Soslovie and the “Foreign” Clergies of Imperial Russia
Journal: OpenEdition (OpenEdition)
Year: 2016

This essay addresses a significant imperial dimension of the soslovie question by analyzing the estate status of the religious servitors of Russia’s non-Orthodox faiths (the “foreign confessions”). Its goal is to ascertain the extent to which one may discern a clerical estate (dukhovnoe sostoianie) for the foreign confessions, the standards by which individuals were recognized as belonging to non-Orthodox clergies, and the rights and privileges to which these religious servitors were entitled. D