On 10 February 2022, Dr James M. White, founder of balticorthodoxy.com, gave an online lecture for the Narva Museum about the attempted conversion of Ruhnu islanders to Orthodoxy in 1866-1867.
Review of N. Kizenko, Good for the Souls: A History of Confession in the Russian Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021)
On 26 September 1892, Jakob Vaarask, an Orthodox teacher on the Estonian island of Vormsi, prepared to confess. He was unhappy: his career plans had stalled. He wanted to become the parish’s next priest, but both his local superiors and the Orthodox bishop of Riga seemed to be hesitant. The reason, he believed, was straightforward. Gossip about pre-marital relations between him and his wife had spread like wild fire (although the couple had married in 1887, they had been cohabiting since 1884). Vaarask thus decided to use the confession to clear his name. Before his confessor, Father Nikolai Orlov, Vaarask relayed: ‘on 8 June 1884, my wife and I made an oath of chastity and we will keep it truly until death: therefore the slanders about our perverse life before marriage are the lowest villainy.’ [1] Alas, Orlov’s response to this declaration of life-long marital celibacy is not recorded. So, Vaarask was using confession not to repent and cleanse himself of sin: in fact, he was doing the opposite, since he was reporting his resistance to bodily temptation and proclaiming his innocence. Furthermore, he evidently expected that Orlov would break the sacred seal of confessional secrecy: he clearly hoped that his confessor would report what he had heard up the ecclesiastical hierarchy, thus removing the obstacles blocking Vaarask’s job prospects.
Here, then, is but one way in which confession could be used (and abused) in the Russian Empire, one way in which it figured not only as a fundamental religious ritual, but also as a social and professional practice. Such is the subject of the book under review here, Nadezhda Kizenko’s extremely ambitious Good for the Souls: A History of Confession in the Russian Empire. In brief, her task is not simply to tell us the changes this rite underwent in the course of two-and-a-bit centuries (although this is, of course, discussed), but equally to show how its political, social, and spiritual uses changed over the course of time and in different contexts. By confession, she means one part of the sacrament govienie (penance), which, for much of the period under consideration, was usually performed once a year, during Great Lent, prior to receiving communion (also generally an annual practice). During it, a person related their sins to their parish priest (who always knew who he was confessing: unlike in Catholic countries, a confessional box was not used), who forgave them, imposed a penance, and allowed the individual to take the sacraments.
Beginning the meat of her examination in the seventeenth century, Kizenko charts how renewed focus on confession in pre-Petrine Russia, especially in the works of Ukrainian churchmen, matched similar developments in Reformation-era Europe, where both religious and secular officials saw the ritual as one of the surest instruments to discipline the minds and bodies of believers and subjects. In Muscovy, this became particularly imperative with the mid-century outbreak of the Old Believer schism: taking (or rejecting) confession now became a key sign of both denominational belonging (to Orthodoxy or to ‘schismatic’ Old Belief and political loyalty.
These disciplinary facets of confession were supercharged under Peter the Great and his clerical allies. The reforming tsar made two steps that were to fundamentally shape confession down to the collapse of the imperial regime in 1917: first, he made confession an obligatory annual practice for every Orthodox subject of the empire and, second, authorised priests to break the sacred seal should they hear anything seditious. The second provision has become notorious as a symbol of Orthodoxy’s fundamental otherness from western branches of Christianity, as a demonstration of how far the Orthodox Church was subordinated to the state, and as a mark of how far the state was willing to reach into the souls of its subjects in order to ensure political stability. However, Kizenko demands that we need to better understand how this measure was taken, what its results were, and how it looked in comparison with practices in Protestant and Catholic Europe. So, Kizenko notes, the act was done not by Peter alone, but in concert with Orthodox churchmen like Feofan (Prokopovich), who framed such reporting as clearly connected to priestly pastoral duty. Equally, the notion of the sacred seal as an indispensable part of confession had only entered Russian Orthodoxy relatively recently, in the seventeenth century. And even then, the idea that the seal could be broken when shocking political crimes were revealed had precedent: Archbishop Innokentii (Gizel’) (c. 1600-1683), abbot of the Kiev Pechera monastery, had already instructed much the same thing in 1669. And while Peter’s provision did go a step further than what was happening in Europe at the time, it was not fundamentally atypical of an era when states across the continent were highly interested in the religious behaviour and discipline of their subjects.
Finally, she uses archive documentation to examine whether indeed priests were regularly breaking the seal to report on their parishioners and whether this was being encouraged by church hierarchs and the Synod. What she finds is a highly variegated picture: in some cases, priests were punished severely for breaking confessional secrecy even when reporting political revelations to their superiors. On the other hand, there seems to have been a rash of instances (particularly in the 1730s) where the seal was broken for far more mundane purposes, such as resolving inheritance disputes and insurance claims. Nor did priests simply accept the new measure robotically: Kizenko cites a few instances of parish fathers seeking guidance on what precisely they were supposed to do and pointing out potential gaps in the legislation (for instance, if a person confessed to political scheming but truly repented of it as a grave sin, should they be reported or not?).
In other words, seeing the fact that the confessional seal could be broken as a key identifying characteristic of imperial Russian Orthodoxy is a mistake. The same is true for the other key Petrine act, making annual confession obligatory. For, in reality, the key instruments required for this, the confessional registries, remained unfit for purpose deep into the nineteenth century. Prior to this, annual confession could only be truly enforced for the most elite sectors of society, those to which the state and the Church had easy access: the court, the nobility, the clergy, and the army. Over the course of several chapters, Kizenko examines the noble experience of confession, demonstrating how the obligation was gradually interiorised by aristocrats, rendered into a quotidian habit that was nonetheless enlivened and spiritualised by a whole host of experiences: the cold bite of the late winter air, the joyous expectation of the fast-approaching spring, the comradery of trooping together with one’s friends, family, or schoolmates to the priest, the shadowy, candle-lit interiors of churches, the queuing, the feeling of a weight being lifted as sins were forgiven, the joyous Paschal feast afterwards. One chapter also considers how noble confession differed in terms of gender, with elite men and women both using and depicting the confession quite distinctly, with women in particular seizing on it as one of the few means available to them to narrate their experiences.
As Kizenko demonstrates, the police function of confession reached its apogee in the reign of Nicholas I (1825-55), the last tsar to be interested in the rite as a political tool. This also marked the height (or lowest depth, depending on your point of view) of church-state interactions through the confession, with priests and consistories turning to police and judicial organs not only to ensure compliance with the obligatory annual confession, but also to determine the penances issued afterwards. As a result, annual confession started to penetrate the rural and urban masses, who previously might have only sought confession and the associated communion when nearing death.
But while this rigorous enforcement proved self-defeating in some aspects (Old Believers, sectarians, and converts quickly dropped attendance at the confession once police enforcement declined with Nicholas’ death, causing numbers to drop from artificial highs; the fact that the sacred seal might be broken became quickly apparent to all), the concomitant expansion of confession into Russia’s lower orders had much the same effect as it had had in noble spheres: its interiorisation as a fundamental religious practice. Indeed, when reporting on declining numbers of people at the confession, some hierarchs insisted that such poor results were not a consequence of people lacking respect for the confession: instead, it was due to the fact that they took it too seriously, that they were deadly afraid of confessing improperly without the necessary spiritual cleansing (particularly castigated was the folk belief that one had to abstain from sex not only before the confession and the connected communion but also for six weeks afterwards).
Meanwhile, the Church increasingly sought to make allowances for their flock; accepting the claims that work and illness were acceptable excuses for not confessing (a necessity given the increasing number of peasants involved in seasonal factory work) and emphasising that one could, potentially, confess at any time of year, not just during Lent, are two examples. Certainly, by 1905 the Synod was bending over backward to accommodate the laity in matters of confession, often taking their side when disputes arose with the clergy. There was much debate in these last few imperial decades about whether confessors and the Church should be strict or soft with the penitent.
The revolutionary period between 1905 and 1917 proved contradictory for confession. While some hierarchs noted that the outbreak of violence in 1905 led to severe and permanent declines in the numbers confessing, others recorded that levels in their dioceses had more or less recovered by 1908. As such, the same reformist spirit surrounding other spheres of church life in this period did not touch upon confession, with the idea of a single Lenten confession and subsequent communion remaining unquestionable for both hierarchs and laity. Experimentation proved limited. Most notable in this regard were the practices of Father (later Saint) Ioann of Kronshtadt: such was his popularity as a confessor that he was forced to hear public confessions, with the flock shouting out their various sins in the church (he probably only got away with this because of his unquestionable reputation as a loyal son of the Orthodox Church and the widespread acceptance of his sanctity). But his practices were a sign of things to come. With the revolutions of 1917 and the demise of the Petrine ordering of the confession, public confessions became increasingly popular with some clergy and parishioners (although others furiously denounced the practice). With Soviet persecution of religion and the Church, the story of the imperial confession ended, leaving a contradictory and tangled legacy for post-Soviet believers to pick up and piece together for entirely different times.
