chapter 13 Confessional Rivals: Conversions and Apostasies in the Middle- Region of the Russian Empire (Nineteenth Century)

Oxana Zemtsova

The Middle-Volga Region as a Disputed Space of Conversion

On 13 March 1826, the provincial authorities issued a resolution that allowed forty-four Orthodox Tatars of the Azeevo and Romashkino villages of the Kazan district to convert to Islam.1 This resolution was unusual since conversions to Orthodoxy were irreversible and apostasy was a crime, at least until 1905, when Tsar Nicholas II issued the Manifesto on the Improvement of the State Order, promising, among other civil rights, freedom of conscience. In 1826, upon inspection, it was discovered that the aforementioned Tatars were only allegedly Orthodox, as the data about their supposed baptism could not be found anywhere in the church registers. An episode that, under different circumstances, could have passed unnoticed, gave many baptized Tatars a rea- son to believe that the authorities recognized their right to ‘return to Islam’ and triggered massive apostasies from Orthodoxy in the Middle-Volga region of the Russian empire. The nineteenth-century Middle-Volga region was situated on the banks of the rivers Volga, and Viatka [Fig. 13.1]. However, it was not an admin- istrative unit in the east of the European part of the empire. It included the Kazan, Simbirsk, Penza and provinces and those territories admin- istratively subject to the jurisdiction of the Kazan school district, the Kazan diocese and (for Muslims) the Orenburg muftiate. The non-Russian popula- tion of the region consisted of a variety of ethnic groups, namely the Tatars, Chuvash (of the Turkic language group), Mari, Udmurt and Mordva (of the Finno-Ugric language group). Besides, and more importantly in the context of nineteenth-century discourse, the region was a virtual crossroads of religions and beliefs, being populated by Orthodox Christians, Muslims, Old Believers

1 Iskhakov R., Missionerstvo i musul’mane Volgo-Kam’ia [Missionary Work and the Muslims of the Volga-Kama Region] (Kazan: 2011) 43.

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FIGURE 13.1 Map of the Volga Region.

(i.e., schismatic­ Orthodox who had separated from the official Russian Orthodox Church after 1666 as a protest against church reforms introduced by Patriarch Nikon), pagans (polytheists who kept to animistic beliefs) and, in smaller numbers, Jews, Catholics and Lutherans. The Kazan and Simbirsk provinces were at the crossroads of the Russian, Finno-Ugric and Turkic worlds. Towns and villages became spaces of contested religious identity. In the present chapter, the region’s villages are viewed as spaces of apos- tasy from Orthodoxy and conversion to Islam and paganism. In the nineteenth century, the phenomenon took on such massive proportions as to shake this part of the Russian empire. I will analyse the reasons for these apostasies and conversions among the non-Russian population in the Middle-Volga region between the 1820s and the 1860s, and the failure of Orthodox missionaries to