In this path-breaking monograph, Nadieszda Kizenko, professor of history at the University at Albany, explores the history of the sacrament of confession in Russia from the seventeenth century to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. During this period, annual confession became compulsory for all Orthodox subjects of the tsar. Even though church and state required confession and punished those who failed to participate in this ritual, confession was not simply a civic duty performed under duress, Kizenko assures us. Instead, “confession was something personal, felt, and real” (6). Through a masterful analysis of a wide variety of published and archival sources from over three centuries, Kizenko provides an account of “how confession . . . actually worked” (2). In seven chronologically ordered chapters, this monograph unveils an overlooked element of the everyday experience of Russian Orthodox Christians before 1917—the yearly process of formal penance. In Kizenko's view, “confession in Russia became simultaneously a means of education, a political tool, a devotional exercise, and a literary genre” (2).

Kizenko opens her work by offering a lucid explanation of the basic liturgical structure of penance, which did not change during the period she examines. From the age of seven, every Orthodox Christian had to undertake govienie, three days of fasting, prayer, and church attendance, before confessing to the priest. Confession was in turn a requirement for communion. Govienie and confession usually took place during Great Lent. Sensitive to the beauty and complexity of the liturgy, Kizenko effectively conveys its significance to the lay reader.

Throughout the book, Kizenko argues against Russian exceptionalism, even as she acknowledges the religious policies that distinguished Russia not only from western Europe, but other Orthodox nations. As a Christian monarchy, Russia's regulation of confession was not so different from that of neighboring Catholic and Protestant kingdoms, she contends. Seventeenth-century Muscovite church reforms to make regular confession compulsory were “utterly within the modern European spectrum of penitential discipline” (33). Kizenko shows how prominent Ruthenian clerics, such as Petro Mohyla, borrowed formulas and practices from the Catholic Counter-Reformation to turn confession into a tool to educate and discipline their flocks.

In her analysis of the church reforms of Peter I (r. 1682–1725), Kizenko faces the greatest challenge to her argument against Russian exceptionalism. In 1722, Peter required priests to “report anything they learned at confession of intended treason or attempts on the life or honour of the sovereign” (73). Kizenko is fully aware of the radical nature of this Petrine innovation: “for the first time in Orthodox writing, the confessional seal is broken explicitly and deliberately” (75). At the same time, she adduces evidence that, in practice, the secrecy of confession remained important: priests who violated the seal faced harsh punishment, including execution.

Yet Kizenko also demonstrates that confessional confidentiality was often breached. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, elite Russians approached confession as social performance. For example, fully aware that the contents of her confession would be swiftly conveyed to Empress Elizabeth (r. 1741–62), the future Catherine II (r. 1762–96) used the sacrament to defend herself against malicious rumors. Nicholas I (r. 1825–55) “continued to loom over the confessions of his elite male subjects” (136), evincing keen interest in the confessions of both the rebel Decembrists and the poet Aleksandr Pushkin. Given the close alliance of church and state, “ordinary Orthodox Christians in the Russian empire could never be entirely sure that what they said at confession would not go further” (175).

By the mid-nineteenth century, enforcement of the confessional requirement became more effective and pervasive. Church penance was routinely assigned to Orthodox subjects who had committed secular crimes. After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, the church developed a more pastoral approach to confession, seeking to persuade and not simply compel parishioners to do their sacramental duty. Charismatic priests such as Ioann Sergiev of Kronstadt gained fervent disciples who wrote down detailed confessions, which “read like vivid autobiographies and not rote incantations” (219). The revolutions of 1917, however, “definitively broke the structures that mandated annual govienie” (238).

Given the complex nature of her evidence, Kizenko is reluctant to make grand theoretical pronouncements, such as those of Michel Foucault, about the relationship between confession and the construction of the modern individual. Rich in empirical detail, Kizenko's fascinating book instead reveals Russia's confessional system as both a “technology of the self” (25) that offered “the potential for truth-telling and transformation” (231) and a technology of domination, in which church and state cooperated to create compliant subjects.