Among the few facts about the Russian Orthodox Church in Imperial Russia familiar to nonspecialists is that Peter the Great's 1722 Supplement to the Spiritual Regulation required priests to report sedition learned through confession. This requirement to break the confessional seal was and remains key evidence for the longstanding argument that Peter reduced the imperial Russian Church to a mere handmaiden of the state. In this fascinating book, Nadieszda Kizenko explores the experience of confession in Russia from the mid-seventeenth century to the 1917 revolution, aiming to bring it into the broader history of penance in Europe. Although an analysis of the establishment, enforcement, and official use of the legal requirement that every Orthodox Christian confess and take communion is central to her account, Kizenko insists that the framework of church–state relations is not sufficient for a history of confession. Instead, she argues forcefully that the fact that annual confession was compulsory did not make it meaningless to those who participated. On the contrary, the near-universal ritual fostered a unique liturgical and confessional culture that became connected in the popular mind with traditional Russianness; moreover, individuals used confession for their own purposes, whether to convey grievances, to demand days off for their spiritual lives, or as a means of self-analysis and telling their own stories.
Kizenko draws creatively on an extraordinarily varied range of sources to get at what was both a profoundly personal experience and a state-enforced requirement. In addition to legislation; theological and liturgical texts; and the archives of the Russian state, the Holy Synod, and local consistory archives from seven cities in Russia and Ukraine; she also examines clerical guides, sermons, saints’ lives, written confessions, and examinations of conscience sent to clergymen, diaries, works of literature, and visual imagery. Her approach is comparative, situating Russian Orthodox theology and Russian statecraft in the broader European context. She focuses on practice: on how laws on confession actually played out over time, and on how people lived out and understood confession rather than assuming that doctrine forms practice.
Kizenko traces how, in line with broader European trends of confessionalization and the “disciplinary revolution,” religious and state authorities in seventeenth-century Muscovy looked to regular confession to address religious and social tensions by creating a more unified and socially disciplined population. To do so, they needed to regularize the still unstable Orthodox rite of confession and looked to the Roman Catholic–inflected work of Ukrainian theologians. The Ukrainians introduced the notion of the seal, which was not traditional in East Slavic theology, but Kizenko shows that the seal remained ambiguous, both in theory and practice, in seventeenth-century Muscovy. Peter I took these trends to their logical conclusion, institutionalizing the sacrament and explicitly tying it to civic virtue on the Western model. Such cooperation between church and state was common in early modern European religious reform; however, Peter went beyond the model by explicitly breaking the confessional seal.
Kizenko traces the use of confession by the state throughout the eighteenth century, arguing that it played the dominant role in setting the goals of the policy. However, she also shows that the church consistently took seriously its goal of bringing people to sincere repentance and regular participation in the sacraments and reveals a century-long debate between religious and civil leaders over whether the state could play a role in the assignment of the church penance that accompanied secular sentences. Especially interesting is her suggestion that after the mid-nineteenth century, Russia's rulers lost interest in confession as a means of uncovering sedition, and church and state to some extent switched roles: the police and bureaucratic mechanisms to enforce confession (such as the routine requirement to attest to recent confession upon initiating any legal procedure) now largely served the church's goals.
Kizenko also reveals a developing culture of confession in the eighteenth century that cannot be reduced to a civic duty. Indeed, the legal requirement, and the state and church's increasing capacity to enforce it among all social groups by the nineteenth century, fostered a unique culture of confession in Russia. Confession was imbedded in a liturgical and social process of preparation and purification called govienie, which involved fasting, limitations of secular activity, attending several days of church services, then confession and communion. Because the vast majority of Orthodox fulfilled this ritual before Easter, govienie took on a communal and seasonal character. Memoirs, letters, and literature of the nineteenth century are replete with descriptions of govienie. Written confessions demonstrate the extent to which Russians incorporated the words of the liturgy into their personal self-examinations. Kizenko's focus on practice, and her gender analysis, support a rethinking of characterizations of elite culture in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that suggest confession was a compromised, theatrical procedure. Kizenko shows the degree to which elite men took it seriously and how it had become intertwined with civic virtue in their minds. Certainly, after heavy-handed efforts by Nicholas I to use confession against those arrested after the 1825 Decembrist uprising, such men increasingly distinguished between the sacraments of the Orthodox Church and the contents of the Gospel in their writings about govienie. However, Kizenko shows that for noble women in the nineteenth century, for whom it was less of a test of loyalty and who had few opportunities to publish their writings, sacramental confession played a key role in their reading and life narration. These women sought father-confessors who were their intellectual equals and corresponded extensively; moreover, these clerics clearly were not just directing their spiritual daughters but using the correspondence to explore ideas in private. The many devotional texts noble women authored to prepare their children for confession reveal the sacrament's centrality to elite domestic culture.
This book is a scholarly tour de force. In Kizenko's able hands, confession proves to be an illuminating window into church–state relations, but also for viewing Russian Orthodoxy in relation to both western Christianity and other Orthodox societies, for exploring social and legal relationships in imperial Russia, and for glimpsing the devotional lives of its Orthodox inhabitants.
