Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  Marital status decides clergy rank. Married clergymen can be either priests or deacons who are ordained by a single bishop and can serve in either monasteries or parish churches. Priests assist bishops by administering the sacraments and leading liturgical services in places assigned by their bishop. Deacons serve priests in those services. As long as his wife is alive, a member of the white clergy cannot rise to the episcopacy. Should his wife die, he must take monastic vows and, with very rare exceptions, enter a monastery. Bishops are chosen exclusively from the monastic clergy and must be celibate (either never married or widowed). A new bishop is consecrated when two or three bishops lay hands upon him. He then becomes part of the apostolic succession, which is the unbroken line of episcopal ordinations that began with the apostles chosen by Jesus. Bishops can rise in the hierarchy to archbishop, metropolitan, and patriarch, but every bishop in the Russian Orthodox Church is understood to be equal to every other bishop regardless of title.

  HISTORY

  The rise of Kiev in the ninth century as the center of Eastern Slavic civilization was accompanied by political centralization that promoted the adoption of Orthodox Christianity. The process of Chris-tianization began with the conversion of individual members of the nobility, most notably Princess Olga, the widow of Grand Prince Igor of Kiev. Her grandson, Prince Vladimir, officially adopted Orthodoxy in 988 and enforced mass baptisms into the new faith. Vladimir’s motives for this decision to abandon the animistic faith of his ancestors remain unclear. He was probably influenced both by a desire to strengthen ties with Byzantium and by a need to unify his territory under a common religious culture. The story of Vladimir’s purposefully choosing Orthodox Christianity over other faiths- a story that is difficult to substantiate despite its inclusion in the Russian Primary Chronicle-plays an important role in Russian Orthodoxy’s sense of divine election. Christianity spread steadily throughout the Russian lands from the tenth to thirteenth centuries, aided by state support and clergy imported from Byzantium. Close cooperation between political and ecclesiastical structures thus formed an integral part of the foundations of a unified Russian civilization. Slavic animistic traditions merged with Orthodox Christianity to form dvoyeverie (“dual faith”) that served as the basis for popular religion in Russia.

  The years of Tatar rule (the Mongol Yoke, 1240-1480) gave an unexpected boost to the spread of Orthodox Christianity among the Russian peoples. The collapse of the political structure that ac1119

  ORTHODOXY

  companied the fall of Kiev forced the church to become guardian of both spiritual and national values. Church leaders accepted the dual task of converting the populace in the countryside, where Orthodoxy had only slowly spread, and promoting a new political order that would avoid the internecine political squabbles among princes that had led to the Mongol defeat of Russia. The church accomplished its political goals by backing leaders such as Prince Alexander Nevsky for his defense of Russia against western invaders (he was canonized for his efforts). Conversion of the masses took place largely through the efforts of monastic communities that spread throughout Russia during the period of Mongol domination. Hesychastic or quietist spirituality based on meditative repetition of the Jesus Prayer fed the proliferation of monasteries under the influence of St. Sergius of Radonezh (1314-1392), founder of the Holy Trinity Monastery outside Moscow. Monastic leaders gained significant political influence, as evidenced by St. Sergius’s blessing of Prince Dmitry Donskoy as he marched his army to victory over the Mongols at Kulikovo Pole in 1380.

  Moscow emerged as the true political and religious center of Russia by the middle of the fifteenth century. The senior bishop of Russia acknowledged his support for the Muscovite princes and their drive to reunify the Russian state by moving to Moscow in 1326. The Russian Orthodox hierarchy declared independence from Byzantium after the Council of Florence-Ferrara (1439-1443) where Constantinople tried in vain to solicit western military aid in return for acceptance of Roman Catholic policies and dogma. Church leaders promoted a messianic vision for Muscovite Russia after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Having broken Mongol domination, Muscovy understood its role as the only independent Orthodox state to mean that it must defend the true faith. The description of Moscow as “the Third Rome” captured this messianic mission when it came into use at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

