60

SUPREME UNDER GOD

In matters of religion, Peter was an eighteenth- rather than a seventeenth-century man, secular and rationalist rather than devout and mystical. He cared more about trade and national prosperity than about dogma or interpretations of Scripture; none of his wars was fought over religion. Yet, personally, Peter believed in God. He accepted God’s omnipotence and saw His hand in everything: life and death, victory and defeat. His letters are studded with the phrase “Thanks be to God”; every victory was promptly celebrated with a Te Deum. He believed that tsars were more responsible to God than commoners were, as tsars were entrusted with the duty to rule, but he did not enshrine the role of monarchy in anything so theoretical or philosophical as the Divine Right of Kings. Peter simply approached religion as he approached everything else: What seemed reasonable? What was practical? What worked best? The best way to serve God, he believed, was to work for the strength and prosperity of Russia.

Peter enjoyed going to church. As a child, he was thoroughly drilled in the Bible and the liturgy, and as tsar he made an effort to spread accurately written Bibles throughout his realm. He loved choral singing, the only music of the Orthodox Church, and it was his lifelong habit to push his way forward through the standing crowd and take his place to sing with the choir. Orthodox congregations are less disciplined than those of other faiths: People stand through the service and move about, coming and going, signaling, whispering and smiling among themselves. Peter accepted this, but he would not tolerate people talking openly during a service. When he heard such an offender, he immediately collected a fine of one rouble. Later, he erected a pillory in front of a church in St. Petersburg for those who spoke during the service.

Respect for the service was more important to Peter than the form of the service. To the despair of many of his countrymen—especially the leaders of the Russian church—Peter’s tolerance of other Christian sects was greater than ever experienced before in Holy Orthodox Russia. Peter had early understood that if he was to recruit foreigners in sufficient numbers, he would have to permit them to worship according to their own traditions. This view was reinforced in 1697 by his first visit to Amsterdam, which allowed people of all nations to practice any form of religion as long as they did not disturb the established church or the churches of other foreigners. “It is our belief that the religious ceremonies of those who have come to reside among us are of little consequence to the state, providing that they contain nothing contrary to our laws,” Witsen had explained. This toleration, Peter noted later, “contributed greatly to the influx of foreigners and consequently increased public revenues,” adding, “I intend to imitate Amsterdam in my city of St. Petersburg.”

As much as possible, he did so. Foreigners in Russia were permitted to have their own councils to rule on marriages and other eccelesiastical matters without being subject to Russian laws or the control of the Russian church. Late in his reign, Peter issued decrees recognizing the validity of Protestant and Catholic baptisms and permitting marriages between Russian Orthodox believers and members of other faiths, providing the children were brought up as Orthodox. Both these laws eased the path of Swedish prisoners now settled in Russia who desired to marry Russian women. Toleration was also state policy toward members of other religions, Christian or non-Christian, in other parts of the Russian empire. In the Baltic provinces conquered from Sweden, Peter agreed that the Lutheran religion should be preserved as the state church, and this guarantee became an article in the Treaty of Nystad. In the vast khanate of Kazan and other regions where the majority of the people were Moslem, Peter made no effort to convert them to Christianity; he knew that such an effort would probably fail and might provoke rebellion.

To a considerable degree, Peter was even tolerant of Old Believers, whom the church vociferously condemned and persecuted. For Peter, the crucial point was whether their religious beliefs helped or harmed the state; their desire to cross themselves with two fingers instead of three mattered little to him. Thousands of Old Believers, fleeing persecution, had formed new settlements in the forests of northern Russia. In 1702, when Peter was traveling south from Archangel with five battalions of the Guard, he was to pass through this region, and the Old Believers, assuming that they were to be attacked, gathered in their wooden churches, locked the doors and prepared to burn themselves to death rather than recant. But Peter had no such intention. “Let them live as they like,” he said, and moved south to fight the Swedes. Subsequently, when iron ore was discovered nearby in the vicinity of Olonets, a number of Old Believers went to work in the mines and forges and proved to be good workmen. This was even more to Peter’s liking; it was a useful fruit of toleration. “Let them believe what they like, for if reason cannot turn them from their superstitions, neither fire nor sword can do it. It is foolish to make them martyrs. They are unworthy of the honor and would not in this way be of use to the state.”

