Religious policy of the Russian Empire in the Baltics

Abstract

The delimitation (if not demise) of the secularization thesis has caused European historiography to reassess the role of religion in nineteenth-century Europe. However, this recalibration has thus far made little theoretical or empirical progress in the historiography of the Russian Empire. Confession was no doubt a particularly powerful factor in a multi-confessional state such as the Russian Empire. And within that empire nowhere was the confessional issue more complex, more conflicted than the Baltic provinces — once a bastion of autonomous German Lutheranism but, from the 1830s, the target of a growing challenge from the Russian state and the Orthodox Church. This study suggests that religion was a major issue in this unassimilated borderland (increasingly subject to integration into a centralized state); that the Russian state attached significant (but qualified and variable) support for the Russian Orthodox Church; that this religious policy served not to integrate but to alienate (both the Lutherans and the Orthodox); and that the Baltic confessional conflict, as it transpired in a new transnational age of globalization, profoundly impacted Russia’s international status and foreign policy. Refs 124.