by James Millar
CHURCH COUNCIL
During the 1920s Chukovsky turned to writing children’s literature as a “safe” genre. His first tale Krokodil (The Crocodile) had been published in 1917, and between 1923 and 1926 he wrote a number of others. Although his tales were widely published and very popular, the author came under attack from writers and educators, including Nadezhda Krupskaya, who called The Crocodile “a bourgeois fog.” Chukovsky’s children’s stories were forbidden and, with the exceptions of two new stories in the 1930s, not republished until after Stalin’s death. Chukovsky’s response to this critique was Malenkie deti (Little Children, 1928; From Two to Five in later editions), a study of children’s language, games, and creativity.
While Chukovsky himself did not directly experience persecution during the 1930s, he knew many, such as his son-in-law, who did. Chukovsky worked tirelessly to help those who suffered, writing letters and petitions on their behalf. In 1962, toward the end of his life, he received the Lenin Prize and was awarded an honorary doctor of letters from Oxford University. See also: CHUKOVSKAYA, LYDIA KORNEYEVNA; KRUP-SKAYA, NADEZHDA KONSTANTINOVNA; NEKRASOV, NIKOLAI ALEXEYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chukovskaia, Lidiia Korneevna. (1978). “Chukovskii, Ko-rnei Ivanovich.” In The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet Literature, ed. Harry B. Weber, 4: 126-137. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press. Forrester, Sibelan (1998). “Kornei Ivanovich Chukovskii, 1882-1969.” In Reference Guide to Russian Literature, ed. Neil Cornwell. London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers.
ELIZABETH JONES HEMENWAY
CHURCH COUNCIL
In the Orthodox Church, councils (in Greek, syno-dos; in Russian, sobor) are the highest form of ecclesiastical authority, the most important of which are the seven ecumenical councils that were held between the years 325 and 787. Since 1500 the Russian Church has convened several “local” or national councils (pomestnye sobory), which apply specifically to the Russian Church itself. Ultimate authority for decision-making at these councils has rested in the hands of the bishops, although, in the twentieth century, clergy and laity have participated in a consultative role with varying degrees of power. Since the rise of Muscovite Russia, the local councils have taken place in Moscow or just northeast of it at the Trinity Monastery in Sergiev Posad (known as Zagorsk during the Soviet period).
The Council of 1503 confronted the conflicting positions of two monastics who were subsequently both glorified by the Church as saints. Joseph of Volotsk advocated the establishment of cenobitic monasteries (in which monks lived in common, sharing everything), church landholdings, and the active involvement of monks in the world. Nil Sorsky promoted a monasticism that separated itself from the world; monks, he thought, should live as hermits and earn income from their own labor. Although the debates between the possessors and nonpossessors, as their two points of view are known respectively, amounted to a difference in emphasis, not of absolute opposition, the Council of 1503 rejected Nil’s positions. As a result, sixteenth-century monastic landholding and wealth increased. The assembly also condemned the Ju-daizer movement as a heresy.
The Council of 1666-1667 was convened amidst Tsar Alexei’s efforts to deal with the reforms of the outspoken Patriarch Nikon. With Patriarchs Paissy of Alexandria and Macarius of Antioch in attendance, the assembly endorsed Nikon’s reforms of ritual and service books, yet deposed Nikon himself for his attempts to attain supreme authority over the tsar. The Council called for increasing the number of bishops, closing the state’s Monastery Office, and restoring the bishops’ authority over the clergy; the state resisted such changes in order to preserve its own power. The Council sought to curtail the unregulated recognition of saints and of miracle-working relics, reduced the number of saints’ days that were national feasts, and called for a skeptical attitude when considering the validity of “holy fools.”
The Council of 1682, convened during the reign of Tsar Theodore, considered questions and proposals that had been raised at the Council of 1666-1667, including the addition of ten dioceses to the existing thirteen. Since only one new diocese had been added, the expansion of ecclesiastical administration still remained an issue. Other decisions concerned the behavior of clergy and the regulation of church services and veneration of relics.
