Russia under the Old regime

THE CHURCH AS SERVANT OF THE STATE

or included in the tax-paying estate. The principle was not strictly enforced, however, in the eighteenth century, for want of the required personnel. It was only in the 1860s that regular lists of the clergy were drawn up, and the state made certain that the number of paid clergymen corresponded to the number of active parishes. Catherine 11 took another step towards the full integration of the clergy into the state bureaucracy in the 1790s when she ordered the boundaries of bishoprics to be aligned with those of the provincial administration, to make it easier for the governors to control the church. As a result of all these measures, the Russian clergy was transformed in the eighteenth century into something very close to chinovniki.

The Orthodox church might have been able to improve its fortunes had it been able to command the loyalty of the population. This, however, it lacked. Peasants with a more than perfunctory concern for religion gravitated towards the Old Believers and Sectarians. The educated classes either had no interest in the church or felt themselves drawn to foreign religions, especially those of a secular (ideological) kind, in which history served as a surrogate for God. The Orthodox church never found a common language with the educated because its conservative outlook made it pronouncedly anti-intellectual. Following the medieval Russian precept, 'all evil comes from opinions', it showed little interest even in its own theology to which it resorted mainly when compelled to defend itself from heretics or foreigners. It met all attempts to revitalize it with instinctive suspicion which turned into hostility, sometimes accompanied by denunciation to the authorities and excommunication, whenever it felt that independent judgement was being brought to bear on its dogmas or practices. One by one, it pushed away from itself the country's finest religious minds: the Slavophiles, Vladimir Solovev, Leo Tolstoy and the laymen gathered in the early 1900s around the Religious Philosophical Society. It also showed little interest in educating its flock. The Russian Orthodox church first began to involve itself in elementary schooling on any scale only in the 1860s, and then on orders of the state which was becoming alarmed over the influence of intellectuals on the masses.

It would be absurd to deny that in the imperial era many Russians, educated and illiterate alike, sought and found solace in the church, or that even among a clergy so subservient to the state there were individuals of the highest moral and intellectual calibre. Even in its deformed shape, the Russian church offered an escape from life's troubles. But viewed as a whole the church was not a popular institution during the imperial period, and what popularity it had it steadily lost. The clergy now became very much isolated from society, especially from the well-to-do and educated. In Kotoshikhin's time, in the mid-seventeenth