Women on the Siberian Frontier: The Expansion of Orthodoxy and Empire in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Combining the use of gender and women’s history to understand female experience and identity formation with the history of the Russian imperial expansion, my dissertation will examine the presence of Orthodox women and on the Siberian frontier in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The relationship between gender and empire existed within a project of ecclesiastic imperialism, in which the Russian Orthodox Church sought to acquire large amounts of land and implant its faith in Siberia. I begin with the premise that both gender and empire are about relationships of power and the politics of difference. Women as Orthodox Christians transmitted the historical identity of the Russian state as empowered actors in the frontier spaces of Siberia, even while they were socially subordinate to the plans and desires of men. Orthodox women’s stories in Siberia intersected with the establishment of ecclesiastical institutions and the propagation of Orthodox belief on the frontier, revealing that the Russian Orthodox Church was not only the moral legitimizer of empire, but the driving force of imperial expansion in this region. The interplay of power on the frontier in the realms of gender and empire occurred on an intimate, personal level, and was mediated in complex and unexpected ways. At times, gender structures reflected imperial models that promoted unequal power. At other times, conventional gender roles of women deviated, and created contradictions to the narrative of singularly powerful males as the dominant productive force in the construction and maintenance of a frontier community. This study of Orthodox women, their storied lives and experiences as monastic women, wives and widows, as well as prisoners and penitents, offers a multi-dimensional view of the Siberian frontier that has not been told.