CHURCH COUNCIL
The Council of 1917-1918 represented the culmination of an early-twentieth-century church reform movement. After the February Revolution, it attempted to reconstruct church-state relations in cooperation with and anticipation of the proposed political transformation of Russia through the Constituent Assembly. It also contended with the rise of nationalist movements and Soviet power. The Council had been much anticipated in 1906 but, due to fears of political unrest, had been postponed by Tsar Nicholas II. Its delegates consisted of 265 clerics (bishops, priests, and monks) and 299 laymen; although the assembly’s plenary sessions were thereby dominated numerically by non-episcopal members (a departure from tradition), no decree was made official until approved by the Council’s episcopal conference, which met in secret session. The Council restored the Moscow Patriarchate to replace the Synodal higher church administration instituted by Peter the Great; decentralized authority in diocesan administration to create an ecclesiastical system more responsive to the needs of clergy and laity; and reformed the parish, which became a legal entity empowered to carry out many decisions on its own. The Council also considered a host of issues concerning church discipline. The Bolsheviks’ disestablishment of the institutional church made it difficult or impossible to carry out the Council’s decrees. In 1918 the delegates focused increasingly on preserving the church rather than reforming it.
The Council of January 31-February 2, 1945, was convened at the behest of the Soviet government and broke with church tradition and the decrees of the 1917-1918 Council in many ways. Held primarily to elect a new patriarch to succeed Patriarch Sergius, the Council selected Alexei, the sole candidate proposed for the position. Consisting of 46 bishops, 87 priests, and 37 laymen, the Council created a centralized authority in the hands of the patriarch, at the expense of Synodal, diocesan, and parish authority.
The Council of May 30-June 2, 1971, was attended by 236 delegates, including a bishop, priest, and layman from each diocese and guests from outside Russia. The Council elected Metropolitan Pimen as patriarch to replace Alexei, who had died in April 1970, and lifted the seventeenth-century excommunication of the Old Believers. It confirmed the parish reforms of the 1961 Council of Bishops, which had given power to executive committees to control finances, thereby undermining the authority of priests and bishops. The Council also approved the granting of autocephaly (independence) to Orthodox Churches in America, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, as well as autonomy (self-rule) to Churches in Japan and Finland.
The Church convened the Council of June 6-9, 1988, during the millennium anniversary of the baptism of Rus in 988. The assembly glorified (canonized) nine saints: Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy, Andrei Rublev, Maximus the Greek, Metropolitan of Moscow Macarius (1482-1563), Paissy Velichkovsky, Xenia of Petersburg, Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, Amvrosy of Optina, and Bishop Theofan the Recluse. The Council promulgated a new statute on church administration, which called for a local council to be convened every five years and a bishops’ council every two years. It also overturned the parish decrees of the 1961 Bishops’ Council by strengthening the position of the priest in the parish, making his signature necessary for all parish council documents and establishing him as chairman of the parish council. See also: HOLY SYNOD; PATRIARCHATE; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH; SAINTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bushkovitch, Paul. (1992). Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. New York: Oxford University Press. Cunningham, James. (1981). A Vanquished Hope: The Movement for Church Reform in 1905-1906. Crest-wood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Curtiss, John Shelton. (1940). Church and State in Russia: The Last Years of the Empire, 1900-1917. New York: Columbia University Press
. Ellis, Jane. (1988). The Russian Orthodox Church: A Contemporary History. London: Routledge. Ellis, Jane. (1996). The Russian Orthodox Church: Tri-umphalism and Defensiveness. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Evtuhov, Catherine. (1991). “The Church in the Russian Revolution: Arguments for and against Restoring the Patriarchate at the Church Council of 1917-1918.” Slavic Review 51(3):497-511. Pospielovsky, Dimitry. (1984). The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917-1982. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Valliere, Paul R. (1978). “The Idea of a Council in Russian Orthodoxy in 1905.” In Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, ed. Robert L. Nichols and Theofanis George Stavrou. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
GEORGE T. KOSAR
CHURCH COUNCIL, HUNDRED CHAPTERS
CHURCH COUNCIL, HUNDRED CHAPTERS
The Hundred Chapters Church Council (known to Russians as the Stoglav) was convened in Moscow in February 1551 by Tsar Ivan IV and Metropolitan Makary, and was attended by representatives of the boyar council, nine bishops, and numerous abbots, priors, and priests. The council’s purpose was to regulate the church’s relationship to the state, reform its internal life, strengthen the authority of the bishops, and eradicate non-Christian folk customs from among the populace. It would not introduce anything new but would purify the Russian church of irregularities.
