Russia’s Social Gospel: The Orthodox Pastoral Movement in Famine, War, and Revolution

“Orthodox Christian practices during the rapid social, economic, and political changes of the Russian Empire’s final decades” go under the microscope in this deeply researched history by Scarborough, a professor of Russian history at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan. Focusing on “Orthodox social activism,” the author explores lower-level church officials’ initiatives to provide education, famine relief, and mutual aid systems to peasant parishioners through “two famines, two wars, and three revolutions.” While the Orthodox Church had long operated as a semiofficial arm of the Russian state—for example, promoting vaccinations and good hygiene at state officials’ instruction during cholera outbreaks—parish clergy engagement with an increasingly powerless and poverty-stricken public radicalized many and led them to advocate for the “decentralization of ecclesiastical authority.” Additionally, Scarborough contends that parish clergy’s practice of teaching children in exchange for parents’ help building and funding schools contributed to the creation of an educated public that supported revolutionary activity in 1905 and 1917. The author’s scholarship is detailed and his prose lucid, showing that, far from obsolete, the church was a “prominent factor in [Russia’s] modernization process” leading up to the Bolshevik revolution. This is an exceptional chronicle. (May)