Authors

Discussion

In the mid-19th century, the Russian imperial administration launched an unprecedented campaign against the schismatics (raskol’niki). This term was applied to a wide variety of numerous religious groups: the priestly and priestless Old Believers and the Russian sectarians: Molokans, Dukhobors, Judaizers, Khlysts, and Skoptsy. One of the crucial components of this campaign was bureaucratic expeditions, which were defined as statistical. These expeditions were sent to the eight provinces of the Russian “imperial core:” Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Novgorod, and the five provinces of the Volga region in 1853-1855.

The expeditions were at the crossroads of two tangible trends in the Russian Empire: an all-out campaign to eradicate the Schism and the establishment of the belief that imperial modernization depended integrally on the production of knowledge, encompassing statistical, geographical, ethnographic, religious, and social diversity. This was a strong shift during Nicholas I’s reign from sporadic projects of the first quarter of the 19^th century to the in-depth exploration of imperial space. The expeditions were organized by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, completed by its officials, and expanded beyond mere statistics to examine the sectarians’ social, moral, and geographic conditions. Early projects like the Yaroslavl Commission (1850–1852) set the foundation for systematic studies across the Russian provinces, led by young bureaucrats who later became influential in imperial administration.

The expeditions presented an illustrative example of governmental science but had a significant specific feature: their strategic goal was to eliminate the study object. However, in some ways, the campaign revealed the futility of its crucial task, as the numbers of the schismatics turned out to be higher than were estimated earlier, the boundaries between the Orthodox Russians and the Old Believers were vague, and the local officials and even the local clergy were reluctant to the struggle with religious dissent. Together with other factors, such as the defeat in the Crimean War, the results of expeditions became one of the prerequisites encouraging the Great Reforms in the Russian Empire. In addition, the expeditions themselves were an important part of the construction a modern state, with the crucial task of accounting for and classifying the subservient population. Moreover, they represented a new element of power production in the imperial space, where epistemic and political power constituted a complex combination.