This summary of Kizenko’s arguments is, of course, reductive, lacking in both the richness and nuance that the historian brings to her subject over the course of several hundred pages. At its core, what the book seeks to do is show how the supposedly private act of confession was replete with social meaning, how it could both reinforce and play with social hierarchy, and how it sat at unique juncture between politics and religion, between the state, the Church, society, and the individual. As such, the history of confession cannot just be the history of a religious rite: it must of necessity be a history of serfdom, a history of evolving police and administrative surveillance, a history of the individual and his/her interior world. And this is what Kizenko provides with utter aplomb and vibrancy. From confession being used to shame a fornicator at the court of Empress Elizabeth to Catherine the Great’s dubious deathbed ‘mute’ confession, from the ornate recollections of aristocratic confessants to a cook’s sordid confessional letter to Ioann of Kronshtadt, from the journals of the first native Alaskan priest seeking to bring confession to his convert flock to interpretations of nineteenth-century visualisations, Kizenko’s book is replete with fascinating anecdotes, wonderful source materials, and acute historical analysis. I was in particular blown away by the width and depth of the archival research, with a large number of document depositories plumbed in order to thoroughly anchor the tome in the everyday experiences of average imperial Russians.
One must also note the work’s novelty: while a few historians have undertaken studies of penance in the empire in limited time periods, no-one so far, in either Russian or English, has written a piece that seeks to cover the entire imperial period and thus reveal the true extent to which confession, penance, and the associated communion changed over the centuries. Furthermore, compliments must be given to the author for her writing: narrated in a chatty, relateable, and light tone, the book stands as an extraordinarily readable example of academic historical scholarship and thus a real standard-setter. This reviewer cannot recommend Kizenko’s book enough: it is simply a must for all academics (even, or perhaps especially, for those who do not usually engage with religious history) and interested general readers.
Review by J. M. White
[1] EAA.2288.1.34.30-30ob.
Irina Paert gives a lecture on the Riga Church Council of 1905
As part of the seminar series Historia Ecclesiae et Religionis (organised by the Centre for the Study of the History of Religion and the Church at the Russian Academy of Science), Irina Paert, one of the founders of balticorthodoxy.com, has given an extremely compelling account (in Russian) of the Riga Church Council of 1905, one of the most significant moments in the Orthodox ecclesiastical reform movement during the imperial period. The lecture, along with others in the same series, can be found on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTVOKrnRBHs.
Podcast: Tales from Imperial Russia
James White, the founder of balticorthodoxy.com, is now running a new podcast, Tales from Imperial Russia. This is a fortnightly podcast narrating ordinary and extraordinary lives from the Russian Empire. In episodes about 10-20 minutes long, the show avoids the oft-retold stories of emperors and battles to focus on the mostly forgotten lives of individuals from an amazing array of locales, peoples, and circumstances.
The podcast is available on most podcast sites and at https://talesfromimperialrussia.podiant.co/
Review of P. H. Blasen and A. Reuter, '...Une vie singuliere avec de nombreuses bonnes pensees': Henri Werling SJ et la mission catholique en Estonie (Casa Cartii de Stiinta: Cluj-Napoca, 2016)
As this short book's title indicates, its main goal is to inform readers about Henri Werling SJ (1879-1961), a Jesuit missionary priest whose life and ministry were largely spent in Estonia. The research and writing of the book were initiated by the Documentation Centre for Human Migrations (CDMH) at Dudelange in Luxembourg with the aim, it would appear, of drawing attention to the missionary migrations of a remarkable citizen of the Grand Duchy. The authors trace Werling's life from his upbringing among the wealthy Luxembourg bourgeoisie, his education in Catholic schools and Jesuit institutions, to his novitiate and training as a missionary priest in Germany and Poland, his ministry in Eastern Prussia and then finally, in Estonia. From autumn 1923 he served as Catholic parish priest in Tartu, struggling with the complexities of local multilingualism among parishioners who did not have a common language and where he needed to understand Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Latgalian, Russian and Polish in order to communicate with them all. His dedication to studying Estonian led to translations of prayers and the Scriptures, with his translation of the entire New Testament being at the printer's when Soviet troops occupied the country during World War Two. He lived through successive occupations and bombings in Tallinn, only to be arrested in August 1945 and deported to the Perm region of Russia where he survived until his release in spring 1954. After his return to Estonia, he lived at Esna until his death in February 1961. Despite his Luxembourg family's attempts to repatriate him, he was determined to remain faithful to his post and he is buried in Tallinn's Liiva cemetery.
The book weaves together archival material from many different, although predominantly Roman Catholic, sources: the archives of the Swiss and German provinces of the Society of Jesus, the archives of the Holy See in Rome, archival correspondence from the Mother House in Olomouc, Czech Republic of the Catholic nuns who served in Estonia alongside Werling, as well as material made available to the authors by the Estonian historian and Catholic priest, Vello Salo, and by the National Archive of Estonia. Nevertheless, despite this wealth of primary source material and Werling's intrinsically fascinating life, we actually get very little feel for the man himself or the events of his life.
One reason for this is that the authors rarely allow Werling to speak with his own voice. Although they tell us that he left long descriptions of his lengthy journeys on foot to visit scattered Catholic parishioners on Estonian islands such as Saaremaa, or to Petseri where he was fascinated by the monastery, the homes and way of life of the nearby villagers, none of these descriptions are actually quoted in the book. We likewise hear nothing about any inner struggles he may have had during his novitiate, training, parish ministry and conflicts with colleagues. Apart from a little correspondence with the Czech nuns whose parcels of food, medicines and books kept him going amidst severe winters, loneliness and illness, lack of access to materials about Werling's life after his deportation to Russia, also mean that this potentially illuminating period is merely outlined and we get no real sense of how Werling fared. Thus we hear almost nothing of Werling's 'many good thoughts' which the title of the book promises: his inner motivations, his lived experience of Estonia and its people, his Jesuit spirituality are more or less passed over in silence.
Another reason for Werling remaining a rather stiff, two-dimensional figure in the book is that we hear almost nothing from those who knew him, apart from the complaints of a few colleagues about his inability to relate to others which leave us with the impression that perhaps he was not as remarkable as his biographers would like him to have been. Despite claims in the Introduction that a biography is justified as in post-colonial studies individuals have agency which allows them to influence their lot, the authors seem unaware that the post-colonial writing of missionary history involves painting a picture of 'mission from below', listening to the voices of those whose everyday life and culture bore the impact of the mission and its perpetrators. We do not hear the voices of those he ministered to in what must undoubtedly have been colourful, multilingual and multicultural parish communities in Tartu in the 1920s, and in Tallinn and the Estonian islands in the 1930s. We hear nothing about whether he collaborated with native speakers while making his biblical translations, the reasons for his dissatisfaction with previous translations, and the reactions of his readership, all of which could potentially bring alive for the reader one of Werling's significant occupations. The events of the book take place largely against the background of the 1920s-1930s, a period of history which saw the social and cultural upheavals caused by Estonian independence and land reform, yet apart from a few details of how this affected the Catholic community, the reader is given very little idea of the rich texture of broader Estonian life at this time.
A further reason for Werling remaining a rather shadowy figure is that in the lengthy second chapter which covers the 1920s-1930s, we lose the thread of his life amidst the ups-and-downs of the development of the Catholic mission in Estonia. The chapter provides a useful summary of the significant figures and monastic orders involved in this process: the sending of a papal visitor at the initiative of Pope Benedict XV in 1921 in the light of the new Estonian government's openness to the presence of the Roman Catholic Church, the ensuing decision to entrust Estonia to Jesuit missionaries owing to the lack of necessary priests, the appointment of Fr Eduard Profittlich as apostolic administrator in May 1931 and as Archbishop in December 1936, the arrival of Capucin fathers as reinforcements in the 1930s and their ministry in Tartu which meant Werling was transferred to Tallinn, the establishment of two houses for Czech nuns in Pärnu and Tartu.
