At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia's Volga-Kama Region, 1827-1905
"Makes a contribution to a more in-depth and nuanced understanding of Russia's confessional politics in the region where its road to empire began."—Azade-Ayse Rorlich, University of Southern California, American Historical Review, June 2003"The collapse of the Soviet Union has clearly energized the study of cultural diversity and imperial policies in the Russian borderlands, and Paul Werth's splendid account of confessional politics on the middle Volga is one of the finest results of this focus."—Stephen Batalden, Arizona State University, The Russian Review, vol. 63, no. 3, July 2004"Werth's At the Margins of Orthodoxy focuses on the Volga-Kama region with its Finnic and Turkic peoples and examines Orthodox missionary endeavors in the region from the 1820s through 1905. . . . Negotiation is a central theme of this study in which non-Russians and Russian authorities were involved in a mutually constitutive relationship, each forming the other. . . . Werth also explores the less well known but nonetheless fascinating story of Mari Orthodoxy, and the creation of a Mari monastery."—Nicholas B. Breyfogle, The Ohio State University, Journal of Modern History, vol. 77, no. 1, 1 March 2005