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.