  Russian political power grew increasingly independent from Orthodoxy in the Muscovite state, however, and church leaders struggled with the consequences. During the early 1500s, a national church council sided with abbots who argued for the rights of their monasteries to accumulate wealth (“possessors”) and against monastic leaders who advocated strict poverty for monks (“non-possessors”). The possessor position promised greater political influence for the church. Tensions between secular and ecclesiastical power increased under Tsar Ivan IV (“the Terrible,” 1530-1584), although the Stoglav Council held in 1551 issued strict rules for everyday Orthodox life. The struggle for succession to the throne following Ivan’s death also brought religious instability by the end of the century. Success in elevating the Moscow metropolitan to the rank of patriarch in 1589 added to the church’s influence in defending Russia from foreign invaders and internal chaos during the Time of Troubles (1598-1613). Rivalry developed between secular and ecclesiastical powers by the middle of the seventeenth century when Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich disagreed with the prerogatives claimed by Patriarch Nikon. Nikon’s position was undermined by the Old Believer schism (raskol) that resulted from his attempts to reform Russian Orthodoxy following contemporary Greek practice. Nikon was exiled and eventually deposed on orders from the tsar, who with other Russian nobles of the time became fascinated with Western lifestyles and religion. Limitations on the power of institutional Orthodoxy increased through the second half of the seventeenth century.

  Orthodoxy in the imperial period (1703-1917) was heavily regulated by the state. The authoritarian, Westernized system of government implemented by Peter I (“the Great”) and his successors meant that secular Russian society lived side-by-side with traditional Orthodox culture. The Moscow patriarchate was replaced with a Holy Synod in 1721. Church authority was limited to matters of family and morality, although the church itself was never made subservient to the state bureaucracy. Western ideas had a striking influence on the clergy, who became a closed caste within Russian society due to new requirements for education. Church schools and seminaries were only open to the sons of clergy, and these in turn tended to marry the daughters of clergy. The curriculum for educating clergy drew heavily on Catholic and Protestant models, and clergy often found themselves at odds with both parishioners and state authorities. Monastic power declined due to government-imposed limitations on the numbers of monks at each monastery and the secularization of most church lands in 1763. Monastic influence recovered in the nineteenth century with the emergence of saints embraced by Russian believers who saw them as models for piety and social involvement. An intellectual revival in Orthodoxy took place at this time, when writers including Alexei Khomyakov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Vladimir Soloviev sought to combine Orthodox traditions

  1120

  ORTHODOXY

  and Western culture. Various leaders in church and state also embraced pan-Slavism with an eye toward Russian leadership of the whole Orthodox world.

  Twentieth-century developments shook Russian Orthodoxy to its core. The revolutions of 1905 and 1917 weakened and then destroyed the governing structures upon which the institutional church depended. The emergence of a radically atheistic government under Lenin and the Bolsheviks promised to undermine popular Orthodoxy. Nationalization of all church property was quickly followed by the separation of church from state and religion from public education. Orthodox responses included the restoration of the Moscow patriarchate by the national church council (sobor) of 1917-1918 as well as an attempt by some parish priests to combine Orthodoxy and Bolshevism in a new Renovationist or Living Church. In reality,
the institutional church was unable to find any defense against the ideologically motivated repression of religion during the first quarter century of the Soviet regime. Neither confrontation nor accommodation proved effective within emerging Soviet Russian culture that emphasized the creation of a new, scientific, atheistic worldview. The Stalin Revolution of the 1930s accompanied by the Great Terror led to mass closures of churches and arrests of clergy.

