Russia during the period of Mongol domination. Hesychastic or quietist spirituality based on meditative repetition of the Jesus Prayer fed the proliferation of monasteries under the influence of St. Sergius of Radonezh (1314-1392), founder of the Holy Trinity Monastery outside Moscow. Monastic leaders gained significant political influence, as evidenced by St. Sergius’s blessing of Prince Dmitry Donskoy as he marched his army to victory over the Mongols at Kulikovo Pole in 1380.
Moscow emerged as the true political and religious center of Russia by the middle of the fifteenth century. The senior bishop of Russia acknowledged his support for the Muscovite princes and their drive to reunify the Russian state by moving to Moscow in 1326. The Russian Orthodox hierarchy declared independence from Byzantium after the Council of Florence-Ferrara (1439-1443) where Constantinople tried in vain to solicit western military aid in return for acceptance of Roman Catholic policies and dogma. Church leaders promoted a messianic vision for Muscovite Russia after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Having broken Mongol domination, Muscovy understood its role as the only independent Orthodox state to mean that it must defend the true faith. The description of Moscow as “the Third Rome” captured this messianic mission when it came into use at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
Russian political power grew increasingly independent from Orthodoxy in the Muscovite state, however, and church leaders struggled with the consequences. During the early 1500s, a national church council sided with abbots who argued for the rights of their monasteries to accumulate wealth (“possessors”) and against monastic leaders who advocated strict poverty for monks (“non-possessors”). The possessor position promised greater political influence for the church. Tensions between secular and ecclesiastical power increased under Tsar Ivan IV (“the Terrible,” 1530-1584), although the Stoglav Council held in 1551 issued strict rules for everyday Orthodox life. The struggle for succession to the throne following Ivan’s death also brought religious instability by the end of the century. Success in elevating the Moscow metropolitan to the rank of patriarch in 1589 added to the church’s influence in defending Russia from foreign invaders and internal chaos during the Time of Troubles (1598-1613). Rivalry developed between secular and ecclesiastical powers by the middle of the seventeenth century when Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich disagreed with the prerogatives claimed by Patriarch Nikon. Nikon’s position was undermined by the Old Believer schism (raskol) that resulted from his attempts to reform Russian Orthodoxy following contemporary Greek practice. Nikon was exiled and eventually deposed on orders from the tsar, who with other Russian nobles of the time became fascinated with Western lifestyles and religion. Limitations on the power of institutional Orthodoxy increased through the second half of the seventeenth century.
Orthodoxy in the imperial period (1703-1917) was heavily regulated by the state. The authoritarian, Westernized system of government implemented by Peter I (“the Great”) and his successors meant that secular Russian society lived side-by-side with traditional Orthodox culture. The Moscow patriarchate was replaced with a Holy Synod in 1721. Church authority was limited to matters of family and morality, although the church itself was never made subservient to the state bureaucracy. Western ideas had a striking influence on the clergy, who became a closed caste within Russian society due to new requirements for education. Church schools and seminaries were only open to the sons of clergy, and these in turn tended to marry the daughters of clergy. The curriculum for educating clergy drew heavily on Catholic and Protestant models, and clergy often found themselves at odds with both parishioners and state authorities. Monastic power declined due to government-imposed limitations on the numbers of monks at each monastery and the secularization of most church lands in 1763. Monastic influence recovered in the nineteenth century with the emergence of saints embraced by Russian believers who saw them as models for piety and social involvement. An intellectual revival in Orthodoxy took place at this time, when writers including Alexei Khomyakov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Vladimir Soloviev sought to combine Orthodox traditions
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and Western culture. Various leaders in church and state also embraced pan-Slavism with an eye toward Russian leadership of the whole Orthodox world.
Twentieth-century developments shook Russian Orthodoxy to its core. The revolutions of 1905 and 1917 weakened and then destroyed the governing structures upon which the institutional church depended. The emergence of a radically atheistic government under Lenin and the Bolsheviks promised to undermine popular Orthodoxy. Nationalization of all church property was quickly followed by the separation of church from state and religion from public education. Orthodox responses included the restoration of the Moscow patriarchate by the national church council (sobor) of 1917-1918 as well as an attempt by some parish priests to combine Orthodoxy and Bolshevism in a new Renovationist or Living Church. In reality, the institutional church was unable to find any defense against the ideologically motivated repression of religion during the first quarter century of the Soviet regime. Neither confrontation nor accommodation proved effective within emerging Soviet Russian culture that emphasized the creation of a new, scientific, atheistic worldview. The Stalin Revolution of the 1930s accompanied by the Great Terror led to mass closures of churches and arrests of clergy.
Orthodoxy remained embedded in Russian culture, however, as seen by its revival during the crisis that accompanied Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Soviet policy toward the Russian Orthodox Church softened for nearly two decades during and after World War II, tightened again during Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign (1959-1964), and then loosened to a limited extent under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev (1964-1982). Mikhail Gorbachev turned to the church for help in the moral regeneration of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. This started a process of reopening Orthodox churches, chapels, monasteries, and schools throughout the country. The collapse of the Soviet Union accelerated that process even as it opened Russia to a flood of religious movements from the rest of the world. Orthodoxy in post-communist Russia struggles to maintain its institutional independence while striving to establish a position as the primary religious confession of the Russian state and the majority of its population. It faces the dilemma of accepting or rejecting various aspects of modern, secular culture in light of Orthodox tradition. See also: ARCHITECTURE; BYZANTIUM, INFLUENCE OF; DVOEVERIE; HAGIOGRAPHY; METROPOLITAN; MONAS-TICISM; PATRIARCHATE; RELIGION; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Belliustin, I. S. (1985). Description of the Parish Clergy in Rural Russia: The Memoir of a Nineteenth-Century Parish Priest, tr. and intro. Gregory L. Freeze. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Cracraft, James. (1971). The Church Reform of Peter the Great. London: Macmillan. Cunningham, James W. (1981). A Vanquished Hope: The Movement for Church Renewal in Russia, 1905-1906. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Curtiss, John S. (1952). The Russian Church and the Soviet State, 1917-1950. Boston: Little, Brown. Davis, Nathaniel. (1995). A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Fedotov, G. P. (1946). The Russian Religious Mind. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fennell, John L. I. (1995). A History of the Russian Church to 1448. New York: Addison-Wesley. Florovsky, Georges. (1979). Collected Works: Vols. 5-6, Ways of Russian Theology, ed. Richard S. Haugh; tr. Robert L. Nichols. Belmont, MA: Nordland. Freeze, Gregory L. (1977). The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Freeze, Gregory L. (1983). The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth- Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Husband, William B. (2000). “Godless Communists”: Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia, 1971-1932. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Levin, Eve. (1989). Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900-1700. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Meehan, Brenda. (1993). Holy Women of Russia. New York: Harper San Francisco. Michels, Georg B. (2000). At War With the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Russia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ouspensky, Leonid. (1992). Theology of the Icon, 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Ware, Timothy. (1993). The Orthodox Church, new ed. New York: Penguin.
EDWARD E. ROSLOF
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ORUZHEINAYA PALATA See ARMORY.
The Osetins are an Iranian nationality of the central Caucasus. They speak a language from the Eastern