No complete record of the council’s resolutions has survived, but a partial account was preserved in a book (the Stoglav) divided into one hundred chapters, from which the council takes its name. Ivan opened the proceedings with a speech in which he confessed his sins and called for national repentance, then asked the council to approve his new law code of 1550 and the statute charters designed to abolish corruption in provincial administration. After this the tsar presented a list of questions, apparently compiled with the help of Metropolitan Makary and the priest Sylvester, relating to deficiencies in church life and heresy among the people, and called on the council to recommend remedies.
By May 1551 the Hundred Chapters Council had completed its deliberations. Ivan’s new law code and statute charters were confirmed, but the proposed secularization of church lands for military tenure and subordination of clerics to secular jurisdiction were categorically rejected. When the tsar confirmed the inviolability of church possessions, the bishops compromised by agreeing to limits on the increase of ecclesiastical property. Moreover, the financial privileges of monasteries were reduced, and no new tax-free monastic settlements were to be founded in towns without the tsar’s approval, thereby increasing crown tax revenues. The council called for many irregularities in church life to be corrected. Among other things, drunkenness among the clergy was to be eradicated, parish priests were to be better educated, and priests and laity alike were to be protected against rapacious episcopal tax collectors. “Pagan” and foreign practices popular among the laity were prohibited, such as minstrels playing at weddings and the shaving of beards. The council’s decisions made it possible to standardize religious books, rituals, and icon painting and protected the church’s possessions and judicial rights against state encroachment. The bishops increased their judicial authority over the monasteries, and likewise extended their supervision of the parish clergy by appointing a network of priest elders. Some of the council’s resolutions were not implemented, however, and others proved to be unsuccessful. The series of decrees issued in 1551 throughout the Russian state calling for the purification of religious life had to be regularly reissued, which suggests that the corrections were not enforced and abuses were not extirpated. Despite council demands for upgraded clerical education, there is no evidence of improvement until the second half of the seventeenth century. Alcoholism continued to be a problem, and extortion by tax collectors was never fully eradicated. Attempts to purify the Christianity of the people appear to have failed, and many superstitious practices listed by the council survived until the early twentieth century. The attempt to reform the laity’s behavior was impeded by the fact that parish priests were responsible for carrying it out but were not given the education, assistance, or means of enforcement that would have made this possible.
The Hundred Chapters Council affirmed the traditional Byzantine principle of “symphony” (i.e., cooperation) between church and state, yet the proceedings exemplify the ongoing power struggle between Russia’s religious and secular authorities. As a historical document, the Stoglav casts a unique light on the cultural life of early modern Russia and on the character of Ivan IV. Alongside the Nomocanon (a collection of Byzantine ecclesiastical law), it became a fundamental manual of church law until the mid-seventeenth century, when Patriarch Nikon of Moscow reversed some of its decisions on minor religious rituals. Nikon’s opponents maintained that the old rituals were correct and that the decisions of the Hundred Chapters council had canonical authority. The ensuing disagreement became one of the chief causes of the schism of the Russian Church. See also: IVAN IV; NIKON, PATRIARCH; OLD BELIEVERS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bushkovitch, Paul. (1992). Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
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Kollman, J. (1978). “The Moscow Stoglav Church Council of 1551.” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan. Kollman, J. (1980). “The Stoglav Council and the Parish Priests.” Russian History 7(1/2):65-91. Soloviev, Sergei M. (1996). History of Russia, Vol. 12: Russian Society Under Ivan the Terrible, ed. and trans. T. Allan Smith. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press. Vernadsky, George. (1969). A History of Russia, Vol. 5, Pt. 2: The Tsardom of Muscovy, 1547-1682. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Vernadsky, George, ed. (1972). A Source Book for Russian History from Early Times to 1917. New Haven: Yale University Press.
