scholarly journals Political Events of February 1917 in the Diocesan Periodicals of Western Siberia

2020 ◽  
pp. 227-238
Author(s):  
A. A. Valitov ◽  
D. Yu. Fedotova

The events of February 1917, presented on the pages of the church periodicals of Western Siberia, is examined in the article. The relevance of the study is due to the fact that for the first time in Russian historiography the political upheavals of this period have been analyzed on the basis of materials from regional diocesan records. The authors note that the diocesan records are an important historical source. A detailed analysis of the content of articles of Omsk, Tobolsk, Tomsk periodicals (“Diocesan Gazette”) on the presentation of the political events of February 1917 in them is carried out. The novelty of the research lies in identifying the attitude of the regional clergy to the revolutionary events in the period from February to April 1917. The presented results of the comparative analysis can be grouped according to the chronology and significance of the events that took place. The article concludes that it was during this period that one could hear the opinion of the Russian Orthodox Church on political changes in the country. It is noted that of particular interest were the issues of the relationship between the Church and the Provisional Government, this topic remained the most acute after the fall of the monarchy. It is shown that the representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church wanted to restore historical justice and receive autonomous government and independence from the secular authorities.

2020 ◽  
pp. 149-180
Author(s):  
Радомир (Роман) Владимирович Булдаков

В настоящей публикации представлен ранее нигде не публиковавшийся Протокол Пензенского епархиального съезда духовенства и мирян, который проходил с 25 апреля по 1 мая 1917 г. Он отражает общее настроение рядового духовенства и мирян Русской Православной Церкви начала XX в. на примере конкретной епархии. Пензенский Съезд проходил одновременно с аналогичными Съездами многих других епархиальных центров, чьи постановления получили своё развитие на Всероссийском Съезде духовенства и мирян в Москве и далее на Поместном Соборе Православной Российской Церкви 1917- 1918 гг. Вопросы, рассматриваемые участниками Пензенского Съезда, касались как общецерковных проблем, так и внутренних дел самой епархии; часть постановлений вошла в состав решений Поместного Собора. Количество вопросов, поднятых на Съезде, превышает два десятка и относится к самым разным сферам церковно-государственных и церковно-общественных отношений, а также к внутренним преобразованиям самой Церкви, одновременно олицетворяя общую тенденцию к Её обновлению и являясь следствием этих перемен. Но среди них важнейшими, по мнению делегатов Съезда, считались вопросы об отношении к происходящим в стране политическим событиям и о поэтапной реформе церковной организации, начиная с прихода и заканчивая уровнем Поместной Российской Церкви. This publication presents the previously unpublished Protocol of the Penza Diocesan Congress of the Clergy and Laity, which took place from April 25 to May 1, 1917. It reflects the general mood of ordinary clergy and laity of the Russian Orthodox Church at the beginning of the 20th century by the example of a specific diocese. The Penza Congress was held simultaneously with similar Congresses of many other diocesan centers, whose resolutions were developed at the AllRussian Congress of Clergy and Laity in Moscow and further at the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1917-1918. The issues considered by the participants of the Penza Congress concerned both general church problems and the internal affairs of the diocese itself; some of the decisions were included in the decisions of the Local Council. The number of issues raised at the Congress exceeds two dozen and relates to the most diverse spheres of church-state and church-social relations, as well as to the internal transformations of the Church itself, at the same time embodying the general tendency towards Her renewal and being a consequence of these changes. But among them the most important, in the opinion of the Congress delegates, were the questions about the attitude to the political events taking place in the country and about the gradual reform of church organization, from the parish level to the level of the Local Russian Church.


Author(s):  
A. Sliusarenko ◽  
T. Pshenychnyi

The events that are taking place today in the church field of the Ukrainian State testify to the importance of the national church in building the national security of the country. The union of the church with the state has been formed for centuries, and to consider the absence of this tandem today would be wrong. However, such an alliance can be dangerous for the state if the church provokes separatism, ignites national conflict, undermines the national security of the state. Evidence of this is the aggressive policy of the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church towards Ukraine throughout history, which has turned the church into an instrument of political games. Thus, by annexing the Metropolitan of Kiev in 1686 and establishing a protectorate over the Ukrainian church space, the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church did everything to destroy the Ukrainian church tradition. History of Ukraine of the twentieth century testifies to the repeated attempts of Ukrainians to get out of the grip of the Russian Orthodox Church and build their own independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church. A striking example of this is the All-Ukrainian Orthodox Church Council of 1918, which, in the context of national competitions of the Ukrainian people for their own state, brought to the agenda of the revolutionary events the question of independence of the Ukrainian Church. At the second session of the Council, the idea of autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church for the first time in many years consolidated a small part of the Ukrainian church and political elite around it. This article is devoted to analyzing the documents of this council session. The author tries to present the main stages of the competition for the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the difficulties that have arisen.


