ALISON RUTH KOLOSOVA

Editor’s note: In Russia, Orthodox Christianity is colloquially tied to Russian ethnicity. Yet prior to the demise of the Russian Empire in 1917, Orthodox missionary efforts reached many minority peoples across its vast expanse, such as the Altai in mountainous southern Siberia and the Mordvin along the Volga River. The current head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, has Mordvin family roots. 

Remarkable among these missionary efforts was the work of Nikolai Ilminsky (1822-1891), still seen today in the Turkic-language worship of surviving Orthodox communities in the nominally Muslim Russian republic of Tatarstan. Visiting Tatarstan in the early 2000s, the editor met a local Protestant who worked on the first modern Tatar translation of the New Testament. He related that his team had also produced a Tatar edition of the Book of Psalms simply by taking Ilminsky’s prerevolutionary translation and giving it modern orthography. 

Another focus of Ilminsky’s mission were the Chuvash, a Turkic people also settled along the Volga River, approximately 400 miles east of Moscow. In this article, Alison Ruth Kolosova—a long-time resident of the present-day Chuvash Republic—provides a fascinating insight into the lasting impact of Nikolai Ilminsky and his followers.

The year 2022 will mark 200 years since the birth of the Russian Orthodox missionary, linguist, and educator Nikolai Ilminsky. His modest grave describes him as “the great enlightener of the natives with Christ’s teaching,” while an icon alongside depicts St. Nicholas holding the Gospel open at the words of Matthew 5:16: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.” On one side of the page these words are written in Slavonic, as is usual on icons in Russia. But on the other side they are in Tatar, the Turkic language still spoken today by many of the inhabitants of the Republic of Tatarstan, in whose capital, Kazan, the grave is situated. 

Ilminsky was a specialist in Arabic and Turkic languages, which he taught in Kazan in the 1840s-1860s. In 1872 he became director of the Kazan Native Teachers’ Seminary, where the first indigenous teachers were trained for native-language schools among the Turkic and Finno-Ugric peoples who then formed the majority of the population in the basins of the great Volga and Kama Rivers. As mentor to these teachers and others at schools set up on his model, Ilminsky worked with them to create alphabets for their almost entirely unwritten languages, as well as to oversee biblical and Orthodox liturgical translations that were read, sung, and prayed in village schools. The missionary movement he inspired thus laid the groundwork for a wave of scholarship on the languages, history, and traditional worldviews and rites of the Volga-Kama peoples, as well as the development of an indigenous intelligentsia, which paved the way for a degree of political autonomy for these peoples in the wake of the 1917 Revolution. 

Over the last century, however—and particularly during the Soviet era—Ilminsky has ironically been portrayed as an instrument of tsarist colonialism who sought to russify the Volga-Kama peoples and to eradicate their languages and cultures. While one may find a page or two devoted to Ilminsky in histories of Orthodox mission, there has been surprisingly little study of his work and few attempts to grapple with one of the key issues it raises: Did he wish to inculturate Orthodox Christianity among the nonSlavic peoples along the Volga River, or was his aim to assimilate them, their languages, and their cultures into greater Russian culture? Alternatively, is this polarization of his motives misunderstanding the man completely?1 

The ambiguity of Ilminsky’s motivation was curiously reflected in the 2020 celebrations marking the centenary of the Soviet creation of the Chuvash Autonomous Region [Russian: Oblast’] in June 1920. In Estonia and Finland, whose independence may also be traced to the collapse of the Russian Empire, similar celebrations in recent years have focused squarely upon national autonomy. But in Chuvashia, the centenary logo proclaims the word “together” (vmeste in Russian, perle in Chuvash) without clarifying whether this refers to the togetherness of the Chuvash within their own republic, or to the Chuvash remaining firmly together with Russia. 