Granted this latitude, the Old Believers continued to live quietly in remote regions, refusing to submit to church authority, but paying taxes and living irreproachable lives. In time, however, as the war made huge demands on Russian labor, Peter began to see their withdrawal into the forests not just as religious conservatism but also as political opposition. In February 1716, he decreed that a census of Old Believers be taken, that they be subjected to a double tax and that, in order to encourage public derision and shame them back into the arms of the established church, they be required to wear a bit of yellow cloth on their backs. Inevitably, the result was that the Old Believers exhibited the badge proudly, their numbers increased and, to escape taxes, they fled even farther from the reach of government control. Toward the end of his life, Peter’s tolerance of them had largely faded. In an exasperated effort to diminish their numbers, he began sending them to Siberia, then rescinded that order because “there are enough of them there already.” In 1724, all Old Believers except peasants who wished to keep their beards were required to wear a copper medallion that depicted a beard—and for this medallion they paid handsomely.

Although Peter tolerated a wide variety of religious worship in Russia, there was one Christian order which he disliked: the Jesuits. (Other brotherhoods of Catholic priests and monks were welcome in Russia; the Franciscans and the Capuchins even possessed small monasteries.) Originally, the Jesuits also had been free to hold services in Moscow and to travel freely through Russia on their way to the court of the great Manchu Emperor of China, K’ang-hsi. In time, however, Peter began to suspect that their religious zeal was largely a façade behind which they were reaching for political power. Confirmation of Jesuit worldliness, in Peter’s view, came from the close relationship between the order and the Imperial government in Vienna, and eventually he decreed that “all Jesuits are earnestly commanded by virtue of these Letters Patent to quit the Russian dominions within four days after notice having given them, the world being sufficiently apprised of their dangerous machinations, and how common it is for them to meddle with politic affairs.” Yet, Peter did not demand the closing of the Catholic church in St. Petersburg. He permitted the parish to send for replacement priests, insisting only that they not be Jesuits and that they not claim protection from the court of Austria.

In other countries, Peter’s well-known tolerance inspired in the heads of other churches the hope that, through him, their own faith might gain a foothold or even predominance in Russia. There was no possibility of this. Peter’s interest in other Christian faiths was a matter of curiosity about the service and the institutions of administration. He never considered any form of religious conversion. Nevertheless, in 1717, while Peter was in Paris, a group of divines at the Faculty of Divinity at the Sorbonne proposed uniting the churches of Rome and Moscow by “observing a certain moderation of doctrine on both sides.” The project worried some of the Protestant envoys in St. Petersburg because of the political implications of any such unity. Thus, it was with satisfaction that Weber reported that the proposal stood little chance. “Neither is it probable that the Tsar, after having suppressed the Patriarchal Authority in Russia, will subject himself and his dominions to a far greater dependency on the Pope.… It is needless to mention that difficulty concerning the marriage of priests which is looked upon in Russia as sacred, and other controverted points, about which both churches are never likely to agree.”

In preserving the predominance of Orthodoxy in Russia, Peter demanded of the church that it make itself useful to society. In his view, the most useful thing that Russian priests could do, besides saving souls, was to teach. There were no schools, and priests were the only channel by which enlightenment could come to the Russian peasantry scattered across the immense land. But, for this purpose, the clergy seemed a woefully inadequate instrument. Many priests were hopelessly ignorant and unshakably lazy. Some were as superstitious as their parishioners. Few had any knowledge of how to preach, and therefore such education and morality as they did possess could not be transmitted. Attempting to overcome this deficiency, Peter sent a number of country priests to Kiev and other theological schools to learn not just theology, but how to speak in public.

