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In 1917 the Cheliabinsk Vicariate, like the Church in most areas in the Russian empire, declined to support the autocracy, welcomed the February Revolution, endorsed the Provisional Government, and envisioned a broad set of reforms that even included a greater role for the laity in Church governance. The key agent for reform in Cheliabinsk – as in other dioceses – was the Assembly of Clergy and Laity, the focus of this study. Although the Assembly did adopt a radical and ostensibly popular social and administrative program, the vicariate encountered growing lay disenchantment – because of its support for an unpopular war, because of a caveat deferring social reform, but also because of the Church’s reluctance to give parishioners full power over the parish. The intensifying crises of 1917 heightened expectations for reform, and the disintegration of authority in Cheliabinsk and within the Church itself widened the chasm between the Church and parishioners. In response, diocesan authorities support...

The history of twentieth-century Russian Orthodoxy has been written largely in terms of the Church and state, martyr and oppressor, all within the traditional paradigm of ineluctable, ubiquitous secularization. This article shifts the focus from Bolshevik and bishop to believer, framed within the more recent model that emphasizes “believing without belonging”. While that new paradigm fits the Russian case, the latter certainly had unique specifics: it was precisely the coercive disestablishment of the Church that empowered parishioners and inadvertently laid the foundations for the post-Soviet religious revival. While the depth and meaning of that revival is open to dispute and calibration, it has unquestionably posed a dramatic contrast to contemporary Europe.