Gregory Freeze, an American historian and expert on Russian history and the history of the Russian Church, tells in an interview about his academic biography and the roots of his interest in the history of the Russian religious history. He recalls Soviet-American scientific relations in the 1970s and 1980s and the communication difficulties of that period. Freeze also speaks about the current state of Russian studies and the history of religion in the United States. Turning to the results of his research, Freeze reveals the complex dynamics of the relationship between secular and ecclesiastical authorities, and compares the Russian society and the people's religiosity in the imperial period with current developments. Freeze puts the current religious situation in Russia in the context of global trends in the religious sphere and notes the gap between the personal faith and belonging to religious institutions. In conclusion, he stresses the need to study religion as an integral part of world civilization.

Key words: History of the Russian Empire, history of the Russian Orthodox Church, social history, clergy, Russian religiosity, popular Orthodoxy, Soviet-US scientifc relations, the Russian studies in the USA.

Friz G. "To understand the church means to understand the people..." (interview) / / State, religion, Church in Russia and abroad. 2016. N 4. pp. 242-250.

Freeze, Gregory (2016) "To understand the Church means to understand people..." (Interview), Gosudarstvo, religiia, tserkov' v Rossii i za rubezhom 34(4): 242-250.

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Why did you become involved in the history of the Russian Orthodox Church?

This was in the 1970s, during the Cold War. In graduate school at Columbia University in New York, I had to choose a dissertation topic. Like many Russian scholars at that time, I was interested in the social history of Russia. However, as a rule, graduate students of Russian studies chose the direction of their work with some regard for Soviet historiography. If Soviet historians wrote about the working class, how it was oppressed and how the workers respected Lenin, then the task of our specialists usually consisted in proving the opposite. I wasn't interested in it, I wanted to work on something on my own.

At that time, none of the Soviet and Western historians - neither ecclesiastical nor secular - paid enough attention to the church and the clergy. The opportunity to conduct original research in this area really attracted me. No one really worked on the subject of the clergy, and there was no research on the Russian Orthodox clergy. And so I had a complete monopoly.

I am a narodnik by conviction. And to understand the people, you need to know their culture in a broad sense, their faith, how it developed, what it influenced, to know their church and the relationship of the people with their church.

Then the history of the Russian Church, as a rule, was considered exclusively in the context of political history. I was interested in the history of the church from the point of view of the history of the people and those layers of the clergy who were particularly close to them. That is why I began to deal with the clergy and directly with the parish clergy, since it was the parish priests who shared the life of the parishioners and were in close proximity to the people.

My active research of the Russian clergy continued from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s. The first book, Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the 18th Century, was published in 1977, and the second, Parish Clergy in Russia in the 19th Century, was published in 1983.1 Then I gradually began to move into svo-

1. Freeze, G.L. (1977) The Russian Levites. Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century. Harvard University Press; Freeze, G.L. (1983) The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform. Princeton.

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they are passed from the clergy to the faithful themselves. I was interested in what the church was to the people, what it meant to the common believer, what "popular Orthodoxy" was like, and how it manifested itself in the everyday life of Russian people. I've been working in this field ever since.

Tell us about your current research.

I continue my research on Russian church history, with a focus on lay believers from the mid-18th century. Now I am also working on problems of the early Soviet period. My archival research is limited to the beginning of the Second World War, and the range of sources is limited to the time frame of the late 1920s. The 1930s are a completely different world. In the 1980s and 1990s, I wrote a number of articles for scientific journals and collections, mostly on pre-revolutionary Russia. Thus, two articles on the Russian Orthodox Church and the divorce issue, an article on penance, several articles on church-state relations, and works on the "parish question" in late imperial Russia were published.2 By the end of the 1990s, I became actively involved in the Soviet period, including because