Yet while there is much detailed information about who was appointed where and when, the narrative suffers from a lack of setting these details into broader contexts. The authors rely on archives from Catholic institutions and so again we hear no reaction to these activities either 'from below', nor from a sideways viewpoint through Lutheran or Orthodox eyes, nor from the secular press. Various eastern-rite priests and nuns wander in and out of the narrative with little indication of where they have appeared from, nor the significance of the frictions with Latin-rite clergy and nuns which they cause. Although we gradually become aware that the tiny Catholic minority in Estonia largely consists of Polish migrants, there is no mention at all of the earlier history of Roman Catholic presence in the form of the crusading Teutonic Order in mediaeval times and the reemergence of Catholic communities in the late 18th century. So the significance of the frequent allusions to the openness of Estonian Lutherans to attending Catholic Mass owing to the vestiges of Catholicism which have remained among them, would probably be lost on many of the book's readers. The book presents the Catholic minority in Estonia as struggling to make its voice heard among the majority Lutheran community and an Orthodox community which had been upheld by the Tsarist government. While there may be much truth in this, it fails to do justice to the alienation of many Estonians from religion in general in the late imperial period, the renewed confidence enjoyed by the Catholic Church in the Russian Empire after the 1905 Religious Toleration Act, and the way that both Lutheran and Orthodox churches were facing the same struggles over indigenizing themselves among the Estonian-speaking population not so long before, and during the very time on which the book focuses.
From the point of view of scholars researching Baltic Orthodoxy, the sections of the book which will be of greatest interest are those devoted to mission among the Orthodox population, and those which focus on what the book refers to as 'the grand project of Rome to win Russia to the Catholic faith, in order to restore the unity of the Church' (29). The book sets the Estonian mission in the context of the broader policy towards the Christian East of Popes Benedict XV (1914-22) and Pius XI (1922-39) who, in response to the collapse of the Russian and Ottoman empires, sought the reunion of the Eastern Churches with Rome and created in 1917 the Pontifical Oriental Institute with its mission of educating both Eastern and Western Christians about the Christian East. The book gives some details of the Institute's representative Francis McGarrigle opening negotiations concerning the union of the Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church with the Holy See with Konstantin Päts, and later his brother Fr Nikolai Päts, while at the grassroots level Henri Werling is credited with being given the opportunity to preach the union in Orthodox churches. The authors attribute the failure of negotiations primarily to Rome's fear that the motives for union on the Estonian side were purely financial, although they do also admit that internal dissension between the different Catholic clergy and orders meant the project was doomed to failure. This section is just one example of where the book's reliance on Catholic archives and viewpoints needs balancing out to provide a more rounded picture of the Estonian Orthodox Church's approaches to both the Anglican Church and the Ecumenical Patriarchate during this complex period, and the viewpoints of the Estonian Orthodox clergy on the union with Rome which has been discussed and documented in recent scholarship.
In short, the book is as it claims in the Introduction, 'une premiere approche' 'a first attempt' which neither does justice to the truly remarkable life of Henri Werling, nor gives a balanced and critical account of the Catholic mission in Estonia in the interwar period. It nevertheless points to the need for a serious monograph which would draw Werling's life into a comprehensive study of the Roman Catholic community in Estonia both in this period, and more broadly throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Review by Alison Kolosova
Review of Galina Sedova (nun Efrosiniia), Rizhskaia eparkhiia 1944-1964. Iz istorii pravoslaviia (Daugavpils Universitātes Akadēmiskais apgāds Saule, 2020)
The Vologda ‘club of culture’ was packed: a visiting propagandist, a former priest, was lecturing on the non-existence of God and the lies of churchmen. It was 1962. Speaking was Aleksei Chertkov, a former priest from Riga and a third-generation clergyman (both his father and grandfather were priests in Riga diocese) who had successfully graduated from the Moscow Theological Academy. In the 1960s, he broke with religion and became the chair of atheism at Moscow State University, authoring several books on godlessness for children and adults. A confident lecturer, he was, however, baffled at the Vologda Club of Culture when a young woman started to defiantly argue with him. He lost his poise. The woman who challenged the visiting lecturer later joined a convent and was tonsured as a nun with the name Magdalena. The public at the club was disappointed: “the ex-priest was so handsome and spoke so well, but some foolish woman spoilt it all”.
This is one of the stories from Galina Sedova’s (nun Efrosiniia) book, Riga Diocese 1944-1964. From the History of Orthodoxy, which was defended as a doctoral dissertation in November 2020 at the University of Daugavpils. A scrupulous researcher and prolific writer, Sedova has studied the history of Riga diocese for many years, accumulating an impressive body of evidence from the state archives and private collections. The study is divided into three parts: state-church relations in 1944-1964; Orthodox religious life in Riga diocese; and, finally, forms of repression against the Church during the early Soviet period. The study complements existing studies of the Orthodox Church under Stalin and Khrushchev by Tatiana Chumachenko and recent books by Victoria Smolkin (A Sacred Space is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism), Robert F. Goeckel (Soviet Religious Policy in Estonia and Latvia) and Andrei Sychov.
The first chapter, which deals with the development of Soviet policy towards the Orthodox Church, provides comprehensive biographical surveys of the commissioners for the Orthodox Church in Riga: the NKVD/KGB officers N. P. Smirnov (1944-1949) and A. A. Sakharov (1949-1987). Since Sakharov clearly built his career in Riga, it is definitely worth learning about his background: a beneficiary of Komsomol recruitment into the NKVD after the purges of 1937, he served in SMERSH on four fronts during the Second World War and was appointed to Latvia after service in Manchuria. In other words, Sakharov was not someone to be messed with. Sedova deduces that Sakharov served as an intelligence agent in Latvia even before his appointment as a commissioner because he studied at the agents’ school in Leningrad and knew Latvian. He personally interrogated members of the Pskov Mission, the mission of the Orthodox Church in Pskov region during its occupation by the armies of Third Reich in 1941-44.[1]. After his retirement from the NKVD in 1948 (no doubt with a good pension), Sakharov received an appointment as a commissioner.
Control and surveillance over the activity of the Orthodox Church in Riga diocese is analysed with attention to detail. In particular, the participation of churches in the ‘struggle for peace’ was one issue riddled with tensions. As the Soviet regime sought ‘to mobilise world public opinion for peace’ (Goeckel, 60), the authorities wanted to use the Church’s leadership in this ideological struggle. The party did not easily accept the unwillingness of some Orthodox leaders to play along and support the ‘struggle for peace’: Metropolitan Veniamin (Fedchenkov), for instance, once famously said that the Church should not struggle for peace but pray for peace. In general, Sedova maintains, the churches used the peace issue in order to safeguard their position. As the growing ecumenical movement and its institutionalised forms such as the Conference of European Churches actively participated in establishing connections between East and West, the Soviet authorities faced increased openness and exchange between churches of all confessions. Church leaders attended conferences abroad and the representatives of western churches visited the Soviet Union. The foreign delegations allowed to come to Riga were shown ‘normal’ religious life in the USSR, were given presents and met with representatives of the Lutheran, Catholic and Orthodox clergy. Sedova emphasises that Orthodox prelates such as Archbishop Filaret (Lebedev) capitalised on this opportunity to use monasteries and diocesan summerhouses to entertain foreign delegations, which allowed the Church to keep these properties from being expropriated. This is reminiscent of a similar tactic adopted by Bishop Aleksei (Ridiger) of Tallinn, who nominated the Pühtitsa convent as a place for receiving foreign visitors, thus preventing it from being closed in the 1960s. Yet, it is obvious from the book that the author regards the uncompromising position of Metropolitan Veniamin, who refused to involve himself in the ideological activities of the ‘struggle for peace’, as more exemplary than that of Filaret or the Lutheran bishop Gustav Turs, who actively played along with Soviet ideology.
According to Sedova’s calculations, 54 churches and prayer houses were closed between 1945 and 1965 in Riga diocese, most of them between 1960 and 1964. This number does not include chapels in cemeteries and public places. In comparison with Catholic churches, which were much less affected, the Orthodox Church suffered severe losses. There are parallels with Andrei Sõtšov’s study on Khrushchev’s anti-religious policy in Soviet Estonia, which argues that about 20% of parishes were closed during the Khrushchev period.[2] There is a need for a comparative study between Latvia and Estonia to assess the impact of Khrushchev’s policy on Latvian- and Estonian-speaking Orthodox parishes.
While most studies of Soviet policy focus on heroic resistance against it, Sedova’s monograph addresses instances of clergy collaboration with the authorities, providing examples of the methods used by commissioners to bring the clergy to heel: these include vilification in the newspapers and blackmail. Yet, the cases of Iakov Legkikh, Dimitrii Okulovich, Savelii Danilov and A. B. Chertkov suggest that the choice to collaborate or not depended not on the methods, but on personal integrity. Danilov and Chertkov renounced their membership in the Orthodox Church and became active atheist propagandists. Sedova believes that they were influenced by the former priest Aleksandr Osipov, professor at Tartu University and then the Leningrad Theological Academy. Sedova is right that the activities of the security forces in anti-religious campaigns in Soviet Latvia, as well as in other regions of the USSR, have not been well studied in Russia. Due to lack of access to operational documents even in Latvia, where the secret police archives are available to researchers, the story of the Soviet organs of state security and religion has to be reconstructed with the use of personal evidence where available. The work of scholars in Ukraine, for example, suggests that the involvement of the KGB in the surveillance of, control over and even direct interference in religious communities was omnipresent.[3] In Sedova’s book, the vignette on priests turning into atheist propagandists and then back again is quite novel, in my view: apart from Firsov’s popular book on Aleksandr Osipov, we lack discussions on turncoats among the Orthodox clergy and their devastating impact on religious life.
