Religion and Secular Modernity in Russian Christianity, Judaism, and Atheism

PART ONE

Church and State in Russia and the Soviet Union

CHAPTER 1

Confession and Modernity in Imperial Russia

NADIESZDA KIZENKO

It was necessary that, in his exile at Romagnano, Fabrizio … should hear mass daily without fail, take as his confessor a man of spirit, devoed to the cause of the Monarchy, and should confess to him, at the tribunal of penitence, only the most irreproachable sentiments.

—Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma

Most of the chapters in this book take as their starting point the middle of the nineteenth century or later. There are good reasons for this approach. The Crimean War, the death of Nicholas I, and Alexander II’s Great Reforms changed relations among peoples inside and outside the Russian Empire. I would like to argue, however, that modernity in Russia, in both a secular and a religious sense, goes back rather further. In the Latin West, the requirement of annual sacramental confession, affirmed at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and broadened at the 1563 Council of Trent, has conventionally been taken to signal a new, peculiarly modern, sense of the accountable individual.¹ Similarly, in Russia, the requirement of confession ushered in modernity not in the middle of the nineteenth century, but in the middle of the seventeenth.²

With the ascent of the Romanovs to the throne, both Orthodox hierarchs and Orthodox tsars began to express concern that people were not going to confession often enough. They then began a long campaign to get people to do just that. From this point, confession in Russia took on a unique role, different from what it had been in Muscovy and different from what it would become after Soviet rule and beyond. Determining whether one had participated in sacramental confession became a standard element in criminal cases.³ Mandatory annual confession from the age of seven onward was one of the few experiences that Orthodox Christians of both sexes and all classes in the Russian Empire had in common; it found expression in everything from woodcuts to children’s books to Peredvizhniki paintings to the works of Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Records and reports of confession persisted through 1917. This interplay formed a distinctive, modern confessional culture that distinguished the experience of Orthodox Christians in the Russian Empire from that of their Orthodox counterparts in the Balkans and in Greece—but not, paradoxically, from their Roman Catholic neighbors to the west. This confessional culture is synonymous with modernity.

What made Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich so intent on having his subjects go to confession at least once a year? Church hierarchs had done so repeatedly; in the fifteenth century, for example, Metropolitan Fotii of Kyiv had urged his clerics to accept their flocks’ repentance and confession during all four fasts.⁴ Nevertheless, despite centuries of exhortation, many Muscovites did not regularly go to confession and communion. The Jesuit missions and the increasing number of un-Orthodox foreigners in Muscovy started to seem alarming precisely because the Orthodoxy of the Muscovites seemed so shaky.⁵ As early as 1627, Patriarch Filaret and Tsar Mikhail Romanov jointly issued a decree forbidding foreigners to have Orthodox slaves and servants. What interests us here is their motivation: "Many [that is, of the Orthodox servants of non-Orthodox foreigners] die without repentance, without spiritual fathers [a synonym for father-confessors], and during Great Lent and the other church fasts eat meat and all matter of non-Lenten food [skorom] against their wills."⁶

This shared concern of both the patriarch and the tsar set the template for the rest of the seventeenth century. From the 1640s onward, Aleksei Mikhailovich and his hierarchs kept appealing to priests and town officials to get laypeople to become more observant. The focus of their concerns was that people were living without spiritual father-confessors, dying without repentance, and not feeling in the least obliged to confess their sins or to receive the body and blood of the Lord. Foreigners were often identified as a particular threat to the piety of the Orthodox. This phrasing appears over and over, whether the writer is a hierarch or the tsar.⁷

This broad trend of an increased emphasis on confession was articulated most forcefully at the Moscow Church Council of 1666–67.⁸ Article 11 of that council read: Instruct your parishioners, men and women and their children, that they should go to their father-confessors for confession often, especially during the four fasts.… If someone should go for a whole year without confession, saving for travel or other valid reasons, and the hour of death come upon him, do not bury such a one in church ground nor serve the funeral rites over him; for such a one, while alive, himself separated from the holy Church.⁹

