Divine Diplomacy: The Armenian Church and the Russian ... · supported an Armenian family’s establishment of the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages in Moscow but prohibited

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Carolina Seminar, “Russia and Its Empires, East and West,” September 17, 2015

Divine Diplomacy: The Armenian Church and the Russian State, 1825-55

Stephen Riegg PhD Candidate

History Department UNC-Chapel Hill

Monument to “Russian-Armenian friendship” in Yerevan. Photo property of the author.


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Introduction

A large crowd in Yerevan braved the winter chill of 2 December 2013 to watch the

unveiling of the city’s latest sculptural addition. Dignitaries at the ceremony included Serzh

Sargsyan, the president of the Republic of Armenia, and Maksim Sokolov, the Russian Minister

of Transportation.1 Towering behind the men stood the new, fifteen-foot-tall marble monument.

It depicts two women, their veiled heads slightly bowed toward each other, bound in an intimate

embrace. A large cross, the focal point of the sculpture, not only links the women but also finds

shelter in their unity. While new to the Armenian capital, the monument is a larger replica of an

older statue in central Moscow, whose inscription declares: “Blessed over centuries is the

friendship of the Russian and Armenian peoples.”

The political partnership and the ecumenical solidarity evoked by these monuments

experienced their defining epoch during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I (1825-55). This paper

examines the encounter between the tsarist state and the Armenian Church in that period, placing

this dynamic within a broader discussion of Russian imperialism. I argue that St. Petersburg

capitalized upon the political influence of the Armenian Church to advance its foreign policy in

the Ottoman and Persian capitals. This circumstance represented the tsarist government’s wider

effort in the nineteenth century to harness the stateless and dispersed Armenian diaspora to build

its empire in the Caucasus and beyond. Russia relied on the stature of the two most influential

institutions of that diaspora, the merchantry and the church, to project diplomatic sway from

Constantinople to Copenhagen; benefitted economically from the transimperial trade networks of

Armenian merchants based in Tiflis, Astrakhan, and Moscow; and drew political advantage from

the Armenian Church’s authority in that nation.

1 The asymmetrical positions of the attending Armenian and Russian dignitaries, of course, speak volumes about modern Russo-Armenian ties.


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At the same time as the government employed Armenian ecclesiastical leaders toward its

goals, the Armenian Church derived social, political, and often economic benefits from its

patronage by the state. The church relied on state institutions to censor critical publications, to

hinder the work of Catholic missionaries, and to expand its physical presence in Russia’s major

cities. Thus a two-way dynamic characterized the encounter between the tsarist state and the

Armenian Church, with each side deriving particular gains.

Yet under the reactionary rule of Nicholas I, who ascended the throne during the

Decembrist challenge to the institution of the Russian monarchy, religious toleration and ethno-

national cooptation represented official policies only in so far as they advanced the state’s

control and domination over non-Russians. In the evolving dialogue between Russian and non-

Russian tsarist subjects, the emperor promoted Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality as a rejoinder

to the republican cries of liberté, égalité, fraternité. The government condoned expressions of sui

generis culture and national identity among its minorities as long as such actions did not imperil

the superiority of the ruling Orthodox Great Russian element. But in the Armenian case, as this

paper shows, the state pursued more important goals than the tranquility of an imperial periphery.

Context

The Russo-Armenian encounter antedates by centuries the tsarist incorporation of Eastern

Armenia in 1828. Divided between the Ottoman (Western) and Persian (Eastern) empires,

Armenia lost its political independence in 1375. Since the mid-seventeenth century, Russo-

Armenian relations developed along two primary foci: economic and ecumenical ties. Having

become frequent visitors in Russian bazaars and trade posts, Armenians’ real and mythologized

economic prowess, as well as the value of the rare goods they carried from the Orient, earned


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them special status by the second half of the seventeenth century. In April 1667, Tsar Aleksei

Mikhailovich (1645-76), eager to take advantage of Persian Armenians’ silk imports, included

Armenians among ethnic groups permitted to trade at advantageous rates, often duty-free, in

major Russian commercial centers, such as Astrakhan and Moscow.2

Under Peter the Great, Russia absorbed Armenians from abroad and sympathized with

the first manifestations of an Armenian liberation movement. In 1701, the Russian emperor

received Israel Ori, an envoy dispatched by Persian Armenians in hopes of securing a tsarist

alliance against the shah. Peter granted the Armenian emissary the symbolic rank of colonel in

the Russian army and promised to “extend his hand of assistance” toward the Armenians of

Persia.3 Although Ori failed to deliver Eastern Armenians from the grasp of the shah, he inspired

other young Armenians to look to the Russian empire for liberation. One of Ori’s most ambitious

successors, Joseph Emin, an Indian Armenian who had served in the British army, arrived in the

South Caucasus in 1761 to rally Armenians and Georgians into a joint uprising against Persia.

In March 1711, Russia codified its recruitment of Armenians from abroad when the

Governing Senate recommended that the state “increase Persian trade and court [prilaskat’]

Armenians as much as possible and ease their lot, in order to encourage them to arrive [in

Russia] in large numbers.”4 In November 1724, Peter issued sweeping economic privileges for

Armenians settled throughout his realm, granting them exemptions from military service and

other exclusive rights.5 After Peter’s death in 1725, his successors continued to grant economic

privileges to Armenians in Russia. In 1746, Armenian merchants in Astrakhan were allowed to

2 Sobranie aktov, otnosiashchikhsia k obozreniiu istorii Armianskogo naroda, vol. 1 (Moscow: Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages Press, 1833), 3-4. 3 Sobranie aktov, vol. 2, 289. 4 Sobranie aktov, vol. 1, 7 and 290. 5 V. B. Barkhudarian, “Armianskie kolonisty v Rossii i ikh rol’ v armiano-russkikh otnosheniiakh,” in M. G. Nersisian, ed., Iz istorii vekovoi druzhby (Yerevan: Armenian Academy of Sciences, 1983), 124-125.


