Adoption Of Christianity By The Highest Kalmyk Nobility In The 18th Century

Abstract

The formation of Russia as a multiethnic empire required the state to adopt the policy, which would ensure the integration of its people, supremacy of centripetal trends, and strength of its unity. The authorities considered the Orthodoxy of the non-Christian people including the Kalmyks as one of the key successful tools of such policy. The Christianization of Kalmyk nomads had to be that spiritual and ideological factor of their integration into a uniform national political, economic, sociocultural space of the country. The historical experience of missionary activity of the Russian Orthodox Church among the non-Christian people still did not receive an exhaustive comprehensive study, which in itself represents an urgent problem of historical science. Among Kalmyk nomads the range and methods of activity of official church representatives prior to the beginning of the 20th century could not be (invariant) fixed, unchanged as they were carried out taking into account both external and internal factors, and considering the change of the status of nomads as part of Russia. During certain historical periods and depending on such changes the missionary activity of ROC were stopped or encouraged by the state, its forms and methods were also changed.