2. Freeze, G.L. (1990) "Bringing Order to the Russian Family: Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia, 1760-1860", Journal of Modern History 62: 709-748; Freeze, G.L. (1999) "L'ortodossia russe e la crisi delle famiglie. Il divorzio in Russia tra la rivoluzione e la guerre (1917-1921)", in Adalberto Mainardi (ed.) L'Autunno della Santa Russia, 1917-1945. Atti del VI Convegno ecumenico internazionale di spiritualita in Russia, pp. 79-117. Magnano: Qiqajon; Freeze, G. L. (2000) "Krylov v. Krylova: 'Sexual Incapacity' and Divorce in Tsarist Russia", in William Husband (ed.) The Human Tradition in Modern Russia, pp. 5-17 Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, Inc.; Friz G. L. Mirskie narrativy o svyatennom sacrament: Brak i razvok v pozdneimperskoy Rossii [Worldly Narratives about the Sacred Sacrament: Marriage and Divorce in Late Imperial Russia]. Collection of articles / edited by M. Dolbilov, B. Kolonitsky, P. Rogozny. SPb., 2009. pp. 122-175; Freeze, G. L. (1993) "Public Penance in Imperial Russia: A Prosopography of Sinners", in Stephen K. Batalden (ed.) Seeking God: The Recovery of Religious Identity in Orthodox Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia, pp. 53-82. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press; Freeze G. L. The Church and the Tsar: A Confrontation over Divorce in Late Imperial Russia // Wanderers of Russian History: problems, events, people: A collection of articles in honor of the seventieth anniversary of Boris Vasilyevich Ananyich / ed. by V. M. Paneyakh. SPb., 2004. pp. 195-203; Freeze, G. L. (2001) " All power to the parish? The problems and politics of church reform in late imperial Russia", in Madhavan K. Palat (ed.) Social Identities in Revolutionary Russia, pp. 174-208. Palgrave; Friz G. L. "All power to parishes": the revival of Orthodoxy in the 1920s. abroad. 2012. N 3/4(30). pp. 86-105.

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access to the archives has become relatively free, but also in order to better understand the dynamics of pre-revolutionary Russia. In 1999, the first article was published (about the Stalinist offensive on parishioners since 1929).3. The other works are parts of a monograph, Bolsheviks and Believers, for the Yale University Press, which I would like to finish next year. Then I plan to focus on my main work- " The Russian Orthodox Church and Society. 1750-1917".

You were one of the first Western researchers to gain access to Soviet archives. How did you do it?

At that time, there was a cultural exchange between the USSR and the United States. America sent poets and historians to the Soviet Union, and the Union - more practically - sent chemists and other natural scientists to the United States. However, it was not easy to get into the Soviet Union. A quarter of those specialists sent by the American side, the Union did not accept, and vice versa. So clearly, those who dealt with the national issue were banned from entering.

Staying in the Soviet Union was fraught with a number of difficulties, the main one being the visa problem. Having obtained a visa to Moscow, you could, for example, stay for a short period in Leningrad (with the permission of the Foreign Department of the university), but it was impossible to work in the province. You come to Moscow, but this does not mean that you automatically get permission to work in the archive. At first it was quite difficult, but eventually I got access to the archive in Moscow, and then to the archive in Leningrad. Oddly enough, I got permission to visit Kiev very easily - it was easier to get to the capital of the union republic at that time. And, on the contrary, it was almost impossible to visit, for example, Vladimir or Tver. We had to negotiate somehow, and our Russian colleagues helped us.

One of the leading employees of the Leningrad Branch of the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences helped me a lot. He asked me to translate his book, or rather, to find a grant for translation

3. Freeze, G. (1998) "Stalinist Assault on the Parish, 1929-1941", in M. Hildermeier (ed.) Stalinismus vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg; Neue Wege der Forschung, pp. 209-232. Munich.

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his books are translated into English. But I immediately realized that it was easier for me to translate this book myself than to mess around, submit applications that are still unknown how they will end. I made this transfer without expecting anything, but he thanked me: he helped me get to Vladimir. And this - from the point of view of historical sources-is a completely different world. I always thought that the Synodal archive (now RGIA) is a giant "vacuum cleaner", and when I got to the regional archives, I realized: a bad" vacuum cleaner", because a lot of interesting and important things did not reach the metropolitan archives.