The Old Believer schism played a role as well. Even before the schism, the tsars and patriarchs had already begun attaching greater importance to the sacraments of confession and communion. With the emergence of Old Belief, tsars and hierarchs saw the need to find an effective way of determining whether their subjects were truly Orthodox. What better way of establishing someone’s Orthodoxy than knowing whether he or she went to confession and communion to a priest of the official, approved, Orthodox church? After all, dissenters, especially monks and nuns, testified that they refused to go to confession or communion once new liturgical books had been introduced.¹⁰ Laypeople sometimes turned to schismatic priests to hear their confessions.¹¹ Thus, partly as a result of a perceived threat from foreign representatives of other religious denominations, and partly in response to the Old Believer schism within Russian Orthodoxy, annual confession and communion in an approved Orthodox church became identified as the surest litmus test both of Orthodoxy and of reliability in general.

Confession became even more important under Aleksei’s son Peter. Famously, the Supplement to the Spiritual Regulation (1722) of Peter I declared that if a priest hearing confessions learned of any treasonous attempts against the emperor or the state and was not able to dissuade the penitent from this nefarious aim, then it was no confession at all; the priest should immediately report the plot to the relevant police authorities. From this point onward, sacramental confession in Russia became the focus around which many modern goals met: on the one hand, education and churching of the ostensibly Orthodox population and, on the other hand, control, that is, increased bureaucratic control over parishes and monasteries and attempted control over what people were thinking and doing. Many historians and theologians have expressed outrage that the seal of the confession was no longer sacrosanct.¹² But this assumes three things: that, if the law were on the books, it would be applied; that Peter’s violation of the seal was something new in Russian practice—that, like the rest of Peter’s reforms, it characterized the intrusion of the Russian state into what had been the autonomous sphere of the Orthodox Church; and, finally, that this violation of the confessional seal fatally distinguished Russian Orthodox practice from that of the Roman Catholic Church, which had supposedly managed to defend its autonomy and safeguard the confessional seal for over a millennium.

But it is not quite so simple. An intense interest in confession as a way of making good citizens was not new to Peter but was already amply present in Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich. And the Roman Catholic Church does not provide such a handy or clean comparison. Confession in the Latin West was neither as confidential nor as silent as one might think; nor was the element of government compulsion absent. In Passau in 1558, authorities threatened prison for those refusing to confess; in 1612, those residents of Salzburg who refused annual confession and communion had their names sent to the territorial government, not the bishop, for action; in Bavaria, the Geistliche Rat (Ecclesiastical Council) continued to seek out and punish the recalcitrant throughout the seventeenth century, keeping lists of the disobedient.¹³ What political misbehavior people relayed at confession could lead to arrest; in Speyer, one peasant revolt was foiled because a peasant had mistakenly trusted his confessor.¹⁴ The works of Stendhal, as this chapter’s epigraph suggests, provide a vivid illustration of how nineteenth-century Roman Catholics wishing to establish their political bona fides would make a point of mentioning their political convictions in confession.

Thus, rather than focusing on the Supplement as an indicator of Russia’s failed modernity or otherness, it is more useful to look at how Peter’s notorious confessional legislation actually played itself out. Several cases from the decades immediately following the Supplement complicate the caricature of Peter as Satan ex machina. They also provide valuable insight into how legislation was—or was not—translated into policy.

In 1723, Antipa Evdokimov, a priest from Baku, was accompanying the Moscow and Tobolsk battalions and, like other priests in the empire, received the instruction to report treason heard at confession and swore the loyalty oath. But, unusually, he thought through the implications of the Supplement and located several potential traps and loopholes. He decided that no doubt other priests might face the same pitfalls and so sent in his queries to the Holy Synod. He framed his queries as problems.

First, Father Antipa noted, the Supplement to the Spiritual Regulation seemed to hinge on the possibility that a potential evildoer would not be dissuaded from his or her aim by the confessor. In that case, as Peter I and Feofan Prokopovich had argued in the Supplement, the confession was no confession at all, and there was no confessional seal to break. The father-confessor thus need have no compunction about turning in the intended evildoer immediately. But what, Father Antipa asked, if the penitent did repent? Was he or she simply to be let go without further supplementary interrogation by the police, just in case? Human nature was so changeable.

Second, what if the evildoer repented himself or herself, but had accomplices?

