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Heather Bailey, Good for the Souls: A History of Confession in the Russian Empire, by Nadieszda Kizenko, The English Historical Review, Volume 137, Issue 589, December 2022, Pages 1843–1845, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac244
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Confession is shorthand for what was, in the Russian empire, a multi-staged process, govienie, that involved fasting, daily church attendance for a period of time (commonly three days), and auricular confession, as preparation for communion. Drawing on legal documents, court cases, church service books, theological and devotional works, consistory records, diaries, memoirs, illustrations and literary works, Nadieszda Kizenko explores both the goals of secular and ecclesiastical authorities and the experiences and attitudes of Orthodox laity who exercised their agency, told ‘their own story’, and described ‘their inner lives’ by complying with or circumventing their obligation to confess (pp. 5–6).
While the Roman Catholic Church adopted the practice of obligatory annual confession at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), the Moscow Church Council of 1666–7 was a turning point in Russia. The schism in the Russian Orthodox Church lent impetus to the expectation that people confess and commune annually. Priests were instructed to teach their parishioners to go to confession during fast periods, not to perform burial rites for parishioners who went more than a year without confession, and to keep records of who went to confession and communion. These measures were to help sniff out Old Believers or other dissenters, and compliance became—and remained until 1917—a marker of Orthodox identity and Russianness.
