The Tsar's Foreign Faiths

Reviews / Votes

Those teaching the history of Imperial Russia at university level would be well served by adding this work to their syllabus. Far from being a straightforward history of religion, Werth offers up a highly stimulating study that reveals a great deal about the Russian state's broad attitude towards toleration and freedom of conscience. More generally, anyone interested in the complex practices of imperial rule in Russia, beset as it was by tensions and contradictions, will gain many insights by reading The Tsar's Foreign Faiths. * Robert Collis, European History Quarterly * excellent ... The Tsar's Foreign Faiths is the wisest sustained discussion in any language of religious freedom in Russia * Slavic Review * In this intellectual, political, and administrative history of concepts and practices of religious toleration and religious freedom in Imperial Russia, Paul W. Werth provocatively argues that confessional institutions provided the crucial framework for the relationship between the Empire and its many subject peoples, and that historians have misread imperial Russian history by seeking to describe a "nationality" policy that was simply not there until the rise of modern nationalist ideas in the latter part of the nineteenth century. I can say with conviction that, with its important argument about the very nature of imperial governance, this book will be required reading for all students of imperial Russia and of religion and governance in modern Europe * Heather J. Coleman, Canada Research Chair in Imperial Russian History, University of Alberta * Paul Werth is once again forcing us to rethink the Empire of the Tsars in a book that is well written, well researched, and well argued. Most of all, it is expertly thought out and meticulously plotted through a wealth of case studies that will inform and surprise. He disrupts our assumption that this was a regime of oppression plain and simple, and he shows this in the most sensitive of areas, religion. Rather this was a confused and complicated reality that negotiated religion between the two poles of tolerance and freedom of conscience ... Werth takes an exceptionally Russian story and makes it a recognizably modern one by giving us the tools to compare. This is the latest word in our ever-fascinating field of ethnicity, nationality, and confession * Yanni Kotsonis, Director, Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, New York University * The Tsar's Foreign Faiths is a first-rate contribution to both imperial Russian and religious history. * Lucien J. Frary, Ab Imperio *