Известия высших учебных заведений. Поволжский регион: Гуманитарные науки (Mar 2020)
ARCHIVAL MATERIALS ON PREPARATION AND CELEBRATION OF THE 1000th ANNIVERSARY OF THE BAPTISM OF RUS: CAPITAL AND PROVINCE
Abstract
Background. Addressing the theme of celebrating the 1000 anniversary of the Baptism of Rus is relevant in the subject field of the history of modernity and is explained by both the novelty of the event and the scale of the subsequent transformations in the central part and in the places of transformation. The purpose of the article is to determine the information content and representativeness of the historical sources presented in the federal and regional archives necessary for conducting research on the preparation and celebration of the anniversary of Christianity as the beginning of the solution of the “religious issue” in the context of the “capital and province” dichotomy. Materials and methods. The study was conducted on the basis of archival sources from the funds of the Council for Religious Affairs under the Council of Ministers of the USSR and its representatives in the regions of the central part of the RSFSR presented in the collections of the State Archive of the Russian Federation and the state archives of Russian entities. The corpus of sources forms the paperwork in the form of reports, certificates, memos, information messages. Comparative historical and historical critical methods, the principle of complementarity of sources were used. Results. A diverse array of archival documents has been examined that reveals the history of the preparation and celebration of the 1000 anniversary of the Baptism of Rus in the central part and in the places of transformation when the actions of local authorities came into conflict with the rapidly changing state policy regarding religion. Conclusions. The materials presented in the collections of the federal and regional archives recreate a holistic and reliable picture of the preparation and celebration of the 1000 anniversary of the Baptism of Rus at the level of the capital and provinces of the center of the RSFSR, where Orthodoxy is the traditional, historically determined religion of most residents. The analysis of the sources shows the differences in approaches to organizing anniversary celebrations in the central part and in the places of transformation: in the capital, foreign policy, organizational, scientific tasks, and publishing were among the most important; in the provincial regions, despite a change in state policy regarding religion, a cautious attitude towards the intensification of religious life and the expansion of the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church remained.
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