Beyond what might be called the innocent ignorance of the Russian clergy, there was another failing which drove the Tsar into a rage. This was the widespread superstition of the Russian people and the playing on this trait by certain unscrupulous people, including members of the clergy. The common people believed in everyday miracles—believed that by the intercession of a specific icon of Christ, the Virgin Mary or one of the special Russian saints, a miraculous personal advantage might be obtained. Unquestioning belief made fertile ground for charlatans. When Peter came upon this kind of unscrupulous priest, his anger flared. One priest in St. Petersburg, for example, persuaded the people that a picture of the Virgin Mary which he kept in his house could work miracles, but only those who could pay were allowed access. “Though he carried on this trade with great circumspection in the nighttime and took all imaginable care in recommending secrecy to his customers, yet the Tsar got information of it,” said Weber. “The priest’s house was searched and the miraculous image fetched away, which the Tsar caused to be brought to him in order to see whether it could perform miracles in His Majesty’s presence. But the priest, at the sight of it, threw himself at the Tsar’s feet and confessed his imposture, for which he was carried to the fortress and suffered heavy corporal punishment, and was afterward degraded from his office in order to be made an example to his brethren.”

Not surprisingly, the impostures which angered Peter most were those which challenged or threatened his own will. On one occasion, a peasant who disliked being forced to live in St. Petersburg prophesied that the following September the Neva would flood so high that it would cover an ancient and lofty ash tree which stood near a church. People immediately began to move themselves and their belongings to higher ground. Peter, furious at this interruption of his plans for the city, ordered the tree cut down and the peasant imprisoned until September. At the end of that month, when no sign of the threatened inundation had appeared, the population was summoned to the site of the tree stump, on which a scaffold had been built. The rustic seer was brought, lifted onto the scaffold and given fifty lashes with the knout while the crowd was lectured on the foolhardiness of listening to false prophets.

A more sophisticated religious hoax simultaneously provoked Peter’s wrath and stimulated his curiosity. In 1720, an icon of the Virgin Mary in a church in St. Petersburg was said to be shedding tears because she was obliged to live in so dismal a part of the world. Chancellor Golovkin heard the report and went to the church, forcing his way through a dense crowd which had gathered to marvel at the phenomenon. Golovkin immediately sent for Peter, who was a day’s journey away, inspecting the Ladoga Canal. Peter came at once, traveling all night, and went directly to the church. The priests took him to the miraculous icon, which at that moment was dry-eyed, although numerous spectators assured him that they had seen tears. Peter stared up at the icon, which was covered with paint and thick varnish, and decided that something about it looked suspicious. He ordered it lifted down from its elevated position and brought to his palace, where in the presence of the Chancellor, many noblemen, the leaders of the clergy and the priests who had been present when the icon was taken down, he proceeded to examine it. He soon found several tiny holes in the corners of the eyes which the shadows created by the curve of the eyes made invisible from below. Turning the icon around, he stripped away the cloth that covered it behind. A little cavity had been hollowed out of the wooden plank, and in it was a small residue of congealed oil. “Here is the source of the miraculous tears,” Peter declared, summoning everyone present to come close and see for themselves. The congealed oil remained solid as long as the icon was in a cold place, he explained, but during a service, when the surrounding air was heated by the burning candles placed before the icon, the oil became fluid and the Virgin “wept.” Peter was delighted with the ingenuity of the mechanism and kept the icon for his Cabinet of Curiosities. But he was extremely angry at the charlatan who had invoked superstition to threaten his new city. The perpetrator was found “and so severely chastised that no one afterward thought proper to attempt anything of a similar nature.”