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trade tax-free and to establish their own court; in 1769, Astrakhan Armenians received the

exclusive right to build seagoing vessels for trade in the Caspian Sea.6 Catherine the Great

continued these policies, increasing the number of her Armenian subjects in 1779 by resettling

Ottoman Armenians from Crimea to Nor Nakhichevan, a new settlement on the Don River.7

Religious solidarity drove Russo-Armenian relations in the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries. From the early adoption of Christianity by the two nations, in 301 by Armenians and

988 by Russians, the links between the Armenian Apostolic and the Russian Orthodox churches

remained strong. Both of these autocephalous national churches are members of Orthodox

Christianity, with Russia part of the Eastern Orthodox branch and Armenia member of the

Oriental Orthodox wing. Although close dogmatic and liturgical cousins, the two churches did

not enter into full communion and developed independently after members of Oriental

Orthodoxy rejected the dogmatic definitions of the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Thus shared

religion played both a unifying and a divisive role between Russians and Armenians.

Religion also produced political implications for Armenians vis-à-vis Russo-Ottoman

relations as soon as the tsarist empire portrayed itself as the patron of Ottoman Christians. When

Russia forced Turkey to sign the Treaty of Kutchuk Kainardzhi in 1774, few contemporaries

could have imagined the later reverberations of the accord’s Article 7, which stipulated that the

“Sublime Porte pledges to give the Christian faith and its churches firm protection and it grants

the Ministers of the Russian Imperial Court [the right] to protect all interests” of Christians.8

6 Sobranie aktov, vol. 1, 27, and Barkhudarian, “Armianskie kolonisty v Rossii,” 126. 7 George Bournoutian, “Eastern Armenia from the Seventeenth Century to the Russian Annexation” in Richard Hovannisian, ed., Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times, volume 2. (New York: St. Martin’s, 2004), 91. 8 Basil Dmytryshyn, ed. Imperial Russia: A Source Book, 1700-1917 (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Publishers, 1990), 109.


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With Armenians comprising one of the largest Ottoman Christian subject groups, their plight

under Ottoman suzerainty became a key component of the nineteenth century’s Eastern Question.

At the dawn of the nineteenth century Russia began a three-decade campaign against

Persian territories in the South Caucasus. During two Russo-Persian wars, in 1804-13 and 1826-

28, the shah’s Armenian subjects collaborated with Russian agents, eager to have Eastern

Armenia absorbed into the realm of the Christian monarch. In a systematic pattern of cooperation,

Armenians served as tsarist spies, soldiers, and settlers, facilitating the Russian annexation of

Persian domains, including Erivan and Echmiadzin, the headquarters of the Armenian Church.

More than a monastic institution, Echmiadzin represented the epicenter of political

initiatives for the stateless Armenians. Enjoying the recognition of the vast Armenian diaspora,

albeit challenged by rivals in Jerusalem and Constantinople, the Echmiadzin Catholicos or

patriarch exercised authority over Armenian communities from Western Europe to southern Asia.

The political implications of this circumstance rendered control over Echmiadzin a key objective

of the tsar, the shah, and the sultan. When Russia seized the complex from Persia in 1828, it

gained a new tool for projecting its foreign policy into previously inaccessible regions. While

tsarist diplomats struggled for influence in Constantinople and Tehran, with the absorption of

Echmiadzin Russia sought to advance its interests in those countries through the leverage of local

Armenian bishops, who, in contrast to their oft-mistreated lay compatriots, enjoyed notable

social and political clout in the Ottoman empire and Persia.

Driven by a shared ecumenical identity, as co-members of Orthodox Christianity,

Armenians embraced Russian patronage in the early nineteenth century to escape social and

political marginalization in the Persian and Ottoman empires. Tsarist officials resettled Armenian

peasants from northern Persia and eastern Anatolia into newly conquered territories in the South


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Caucasus, provided financial incentives to Armenian vendors from Constantinople to relocate to

Crimea, and institutionalized exclusive tax breaks for the Armenian communities of Astrakhan

and other southern Russian cities. After it wrested Echmiadzin from Persia, as Paul Werth has

demonstrated, the tsarist state maneuvered to ensure the election of an Armenian ecclesiastical

leader most conducive to Russia’s geopolitical objective of maintaining influence over

Armenians abroad.9 In the 1850s and 1860s, the government joined forces with Echmiadzin to

stave off the encroachment of Catholic and Protestant missionaries in the South Caucasus.10

Despite ecumenical solidarity and an attendant political symbiosis, tensions often

characterized Russo-Armenian ties throughout the nineteenth century. Tsarist agents lauded

Armenian traders’ contributions to the economic development of the imperial periphery but

distrusted their affiliations with British and French merchants in Asia Minor. The government

supported an Armenian family’s establishment of the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages in

Moscow but prohibited the formation of smaller Armenian academies and benevolent

organizations elsewhere. Tsarist diplomats amplified the clout of the Armenian Church in

European capitals and Russian generals relied on Armenian priests to gather intelligence in

Anatolia during wartime, but the government shuttered Armenian parish schools and imprisoned

clergy when it detected links between the church and a rising nationalist movement in the last

quarter of the nineteenth century.

Thus situational circumstances informed the political encounter between the Russian state

and its Armenian subjects, illustrating the Russian manifestations of the “tensions of empire”

9 Paul Werth, “Imperial Russia and the Armenian Catholicos at Home and Abroad," in Reconstruction and Interaction of Slavic Eurasia and Its Neighboring Worlds, ed. Osamu Ieda and Tomohiko Uyama (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, 2006). 10 Russian State Historical Archive, St. Petersburg (RGIA), f. 1268, op. 10, d. 103, ll. 2-3.


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identified by Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper.11 The strain between what empires sought

and what they did, this framework helps us understand the ostensibly contradictory statutes and

policies that the tsarist empire employed toward Armenians in the nineteenth century. Far from a

cumbersome yet omnipotent “prison house of nations,” imperial Russia adapted its strategies of

rule in response to evolving political realities. As Stoler has emphasized, “blurred genres of rule

are not empires in distress but imperial polities in active realignment and reformation.”12 When

the government combined restrictive control with exclusive privileges for the Armenian Church,

it was responding to the more pressing needs of its foreign policy in the neighboring Eastern

empires of Turkey and Persia.