Sedova provides interesting characteristics of the hierarchs who served in Riga diocese from 1944 to 1964. There was Kornilii (Popov, 1945-48), a former Renovationist eager to demonstrate his loyalty to the Soviet authorities; Veniamin (Fedchenkov, 1948-51), a Russian émigré who had a particular spiritual impact on his parishioners; and Filaret (Lebedev, 1951-58), whose main achievement was to secure financial support from the Moscow patriarchate, which allowed him to maintain churches and pay taxes. After the short-lived appointments of Aleskei (Ridiger) and Filaret (Denisenko), in 1962 Riga diocese received Nikon (Fomichev), who stimulated liturgical life in the diocese, leading to increased income for churches.
What I found missing in the book is an analysis of the impact of Soviet policy on the ecclesiological status of Riga diocese, which had been an autonomous church between 1920 and 1940 within the independent state of Latvia. I wonder whether this independent status was in any sense preserved in church practices, including forms of self-government, or whether it was suppressed entirely during the Soviet period. I also wonder how the emigration of a large number of priests affected Latvian Orthodoxy. The book is very rich in detail and based on solid research, but the story of the Riga diocese is not been placed in a comparative context vis-à-vis other dioceses in the Soviet Union, including neighbouring Estonia.
Nonetheless, the book is undoubtedly an important contribution to the religious, political and social history of the Soviet western outposts period following the end of the Second World War.
Review by Irina Paert
[1] Konstantin Oboznyi , Istoriia Pskovskoi pravoslavnoi missiii 1941-1944 (Moscow, 2008).
[2] Andrei Sõtšov, Eesti Õigeusu Piiskopkond nõukogude religioonipoliitika mõjuväljas 1954-1964 (Tartu: Tartu University Press, 2008).
[3] Tatiana Vagramenko, ‘“KGB Evangelism”: Agents and Jehovah’s Witnesses in Soviet Ukraine’, Kritika; Tatiana Vagramenko, ‘Visualizing Invisible Dissent: Red-Dragonists, Conspiracy and the Soviet Security Police’, in The Religious Underground and the Secret Police in Communist and Post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe, edited by James Kapaló and Kinga Povedak (Routledge, forthcoming in 2021).
CfP: Forum in Ab Imperio: “Religion, National Indifference, and Forms of Solidarity: Historical Perspectives from Imperial and Post-Imperial Borderlands”
Academic visitors to balticorthodoxy.com may be interested in the following CfP for a special issue of the journal Ab Imperio.
Forum in Ab Imperio: “Religion, National Indifference, and Forms of Solidarity: Historical Perspectives from Imperial and post-Imperial Borderlands”
Guest Editors Catherine Gibson (University of Tartu) & Irina Paert (University of Tartu)
There has been an invigorating body of scholarship in recent years seeking to challenge dominant nationalist narratives of ‘national awakening’ by highlighting the flexible and often ambiguous ways in which inhabitants of Central and Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century engaged with ideas about nationhood. Rather than been swept up in an overwhelming tide of nationalism, scholars have drawn attention to populations who remained ‘indifferent’ to national ideas, who strategically side-switched for political, economic, or social reasons, who felt a stronger sense of identification towards their local area, or who had a hybrid or hyphenated sense of belonging as a result of multilingualism or mixed marriages (Judson, 2006, King, 2002, Zahra, 2008). Research on ‘national indifference’ has mostly focused on problematising national and linguistic categories for grouping people, yet the conversations about ‘national indifference’ have many parallels with the themes and approaches of historians working on the fluidity and flexibility of religious practices and behaviours (Emiliantseva 2008, Kefeli 2016, Paert 2016). So far, however, the interplay between ‘national indifference’ and religious forms of identification and solidarity have often been overlooked in this larger discussion (Van Ginderachter & Fox 2019, Fellerer et al, 2019; notable exceptions include Paces & Wingfield 2005, Bjork 2008, Cusco 2019, Aoshima 2020).
In this Ab Imperio Forum, we invite contributors to critically reflect on how the concept of ‘national indifference’ might be applied to understand flexible religious behaviours and identifications and to problematise the simplistic confessional classifications still often used by scholars and the media. The papers will discuss populations who converted or oscillated between commitment to different confessions, displayed confessional indeterminacy, informality, ambivalence, or ‘situational religiosity’, or who proved problematic in some way for state and Church authorities to classify using routine administrative practices of religious classification and statistical enumeration. Through consideration of different historical case studies, the articles will explore how religion was not displaced by nationalism as a pre-modern relic, but intersected and overlapped with emerging ideas about nationhood in complex ways. By reflecting on the imperial period, the Forum will provide insights on historical dynamics and processes underpinning intersectional identities in the post-Soviet space today.
We invite submission from scholars working on the Russian Empire (including its border regions with the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, and Central Asia) and successor territories from c.1850 to c.1950. Themes and questions to be covered in the Forum may include, but are not limited to:
- The relationship between ethnolinguistic, national, and religious forms of personal identification and group identity;
- Responses of religious minorities to various nationalising projects, forms of bureaucratic ascription, calendar reforms, language policy, and name-changes
- Attempts by Church and state authorities to tackle religious ambivalence, hybridity and people who went back and forth between different religions.
- Conversions and re-conversions
- Interconfessional marriage, mixed-faith schools
- Cartographic, ethnographic, and statistical representations of religious diversity
- The responses of religious groups to various forms of national mobilisation, including the war effort. Did all religious groups rally behind the patriotic and xenophobic slogans of their governments during the First World War? How did groups that shared a religious identity with the enemy react?
- What was the position and identity of the multilingual clergy who served mixed ethnic communities towards the nationalist agenda? How do ego-documents shed light on the self-understanding of such clergy?
- How was confessional inter-ethnic solidarity affected by transitions from empire to nation-states in the 20th century? In what ways did confessional networks and communities promote feelings of transnational and international solidarity across state borders?
- To what extent can approaches from the ‘national indifference’ historiography be applied to study religious groups? What are the possible limitations of such an approach? What insights and perspectives can scholars of religion bring to the broader discussion of ‘national indifference’?
Provisional Timetable 2021-2022
1 February 2021 Abstracts to be submitted
1 March 2021 Selected abstracts will be invited for full article submission
15 June 2021 Full article will be collected for internal review
June-July 2021 Articles will be sent back and forth to authors for internal revisions, if necessary
1 August 2021 Articles submitted to Ab Imperio for peer-review
2022 Year of publication
We invite those interested to send us article proposals (title and an abstract max. 300 words) to Catherine Gibson (catherine.helen.gibson@ut.ee) and Irina Paert (irina.paert@ut.ee) by 1 February 2021.
We look forward to receiving your proposals. Please do not hesitate to get in touch with any questions.
Kind regards,
Catherine & Irina
Review of Mari-Liis Paaver, Ikoonimaalija Rajalt – Pimen Sofronov (Vilnijus, 2020)
Pimen Sofronov: The Icon Painter from Paradise. This is a literal translation of the Russian title of this bilingual art book dedicated to Sofronov, an Old Believer artist from Estonia and arguably one of the most significant iconographers of the twentieth century.
The title plays on the name of Raja (Est.) or Rajushi (Russian), a village on the shore of Lake Peipus (Chudskoe ozero) inhabited by the Old Believers from the eighteenth century. This was a centre of the Theodosians (fedoseevtsy), a conservative Old Believer concord. Sofronov (1898-1973) came to Raja as a pupil of Gavriil Florov (1854-1930), a spiritual father, iconographer and writer: together, they painted the iconostasis of the Old Believer church in Raja in the 1920s. The journey of Sofronov from Raja to Western Europe and later the USA is a story of the rediscovery of the traditional art of icon-painting in the twentieth century and of Orthodoxy in the West. The book consists of an extended biographical essay and expert commentary on the style, symbolism, religious subjects and artistic choices of Sofronov’s works, which are preserved in different locations across Europe and the USA.
