About the Event:
The Turpanjian Institute of Social Sciences is pleased to invite you to a public lecture by Dr. Paul Werth on his new book project, Russia’s Other Eastern Church: The Armenian Confession and the Romanov Empire.
Imperial Russia is rightly regarded as an Orthodox Christian country, but this book project insists that it had more than one eastern creed. Deeply implicated in the empire’s governance and geopolitical ambitions was Russia’s other eastern church: the Armenian Apostolic Confession. Combining matters of religious doctrine, geopolitics, and imperial rule, this project offers a deep exploration of Russia’s engagement with the South Caucasus and the experiences of Armenians across the Romanov empire (and beyond) in the long nineteenth century.
The product of work in six archives, argues that two key factors — the theological proximity of the Armenian confession to Eastern Orthodoxy and the trans-imperial character of the Armenian religious community — framed Russia’s relationship with the Armenian church and promoted both partnership and conflict between the two.
Implicated in the study are a broad range of key issues in the history of Russia, the Caucasus, and Eurasia more broadly: the role of doctrinal differences in constituting religious community, the challenge of nationalism for modernizing multinational empires, the implication of religion in Eurasian geopolitics and diplomacy, the links between Russia and the wider world, modes of contact among Armenians across imperial borders, and the presence of democratic elements in tsarist Russia’s autocratic system.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Paul W. Werth is professor of History at University of Nevada, Las Vegas and is the author of several books on religion, empire, and ethnic diversity in Russian history, including most recently How Russia Got Big: A Territorial History (Bloomsbury, 2025).