Religious Tension and Ethnic Consciousness in the Later Russian Empire

The Russian Empire collapsed because it failed to assimilate non-Russian minorities, and did not provide a coherent national narrative to unite the Russian population. Its religious policies were key contributors to these failures, and this article examines their impact in order to shine a new light on the religious background to the empire’s demise. The Orthodox Church was supposed to provide the means to assimilate non-Russians and offer up the core cultural component for a Russian national consciousness. Its inability to do so became clear in the 1860s–1880s when, in the liminal regions of the empire, Orthodoxy fragmented along ethnic lines. Russians deserted churches for the dissenting Old Believer movement, and non-Russians returned to their ancestral faiths of animism and Islam. This was partly down to an inconsistency in government, which meant that religious repression overlapped with the principle of toleration; however, an exploration of the dynamics of apostasy at a parish level shows that where Russians and non-Russians were compelled to worship together, religious tensions emerged and churches lost their sacred character. As well as providing new insights into how the empire alienated its subjects at a local level, this exploration reveals pathways to ethnic consciousness from below. Ethnicization was the process that separated ethnicity from religion, and places of worship possessed characteristics, most importantly the performance of communal historical memory, that made them into key sites of ethnic boundary formation.