I worked in the archives without lunch, from nine in the morning to nine in the evening. Every case is a gift. You open the manuscript and it can be anything! Sure, you read the headline, but you never know what's really in it. Now, if I see a case on 60 pages, I already know what will happen there. But then, at the beginning of my work, every case was a real discovery. However, there were restrictions on access to documents. One day a demographer helped me-he gave me a file from 1784 with a complete list of participants and their data. He used this document in demographic research and shared it with me. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to get this case.

How popular is Russian studies today?

After 1991, when they stopped being afraid of the Soviet Union, interest in Russia fell. Nevertheless, until 2008, quite a lot of students attended lectures. With the onset of the economic depression, our students do not study humanities in general and history in particular. Most of them study "practical" specialties - natural sciences, economics or business-in order to be able to easily find a job. A colleague of mine from New York University says that she has 5-6 students in her course. I have 25 students on the course now, but before that there would have been 40.

At the same time, interest in Russia has been growing in recent years. Religion has also become much more interesting for students than before. We are seeing an increase in interest in the spiritual sphere.

Recently, Harvard University invited me to teach a course on the Russian Orthodox Church. This invitation is caused by the growing interest in religion, and among Slavists - in the Russian Church. And there are few specialists in this field.

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Is there a school of Russian Church researchers in the United States today?

In the mid-1980s, there was a "cultural turn" in world historiography, which had a huge impact on modern historical science. The idea has been established that culture is not a superstructure, but a powerful driving factor in the development of society, that culture is not passive, but active. New forms of studying the "social" have emerged, and religion as a part of culture has become the subject of special attention of researchers.

The interest in the history of the Russian Church in the 1970s and 1980s coincided not only with the appeal of a large group of graduate students to this topic, but also with this "cultural turn". In the mid-1980s, I was a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and then a whole group of researchers began to study religion. However, today in the West, new people in this area are rare. The old names still ring out. Vera Shevtsova, Nadezhda Kitsenko and others continue to work, write interesting works, but a new generation of scientists, unfortunately, is not formed, new names do not appear. However, this applies not only to the history of the Russian Church: after the crisis of 2008, almost all universities are in a difficult financial situation, they are reducing staff, especially in the humanities (demand has fallen!), and therefore the new generation of historians simply cannot get a job and is forced to look for work not in science, but in other fields.

What role does the personal religion of a researcher who studies the history of the church play?

If a person is, so to speak, too confessionally conscious in the bad sense of the word, that is, "fanatic", this can have negative consequences. However, non-believers who are far from the church may miss the very essence of religious problems if they study only their institutional or social dimension. It is easier for believers to understand religious traditions and the complexity of believers ' behavior. For example, what are the motives of a parish that demands the removal of a priest? A researcher who is far from the church may refer to the fact that the priest is a drunkard. However, he may not notice,

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that the main reason is that the priest is just a bad shepherd. In other words, the importance of the spiritual factor cannot be ignored or downplayed.

Can we say that the official church and the popular religion have always followed the same path? What was their relationship like?

Here we need to talk about two periods-before 1850 and after. Until the mid-19th century, official Orthodoxy was institutionalized in Russia. In fact, this was the implementation of Peter's reform of piety, the implementation of which Peter himself failed to complete. From the middle of the 18th century, during the Enlightenment, there was a process of church building as an administrative system. The government actively promoted the development of sciences and arts, but the enlightenment in Russia was religious. Many priests subscribed to publications by writers of the Russian Enlightenment. Until the mid - eighteenth century, no sermons were preached in churches- there was simply no such practice, and by the mid-nineteenth century, every priest preached a sermon once a week; however, most often it was reading out ready-made, printed sermons. They also began to read and study the catechism. At the same time, until the middle of the XIX century, there were attempts to "purge" popular Orthodoxy from the fascination with miracles, the hierarchs opposed new canonization, the spread of religious processions, and so on.