The walls in the center of Cheboksary, the republic’s capital, have become an open-air exhibition of 100 Chuvash artists, musicians, and writers who have played significant roles in preserving and developing Chuvash national identity. One key figure is Ilminsky’s main Chuvash follower, Ivan Yakovlev (1848-1930). Yakovlev is today remembered as the “Enlightener of the Chuvash” owing to his outstanding contribution to the development of the Chuvash written language and the late-19th-century creation of the first schools where the Chuvash language was used as the teaching medium. These schools promoted literacy, music, craftsmanship, agriculture, and the Orthodox Christian faith. Out of them emerged the first generations of a creative, scientific—and at times revolutionary—Chuvash intelligentsia. Many alumni of these schools are featured among the centenary exhibition, and some were directly responsible for the attainment of a degree of Chuvash political autonomy in 1920.2 

An imposing monument to Yakovlev—appropriately seated with a large open book on his lap—has long stood in front of the Chuvash National Library. In 1868 Yakovlev founded the Simbirsk Chuvash Teachers’ School, where around a thousand teachers were trained for village schools. It was in this communal context that the main Orthodox service books were translated into, and published in, the Chuvash language, and teachers were trained in the art of church choir directing, so that pupils and parishioners could fully participate in Chuvash-language Orthodox worship. After translating the Gospels into Chuvash beginning in the early 1870s, the entire New Testament was published in collaboration with the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1908-11. Out of this hotbed of translating, publishing, and musical activity, Chuvash-language Orthodox parish communities with indigenous clergy emerged in towns such as Kazan or Simbirsk [now Ulyanovsk] and many scattered villages, where the new texts were edited by being read and sung in streets and homes. 

The vibrant Orthodox Christian community worshipping in Chuvashia today suggests that this 19th-century missionary work has borne fruit. Most Chuvash would describe themselves as Orthodox, despite some Chuvash adopting the Islam of their Tatar neighbors in the wake of Tsar Nicholas II’s 1905 decree On Strengthening the Foundations of Religious Tolerance, and despite the emergence of Pentecostal and other Protestant churches, many of which arrived on the scene since the 1990s. In villages, where the Chuvash language is still spoken by the majority, Chuvash-language Orthodox worship remains the norm. In larger towns there are many dual-language parishes such as the Church of the Resurrection in Cheboksary, where worship takes place in Chuvash in one half of the church and in Slavonic in the other half. Revised versions of Ilminsky’s 19th-century liturgical texts have recently been published, while in 2009 the Russian Bible Society published the entire Bible in Chuvash, partly based upon the translations of Yakovlev and his schools. An impressive Orthodox prison ministry serves throughout the republic, with many laypeople involved in catechetical work among inmates. The appearance is of the Chuvash having adopted Orthodoxy as their own. 

In the wake of the 2020 centenary celebrations, however, one Cheboksary clergyman expressed to me his concern about the rise of Chuvash nationalism accompanied by a hostile attitude towards Orthodoxy. Of course, a heightened sense of national identity  would appear natural during the centenary celebrations, and there may be many factors behind hostility towards Orthodoxy. Yet two aspects of the history and legacy of the missionary movement point to latent issues that remain unresolved. 

The clergyman’s concern reminded me of an earlier conversation I had with a senior scholar at the Chuvash State Institute of Humanities, the republic’s leading research institution for Chuvash language, history, and culture. He remarked that the Orthodox faith and the Chuvash indigenous faith are two very distinct phenomena—a statement that arose out of his obvious concern that indigenous worldviews and rites had been lost with the Chuvash conversion to Orthodoxy. Underlying his viewpoint, I would argue, are Soviet interpretations of the impact of Christianization upon the worldviews and rites of both the Slavic and non-Slavic peoples of the Russian Empire. These interpretations may be summed up by the Russian word dvoeverie [“dual faith” or “double belief ”]: the syncretistic practice of Christian and indigenous, pre-Christian rites. 

In the 19th century both the concept and word dvoeverie were already in use by some ethnographers and missionaries to describe “pagan,” “idolatrous,” or “devilish” rites, which they saw as still entwined with Orthodox practices and beliefs among the Volga peoples. Under the influence of Soviet atheism, this led to the creation of a model of folk culture that exaggerated the “pagan” elements in popular piety, but remained silent about the Christian basis of many popular religious practices and beliefs. Such views were based upon the presupposition that there could be no overlap or correlation between indigenous belief systems and Christian cosmology, no common understandings or aspirations to the divine that would enable indigenization of the Christian faith without necessarily uprooting ancient worldviews and rites.3 On this point, Ilminsky himself wrote:

Viewing the natives from the psychological viewpoint, it is strange for me that some missionaries persecute with every available method… and try to destroy shamanistic beliefs and rites as if they were positively the work of the devil. In my opinion, these beliefs and rites are no more than the aspiration to the divine and mystical, deeply implanted in human nature by the Creator Himself.4

Thanks to Ilminsky’s inspiration, many teachers and clergy became the first native-speaker ethnographers to write descriptions of indigenous beliefs and rites, upon which much contemporary Chuvash scholarship is based. Nevertheless, the general tendency of the 19th-century missionary movement to label indigenous practices as “paganism” and automatically alien to Orthodoxy, together with Soviet conceptions of dvoeverie, has led some post-Soviet scholars to feel that Chuvash indigenous culture has been uprooted by Orthodoxy.5 

The labelling of unconventional faith practices as “pagan” is still common among Orthodox believers in Chuvashia. A woman who grew up in a Chuvash village but now lives in Cheboksary once spontaneously commented to me, “But the Chuvash, of course, are still largely pagan.” When I asked her to give me an example of this Chuvash paganism, she told me that at the end of Orthodox funerals, villagers would go together to the boundary of the village and communally shout farewell to the soul of the departed. She was considered very strange for refusing to participate in what she now viewed as a pagan practice. I asked her whether there was anything intrinsically more pagan in such a communal “farewell shout” than in the standard practice of saying farewell to the departed by kissing them as they lie in their coffin at the end of the Orthodox funeral service. My question left her deep in thought.

Another controversial practice is that of consecrating salt on Holy Thursday—the Thursday before Easter when Orthodox services recall Christ’s Last Supper with his disciples, and devout Orthodox come to church to take communion. During Holy Week in 2019 many of the parishioners at the Church of the Resurrection in Cheboksary could be seen bringing salt from their homes. The priest prayed a blessing over it at the end of the communion service, and the salt was then taken home to be used for domestic purposes. Bringing other natural elements before God for His blessing is common Orthodox practice, such as the blessing of water on the feast of Epiphany, the blessing of the honey harvest on the feast of the Procession of the Precious Wood of the Life-giving Cross, and of apples and other fruit on the feast of the Transfiguration. 

On Holy Thursday in 2019, a woman I sang with in the church choir told me that the “Thursday salt” would traditionally have been baked in the stove throughout Lent until it turned black. She pointed out that some of the pots of white salt being consecrated had this “black salt” sprinkled on them, both to recall the tradition and to give the white salt the efficacy of the old rite. Such salt was used, she told me, in popular healing practices connected with curing alcoholism or warding off evil. While such practices may be considered evidence of lingering pre-Christian paganism or of dvoeverie, it is worth remembering the vital role played by salt in preserving and curing food, and in healing the physical bodies of both humans and animals, especially before the rise of modern medicine and industrialized food production. We should therefore perhaps not be surprised that a tradition of consecrating salt on one of the most important days of the Orthodox liturgical year has continued among the Chuvash, and that this salt was formerly prepared alongside prayer and fasting during the entire period of Lent.6 

Another lingering shadow leading some Chuvash to view Orthodoxy and traditional Chuvash culture as irrevocably separate is cast by a further issue arising from within the missionary movement itself: native church leadership. A number of teachers who trained in Ilminsky’s schools went on to become Orthodox clergy; of 141 graduates by 1890, 19 had become priests or deacons. In the 1890s Ivan Yakovlev increased the amount of religious instruction at the Simbirsk Chuvash Teachers’ School with the aim of training future clergy. By the early 20th century there were modest yet significant numbers of Chuvash clergy in several dioceses. In 1904 there were 36 Chuvash priests serving some 502,000 Chuvash living in Kazan Province, while in neighboring Samara Province that same year, 56 Chuvash priests served some 92,000 Chuvash inhabitants.7 

Fed by the surge of national consciousness that arose among the Empire’s non-Russian peoples during the 1905 Revolution, anonymous articles appeared in one Kazan radical journal in 1906 suggesting that native bishops should be consecrated for the Volga peoples.8 While native clergy and teachers discussed the issue among themselves from that point, it was only in 1919 that Yakovlev sent a memorandum to the Missionary Council of the Holy Synod requesting the appointment of a native bishop for the Chuvash.9 Amidst the post-revolutionary turmoil of the Civil War and widespread famine, there was an ambivalent response to his request, which suggested the current structures were adequate. 

