| Summary: | Background. A study of the materials of the periodical press of the capital and
the province in relation to the status of the Russian Orthodox Church in the second
half of the 19th – early 20th centuries allow us to understand the position of contemporaries and rethink the significance of the confessional factor during the period of
systemic reforms. The research purpose is to study the place of the official Church
in post-reform Russia on the basis of the analysis of periodical press materials and
works of contemporaries.
Materials and methods. The research was conducted on the basis of archives,
memoir literature, materials of the periodical press. Formal-logical, comparativehistorical
and content analysis methods were used. In terms of the potential of the
social approach, the author has studied the state of various classes of the Russian society
in the 1850s and 1890s.
Results. The article settles the main objective – to study the place of Orthodoxy
as a state religion in the structure of the Russian state and society of the second half
of the 19th century.
Conclusions. The Russian Orthodox Church was firmly embedded in the bureaucratic
machinery of the state, and during the preparation and implementation of
reforms, it was the spiritual bureaucracy that was relied on as the conductor of the
ongoing reforms in the field. How effective such a channel of interaction with
the population was can be judged by the reviews of contemporaries and responses in
the periodical press. The degree of influence of the Orthodox clergy on the mood of
the population varied significantly and directly depended on both the territorial
remoteness from the capitals and the ethnoconfessional characteristics of the provinces.
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