Russia under the Old regime

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offices, and its properties whose inhabitants it taxed and judged. It was Peter who did away with this semi-autonomous status; he abolished the patriarchate, transformed its offices into branches of the secular administration, lifted its judiciary immunities, and, perhaps most importantly, confiscated its incomes. After Peter's reign, the Russian church became just another branch of the civil administration. The coup de grace was dealt a victim so drained of all vitality that it hardly twitched; there were no protests, only silent submission. No church in Christendom allowed itself to be secularized as graciously as the Russian.

Peter heartily disliked the Orthodox church, especially its Great Russian branch; he much preferred the Ukrainian and especially the Protestant clergy. It troubled him that by virtue of privileges granted them in the Dark Ages tens of thousands of clergymen escaped taxes and service obligations, and at the same time devoured a good portion of the country's wealth in the form of labour services and rents. To him they were a lot of parasites. His animus towards the church was exacerbated by its support of his son Alexis with whom he was on bad terms. He was thus predisposed to cut the Orthodox church down to size in any event. What made it urgent to do so were fiscal considerations, so decisive in all of his reforms. On his accession the church remained rich, notwithstanding repeated injunctions against its making additional acquisitions of land. The custom of making provision for the church in one's will remained strongly ingrained among the service class; indeed, the tsars themselves continued making generous gifts to their favourite monasteries after they had decreed such practices illegal for ordinary landlords. Because of the rapid expansion of Russia, the percentage of the nation's wealth owned by the clergy diminished, but in absolute numbers it remained formidable: at Peter's accession they controlled an estimated 750,000 peasants out of a total of 12-13 million.

Peter began as early as 1696 to tamper with the right of the parish and monastic clergy freely to dispose of the incomes from church properties. Four years later, following the death of Patriarch Adrian, he decided to take advantage of the vacancy to abolish the whole separate church administration. Instead of appointing Adrian's successor, he selected a locum tenens, a learned but spineless Ukrainian divine. The actual authority over the church's properties and other worldly responsibilities he entrusted to a Monastery Prikaz, which he charged with administering, judging and taxing the inhabitants of ecclesiastical votchiny. Ecclesiastical properties were not actually secularized but they were incorporated to such an extent into the general administrative structure of the state that when it came, half a century later, secularization appeared a mere formality. After 1701 the principle was established -though like every other government policy it was irregularly enforced -