The Emperor and the Catholicos

Under Tsar Nicholas I, especially in the 1830s, the encounter between the tsarist state and

the Armenian Church underwent major transformations. In 1836, eight years after the annexation

of Echmiadzin, the state codified the rights and obligations of the Armenian Church and its

followers in Russia. While the Polozhenie (Statute) of 1836 simultaneously granted powers and

placed restrictions on the Catholicos, it also carried implications beyond the Armenian

ecclesiastical sphere. Not only did the autocracy rely on Echmiadzin to facilitate its foreign

policy in Turkey and beyond, but also the Orthodox and Armenian churches cooperated against

threats to the integrity of the Armenian confession, as long as such collaboration did not

encroach upon the paramount authority of the Russian Orthodox Church.

11 Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler, “Tensions of Empire: Colonial Control and Visions of Rule,” in American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (November 1989): 609-621. 12 Ann Laura Stoler, “On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty,” in Public Culture 18, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 138.


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Nerses of Ashtarak, an ambitious and nimble Armenian cleric, played a key role in the

autocracy’s interaction with the Armenian Church in much of the Nicholaevan era. Nerses first

gained prominence as the archbishop of the important diocese of Georgia, where he served

between 1811 and 1830. During his tenure in Tiflis, Russian officials noted the prelate’s

administrative efficiency and often relied on his connections to Persian officials, especially

during the Second Russo-Persian War.13 Harboring dreams of a self-governing Armenia, Nerses

cooperated with General Ivan Paskevich during the war, and at its conclusion facilitated the

resettlement of Persian Armenians into Russian territory.14 Yet Nerses’s zealous advocacy for a

vaguely autonomous Armenia conflicted with the tsarist state’s decision to absorb Eastern

Armenia into the empire as Armianskaia oblast.15 As a result, in 1830 Nerses was effectively

exiled to Kishinev, where he became the first archbishop of the Bessarabian Armenian diocese.16

The “benign” Efrem, whom Persians had removed from Echmiadzin during the war, returned to

lead the Armenian Church.

Despite Nerses’s clash with tsarist policy, he enjoyed the support of the most prominent

Russian-Armenian family, the Lazarevs. Shortly after Nerses’s departure from Tiflis, Khristofor

Ekimovich Lazarev, the family’s patriarch, corresponded with Count Alexander von Benkendorf,

the architect and head of the Third Section of the Imperial Chancellery, the secret police

established after the Decembrist revolt.17 A close confidant of the tsar, Alexander Benkendorf

was the brother of tsarist general and Lazarev ally Konstantin von Benkendorf.

13 George Bournoutian, The Khanate of Erevan Under Qajar Rule, 1795-1828 (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1992), 84-86. 14 Russian State Military Historical Archive, Moscow (RGVIA), f. 846, op. 16, d. 978, l. 13. 15 Bournoutian, The Khanate of Erevan, 89. 16 Paul Werth, “Imperial Russia and the Armenian Catholicos at Home and Abroad," in Reconstruction and Interaction of Slavic Eurasia and Its Neighboring Worlds, ed. Osamu Ieda and Tomohiko Uyama (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, 2006), 211. 17 RGIA, f. 880, op. 5, d. 21, ll. 16-31.


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Lazarev lobbied Benkendorf to have Nerses transferred from Bessarabia to St. Petersburg.

“It is necessary for the benefit of Russia—for the good of the Armenian people—that

Archbishop Nerses . . . is summoned to St. Petersburg to settle national and ecclesiastical

matters,” urged the Armenian tycoon.18 Lazarev argued that “no one else is capable of

successfully executing all-beneficial [obshchepoleznykh] intentions,” and wished to see Nerses

play an active role in molding the state’s policy toward the newly annexed regions of the South

Caucasus. In extoling Nerses, Lazarev claimed that “his personal influence, his talent, his trust,

his knowledge, and reasoning, dependent upon the cooperation of the local—and well-

disposed—civilian leadership, can contribute quite a lot in all-beneficial matters.”19

Going a step further, when the incumbent patriarch, Efrem, died in early 1830, Lazarev

lobbied Benkendorf to facilitate Nerses’s ascension to the apex of the Armenian Church. In

March 1830, Lazarev claimed that the selection of Nerses as patriarch represented the “unified,

general request of the Armenian people and the entire clergy.”20 The prelate even petitioned the

tsar himself in April 1830, asking Nicholas’s permission to return to the South Caucasus. “I have

served Russia for 30 years,” Nerses insisted, “[I] have demonstrated in many ways and in

important matters loyalty to the [Russian] emperors, to the benefit of the government and nation,

have entirely justified trust, especially in wartime, [and I am] filled with the direct spirit of

devotion to Russia, which is blissfully united with Armenia.”21

Thus Nerses signaled his acquiescence to Armenia’s political status and abandonment of

his former dreams of autonomy. Yet, despite his appeals and Lazarev’s advocacy, Nerses spent

thirteen years in Bessarabia waiting to become patriarch, ascending to the post in 1843. In his

18 RGIA, f. 880, op. 5, d. 21, l. 17. 19 RGIA, f. 880, op. 5, d. 21, l. 17. 20 RGIA, f. 880, op. 5, d. 21, l. 31. 21 RGIA, f. 880, op. 5, d. 21, l. 39.


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stead, the tsarist state “insisted” on the election in 1831 of a candidate more suitable to its

political goals, Hovannes.22 This episode confirmed the extensive leverage the tsar exercised in

swaying the ecclesiastical developments of the Armenian Church. Even Lazarev’s intervention

proved futile, suggesting that Nicholas and his advisors took Nerses’s earlier political aspirations

seriously and responded by (temporarily) blocking his career aspirations. However, at the same

time that it protected its domestic interests by intervening in the affairs of the Armenian Church,

the tsarist state also deployed that confession’s broad influence to advance its foreign policy.