  Orthodoxy remained embedded in Russian culture, however, as seen by its revival during the crisis that accompanied Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Soviet policy toward the Russian Orthodox Church softened for nearly two decades during and after World War II, tightened again during Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign (1959-1964), and then loosened to a limited extent under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev (1964-1982). Mikhail Gorbachev turned to the church for help in the moral regeneration of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. This started a process of reopening Orthodox churches, chapels, monasteries, and schools throughout the country. The collapse of the Soviet Union accelerated that process even as it opened Russia to a flood of religious movements from the rest of the world. Orthodoxy in post-communist Russia struggles to maintain its institutional independence while striving to establish a position as the primary religious confession of the Russian state and the majority of its population. It faces the dilemma of accepting or rejecting various aspects of modern, secular culture in light of Orthodox tradition. See also: ARCHITECTURE; BYZANTIUM, INFLUENCE OF; DVOEVERIE; HAGIOGRAPHY; METROPOLITAN; MONAS-TICISM; PATRIARCHATE; RELIGION; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Belliustin, I. S. (1985). Description of the Parish Clergy in Rural Russia: The Memoir of a Nineteenth-Century Parish Priest, tr. and intro. Gregory L. Freeze. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Cracraft, James. (1971). The Church Reform of Peter the Great. London: Macmillan. Cunningham, James W. (1981). A Vanquished Hope: The Movement for Church Renewal in Russia, 1905-1906. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Curtiss, John S. (1952). The Russian Church and the Soviet State, 1917-1950. Boston: Little, Brown. Davis, Nathaniel. (1995). A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Fedotov, G. P. (1946). The Russian Religious Mind. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fennell, John L. I. (1995). A History of the Russian Church to 1448. New York: Addison-Wesley. Florovsky, Georges. (1979). Collected Works: Vols. 5-6, Ways of Russian Theology, ed. Richard S. Haugh; tr. Robert L. Nichols. Belmont, MA: Nordland. Freeze, Gregory L. (1977). The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Freeze, Gregory L. (1983). The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth- Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Husband, William B. (2000). “Godless Communists”: Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia, 1971-1932. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Levin, Eve. (1989). Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900-1700. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Meehan, Brenda. (1993). Holy Women of Russia. New York: Harper San Francisco. Michels, Georg B. (2000). At War With the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Russia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ouspensky, Leonid. (1992). Theology of the Icon, 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Ware, Timothy. (1993). The Orthodox Church, new ed. New York: Penguin.

  EDWARD E. ROSLOF

  1121

  ORUZHEINAYA PALATA

  ORUZHEINAYA PALATA See ARMORY.

  OSETINS

  The Osetins are an Iranian nationality of the central Caucasus. They speak a language from the Eastern Iranian group of the Indo-European language family. The three major ethnic and linguistic subdivisions of the Osetins are the Taullag, Iron, and Digor groups. The territories they inhabit straddle the primary land routes across the central Great Caucasus mountain range.

  Their remote origins can be traced to Iranian-speaking warrior and pastoralist groups such as the Scythians and Alans. Byzantine, Armenian, and Georgian sources from the seventh through thirteenth centuries suggest that the Alans became a major power in the central Caucasus, and linguistic and ethnographic evidence links the modern Os-etins to the Alans. In the tenth century the Alans often allied with the Byzantine Empire. Over the next two centuries Christian missionaries gained wide influence among the Alans. In the upper Kuban, Teberda, Urup, and Zelenchuk river valleys many churches and monasteries were constructed. By the twelfth century Kypchaks became the main power in the region, and the Alans were eclipsed by their Turkic neighbors. During the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century Alans took refuge high in the mountains and abandoned their centers in the territory of modern-day Karachaevo-Cherkessia. At some point before the mid-sixteenth century, the Osetins came under the domination of princes in Kabarda.

  As Russian influence in the central Caucasus began to grow in the mid-eighteenth century, Os-etin elders sought political alliances and trade ties with the imperial government. In 1774 negotiations between an Osetian delegation and the imperial government recognized the incorporation of Osetia into the Russian empire. In subsequent decades imperial authorities facilitated the relocation of loyal Osetins from the mountains to settlements and forts in the plains between Vladikavkaz and Mozdok. Beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century Russian Orthodox missionaries worked to revitalize Christianity among the Osetins, who had remained nominally Christian but practiced a combination of pagan and Christian rituals. The construction of military road networks through Osetia in the nineteenth century facilitated the economic development of the central Caucasus and the extension of Russian rule to Georgia and Chechnya. During the Russian Revolution and civil war, both Red and White armies vied for control of Vladikavkaz, the main political and economic center of the region. A South Osetian autonomous region was established in 1922 within the Georgian Soviet Republic, and a North Osetian autonomous region was established in 1924 within the boundaries of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Although their territories were occupied by German forces during the World War II, the Osetins were considered reliable by the Soviet regime and, with the exception of some Muslim Digors, they avoided deportation to Central Asia. During the Gorbachev period Osetins began to pressure for unification of the two autonomous republics into a single entity. In 1991 attempts by Georgian authorities to suppress local autonomy led to a war between Georgian and South Osetian militias. In 1992 conflicts also broke out in the suburbs of Vladikavkaz between Osetin and Ingush groups. While Northern Osetia became a republic of the Russian Federation and renamed itself Ala-nia in the 1990s, the precise juridical status of Southern Osetia within Georgia remained unresolved.

