longer contradict federal law. To this end, he has created seven super regions superimposed over the other eighty- nine and staffed by presidential appointees. In general, Putin’s desire for a strong central state is not easily reconciled with regionalist demands for a more decentralized government. See also: FEDERATION TREATIES; GEOGRAPHY; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; SOVNARKHOZY; UNION TREATY; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Evtuhov, Catherine. (1998). “Voices from the Provinces: Living and Writing in Nizhnii Novgorod, 1870-1905.” Journal of Popular Culture 34(4):33-48. Gel’man, Vladimir. (1999). “Regime Transition, Uncertainty, and Prospects for Democratisation: The Politics of Russia’s Regions in a Comparative Perspective.” Europe-Asia Studies 51:939- 956. Herd, Graeme P., and Aldis, Anne, eds. (2003). Russian Regions and Regionalism: Strength through Weakness. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Nikitin, N. P. (1966). “A History of Economic Geography in Pre-Revolutionary Russia.” Soviet Geography: Review and Translation 7(9):3-37. Von Mohrenschildt, Dimitri. (1981). Toward a United States of Russia: Plans and Projects of Federal Reconstruction of Russia in the Nineteenth Century. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
(1820-1890), financial official during the reign of Alexander II. As minister of finances, state secretary, member of the State Council, and chairman of the Council of Ministers, Count Mikhail Khristoforovich Reitern oversaw Russia’s finances during the epoch of the Great Reforms. Reitern was born in the city of Poreche in Smolensk guberniya. His father, a Livonian-German nobleman who distinguished himself in Russian military service, died when the boy was thirteen, leaving his widow to raise fourteen children. Mikhail attended the prestigious Imperial Lyceum at Tsarskoe Selo on a scholarship and graduated in 1839. Like most of his classmates, he embarked upon a career in state service, joining the Ministry of Finance in 1840. Three years later he transferred to the Ministry of Justice, where he remained until 1854, when he joined the staff of the chief of the Main Naval Staff, Grand Duke Kon-stantin Nikolayevich (the second son of Emperor Nicholas I).
As one of the so-called Konstantinovtsy, the circle of reform-minded officials around the grand duke, Reitern carried out a variety of special commissions and inspections, and championed a series of innovations that included cutting the number of state-owned enterprises, abolishing obligated labor, and contracting with private firms. He was largely responsible for the Naval Ministry’s establishing a pension fund for naval officers. In 1855 Reitern went abroad to study finance and administrative practices in Prussia, the United States, France, and England. His reports stressed the utility of private capital in the development of the national economy. On his return in 1854, he was appointed to the special committees on railroad development and the banking system. The latter led to the founding in 1860 of Russia’s first central bank, the State Bank. Reitern subsequently returned to the Ministry of Finances as a senior official and in 1861 was named to the Commission on Financing Peasant Affairs, which worked out the financial arrangements for the emancipation of the serfs.
In 1862 Alexander II appointed Reitern minister of finances, a post he held until 1878. During his tenure he fostered greater glasnost in Russian state finances (including the first published budget in 1862) and reformed the tax system to include more indirect taxation, such as excise taxes on spirits and salt. He sought unsuccessfully to restore the convertibility of Russia’s paper rubles into gold and silver, and in addition worked to balance the budget but did not succeed until in the sixth year of his tenure. Reitern was keen to sustain the empire’s credit rating on international financial markets, but
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his efforts were frustrated by the economic consequences of the Polish Rebellion of 1863. Reitern promoted private railroad construction, shaped the policies of the State Bank to enhance private investment, and drafted legislation for joint stock companies. His tenure witnessed a great expansion of Russian railroads from a little more than a thousand miles in 1862 to close to fourteen thousand by 1878. He favored both the integration of the national economy into the world economy and the development of Russian industry as necessary to ensure the empire’s welfare and security. In 1876, as war loomed with Turkey, Reitern warned Alexander II that the conflict would threaten Russia’s credit and finances, offering to resign when Alexander II nonetheless decided upon war. At the emperor’s request, he remained in office until the conflict was over and resigned in June 1878.
Reitern remained a member of the State Council, and in 1881 Alexander III appointed him chairman of the Council of Ministers, a post he held until 1886, when he retired because of poor health. See also: ECONOMY, TSARIST; GREAT REFORMS; RAILWAYS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kipp, Jacob W. (1975). “M. Kh. Reutern on the Russian State and Economy: A Liberal Bureaucrat during the Crimean Era.” Journal of Modern History 47 (3): 437-459.
Russia has been multireligious from its very inception. When Kiev Rus adopted Eastern Orthodoxy in 988, a gradual Christianization began, advancing slowly from urban elites to the lower classes and countryside. Pagan belief and practice persisted, however, and was sometimes incorporated into Orthodox ritual. Prerevolutionary historians termed the resulting syncretism “dual faith” (dvoyeveriye), emphasizing the survival of paganism and superficiality of the Orthodox veneer. While simplistic, that reductionist view of popular religion suggests the complexity of religious cultures, the institutional backwardness of the church, and the daunting geographic scale of the task it faced. Not until the eighteenth century did the church, in any real sense, construct the administrative tools needed to standardize and regulate popular Orthodoxy. By that time the empire was exploding in size and religious diversity. Although medieval Russia had absorbed peoples of other faiths (such as the Muslim Tatars), religious pluralism became a predominant feature in the modern period. The state annexed vast new territories of Siberia and eastern Ukraine (in the seventeenth century) and then added an array of new lands and peoples in the eighteenth (Baltics, western Ukraine, Belarus) and nineteenth centuries (the Caucasus, Poland, Finland, and Central Asia). That expansion increased the size and complexity of the non-Orthodox population exponentially. Although, according to the census of 1897, the population remained predominantly Eastern Orthodox (69.3%), the empire had substantial numbers of non-Orthodox believers (often concentrated in geographic areas): Muslims (11.1%), Catholics (9.1%), Jews (4.2%), Lutherans (2.7%), Old Believers (1.8%), and various other Christian and non- Christian groups. Indeed, the figures on the non-Orthodox side are understated: the census failed to record adherents of persecuted movements seeking to evade legal trouble.
This waxing religious pluralism posed a serious problem for a regime once imbued with a messianic identity as the Third Rome. Although the process of accommodation commenced in the seventeenth century, it sharply accelerated in the eighteenth, as the regime sought to recruit foreign mercenaries, specialists, and colonists. To reaffirm the precedence of the Russian Orthodox Church, the government adopted the principle of static religious identity: each subject was to retain the original faith (the sole permissible form of conversion being to Orthodoxy, with conversion from Orthodoxy criminalized as apotasy). For state officials devoted to raison d’?tat what mattered most was stability, not salvation-much to the chagrin of Orthodox zealots. Indeed, that secularity prevailed in the imperial manifesto of April 17, 1905, which, in a futile attempt to quell the revolution of 1905, granted freedom of religious belief. After an interlude of broken promises and rising tensions, the February Revolution finally brought full religious freedom (including freedom of official religious affiliation and practice).
That freedom was short-lived: Once the Bolshevik regime came to power in October 1917, it persecuted religious groups, with the assumption that such superstition would promptly wither away. Dismayed by signs of a religious revival, in 1929 the party unleashed a massive assault on all religions, systematically closing houses of worship
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Procession of clergy outside Moscow’s city walls, 1867. © AUSTRIAN ARCHIVES/CORBIS and subjecting not only clergy but also believers to repression. To no avail: The January 1937 census revealed that 55.3 percent of