I remember one "case" of 1778. The Bishop of Vladimir has arrested an icon revered as miraculous in one of the parishes of the diocese. Of course, such icons were not destroyed, but only confiscated. And so, he took it away and put it in the Vladimir Cathedral. The faithful showed great perseverance: every ten years this parish complained and asked to return the icon, but this happened only in 1918.

The second period begins in the middle of the 19th century, when this kind of persecution ceased and the goal was to mobilize the spiritual power of the Orthodox people. The authorities were afraid of what was already happening in the West, that is, de-Christianization and de-churching of believers. At the same time, they opposed not so much atheism and disbelief as the Old Believers and sectarians. The so-called cathedrals of the XIX century, congresses of bishops of nearby dioceses in Kiev, Kazan and Irkutsk, focused mainly on the internal mission, gathered. To folk traditions-

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churches became more loyal, allowed religious processions, and recognized many locally venerated saints. The parish received more authority and independence through parish wardens. However, a complete turn to popular Orthodoxy did not take place. At the same time, the diocesan authorities strengthened control and conducted audits.

Did the authorities share the faith of their people?

The legitimacy of the Russian emperor rested on five grounds. The first is piety; a real Russian tsar, like Alexey Mikhailovich, spent many hours in church every day. The second is patrimoniality, patrimonial mentality. Relations between the tsar and his subjects were built by analogy with the power of the patrimonial ruler over "slaves" (in pre-Petrine Russia, the word "slave" was used, not "subject"). However, gradually the original concept of the" patrimonial patrimony " acquired a patriarchal connotation-in the sense of the father's attitude to his young children. At the beginning of the 18th century, three more principles appeared: personal charisma, a vivid example of which is Peter the Great; the idea of the" common good", which determines the vocation of the state; and, finally, foreign policy military power.

Historically, in Muscovite Russia, piety was the most important of these principles, but since the time of Peter the Great, the importance of this factor for the legitimacy of power has been decreasing. The situation begins to change only under Nicholas II, who had a great interest in pre-Petrine Russia and tried to increase the importance of piety. Under his rule, churches of pre-Petrine architecture were built, and a number of canonization events took place. He personally insisted on the canonization of Seraphim of Sarov, and the entire royal family took part in the celebrations on the occasion of his glorification as a saint.

How do you see the current religious situation in Russia?

Today, the problems in Russia are the same as in the rest of the world: people profess faith, but do not belong to religious institutions. The gap between believers and religious institutions is growing every year. We see this in Russia as well. Most of the people here are as" uncircumcised " as the rest of us.

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and believers in the West. The phenomenon of anti-clerical moods is becoming more noticeable, but in some cases it is inevitable. This poses new challenges for church representatives. They need to understand that the main thing is not to build churches, but to establish a dialogue, communication with believers, that there is a great potential in folk Orthodoxy. In conflict situations, they need to act in a Christian way, with patience. It is also very important to pay attention to what is good in the church and what the church can give to the world. Today, we need to carefully study social issues and develop social programs. As it was, by the way, before the revolution, when the church took an active part in the fight against serfdom, drunkenness, and prostitution. The Church must enter the world, pay great attention to the problems of our time, and embody the teaching of Christ in this world.

What lessons can be drawn from the Russian history of the imperial period?

I believe that tolerance and respect for other faiths are important. Nothing good has come of the government's policy of marginalizing them. Equally important is the mutual respect of believers, since all the leading faiths have common values. There may be disputes and discussions, but there must also be a constructive dialogue.

For many students, the humanities and especially religious topics are on the periphery of their interests. How would you formulate the significance of this kind of knowledge for them?

I am sure that a Russian person, in order to understand himself, needs to know the history of the Russian Orthodox Church, one of the most important institutions that has played and continues to play a key role in the history of Russia, if not always in institutional terms, then certainly in cultural terms. In addition, by studying religion, you get an opportunity to understand the world's civilization. You must be interested in religion, even if you are not religious yourself, in order to understand the world, understand the people who live in it, and be citizens of the world.

Interviewed by Maria Vinogradova

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