Russia utilized Echmiadzin to exert influence in the Ottoman empire and beyond. As Paul

Werth has demonstrated, the autocracy’s considerations of the Armenian patriarch’s influence

abroad necessitated a “policy of indulgence” that privileged Echmiadzin’s external prestige over

its internal control.23 This policy had to be balanced between, on the one hand, amplifying the

patriarch’s authority over non-Russian subject Armenians and, on the other hand, enforcing the

domestic legal and administrative obligations of that tsarist subject. For much of the nineteenth

century, the state chose the former avenue, augmenting Echmiadzin’s standing abroad in

expectation of reciprocal political benefits within the Ottoman empire.

St. Petersburg hastened to reestablish Echmiadzin’s influence among foreign Armenians

soon after absorbing the monastery in 1828. To be sure, some distant Armenian communities

celebrated the change of Echmiadzin’s imperial master. From as far away as Madras, India, local

Armenians declared to Khristofor Lazarev their readiness to support the church financially and

even to emigrate to Armianskaia oblast.24 However, the wars with Persia and Turkey in 1826-29

had weakened the links between the Echmiadzin Catholicos and his followers in the neighboring

22 Werth, “Imperial Russia and the Armenian Catholicos,” 209. 23 Werth, “Imperial Russia and the Armenian Catholicos,” 203-235. 24 RGIA, f. 880, op. 5, d. 21, ll. 15-15ob.


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Muslim empires, who were wary of openly affirming the pro-Russian prelate’s authority.

Ecclesiastical matters between Russian- and Ottoman-subject Armenians were further strained

when Catholicos Hovannes was elected in 1831 without the participation of Ottoman Armenian

delegates.25 Moreover, two rival Armenian patriarchs in Turkey, at Sis and Constantinople,

sought to take advantage of the situation to assume more prominent roles in Armenian religious

life and eclipse Echmiadzin’s perennial authority.

Hovannes supported the integration of the Armenian nation into Russian society.

Although little evidence survives to illustrate his ideas, it appears that the Catholicos envisioned

the social and political melding of Armenians into Russian everyday life, while maintaining the

markers of cultural distinction, such as religious rites, that formed the cornerstones of the

Armenian national identity. Hovannes saw the Armenian learning of the Russian language and

observance of Russian laws not as a threat to the integrity of the Armenian ethnocultural identity

but as a means toward social, economic, and political prominence within the empire’s diverse

social framework. In backing a proposed seminary at the Lazarev Institute, Hovannes asserted

that “the young Armenian clergy, having been educated in the [Armenian] national Lazarev

Institute of Moscow, quickly will connect morally with native Russians and consequently will

adopt [srodnitsia] the customs and laws of their new fatherland.”26 Yet foreign policy matters

often overshadowed the domestic dimensions of the Russo-Armenian ecclesiastical encounter.

Baron Rosen, the tsarist commander-in-chief of the Caucasus (1831-37), advocated

boosting Echmiadzin’s prestige abroad. He wrote to Tsar Nicholas that Hovannes “deserves

particular attention because the spread of Echmiadzin’s influence upon Armenians in Turkey is

25 Werth, “Imperial Russia and the Armenian Catholicos,” 207. 26 RGIA, f. 880, op. 5, d. 174, l. 1ob.


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quite beneficial not only for him personally but also for our government politically.”27 From his

election in 1831, Hovannes and Rosen cooperated to regain the prelate’s standing among

Ottoman Armenians. To this end, Rosen corresponded with the tsarist foreign, internal, and war

ministries to achieve such goals as the Ottoman acceptance of an Echmiadzin nuncio in

Constantinople.28 The Russian government also ordered its ambassador in Constantinople,

Apollinarii Butenev, to negotiate with the Armenian patriarchs of Sis and Jerusalem and to urge

them to endorse Hovannes’s spiritual superiority and pronounce his name during liturgy,

requests that the rival patriarchs rejected.29 “This is a very important matter,” emphasized Rosen

to the tsar, because the foreign patriarchs’ refusal to recognize Hovannes could precipitate a

chain reaction among other, particularly Persian, Armenian communities. Hostile powers could

co-opt such ostensibly ecclesiastical schisms for political purposes, Rosen warned.30

To be sure, not just Persia and Turkey, but also Russia’s European rivals, cautiously

watched the tsar’s growing influence over the Armenian Church in the 1830s and 1840s.

Western observers noted the emperor’s desire to employ Echmiadzin toward his foreign policy.

Robert Curzon, the private secretary to the British ambassador to Turkey, stressed this goal:

[The tsar] will not fail to pull the strings that hang loosely in the hands of the Armenian Patriarch. If he pulls them evenly and well, he will advance his interests far and wide, even in the dominions of other princes, who may hardly be aware of the influence exercised in their states from a source so distant and unobtrusive. The danger in his case is that he may use too great violence, and break the strings from too severe a tension, raising the storm against himself that he intended to direct against others.31

27 RGIA, f. 1268, op. 1, d. 55, l. 1. 28 RGIA, f. 1268, op. 1, d. 55, ll. 1-1ob. 29 RGIA, f. 1268, op. 1, d. 55, ll. 1ob-2. 30 RGIA, f. 1268, op. 1, d. 55, l. 2. 31 Robert Curzon, Armenia: A Year at Erzeroom, and on the Frontiers of Russia, Turkey, and Persia (London: John Murray, 1854), 209.


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Curzon echoed the sentiments of many European statesmen when he emphasized the potential

political ramifications of Russia’s patronage of Echmiadzin: “the power of which he [the tsar]

holds the reins is one which may be used for the advancement of the greatest or the most ignoble

ends.” Given such far-reaching implications, by the mid-1830s the autocracy recognized the need

for a clear state policy toward the Armenian Church.

The government answered this need with the Polozhenie of 1836. The royal fiat codified

Armenians’ freedom of worship, granted their church control over education, and formally

acknowledged the institutional autonomy of the Armenian Church.32 The decree also formalized

the church’s existing practice of owning land for income, and freed Armenian clergy from

taxes.33 The new regulations took into consideration the teachings and traditions of Armenian

ecumenical culture, seeking to reconcile them with the demands of the modern Rechtsstaat.

