Abstract
Scholarship on confessional history—the history of religious institutions, practices, and interaction— has undergone profound change, especially in the last quarter century. Although bibliographical resources are woefully inadequate, the change has been enormous, reflecting all four dimensions of ―confessional history‖: (1) institutional religion (and its servitors); (2) believers; (3) ethno-confessional interrelations; and (4) the state‘s relationship to all of the foregoing. That massive accumulation, and of late more diversified and independent, makes possible a systematic analysis of the ―confessional factor‖ in ethnic issues and the state‘s response to them. It is essential, as all this literature demonstrates, to emphasize not only the diachronic (temporal) but also spatial (geographic) dimension, for the role of the religious factor varied sharply, not only for particular confessions, but also over time and space. The historiography has undergone a corresponding evolution, reflecting at once the dynamics and desiderata of Russian political history as well as the disciplinary evolution of scholarship on religion in the modern world. In the Russian case, this evolution falls into three main periods: pre-revolutionary, twentieth-century (Soviet), and post-Soviet, a periodization that applies for both Russian and foreign scholarship.