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Religious and Secular Forces in Late Tsarist Russia. Essays in Honor of Donald W. Treadgold by Charles E. Timberlake Review by: Geoffrey Hosking The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 71, No. 3 (Jul., 1993), pp. 594-595 Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4211371 . Accessed: 14/06/2014 21:54 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Slavonic and East European Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 195.34.79.192 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 21:54:57 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Religious and Secular Forces in Late Tsarist Russia. Essays in Honor of Donald W. Treadgoldby Charles E. Timberlake

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Religious and Secular Forces in Late Tsarist Russia. Essays in Honor of Donald W. Treadgold byCharles E. TimberlakeReview by: Geoffrey HoskingThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 71, No. 3 (Jul., 1993), pp. 594-595Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4211371 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 21:54

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and EastEuropean Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Slavonic andEast European Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.192 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 21:54:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

594 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

These observations are provocative and some of Professor Confino's stric- tures are valid. But if one were consistently to follow his requirements, narrative history would become impossible since each action - the essence of the narrative - would have to be dissolved in countervailing 'mentalites' and thus never get off the ground. It is no wonder that the Annales school, for all its brilliant accomplishments, has produced no major narrative histories. Its very methodology limits it to static analysis.

Within these self-imposed constraints, Professor Confino's studies have no peer in the field of Russian history. Meticulous without being pedantic, elegant in conception as well as execution, they explain better than any existing works how and why the social groups of Imperial Russia, called nobles, peasants and intellectuals, thought, felt and sometimes acted as they did. Department of History RICHARD PIPES Harvard University

Timberlake, Charles E. (ed.). Religious and Secular Forces in Late Tsarist Russia. Essays in Honor of Donald W. Treadgold. University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, I992. x + 366 pp. Tables. Notes. Bibliographical essay. Index. $35.00.

THE wuvre of Donald Treadgold is so diverse and extensive that the editor of a collection of essays in his honour inevitably faces an embarrassment: what subject should he concentrate on? Some of this embarrassment is reflected in the present title, which seems at first sight so all-embracing as to be meaning- less. In fact, though, there is a justification for it, since in Russia secularism was itself a kind of religion and deserves to be treated as such. As Joseph Schiebel remarks in his essay on 'Marxism and Aziatchina', 'When Marxism moved east it took on a religious character' (p. I45).

Hitherto, historians of Russia have concentrated mainly on the secular forms of religion. It was the outstanding virtue of Treadgold's work that he took no less seriously the non-secular faiths which flourished in the empire, and in particular Orthodox Christianity. It is appropriate that this distinctive feature of his contribution should be celebrated in this collection of papers.

As Timberlake points out in his excellent introduction, once Russia was committed to empire, it was vulnerable to religious and secular forces which were bound to challenge the dominance of the Orthodox faith. The diversity of non-Orthodox and even non-Christian peoples absorbed into the empire meant that some degree of religious tolerance was essential for the preserva- tion of peace; and the high degree of education necessary to train elites for the tasks of public administration exposed them to a plurality of ideas which undermined the faith to which they had been born.

These are the major themes of this volume, though naturally they are not pursued with equal consistency in each contribution. Perhaps the key paper is that of Alan Kimball, who demonstrates how Herzen, generalizing from his own experience, outlined a new project for young nobles who could not accept the demands of chin or soslovie, that is of service rank or social status; remoulded

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REVIEWS 595

by education, they dedicated themselves to service, not to the state, but to the people. In doing so they formed a new social stratum, the intelligentsia, whose bounds would soon far outstrip the nobility.

The difficulties the empire brought on itself by training young people for the modern world are illustrated by Charles Timberlake in his paper on the short-lived technical school in Rzhev, set up by the Tver' zemstvo in I871 to bring the latest scientific methods to higher education. Within a few months of its opening, both students and teachers were attracting criticism from the inspectors. One teacher expounded the theories of Darwin and when asked 'How is it that the priest says otherwise?' replied 'I am not a priest and do not recite fables, but speak about scientific facts; if you want to hear fables, go to the priest' (p. I 4 ) . Shortly afterwards the school was closed down, because of 'the inability of the teachers to guide the school along the desired path' (P. 144).

One statesman tried to use primary education to prevent such problems emerging at all: that was Pobedonostsev, whose campaign as Procurator of the Holy Synod to raise money for parish (as distinct from zemstvo) schools, and thus couple literacy with piety, is described in detail here by Thomas C. Sorenson. 'The parish schools were designed as a practical and realistic means of providing mass elementary education while retaining loyalty to Orthodoxy and autocracy', Sorenson writes (p. 205), but concludes that even Pobedo- nostsev's strenuous efforts could not achieve the goal.

The Orthodox Church in the nineteenth century was well aware of its isolation and vulnerability, and occasionally some of its leading figures attempted to reach out to western churches in the hope of finding a partner there. At one time their hopes were pinned on the Old Catholics, asJohn Basil reports. The Old Catholics' rejection of the papal declaration of infallibility in I870 recapitulated many of the criticisms which the Orthodox had long been making about the pretensions to temporal power of the Roman church. However, although there was interest in rapprochement on both sides, Old Catholics were not prepared to accept the demand voiced by some Orthodox prelates that they simply acknowledge that the Orthodox had been right all along, and thus had always been the only true Christian church. The mixture of exclusivity and vulnerability dogged the Orthodox Church right up to I 9 I 7.

Nicholas II sought his own solution to the social and cultural rifts opened up by bureaucracy and intelligentsia. Cleaving to a fervent personal Orthodox faith tinged with western pietism and mysticism, he hoped to rediscover his unity with the ordinary Russian people through elaborately staged public rituals like the canonization of Serafim of Sarov in 1903. Robert L. Nichols shows how his attempts coincided with a new imperialist militancy, embodying 'a solidarity that was as patriotic as it was spiritual' (p. 229). One result was the fiasco of theJapanese war.

Inevitably this collection of essays is varied in coverage and quality, but overall it forms a worthy offering to a historian who has always pursued his own lines of enquiry with impeccable scholarship and integrity. School of Slavonic and East European Studies GEOFFREY HOSKING

University ofLondon

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