Russia. A History

These two reforms expanded the number of provincial governments from eight to thirty-five (later the number rose to fifty), each having a population between 300,000 and 400,000 souls. Each provincial capital had a full-time and salaried civil staff headed by a governor, who was appointed personally by the sovereign and given a large salary and high grade on the Table of Ranks. In addition, there was to be a commander-in-chief, appointed by the Senate, with responsibility for maintaining order. Courts and judgeships were established, and responsibility for staffing them was shared by the central authorities and the local nobility. Charity, education, wardship, and the like fell under the aegis of a newly established body called the Board of Public Welfare, an agency headed by the governor but managed by representatives from the local élites.

The Law on Provincial Police nominally established local police offices and empowered them to maintain order, keep track of religious minorities and schismatics, and oversee local publishing. But in practice these responsibilities, like many of the provisions in the 1775 Statute, were honoured mostly in the breach, at least during the eighteenth century; hence serious investigations typically had to be handled by other agencies. Nevertheless, the two statutes had the combined effect of establishing a civil presence sufficient to prevent local disturbances from getting out of control. By the minimalist standards of Russian government in the eighteenth century, this was one definition of success.

The Church, Dissenters, and Popular Religion

With the sequestration of church lands and peasants in 1764, Catherine severely limited the Church’s resources and capacity to address its various problems. However, the ‘Common on Church Properties’ provided a modest budget for ecclesiastical administration and some funds for monasteries (many of which, however, were abolished as redundant and ‘useless’). But that budget contained no funds to provide proper support for the parish churches and their staffs. Given the lack of endowments, benefices, or tithes, parish clergy had to support themselves primarily by cultivating the plot of parish church land and by exacting gratuities for various religious rites (for example, baptism, weddings, and burials). Significantly, the parish as an institution was also losing its centrality in daily life: it did not form a lower unit of civil administration, had indeed no juridical status in state law, and even lost some of its traditional functions as the commercial and cultural vortex of the community.

At the same time, parish clergy underwent far-reaching changes in their status and training. The Spiritual Regulations of 1721 had required them to be educated, to know Feofan Prokopovich’s catechism, to read laws and important notices to the parishioners, and to maintain accurate parish registries of births, deaths, and marriages. As ever, imperial fiat was slow to become everyday fact, but in the second half of the century parish clergy did in fact find it necessary to fulfil these various mandates. Perhaps the most significant change pertained to formal education: from the 1740s the Church gradually erected a network of diocesan seminaries where, increasingly, the clergy’s sons were forced to enroll—on pain of exclusion from the clergy and even conscription into the army. It took time, of course, to construct a seminary system based on the Latin curriculum of Jesuit schools, but by the mid-1780s nearly every diocese had established such a seminary, with advanced classes in philosophy and theology. Few students completed the course of study, however, and most departed at the first opportunity to fill a vacant clerical position in their home region. Nevertheless, ecclesiastical élites—above all, the ‘learned episcopate’ and isolated members of the parish clergy—did master the curriculum and, on the basis of their education, held the top positions in church administration.