Author(s):  
N.A. Beliakova

This study aims at providing an overview of the everyday life of Russian nuns in Palestine after World War II. This research encompassed the following tasks: to analyze the range of ego-documents available today, characterizing the everyday life and internal motivation of women in choosing the church jurisdiction; to identify, on the basis of written sources, the most active supporters of the Moscow Patriarchate to examine the nuns’ activity as information agents of the Russian Orthodox Church and Soviet government; to characterize the actors influencing the everyday life of the Russian nuns in the context of the creation of the state of Israel and new borders dividing the Holy Land; to present the motives and instruments of influence employed by the representatives of both secu-lar and church diplomacies in respect to the women leading a monastic life; to describe consequences of including the nuns into the sphere of interest of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR; to show the specific role of “Russian women” in the context of the struggle for securing positions of the USSR and the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in the region. The sources for the study were prodused by the state (correspondence between the state authorities, meeting notes) and from the religious actors (letters of nuns to the church authorities, reports of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission, memoirs of the clergy). By combining the methods of micro-history and history of the everyday life with the political history of the Cold War, the study examines the agency of the nuns — a category of women traditionally unnoticeable in the political history. Due to the specificity of the sources, the study focuses exclusively on a group of the nuns of the Holy Land who came under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patri-archate. The majority of the Russian-speaking population of Palestine in the mid-1940s were women in the status of monastic residents (nuns and novices) and pilgrims, and in the 1940s–1950s, they were drawn into the geopolitical combinations of the Soviet Union. The Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem, staffed with representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church, becomes a key institution of influence in the region. This article shows how elderly nuns became an object of close attention and even funding by the Soviet state. The everyday life of the nuns became directly dependent on the activities of the Soviet agencies and Soviet-Israeli relations after the arri-val of the Soviet state representatives. At the same time, the nuns became key participants in the inter-jurisdictional conflicts and began to act as agents of influence in the region. The study analyzes numerous ego-documents created by the nuns themselves from the collection of the Council on the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church under the USSR Council of Ministers. The study shows how nuns positioned themselves as leading a monastic life in the written correspondence with the ROC authorities and staff of the Soviet MFA. The instances of influence of different secular authorities on the development of the female monasticism presented here point to promising research avenues for future reconstruction of the history of women in the Holy Land based on archival materials from state departments, alternative sources should also be found. The study focused on the life of elderly Russian nuns in the Holy Land and showed their activity in the context of the geopolitical transformations in the Near East in the 1940s–1950s.


2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Detelina Tocheva

AbstractThe liberalisation of religious practice after the fall of the Soviet regime and the support by the Russian state to the Russian Orthodox Church have contributed to the enormous growth of the church economy. Controversies within and without the Church interrogate commercial and gifting practices. The relationship between the expansion of church commerce and the operation of moral boundaries, underlined by critical stances, has been determined by culture and history, with the post-Soviet transformation having played a key role in shaping popular notions of selflessness and profit-seeking. Moreover, as people participate in the church economy they mobilise perceptions of the differential moral valence of gift and commerce in order to communicate concerning the power of the Church, its controversial image, Russia’s social stratification, and to deploy ethics of equity and honesty.


Author(s):  
Artur Aleksiejuk ◽  

The foundations of the social concept are one of the most important normative acts issued by the Russian Orthodox Church. The unanimous adoption of this document by the Holy Council of Bishops of the Russian Church, which took place on August 13-16, 2000 in Moscow, was not only a local event, but a significant fact on the scale of the entire Orthodox Church worldwide. For the first time in history, one of the autocephalous Orthodox Churches decided to formulate an official position on current social, economic, economic and cultural issues, as well as define the Church-state relationship in the conditions of historical reality in which it found itself at the threshold of the third millennium. The promulgation of the Foundations of the Social Concept has become a powerful impulse for the renewal of spiritual life, greater involvement of the Orthodox clergy in social life, the development of institutional and non-institutional forms of mission and evangelization, and the multidimensional dialogue of Orthodoxy with the world of science, politics and economy. The aim of this publication is to familiarize the Polish reader with the content of chapters twelve and thirteen of the document, which relate to bioethical and ecological issues. It is worth noting that this is their first translation into Polish. The translator hopes that they will contribute to a better understanding of the Orthodox Church’s position on issues that are currently among the most discussed social topics.


