The myth of the 'Holy Russian land" was the founding idea of the Muscovite tsardom as it was developed by the Romanovs from the start of the seventeenth century. After the civil war and Polish intervention during the Time of Troubles (1598-1613), Mikhail Romanov, as the legend went, was elected by the entire Russian population, therefore reuniting the Holy Russian land behind the Romanov dynasty and saving Orthodox Russia from the Catholics. (Carr 125). The idea of Russia as a holy land contributed to the Tsar's position not as a king ruling with a divine right, but a god on earth. There was, in fact, a tradition in Russia of canonizing princes who died pro patria et fides. Tsars used Church laws to persecute political opponents, unlike the Western rulers of this time. Peter the Great later tried to reform relations between Church and state in an attempt to Westernize Russia, transferring the Church's administration from the patriarchate to t

Figes, Orlando. A People's Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution. New York: Viking Penguin, 1996.

- - - . The Russian Church and the Soviet State, 1917-1950, Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1953

Shanin, Theodore. The Awkward Class; Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society: Russia 1910-1925. Oxford, 1972

Urbanization was the root cause, in that the growth of cities was faster than the church building in them. Millions of workers who had relocated to the cities were forced to live in a state of Godlessness. The Church also failed to address the new problems of city life and was too conservative to allow for religiously inspired social reform, despite attempts by a few radical clergy, such as Father Gapon with his workers' march to the Winter Palace in January 1905. Urbanization was a pressing force toward secularization, with young workers leaving their villages for cities and finding there socialist groups who influenced their thinking (Figes 65). What about the countryside, which boasted the 'holiness' of Russia and was supposedly the stronghold of the Church? The religiosity if the Russian peasants was one of the greatest myths. They displayed a great deal of external devotion, continually crossing themselves, regularly attending church, always observing the Lenten fast, never working on religious holidays, and sometimes even going on pilgrimages to holy sites, but their actual religion was far from that of the clergy (Cherniavsky 114). The peasants, in actuality, very often had not been completely converted from Pagan beliefs and developed a vernacular religion mixing Christian dogmas and Pagan cults and magic (Figes 66). In addition, peasants saw parish priests not so much as 'spiritual guides or advisors, but as a class of tradesmen with wholesale and retail dealings in sacraments.' (Shanin 66). Priests were often greedy, asked fees for services and haggled with poverty stricken peasants, harming the prestige of the Church. The low educational level of many of the priests, their tendencies toward drunkenness, their well-known connections to the police and their subservience to the gentry all added to the low esteem of the Church (Pipes, "Russian Revolution" 68). "Everywhere", wrote a nineteenth-century parish priest, "from the most resplendent drawing rooms to smoky peasant huts, people disparage the clergy with the most vicious mockery, with words of the most profound scorn and infinite disgust." (Freeze 330) When this is compared to the respect and deference shown by the peasants of Catholic Europe toward their priests, it becomes more clear why peasant Russia had a revolution, and, for example, peasant Spain had a counter-revolution (Figes 67). Towards the end of the nineteenth century a growing number of Orthodox clergy realized that the Church was in no position to shield the peasants from the secularization of urban society, and it was from this concern that new calls for a radical reform of the Church were made. New "clerical liberals" inspired by Great Reforms of the 1860s were better educated and more conscientious than their predecessors, and wanted to revitalize the Church by bringing it closer to the peasants' lives. It was their belief that parishioners should have more control of their local church, there should be more parish schools, and priests should be able to concentrate on religious affairs without being burdened by bureaucratic tasks. In January 1881 Alexander II instructed his Minister of the Interior, Count Loris-Melikov, to draw up plans for a limited constitution which would give invited members of the public an advisory role in legislation. On the other hand were the supporters of the traditional tsarist order. The only way, they argued, to prevent a revolution was to rule Russia with an iron hand.

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