Freedom of Conscience and the Redifinition of Confessional
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FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE AND THE REDEFINITION OF CONFESSIONAL BOUNDARIE S IN IMPERIAL RUSSIA, 1905-1914 Paul W. Werth University of Nevada, Las Vega s The National Council for Eurasian and East European Researc h 910 17th Street, N .W . Suite 300 Washington, D .C. 20006 TITLE VIII PROGRAM Project Information * Principal Investigator : Paul Werth Council Contract Number : 816-15g Date: July 16, 2002 Copyright Information Scholars retain the copyright on works they submit to NCEEER . However, NCEEER possesse s the right to duplicate and disseminate such products, in written and electronic form, as follows : (a) for its internal use; (b) to the U.S. Government for its internal use or for dissemination to officials of foreign governments; and (c) for dissemination in accordance with the Freedom of Information Ac t or other law or policy of the U .S. government that grants the public access to documents held by th e U.S . government. 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The analysis and interpretation s contained herein are those of the author. ii Abstract This paper demonstrates that "freedom of conscience" became the central touchstone fo r believers, politicians, and statesmen in their attempt to imagine and effectuate a new religious order i n 1905 Russia and after. Encompassing both new rights on the part of virtually all non-Orthodox believer s and therefore new obligations on the part of the state towards those communities, the concept "freedom o f conscience" necessitated the institutionalization and legal regulation of diverse conceptions of the sacre d along new lines. Moreover, because this task required the theoretical definition of the condition s necessary for the free exercise of conscience, state authorities were compelled to conceptualize wha t "religion" and "spirituality" actually represented in generic terms. Yet all the while, both older prejudice s and, increasingly, the political constellation of forces in Russia in the Duma period of impinged upon this reconceptualization . iii Introductio n In 1905 the Russian state and its subjects made a fundamental transformation in the religious life of the empire. Having resisted and subverted various restrictions on their exercise of spirituality for decades, believers beyond the official Orthodox fold – sectarians, OW Believers, non-Orthodo x Christians, non-Christians, and various "recalcitrants" ' – now received enhanced rights and possibilitie s for the development of their communities . Conversion among Christian faiths was legalized fully, whil e certain formally Orthodox subjects gained the possibility of returning to non-Christian faiths . Old Belief in effect gained the status of a recognized "foreign confession," and various other restrictions on religiou s life were now repealed . The period after 1905 witnessed the transfer (or attempted transfer) o f confessional identity in virtually every possible combination and circumstance, as well as the proliferatio n of new religions and sects. By the end of 1905, in part due to the October Manifesto, the concept o f "freedom of conscience" had substantially deplaced older notions of "religious toleration" in official , public, and popular discourse, thereby signaling a general acceptance of the proposition that the new orde r would involve considerably greater religious liberty than the old . Yet, for all this, a number of circumstances made it impossible for the state to regard its subjects ' religious affiliation with indifference and to sanction unlimited "freedom of conscience," whereby th e dictates of the individual's conviction would serve as the only factor in his/her choice and practice o f religion. Even as many statesmen genuinely aspired to maximize religious freedom, they continued t o regard Russia as an Orthodox Christian state, which implied some degree of preference for Orthodoxy over all other confessions, and for Christianity over non-Christian faiths . Moreover, the questionable character of some religions – especially those that had appeared recently and were therefore the leas t familiar to state authorities – as well as the problem of atheism and its possible recognition as an officia l status raised serious moral questions for a society in the midst of a great social transformation . This paper represents an initial draft of a chapter for a book-length study (very) provisionally entitled "Regulation s of Heterodoxy : 'Foreign Faiths' and Religious Toleration in the Russian Empire, 1772-1914 . " 1 Nor was it possible to disentangle religious confession from issues of nationality or to abando n assumptions of hereditary and stable confessional belonging, whereby certain ethnic groups, communities , and even individuals were understood to be linked to specific faiths as if by blood. Finally, because it was almost in all cases clergies rather than civil officials who maintained metricheskie knigi – civil records on the empire's population – the transfers of Russia's subjects from one confession to another would have to he carefully regulated in order to forestall complete administrative chaos. Practice would demonstrate that there was but a fine line between the power to permit conversions and the authority merely to register them . This paper demonstrates that "freedom of conscience" became the central touchstone for believers, politicians, and statesmen in their attempt to imagine and effectuate a new religious order i n 1905 Russia and after . Encompassing both new rights on the part of virtually all non-Orthodox believers and therefore new obligations on the part of the state towards those communities, the concept "freedom of conscience" necessitated the institutionalization and legal regulation of diverse conceptions of the sacre d along new lines. Moreover, because this task required the theoretical definition of the condition s necessary for the free exercise of conscience, state authorities were compelled to conceptualize wha t "religion" and "spirituality" actually represented in generic terms. Yet all the while, both older prejudice s and, increasingly, the political constellation of forces in Russia in the Puma period impinged upon this reconceptualization . Perhaps nowhere did the idea of "freedom of conscience" demand more direct attention than i n the matter of conversion . For many of the empire's subjects, spiritual satisfaction could he attained onl y through a transfer of religious identity, and thus my discussion here will focus on the problem of forma l conversion and its recognition by the state . I conclude that while the government – and in particula r the Ministry of Internal Affairs – made a sincere effort to broaden substantially the religious freedoms of its subjects, the dynamic circumstances of the early twentieth century ultimately demanded a redefinition o f Known in Russian as uporstvuishchie, "recalcitrants" were former Uniates who had been bureaucraticall y "reunified" with Orthodoxy in 1839/1875 and Baltic converts to Orthodoxy in the 1840s who subsequently sought t o return to Lutheranism . confessional boundaries that was only partly compatible with official conceptions of confessiona l belonging, the prevailing political climate, and the imperatives of the state in other realms of governance . Frameworks for the regulation of confessional transfe r To begin, we need to establish a very basic chronology of events, Already in the late nineteenth century, pressure had been building for religious reform, especially as regards "recalcitrants" an d "apostates" seeking affiliation with Catholicism, Lutheranism, or Islam, and by December of 1904 th e autocracy agreed to eliminate "all constraints on religious life not established by law . On the basis of this decree, the Committee of Ministers initiated an extensive review of the empire's laws on religion , which in turn led to a new law of 17 April 1905 that substantially liberalized the empire's religious order . Almost immediately, the mass transfer of "recalcitrants" began, and its spontaneous characte r compelled the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) to issue a series of basic rules for the regulation of thi s process on 18 August (circular no. 4628). By the fall of 1905 the crisis of autocracy had proceeded t o such a point that Nicholas II issued the October Manifesto, which granted a series of basic liberties to th e Russian population, including "freedom of conscience ." Over the course of 1906, the governmen t assembled data on this question and drafted a series of law proposals . Submitted to the Duma in March of I907, those proposals were discussed at length in a subcommittee in 1908, and subjected to consideratio n of the full Duma in May of 1909 . By September of that year, however, in response to intense pressure from the right and a desire t o ensure support for his agrarian reforms, Stolypin withdrew several of the draft laws on religion for furthe r revision. As all of this occurred, questions not addressed in existing laws or directives were resolved in 2 I have addressed these developments, particularly as concerns baptized Tatars and Islam, in my study At the Margins of Orthodoxy : Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia's Volga-Kama Region, 1827 - 1905 (Ithaca, 2002), pp . 238-45 . 3 A subcommittee of the second Duma began to consider these drafts prior to Stolypin's coup d'etat in June of 1907 , but they were not discussed by the full Duma .