Indeed, Tsar Nicholas directed his aides to ensure that the law was based on the Armenian

Church’s “own ancient ordinances” while also being “brought into conformity with the legal

provisions of the Russian empire.”34 In another sign of the autocracy’s acceptance of the

Apostolic confession, in April 1836 Armenian religious doctrine and language courses were

introduced for Armenian-heritage students at the elite Cadet Corps in St. Petersburg.35

At the same time, the 1836 statute placed restrictions on the Armenian faith. Echmiadzin

became formally subordinated to the Russian emperor, despite receiving more autonomy than

other national churches, such as the Georgian Orthodox Church.36 Although ostensibly the state

32 Ronald Suny, Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 40. 33 Razmik Panossian, The Armenians: From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 123. And also Suny, “Eastern Armenia under Tsarist Rule,” 115. 34 Quoted in Paul Werth, The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 62. 35 RGIA, f. 880, op. 5, d. 344, l. 89. 36 Suny, “Eastern Armenia under Tsarist Rule,” 115.


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dropped its “insistence” on the election of a tsarist-subject Catholicos,37 the Polozhenie required

Armenian clergy and laymen from Russia and abroad to elect two final candidates, among

whom the tsar would choose the Catholicos.38 Moreover, while the church enjoyed freedom in

other aspects of education, the curriculum of its schools required the approval of the Holy Synod

and the ministry of internal affairs. Finally, a state representative observed the Echmiadzin

Synod to ensure the church’s compliance with these regulations.39 Despite such restrictions, most

tsarist-subject Armenians reacted positively to the new regulations, and, as Ronald Suny has

summarized, “Rather than creating antagonism between church and state, the Polozhenie

established a working relationship and cooperation.”40

In terms of lay Armenians’ position in imperial society, the significance of the

Polozhenie eclipsed other relevant state laws of the first half of the nineteenth century. The

totality of the 1836 decree surpassed the ad hoc policies of the previous decades, when the

autocracy affirmed the importance of Armenians to its political aims by granting economic

incentives and transplanting foreign-subject Armenians to Russia. Now, in the mid-1830s, little

doubt remained that Armenians were key to Russia’s foreign policy vis-à-vis Turkey and Persia,

and also to its internal tranquility in the Caucasus.41 This was a two-way dynamic.

While the tsarist state utilized Echmiadzin to advance its interests abroad, the Armenian

Church relied on the imperial government to defend its domestic interests. For example, when in

1839 a book tangentially addressing the Armenian doctrine appeared in Russian bookstores,

37 Werth, “Imperial Russia and the Armenian Catholicos,” 209. 38 Suny, “Eastern Armenia under Tsarist Rule,” 115. 39 With full Russian support, the Echmiadzin Synod was established in 1837 as part of the contemporaneous church reforms. See National Archive of Armenia (NAA), f. 90, op. 1, d. 353, ll. 1-4. 40 Suny, “Eastern Armenia under Tsarist Rule,” 115. 41 As Paul Werth has emphasized, the Polozhenie of 1836 was part of the state’s broader effort to codify the rights and obligations of its non-Orthodox confessions in the 1830s. See Werth, “Imperial Russia and the Armenian Catholicos,” 209.


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Catholicos Hovannes coordinated with the interior ministry, the Holy Synod, and the Caucasian

administration to establish a new policy.42 A renegade Orthodox monk, Ioann Malinovskii,

published the book, An Addendum to the Proof of the Antiquity of the Tri-finger Service

(Dopolnenie k dokazatel’stvu drevnosti trekh-perstnogo sluzheniia), in Moscow. Hovannes not

only petitioned the tsar directly,43 but also convinced Interior Minister Lev Perovskii that the

book contained “unfair and offensive expressions against the Armenian-Gregorian confession.”44

The Catholicos urged the state to introduce regulations “not to publish books or articles related to

[the Armenian faith] without first consulting the supreme ecclesiastical leadership of this

confession and receiving from it precise information and clarifications.”45

Echmiadzin’s efforts to protect its interests found support in the empire’s predominant

confession, the Orthodox Church. The Holy Synod, reviewing Hovannes’s request, agreed that

Malinovskii’s book contained “unfair information” about the Armenian faith and directed the

office of church censorship (dukhovnaia tsenzura) to ensure that similar items would not be

published, and that subsequent reprints of Malinovskii’s book would be censored.46 Additionally,

in a curious development, the Holy Synod “saw with comfort” that Armenian doctrine aligned

with Orthodox teachings in condemning the “heresies” of Aria, Macedonia, Nestorius, Eutyches,

Severian, and the Monophysites. As a result, the Holy Synod requested from Echmiadzin an

explanation of Armenian dogma, promising to use it to enforce stricter censorship of religious

42 RGIA, f. 880, op. 5, d. 179, ll. 1-1ob. 43 RGIA, f. 880, op. 5, d. 179, ll. 12-18ob. 44 RGIA, f. 880, op. 5, d. 179, l. 1. The exact reasons for Hovannes’s displeasure with the book’s content are not clear from the Russian sources. 45 RGIA, f. 880, op. 5, d. 179, l. 1. In an analogous but more vague example, in 1831 the Armenian Church worked with tsarist officials to curb the activities of the (Swiss) Basel Evangelical Society in the Caucasus. See RGIA, f. 383, op. 29, d. 557, ll. 1-12ob. 46 RGIA, f. 880, op. 5, d. 179, ll. 1-1ob.


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publications that, like Malinovskii’s monograph, misrepresented Armenian canon.47 Tsar

Nicholas approved these initiatives.

This episode evinced the state’s imperative of supporting the integrity of its foreign faiths.