The author of the book, the Estonian art historian Mari-Liis Paaver, takes us on a journey from Estonia to Riga, Prague, Belgrade, Rome, Paris, Chevetogne and New Jersey. She has studied, photographed and identified many works by Sofronov, including those which were not signed by him. While the book is undoubtedly a weighty contribution to art history, it is also to a great interest to church historians who study Old Belief, Orthodoxy and ecumenical relations between churches.
As old Russian icons, including Rublev’s Trinity, were rediscovered in the early twentieth century, scholars and the educated public began to appreciate Old Believer icons, which during the 1800s had been denigrated as dark and primitive. The book shows that the pupils and consumers of Sofronov’s art after he left his home in Estonia in the early 1930s were largely outside Old Believer circles, and included both Russian émigrés and Western Christians. Icons were becoming fashionable: Sofronov received orders from non-Orthodox, members of European elites and even the Vatican.
Sofronov’s art was dynamic: he did not just paint in the manner of his teacher Florov, one which reflected the traditional old Russian style, but also refined his knowledge of the Byzantine iconography by studying albums published by Nikodim Kondakov and frescos in Serbian monasteries and Italian churches. The influences of Balkan and Roman styles are discernible in the works of that period.
Kazanskaia Mother of God, 1930s Chevetogne
Yet, despite these influences, Sofronov remained very strictly bound to tradition, both in terms of representation and technique. This put him in an awkward position vis-à-vis Russian emigres who tried to reinterpret iconographic art through modernist styles. These interpretations can be seen in the works of Dmitrii Steletskii, Leonid Uspenskii, Mother Maria Skobtsova, Grigorii Krug (another artist who lived in Estonia before moving to Paris), Julia Reitlinger (Mother Ioanna) and Archimandrite Sofronii (Sakharov). Paaver touches upon this problem by quoting Mother Ioanna, who critically described Sofronov’s style as ‘blind fanaticism’ and the result of ignorance about the icon as an art object. Reitlinger’s remark demonstrates that Parisian circles of Russian emigres did not accept Sofronov: indeed, his position was quite marginal, even though some members of émigré communities, including the wife of the priest Alexander Elchaninov, attended his courses. Paaver, however, demonstrates that Sofronov influenced the followers of the Benedictine monk Dom Lambert Beaduin, the founder of an ecumenical community in Belgium (first in Amay-sur-Meuse and then, from 1939, in Chevetogne): he tried to build a bridge between Western and Eastern Christianity, adopting the rites of the Eastern Church and studying the Eastern tradition without either becoming Greek Catholic or following the proselyting aims of the Vatican Pro Russia commission. Soronov stayed in the monastery in 1939 and painted a very fine Deesis (Greek: δέησις, ‘prayer’ or ‘supplication’, a triptych of Christ, Mother of God and St John the Baptist) that decorates the refectory of the abbey. He also taught the monks to paint icons.
Sofronov’s iconostasis in the church of St Dimitry Solunskii in Lazarevac, Serbia, 1939.
Paaver traces the mutual influences between Sofronov and the Roman Catholic world in her analysis of the painter’s Italian period. He stayed in Rome during the Second World War and originally planned to finish a five-tiered iconostasis for the Vatican. This commission did not take place and only 54 icons were completed. Nonetheless, in 1941, the Pontific Oriental Institute organised a personal exhibition of Sofronov that was quite favourably received by the Italian press. Paaver takes the praise of the Italian journalists with a pinch of salt, pointing out that the quality of icons painted in Italy was not very high.
The art of iconography is passed from a master to a disciple. Safronov’s courses on icon painting were very popular, attended by priests, priests’ wives, monks, nuns, bishops, artists, and many talented women, such as Princess Natalia Jashvil, who became Sofronov’s life-long friend. Sofronov’s disciples, who came from various ethnic and confessional backgrounds, developed their own styles and created their own schools of iconography: these include Hieronimus Lessing from Belgium, Robert de Caluwé (1913–2005) from Finland, and others whose personal artistic trajectories are yet to be traced.
Christ Pantocrator with saints, 1930s
In 1947, Sofronov moved to the USA, where he settled in Mellville, New Jersey. While he attended an Old Believer parish, he painted icons and frescos for various Orthodox groups in the USA, including American and Greek Orthodox churches and Uniate parishes. He taught the old Russian style in the Jordanville seminary, having painted 30 churches across the USA. Sofronov’s biggest achievements are the churches in Ansonia and Syracuse (New York State).
Sofronov visited his native Estonia in 1969, meeting his family and his old friend Ivan Zavoloko. Many leaders of Old Believer communities were repressed during the Soviet occupation of the Baltic, being executed or deported to Siberia where they served sentences in the gulag: Sofronov managed to avoid this fate and continued to perfect his style, transmitting traditional Orthodox art to Western and émigré audiences. The illustrations of Sofronov’s work, which Paaver masterfully and lovingly presents in this book provide an objective retrospective of the highlights and low points in Sofronov’s art. The reader learns that Sofronov is undoubtedly a unique figure who has been undeservingly undervalued.
While the book is well researched, I feel that some pieces of the mosaic are missing: for example, the archives in Pushkinskii Dom (St Petersburg), which include correspondence between Sofronov and Vladimir Malyshev, have not been used, perhaps due to various restrictions. This reader would also like to know more about Gavriil Florov, who had a formative influence on Sofronov. Florov’s family, originally from Starodub’e, studied iconography in several centres in Russia: their influence on Baltic Old Believer iconography needs to be traced.
The book is beautifully edited and executed: the Russian and Estonian texts run in parallel, the illustrations, many of which are photos made by the author in different locations, tell a story of traditional art in different cultural contexts, allowing the reader to follow developments and changes in tartistic style. There are also rare photographs from the archive of the Raja community and Sofronov’s archive in the USA.
Review by Irina Paert.
Review of Neil Taylor, Estonia: A Modern History (2nd edition. Oxford: C. Hurst and Co, 2020)
The history of Estonia’s tumultuous twentieth century is intriguing, complex and unjustly ignored. The country went from a province of the Russian Empire to an independent nation to a Soviet republic and then back to a sovereign state, all in the course of a hundred years. This has created a dense and tangled web of traumas and victories, of repressions and resistance, of betrayals and resolve. This is particularly the case for the Second World War and its aftermath, when subsequent Soviet and German invasions and the installation of the Stalinist regime left a bloody trail of recriminations and reprisals that still influence modern domestic and international politics in the Baltic region. The historian approaching this topic needs a deft touch to emerge with an account that approaches at least some standards of objectivity.
Regrettably, Neil Taylor is not such a historian.
As a travel writer, he certainly knows how to craft a readable narrative that can appeal to an audience lacking familiarity with Estonia. Quickly dispatching with the country’s pre-revolutionary history in the first chapter, he comes to the meat of his story, the political events between 1917 and 2017. The prose is lively and moves at a brisk pace, introducing key figures, places and occurrences through memorable anecdotes. The basic contours of Estonia’s history are traced and some of the complexities at least touched upon. If perhaps Taylor’s goal was to encourage curiosity in (and thus tourism to) Estonia among a wider English-speaking public, then it has most likely been achieved (rather strangely, the book has been translated into Estonian: quite how natives, presumably well versed in their recent history, will benefit from this work is open to question).
I do not criticise the paucity of footnotes in Taylor’s book (although he certainly should have considered citing evidence for at least some of his claims): it is a valid choice to dispose of the bulky and off-putting hallmarks of academic presentation when writing a popular history. What I do intend to criticise are the remarkable caesurae, the glib moral and analytical judgements and the abandonment of any pretence of objectivity, especially towards the end of the book.
First things first: caesurae. The book is overwhelmingly a political history, focusing almost entirely on the actions of great men and (more recently) women. His sources reflect this, since he predominantly quotes books penned by presidents, preeminent politicians, ambassadors and journalists to the significant detriment of other historical documentation. That such figures might have a particular political perspective on the past does not seem to occur to him. But such people often wrote in English, French or German, the main criterion in Taylor’s selection: only two or three Estonian works are cited in his bibliography. No archival and newspaper sources are mentioned. As a consequence of this overweening focus on the great and the good, the daily lives of Estonians are either ignored or generalised. For instance, rather than focus on how people’s economic and cultural life changed in the chaos of the early 1990s, we are assured that in 1994, foreign journalists could now pay with credit cards, watch international TV and have a Chinese [1]. This is most certainly not a people’s history.
More serious is the absence of any sustained discussion about Estonia’s Russian-speaking minority, currently around a quarter of the population. The only real mention of them comes in the last chapter, that on the post-Soviet era, presumably because the author could no longer ignore them at this point. That rather significant populations of Russians have existed in the region for some centuries is skipped over, along with any contributions (cultural, social, economic, or otherwise) they have made.
