Gregory L Freeze

The bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church, like military and civil servants in late imperial Russia, underwent significant "aging," with the median age rising substantially as a result of greater life expectancy. In contrast to existing scholarship, which advances a political explanation for staffing in the episcopate (above all, the high rate of turnover and transfers), this study seeks to show that demography and the service structure were the key factors. Rather than rely on the politicized memoir literature, this analysis is based on the diary of the presiding member of the Synod, which focuses on the rationale and problems in staffing the episcopate. Significantly, the diocesan bishops were not only overaged but overtasked, finding it ever more difficult to perform traditional, let alone, additional roles. All this provides a new perspective on the Church's capacity to address the growing social and confessional challenges in late imperial Russia.

This study upends the conventional view about Konstantin Pobedonostsev’s power over the Russian Orthodox Church and instead emphasizes organizational demography—aging and service structure. Revisionist scholarship has shown that the Church significantly expanded its social mission, but emphasizes the barriers of state tutelage and, especially, the machinations of an all-powerful procurator. This essay suggests an alternative explanation: an over-aged, over-tasked, but under-funded episcopate found it difficult to perform traditional, let alone the massive list of new tasks. Appeals for state support had scant effect; the main exception was the parish school, which the regime encouraged for its own political purposes. Frustration with the state (more inclined to appease confessional foes than to aid the Church) explains why conservative prelates, not just liberal priests, gravitated toward opposition and rebellion during the last decade of the ancien regime.

The capital monograph by A.L. Beglov provides an exhaustive analysis of institutional development, discourse about the parish question, and various attempts and proposals to reform the Russian Orthodox parish. With this macrohistory of the parish available, researchers can now proceed to conduct microhistorical studies to study the parish question not from above but “from below,” thereby making is possible not only to understand dynamics at the local level but also to give agency to miriane and recognize their response to the “parish question.” This article addresses the problem of sources and suggests the range of archival and printed sources for this new stage of parish microhistory.

Western scholarship on secularization takes into account “churching” — expansion of the parish base to accommodate population growth and migration. This study examines churching in Imperial Russia, with a focus on two questions: how well (when) did the Orthodox Church expand its parish base, and how did that churching impact the aspirations and activity of parishioners? Perhaps even more than its peers in Europe, the Russian Orthodox Church faced a growing challenge in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: on the one hand, enormous social change, but on the other hand, limited resources to adapt. This paper suggests that the Russian response was belated, but intense, with churching sharply accelerating after 1880. The local parish, almost alone, had to finance churching, yet continuing paying substantial diocesan levies that mainly served the interests of the clergy. The double burden was too much. Parishioners, encouraged to organize and mobilize since the 1860s, became increasingly assertive in claiming their right to govern the parish, to control its finances, and to choose its clergy. In short, churching led to revolution in the church.

The article, part of a project to publish the diary of Metropolitan Isidor (chairperson of the Holy Synod), demonstrates the impact of aging on Church administration: as in the secular domain, top administrators remained in service well beyond their prime, with many subject to disease, disability, even dementia. A gerontocracy thus came to prevail in the Church as it attempted to grapple with enormous challenges; the old regime was, in fact, really old and incapable of solving the plethora of critical problems facing the Church on the eve of revolution.