Third, what if the penitent had blasphemed against God, the church, and the sovereign in letters or leaflets he or she had distributed? He or she had repented, well and good—but what about the harm that might come about because of these letters, even though the penitent might not even know about it? What ought the confessor do?

Fourth, what if someone had reproached or criticized the sovereign with inappropriate words or thoughts, but promised not to do so anymore? Should he or she be punished or reported?

Fifth, if someone stole something from the sovereign or the state, great or small, and repented for it—but was not able to compensate for it monetarily, as thieves were meant to do—then what?

These questions are interesting because they show that priests did not simply read government circulars and file them. The Synod’s answers show that the priests, too, understood the issues raised. Father Antipa was told that if an initially treasonous penitent at confession wholeheartedly abandoned his or her original evil intent, and no one else was involved, the person should be treated according to the holy canons—that is, absolved—and that no denunciations should be submitted. If the penitent had accomplices at large, he or she should be asked not for their names but for how many there were and where the location of the act harmful to the sovereign or state was meant to occur. In other words, the Supplement did not create a climate of denunciation; the goal was to prevent assassination attempts and to uncover conspiracies before they can be implemented and thus without breaking the confessional seal.¹⁵

However, the seal was one thing; absolution was another. The father-confessor was to ask the penitent to personally track down any accomplices and try to dissuade them and to report back the results within a set period of time. Until or unless the penitent succeeded in doing so, there was to be not only no communion of the Holy Mysteries but also no absolution of sins; the penitent was only instructed that, if unable to dissuade his or her comrades, he or she must report them immediately, with the understanding that he or she could then be absolved and not considered an accomplice. But if someone was silent at the prospect of what the Synod called satisfaction (dovletvorenie) or if he or she were evasive or promised to quell the evil and did not report back, no matter how sincere the penitence might be, he or she was still to be regarded as a miscreant (zlodei).

If the penitent had distributed any seditious or blasphemous letters, he or she was to track them down and destroy them and swear under oath at having done so. If it were not possible to track them down, then he or she must post rebuttals of any previous leaflets (without repeating the original blasphemies or seditions). He or she could then be absolved and the bishop in the area covered by these leaflets informed so that the matter could be dealt with. If anyone thought, and only thought, evil against the sovereign and repented of it, he or she could be absolved without further action. Finally, Father Antipa was informed that he was stupid to have raised the issue of not being able to compensate a theft, as canons were clear; such people could be absolved without compensation.¹⁶

All these details suggest that the instructions regarding the confessional seal in the Supplement to the church reform should not be regarded as something self-evident; the details were worked out on an individual basis, and the clerics who were not as cautious as Father Antipa and revealed contents of confessions too hastily could find themselves paying the price. After detailed canonical debates on the penalties for breaking the confessional seal, for example, one priest was executed; another was defrocked, had his nostrils slit, and was sent to Siberia for permanent hard labor.¹⁷ This also shows that the notion of satisfaction introduced by Ukrainian theologians in the seventeenth century lingered well into the eighteenth century.¹⁸ But the confession’s social and political use was not limited to treason. Despite confessional manuals’ insistence that the seal could be broken only for treason or state security, other eighteenth-century cases illustrate how confession could be used creatively even when treason was not involved.

In the reign of Empress Anna Ioannovna, in 1730, Avdotia Ivanova Skvornikova declared her wish to enter a convent, given that she could not have physical relations with her husband because of illness. She was asked whether she had married as a widow or as a maiden, what exactly her ailment was, and how long she ailed thus. More interesting is that she was asked if she was making this request of her own free will or whether she feared being beaten by her husband. Even more interesting for our purposes is that her confessor was also questioned for corroboration. Thus, the assumption here, as in other cases, is that people will tell the truth at confession and that what Avdotia had told her confessor could be admitted as evidence if it would mitigate circumstances favorably. In this case, because the confession could have been used to free Avdotia from being pressured to enter a convent by her husband, using it might be argued to be potentially liberating and sympathetic to her freedom rather than an infringement of it.¹⁹

