Russification - Religion

• The Russian Orthodox Church launched a mass conversion campaign among the Muslim Tatars.

  By 1900, an estimated 100,000 Tartars had been converted to Christianity.

  As a result of this persecution, separatism remained a strong ambition among the Tatars up to 1917.
• The Russian Orthodox Church even went as far as politically assassinating officials in the Georgian Church.

  Resistance to the attacks on their church stimulated Georgian nationalism rather than suppressing it.
• The property of the Armenian Church was seized.
• The reconstruction of the huge Russian Orthodox cathedral in Riga, Latvia in 1885 was a deliberate symbol of the increasing desire of the tsarist autocracy to assert the superiority of the Russian Church.