Spurred on by the creation of limited Chuvash political autonomy in 1920, a group of Chuvash clergy established an autonomous Chuvash diocese with two Chuvash bishops. This did not entail full autonomy from the Russian Orthodox Church, but a diocese separate from the Kazan and Simbirsk dioceses, where most parishes on the present-day territory of Chuvashia were located in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were supported in this endeavor by the controversial Renovationists, a group of progressive clergy who had taken control of the Russian Orthodox Church after the arrest of Patriarch Tikhon for counter-revolutionary activity in May 1922.10 Owing to the Renovationists’ declaration of loyalty to the Bolshevik government and their defrocking of Patriarch Tikhon in May 1923, they are now widely considered by Russian Orthodox to be a schismatic group. Consequently, among Chuvash believers, relatively little is known today about Ilminsky’s followers apart from Ivan Yakovlev himself, owing to the tarnished reputation of those Chuvash considered to have betrayed the Russian Church by going over to the Renovationists.11 

During the 1930s mass church closures and persecution of clergy and laity decimated the Orthodox Church in Chuvashia as elsewhere in Soviet Russia. In 1945 a diocese of Cheboksary and Chuvashia was created to coincide with the territorial limits of the Soviet-era Chuvash Republic, but it only had 35 functioning parishes by 1976. Much energetic rebuilding of churches and parish communities took place in the post-Soviet period under the leadership of Metropolitan Varnava (Kedrov, d. 2020), and there are now more than 200 parishes.12 [Editor’s note: For comparison, the neighboring region of Nizhny Novgorod has a similar number of parishes for nearly triple the population.] 

In an effort to resolve the issue of local church leadership and governance, metropolitan districts were created in Russia’s national republics in 2012. The current metropolitan of Chuvashia, Savvati (Antonov), was born in Cheboksary and is a Chuvash speaker, while a bishop within his metropolia also speaks Chuvash. A former auxiliary bishop of the metropolia who is also a fluent Chuvash speaker, Ignati (Suranov), is currently bishop of the northern Russian diocese of Cherepovets. Ilminsky and Yakovlev would no doubt be glad that today’s Chuvash Orthodox have their own indigenous leadership and their own ecclesial metropolia, yet are firmly “together” with the wider Russian Orthodox Church. 

Nikolai Ilminsky lived long before the time when the term “inculturation” was coined to refer to the process by which the Gospel becomes “enfleshed” in the language and culture of a people.13 Discussion of inculturation in recent years typically refers to Christ’s incarnation as the model upon which it is based. According to Archbishop Anastasios Yannoulatos, prominent missionary theologian and head of the Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Albania, “the Gospel... has no difficulty in being incarnated in the specific cultural body of each epoch.”14 A careful reading of Russian 19th-century missionary texts reveals that within the Russian Orthodox Church, it was almost certainly Nikolai Ilminsky who first used this incarnational language about the cross-cultural missionary process.15 Crucially, he succeeded in passing on this vision to his disciples. In a 1916 tribute to Ilminsky, the Chuvash priest Mikhail Petrov wrote: “Orthodoxy must be incarnated in the native peoples as creatively and religiously as it has been incarnated in the great Russian people. …This was Ilminsky’s concern, and here is the center of gravity of his entire system.”16 Although Petrov’s words suggest that there was still work to be done, they also make clear that both he and Ilminsky envisioned that such a process of incarnation was possible, and that a radical coming “together” of Orthodoxy with the ancient Chuvash language and culture could take place. 

