The book examines the history of the Orthodox parish, which in the period from the Great reforms of the 1860s to the revolutionary events of 1917-1918 constituted the smallest, but also the most numerous unit of the Church body. The author examines the parish in three aspects: as a social structure, as a subject of public discussion, and as an object of political reform by secular and ecclesiastical authorities. As a social structure, the parish during this period was closely associated with the evolution of the peasant community, urbanization, the development of the clergy class, and other social processes of the Imperial period. The author shows how the policy of the authorities consistently limited the independence of parish institutions and increased the fiscal burden on the parish, which created conditions for the parish crisis. The author reconstructs all the stages of heated discussions about the parish and draws attention to their characters, including those forgotten in historiography. For the first time in the context of the political history of this period, all the projects of transformation of the Orthodox parish put forward during the inter-revolutionary period by various social forces, including the Synodal bureaucracy and deputies of the State Duma, are consistently considered. The components of the “parish revolution” of 1917 and the reaction of Church authorities at various levels, including the Council of the Russian Church of 1917-1918, are described in detail. In addition, the introductory Chapter of the book contains a brief overview of the history of the parish in pre-Petrine Russia, as well as a description of its transformations in the late XVII – early XIX centuries, and the final paragraph provides an overview of the history of the parish in the Soviet period. The initial publication of the extensive archival and statistical material adds to the discussion. The book is addressed both to specialists and those interested in Russian and Church history of the XIX-XX centuries.
