Military Chaplaincy in the Russian Empire in the Eighteenth Century

In the Orthodox tradition, clergy are divided into categories: black (monastic, celibate) and white (non-celibate). For the latter, during the Synodal period, three subcategories were coined: diocesan, court, and military. Occasional references to the presence of clergy in the army in Russian wars and military campaigns go back to the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁶ However, as in western Europe, a more formally structured military chaplaincy appeared in Russia with the formation of a regular army from the second half of the seventeenth century. The position of military priests was established under Peter the Great (1672–1725) in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, the period in which Russia became a military empire, and a state based on the ethos of service (the so-called ‘service state’), with discipline imposed from above.Footnote ⁷ Peter the Great’s Military Articles (1715) and Military Statute (1716), together with the Naval Statute (1720), all of which were based on western European (mainly Swedish, Austrian and Saxon) models, introduced the position of regimental priests or, in the case of the navy, ship’s priests, under the jurisdiction of ‘ober-’ or ‘high’ (vyshnie) priests, that is, military superintendents.Footnote ⁸

The main responsibility of both regimental and ship priests was to perform church services. These were, firstly, prayer services. According to the Military Articles,

Over time, church ceremonies in the army became more complex. At the end of the eighteenth century, the evening zorya or tapta (from the Dutch taptoe, ‘tattoo’)Footnote ¹⁰ was transformed into a solemn ceremony with the singing of the hymn ‘How Glorious is Our Lord in Zion’. In 1813, the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm III adopted some elements of the Russian ceremony: this hymn in an eighteenth-century German form was incorporated into the Prussian ‘Der Große Zapfenstreich’ (‘Grand Tattoo’), and remains there to this day in rituals of the Bundeswehr.

In addition to public and private prayer services (treby), the military priests were expected to lead church services: matins, vespers and the liturgy (eucharist). When the troops were encamped and not marching, such services were held in regimental churches on Sundays, feast days, ‘Victorial’ days (commemorations of major victories) and ‘Royal’ days (days of enthronement, name days, and royal birthdays). Field church tents – both regimental and those of the ober-priest – reproduced an Orthodox church in miniature: inside, a separate small tent was equipped with an altar and altar table with antimension (the special corporal required to be on the altar in most of Eastern Christian liturgical traditions), separated from the main space by an iconostasis with a few regimental icons.Footnote ¹¹ The tent of the Protestant field church was even more luxurious: a gift to the commander-in-chief from the merchants of Königsberg,Footnote ¹² it was also used as the generals’ dining space. Russian Army chaplains performed the liturgy including the consecration of bread and wine, whereas in the Imperial navy, for fear of spillage in rough seas, the elements were consecrated before the ships sailed from port and stored in special vessels (the so-called ‘presanctified gifts’) so that communion could be given from the reserved sacrament.

Regimental priests were appointed on a permanent basis; in peacetime, they fell under the jurisdiction of the diocesan authorities where the regiments were stationed. Initially, they subsisted on a special church levy; later, they received a permanent salary.Footnote ¹³ In the eighteenth century, ober-priests or ‘prefects’ (military superintendents) were appointed, as a rule, only to active army and naval forces, before being dismissed at the end of each campaign. A permanent ober-priest for the army and navy was only introduced under Emperor Paul I at the end of the eighteenth century. However, subsequently, the Guard and the Army Corps in the Caucasus were removed from his jurisdiction. Finally, in 1890, the unified office of Supreme Protopresbyter of the Imperial Army and Navy was established, which remained in existence until 1917.Footnote ¹⁴ According to the regulations of 1722, there should have been two ober-priests for the army, although in practice this was observed only if the two army corps acted independently of each other, as in the Russian-Turkish war of 1769–74. Ober-priests were appointed by the Holy Synod, usually at the request of the commander-in-chief who was primarily interested in the order of the army subordinate to him and the supervision of regimental priests away from their homeland. For example, such an ober-priest was appointed in 1746 at the request of the Field Marshal-General, Count Peter Lacy, an Irishman in Russian service, to the corps under his command in the Baltic provinces. At the end of 1747, the ober-priest was assigned to the ‘auxiliary corps’ under the command of Prince Vasily Repnin, who took part in the War of the Austrian Succession (the so-called Rhine march of 1748).Footnote ¹⁵

