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Three Hundred Years of European Integration and Relations Between Churches in St THREE HUNDRED YEARS OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATION AND RELATIONS BETWEEN CHURCHES IN ST. PETERSBURG Archpriest V. Fedorov Three hundred years of St. Petersburg is not an especially long period in the history of Christianity, whereas it spans almost a third of Russia’s Christian history. The Jubilee encourages us to look deeper into what now is within the realm of history. St. Petersburg had its prehistory. Our city was founded 128 km to the West from the rst capital of Northern Russia—Ladoga,1 which was for the rst time mentioned in the eighth century. In the ninth and tenth centuries it was one of the political centres of the Medieval Russian state. The town of Staraya Ladoga, which a month ago was celebrating its 1250th anniversary, grew from a fortress on the famous route “from the Varangians to the Greeks.” Archaeologists say that it was here that Slavonic and Finnic tribes rst met Scandinavians and other Europeans. They were craftsmen, war- riors, and merchants. “Slavonic Ladoga may be called a cosmopolitan town, a town of international culture, a town where there were not any serious con icts generated by ethnic prejudices.”2 Later, Orthodox Christianity was preached here by Novgorodian missionaries, who were backed by secular authorities. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Russians were beating back the incursions of Swedes and the Livonian Order. Historians believe that in the fteenth and sixteenth centuries there were 35 churches and about twenty mon- asteries and convents around Ladoga, Oreshek, Koporye, and Yam- gorod. In 1610, the Swedes took Ladoga and Veliky Novgorod. In 1703, Russian troops captured the Swedish fortress Nienschanz, and on the Feast of Holy Trinity the City of St. Petersburg was founded nearby 1 Since the eighteenth century the town has been called Staraya [Old] Ladoga, because in 1704 the town was transferred to the estuary of the river Volkhov and called Novaya [New] Ladoga. Parts of the rampart and stone fortress, churches from the twelfth century with frescoes, and remnants of residential quarters from the eighth to twelfth centuries have been preserved in Staraya Ladoga. 2 http://www.mirtv.ru/rubrics/4/224_1.htm. 16 archpriest v. fedorov with the explicit trust in the intercession of the apostles Peter, Paul, and Andrew as patron saints. This belief lies at the root of cooperation between Christian Churches in St. Petersburg. The Synodal period in Russia The Petersburg period of Russian ecclesiastical history (also known as the Synodal period) spans two centuries, the eighteenth and the nine- teenth (until 1917), when St. Petersburg was the capital of the Russian Empire. This period was ushered in by the abolition of the Patriarchate and other Petrine reforms and closed by the downfall of “Holy Russia.” Historians’ estimations differ widely; however, one may safely state that for Russian Orthodox Christianity these were two centuries of European integration. First of all it implied a transformation of church-state relations, which was part of an international process. The deep self-criticism voiced in 1906–12 by the archpriests who took part in the Pre-Council Session and Pre-Council Conference may be now balanced by positive opinions to which the long chronological distance entitles us. Even in the beginning of the twentieth century, the famous historian E.E. Golubinsky expressed his disagreement with the judgments then prevalent by saying, “The current Petersburg period for us is a period of genuine enlightenment and along with it a more perfect understanding of Christianity.” Compared to the preceding Patriarchal period, the Russian Church grew almost ten times in numbers during the Synodal period. While under Peter the Great there were about \ fteen million Orthodox Chris- tians on a total population of 21 million in Russia, according to the last census taken in 1915 there were 115 million Orthodox Christians out of a population of 182 million in Nicholas II’s Empire. During the Patriarchal period Russia had twenty dioceses headed by bishops. At the time of the Empire’s collapse the Russian Church had 64 dioceses and about 40 vicariates, headed by more than 100 bishops. It included over 50,000 churches, 100,000 clerics, up to 1,000 monasteries and convents with 50,000 monks and nuns, four theological academies, 55 seminaries, 100 theological schools and 100 diocesan schools with 75,000 students annually. Professor Kartashev emphasizes the tolerance towards non-Christian religions during this period: “The traditional tolerance towards all religions, nationalities and tribes living in Russia precluded an overly fast advancement of the Russian Orthodox Church’s external .
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