Russia under the Old regime

THE CHURCH AS SERVANT OF THE STATE

that the monasteries were to forward to the Treasury all their revenues in return for fixed salaries.

Peter's church policies culminated in a general charter called Ecclesiastical Regulation {Dukhovnyi Reglament), prepared under Peter's personal supervision and issued in 1721. It provided in the minutest detail for the operations of the parish and monastic clergy, laying down what they could and could not do, and even what they were required to do. The Regulation was a veritable bureaucratic constitution of the Russian church. Among its most important provisions was the formal abolition of the office of the Patriarch, vacant since 1700, and its replacement with a bureaucratic institution called initially Ecclesiastical College and later the Most Holy All-Ruling Synod. The Holy Synod was nothing more nor less than a ministry of religious affairs; its head, called Chief Procurator, need not have been a cleric and indeed in the course of the eighteenth century he was usually a military man. Until 1917, the Synod assumed full responsibility for administering the Russian church. With its establishment, the Russian church lost its distinct institutional existence and merged formally with the state apparatus.

The extent to which the church became politicized under Peter can be seen from some of the obligations which the Regulation imposed on the clergy. Ordained priests were required to take an oath in which they pledged to 'defend unsparingly all the powers, rights and prerogatives belonging to the High Autocracy of His Majesty' and his successors. Members of the Spiritual College (Holy Synod) swore an oath in which the following words appear: 'I swear by Almighty God that I resolve, and am in duty bound, to be a faithful, good, and obedient slave [rab] and subject to my natural and true Tsar and Sovereign..,'13

Beyond this generalized promise, parish priests had to pledge they would denounce to the authorities any information prejudicial to the interests of the sovereign and his state which came their way even at confession:

If during confession someone discloses to the priest an unfulfilled but still intended criminal act, especially [one] of treason or rebellion against the Sovereign or the State, or an evil design against the honour or health of the Sovereign and the family of his Majesty... the confessor must not only not give him absolution and remission of his openly confessed sins... but must promptly report him at the prescribed places pursuant to the personal decree of His Imperial Majesty... in virtue of which, for words reflecting on the high honour of His Imperial Majesty and prejudicial to the State, such villains are commanded to be apprehended with all dispatch and brought to the designated places [i.e. the tsar's Privy Chancellery and the Preobrazhenskii Prikaz]."