For Russia, the eighteenth century was the era of classical imperial wars outside its territory, in western and southern Europe, mostly in coalitions with other European powers. In the middle of the century, Russia participated in this way in the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) on the side of Austria and France against Prussia and pro-Prussian Britain. During this war, the Russian ‘Expeditionary Army’ spent nearly five years away from its home country. The first campaign in 1757 revealed significant problems with discipline. As part of measures to strengthen morale, the following year, Fr Ioann Bogaevsky, from the Poltava region in the Ukraine, was appointed as an ober-priest to the Russian ‘Expeditionary Army’ at the request of its new commander-in-chief, William Fermor, of Scottish and Lutheran Baltic German descent, and a Lutheran by faith.Footnote ¹⁶

In the Russian Imperial navy, as a rule, monks with a hieromonk at their head were appointed as ship priests. In contrast, the military clergy in the army mostly came from was the ‘white’, that is, non-celibate, clergy (although this was never a strict rule). The Synod sought to select clergy for appointment to the army who were widowers or childless, but there were also priests with families. In peacetime, such regimental priests lived with their families, but in the first half of the eighteenth century, there were also cases when the families of military priests accompanied the army on campaign.Footnote ¹⁷ However, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the rules had become stricter due to the need to limit the enormous train of the RIA. For this reason, although there were also other considerations, those serving in the military were forbidden from taking their wives with them. Fr Ioann Bogaevsky, who by this time had a wife and several children, was separated from them for six years, from October 1757 until autumn 1763, with only a short period of home leave.

Not only in the Middle Ages, but also in the early modern period, and despite dogmatic restrictions, Orthodox clerics could be armed and fight in wars. For example, monks actively participated in the defence of the Trinity-Sergius monastery against the Poles in 1608–10. In the Great Northern War (1700–21), during which a Russian-led coalition fought against Sweden, there was a case, in 1702, in which a priest gathered under his command a group of volunteers for a campaign in the Swedish rear. In the Synodal period, by contrast, it was forbidden for military priests in the RIA to take up arms. Similarly, during the First World War, the Holy Synod in 1915 issued a categorical prohibition for volunteer priests to take up arms. However, even without weapons, military priests remained under fire, which required considerable personal courage, noted in certificates (‘during the battle [the priest] was with the regiment with a cross and prayed’).Footnote ¹⁸ Indeed, from the late eighteenth century, the practice of awarding combat orders to military priests was introduced. They were not only present in the fighting ranks of the regiment, but also went with those ranks into offensives. This was observed also by Russia’s enemies. Thus, during the battle of Zorndorf (1758), a German account noted:

The practice of military priests accompanying the troops into battle was quite common, even later. For example, during the Russo-Turkish War of 1790, a sixty-year-old priest, a veteran of the Seven Years’ War, marched alongside the army columns to storm the Turkish fortress of Izmail and was awarded a cross with the ribbon of the Order of St George.Footnote ²⁰ In the wars of the twentieth century, specifically the Russo-Japanese War and the First World War, dozens of military priests on the front lines were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.

Religiosity and War in the Eighteenth-Century Russian Army

Under Peter I, the Orthodox Church was restructured, largely in accordance with the German Protestant principle of territorialism known as the Landeskirche, a concept which integrated the church into the structures of the territorial state. With the abolition of the Russian patriarchate in 1721, and its replacement with a collective body of governance, the Synod, which was again modelled on its Protestant counterparts, the church was integrated into the service state, with a strong emphasis on the ‘usefulness’ that Peter favoured, and active pastoral service. While monasteries in Peter’s state were primarily used to support retired soldiers and the disabled, active military service, similar to that in many western European armies, required ‘learned’ (uchitelnye) priests,Footnote ²¹ that is, educated priests who could engage in active pastoral work, particularly preaching. Preaching was a new practice for the Russian church; before Peter I, sermons were very rarely delivered. Now, the state saw sermons as a tool for the enlightenment and disciplining of congregations, and the art of rhetoric began to be cultivated in the church’s educational institutions. Sermon texts were now printed and copied.Footnote ²²

