At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia's Volga-Kama Region, 1827-1905

by Paul W. Werth

In a period of dramatic social change, when Orthodoxy and nationalism were the twin pillars of the Russian state, how did the tsarist bureaucracy govern an expansive realm inhabited by the peoples of many nations and ethnicities professing various faiths? Did the nature of tsarist rule change over time, and did it vary from region to region? Paul W. Werth considers these large questions in his survey of imperial Russian rule in the vast Volga-Kama region. First conquered in the sixteenth century, the Volga-Kama lands were by the nineteenth century both part of the Russian heartland and resolutely "other" the home of a mix of Slavic, Finnic, and Turkic peoples where the urge to assimilate was always counterbalanced by determined efforts to preserve cultural and religious differences. The Volga-Kama thus poses the dilemmas of empire in especially complex and telling ways. Drawing on a wide range of printed and archival sources, Werth untangles and reconstructs this complicated history, focusing on the ways in which the tsarist state and Orthodox missions used conversion in their ongoing (and regularly frustrated) efforts to transform the region's Muslim and animist populations into imperial, Orthodox citizens. He shows that the regime became less concerned with religion and more concerned with secular attributes as the marker of cultural differences, an emphasis that would change dramatically in the early years of Soviet rule."

296 pages, Hardcover

First published October 25, 2001

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

The diversity of Russia's Volga-Kama region is little known, mainly because it lies on the European side of Russia which is seen as less exotic than Siberia and the Far East with their enormous amounts of indigenous tribes. However, the Volga-Kama area was dominated by various non-Russian and non-Christian peoples until only a little over a century ago: Mari, Udmurts, Chuvash and Tatars. The 19th-century saw conflict between these indigenous peoples and the Tsarist state with its official Russian Orthodox Church, and these events are the focus of Paul W. Werth's 2001 study At the Margins of Orthodoxy.

The biggest challenge that the Russian Orthodox Church faced in the 19th century was the "apostasy" of communities that were believed to have converted to Orthodoxy in the 18th century. In fact, their "conversion" was often just being chased into a river and proclaimed baptised, and they had no understanding of the Christian faith. Nonetheless, once marked down in civil records as Orthodox, under tsarist law they and their descendants could not change their status. Thus the petitions of many to openly profess paganism or Islam, the faiths they had in fact been brought up in, were turned down. Aghast at these attempts to formally leave Christianity, Orthodox missionaries launched some initiatives to travel in the area and convince them to reaffirm Orthodoxy for their salvation.

A second phase started in the 1860s, when there was a new conception of Russia as a nation-state, with a need to instill feelings of citizenship in its varied population and "civilize" minority peoples. Now Orthodoxy was simply treated less as a means of saving souls than as one element by which populations could be russified. The term "inorodsy" for non-Russians, originally used for the very alien peoples of Siberia and the Far East, was now brought to the Volga-Kama area and the ethnic identities of the Maris, Chuvash, and Udmurts were seen as something to be eradicated posthaste. The Muslim Tatars were initially left alone in all this, as since the days of Catherine the Great there had been religious tolerance. However, missionaries complained that the Muslim Tatars were stirring up discontent among the neighbouring ostensibly Christian populations, while Tatars were agitated by rumours that the Crimean War was an attack on Islam itself. Thus it is in the mid 19th century that one sees a real dawn of Russian islamophobia.

Finally, Werth tracks the development of Orthodox mission away from itinerant missionaries to the creation of educational institutions, which would combat islamification of the Volga area's pagan peoples through the creation of national intelligentsia looking towards the Russians. Led by the fascinating missionary and Turkologist Nikolai Ivanovich Ilminsky, part of this campaign was the use of the indigenous language in education. This campaign proved very influential, as it not only eradicated Chuvash paganism, but also laid the foundation for the Chuvash literary language. Around the same time, a group of Hill Maris professing Orthodoxy founded their own monastery, which quickly lost its Mari character but which nonethelessly represents Orthodox inroads among the indigenous peoples of this side of the Volga.

As a linguist working with these minority peoples, I greatly enjoyed Werth's book and am grateful that it gave me a much clearer picture of life in the Volga-Kama region and the relations between Russians and the local peoples. These events cast a long shadow, as the discontent with the Russian Empire drove the Mari intelligentsia to embrace Leninism with its promise of national liberation. Werth draws on an enormous amount of scholarship, which is cited in footnotes, and will give readers with a knowledge of Russian much to explore.