DEBRA A. COULTER
CHUVASH
The Chuvash (self-name chavash) are an indigenous people of the middle Volga basin. According to the 1989 census there were 1.8 million Chuvash in the former Soviet Union. The greatest concentration (906,922) lived in the Chuvash Republic on the west bank of the Volga river between its tributaries the Sura and Sviaga, with most of the remainder living in adjacent republics and provinces. Chuvash made up 67.8 percent of the population of Chuvashia in 1989, with Russians accounting for 26.7 percent.
The ethnonym chavash first appears in Russian sources in 1508, so early Chuvash history is not entirely clear. Scholars agree that today’s Chuvash are descendants of at least three groups: Turkic Bul-gar tribes who arrived on the Volga in the seventh century from the Caucasus-Azov region; the closely-related Suvars (suvaz, perhaps the origin of chavash) who migrated from the Caucasus in the eighth century; and Finno-Ugric tribes who inhabited Chuvashia before the Turkic settlement. The Bulgar state dominated the region from the tenth century until conquest by the Mongols in 1236. Chuvash were ruled by the Golden Horde in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, then by the Kazan Khanate from the 1440s, and were finally incorporated in the Muscovite state in 1551.
The Chuvash speak a Turkic language that preserves many archaic elements of Old Bulgar and is largely incomprehensible to speakers of other Turkic dialects. Early Chuvash was written with Turkic runes, supplanted by the Arabic alphabet during the time of the Bulgar state. A new Chuvash script based on the Cyrillic alphabet emerged in the eighteenth century. The first Chuvash grammar, which used this script, was published in 1769. The Chuvash educator Ivan Yakovlev developed a new Chuvash alphabet in 1871. The first Chuvash newspaper, Khypar (News), appeared in 1906.
Early Chuvash animism was influenced by Zoroastrianism, Judaism (via the Khazars), and Islam. Chuvash honored fire, water, sun, and earth, and believed in a variety of good and evil spirits. By the middle of the eighteenth century, most Chuvash had converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity under the influence of Russian settlers and missionaries. However, some who lived among Tatar populations converted to Islam and assimilated to Tatar culture and language. Today’s Chuvash are predominantly Orthodox Christians, though pagan beliefs
survive in scattered settlements.
The second half of the nineteenth century brought significant economic changes, as Chuvash peasants left their villages for railway employment, lumbering and factory work in the Urals, mining in the Donbas, and migrant agricultural labor. Urbanization began in this period and accelerated in the twentieth century, although in 1989 less than half (49.8 percent) of the Chuvash in the Russian Federation lived in cities.
During the Russian Revolution of 1917, Chuvash leaders demonstrated interest in joining the Idel-Ural (Volga-Ural) state proposed by Tatar politicians as a counterbalance to Russian hegemony in the region, and later (March 1918) agreed to join the Tatar-Bashkir Soviet Republic. After this project fell victim to the conflicts of the civil war, the Soviet government formed a Chuvash Autonomous Region (1920), later upgraded to an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1925). Chuvash leaders declared their republic an SSR (Soviet Socialist Republic, or union republic) in 1990 and renamed it the Chuvash Republic in 1992. Important organizations active since the late Soviet years include the Chuvash Party of National Rebirth, the Chuvash National Congress, and the Chuvash Social-Cultural Center. The Chuvash Republic is a signatory to the March 31, 1992, treaty that created the Russian Federation. See also: NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST
