This article compares interethnic and interreligious marriages in Russia and Norway during the decades around 1900. State churches dominated religious life in both countries with over 90 percent of the population but both were losing influence during the period we focus on—rapidly in Russia after the 1917 Revolution. The part on Norway employs nominative and aggregate census material which from 1865 asked questions about religious affiliation, while the Russian case study utilizes the database of church microdata being built for Ekaterinburg—a railway hub and an industrial city in the Middle Urals, in Asia—in addition to census aggregates. Our main conclusion is that religion was a stronger regulator of intermarriage than ethnicity. Religious intermarriage was unusual in Ekaterinburg, even if official regulations were softened by the State over time—the exception is during World War I, when there was a deficit of young, Russian men at home and influx of refugees and Austro-Hungarian Prisoners of War (mostly Catholics and Lutherans). The situation was also affected by the 1917 Revolution creating equal rights for all religious denominations. The relatively few religious intermarriages in Norway were mostly between members of different Protestant congregations—nonmembers being the only group who often outmarried. We conclude that representatives of ethnic minorities and new religions seldom outmarry when religion was important for maintaining their identity.

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Smallpox has long been among the infections causing colossal fatalities in epidemics. The creation of a smallpox vaccine in the late eighteenth century helped improve the situation significantly. However, due to a wide range of reasons, some of which were common for many states and some reflected the country’s specificity, it took almost two centuries to introduce vaccination and combat the disease. This time was required not only for the creation of medical structures that provided smallpox vaccination. A considerable obstacle was the prejudice against medical intervention shared by many people, and relative control over the disease was gained only after fear was replaced by an understanding of necessity and appropriateness. High mortality was connected both with health care issues and the existing system of values which was changing more dynamically in cities. This article is devoted to the situation with mortality from smallpox in the early twentieth century in Yekaterinburg, a large commercial, industrial, transport, administrative, and cultural centre of the Central Urals with a population of diverse confessions. The source of data for statistical analysis is registers of city parishes of all religious denominations in the city. The author mostly focuses on three denominations, i.e. Orthodox Christians, Old Believers, and Muslims. The analysis reveals the dependence of mortality of the people’s religion and migration statuses. The results of the research testify to the fact that the medical infrastructure and the level of anti-smallpox measures were effective and helped maintain control over the disease and prevent epidemics of smallpox despite the intense influx of migrants to the city from places where acknowledgement of the need for vaccination was lower and opportunities to carry it out were scarcer.

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