In a very different kind of case, in 1731, the Synod acted on behalf of an insurance company. It asked a priest who had confessed the merchant Moskvin on his deathbed if Moskvin was guilty of setting fire to a ship containing goods he had insured. The insurance company was reluctant to pay out and wanted every assurance possible that the goods had in fact been on the ship, as Moskvin had not declared them at customs and received the necessary paperwork of inspection. The father-confessor assured them that indeed, Moskvin had regretted the loss of the ship at confession and that it really did contain merchandise and not (as the insurance company suspected) sand; but Moskvin did express regret that he had not filled out the correct customs paperwork. Interestingly, the father-confessor also added that he had asked Moskvin these questions when they were alone, but before he began asking about his sins, so that the discussion was actually just before the confession proper and thus not bound by the confessional seal. Although the Synod noted the distinction, they described the discussion as having taken place at confession (na ispovedi).²⁰

Finally, in 1735, the Synod decided to systematize its confessional practice regarding prisoners held in the Chancellery of Secret Investigations (Kantseliaria Tainykh Rozysknykh Del). Rather than assigning random priests as confessors on an ad hoc basis, as had been previous practice, the Synod appointed one priest for all the prisoners.²¹ Priest Grigorii of the Peter and Paul Fortress Cathedral was now instructed to stop by every day to and from church services to inquire whether there was a prisoner who needed to be confessed or counseled. At each confession, he was instructed to ask whether the prisoner had hatched thievery or treason or other ill intent against Her Imperial Majesty. The Supplement to the Spiritual Regulation was mentioned specifically, and the instructions to leave the impenitent without absolution and to report it were transcribed from the Supplement nearly verbatim. The innovation was that Priest Grigorii was told to remind the penitent of the Second Coming of Christ and His Dread Judgment and not to subject himself or herself to the torments of Gehenna by making an incomplete confession. Another innovation was elaborating what to do if someone wished to denounce someone else. The penitent was to be told that denouncing someone else out of malice or ill will was a grave sin, especially if the person were innocent. But, if the penitent wished to denounce someone else sincerely and if there was something to denounce him or her for, then this was not and could not be sinful. The other interesting thing is that Priest Grigorii was instructed to keep these last instructions in strict secrecy and not to tell a soul about them, but to act on them boldly and with common sense. Moreover, if Priest Grigorii did not report something he learned at confession, he himself would be executed after harsh tortures without any mercy. Thus, while the Supplement to the Spiritual Regulation had sought to cloak its violation of the confessional seal in the guise of the canons, by 1735 the Synod understood that extorting information about others at confession was not something to publicize.²² This suggests that, on the one hand, some lingering reservations about using confession as a means of incriminating others remained. On the other hand, as the cases of Skvornikova and Moskvin show, in the decades immediately following the Supplement there was little hesitation about using confession as a way of getting to additional information when treason was not involved.

By the nineteenth century, this would change. Any evidence obtained at sacramental confession was deemed inadmissible—because the priest himself might lie, as might the people involved, and because if people thought what they said at confession could be used against them, they might not make a clean breast of it and therefore risk perdition.²³ Thus, the attitude in late imperial Russia was both more cynical and more enlightened. But in the decades after the Supplement in the eighteenth century, confession was regarded as a precious and definitive source of information precisely because church and state authorities worked under the assumption that people would not lie and that the truths they uttered could and should be used for the benefit of the tsar and the populace.

Why did people not resist this state-sponsored attempt at regulating their religious practices the way they did many of the other reforms Peter sought to introduce? I would frame the argument differently. The most successful part of the Petrine reforms was precisely the mandate of annual confession. True, annual confession was not an integral part of popular piety, unlike icons, processions, and the exchange of Easter eggs; these were, and because they were, when Peter tried to ban these as being superstitious, people fought him tooth and nail. Annual confession, by contrast, was able to stick precisely because it conformed to what the bishops were trying to do, without interfering with popular piety. From the point of view of the government, in terms of accomplishing basic education, discipline, and surveillance, confession was maximally effective; from the point of view of the populace, it was minimally invasive and corresponded more or less to what they had been told to do all along; from the point of view of the hierarchy, it was essential and desirable.²⁴ Most importantly, violations of the confessional seal did not affect enough of the population for people to notice. This is the confluence that allowed it to stick.

The structures established by Tsars Aleksei and Peter endured after their creators. Their successors proved just as eager to use confession as a means of creating good imperial citizens. But it would take time to create mechanisms that allowed tracking and investigating everyone. Until the establishment of the consistories in 1801, the authorities focused on groups that both were easiest to notice and seemed to pose the greatest potential risk to good order and setting a good example: the military and the court elite.

