In recent years, new archival-based social and cultural histories have produced an increasingly rich view of Orthodox Christian life in the Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union. By contrast, empirically grounded bottom-up views of the post-Soviet Orthodox church are still relatively rare, making Russia's largest religious community, ironically, something of a scholarly blind spot.
Detelina Tocheva's study fills this gap through an ethnography of three parishes in a small town in the St. Petersburg region, described from the perspective of what she calls “street-level orthodoxy.” Borrowing from sociologist Michael Lipsky's concept of street-level bureaucracy, “street-level orthodoxy” paints a broad vision of parish life, including clergy and regular attendees as well as casual stoppers-by (zakhozhane). It also directs attention to “the types of people whose presence is instrumental to the practical operation of the church, such as (female) doorkeepers and cleaners, or people who voluntarily participate in church reconstruction” (11), as well as to the receivers and givers of alms and donations. This inclusive perspective allows Tocheva to see people and social interactions at the interface between the church and everyday small town life, themes that often remain outside classical studies of religion.
For example, she looks at the long term legacies of initiatives of church reconstruction in the 1990s and early 2000s, which not only drew some people into permanent membership, but shaped the image of each congregation in the town. She also provides a detailed view of the peculiar economic status of the Orthodox parish: different from what the Russian Orthodox Church's (ROC) reputation of a de facto state church may lead us to expect, every Orthodox parish is an independent economic unit, relying on donations and payments for ritual services. The moral dilemmas of collecting payment for services versus receiving and distributing donations are the subject of several chapters, which show the daily reality of sustaining one of Russia's largest and most influential institutions. Through Tocheva's conversations with female accountants, shopkeepers, teachers, and cleaners, we learn about the crucial roles women play in street-level orthodoxy, often connecting employment within the parish with spiritual pursuits that other scholars characterize as “nomadic” or “virtual.”
Finally, street-level orthodoxy includes the beggars who sit outside of the church gates and people who bring or collect used clothing and other items, treating churches as a distribution hub. Insisting that few people who participate in such grassroots charitable activities identify any religious motivation, Tocheva shows the specific, if somewhat marginal, place of the Orthodox Church in the lives of many Russian citizens: even for those who rarely attend church or request ritual services, it is a place they find appropriate for “brokering social relations” (148), where discarded possessions find deserving recipients. As sites that even those who do not claim membership associate with a particular system of social norms, the parishes play a role in the lives of religiously uncommitted citizens that would not be accessible to other religious groups.
In the opening chapter, Tocheva gives a frank description of her good-natured but sometimes initially-tense relationships with parishioners in the city she calls Ozerovo. In order to protect the privacy of her participants, she goes to unusual lengths, using pseudonyms not only for individuals, but also for the city, the parishes, and even a newly canonized local saint (69). This kind of anonymization is not unheard of in ethnography, especially when discussing people in close social and employment relationships. The gain is an unusually open (though never sensationalist or hypercritical) portrayal of an institution that is quite protective of its public image. The downside is the disconnection of this portrayal of life in “Ozerovo” from historical research on similar topics. Tocheva refrains from citing local scholarship on the parishes and the new saint, though assuring the reader that she has consulted it. Given that insiders will have little trouble identifying the city and its three parishes, one wonders if what is gained in confidentiality is worth the loss in connectivity with other disciplines and intellectual conversations. In addition to calling for new theoretical models for studying the Orthodox Church and its place in wider society, Tocheva also challenges readers to consider the ethics of researching religion in today's Russia, including shared standards of privacy and identification among social scientific and historical research.
With a wealth of human-to-human encounters and a wider-than-usual lens on a little-known institution, Tocheva's book is a candidate for courses in post-Soviet religion, and recommended reading for anyone who would like to look beyond the stereotype of the ROC as a powerful political player.
