Apostasy in the Baltic Provinces: Religious and National Indifference in Imperial Russia

There has been a rich body of scholarship in recent years that challenges the accepted idea of the spread of nationalist thinking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by highlighting the flexible, ambiguous, opportunistic or instrumental ways in which the inhabitants of central and eastern Europe engaged with ideas about nationhood. However, so far these discussions of ‘national indifference’ have not extensively examined the crossovers with flexible and ambivalent attitudes and actions regarding matters of religion, such as oscillating religious commitment, hybrid forms of religiosity and conversion. This article examines cases of conversion and reconversion (apostasy) between Lutheranism and Orthodoxy in the Baltic provinces of the Russian empire in the second half of the nineteenth century, in order to deepen our understanding of how institutionally determined forms of religious ascription often became blurred at the level of everyday activities as people exercised choice over matters of faith for various personal, social and economic reasons. By extending the concept of national indifference through an examination of religious indifference, the cases under consideration elucidate how confession became entangled with ideas about national and imperial belonging in the late nineteenth century.