monasteries), primarily in western Belarus’and Volhynia. Only in Right Bank
Ukraine had it been generally eliminated. Declaring himself for freedom of con-
fession, Paul abrogated forcible conversion and restored several diocesan sees; many
Uniate parishes promptly re-emerged. A policy of tolerance for the Uniate confes-
sion endured until the 1830s, when Russia cracked down on many dissident
Orthodox groups—Old Believers, sects, and Uniates. By 1839 the remaining
Uniate monasteries, churches, clergy, and parishes in the lands of partitioned
Poland had been transferred to Russian Orthodoxy and the Uniate Church
remained alive (and thriving) only in western Ukrainian lands annexed in 1772
by Austria (where Uniates became referred to as Greek Catholic). From there, the
Uniate Church spread in emigration to North America and re-emerged in post-
Soviet Russia and Ukraine as well.
All in all, Russia faced a challenge of policing Orthodoxy through the eighteenth
century as the Old Belief spread and as Uniate parishioners were incorporated into
the empire. The Church’s loss of a monolithic image might have helped Russia’s
Europeanizing monarchs shift the empire’s rhetoric towards a more pragmatic
service state from one grounded in piety in this century of religious reform and
change.
*****
On Peter I’s reforms: James Cracraft,The Church Reform of Peter the Great(Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1971); Alexander V. Muller,The Spiritual Regulation of Peter
the Great(Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1872). On intellectual
and theological trends in Russian Orthodoxy: Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter,Religion and
Enlightenment in Catherinian Russia: The Teachings of Metropolitan Platon(DeKalb, Ill.:
Northern Illinois University Press, 2013); Gary Marker,“Between Enlightenment and
Orthodoxy: The Primers of Platon (Levshin) and the Ascent of Secular Russian in the
Late Eighteenth Century,”History of Education and Children’s Literature9 (2014): 71– 87
and his“Catechizing in the Diocese: The Place of Mary in Dimitrij Rostovskij’sQuestions
and Answers,”Russian Literature75 (2014): 391–413; Andrei V. Ivanov,“Reforming
Orthodoxy: The Russian Bishops and their Church, 1721–1801,”Ph.D. Dissertation,
Yale University, 2012.
Gregory Freeze has examined social and institutional change in Russian Orthodoxy in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries:The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth
Century(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977);“The Rechristianization of
Russia: The Church and Popular Religion, 1750–1850,”Studia Slavica Findlandensia 7
(Helsinki, 1990): 101–36;“Institutionalizing Piety: The Church and Popular Religion,
1750 – 1850,”in Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel, eds.,Imperial Russia: New Histories
for the Empire(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), 210–49;
“Handmaiden of the State? The Church in Imperial Russia Reconsidered,”Journal of
Ecclesiastical History36 (1985): 82–102; and“Russian Orthodoxy: Church, People and
Politics in Imperial Russia,”in D. C. B. Lieven, ed.,The Cambridge History of Russia, Vol.
2: Imperial Russia, 1689– 1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006),
284 – 305.
On Orthodox practice: Irina Paert,Spiritual Elders: Charisma and Tradition in Russian
Orthodoxy (De Kalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010); Robert L. Nichols,
“The Orthodox Elders (startsy) of Imperial Russia,”Modern Greek Studies YearbookMaintaining Orthodoxy 425