Увидеть «Церковь»: любительские снимки как окно в жизнь евангельских христиан СССР

Abstract

It is known that the documents from the State archives concerning the history of religious life in the USSR had the primary importance and they are remained the same. However, a significant part of historical documents are kept by believers. Film and photo documents are of particular interest. The “visual turn” in the historiography of the beginning of 2000s opened up new opportunities for studying film sources and photographic documents. The attention of historians has focused on the symbolic and linguistic systems of transmission of film and photographic messages, on the visualization of ethnic, confessional identities or cultural characteristics of various population groups. Thus, turn to the film and photo documents helps better understanding the collective self-perception of Soviet believers and finding the ways to present themselves to the surrounding world. The purpose of this study is to study the informational possibilities of photographic documents on the history of Evangelical Christian-Baptists in the USSR in the 1970s. The main historical sources in the study are two photographs from the mid-1970s. They are kept in the church of evangelistic Christians-Baptists in the city of Perm. Archival documents of the State Archives of Perm Krai and confessional literature helped to reconstruct the historical context of photography. Conversations with a presbyter of the Perm community of Evangelical Christians-Baptists helped in attribution of photographs. The author believes that these photographs formed the iconographic image of the ECB church in the space of the Soviet city. The active use of these photographs in the post-Soviet period testifies the high “symbolic efficiency” (P. Bourdieu) of photographic communication from the past.