Solovki by Robson Roy R

Author:Robson, Roy R.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2004-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

eleven REFORM

In 1762, the government forever changed the face of Russian monastic life when Emperor Peter III took the long contemplated but never implemented step of secularizing, in other words confiscating, all monastic land. Suddenly, the great monasteries of Russia, including Solovki, had no source of income. They could no longer rely on the local peasantry, which now had to pay its rents directly to the state or to new landlords. This gave the emperor a lot more land to distribute to faithful nobles and simultaneously undercut the possibility of monasteries becoming too independent or rich. With the stroke of a pen, the cloisters had been made almost completely dependent on the state for financial aid.

Solovki’s new archimandrite, Dosifei, was aghast at the implications for Solovki: he hazarded a crossing to the mainland, a very rare occurrence, in December 1763 to plead the monastery’s case before the Holy Synod for three entire months. In 1764, the College of Economy, which had taken over monastic lands, confirmed Solovki’s status as a “first-class'’ monastery, meaning that it would receive the largest financial support and the highest prestige. The next year, Solovki received another honor, the title of stavropigialnyi, which meant its archimandrite was placed on an equal rank with a bishop. Finally, the monastery would again be able to deal directly with the Holy Synod, bypassing the demeaning paperwork filed through the bishop of Kholmogory.

At the same time, Solovki was unburdened of the day-to-day administration of its jail. In 1766, control of the prisons moved from the archimandrite’s office to that of the army command at Solovki. This was a relief for Archimandrite Dosifei — abbot and warden were not easily compatible positions—but it also created problems. In his own monastery, an archimandrite’s power was rarely questioned; by tradition and rule, he had almost complete daily control over spiritual, financial, and administrative matters. His staff (cellarer, treasurer, and others) and the Black Council advised the archimandrite, but their power was limited. After 1766, however, the prison became nearly independent of the monastery though located inside its walls. The only official contact between the captain of the guards and the archimandrite was a ritualized message saying, almost invariably, something like “forty prisoners are in a prosperous condition.” There was much friction between the archimandrite and the captain, with each wary of the other taking too much power.1

Left without its greatest sources of income, Solovki was forced to fall back on the cloister’s traditional strengths to revive economic life. Since the monastery had lost all of its land and saltworks, it would have to enlarge its own substantial enterprises (brickworks, tar works, icon studio, bookbinding, rope-making, and others), which were on the islands and therefore not subject to secularization. To do so, it needed to expand the number of monks at the monastery and—more important—the legion of trudniki who came there to atone for sins or thank the saints for protection. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, in fact, Solovki seemed to have recovered from the worst.

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