This monograph owes its origin to the author's work with the documents of the Solovetsky Monastery, thanks to which he got special interest to some issues of the Church economics, and parish problems. This work, defended by the author as his Doctoral thesis, was the first experience of a comprehensive study of church parishes in the Russian Empire.
Z. shows how parish life changed in Russia, and how the relative independence of parish life disappeared (the study was mainly based on the study of parish documents of the North-West Region, where the community enjoyed certain independence, which extended to parish life as the center of community life). When centralization intensified in the structure of the state, communities lost their freedom, and with it parishes also lost their independence, which became the reason for the separation between clergy and laity, and led to the situation when, in the beginning of the reign of Peter the Great, the parish clergy got marginalized into a “crowd of proletarians, ecclesiastic day laborers”, who in the eighteenth century were finally alienated from their flock. Modern scholars note a certain one-sidedness of this interpretation, in which the idealization of the pre-Petrine clergy is complemented with an overly critical view of the clergy of the eighteenth century.