And even when Taylor does discuss Russian-speakers, he is oddly condemnatory. For instance, when he investigates the privatisation of the Estonian economy in the early 1990s, he notes that had the Russian population followed the example of the Baltic Germans following land redistribution in the 1920s and set up businesses, they might have avoided economic exclusion [2]. But surely the question should be asked: did the Russian-speaking population have sufficient capital to take part in the bonanza sale of national assets, especially given, as we are told a few pages before, a large portion of this group could only exchange their roubles at a discriminatory rate? The comparison is additionally loaded, since the Baltic Germans were a landed and mercantile elite, whose international capital and revenue streams were sufficient to allow their community to adapt to post-1917 independence.
There is another notable gap. Despite being penned in 2018, no mention is made of the alarming rise of the populist EKRE party in 2015, a fact surely of interest to Taylor’s readership given the party’s notable share of parliamentary seats and invitation into government in 2019. One could come to the reasonable conclusion that the reason Taylor does not mention EKRE is the same reason he does not mention the Estonian economy’s sharp plunge in the recession of 2008-9 or the demographic problems caused in part by emigration to the West: to do so would dim the glowing encomium to Thatcherite neoliberalism that constitutes his book’s finale.
On the second major problem: the glib moral and analytical judgements. Minor instances of this occur throughout. Why twice condemn Winston Churchill for congratulating Stalin on the Red Army’s entry into Tallinn, a prestigious victory for the Allied cause? More substantive, however, are how Taylor treats issues of occupation. In recent years, much of the literature on authoritarian and dictatorial regimes (not to mention the body of work on social reconciliation and healing) has advised moving beyond dichotomies of collaboration and resistance, instead focusing on the myriad ways people sought to navigate imperilled social and political lives. The same is true of scholarship on imperialism, which has focused on the complex and contradictory mechanics at work in the relationship between ruler and ruled. For the most part, Taylor is not interested in this more sophisticated perspective on the difficult issues he discusses. In fairness, he does mention in the introduction that he wants to take a more balanced approach to figures often condemned simply as traitors in the Estonian national canon. But this is not how things ultimately work out. Estonian interaction with the Soviet regime is almost entirely seen through a lens of betrayal or resistance. The focus on local politicians and notable emigres helps this approach, since it is quite easy to assign labels of moral cowardice or purity to such figures. A discussion of everyday life, with its inevitable compromises and accommodations, might have inclined the author to a more balanced perspective.
In the book’s final pages, a quotation is offered (of course from the Observer, and not an Estonian source): one of the problems in Estonian society is ‘Estonian bitterness and Russian blindness to the roots of that bitterness’. This quote is not analysed beyond to ignore the first half and focus on the second, presumably to make sure that blame is properly allocated. If Taylor had indulged in some contemplation, he might have realised that popular history books which are all too quick to dole out condemnation and accolades in morally compromised situations contribute to bitterness and blindness, rather than correct them.
And, finally, the abandonment of objectivity. It is natural for writers to have sympathy for their subjects, especially when they have long-standing associations with them. The Estonian story during the twentieth century is indeed a sympathetic one. But to simply cast aside analysis and reasoned observation in favour of cheerleading a particular perspective, and one skewed by a highly limited source base, is scarcely acceptable. By the conclusion of this book, the reader is left in no doubt where Taylor’s sympathies lie and that these sympathies have an exclusionary quality. Russians must accept Estonia’s language laws are “understandable revenge” and deal with the fact that their tongue can only ever be for the home.
In sum, Taylor’s obvious sympathies, superficial judgements and limited source base have led him to wholeheartedly accept and embrace a particular narrative of Estonian history, one typical of smaller states trying to forge a particular national identity in the wake of independence (this is presumably why the work was translated into Estonian). Such narratives cast all preceding history as a centuries-long road to national independence. Anything that comes between the nation and its independence is bad, ipso facto. Any interactions with intervening forces are seen through a lens of collaboration or resistance. Eras of independence are shining beacons of light, shattering the shadows around them. This narrative is, in short, a fairy tale.
Given all this, Taylor’s book cannot act even as a supplement to more serious historical works on the subject: it certainly does not hold a candle to Toivo Raun’s much more solid work Estonia and the Estonians (2nd edition. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2002). Should they be curious about Estonia’s past and present, it is to this latter work that all readers should turn.
Review by J. M. White
[1] Loc. 3303 Kindle version
[2] Loc. 3289 Kindle version
Book launch event: Unity in Faith? Edinoverie, Russian Orthodoxy, and Old Belief, 1800-1918
On 3 November, James M. White, the founder of www.balticorthodoxy.com, released his new book, Unity in Faith? Edinoverie, Russian Orthodoxy, and Old Belief, 1800-1918, with Indiana University Press. This book offers a new perspective on the enduringly popular subject of Old Belief by looking at the previously untold story of edinoverie, those Old Believers who reconciled themselves with the Russian Orthodox Church. The book principally examines edinoverie through the lens of imperial diversity and the Russian Orthodox Church's struggle to accept those it had previously cast out. In the process of its century-long engagement with Old Believers through edinoverie, the Church itself was changed, as it was forced to provide a new and more expansive conception of Orthodox identity. The narrative also relates the lives of the edinovertsy themselves, both through the experiences of everyday believers and the fascinating biographies of some of its leaders, such as the charismatic elder Pavel Prusskii, the renegade priest Ioann Verkhovskii, and the firebrand reformer Simeon Shleev. As it unfolds through their eyes, the history of edinoverie is a complex and engaging tale of compromise, negotiation, and adaptation against the backdrop of a rapidly modernising Russian Empire.
The launch event was hosted by Quaestio Rossica on facebook. Dr Alexander Palkin (Ural Federal University) interviews Dr White about the book and edinoverie more generally.
Review of Jean-François Jolivalt and Metropolitan Stephanos of Tallinn and All Estonia, La véritable histoire des Orthodoxes d’Estonie (Graveurs de Mémoire) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012)
Review by SEBASTIAN RIMESTAD. This review is a direct translation by the author of a review in French, published in Révue d’histoire ecclésiastique, vol. 111, no. 1-2 (2016), pp. 340-343.
A conflict occurred during the 1990s in the Orthodox world in Estonia between, on the one hand, the Orthodox Church emerging from the Soviet Union and reporting to the patriarchate of Moscow and, on the other, a group of priests and laypeople who wanted to reinstate the inter-war Orthodox Church of Estonia under the patriarchate of Constantinople.
This conflict, which engendered a three-month rupture of communion between the patriarchates of Constantinople and Moscow in 1996, has been well covered by academic treatments. The two opposing parties have published several volumes meant to justify their point of view. [1] This book by Metropolitan Stephanos and Jean-François Jolivalt perfectly inscribes itself into this historical tradition.
At the same time, the book boasts a very anachronistic title: The true history of the Orthodox Church in Estonia. At least since the historical debates of the 1970s, it is generally accepted that there is no such thing as ’true history’. Historiography is told in hegemonic narratives and their alternatives. According to Metropolitan Stephanos, the current head of the Estonian Orthodox Church under Constantinople, the hegemonic story of Orthodox Estonians is not the correct one. That is why he feels the need to publish this book in order to rectify the false narratives.
Nevertheless, the book cannot aspire to tell a true history since it is written from a very specific standpoint, at times so convinced of its own truth that alternative interpretations and arguments are not even acknowledged. If we add that Metropolitan Stephanos is a Cypriot by birth who spent most of his life in France, having never studied history and knowing Estonia only since his arrival in 1999, the pretension to write a true history becomes even less convincing. The other author, the journalist Jean-François Jolivalt, seems just to have put Stephanos’ ideas to paper, adding some colourful geopolitical analyses without having any knowledge of Estonia.
Thus, the book does not have much academic value and only serves as a justification for a certain point of view. The bibliographic apparatus and the few footnotes do not in any way help the reader find more information about the arguments and facts presented. This is especially the case in the first nine chapters, which treat the history of Orthodoxy in Estonia until the 1980s. The people that have been around the metropolitan since his nomination in 1999 do not have much living memory about this history. Therefore, the history of the Orthodox Church until Estonia’s first independence in 1917/1920 is full of factual errors, inaccuracies, and exaggerated generalisations. Moreover, according to Stephanos, there is a perfect continuity between the first Orthodox Christians on the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea and the current Orthodox Estonians. In reality, history is much more complex and contradictory than is possible to cover in a few pages without having profound knowledge of the region.