Author(s):  
Aleksandr R. Pavlushkov ◽  

Based on various sources, this article attempts to determine the scope and nature of the relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Secret Chancellery during the reforms of Peter I. The chronological framework of the period under study is limited to 1718–1725. It should be noted that the number of works on this topic is rather small. The article dwells on the various aspects and forms of the relationship between the penal body and the Church as a whole. The starting point is the case of Tsarevich Alexei, which exposed the dissatisfaction of the clergy with the reforms of Peter I and initiated the strengthening of punitive policies, involving the tools of the Church. According to the author, the established relationship between the Church and the Secret Chancellery cannot be called sporadic, since there had been a certain unity of mutual interests between the parties. It is emphasized that contradictions had been accumulating between them, related to the violation of the secrecy of confession, lack of legal regulation of official relations, and structural vagueness of the institutions of the Most Holy Synod that had contacts with the Secret Chancellery. Nevertheless, in practice there had been developed a certain procedure for coordinating various issues, which both sides refrained from violating. Further, the author analyses the case of Tsarevich Alexei and the role of the first chief procurators of the Most Holy Synod in the context of the development of the relationship between the Church and the Secret Chancellery. Further, the article indicates the reasons for not only mutual interest, but also the subsequent crisis in their relationship that occurred in 1725. The author concludes that the relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Secret Chancellery was in line with the policy of forming a police state.


2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 569-584
Author(s):  
Evgeny Krinko ◽  
Alexander Skorik ◽  
Alla Shadrina

AbstractThis article studies the famine of 1921–1922 and 1932–1933 in the Southern Russian regions. Famine as a socio-historical phenomenon is considered in the context of the relationship of state power, the Cossacks, and the Church. The authors reveal the general and special features of the famine emergence and analyze the differences in the state policies of 1921–1922 and 1932–1933. Considerable attention is paid to the survival strategies of the Don, Kuban and Terek populations. Slaughtering and eating draft animals, transfer from the state places of work to the private campaigns and cooperatives, moving to shores and banks, and eating river and sea food became widespread methods of overcoming famine. Asocial survival strategies included cannibalism, abuse of powers, bribery, and more. In 1921–1922, the Russian Orthodox Church fought actively against the famine. In 1932–1933, the Church was weakened and could not provide significant assistance to the starving population. The article was written based on declassified documents from the state and departmental archives, including criminal investigations and analytical materials of the Obedinjonnoe gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie [Joint State Political Directorate] (OGPU) recording the attitudes of minds. Also used are personal stories—namely, interviews with eyewitnesses of the famine of 1932–1933, recorded by the Kuban folklorists in the territory of the Krasnodar and Stavropol Krai.


Author(s):  
Yana Yu. Guseva ◽  

The article reveals the relationship between the Soviet state and the Russian Orthodox Church (the ROC) in the late 1940s on the territory of the Saratov Volga region. After several years of a forced truce, the state began to tighten its religious policy again and resumed an active anti-religious campaign. One of the reasons was the scandal in the Saratov region in 1949, connected with the mass bathing on the Epiphany holiday and the subsequent publication of I. Ryabov’s feuilleton called “Saratov font” in the Pravda newspaper. The anti-religious campaign that followed these events revealed multiple manifestations of religiousness in the Saratov region of both the ordinary population and representatives of the authorities. It turned out that many people participated in the sacraments of the Church, wore crosses and provided all possible assistance to the Church. As a result, a wave of administrative punishments started again: believers were expelled from the party, fired from their jobs. But a complete rupture of relations between the state and the church did not happen, which was associated with the intense foreign policy activities of the ROC and its participation in the struggle for peace.


Author(s):  
Oksana Babenko ◽  

The review examines the works of Polish researches in which the problems of the history of the Russian Orthodox Church are analyzed. The relationship along the lines of «church-state» and «church-intelligentsia» is presented. The conclusions of Polish historians boil down to the fact that the church and the state in Russia interacted in order to turn Orthodoxy into the state religion.


2021 ◽  
Vol 03 (07) ◽  
pp. 110-117
Author(s):  
A.A. Leontev ◽  
◽  
L.V. Alieva ◽  

Despite the large volume of archival materials on church discipline in Russia of the XIX – early XX centuries, this topic has been studied rather poorly. This article analyzes the source base on the church discipline in the Pskov diocese based on the materials of the State Archive of the Pskov region. During the study of these sources, a count of specific violations of the church discipline among the laity, church officers and the clergy was made, and the main categories of offenses were identified. The main types of punishments for violating church discipline are shown. The gender composition of laypeople in the structure of offenses is considered. The structure of the titles of archival cases concerning violations of the church discipline is also addressed. The author came to the conclusion that clerics were punished mainly for drunkenness and official misconduct. In relation to the laity, the Pskov Spiritual Consistory most often considered cases related to the violations of sexual morality and illegal marriages, as well as murders and suicide attempts. This work is relevant because at present the Russian Orthodox Church is continuing to create unified documentation regulating the issues of the church court. This study, in turn, allows us to update the historical experience of regulating the church discipline and assigning punishments for its violation. The uniqueness of this work lies in the fact that the materials on the church discipline of the Pskov diocese of the XIX – early XX centuries have been analyzed for the first time, and the data obtained were introduced into scientific circulation.


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