On church life in Turkmenistan in 1923: materials for the history of Turkestan diocese
Abstract
The article is devoted to a detailed analysis of two documents of 1923 from the city of Poltoratsk (now the capital of Turkmenistan, the city of Ashgabat), stored in the fund of the Chancellery of the Holy Synod in the Russian State Historical Archives. Addressed to Patriarch Tikhon, they contain facts from the history of the Russian Orthodox Church in Central Asia. This information is for the first time introduced into scientific circulation with the necessary clarifications and comments. The messages are signed, but their authorship is questionable, therefore, in order to identify the persons who participated in the process of creating the documents, their comparative stylistic analysis, comparative content analysis are carried out, hidden intentions and ideological context are clarified. As a result of the study, it turns out that among the unspecified authors of one of the documents was Bishop Andrei (Ukhtomsky) of Ufa, who, being in Turkmen exile at that time, tried to implement in Central Asia his program of Church decentralization, to carry out the task of overcoming the Old Believer schism of the Russian Church and to organize an autonomous Trans-Caspian Orthodox Church. Additional facts from the church history of Turkmenistan brought into the study give grounds to conclude that the ideas of decentralization did not find mass support among the clergy of the Trans-Caspian deanery. The article also puts forward a number of hypotheses that require further research to confirm.
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