Along with tightening discipline among the priesthood and stamping out charlatanism and superstition, Peter set himself to bring piety and utility to Russian monasteries. The Tsar himself was not opposed to the monastic ideal of poverty, scholarship and devotion to God. As a young man, he had paid a respectful visit to the great Solovetsky Monastery on the White Sea, and in 1712 he had founded the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in St. Petersburg. What distressed him was the extent to which Russian monasteries had strayed from their ideal. There were more than 557 monasteries and convents in Russia in Peter’s day, housing more than 14,000 monks and 10,000 nuns, and some of these institutions possessed great wealth. In 1723, the 151 monasteries in the vicinity of Moscow owned 242,198 male serfs—Troitskaya Sergeeva, the richest of them, owned 20,394 peasant houses—and the number was constantly growing, as Russian noblemen and wealthy merchants competed to give money and land to monasteries in order to assist their own salvation.

For all their wealth, little that Peter found useful emerged from these retreats. No notable scholarship or learning was being produced in monasteries in Peter’s time, and the charity dispensed under their walls simply attracted swarms of army deserters, runaway serfs, “hale and lazy beggars, enemies to God and useless hands,” in Peter’s scornful words. The Tsar considered many of the monks to be parasites, sunk in sloth and superstition, whose growth in number and decline in holiness threatened the state.

Peter began to restrict the role of Russian monasteries soon after the death of the Patriarch Adrian in 1700. Administration of these institutions was turned over to a new state office, the Monastery Office, headed by a layman, Boyar Ivan Musin-Pushkin. All money and property belonging to the monasteries were to be managed by this office “in order to enable the monks and nuns to better fulfill their religious duties.” The number of new monks was drastically limited by forbidding the taking of holy vows by noblemen, officials of the government, minors and anyone who could not read or write. In time, any person desiring to take holy orders had to receive permission from the Tsar. Simultaneously, all monasteries containing fewer than thirty monks were closed and converted into parish churches or schools. The monks from these small institutions were transferred to larger houses.

As ruler of the state, Peter was basically concerned with the structure and role of the church as an institution and the relation of that institution to the state. Despite the blow at church independence struck by Tsar Alexis when he removed the Patriarch Nikon, the Patriarchy still wielded considerable autonomous power when Peter came to the throne. It possessed its own administrative, judicial and fiscal offices. It taxed the inhabitants of its immense landholdings. It judged all questions of marriage, adultery, divorce, wills and inheritance, as well as disputes between husbands and wives, parents and children, laity and clergy. The Patriarch Adrian, who took office when Peter was eighteen, was not as strong a personality as Nikon, but as an arch-conservative he was constantly interfering in Peter’s personal life: protesting the time he spent with foreigners, demanding that Peter change the Western clothes he preferred, insisting that he spend more time with Eudoxia. Not surprisingly, the young Tsar wished that he might somehow be rid of both the personal irritation and the conservative policies which the Patriarch embodied.

As it happened, Adrian died suddenly in October 1700 while Peter was with the army besieging Narva. The Tsar had given no thought to the choice of a successor; he knew only that he wanted a man who could not challenge his own supreme power and who would support the changes he might wish to make in the structure and authority of the church. No such candidate seemed available, and he lacked time to make a search. Rather than appoint the wrong man, and unwilling to risk confusing and dividing the country by doing away with the office, Peter compromised. He preserved the office of Patriarch, but declared the throne “temporarily vacant.” To provide the church with interim leadership, he appointed a “temporary” guardian whose indefinite status would not permit him to become a true focus of power. Then, satisfied with this arrangement, he simply let the matter drift. Whenever the clergy urged, as it did strongly and repeatedly, that a new Patriarch be appointed, Peter replied that he was too busy with the war to give the choice the deep thought necessary.

