The orthodox church and religious life in imperial Russia

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries form a distinct period in Russian religious life. Russia was now a multinational, multiconfessional empire, and the Orthodox Christian autocrats who ruled it could shape religious policy more forcefully than many of their European counterparts. However, ecclesiastical structures and individual actors, apart from the sovereign, provided a framework allowing both continuity and evolution in Russian Orthodox religious life. The structures included the liturgy, the sacraments, legislation, monasteries, theological academies, book and journal publishers, and bureaucratic institutions like the Consistories and the Holy Synod. The actors included bishops, spiritual elders and eldresses, publishers and writers, priests, and educated laypeople For the non-Orthodox absorbed into the empire as a result of military conquests or diplomatic negotiations (Greek and Roman Catholics, Jews, and Protestants as well as Muslims and Buddhists), these centuries marked a time of renegotiation with new state structures and policies and a new self-articulation, sometimes as a direct result of their contacts with Russian imperial authorities, and sometimes independently (Werth 2014). Their collective interaction shaped Russian religious life.