Navigating an Orthodox conversion: community, environment, and religion on the Island of Ruhnu, 1866-7

ABSTRACT Over the summer of 1866, the majority of the Swedish-speaking population on the Baltic island of Ruhnu (then part of the Russian Empire’s Livland province) sought conversion from Lutheranism to Russian Orthodoxy. Despite interest from the Russian secular and ecclesiastical authorities, however, the conversions did not take place. The islanders used the threat of conversion to leverage concessions from the Lutheran consistory: once achieved, the community lost any interest in pursuing Orthodoxy further. The following article analyses largely unknown sources from both Estonian and Swedish archives to show how the island’s social structure and peculiar geographical position conditioned its inhabitants’ religious choices, thereby providing insight into a previously unstudied instance of peasant agency in the Russian Empire and contributing to studies of that polity’s environmental, ethnic, and confessional diversity.