| In 1905, contrary to their traditional image as apologists of tsarist autocracy, Christian Orthodox clergymen joined lay Russian society in revolution. Orthodox clerics from all over the empire took part in actions of dissent, demanding the reform of autocratic government. The study of this hitherto unnoticed dissident group challenges the historiographic assumptions of the Russian Church's willing servitude to the state, the clergy's exclusively transcendental/ascetic or obscurantist socio-political views, and the clergy's isolation from society.Clerical dissident political activity emanated primarily from priests, and secondarily from deacons and sacristans. Orthodox parish clergy joined the debates on Russia's social and political ills and often supported the same demands as other social groups, e.g. the distribution of more land to their agrarian flock, the abolition of capital punishment, representative political institutions in lieu of the bureaucratic regime, the freedoms of press, conscience, speech, association, and assembly. The political crimes of which clergymen were accused included sedition, incitement to violence against large landowners and their property, incitement to resist taxation and the military draft, various acts of insubordination to authority, lese majeste and public critique of government policies and officials. The dissident clerics motives were: identification with the lot of the despondent peasantry, compounded by Christian ethics deep discontent with the clergy's socio-economic status and with the bureaucratic and policing functions with which the state had traditionally burdened them the influence and example of other social groups demands' for more representative institutions and aspirations of national liberation (in Georgia and Ukraine).Despite government pressure on the hierarchy to punish dissident clergy in exemplary manner, the rulings of the Holy Synod, the episcopate, and diocesan consistories were not nearly as ruinous to the dissidents as the government demanded. Through bureaucratic obstructionism and occasional confrontation, church authorities shielded dissidents from punishment. The Church was neither a willing accomplice in the autocracy's unpopular policies nor a passive victim. Hierarchy, parish clergy, academies and consistories partly converged in a not so clamorous resistance to the autocracy. Based on archival sources and published material in Russian and secondary literature in Russian, English, German, French and Greek. |
