At the Margins of Orthodoxy

In a period of dramatic social change, when Orthodoxy and nationalism were the twin pillars of the Russian state, how did the tsarist bureaucracy govern an expansive realm inhabited by the peoples of many nations and ethnicities professing various...

Paul W. Werth is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

The collapse of the Soviet Union has clearly energized the study of cultural diversity and imperial policies in the Russian borderlands, and Paul Werth's splendid account of confessional politics on the middle Volga is one of the finest results of this focus.

Azade-Ayse Rorlich, University of Southern California,:

Makes a contribution to a more in-depth and nuanced understanding of Russia's confessional politics in the region where its road to empire began.

Nicholas B. Breyfogle, The Ohio State University:

Werth's At the Margins of Orthodoxy focuses on the Volga-Kama region with its Finnic and Turkic peoples and examines Orthodox missionary endeavors in the region from the 1820s through 1905.... Negotiation is a central theme of this study in which non-Russians and Russian authorities were involved in a mutually constitutive relationship, each forming the other.... Werth also explores the less well known but nonetheless fascinating story of Mari Orthodoxy, and the creation of a Mari monastery.