The Ukrainian origin of Fr Ioann Bogaevsky was not coincidental in this context. Starting from the incorporation of left-bank Ukraine in the mid-seventeenth century, the intellectual potential of the church in the Tsardom of Moscow, and later in the Russian empire, was concentrated in Ukrainian lands, where higher educational institutions, Latin culture, and a curriculum borrowed from the Jesuits existed. Ukraine supplied the empire with court preachers and theologians from the circle of learned monks, such as Theophan Prokopovich, who advocated for the ideal of enlightened subjects and citizens of the empire, serving God and the sovereign ‘not as slaves, but as sons’.Footnote ²³ In the mid-eighteenth century, Ukrainian influence took on a particularly important role due to the strengthening of the Razumovsky clan at court, the family of the chief favourite of Empress Elizabeth. The empress’s confessor and the archbishop in the capital, also both Ukrainians, served as patrons for the church appointments of their fellow countrymen, including, in all probability, that of Fr Ioann Bogaevsky. His predecessor as ober-priest of the army during the 1748 Rhine campaign, Hieromonk Paphnutii (Bykovsky), was also from Ukraine.Footnote ²⁴

Reformist tendencies within the eighteenth-century Synodal church clashed with traditional forms of religious culture, a conflict which was, to some extent, universal and also characteristic of other denominations. Among these were, primarily, the understanding of faith as ‘surrendering oneself to God’ in a passive, rather than an active, mode, along with a focus on the collective, rather than individual, nature of religiosity.Footnote ²⁵ For instance, daily prayers in the Russian regular army were initially to be read by the commander; later, this became the responsibility of the regimental priest or an appointed reader. Prayers were recited by companies, batteries or squadrons from specially printed prayer books. However, there were no individual prayer books nor anything analogous to Protestant Gesangbücher (hymn books) in the knapsacks of the Russian rank and file; soldiers knew only the collective prayers they recited out loud.

Indeed, the trend towards the individualization of religion was only just beginning among Orthodox officers of the nobility. This was driven by the delayed spread of literacy in Russia and intertwined with the influences of revivalist movements from western Europe, such as German Pietism, which was popular among Russian Protestant officers and also influenced eighteenth-century Orthodox literature.Footnote ²⁶

The experience of fighting abroad and encountering new realities also played an important role in the formation of a new religious culture in Russia. For example, the well-known eighteenth-century memoirist, the ‘Russian Pepys’, Andrei Bolotov, who served as a lieutenant in the Seven Years’ War, described the evolution of his religious faith under the influence of a protracted stay in Königsberg, east Prussia, when that city was occupied by the RIA. Prior to this war, Bolotov’s main religious reading had been the lives of saints. During the ‘Prussian war’, he experienced first a crisis and subsequently a return to faith: after reading the ‘free-thinking books’ of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Christian Wolff in Königsberg, he ‘fell into complete doubt about the faith’, but then found an antidote in the writings of the anti-Wolffian theologian and philosopher Christian August Crusius, after which, he remembered, ‘all the troubled blood within me came … to the most pleasant calm’.Footnote ²⁷ Another new religious experience for officers arose from their participation in the Masonic lodges which began to be established in the army at this time, primarily under the influence of British immigrants, especially the Russian General-in-Chief, James Keith, who was of Scottish origin; Russian officers also joined Masonic lodges in occupied Prussia.Footnote ²⁸

Catechisms appeared only in the seventeenth century in the Orthodox tradition and, at first, only in the Ukrainian and Belorussian lands; their development and the spread of Orthodox catechization in the whole Russian empire took place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Footnote ²⁹ The Bible was used for liturgical purposes at church services, but not for reading every day, and even less for individual reading. Reflecting in the 1780s, the famous Russian mason Alexander Labzin remarked that people generally considered the Bible:

The main religious literature available in the Russian army, as in Russian society in general, consisted in saints’ lives (often handwritten copies of church publications, as printed books remained expensive for many) and spiritual collections containing similar hagiographical and edifying texts. Some officers carried icons with them and even wore them during battles. However, in the two surviving inventories of officers’ belongings from the period of the Seven Years’ War, no devotional items are listed, in contrast to the profusion of trousers, hats and pipes. In contrast, soldiers of lower ranks, in addition to wearing crosses or carrying icons and relics, often kept what were called ‘weapon charms’, prayers or incantations intended to protect them ‘from a German strike’. This is further evidence of the continued prevalence of ‘folk faith’ in eighteenth-century Russia, including the army. The cult of saints was equally popular among officers and soldiers, although the cultural differences between the privileged classes and the masses, which had gradually grown since Peter the Great, began to have an impact here as well: in this period, saints began to be distinguished as either ‘folk’ (St Nicholas), ‘noble’ (St Demetrius of Rostov, canonized shortly before the Seven Years’ War), or ‘state’ (St Alexander Nevsky) saints.Footnote ³²