Peter had chosen as temporary Guardian Exarch the forty-two-year-old Metropolitan of Ryazan, Stephen Yavorsky, a Ukrainian monk trained in the Jesuit-inspired Orthodox academy in Kiev, where the level of church scholarship and general culture was higher than among the purely Muscovite Orthodox clergy. As professor of theology at the academy and a frequent orator in the city’s great Santa Sophia Cathedral, Yavorsky made an impressive figure. His deep, sonorous voice, his dramatic gestures, his skillful blend of scholarship and anecdote moved his large audiences easily from laughter to tears. Peter had never heard such oratory in a Russian church, and whenever possible—at church ceremonies, public dedications or military triumphs—he asked that Yavorsky preach. But in giving office to Yavorsky, Peter did not equip him even temporarily with all the authority formerly held by the Patriarch. The actual administration of church properties, as well as the taxing of all inhabitants of ecclesiastical lands, was turned over to the new Monastery Office headed by Musin-Pushkin. Thereafter, most church income went directly into the state Treasury, which, in turn, paid the salaries of church officials.

Yavorsky was never really happy in his office. He was not ambitious, and soon he was looking back wistfully on the calmer, more reclusive life he had led in Kiev. In 1712, he begged Peter to release him from his assignment. “Where shall I go from your spirit and how shall I flee from your face?” he wrote despairingly to the Tsar. “I will not go to a foreign realm, for your power is given to you by God. In Moscow or in Ryazan—everywhere your sovereign power reigns over me. It is impossible to hide from it.” Peter, having no one to replace him with, always refused Yavorsky’s appeals until, with the passage of time, Yavorsky began to grow stronger in his office; he began to support his fellow churchmen in their confrontation with civilian authorities; he began to protest the extent to which church revenues were being diverted from religious purposes to support the army and the war. Even his sermons began to take a turn which Peter did not like: He preached against husbands who had persuaded their wives to enter a convent so that the husbands could remarry—a thrust whose most prominent target was obvious to all. In 1712, Yavorsky used the occasion of the Feast of St. Alexis to speak of the Tsarevich Alexis as “our only hope.” Peter was not present, but a copy of the sermon was brought to him. He read it carefully, annotating it with his pen. Unwilling to make Yavorsky a martyr, he did not retaliate, but sent word to the churchman that he should not admonish in public before doing so in private. Yavorsky apologized, “writing with tears, not with ink,” and remained in office, although for a while Peter forbade him to preach.

Thereafter, Peter found a new instrument with which to reform the church. This was another Ukrainian monk from Kiev, much younger than Yavorsky, more sophisticated, more practical and infinitely more forceful. Feofan Prokopovich was a modern eighteenth-century man who happened to be a cleric. He was an administrator, a reformer, a polemicist, even a propagandist, and he concurred completely in Peter’s desire to modernize and secularize the Russian church. For a Russian churchman, Prokopovich was a man of extraordinary learning—he had read Erasmus, Luther, Descartes, Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke. An orphan in childhood, Prokopovich was educated by his uncle, a learned monk and rector of the academy in Kiev, and went on to Jesuit colleges in Poland and then to a special college in Rome. There, he studied theology, took Catholic orders and, in 1700 at the age of twenty-two, witnessed the coronation of Pope Clement XI. The effect of his three years in Rome, however, was to instill in Prokopovich a permanent dislike of the Papacy and the Roman church. Returning to the Kiev academy, he taught philosophy, rhetoric, poetics and literature, lecturing to his students in Latin. He pioneered in introducing arithmetic, geometry and physics into the curriculum. While still in his twenties, he wrote a five-act play in verse, dramatizing the theme of the bringing of Christianity to Russia in the tenth century by Vladimir, Prince of Kiev. In 1706, Peter visited Kiev and heard Prokopovich preach in Santa Sophia. In the crisis of 1708, when Mazeppa betrayed the Tsar in favor of Charles XII, Prokopovich quickly took Peter’s side. Prince Golitsyn, Governor of Kiev, responded to Peter’s question about the loyalty of the higher clergy in the city by saying, “All the monks avoid us. In all of Kiev I have found only one man, the prefect of the academy [Prokopovich], who is well disposed toward us.” In 1709, following the Russian victory at Poltava, the Tsar returned to Kiev, where Prokopovich welcomed him as “His Most Sacred Majesty, the Tsar of All the Russias” and preached a sermon filled with superlatives. In 1711, Prokopovich accompanied Peter on the disastrous campaign on the Pruth, and later that year, at the age of thirty-one, he was appointed rector of the Kiev academy. In 1716, the Tsar summoned him to St. Petersburg, and Prokopovich left Kiev, never to return.

