The 'Infidel' Against the Empire: Based on Materials from the Secret Chancellery and Expedition

• In Event: The Individual and the Empire: The Fate of Subjects in the 18th-Century Russian Empire (The Problem of Source Analysis)

Abstract

The presentation will examine an individual’s unique form of protest against imperial expansion in the 18th century. The primary sources for this study are investigative cases from the Secret Chancellery and Expedition, which document accusations of insulting the monarch, the church, and the faith by "infidels" (inorodtsy) and "foreigners" (inovertsy)  — whose ethnicity and often religion were explicitly recorded. For example, a Latvian, Tatar, Bashkir, Kalmyk, Polish nobleman, Caucasian Chechen, or Yakut might have uttered "insolent words about the empress" or, in "a state of drunkenness", spoken of "killing her for forced baptism."
These investigative records provide a rare opportunity to hear the voice of the silent majority (borrowing from Aron Gurevich), as they preserve the actions and motivations of subjects deemed dangerous to the state. At the same time, the authorities did not merely punish these "grave" offenses but frequently used the threat of execution as leverage, substituting it with conditional loyalty—often in the form of conversion to Orthodoxy. This sheds new light on the mechanisms of social control and standardization within the Russian Empire.

Author

• Elena Marasinova, U of Münster (Germany)