As Werth maintains, imperial Russia’s “multiconfessional establishment” provided “a series of

significant collective rights to recognized religious groups and rendered the foreign confessions

state religions entitled to certain forms of government patronage and protection.”48 The

Armenian Church fit squarely into this framework. To be sure, as one official tsarist document

summarized, “the dogmas and rites of the Armenian Church must be inviolable in all their

fullness and purity – without deviation and without change.”49 To protect the orthodoxy of the

Armenian faith and educate state censors, the Armenian Church and Russian government

cooperated to compile a “simple, direct, clear, and convenient” catechism of the Armenian

doctrine in Russian.50

Even more importantly, this initiative sought to highlight the kinship of the Armenian and

Orthodox confessions. The government report optimistically contended that “every well-meaning

and enlightened” person, having read the Armenian catechism in Russian, will

understand and be convinced that the goal of Christianity is one and the same in all Christian denominations, . . . that the main tenets of the faith are the same, but the small and even trivial difference is only in a few words, in outward forms and in private ceremonies. [And] that the foundational stone of the Armenian Church agrees with the Greco-Russian Church, for the dogmas are based on reason and the power of Holy Scripture.51

In a word, in the reign of Nicholas I, the tsarist state and the Armenian Church not only derived

mutual political benefit, but also coordinated efforts to publicly emphasize the dogmatic ties

47 RGIA, f. 880, op. 5, d. 179, l. 1ob. 48 Werth, The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths, 4. 49 RGIA, f. 880, op. 5, d. 179, l. 6. 50 The structure and format of the Armenian catechism was modeled on the Russian Orthodox version. 51 RGIA, f. 880, op. 5, d. 179, ll. 6ob-7.


18

between the two national churches.52 Although occasionally serious discord arose in the next

decades, this symbiosis lasted until the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

The tenure of Catholicos Nerses (1843-57), who succeeded Hovannes, exemplified the

complex relationship between the government and the Armenian Church. Upon the death of

Hovannes, Perovskii and Neidgardt plotted the selection of a prelate conducive to tsarist interests.

The statesmen agreed on the importance of “reinforcing the domination of the Echmiadzin

patriarchal throne over the entire Armenian Church and delivering our government the moral

influence over all Armenians, [including] those outside the empire.”53 To this end, the autocracy

dispatched a “special bureaucrat” to Echmiadzin, tasked with “giving the election such a

direction, that the lot falls on a person worthy of Imperial approval, disposed toward Russia, and

enjoying equal respect among foreign and Russian Armenians, even if the patriarch elected on

these bases is not a Russian subject.”54 No sources survive to illustrate the results of this mission,

but, with or without tsarist interference, the 1843 election boded well for the autocracy.

Unanimously elected by 26 tsarist and foreign-subject Armenian delegates in April 1843,

Nerses finally received the tsar’s nod after thirteen years of exile as the archbishop of the

Bessarabian-Nakhichevan diocese.55 In a sign of the tsar’s efforts to woo Armenians abroad,

Nicholas sent ornate gifts to the losing candidates of the election, including the archbishop of

Jerusalem and some Persian and Ottoman Armenian representatives.56 This development

52 More minor evidence of the Russo-Armenian religious symbiosis in this era includes state and local permission for the expansion of Armenian churches in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and the Lazarevs’ construction of new Armenian orphanages in Moscow. See RGIA, f. 880, op. 5, d. 179, l. 41. 53 AKAK, IX (1884), 714. 54 AKAK, IX (1884), 714. Officials selected two agents of the ministry of internal affairs for this mission. 55 AKAK, IX (1884), 715. It is not clear whether senior representatives of foreign Armenian communities attended the election in Echmiadzin or, as Werth suggests, merely sent written deeds and low-ranking representatives. In either case, it appears that both Ottoman and Persian Armenians participated in the 1843 election and recognized its results. See Werth, “Imperial Russia and the Armenian Catholicos,” 211. 56 AKAK, IX (1884), 715-16. The presents included crosses and rings decorated with precious stones.


19

illustrated the importance assigned by the government to maintaining its position as the patron of

foreign-subject Christians, particularly of Armenians in the Ottoman empire. The state sought

not only to nurture ties with Echmiadzin, but also to develop a rapport with Echmiadzin’s rivals

abroad. The new Catholicos, meanwhile, both engaged with and resisted the tsarist government.

Nerses accomplished much in meeting Russian expectations. He reestablished the

submission of the Constantinople patriarch to Echmiadzin and normalized relations with the

Ottoman government in 1844.57 Nerses also cooperated with Caucasus Viceroy Mikhail

Vorontsov to found a new “commercial school” in the South Caucasus and to send Armenian

and other native students to elite institutions in the two capitals, including St. Petersburg

University and the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages in Moscow.58 The viceroy also

supported the Catholicos’s plans for a new seminary in Echmiadzin, insisting to the tsar that this

project would yield advantages “in the political sense, for there is no doubt that Armenians from

Constantinople, India, and other parts of the Orient will send their children to Echmiadzin for

education.”59 Vorontsov extoled Nerses to the tsar in 1846, praising the prelate as “always ready

and always able to help in everything useful.”60 Before his retirement, too, Vorontsov lionized

Nerses as the local administration’s “powerful and always prepared weapon,” and assured his

replacement at the head of the Caucasus, Viceroy Bariatinskii, that “I have always found in him

full readiness to assist us in everything that is useful, . . . soon you will fully confirm this.”61

Yet Nerses also challenged the state’s oversight of the Armenian Church. According to

Werth, the Catholicos “vigorously resisted the constraints imposed by the [Polozhenie of 1836],

57 Werth, “Imperial Russia and the Armenian Catholicos,” 212. 58 AKAK, X (1885), 842. 59 AKAK, X (1885), 857. 60 AKAK, X (1885), 842. 61 AKAK, X (1885), 96.