Notes: 

1. For English-language discussion of Ilminsky, see R.P. Geraci, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001, 83, 253; Paul W. Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance and Confessional Politics in Russia’s Volga-Kama Region, 1827-1905, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002.
2. Following disruptive behavior and revolutionary protests at the Simbirsk Chuvash Teachers’ School in 1907, all first-year students were expelled. Among the protesters was Daniil El’men’, the future architect of limited Chuvash political autonomy, and Konstantin Ivanov, today regarded as the Chuvash national poet.
3. On dvoeverie, see Stella Rock, Popular Religion in Russia: “Double Belief ” and the Making of an Academic Myth, Abingdon: Routledge, 2007; Eve Levin, “Dvoeverie and Popular Religion,” in S.K.Batalden (ed.), Seeking God: The Recovery of Religious Identity in Orthodox Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993, 31-53.
4. [In Russian] N.I. Il`minskii, Kazanskaia Tsentral`naia Kreshchenotatarskaia shkola: materialy dlia istorii khristianskogo prosveshcheniia kreshchenskykh Tatar, Kazan: Tipografiia V.M.Kliuchnikova, 1887, 121-122.
5. Anton K. Salmin’s classic Russian-language work on the spiritual dilemmas of the post-Soviet Chuvash intelligentsia is Narodnaia obriadnost’ chuvashei, Cheboksary: Chuvashskii Gumanitarnyi Institut, 1994. He has recently updated it with Prazdniki, obriady i verovaniia chuvashskogo naroda, Cheboksary: Chuvashskoe Knizhnoe Izdatel`stvo, 2016.
6. The consecration of chetvergova sol’ or “Thursday salt” was also a practice among the Orthodox Slavs. Among the Finno-Ugric Mari people—neighbors to the Chuvash—salt is consecrated on the feast of the Annunciation. Curiously, however, it is called Kugeche shinchal—Kugeche being the Mari word for Easter. [In Russian] L.S. Toidybekova, Mariiskaia mifologiia, Ioshkar-Ola, 2007, 124. 
7.  [In Russian] Nauchnyi arkhiv Chuvashskogo Gosudarstvennogo Instituta Gumanitarnykh Nauk, otd.1, t.178, l.233-236; [in Russian] V. Ivanov, Etnicheskaia geografiia chuvashskogo naroda, Cheboksary: Chuvashskoe knizhnoe izdatel`stvo, 2005, 151. The appointment of a higher proportion of Chuvash clergy in Samara province may be explained by concern at the numbers of Chuvash adopting Islam in a province with a high percentage of Muslims.
8.  [In Russian] Tserkovno-Obshchestvennaia Zhizn`, Kazan, 1906, 689, 804.
9.  [In Russian] Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv (St. Petersburg), f.831, op.1, d.63, l. 55. 
10.  For English-language accounts of the Renovatist movement, see Scott M. Kenworthy, “Russian Reformation? The program for religious renovation in the Orthodox Church, 1922-1925,” Modern Greek Studies Yearbook, Minneapolis, MN, 2000/2001, vol. 16/17, 89-130; Edward E. Roslof, Red Priests: Renovationism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Revolution, 1905-1946, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
11. For more on the creation of a Chuvash national diocese, see Alison Ruth Kolosova, “Sobornost’: its concept, praxis and reception by Chuvash Orthodox Christians of the Volga-Kama region in the early 20th century,” Sobornost/Eastern Churches’ Review, 42 (2020), 1-2.
12.  Metropolitan Varnava died on 1 June 2020 amidst the coronavirus pandemic.
13. For discussion of inculturation and incarnation, see David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission, New York: Orbis Books, 1991, 454.
14. Metropolitan Anastasios Yannoulatos, Facing the World: Orthodox Christian Essays on Global Concerns, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003, 88.
15. [In Russian] N.I. Ilminskii, “O perevode pravoslavnykh khristianskikh knig na tatarskii iazyk pri Kreshcheno-tatarskoi shkole v Kazani,” in Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshchenia, 1870, 43-45.
16.  [In Russian] M. Petrov, “Polozhenie inorodtsev v VolzhskoKamskom krae i prosvetitel’naia sistema N.I. Il’minskago,” in N.I. Il’minskii, Sbornik, Kazan, 1916, 59.

Alison Ruth Kolosova recently completed a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Tartu University, Estonia. Originally from the U.K., she is currently an independent writer and scholar living in the Chuvash Republic. Research for this article was funded by European Regional Development Fund Mobilitas Pluss grant MOBJD318.