Единоверческое население Области войска Донского в начале XX века: численность и локализация

Abstract

This article considers the results of the formation of Common Faith in the Don Army Land, as a way to overcome the Old Believers’ Schism. In the 18th century, the numerous Old Believers living in the Don area interacted and cooperated with the official Orthodox Church’s parish priests who had been authorized by the eparchial bishops to practise rites in accordance with the old books published in Russia before the 18th centu-ry and used by the Old Believers. Despite the repeated cooperation facts, there were few Cossacks who joined the Russian Church after the establishment of the Common Faith regulations in 1800. The Common Faith development started in the Don area in the 1860s and was associated with the emergence of the Hierarchy of Be-laya Krinitsa, with the establishment of missionary movement within the Russian Church, and with the activities of Archbishop Platon (Gorodetsky). Over the ten-year period when he was the head of the Don and Novo-cherkassk Diocese, he initiated the series of measures which drew the Cossacks’ attention to the possibility of joining the Church without having to reject the old rites. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were 30 active Common Faith churches in the Don Army Land: 27 with their independent parishes and 3 with at-tached ones. Analyzing the quantitative composition of the Common Faith churches’ parishes, which was pro-vided in the clergy registers of the Don and Novocherkassk Diocesan churches, resulted in the conclusion that by the beginning of the 20th century, Common Faith had grown to a noticeable movement uniting 11,836 co-believers. They made 22.4 % of the Old Believers who were members of the Common Faith parishes and 0.5 % of the Orthodox believers registered in the Don Army Land’s statistics of the 1897 First General Census of the population of the Russian Empire. The co-believers were localized across the territories which had been the Old Believers’ settlement area since the early 18th century.