Конфессиональная составляющая национального самосознания русских во второй половине ХIХ – начале ХХ века (на материалах Среднего Урала)

Abstract

This study is devoted to the national self-consciousness (identity) of Russians in the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries through the prism of religious beliefs. The work was carried out based on the materials of the Middle Urals (Perm province). The main purpose of the study is to determine the role of confessional identification in the national selfconsciousness and to characterize the mechanisms of its formation by the religious environment. Unpublished personal archives of Ural local historians and collectors of folklore, archives of the authorities of the Perm province, articles from the mass media of the specified period, published materials and collections of texts of historians, philologists, linguists, speeches of priests and townsfolk recorded by contemporaries were used as sources for such an analysis. The analysis makes it possible to fix the confessional component in the manifestations of national self-consciousness. At the same time, the emphasis in the work is made on the Orthodox component of the official Church. The Old Believer ethnics and religious beliefs of the Russian population of the Urals are not considered in the study as having significant differences from the bulk of the Russian people. The work emphasizes that the most important components of the Russian national self-consciousness of the prerevolutionary era was the correlation of the supreme secular power (the tsar) with the spiritual power (the Orthodox Church), which resulted in the image of the sovereign as an archpastor. An important mechanism in the formation of this kind of views is the activity of priests and the intelligentsia and their patronage by the local and supreme authorities. At the same time, the study noted that the formation of such a national-confessional worldview has its roots in the popular Christian and pre-Christian beliefs and ideas.