Abstract
Reviewed by: James M. White, Laboratory for the Study of Primary Sources, Ural Federal University, Ekaterinburg, Russia
From prayers in Russia’s major cathedrals to charitable collections reaching even the most isolated villages, from icons and crosses closeted in soldiers’ knapsacks to the military chaplain Stepan Shcherbakovskii leading his regiment into the fray at the Battle of the Yalu River, the role of Orthodoxy in the Russo-Japanese War was multifaceted. However, it has not been the subject of an extensive examination in either the English or Russian historiography: indeed, much the same can be said for the role of religion in any of the Romanov Empire’s major conflicts. As such, the publication of Betsy Perabo’s new book is a welcome sight.
The work is divided into two halves, with the first examining the intellectual and institutional context and the second offering a chronological narrative of the Russo-Japanese War itself: both parts are, however, united by a focus on ideas, their development, and their interaction with other concepts like race and civilization. The core task of the first half is to establish a political theology of Orthodox Christianity’s relationship with the state and its attitude to war. Noting the lack of a defined ‘just war’ tradition in Orthodoxy comparable to that which emerged from St Augustine and Grotius, Perabo nonetheless argues for a Russian Orthodox way of thinking about armed conflict that, while coinciding with the western doctrine in some ways, was rather distinct. This is discussed most intensively in Chapter 4, where the author interrogates the concept of the ‘Christ-loving army’, liturgical and ritual practices, and the writings of the philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev and Archbishop Innokentii (Borisov) in order to construct the outlines of a Russian Orthodox notion of ‘holy war’.
Perabo also looks at the history of the Orthodox Church’s missionary efforts in Japan and its conceptualization of Buddhism: this helps introduce the central figure of the book’s second half, St Nikolai, the founder of the Japanese Orthodox Church. During the conflict, Nikolai remained in Japan, where his loyalty was divided between his convert flock on the one hand and his motherland on the other: this difficult situation provoked some of the most original Orthodox introspection on war to emerge from the battle between Russia and its Asian adversary. Furthermore, the author takes into account the views of Lev Tolstoi, the revolutionary-turned-monarchist thinker L. A. Tikhomirov, an imprisoned Russian soldier, and a frontline military chaplain so as to posit that Orthodoxy’s role in the conflict was considerably more complex than was assumed immediately afterwards.
To begin with the positive aspects of the work under review, it is most certainly an original contribution, being one of the first book-length studies on Orthodoxy and war in the Russian Empire. The analysis of the primary sources is generally sound, especially with regards to the diary entries of St Nikolai. The elucidation of dense theological ideas renders much that is opaque clear to even the unversed reader. The use of English-language materials published in Japan offers a valuable counterweight to the Russian sources. The conclusion is well reasoned and contains an interesting discussion of the modern application of the Orthodox concept of holy war to the campaign against terrorism.
However, there are significant flaws that must be addressed. Firstly, on a superficial level, there are some peculiar stylistic choices, the most jarring of which is that the author evinces a strange disdain for the past tense. Equally, she never settles on whether to refer to bishops by their Russian names or the English/Greek equivalents. These issues, combined with the occasional factual and typographical error (for instance, Antonii (Khrapovitskii) was a bishop in 1904, not a metropolitan (88)), suggest that more intensive proofreading of the manuscript was required.
Secondly, and more problematically, no archival sources are used at all: this is partly defensible when we consider that this is principally an intellectual history, but it is a missed opportunity, especially given that the archives of the Orthodox military chaplaincy and the Church itself are fairly easy to access. What makes this omission more egregious, however, is that the research on the printed sources is very far from comprehensive, with only four contemporary Russian journals being employed: indeed, the author claims on page 12 to have surveyed the military chaplaincy’s newspaper Vestnik Voennogo Dukhovenstva (title misspelled in the book), but the reference list only contains one or two mentions of modern reprints from it. Had she actually studied the journal, she would have given greater prominence to the debate held on its pages during the war about whether it was proper from both a theological and practical perspective for Orthodox chaplains to perform memorial services for the dead soldiers of non-Orthodox confessions: this heated, enduring, and important argument (Father Georgii Shavel’skii, the head of the Orthodox military chaplaincy in World War One, claimed to have almost resigned over it) surely deserves lengthier discussion in a work of this kind. All of this does make the research seem rather slapdash, particularly given that the diocesan gazettes of the Russian Empire are almost all available online through the Russian National Library. This impression is sustained by the failure to engage with what little work does exist on Russian Orthodoxy and war, such as Scott Kenworthy’s articles on monasticism in the First World War or Steven Merritt Miner’s book on the Church in Stalin’s conduct of World War II. Nor is scholarship on comparable cases used, like Patrick Houlihan’s volume about Catholicism in Germany and Austria-Hungary during the Great War.
Finally, the historical narrative of Russian Orthodoxy’s relationship with war as a practice and as a concept prior to the struggle with Japan is full of glaring lacunae. The Church’s role in the Time of Troubles (c. 1598–1613), when Muscovy was riddled with rebellion and foreign invasion, garners nary a mention, despite being the subject of a full book by Isaiah Gruber. Equally overlooked is the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, even though the ecclesiastical journals of the time contain pages upon pages of discussion and the frontline letters of the chaplain Father Vakh Gur’ev were published quite recently.
Unfortunately, these oversights considerably diminish the value of Perabo’s book. It certainly has its virtues as an exploration of an Orthodox alternative to the Western just-war tradition, but the limited primary source research, the absence of the available historiography, and the caesurae in contextualization mean that Orthodoxy in the Russo-Japanese War still awaits a study that will do justice to an intriguing and severely understudied avenue of investigation.
The completion of this review was supported by the Russian Science Foundation (RNF), project no. 18-18-00216.