Popular religious culture in early modern Russia was characterized by the principle of delegation of sacral powers. It was believed that bogomolcy (prayers to God, oratores) were to be conducted by those considered closest to God (a category which generally included the clergy and, among the laity, women and the elderly), who were also understood as tasked with praying for others, in the first instance for the military (bellatores).Footnote ³³ If military affairs went badly, prayers to God were understood as having failed. Thus, a Russian general, Zakhar Chernychev, who was captured and imprisoned in the casemates of the Küstrin Fortress near Berlin in Prussia, mockingly greeted the Protestant chaplain of the Russian army, Christian Täge, saying: ‘You prayed badly to God, for we lost the battle.’Footnote ³⁴ Coming from the enlightened and rational-minded general, this may sound like scathing irony. However, as we shall see, the lower ranks and more ordinary officers perceived war primarily as an act of Providence, and the piety of priests as intermediaries with the heavenly world had, in their eyes, a direct impact on the outcome of military operations.

Religious Practices and Religious Culture of the Military Clergy

The Ober-priest, the post held by Fr Ioann Bogaevsky, was expected to be present with the commander-in-chief of the army and to undertake spiritual and administrative duties. The administrative tasks included ‘keeping the regimental priests in proper order and obedience’ and reconciling any quarrels.Footnote ³⁵ The general situation of the rank-and-file priests during this period was hardly satisfying, with low educational standards, usually only basic literacy, and often moral issues. As a result, conflicts with the ober-priest were not uncommon, and he was allowed to ‘take action’ in the case of minor misdemeanours – in most cases, drunkenness – by holding the offender in custody or imposing a moderate fine. The ober-priest even had the right to administer corporal punishment: in one case, he ‘punished a regimental priest by beating him with a Cossack whip on his fully dressed buttocks’ for dancing while drunk and then insulting the wife of the commanding officer.Footnote ³⁶ Bogaevsky complained that the ‘roughness of the common folk’ and the ‘vice of excessive drunkenness’ among the priests under his authority harmed the prestige of Russia abroad: ‘Here in the army, the priests are unlearned and unable to behave themselves amongst the local civilized [politichnyi] and curious [curiosnyi] nation.’Footnote ³⁷ He constantly demanded replacements from among his Ukrainian acquaintances. The Holy Synod responded: ‘it is difficult to provide all the regiments with learned, wealthy, and civilized [politichnyi] priests.’Footnote ³⁸ But even when the Kiev diocese finally sent 19 priests from Ukraine to the ‘Expeditionary Army’ in 1761 to replace those who had ‘died or were beyond hope of further service’, of these 19, one died ‘on the way to the army from drunkenness’, two turned out to be ‘intemperate in drunkenness’, and four were ‘uneducated and very poor’; ‘furthermore, some were very crude.’Footnote ³⁹

In serious cases, the ober-priest, under the threat of depriving a disobedient regimental priest of his clerical status, could order his arrest and wait for a decision of his fate by the highest church authorities. In general, the ober-priest was expected to act ‘according to the authority of the rules of the Church Fathers, government decrees, and the instructions given by the Synod.’Footnote ⁴⁰ Required to report all important matters to the Synod, he also had to coordinate all his actions with the army command.

The spiritual duties of the ober-priest, as with regimental priests, primarily involved conducting public and private (treby) church services. In addition to blessing the army before battle, as described in the opening quotation, if a battle was won, then a thanksgiving service was held directly on the battlefield. Such services seem to have included a sermon and the singing of Te Deum laudamus in Slavonic translation. In the slang of the Russian Imperial Army, this was commonly referred to as a ‘service on the bones’, an allusion to its being held on the battlefield immediately after the fighting, amidst the dead who still lay where they had fallen or who had just been buried. The cynical German monarch Frederick II ironically dubbed such services ‘te-deumieren’ (‘to te deum’), yet he did not disregard them, as shown by the famous example of the ‘Leuthen Choral’ after the eponymous battle with the Austrians in 1757.Footnote ⁴¹ In other cases, a victory service in the RIA could be even more solemn: after the capture of the Turkish fortress of Ochakov in 1788, for example, a priest under the commander-in-chief Prince Grigory Potemkin set up a church in one of the former mosques, with bells which had been carried with the army’s train, and held a service modelled on the Palm Sunday liturgy, identifying the Russian occupation of the Muslim city with the entry of the Lord into Jerusalem.Footnote ⁴²