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which he regarded as being inconsistent with the dignity of his position and the prerogatives of

his predecessors.”62 Specifically, Nerses undermined the authority of the Echmiadzin Synod,

seeing it as a threat to his clout, and also delayed the appointment of new bishops to amplify his

influence. Such actions aroused the resentment of other senior Armenian clergy, including the

archbishop of the Bessarabian-Nakhichevan diocese, who complained to St. Petersburg about

Nerses’s excesses. The ministry of internal affairs, while overall deferential to the prelate,

conceded that “the unlimited despotism of Patriarch Nerses is manifest in all of his actions.”63

Despite such impediments, state-church relations within the Russo-Armenian encounter

developed amicably at mid-century. Indeed, at times the autocracy made legal exceptions for the

Armenian Church. For example, in 1851 Nerses complained to Vorontsov that Catholic

proselytizers were converting individual Apostolic Armenians into the Catholic faith.64 Among

the evidence the patriarch cited were 1844 reports from Russian agents to then-Caucasus

commander Neidgardt about the efforts of Catholic Armenians from Venice to convert Apostolic

Armenians in the South Caucasus. Nerses accused Catholic missionaries of targeting young and

uneducated Armenians.65 Although it appears these efforts bore limited fruit, they unnerved

Echmiadzin enough to seek the state’s assistance.66

Vorontsov conveyed to Interior Minister Perovskii the Armenian patriarch’s request “that

the Armenian-Gregorian clergy have complete freedom in returning its progeny to the core of

62 Werth, “Imperial Russia and the Armenian Catholicos,” 212. 63 Quoted in Werth, “Imperial Russia and the Armenian Catholicos,” 212. 64 RGIA, f. 821, op. 7, d. 7, ll. 5-7ob. Also: RGIA, f. 1268, op. 6, d. 44, ll. 1-1ob. 65 RGIA, f. 821, op. 7, d. 7, l. 6. 66 As Werth has pointed out, “Still, data (presumably provided by the patriarch) indicating that the persistent efforts of Catholic clergy over more than a half-century (1787-1846) had resulted in the ‘enticement’ of just 26 men and 21 women scarcely suggests a crisis.” See Werth, The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths, 88 (footnote 66).


21

their church.”67 Nerses not only asked for the authority to take these actions without the

preliminary approval of tsarist officials, but also urged the government to expel Catholic

Armenian priests from the Caucasus to Poland. Apparently in a concession, he allowed for the

possibility of transferring Catholic Polish clergy to Russia proper and the Caucasus, including

regions populated by Armenians.68 Nerses likely believed that Armenians would be less inclined

to accept Catholicism from ethnic Polish, rather than Armenian, priests. In effect, this

demonstrated Echmiadzin’s implicit assumption of the interplay between ethnic and religious

identities among tsarist-subject Armenians. While Nerses likely realized that the sudden influx of

Catholic Armenian clergy in Poland would cause myriad logistical problems, he acquiesced to

accepting Catholic Polish priests among Armenian communities, evidently confident that Polish

proselytizers would prove unsuccessful among his compatriots.

The tsarist officialdom endorsed Echmiadzin’s efforts to “shield Gregorian Armenians

from Catholicism.”69 Vorontsov lobbied Perovskii to make a legal exception in this case,

allowing the Armenian Church to convert Catholic Armenians to the Apostolic confession

without the onerous participation of imperial ministers. Although state law70 required the

bureaucratic approval of all conversions between non-Orthodox Christians, Vorontsov sided with

Nerses in arguing that the Armenians presented a unique case. The minister of internal affairs

concurred with the viceroy and the patriarch, concluding that “with respect to the Armenian

Gregorian church, Armenian Catholics occupy an exceptional position, because they are merely

the lost progeny of that ancient church.”71 The emperor approved these measures soon.72

67 RGIA, f. 821, op. 7, d. 7, l. 2. 68 RGIA, f. 821, op. 7, d. 7, l. 2ob. 69 RGIA, f. 821, op. 7, d. 7, l. 2ob. 70 [ст. 111, п. 4 XIV т. св. Гражд. зак. изд. 1842 года] 71 RGIA, f. 821, op. 7, d. 7, ll. 16-16ob.


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While the autocracy supported Echmiadzin’s conversion of wayward Catholic Armenians,

it maintained a tight grip on the Armenian Church’s recruitment of other groups. In 1853,

Catholicos Nerses petitioned for local tsarist officials in the Caucasus, rather than the tsar and his

ministers in St. Petersburg, to grant permission for voluntary Muslim baptism in the Armenian

rite.73 The autocracy rejected this request, pointing out that between 1843 and 1852 just 109

Caucasian Muslims converted to the Armenian creed.74

Likewise, the state had no tolerance for Orthodox apostasy. When in 1854 news reached

St. Petersburg that “several” residents of Shemakhinskaia guberniia (in modern Azerbaijan) had

converted from “Greco-Georgian” and, reports implied, Russian, Orthodoxy to the Apostolic

Armenian confession, Tsar Nicholas took up the case.75 Although zealous local authorities had

convicted the defectors of apostasy, the tsar and the ministry of internal affairs relented,

instructing regional officials in the Caucasus to continue their attempts to return the individuals

to Orthodoxy but avoid “constraining their personality” (ne stesniaia ikh lichnosti).76 This

episode confirmed that the tsarist government protected the integrity of its predominant

Orthodox confession against the encroachment, however negligible, of such otherwise favored

foreign faiths as the Apostolic Armenian confession.

To be sure, there were limits to the cooperation of the government and the Orthodox

Church with the Armenian Church. Particularly coupled with Nerses’s resistance to the

Polozhenie of 1836, the tri-sided dynamic often yielded tension. Unlike the major legislative and

ministerial markers of partnership, such as Perovskii’s approval of Nerses’s conversion request,

72 RGIA, f. 821, op. 7, d. 7, ll. 17-18ob. 73 RGIA, f. 1268, op. 7, d. 364a, ll. 1-2. Nerses justified this request by arguing that the long delay in receiving permission from the capital discouraged Muslims from converting to the Armenian faith. 74 RGIA, f. 1268, op. 7, d. 364a, l. 6. 75 RGIA, f. 821, op. 7, d. 11, ll. 1-4ob. 76 RGIA, f. 821, op. 7, d. 11, l. 7.


23

the evidence of latent strain is more trivial, such as the above-cited example of the Orthodox

apostates. To cite another example from the end of Nerses’s tenure in 1857, the Orthodox

leadership foiled Echmiadzin’s attempts to expand its foothold in Moscow.77 The dispute traced

to the fundraising of the city’s Armenian community, which collected money for the construction

of a monastery on the grounds belonging to an Armenian cemetery. To secure the permission of

the local authorities, the Armenians of Moscow enlisted the support of Catholicos Nerses, who

corresponded with state officials to secure the necessary approval for the new monastery.