Because of the instability created by Peter’s legislation on imperial succession, in which the ruler could designate anyone he or she wished as a successor (and given that Tsarevich Aleksei Petrovich had been exposed through confession), rulers most immediately sought to learn whether officers, soldiers, or others were spreading treason. Some anti-imperial plots did emerge as a result of information obtained (or obtained but not reported) at confession. Priest Iakov Savich, for example, was blamed for not reporting the sentiments in favor of Ukrainian independence that the sailor Matviei Nikonov (who later claimed he was drunk) had expressed at confession in 1733; Parfen Frolov repented at confession for his sinful ideas about the empress Anna Ioannovna in 1732 (but was still sentenced to whipping and forced labor); the soldier Ivan Anikiev was charged with revealing anti–Empress Elizabeth sentiments at his 1752 confession.²⁵

After the military, the groups that appear to have been most immediately affected by the larger requirement to confess yearly—and, not coincidentally, easiest to keep track of—were the court, monks, and nuns. The imperial family itself was not only immune from the requirement—it was the most important target. Particularly telling is the role that the confessor played in the relations between the empress Elizabeth and the future Catherine the Great. As Catherine wrote in her memoirs in the beginning of August 1746:

The Empress had the Grand Duke and me informed that we should make our devotions [that is, go to confession and communion]; we both obeyed her wishes … [on] Friday, when it was time to go to confession, the reason for this order [to go to confession] became very clear. Simeon Theodorsky, the Bishop of Pskov, questioned us both a great deal, each one separately, about what had happened between the Chernyshevs and us. But as nothing at all had happened, he was a bit contrite when he saw that with the candor of innocence we told him that there was not even the shadow of what they had dared to suppose. To me he let slip this question: But then whence is the Empress informed to the contrary? At this, I told him that I did not know. I suppose that our confessor transmitted our confession to the Empress’s confessor, and that he informed Her Imperial Majesty of what had happened, which certainly could not damn us.²⁶

Two things are interesting here. First, the decision of when to go to confession was made not by either young spouse, but by the Empress. They accepted her order to do so without question. Second, the purpose of the confession appeared to have been a simple desire for information—and all of this appeared to have been taken for granted by all concerned. Catherine would continue to use this tactic for her own purposes, as when in 1758 she and one of her ladies-in-waiting devised a sure plan to bring her back into Elizabeth’s good graces; she pretended to be ill, asked for last rites, and used the confessor (who happened to be the uncle of the lady-in-waiting) to present her side of the story in a conversation that lasted an hour and a half. The tactic worked beautifully, with both the confessor and his niece serving as intermediaries between Catherine and the eventually mollified Elizabeth.²⁷ Catherine remained conscious of using confession to set a good example; even while traveling one year at the end of Great Lent, she and her court spent Holy Week in prayer and fasting using a portable church.²⁸

What is surprising is that, while all sides appear to have been aware of what was going on, this does not appear to have undermined the reliability of the confession as a trustworthy source in anyone’s eyes. Confession had become a hybrid of private and public, an opportunity both to unburden oneself and sometimes to call attention to something that now had the impress of God’s truth.

These elements emerge in the cases of nobility in the diplomatic service. Russian state servitors abroad, as the public face of the empire and on public display, were held to a high standard; any falls from Orthodoxy on their part were castigated with particular severity. In 1744, for example, the Holy Synod noted that, while there were numerous Orthodox Christian diplomats, ministers, and other subjects in Her Imperial Majesty’s service residing abroad, the Synod did not know whether they had priests for confession, both their own and those serving them, and for other Christian duties, and so it asked the College of Foreign Affairs to supply them with a list of all state servitors and their families abroad, as well as of churches and clerics abroad.²⁹ Noteworthy here is that what alarmed the Synod was that nobles who had spent time abroad, particularly without ready access to the sacraments, might fall away from Orthodoxy and turn to other religions, especially Roman Catholicism.

