The tsar's faith: Conversion, religious politics, and peasant protest in imperial Russia's Baltic periphery, 1845--1870s

This dissertation project seeks to understand the origins, nature, and outcome of the astonishing mass conversion of more than 100,000 Lutheran Estonian and Latvian peasants from the Lutheran to the Orthodox faith in imperial Russia's Livland province during the 1840s. I argue that peasant protest---conversions and claims made on the basis of Orthodox status---were shaped by tsarist policies and peasant interaction with Russian-speaking elites. In turn, mass religious conversion encouraged the intervention of the Russian state and the Orthodox Church into local affairs.Above all, the conversions created a situation in which peasants challenged local authorities and appealed to the Orthodox state regarding social, economic, and even political concerns, always with reference to their Orthodox status---claiming to have been persecuted, unfairly taxed for pastoral dues, and prohibited from practicing their faith by traditional manorial practices. With the advent of mass conversions, the state had to re-work numerous "religious" and "secular" policies in order to accommodate the privileged position of the state Church and in seeking to satisfy peasant claims, often disrupting the authority of traditional Lutheran elite in so doing.The conversions exacerbated tensions between imperial and local law, between various levels of authority, and between competing religious institutions. Questions about the social and political meanings of religious affiliation led the state to intervene repeatedly in order to mediate disputes between varies parties in the Baltic, which compelled the government to confront the problems of religious difference and regional autonomy. Ultimately, by the 1860s and 1870s, Slavophile publicists and reform-minded statesmen advocated substantial reforms touching upon political institutions, law, rural administration, in seeking to protect peasants, not least of all converts, from the caprices of their supposedly arbitrary and cruel landlords, which had an important effect on the reforms that began in the 1870s---often termed "Russification" policies in the historical literature.