For example: “Thus, in 1838, Estonia is threatened by famine after three years of draught. A delegation of Lutheran peasants travels to Riga, the administrative centre of the Baltic region, in order to express their suffering to the Russian governor. Instead of meeting with the representative of the Tsar, who closes the door before them, they go to the Orthodox bishop, another Russian, to plead for help. The prelate, attentive and compassionate, is convinced and releases the help that lets the peasant live through their misery.” (p. 18) In this short passage, there are no less than four grave historical errors. First, this happened in 1841 and again in 1845. Second, Riga was not the capital of the Baltic region, but only of the province of Livland, one of the Baltic provinces. Then, the governor was not a Russian, but a Baltic German. Finally, the bishop had no possibility of helping the peasants out. His hands were tied, as the Baltic Germans had a religious monopoly over the Estonians.
The rest of the historical narrative of the book’s first part could also be criticised in the same vein. Sometimes, there seems to have been a long transmission chain: first, there are the Orthodox Estonians, who try to present a positive history to their hierarch. Then, Stephanos tells Jolivalt what he has understood and the latter adds his own geopolitical elements that make the prose appealing and emotionally engaging.
After 1917, the same historiographical tendency continues, although the sources used become more concrete. Unfortunately, these are seldom of great value. In fact, Metropolitan Stephanos often uses the historical summary prepared by the Estonian lawyer Mari-Ann Heljas for the registration hearing of the Constantinople Church in 1993. Even though this summary is largely correct, it remains a juridical document and not an objective treatment of academic history. On the other hand, the footnotes often refer to the dissertation of Andrei Sõtšov, Achievement and Fight for the Independence of Orthodox Church of Estonia, 1940-1945. However, this was not a PhD dissertation, but merely a short summary of Sõtsov’s BA thesis, published in English. The PhD dissertation covers a different period and is written in Estonian.
The major part of the book treats recent history since the fall of the Soviet Union. This enables a much clearer picture, since Stephanos is able to consult eyewitnesses and, from 1999, his own memory. What Stephanos tells in this part of the book corresponds largely to what one can find in other treatments of recent Estonian Orthodox history. The main difference is that the entire history is told solely from the point of view of the Estonians, wishing to reinstate the “lost” church “crushed” by Stalin. This view is often just sentimental and personal, verging even on the apologetic.
Stephanos often claims that he is interested in a dialogue with the Estonian diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church, but, at the same time, he accuses the latter in less than courteous terms. Metropolitan Kornelii of the Russian diocese (whom Stephanos seems to refuse the title of metropolitan) is described as “clumsy” (p. 280) and Patriarch Kirill of Moscow as someone who has “escaped from a different century” (p. 296). In contrast to the Russian treatments of the conflict, which claim that it is the Russian church that is maltreated, Stephanos tends to describe the Estonian Orthodox community as the victim of Russian bullying, all the while depicting his own church as superior because it is under Constantinople’s protection. He repeatedly claims that Estonian Orthodoxy would have imploded without Constantinople’s intervention.
Towards the end of the book, the author becomes more personal, since he describes his own everyday life. For Stephanos, living the church is not only doing politics – i.e. opposing the Russian church – but, and most importantly, finding a foundation in the Bible. This is why theological language becomes prominent in this part of the book. The author talks about the ecumenical movement and theological education in Estonia. At the same time, he does not hesitate to criticise those of the clergy and the lay faithful who see the church as nothing but a way of affirming their nationality. Now that the legal situation of the church is regulated, Stephanos aims to instil a truly Christian spirit in it.
In conclusion, the book does not deliver on the promise in the title, at times even contorting historical facts to fit into a specific narrative. However, it is not completely useless, as it gives an insight into Metropolitan Stephanos’ personal view of the current ecclesiastical situation in Estonia. The situation is not entirely clear and, because of the polemics of the two adversaries, it remains opaque. The book is a good point of departure in order to understand the complex challenges that engendered one of the gravest crises of the Orthodox world in the 1990s. It also shows how history often is much more complex than at first glance. To fully understand this last point, it is not enough to read this book alone: it should necessarily be complemented by others.
[1] From the Moscow side: Igor PREKUP, Pravoslavie v Estonii (Tallinn, 1996); Patriarch Aleksii II of Moscow, Pravoslavie v Estonii (Moscow, 1999); Pravoslavie v Estonii, 2007. From the side of Constantinople: Grigorios Papathomas and Mattias Palli (eds), The Autonomous Orthodox Church of Estonia – L’Eglise Autonome Orthodoxe d’Estonie (Katérini, 2002); special issue of Istina, 1 (2004). For an objective treatment of this conflict, see Sebastian Rimestad, “Orthodox Churches in Estonia”, in Lucian Leustean (ed.), Eastern Christianity and Politics in the Twenty-First Century (Abingdon: Oxon, 2014), pp. 295-311.
Review of Kevin O'Connor, The House of Hemp and Butter: A History of Old Riga (Ithaca: Northern Illinois University Press, 2019)
When I first visited Riga in 2018, I had the opportunity to work in the National Library of Latvia. A very modern ensemble of glass and metal, the library’s high windows overlook the River Daugava and the old city. In a clement September, the bright sun sparkled off the flowing waters and soaring spires, a truly staggering panorama of one of eastern Europe’s most gorgeous cities. Now my only regret is that I had not yet read Kevin O’Connor’s wonderful book to put this amazing sight into its proper historical perspective.
Stretching from the arrival of the first German merchants in the late eleventh century to Russia’s conquest of the city in 1710, O’Connor weaves an engaging narrative of warfare, politics, economics, and society. Highlights are descriptions of the brutalities of the Northern Crusades, the upheavals of the Lutheran Reformation as it swept across the Baltic, and the final, agonising death of Swedish Riga as it was besieged by flood, plague, and cannonball. These events are, however, always rooted within a concern for Riga’s physical and social environments: the reader is continually updated on the changing cityscape and how grandiose historical developments impacted the lives of normal Rigans, be they from the wealthy German merchantry or the city’s large Livonian underclass.
For O’Connor, medieval and early modern Riga was fundamentally a German city, unquestionably modelled on such northern European trading hubs and replicating their institutions and social structures. Drawing initially on luxury goods from the Russian interior and later on shipbuilding materials from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, German merchants dominated the city’s economic, social, and cultural life, ultimately creating an exclusionary environment designed to shield themselves from outsiders, whether Latvians in the suburbs or foreign traders from abroad. In this sense, while strongly resembling its counterparts in Germany, Riga was most like Danzig (Gdansk) and its northern neighbour Reval (Tallinn).
O’Connor closely follows the fundamental differences between Riga and its German sister-cities. First, there were the crusaders, the Livonian Order. Their presence was both an encumbrance and a necessity to the other two parties involved in urban politics, the archbishop and the city council. Although the knights and their servants sought to control civic life, the city required their swords to defend it from hinterland tribes and more powerful states. Tracing the outcome of this triangular struggle for control occupies much of the first half of the book. By the time the Order had conclusively won, however, it was too late: in the early modern age, a ramshackle conglomeration of city council and crusading military order could not stand against the rapidly centralising empires around it.
Second, this German city sat amidst a land full of competing native groups, some occasionally in alliance with the city, others seeking its destruction: its relationship with these peoples was, as O’Connor correctly diagnoses, colonial in nature, as the latter were exploited, often coercively, for their money, labour, and resources. Riga’s size and economic pre-eminence drew in crowds of Lats and Livs, often forced there by conflict, famine, and the brutality of the Baltic German aristocracy. While they might find freedom in the city’s outskirts (for they were seldom allowed to settle in the old town itself), they did not find equality: clothing choices, housing locations, and educational opportunities were all circumscribed by the city’s strictly hierarchical structure, one which put Germans on top and all others underneath. When the city of Riga came to suffer (and suffer it did from famine, flood, and fire), it was all these hapless people who suffered and suffered most. Even the Swedes, seeking to rationalise the messy suburbs into neat squares and broad prospects, forbade buildings to be constructed of anything but wood: in the event of war, these houses and businesses would have to be burnt to give the fortress walls a clear view of approaching enemies. It is to O’Connor’s great credit that he does not abandon these Livonian groups to the condescension of history: although sources describing their daily lives are near non-existent, he tries to give the reader at least an appreciation of their experiences in and around Riga.
Finally, Riga sat on a tense but also productive international crossroads, with Russians to the east, Poles and Prussians to the south, and Scandinavians to the north. This was also a religious meeting point, with Riga’s Catholic (later Lutheran) churches being joined by small Orthodox sites for Russian merchants. This strategic position was both Riga’s core strength and perhaps its most fundamental weakness. Its proximity to the Russian lands and their wealth of furs and trees allowed the city to boom, becoming the Baltic’s premier emporium. But this wealth and geographical site drew envious eyes: between 1600 and 1710, the city passed from Polish to Swedish to Russian rule, each war bringing with it devastation.