This was not paranoia. In 1746, for example, Princess Irina Petrovna Dolgorukova and her family came to the attention of the Holy Synod for just this reason. The empress Elizabeth took a lively interest in the case, ordering that the matter be strictly investigated. Showing concern as she did for the pernicious enticement of their souls, she wanted the Dolgorukovs to be admonished and to affirm them in the faith.³⁰ Because Dolgorukova initially replied falsely to the empress’s questions, she was shown no lenience; she was confined to her house and then assigned public penance.

What had happened was the following. In the 1730s, the confessor of Sergei Dolgorukov, the husband, had already noticed that Dolgorukova consistently shied from going to confession. Year after year, the confessor was unable to include her in the lists he was expected to submit annually about the souls for which he was responsible. She deflected his attempts to exhort her to go to confession, claiming either fulfillment of the obligation elsewhere (though from whom she could not recall), or while traveling abroad, or women’s weakness.³¹ (This last was a strategically clever loophole; as church custom prohibited women from going to communion while menstruating or otherwise being ritually unclean, as after childbirth, they could and did claim that these happened to coincide with customary times for confession and communion, and thus women had more opportunities than men to beg off.)³²

After a long and exhaustive investigation, however, it emerged that Dolgorukova was lying and had consistently lied to the men she named as her spiritual fathers. She appeared nowhere in the confessional registers. She had converted to Roman Catholicism and had her children converted as well. Her maid and companion, Mam’selle Behr, confirmed that her mistress had indeed confessed and communed from a Roman Catholic priest three times in Holland.

This was a scandal on a number of levels. The Dolgorukovs were as prominent as an aristocratic family could be. The proselytizing had been prompted by foreign travel, which raised suspicions about the wisdom of such a practice. According to Russian law, anyone born Orthodox had to stay Orthodox; if a child had one Orthodox parent (regardless of sex), that child was to be raised Orthodox.

The relation between husband and wife is striking as well. When Dolgorukov was queried, he claimed complete ignorance. He could not be expected to keep an eye on his wife’s every coming and going; they went together to ceremonial religious functions that the court was expected to attend (the birthday and saint’s day of the empress, for example); and his wife had never given him cause to question her Orthodoxy. He pleaded ignorance, begged forgiveness, and promised that he would try to admonish and exhort her.

But these attempts came to naught. The Synod refused to believe that he could have been ignorant of the Roman Catholic priest brought from Holland ostensibly to educate their children; that he could have neglected to notice that she never went to confession or communion in an Orthodox church; and that he was ignorant of the December 16, 1723, legislation forbidding Russians to maintain foreign religious persons without express permission of the Synod.

Most interesting here is the decision of the Synod on how to proceed. Dolgorukova and her children were provided with a text disavowing their Roman delusion and avowing their adherence to the dogmas and traditions of the Orthodox Eastern Greco-Russian Church. They would then be confessed, but not absolved. Then, on a day specified by Her Imperial Majesty, Dolgorukova and her children, in the court church, would read the text aloud in public before the Gospel and the Cross and before the reading of the liturgy. Once they did that, they would be absolved. They would be communed at the same service. However, given that Dolgorukova had repeatedly shown herself to be shifty, to ensure that both she herself remained Orthodox and others did as a precautionary measure (so that they who behold this would beware of such evil delusion, and remain firm and steadfast in their native Orthodox Eastern Greco-Russian faith), she was to be sent to a convent (to be specified by Her Imperial Majesty) with her daughter for public penance, in hopes that the separation from her luxurious home and the constant company of nuns and Orthodox services would have the desired effect. Dolgorukov and his son were also sentenced to penance in another monastery, on the grounds that he should have kept a better eye on his wife and that he should take some time to reflect on how to bring up his children in an Orthodox way. All were to go to daily morning and evening services and to go to confession and partake of communion (with suitable Christian preparation) in each of the four church fasts. The priests who had earlier given false information about Dolgorukova’s going to confession would be dealt with by the Synod separately and directly.

