A Special Body for Managing Heterodox Confessions in the Sate System of the Russian Empire at the Beginning of the 19th Century

Since the end of the 1710s and until 1832 the Justitz Collegium of Livland, Estland and Finland Affairs (from 1812 the Justitz Collegium of Livland and Estland Affairs, LEF) was a central non-departmental state institution with administrative and judicial functions. The collegium did not have a single constituent document, as a result of which its competence was not precisely defined. It should be noted that the jurisdiction of the LEF extended mainly to institutions and persons of the Protestant (Lutheran, Reformed and Augsburg) religion. A specific feature of the LEF by the beginning of the 19th century was that in its activities it was guided primarily by local (mainly Swedish) legislation of the 15th–early 18th centuries and ecclesiastical law, and not Russian (general imperial) legislation. The highest court of appeal for LEF was the Governing Senate. The activities of the Ministry of Spiritual Affairs of Foreign Confessions in 1817–1824 organizationally united the Synod and the Justitz Collegium of the Livonian, Estonian and Finnish Affairs under the authority of the Minister of Spiritual Affairs and Public Education. Despite submission to the Governing Senate, LEF managed to actually maintain an autonomous, intermediate position in the system of central and local state institutions, not obeying the Synod. A short period of time 1817–1824 became a time of the organizational unification of the subjects of jurisdiction of the Holy Synod and the LEF League under the authority of the Minister of Spiritual Affairs and Public Education. The article is based on a scientific report made at the International Scientific Conference “Russia and Finland: Interaction of Cultures in the Past and Present” in St. Petersburg on October 13–15, 2009.