Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia

Russia's ever-expanding imperial boundaries encompassed diverse peoples and religions. Yet Russian Orthodoxy remained inseparable from the identity of the Russian empire-state, which at different times launched conversion campaigns not only to "save the souls" of animists and bring deviant Orthodox groups into the mainstream, but also to convert the empire's numerous Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Catholics, and Uniates. This book is the first to investigate the role of religious conversion in the long history of Russian state building.

How successful were the Church and the state in proselytizing among religious minorities? How were the concepts of Orthodoxy and Russian nationality shaped by the religious diversity of the empire? What was the impact of Orthodox missionary efforts on the non-Russian peoples, and how did these peoples react to religious pressure? In chapters that explore these and other questions, this book provides geographical coverage from Poland and European Russia to the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia, and Alaska.

The editors' introduction and conclusion place the twelve original essays in broad historical context and suggest patterns in Russian attitudes toward religion that range from attempts to forge a homogeneous identity to tolerance of complexity and diversity.

Robert P. Geraci is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia and the author of Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia, also from Cornell. Michael Khodarkovsky is Professor of History at Loyola University, Chicago, and author of Where Two Worlds Met: The Russian State and the Kalmyk Nomads, 1600-1771, also from Cornell, and Russia's Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800.