated offices that had prolif-
erated since Catherine’s time in the Synod, the Ministry of the Interior, and in
gubernii into the Department (with many sections) of Religious Affairs in the
Ministry of Interior. The state declared that no one should be without confession
and from the 1830s onward embarked on top-down confessionalization, strength-
ening the institutional structures of the major faiths and establishing conformity
around“orthodoxy”within each faith—Islam, Buddhism, the Protestant faiths,
Catholicism. It created the Evangelical-Lutheran Charter for the Protestants, giving
preference to Lutheranism, in 1832; it affirmed the Orenburg Spiritual Assembly’s
authority in Muslim religious disputes, reining in rival schools, for example, of
Hanafiand Sufilaw; it created a Rabbinical Commission on the model of the
Orenburg Assembly for religious disputes in Judaism in 1848; it created a central-
ized apparatus for Buddhist temples and lamas in Eastern Siberia in 1853. It
imposed more civil duties (maintenance of parish registers, oversight of recruit-
ment, etc.) on local clergy of all confessions. All this occurred after the early modern
period, but already by 1801 these trends were under way.
*****
On the concept of confessionalization, see Alfons Brüning,“Confessionalization in the
SlaviaOrthodoxa (Belorussia, Ukraine, Russia)? Potential and Limits of a Western
Historiographical Concept,”in Thomas S. Bremer, ed.,Religion and the Conceptual
Boundary in Central and Eastern Europe: Encounters of Faiths(Houndmills: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008), 66–97. For nineteenth-century religious policy, see Robert Crews,
“Empire and the Confessional State: Islam and Religious Policies in Nineteenth-Century
Russia,”American Historical Review108 (2003): 50–83 and Paul W. Werth,The Tsar’s
Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia(Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014).
Catherine II’s Instruction of 1767 on religion: Paul Dukes,Russia under Catherine the
Great, 2 vols. (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1977), 2: 104, 43 (arts.
494 – 5, 5).
On conversion and Orthodoxy: Paul Bushkovitch,“Orthodoxy and Islam in Russia
988 – 1725,”Forschungen zur osteuropaïschen Geschichte76 (2010): 117–43; Ricarda
Vulpius,“The Empire’s Civilizing Mission in the Eighteenth Century: A Comparative
Perspective,”in Tomohiko Uyama, ed.,Asiatic Russia: Imperial Power in Regional and
International Contexts (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 13–31; Gary
M. Hamburg,“Religious Toleration in Russian Thought, 1520–1825,”Kritika: Explor-
ations in Russian and Eurasian History13 (2012): 515–59. For Russian readers,
V. M. Kabuzan’s book is valuable:Rasprostranenie pravoslaviia i drugikh konfessii v Rossii
v XVIII–nachale XX V.: 1719–1917 gg.(Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 2008).
On Lutheranism: Gregory L. Freeze,“Lutheranism in Russia,”in Peer Schmidt and Hans
Medick, eds.,Luther zwischen den Kulturen: Zeitgenossenschaft—Weltwirkung(Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 297–317.
On Islam, see Robert D. Crews,For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and
Central Asia(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); Barbara Kellner-
Heinkele,“Crimean Tatar and Nogay Scholars of the 18th Century,”in Michael408 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801