ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the attitudes toward the Orthodox hierarchy and its faith as they are reflected in the Duma debates by elements of Russian society who had a significant influence on the course of its development--the state, representatives of church officialdom, their supporters and the Duma opposition. The state strove to retain a maximum of its heretofore unlimited prerogatives in the traditional statist concept while the Duma majority, the opposition in the debates on religious matters, sought to broaden the rights of the Orthodox clergy and non-Orthodox faiths in the name of the civil rights of the individual. Peter Arkad'evich Stolypin defended his measure succinctly and forcefully and he thought primarily in terms of the legal relations of church and society to the state and the privileged position of the Orthodox Church under the Fundamental Laws. Bishop Evlogii, an archconservative, at least on matters concerning the privileges of the Orthodox Church, generally concurred with Stolypin.