Unlike Yavorsky, Prokopovich firmly supported Peter’s attempts to subordinate the church to the state. Vockerodt, secretary to the Prussian minister Mardefelt, commented that he found in Prokopovich, apart from wide learning, “an ardent concern for the good of the country, even at the expense of the clergy’s interests.” Prokopovich’s antagonism toward the “beards of the church” was further stimulated by their support of the Tsarevich Alexis, and on Palm Sunday, April 6, 1718, as the leaders of the church were being asked to judge the Tsarevich, Prokopovich thundered from the pulpit on the power and glory of the tsar and the holy duty of all subjects to obey the temporal power. “The supreme authority is established and armed with the sword of God, and to oppose it is a sin against God himself,” he cried. He dealt harshly with the idea that the clergy was exempt from loyalty and service to the sovereign: “The clergy, like the army, the civil administration, doctors and artisans, is subject to the state. The clergy is another order of rank of the people and not a separate state.” Naturally enough, the rest of the clergy accused Prokopovich of sycophancy, opportunism, hypocrisy and ambition. When Peter nominated him as Archbishop of Pskov and Narva, the Moscow clergy accused him of heretical Protestant leanings. Yavorsky joined this attack until Peter asked for evidence; unable to document his charge, the Exarch was obliged to retract it.

As the war with Sweden drew to a close, Peter’s thoughts turned toward a permanent structure for governing the church. Yavorsky’s temporary assignment had stretched into eighteen years. Repeatedly and urgently, the bishops begged the Tsar to name a new patriarch. At last Peter responded, but in a manner very different from that which they expected. In the years since the last patriarch had died, Peter had traveled abroad and seen much of other religions in both Catholic and Protestant countries. The Roman church, of course, was administered by a single man, but in Protestant lands the churches were administered by a synod or assembly or board of administrators, and this idea appealed to Peter. Having already reformed his civil administration by putting government in the hands of ministries or colleges, he was ready to impose a comparable structure on the church. In the latter part of 1718, Peter entrusted to Prokopovich the drafting of a church charter called the Ecclesiastical Regulation, which was to promulgate a new administrative structure for the Russian Orthodox Church. Prokopovich worked for many months, and the document is his most important achievement, but every section was read, revised and sometimes rewritten by Peter himself.

In 1721, the Ecclesiastical Regulation was enacted by decree. It struck hard at those features of the old Muscovite church which so angered Peter. Ignorance and superstition were to be rooted out, not only among the parishioners but among the clergy. “When the light of learning is lacking,” read the Regulation, “it is impossible that the church should be well run.” Bishops were ordered to establish training schools for priests; forty-six such schools opened their doors within four years. Priests were to learn theology; “he who would teach theology must be learned in Holy Scripture and be able to corroborate all the dogmas with scriptural evidence,” declared the Ecclesiastical Regulation. On Prokopovich’s insistence, priests also had to study history, politics, geography, arithmetic, geometry and physics. Parishioners were required to attend church, and those who failed to appear or who talked in church were fined.

The most notable feature of the new Regulation was the abolition of the Patriarchate as the governing body of the church, and its replacement with a bureaucratic institution called the Holy Governing Synod. In effect, the Synod was organized on the same model as the colleges of the civil government; it had a president, a vice president and eight members. In fact, Peter wished it to be apart from and superior to the colleges, equal to the Senate. Like the Senate, the Synod had a civilian watchdog administrative officer, the Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod, whose job it was to oversee church administration, settle quarrels and deal with negligence and absenteeism. In effect, the Holy Synod, which was responsible for all spiritual as well as temporal affairs of the church, became a Ministry of Religious Affairs, and the Chief Procurator, the Minister of Religion.

