Through the synods and in other ways the tsarist government annually supplied the church with the average amount of 50,000,000 roubles (at a time when the rouble was worth one hundred times as much as to-day). The synods had 70,000,000 roubles to their credit in the banks. The churches and the monasteries owned vast areas of land. In the year 1905 the churches owned 1,872,000 desyatinas, and the monasteries owned 740,000 desyatinas. Six of the largest monasteries owned 182,000 desyatinas. The Solovyetsky monastery owned 66,000 desyatinas; the Sarovskaya, 26,000; the Alexandro-Nevskaya, 25,000; and so on. In 1903, the churches and monasteries of Petrograd owned 266 rent-producing properties in the form of houses, shops, building sites, etc. In Moscow, they owned 1054 rent-paying houses, not to mention 32 hotels. In Kiev, the churches owned 114 houses. Here are the stipends of the metropolitans and the archbishops. The metropolitan of Petrograd received 300,000 roubles per annum; the metropolitans of Moscow and of Kiev were paid 100,000 roubles per annum each; the stipend of the archbishop of Novgorod was 310,000 roubles.
There were about 30,000 church schools, and these were attended by 1,000,000 pupils. More than 20,000 teachers of religion were “at work” in the elementary schools of the Ministry for Education.
Everyone knows that the autocracy supported the Orthodox church as the dominant and only true church. Many millions of roubles were raised by taxing Musulmans (Tartars and Bashkirs), Catholics (Poles), and Jews. This money was used by the Orthodox clergy to demonstrate that all other faiths were false. Under the tsarist regime, religious persecution attained unprecedented proportions. In the population of Russia, for every hundred inhabitants there were (besides the 70 Orthodox,) 9 Catholics, 11 Mohammedans, 5 Protestants, 4 Jews, and 1 of various creeds. As for the number of the Orthodox clergy, the following were the figures for the year 1909: