The clergy in eighteenth-century Russia experienced enormous changes over two or three generations adapting to a new post-Petrine reality. That is to say the representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church remained committed en masse to the pre-Petrine culture, and it was they who were the main focus of the most radical measures of ‘top-down’ Europeanization. This consisted in the creation of a mandatory system of seminaries – public education, supported by regular ‘appraisals’ after which illiterate or half-illiterate clergy were drafted into the army or became peasants. Sociocultural changes in the life and manners of the clergy have been studied repeatedly, but specialists have usually ignored the impact of these changes on the linguistic practices of the clergy. Church Slavonic, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and French and German a little later, were all languages that had become irrelevant or gradually fallen into disuse among the clergy throughout the eighteenth century. The same applies to the languages of the peoples intended for missionary activities: Tatar, Kyrgyz, Chuvash, Mongolian, and others. Each of these languages was a symbol of a certain sociocultural type or lifestyle, a marker of the education received (or not), a sign of the family, career, and personal aspirations of the individual clergyman.