In a lengthy preamble, Prokopovich (and, through him, Peter) explained the decision to abolish the one-man rule of the Patriarchate and replace it with collective administration:

From collegiate government in the church there is much less danger to the country of sedition and disorder than may proceed from rule by a single spiritual ruler. For the common people do not understand the difference between the spiritual power and that of the autocrat. Instead, dazzled by the splendor and glory of the highest clergyman, they think that he is a second sovereign equal to or even greater than the autocrat, and that the spiritual power is of another and better realm. If then there should be any dispute between the patriarch and the tsar, they might take the part of the patriarch in the belief that they were fighting for God’s cause.

For the next two centuries, until 1918, the Russian Orthodox Church was governed by the principles set down in the Ecclesiastical Regulation. The church ceased to be an institution independent of government; its administration, through the office of the Holy Synod, became a function of the state. The rule of the autocrat in all matters except doctrine was supreme and absolute; ordained priests were required to swear an oath pledging themselves “to defend unsparingly all the powers, rights and prerogatives belonging to the High Autocracy of His Majesty.” In return, the state guaranteed to Orthodoxy the role of state religion within the Russian empire.

Although Yavorsky was strongly opposed to the new institution, Peter installed him in the leading post as president of the Holy Synod, deciding that he would be far less dangerous enmeshed in the new machinery than in opposition to it. Yavorsky tried to decline, asking to be allowed to finish his days in a monastery, but, over his objections, he was appointed and remained in the post a year until his death in 1722.

Prokopovich, despite his relative youth (he was forty-one in 1721) and junior position in the church hierarchy, was appointed to the third-ranking position in the Holy Synod, second vice president. From this office, he effectively administered the church along the lines he himself had drawn, surviving Peter by ten years and continuing to dominate the Holy Synod under the Emperor’s successors until eventually he was appointed to the prestigious post of Archbishop of Novgorod.

By abolishing the Patriarchate and transforming the administration of the church into a branch of the secular government, Peter had achieved his goal. There was no further danger from a second competitive focus of power in the land; how could there be when the church bureaucracy was actually administered by his own lieutenants? Some improvement in the education and discipline of priests resulted, although Russian village priests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries never became paragons of learning. The most striking feature of the Ecclesiastical Regulation was that it met no opposition, either within the church or among the people. In large part, this was because Peter had not tampered with the elements which mattered most in the Russian church, the sacred ritual and dogma. Who administered the church was of overriding concern to Peter; the form of the liturgy and sacraments did not interest him, and so he did not touch it.

In time, however, the assumption of state control over the church had an injurious effect on Russia. Individual parishioners could seek salvation and find solace from life’s burdens in the glory of the Orthodox service and its choral liturgy, and in the warm communality of human suffering found in a church community. But a tame church which occupied itself with private spiritual matters and failed to stand up against successive governments on behalf of Christian values in questions of social justice soon lost the allegiance of the most dynamic elements of Russian society. The most fervent peasants and simple people seeking true religion gravitated toward the Old Believers and other sects. Students, educated people and the middle classes disdained the church for its conservative anti-intellectualism and slavish support of the regime. The church, which might have led, simply followed, and ultimately the entire religious bureaucracy established by Peter followed the imperial government over the cliff; the Holy Synod was abolished in 1918 along with all the other governing institutions of the imperial regime. Lenin reestablished the Patriarchate, but it was a puppet Patriarchate, more controlled by the state than the Holy Synod ever was. Not once in its existence has this new Patriarchate uttered a word of criticism against the regime it serves. It was the continuing passivity and servitude of the Russian church which Alexander Solzhenitsyn was regretting when he declared that the history of Russia would have been “incomparably more humane and harmonious in the last few centuries if the church had not surrendered its independence and had continued to make its voice heard among the people, as it does, for example, in Poland.”