The main opposition to the Armenians’ petition came not from state or city officials but

from the senior clergy of the Orthodox Church. Moscow Metropolitan Filaret alerted the Holy

Synod to the Armenian plans, vociferously objecting to the perceived encroachment on his

jurisdiction of the Armenian Catholicos. The Russian prelate argued that the city’s Armenian

population was too small to justify a new monastery. More importantly, Filaret maintained that

the approval of the project would “make an unfavorable impression upon the Orthodox people of

Moscow,” who “from ancient times have been especially strongly marked by the character of the

dominant confession in Russia, and in the interests of general wellbeing [the Orthodox

community of Moscow] demands the protection of its character now and in the future.”78 Even

more worrisome to Filaret was the likelihood that the Roman Catholic Church, emboldened by

the Armenian example, would establish its own monasteries in Moscow and thus threaten not

only the Orthodox hold on Moscow but also entire Orthodox Russia.

Thus the Armenian Church in the second quarter of the nineteenth century operated

within a tightly delineated framework. One the one hand, it enjoyed the exclusive right to

convert non-Orthodox Christians into the Armenian faith and benefitted from the government’s

77 RGIA, f. 821, op. 7, d. 39, ll. 1-5. 78 RGIA, f. 821, op. 7, d. 39, l. 4.


24

distrust of Catholic and Protestant proselytizing. On the other hand, the church had to observe its

Orthodox counterpart’s prerogatives, maintaining a delicate balance between promoting its

interests and avoiding antagonizing the venerable Russian institution.

Conclusion

Under Tsar Nicholas I, the state codified the activities of Orthodox and non-Orthodox

religious groups in what Laura Engelstein has called a “project of administrative

modernization.”79 The government included the Armenian Church in this endeavor, guaranteeing,

restricting, and defining the rights and obligations of tsarist-subject Armenians. Aimed at

standardizing and legalizing the relationship between the tsarist state and Echmiadzin, the

Polozhenie of 1836 and its attendant policies constituted a part of an empire-wide modernization

initiative that affected most of Russia’s non-Orthodox faiths. Under Nicholas, the Muslims of

Crimea, Protestants, Jews, and Karaites received royal fiats that defined their ecumenical, social,

and political position in imperial Russia.80

But even during efforts to modernize the bureaucratic and legal systems of governance,

state policy toward the non-Orthodox often reflected Nicholas’s conservatism. Indeed, new

statutes and streamlined administrative practices produced as many restrictions as opportunities.

John Klier has insisted that during the reign of Nicholas I, the government targeted Jews for full-

scale conversion more than at any other time in the nineteenth century.81 Although Jews were

socially and politically marginalized in imperial Russia throughout its existence, they

79 Laura Engelstein, Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 50-51. 80 Werth, “Imperial Russia and the Armenian Catholicos,” 209. 81 John Klier, “State Policies and the Conversion of Jews in Imperial Russia,” in Robert Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky, eds., Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Imperial Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 92-112.


25

experienced the greatest threat to their religious and cultural identity under the onslaught of the

conscription system and the education policies of Sergei Uvarov, the architect of the Orthodoxy,

Autocracy, Nationality triumvirate.

Yet the experience of the Armenian Church differed from the encounters of other non-

Orthodox groups with the tsarist state in 1825-55. Armenian ecclesiastical and lay leaders found

tangible reasons to cooperate with the government for much of the first half of the nineteenth

century. This two-way dynamic ensured growth and stability for Echmiadzin and its flock, while

providing the autocracy with the means to penetrate previously inaccessible Ottoman and Persian

political circles.

To be sure, the complexity of the relationship between the Armenian Church and the

tsarist state lay in the fact that not just domestic interests were at stake. Unique in that it

exercised real influence over coreligionist communities in Persia, Turkey, Europe, India, and

beyond, the Armenian Church at Echmiadzin heralded for the government of Nicholas I diverse

geopolitical advantages. At the same time that officials in St. Petersburg relied on the

Echmiadzin Catholicos to reestablish diplomatic ties with Constantinople, tsarist diplomats

worked to secure foreign Armenian prelates’ submission to Echmiadzin. That is why the state

largely privileged religious freedom over suppression for the Armenian clergy and laity. Yet this

policy at times clashed with inherent Russian interests whenever the advances of the Armenian

confession posed real or imagined threats to the Orthodox faith.

Overall, any leeway the autocracy granted to its non-Orthodox subjects in hopes of

structuring and regulating their existence, the state also extended to Armenian external activities.

As Robert Crews has argued, “Confessional communities that subjected the followers to divine

as well as monarchical judgment provided useful forms of social discipline to complement the


26

will of the sovereign.”82 Elsewhere, Crews has shown that the empire coopted Muslim

community leaders into its bureaucratic and cultural fabric to attain stability on its imperial

periphery.83 However, if the government employed religious toleration as a system of control

over non-Russians, in the Armenian case the state sought more than docile subjects. The

opportunity to project diplomatic influence into the capitals of Eastern empires through

Armenian clerics outweighed the dangers of Armenian proselytizing or encroachment upon

traditional Orthodox spheres of influence. Thus the encounter between the tsarist state and the

Armenian Church in the second quarter of the nineteenth century represented a careful

calculation on each side. The codification of Armenian rights and obligations with the

Polozhenie of 1836 evinced Stoler’s “active realignment and reformation” that was driven by

geopolitical realities beyond tsarist frontiers.

For the Armenian ecclesiastical leadership, especially Catholicos Nerses, the vision of an

independent Armenia—never clearly articulated until the second half of the nineteenth century—

quickly yielded to a desire to consolidate Echmiadzin’s authority over the diaspora.

Consequently, Nerses styled himself pope, not president. Unlike some of his quixotic lay

compatriots, Nerses understood after his exile to Kishinev that the Russian government would

tolerate no irredentist claims. Thus an aim of theological and, by extension, cultural and

economic authority over distant Armenian communities drove the heavy-handed policies of the

Catholicos, for which even his tsarist overlords faulted him.

82 Robert Crews, “Empire and the Confessional State: Islam and Religious Politics in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” in The American Historical Review 108, no. 1 (February 2003): 59. 83 Robert Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).


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The entrance to the Echmiadzin complex in 2014. Photo property of the author.

Documents

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