“Divorce, soldier style” in eighteenth-century Russia

The article analyzes the practice of unauthorized divorces by drawing up a written document - a divorce letter - during the 18th century. The authors consider this phenomenon in the broader context, i.e. the effectiveness and degree of control of the Russian Orthodox Church over the life of laypeople in Russia in the early modern period. The article gives a brief description of modern historiographical trends in the study of this problem. Based on a wide range of archival and published sources, the authors identify factors that influenced the practice of divorce by mutual consent. According to the authors, the creation of a large regular army and the conditions of service in it played a serious role in the unfolding rivalry between the two trends in treating marriage - as a sacrament and as a civil contract. Among the common people the practice of divorce letters was eliminated under the influence of bureaucratic regulation, the modernization of the state and institutional strengthening of the church. As to the nobility and officer environment, no less significant constraint for the above practice were the problems with the inheritance of estates. Soldiers, on the other hand, were the social stratum in whose environment the practice of unauthorized divorce spread more easily and they were less exposed to all these deterrents. The authors come to the conclusion that the regular army, due to the mere fact of its existence and the specific conditions of army life, brought about a demand for a different attitude to marriage as a union containing the features of a civil contract and carrying a powerful impulse of modernization in the socio-cultural sphere.