Theoretical discussions of war and peace within the Russian Orthodox Church had begun in the seventeenth century, driven by the need to establish criteria for just and unjust wars during the era of modern state conflicts.Footnote ⁴³ However, there was no specific religious literature for the military or works by military clergy in Russia at this time, and their views on war can only be reconstructed indirectly. Moreover, the European wars of the eighteenth century, in general, no longer fell into the category of religious wars.Footnote ⁴⁴ In eighteenth-century Russia, state propaganda still readily used religious rhetoric when referring to fighting against ‘wicked Hagarenes’ (i.e. Muslims) in the numerous Russo-Turkish wars. However, it completely abandoned such religious undertones with regard to wars with western neighbours, which, before Peter, had been considered just wars of the Orthodox against the heretic Roman Catholics and Protestants.

At the same time, the military reality was still largely understood from a religious perspective. Thus, in his report to the Synod after the unfortunate outcome of the battle of Zorndorf against Frederick II in 1758, Bogaevsky began by sympathetically relaying the soldiers’ interpretation of the events, before developing it further himself:

Military failures were, in this account, still perceived by soldiers as a punishment by heavenly forces for impiety. One contentious issue was the cancellation of church fasts for the army under Peter the Great. Indeed, while building his army (alongside a modernizing state) on new rational foundations of ‘regularity’, Peter had long been concerned that ‘hungry soldiers cannot serve’.Footnote ⁴⁶ In 1715, the emperor, after the payment of considerable sums of money, obtained special letters from the ecumenical patriarchs in Constantinople granting the army permission for ‘meat-eating’ (miasoiastie). The justification cited was the terrible defeat of the Russians by the Swedes at Narva in 1700, allegedly because the soldiers had been weakened by the Nativity fast.Footnote ⁴⁷ Similar measures were also undertaken in the armies of Roman Catholic countries.Footnote ⁴⁸ There are four such fasts in the Orthodox calendar: Great Lent (before Easter), the Apostles’ fast (preceding the feast day of Sts Peter and Paul on 12 July), the Nativity fast (before Christmas), and the Dormition fast (in August). The Apostles’ and Dormition fasts, which fell in the summer when military campaigns were underway, were most affected by these reforms and the Dormition fast in August is the one referred to here. Despite the special letters that Emperor Peter I received from the ecumenical patriarchs in Constantinople giving the army permission for ‘meat eating’ (miasoiastie), many soldiers and officers refused to break the fast, thus showing direct insubordination against their own commanders and emperor, while placing their fear of God’s punishment and the defeat of the army above the spiritual authority of Constantinople.

A representative of the Polish-Saxon court, in his description of the Russian Imperial Army, noted that on the eve of the first campaign of the Russian Imperial Army in 1757,

Even at the end of the eighteenth century, Prince Charles de Ligne, a volunteer with the Russian Imperial Army during the Russo-Turkish War, was complaining about ‘religious fanatics who preferred to die rather than take a meat broth.’Footnote ⁵⁰

At the same time, the priests under Bogaevsky’s supervision, to whom the exemption from fasting did not apply, broke the fast. In the eyes of the army, this damaged the authority of the military clergy far more than their drunkenness or illiteracy. Thus, the rational logic of military effectiveness clashed with the metaphysical view, according to which the outcome of a battle served as a measure of the efficacy of spiritual effort and depended on the collective piety of the army.

