«Иная» жизнь Урала: основные направления социокультурной деятельности монастырей Пермской губернии в предсоборный период

Abstract

The Ural historical and geographical region as an object of historical research was most often of interest from the point of view of studying its socio-economic and, less often, sociopolitical and socio-cultural processes. It must be said that turning specifically to the history of the Russian Orthodox Church of the 20th century in the Urals was very rare in the Russian historic studies. When assessing the Russian Orthodox Church at the beginning of the 20th century, there are still many cliches and mythologies. The Church is viewed as an “appendage of the state apparatus”, “an organization for the ideological indoctrination of the masses”, “a defender of the interests of the ruling classes”. Recent publications demonstrate interest in the development of issues related to the objective state of the church, as well as its role and significance in the history and culture of Russia. The aim of the research is to identify the main directions and content of the socio-cultural activities of monasteries in the conditions of the dynamically changing political, economic and social Russian reality of the pre-revolutionary decade in the new paradigm. To achieve the goal, historical, comparative and statistical research methods were used. This article, based on an extensive factual series, systematizes the main directions of the socio-cultural activity of monasteries which are characteristic of the pre-conciliar period of 1905–1917. Most of the documents presented in the publication were introduced into the scientific circulation for the first time. Both published and unpublished sources are used comprehensively here. The chronological framework is due to the fact that it was in 1905 that the 25-year period of activity of the Chief Prosecutor of the Holy Synod, K.P. Pobedonostsev, ended. In 1917, the Local Council began its work, starting a new milestone in the church life. It was a new stage not only from the point of view of the state-church relations, but also from the point of view of the intra-church processes. The territorial framework is limited to the Perm province, which was, on the one hand, a distinctive industrialized region, and on the other hand, a typical province of the Russian Empire