“A Territory of Threat”: The Banning of the Herrnhut Communities in Livonia and Local Society in 1743

Abstract

This article analyses the decree issued by Empress Elizaveta Petrovna on April 16, 1743, the first in the Russian Empire and targeting the Herrnhut Brethren Community. It has been mentioned in historiography but quoted from secondary sources and interpreted as a decree directed against the missionaries, even though J. Eckardt (1876) and, recently, O. Teigeler (2006) put it in the context of the history of the Herrnhut communities in Livonia. The author analyses the content and implementation of the decree of 1743 in the context of the development of the Herrnhut communities in Livonia, including the island of Ösel, in the 1720s–1730s. The documents of the investigative case against the Herrnhut communities preserved in the fund of the Secret Chancellery (RGADA) and partly copied in the investigation dossier compiled by the College of Justice for Livonia, Estland, and Finland and kept in the fund of the College of Foreign Affairs in AVPRI, reveal that by 1743, the St Petersburg authorities did not consider the sermon of the Herrnhut to threaten them or Orthodoxy, nor did they have any idea of the doctrine itself. First, the decree ordered that Countess von Zinzendorf be caught, as the purpose of her stay in St Petersburg in 1743 was unclear. Further, the decree of 1743 was not intended against the few missionaries settled in St Petersburg who were striving to reach Asia through the Russian Empire. The correspondence between Chancellor A. P. Bestuzhev-Rumin and I. A. Cherkasov, Cabinet Minister of Empress Elizaveta Petrovna, reveals that the action taken on the community in 1743 was largely prompted by the foreign policy circumstances. The main threat to the central government was the commissions set up a year earlier by local noble elected bodies, i. e. the Landtags and the Ober-Consistory, to investigate the activities of the Herrnhut communities in Livonia. The activities of the Baltic nobility carried out independently of the imperial centre aroused the gravest suspicions because its specific rights and privileges, though confirmed by the Peace of Nystadt, were kept vague for the St Petersburg authorities by the 1740s. The local nobility, dramatically involved in the activities of the Herrnhut communities in the 1720s–1740s, found themselves in a difficult position, torn between their adherence to the doctrine and the need to remain loyal to the St Petersburg authorities, fulfilling the requirements of the personal decree of 1743.