Russian Empress Catherine the Great issued a decree on the secularization of church lands on this day in 1764. Perhaps there was something from the Roman Republican past in the Byzantine “culture of place” that prevented Christians from fully subjugating themselves to the Empire. This was different from the scenario in Russia. Peter the Great, having established the Most Holy Governing Synod, implemented the boldest dreams of the Byzantine iconoclast emperors regarding state control over the Church. After Rusʹ came under the Mongols in the thirteenth century, the Russian Church supported the restoration of the Russian lands by the Grand Princes (or Dukes), who resided in Muscovy from the fourteenth century onward. As a result, after the liberation from the Mongols in 1480, the Russian state had gradually been encroaching on the Church’s independence. Because the Mongols did not tax the Church and because Russian nobility donated lands to the Church, by the end of the Mongol rule, one third of the best land in Russia belonged to the Church. At various stages, the Russian state (as for instance at the Stoglav Council [Council of the Hundred Chapters] in 1551) attempted to regulate land transactions. For her part, Catherine the Great resolved the issue unambiguously in the favor the state. Only the Bolsheviks, who simply took everything from the Church in 1918, were more radical than her. Catherine the Great’s reform organized all monasteries of the Russian Church into categories. The state annually allocated funds to the monasteries within these categories. The monasteries left out of the classification (zashtatnye) had to survive on their own. Some of them, like Optina Hermitage, were closed down, while others became parish churches. And those who belonged to the first class, like Holy Trinity St. Sergius Lavra enjoyed quite a comfortable lifestyle. | 
