The Russian Empire conquered Eastern Armenia between 1805 and 1828. Bishop Nerses Ashtaraketsi (1771-1857) had supported the Russian conquest of Eastern Armenia in the belief that liberation from Persian rule would bring greater freedom to the Armenian people. However, he had been blindsided; his opposition to General Field Marshal Ivan Paskevich (1782-1856), who was the commander of the Caucasian front during the Russo-Persian and Russo-Turkish wars of 1826-1829, earned him to be exiled to Besarabia as primate of the Armenian diocese in 1828.
The
Russian government immediately took measures to regulate its relations with the
Catholicosate of All Armenians, headquartered in Holy Etchmiadzin. Paskevich
obtained special permission from the government to establish a set of rules. He
formed a four-member committee in 1829, which produced a statute of the
Armenian Church on January 8, 1830.
The
preliminary version was revised in Saint Petersburg, the capital of the Russian
Empire, and after certain changes it was presented to Czar Nicholas I
(1825-1855), who approved it on March 11, 1836. These bylaws, officially titled
“On the Management of the Spiritual Activities of the Armenian Gregorian
Church,” were included in the eleventh volume of the Russian code, and
popularly known as Polozhenye (“statute,”
in Russian). (The name “Gregorian” is a misnomer of the Armenian Church, as it was
not founded by St. Gregory the Illuminator, but by the Apostles Thaddeus and
Bartholomew.)
The Polozhenye, composed of 141 articles, greatly reduced the political powers of
the Armenian religious leadership, including that of the Catholicos, while
preserving the autonomy of the Armenian Church. It established a Synod that
would oversee the activities of the Catholicos. After 1836, in agreement with
the new regulation, the Catholicos of Etchmiadzin was to be elected in
congresses in Etchmiadzin, in which religious and non-religious dignitaries
would participate.
Nerses
Ashtaraketsi, elected Catholicos of All Armenians in 1843 (1843-1857) fought to
restore the rights of the Catholicos curtailed by the Polozhenye. Realizing that one tyranny had been replaced with
another, Catholicos Nerses frequently overlooked the Russian-approved statutes
and worked on his own. He concentrated all ecclesiastical power in his hands
and did not complete the members of the Synod. He made sure that the resolutions
of the Synod were not approved and thus reduced its effectiveness to naught. He
even wrote a new statute for the Armenian Church that was not submitted to the
government for approval, but he used it as the Church’s own guideline.
Nevertheless,
the Polozhenye continued to be
applied in Eastern Armenia until the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917.