Another problematic issue mentioned by Bogaevsky was sexual immorality. Such complaints were also standard across other European armies. In this context, such behaviour was seen as a threat, not so much to discipline as to the moral character of the army, which, again, was understood to affect its combat effectiveness. While priests were blamed for neglecting the fasts, in this latter case, the demoralizing factor came from officers and generals. As early as the beginning of the eighteenth century Bogaevsky’s predecessor as ober-priest complained from Riga about the prevalence of bigamy among the officers, many of whom had one wife at home and another at the place where they were stationed.Footnote ⁵¹ An Austrian military representative in the Russian army during the Seven Years’ War wrote: ‘[Russian generals] are prone to taking concubines. Many senior officers follow their example.’Footnote ⁵² Bogaevsky complained to the Synod, but the response was evasive, as the church prelates feared conflict with powerful generals. In an attempt to address the issue of bigamy, Bogaevsky forbade marriages in the army altogether. He also intended to impose penance on ‘open sinners’, both on those ‘keeping whores of this [i.e. the Prussian] nation’ and on those ‘eating meat without necessity during the fasts contrary to the tradition of the Holy Church.’Footnote ⁵³

On the whole, low standards of sexual morality, hedonism coupled with an indifference to religion, or, in the parlance of the era, ‘Epicureanism’, rather than outright irreligion,Footnote ⁵⁴ were acknowledged as being characteristic of the military milieu throughout Europe. ‘Epicureanism’ was often coupled with ‘insensibility’, that is, fatalism, which undermined the concept of an active pursuit of salvation. In the theatrum mundi of the Baroque, death was a lawful and constantly present character. For rank-and-file soldiers, the prospect of death often seemed like a release from the unbearable burdens of war, a desired rest, a ‘tame death’ (la mort apprivoisée).Footnote ⁵⁵ ‘They do not wish to think about the reward for each according to his deeds, and consider their death a respite,’ wrote an indignant Russian landowner from the mid-eighteenth century regarding the ‘common folk’.Footnote ⁵⁶ A similar sentiment was expressed by the young German-Baltic officer Karl von Kettler in a letter home after the campaign in 1758: ‘My God, when will our miserable lives finally end?’Footnote ⁵⁷

The response to military realities can appear cynical: for officers, war, and especially major battles, shaped career strategies, often providing for rapid advancement, notably through the so-called ‘fallen positions’ (upalye mesta), the positions made vacant through the deaths of comrades. For soldiers, and especially irregular troops, war was seen as a desirable and legitimate route to ‘holy plunder’ (sviataia dobych’), as one of the most successful commanders of the Russian Imperial Army in the eighteenth century, Alexander Suvorov, who well understood the psychology of soldiers, put it.Footnote ⁵⁸

However, at the same time, evidence shows that in the Russian case, as in western European ones, indifference to religion or, even more, irreligion, did not fully define the spiritual world of the military. The constant threat of death could intensify religious sentiments and trigger self-reflection. The fear of dying without confession or communion, or of being left unburied, was one of the driving forces behind the establishment of military clergy in Russia. According to the Synod’s instructions, overseeing the mandatory making of confession and reception of holy communion was the second most important duty of a regimental priest after the provision of regular church services.Footnote ⁵⁹

The proactive attitude to confession and communion in the field army, while not denying the thesis expressed in recent literature about the ‘fearlessness’ about their salvation that characterized mass religious culture of Russians in the early modern period, certainly relativizes it.Footnote ⁶⁰ While under normal circumstances many Russians received communion once a year at Easter at best, and even then, not without coercion from the authorities,Footnote ⁶¹ in the field army, the popularity of confession and communion, particularly before serious military actions, is evidenced not only by Täge for Protestants, but also by Bogaevsky for the Orthodox. Täge recounts that several Protestant officers came to him the night before the battle of Zorndorf with requests to receive communion: ‘Herr Feldprediger [Chaplain, Sir], I and several other officers wish to receive the sacrament from your hands right now. Tomorrow we may no longer exist. We wish to reconcile ourselves with God, leave any valuables we may have to you, and reveal our last wills.’ In response, despite the absence of a tent and an altar, Täge conducted a mass communion on a drum under the open sky.Footnote ⁶²

Following the established practice among military chaplains, Bogaevsky consulted with the Synod regarding difficult cases that emerged during confession, without mentioning names. One of these cases involved a military person – presumably a soldier – who took communion immediately before battle, but did not swallow the Holy Gifts, instead firing them from his musket, for which he later expressed remorse. Why did he do this? It would be reasonable to assume that it was not intended as blasphemy; more probably, this was a manifestation of ‘popular faith’, with its magical beliefs about the Holy Gifts. In this context, the soldier was probably hoping that the Holy Gifts would crush the advancing enemy.Footnote ⁶³ On the one hand, this case demonstrates once again the power of the magical traditions of ‘folk belief.’ Yet at the same time, repenting of his actions, the soldier resorted to confession, perceiving it not as a formality, but as a necessary step on the path to salvation.