However, Elizabeth softened the Synod’s sentence. While Dolgorukov and his son were indeed sent to the Savva Storozhevskii monastery for a year, Dolgorukova and her daughter, instead of a penance, were to attend local churches for daily morning and evening services; both parents and children were expected to confess and commune during each of the four fasts. After a year had elapsed, they were all, for all their lives, to maintain their faith unwaveringly—and their confessors and parish priests were to keep a firm eye on them to ensure they did so. Thus, just as not going to confession was a sign that one was dubious, so going to confession both privately and publicly was the surest means of spiritual and social atonement.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, both the theory and the practice of confession changed relative to that of the eighteenth in one key respect. The establishment of the religious consistories made it possible to track confession far more than before. While priests had been sending in confessional records for decades, the sheer bulk and unwieldiness of those books made them as difficult for Synodal functionaries to sift through as they have for later historians. The consistories became not only screeners of the new reports; they also became the chief forum for parish priests—and their parishioners—to remark on, or denounce, anything that they regarded as troublesome, inappropriate, or disagreeable—and which in their minds required further action from higher powers. Thanks to these records, it became possible to broaden the focus of confession beyond the court and the elites to that of the average parish.

Thus, it may be surprising that the first goal of the consistories regarding confession, as set down by Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, was simply to try to get people to go annually. Some of the original problems persisted as well. For all the new information, it was impossible to go after every Orthodox Christian who had missed confession. Overburdened parish priests had only so much time, as did overburdened police. But—and this was the innovation—it was easy to do so once someone was already out of his or her own house and in the hands of the law. One was far more likely to be assigned a penance for not going to confession, or to be brought up before the consistory for not going to confession, if one had already entered the imperial legal machine for another, secular offense. That is, if one were already in the hands of the secular legal authorities, then it was much easier to apply the discipline of the religious law as well. If someone was already being questioned for theft or horse-stealing or violence or harboring fugitives or attempting suicide or anything else, it was pro forma to inquire when he or she had last gone to confession—and, in the case of an unsatisfactory answer, to send his or her (offenders were overwhelmingly, though not universally, male) case to the consistory.³³

An absolutely typical early consistory case is that of the house serf Merkul Ksenofontov Kondrat′ev from the district of Sviiazhsk in the diocese of Kazan. In the summer of 1819, Kondrat′ev escaped from the estate of the court counselor Mikhail Emel′ianov and was arrested for flight and for having false identity papers. For those offenses, he was lashed thirty times. For not remembering the last time he had gone to confession and communion, he was sent to the Kazan Consistory to be assigned his penance. On completing that penance, he was to be returned to Emel′ianov.

The penance was set at half a year (given that Kondrat′ev could not remember when he had last gone to confession, the rationale was that it might have been ten years ago or more), and Kondrat′ev was sent to the Theophany monastery in Sviiazhsk. Archimandrite Izrail, in his report, informed the consistory that, under the supervision of the hieromonk Leonid, Kondrat′ev had satisfactorily completed his penance, had shown good conduct, and, after appropriate preparation, had gone to confession and Holy Communion. Kondrat′ev was then released.³⁴ This pattern—being arrested for something else, questioned routinely about confession, assigned a church penance for not having gone to confession (culminating in confession and communion) along with one’s secular punishment for one’s secular crime, and exhorted to continue to partake of these sacraments without fail—applied throughout the Russian Empire, before and after the emancipation of the serfs.³⁵

But penances were assigned not only to arrested individuals who had not gone to confession. Through the beginning of the twentieth century, civil criminal sentences automatically carried church penances along with them. The Kazan Consistory, covering territory in present-day Tatarstan, went the furthest in this respect. The Kazan District Court had standard forms for every criminal offense earmarked for the consistory, specifically so that a church penance could be assigned. The relationship of jail sentence and penance was directly proportional. For the shortest term of arrest—seven days—the penance was left to the discretion of the authorities.³⁶ Most interesting, though, is the automatic reduction (halving) of the penance in the case of a prison sentence. The law, cited in full on each form, spelled out this relationship:

Although [name of person sentenced by the Court], for the crime he or she committed of [type of crime] should be subject to a church penance for a term of [n] years, but, bearing in mind that he or she has been sentenced by the civil court for the aforementioned crime [type and duration of sentence], then according to established practice the accused’s penance is reduced by half to [n divided by 2] under the supervision and guidance of the parish priest, granting the latter the right, on the basis of the 102nd canon of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, in cases of the criminal’s despair, risk of death, or sincere repentance, to reduce the term of penance according to his own discretion.³⁷

Even in cases where someone received only a stern reprimand/warning from the court instead of a jail sentence, if