There can be no doubt that O’Connor achieves one of his major aims with his wonderfully colourful and evocative story: medieval and early modern Riga must surely now be put alongside the trading towns of northwestern Europe in any subsequent history. With expert sure-footedness, the author carefully avoids the glaring excesses of Latvian, Russian, and German nationalist narratives to deliver a thoughtful and captivating synthesis that will appeal to both specialists and the general public in equal measure.
Review author: J. M. White
YouTube Series on the History of Russian Orthodoxy
The School of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Tartu is putting the lecture series ‘Witches, Saints, and Tsars: Orthodoxy in the Russian Empire’ on YouTube. Given by Dr James White (founder of balticorthodoxy.com), the lectures cover all aspects of Orthodoxy in the Russian Empire from 1721 to 1917. See the playlist below.
Online lecture on Estonian Swedes and Conversion to Orthodoxy
On 8 April 2020, Dr Trond O. Tollefsen (Uppsala University) will be presenting an online lecture about the conversion of Estonian Swedes to Orthodoxy in the 1880s. This lecture is part of ongoing cooperation with Dr James White, founder of balticorthodoxy.com
Remains of the Swedish Orthodox Vormsi church
For those of you who would like to tune in to the lecture, you can find details and links at the following page:
Review of Irina Paert's book on Baltic Orthodoxy
In 2018, Dr Irina Paert of the University of Tartu (and one of the co-founders of balticorthodoxy.com) published the Russian-language anthology Pravoslavie v Pribaltike: religiiia, politika, obrazovanie, 1840-e - 1930-e gg. [Orthodoxy in the Baltic Provinces: Religion, Politics, Education, the 1840s to the 1930s]. The book contains 14 essays by Russian, Latvian, Estonian, and German academics on a wide range of subjects, including church architecture in the Baltic region, the role of the Orthodox clergy in the formation of the local intelligentsia, and the politics of Old Believer communities in inter-war Latvia and Estonia. The book can be downloaded for free here.
We are happy to present the first English-language review of this work, written by Professor Grigorijus Potašenko of Vilnius University for the journal Lithuanian Historical Studies (no. 23, 2019, pp. 216-222).
Crowdfunding for the repair of the Mõniste-Ritsiku Orthodox church
The parish of the Mõniste-Ritsiku Orthodox church and the Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church are currently trying to raise money for the repair of the Mõniste-Ritsiku church. This building dates back to 1855. Given that this project is aimed at restoring an artefact of considerable historical significance, we at balticorthodoxy.com strongly support the campaign.
Their crowd funding campaign is open until 31 December 2019: if you would like to donate, please visit https://www.hooandja.ee/en/projekt/moniste-ritsiku-kirikuhoone-remont
UPDATE: The campaign was a success, raising 1775 euro for the repair of the church.
The Mõniste-Ritsiku Orthodox church
Paper on Baltic Orthodox monasticism presented at Ural Federal University
Professor Paul Werth and his recent books (photo: A. Mikheeva)
On Tuesday 17 December, a research seminar entitled ‘The Problems of Russian Confessional History’ was held at the historical department of Ural Federal University. The seminar was opened by Professor Paul W. Werth from the University of Nevada, who presented a paper on “The Trajectories of Toleration in the Russian Empire” and his recent monograph The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths: Tolerance and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia.
Dr James White on Orthodox monasteries in the Baltic (photo: A. Mikheeva).
Dr James M. White, founder of balticorthodoxy.com, gave a talk on “Orthodox Monasteries in the Baltic (1881-1917)”. He joined several other scholars presenting their research, including Dr Elena M. Glavatskaia (“The Evolution of the Religious Landscape of the Urals: Sources, Methods, and Results”), Dr Aleksei N. Starostin (“Muslims in the Urals in the Imperial Period”), Dr Anna Mikheeva (“Researching the Musical Culture of Old Believers at the Laboratory of Archaeographical Studies”) and Dr Aleksandr Palkin (“The Periodical Press of a Religious Minority: Edinoverie Journals of the Reform Era”). Papers were given in Russian and English.
Dr Elena M. Glavatskaia on the religious landscape of the Urals (photo: A. Mikheeva).
Review of V. I. Musaev, Pravoslavie v Pribaltike v 1890-1930-e gg. (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Politekhnicheskogo universiteta, 2018)
The study of Orthodoxy in the Baltic remains trapped by several conventions. One of these is the general preference of scholars to focus on the political story within which the Orthodox Church was entwined, whether the story concerned revolves around the Russification of the 1880s and 1890s or the policies of the independent Latvian and Estonian republics. Another is the tendency to isolate Orthodoxy from other confessional influences, by which I mean those occurring in the Lutheran and Catholic churches which predominated in the region. Finally, the region has attracted no shortage of Orthodox academics whose main interest is to present their ‘side’ within an on-going confessional battle (either between Orthodoxy and non-Orthodoxy or between the various branches of Orthodoxy which now operate in the Baltic).
Regrettably, the recent book by V. I. Musaev does not avoid these potholes, but instead trips over them in a rather willy-nilly fashion. Firstly, though, a description of the book’s contents. Musaev sets himself the task of focusing on Orthodoxy in the Baltic region from the late imperial period to the middle of the inter-war period. This, it should be said, does him credit: most works tend to focus on the revolution and subsequent wars of independence as an impenetrable boundary between two overwhelmingly different eras. However, the reality was considerably different, as trends originating in the imperial period continued to operate deep into subsequent eras. His structure is defined by both this chronological approach to Baltic Orthodoxy and by his relatively broad geographical scope, which includes the Lithuanian provinces of the Russian Empire. So, for example, the first two main chapters focus on the Baltic provinces (Estland, Livland, and Kurland) and Lithuania in the imperial period. This is an odd approach, since the generally prevalent view in the historiography is that the policies of the imperial government towards these two areas were quite distinct: after all, the Baltic provinces were regarded as belonging to the ‘cultural zone’ of the Lutheran German landowning aristocracy, while Lithuania was generally placed within the orbit of the Polish Catholic elite. The latter actively rebelled against the Russian Empire, while the former were generally acquiescent, coming to be regarded as an enemy thanks to an exclusionary Russian nationalism heavily based in Slavophile ideology. While I do not deny there were certainly commonalities in the approach of the imperial government to these regions, it does seem a strange decision to shove them together into a single account, especially since Musaev does nothing at all to draw out the reasons for the similarities and differences in the governance of these zones, but is simply content to place them into self-contained chapters with self-contained narratives.
This peculiar geographical perspective is perhaps the most outstanding element of Musaev’s book: regrettably, nothing else is particularly noteworthy. The account of Orthodoxy in the Baltic immediately (and uncritically) fastens itself to late imperial scholarship, repeating late 19th-century narratives of Orthodoxy’s embattled position in the region from the early medieval period onwards. When he reaches the 18th century, Musaev contents himself with listing: listing the achievements of each bishop, listing the policies of the Russian imperial government, listing the legislative acts of the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian republics. Later portions of each chapter do make movements towards understanding religious life in the multi-confessional region, but these limit themselves to statistics and the Orthodox perspective. Little is done to try and present everyday religious life. Few, if any, documents are subjected to analysis, and are instead stated as fact. And speaking of documents, the research is insufficiently broad: Musaev has limited himself to the archival depositories in St Petersburg and Moscow, without reference to local documents available from Tartu and Riga. This is just about justifiable for the imperial period: for the inter-war era, it is a considerable lapse. It goes without saying that all his documents are in Russian, not Latvian, Estonian, or Lithuanian, although he has been broader with his historiography, citing a few works in English and other languages.
Such a volume might not be without its uses, especially as a textbook. Musaev’s dates, figures, and facts are exact and supported with archival documentation. The chronology is clear. The book offers little to scholars who already know the printed sources and the historiography, but it does present a clear schematic history of Baltic Orthodoxy, useful for students attempting to navigate the tricky reefs of this subject for the first time. What diminishes this value of the work is that, all too often, it descends into apologia for the Russian (and specifically the Russian) Orthodox Church. So, for instance, we are told that the local Orthodox Church bore no responsibility for Russification in the 1880s: all of this came from the local governors, the imperial government, the Synod, and the Synodal ober procurator. Never mind that the best in recent research (I have in mind the articles of Aleksandr Polunov) show quite clearly that the russifying zeal of church figures like the bishops Donat (Babinskii-Sokolov) and Arsenii (Briantsev) not only met the expectations of the central government, but dangerously exceeded them, putting the entire russifying project in jeopardy because of their tactless energy.
In sum, Masuaev has managed to present a clear chronological account of Baltic Orthodoxy in the late imperial and inter-war periods through rather limited archival research. However, his book is a symbol of what the field needs to overcome, not what it needs to be.
Author: J. M. White