Realities of a Multi-Confessional Army

One of the central questions which recent scholarship has explored regarding the religiosity of early modern European armies is that of religious pluralism and the coexistence of different confessions. How does the Russian Imperial Army appear in this context? It was an army of recruits. Its core – the field infantry regiments – was homogeneous both socially (peasants) and ethnically (recruits came only from the central provinces of Russia during this period), something that foreign observers noted with envy. Thus, the Austrian Ludwig Zinzendorf commented: ‘Point de troupes mercenaires dans leur armée. Unité de nation, unité de langue, unité de religion chez eux’ (‘No mercenary troops in their army. Unity of nation, unity of language, unity of religion among them’).Footnote ⁶⁴ Austria’s army was, by contrast, extremely diverse. In general, the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional composition of armies was more the norm than the exception for European armies of this period. Moreover, the fact that the vast majority of Russian soldiers was Orthodox did not mean that they all were. Even the core infantry regiments of the Russian army included Muslims from the eastern provinces of Russia. Multi-ethnicity and multi-confessionality were even more common in the cavalry, especially in irregular units, where Buddhists and pagans (such as the Kalmyks) also served. Regimental priests of the Hussars, who were recruited into the RIA from the so-called ‘Hussar nations’ of the Caucasus, the Balkans, and the south-eastern territories of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, had a special status. For example, the regimental priest of the Macedonian Hussar regiment during the Seven Years’ War, Fr Philopheus Vladevich, who later participated in the siege of Izmail, had moved to Russia with settlers from Serbia, which was then under Ottoman rule, and been assigned, together with them, to the same Hussar regiment.Footnote ⁶⁵ In peacetime, religious requirements in the Hussar regiments mostly adhered to the Greek Orthodox faith (Catholics were allowed to serve in the Hungarian Hussar regiment). However, during wartime, when the army was operating abroad, the Hussars were recruited from all nations and confessions.

Official Russian legislation in the first half of the eighteenth century was repressive towards ‘sectarians’, particularly those who had broken from the official Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century, known as ‘Old Believers’. In contrast, non-Orthodox Christian confessions were increasingly tolerated in the latter part of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries: European mercenaries from non-Orthodox Christian denominations were tolerated in the newly formed regular Russian regiments, although those who converted to Orthodoxy were viewed as full subjects of the empire and given privileges in salary and in their career.Footnote ⁶⁶ Similarly, in the case of non-Christian denominations present among the lower ranks, the state advocated for baptism, even if it was not to be coerced. At the same time, starting with Peter I, loyalty to a specific confession was no longer officially tied to engagement in military duties. The military regulations of 1716 decreed concerning church services, that: ‘Since among the troops there are some of different faiths, they are to follow their own practices, but they should pray at the same appointed times.’Footnote ⁶⁷

By the mid-eighteenth century, officers of non-Orthodox (specifically Protestant) confessions made up about a third of the RIA, with the proportion approaching half amongst higher officers and generals. It was therefore not unusual that the Russian commander-in-chief in the war with a predominantly Lutheran Prussia was the Lutheran Fermor, just as, for instance, in the War of the Polish Succession (1733–5), the Russian forces were commanded by the Roman Catholic Peter Lacy and the Protestant Burkhard Christoph von Münnich. Standing guard over religious tolerance were the military legislation and ecclesiastical courts. For instance, in 1758, an Orthodox priest faced punishment from church authorities for inappropriate behaviour in a Protestant church, when he had approached the altar and taken up the chalice in an improper manner.Footnote ⁶⁸ In the instructions to the regimental priests accompanying the army abroad, it was emphasized that ‘no disputes over faith should be entered into with people of other confessions, nor should any other priests be allowed to do so.’Footnote ⁶⁹