  Traditionally Osetins residing in the mountains subsisted on stock-raising, and Osetins inhabiting the plains pursued agriculture. In the late nineteenth century many Osetins began to migrate to cities in search of employment, and by the last decades of the twentieth century the majority of Osetins lived in urban areas. In the twentieth century the Osetin population grew from 250,000 to more than 600,000. An Osetin literary language based upon the Iron dialect was developed during the imperial period, and Osetins were one of the few groups in the North Caucasus to possess a standardized literary language and to have developed literature in their native tongue before the revolution. See also: CAUCASUS; GEORGIA AND GEORGIANS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Wixman, Ronald. (1980). Language Aspects of Ethnic Patterns and Processes in the North Caucasus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  BRIAN BOECK

  1122

  OSTROMIR GOSPEL

  OSORINA, YULIANYA USTINOVNA

  (d. 1604), noblewoman, local saint of Murom.

  Yulianya Osorina is known through the Life [or Tale] of Yulianya Lazarevskaya, a remarkable document of the seventeenth century. Written by the saint’s son Druzhina Osorin in the 1620s or 1630s, it stands out among vitae (lives of saints) i
n that it is tied to precise historical time and events. Most striking is its subject: an ordinary laywoman, the only Russian saint who was not a martyr, ruler, or nun.

  Yulianya was born into a family of the upper ranks of the service nobility. Her father, Ustin Nedyurev, was a cellarer of Ivan IV; her mother was Stefanida Lukina from Murom. Orphaned at the age of six, Yulianya was brought up by female relatives and proved to be a serious, obedient, and God-loving child. At the age of sixteen she was married to the wealthy servitor Georgy Osorin. The Life throws some light on the wide scope of duties expected of a noblewoman of that time. Osorina’s parents-in-law passed on to her the supervision of all household affairs; in the frequent absence of her husband she ran the estate and managed family affairs: for instance, giving an adequate burial and commemoration to her mother- and father-in-law. The Life shows no trace of the alleged seclusion that has been usually postulated for Muscovite women of some status.

  Yulianya began helping widows and orphans in her youth and continued the commitment after marriage. During her widowhood she intensified the charity work, giving away all but the most basic material necessities. Having donated all her belongings in the years of the terrible famine (1601-1603), she died in poverty on January 2, 1604.

  The genre of the Life has been disputed widely. In 1871 Vasily Osipovich Klyuchevsky was the first to describe it as a secular biography. The Soviet scholar Mikhail Osipovich Skripil shared this view and chose for his 1948 edition the title Tale of Ulianya Osorina, abolishing traditional headings such as Life of Yulianya Lazarevskaya. On the other hand, Western scholars T. A. Greenan and Julia Alissandratos, as well as the Russian philolologist T. R. Rudi, insist on the hagiographic character of the work. Different signs of saintliness can be found in the Life: For instance, when Yulianya died, “everyone saw around her head a golden circle just like the one that is painted around the heads of saints on icons.” When in 1615 her son was buried and her coffin opened, “they saw it was full of sweet-smelling myrrh,” which turned out to be healing. According to Greenan, the Life is firmly rooted in Russian religious tradition, especially in the popular fourteenth-century collection Iz-maragd, which emphasizes the possibility of salvation in the world, a central theme in the Life.