Missionary Practices of the Russian Orthodox Church in the eastern Outskirts of the Russian Empire in the second half of the XIX – early XX centuries (based on the materials of the Orthodox missions of the Tobolsk Diocese)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the actual problem of the organization of missionary practices of the Russian Orthodox Church and the functioning of Orthodox missions of the Tobolsk diocese, which entered in the second half of the XIX – early XX century as an actor of colonization of the eastern outskirts of the Russian Empire. The object of this work is the communicative space of the activity of the Russian Orthodox Church in the second half of the XIX – early XX century. The subject of the study is the missionary practices of the Russian Orthodox Church as an actor of colonization of the eastern outskirts of the Russian Empire in the second half of the XIX – early XX centuries (based on the materials of the Orthodox missions of the Tobolsk diocese). The purpose of the article is to identify and characterize the missionary practices of the Russian Orthodox Church in the territorial borders of the Tobolsk province as part of a vast and ethno-confessional mosaic of the West Siberian region, within whose boundaries missionary societies positioned themselves as a force that performed important colonization tasks of the State. In methodological terms, the formulation of the problem, its solution and conclusions are provided by the application of a socio-cultural approach and appeals to the practices of a new local history. The source base of the work consisted of a wide range of materials of a clerical and regulatory legal nature, published statistical information, publications in the periodical diocesan press, certificates of personal origin, which ensured the representativeness of conclusions regarding practices in the activities of the missions of the Tobolsk diocese in the chronological boundaries of the second half of the XIX – early XX centuries. The article concludes that the missionary work of the Russian Orthodox Church in Western Siberia and, in particular, the Tobolsk province becomes an effective tool of internal colonization and is constructed within the framework of the foreign policy of the Russian Empire on the eastern outskirts, which was based on the principles of paternalism and the idea of creating conditions for the "maturation" of indigenous peoples.