There were no permanent chaplains of non-Orthodox confessions in the RIA in the first half of the eighteenth century; however, they could be invited for specific campaigns at the initiative of non-Orthodox commanders-in-chief. For instance, for Protestants, Field Marshal von Münnich appointed a Magister from Halle as a ‘Kabinett- und Feldprediger’ (‘Private chaplain and preacher in the field’), who served with the army during the Crimean campaigns of the Austro-Russian-Turkish war of 1735–9.Footnote ⁷⁰ William Fermor, who was on Münnich’s staff, did the same during the Seven Years’ War, appointing the Protestant chaplain Christian Täge. However, after Fermor was replaced as commander-in-chief by the Russian General-in-Chief, who was Orthodox, Täge did not return to the army. Without their own chaplain, Protestant officers in the RIA attended services in the churches of the conquered Prussian cities.Footnote ⁷¹ The Swedish chaplain during the Russo-Swedish War of 1741–3 wrote in his diary that, lacking a Protestant clergyman, the Protestant Russian officers stood near the Swedish camp and listened to their religious service.Footnote ⁷² By the second half of the eighteenth century, Protestant chaplains had become a permanent presence, both in the field army (for example, during the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74), and in garrisons from Smolensk and Ukraine to Siberia.Footnote ⁷³ As early as the eighteenth century, in the garrisons located in the Asian part of the empire, Muslim chaplains were also to be found. Finally, from the mid-nineteenth century, with the recruitment of Jews into the RIA, military rabbis appeared. At the grassroots level, interconfessional relations in the RIA cannot be called trouble-free. Among the soldiers and some of the Orthodox clergy, issues of piety were often linked to the ‘German dominance’ after Peter I, and it was on the wave of this anti-German sentiment that Empress Elizabeth Petrovna came to power. Court preachers in the early years of her reign denounced those foreigners in power who ‘devoured meat during holy fasts’ and ‘fell into Epicurean views’.Footnote ⁷⁴ During the Russo-Swedish War of 1741–3, the guards staged two uprisings, seeking to kill the foreign officers for treason. In the Seven Years’ War, rumours of treason resurfaced: upon the change of commander-in-chief to Fermor, the secretary of the campaign’s Secret Office sent reports to St Petersburg, quoting soldiers’ talk: ‘What good can be expected from the wicked Germans? After all, birds of a feather flock together.’Footnote ⁷⁵

At the same time, in extreme situations, and fearing death ‘without Christian guidance’, Russian soldiers in captivity would seek communion from Protestant pastors. Orthodox children from regiments stationed in the Baltic provinces of the empire were in this period baptized by local Protestant pastors without hesitation.Footnote ⁷⁶ Conversely, in the empire’s remote garrisons, Orthodox priests would conduct funeral services for deceased non-Orthodox officers and bury them near Orthodox churches.Footnote ⁷⁷ Life side-by-side proved stronger than dogmatic differences.

There were also no conflicts between the two chaplains, the Orthodox Bogaevsky and the Protestant Täge. Bogaevsky’s church tent stood at the centre of the camp alongside the tent of Täge’s Protestant church. Both preached regularly, with Bogaevsky even preaching in German, which he had apparently learned while still in Ukraine. Similarly, when Bogaevsky was not present, Täge conducted a service for the Orthodox Cossacks and Kalmyks, most of whom were Buddhist. Täge described this in a conversation with a sergeant:

• — The Cossacks and Kalmyks are crossing the Vistula today as advance troops. The Cossack Hetman wants you to bless the troops before the crossing.

• — Me? A Lutheran preacher? Soldiers of the Greek religion?

• — The Hetman says that we are all Christians and that your blessing would be as good as the blessing of the proto-pope who is otherwise responsible for this duty but who has not yet arrived from Königsberg.

In response to Täge’s objections that he didn’t understand a word of Russian, the sergeant advised him to frequently mention the names of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus. Everyone was satisfied. The Cossacks piously crossed themselves at the mention of the nomina sacra, and Täge received forty roubles for his sermon (gifts, usually monetary, for sermons were quite common among military priests in the Russian Imperial Army).Footnote ⁷⁸

Not only did they cover for each other in leading prayers and preaching, but Bogaevsky even invited the Lutheran Täge to marry his daughter. Täge politely declined; however, in his memoirs, he was complimentary, not only about the Protestant officers in Russia, but also about his Orthodox counterpart and about the Russian army as a whole.