Old Believers and "former" Cossacks in the Buryat-Mongolian ASSR: interaction with the Soviet government (1920s – early 1930s)

Abstract

The subject of the research in the article is the problem of similarities and differences in the interactions of the Soviet government with two traditional communities living in the newly formed Buryat-Mongolian ASSR since 1923 – Old Believers and Cossacks who have lost their official status (act as the object of research). The modifications of their identities caused by both intra-communal processes and external invasions by the state have largely led to a certain ideological collapse of modern renaissance trends. The following aspects of the topic are considered: analysis of the policy of "soft power" in terms of influence on Ancient Orthodoxy and radical "storytelling" of the 1920s, respectively; study of the parallel with this policy of the transition of communities to practices of socially approved behavior by the early 1930s. The study mainly used a historical and comparative method involving the allocation of common and special features of various phenomena. This helped to compare the policy of the Communists in relation to two rather different communities from each other. The ideographic method made it possible to better understand the peculiarities of the 1920s, through the prism of elements of biographies of individual people. The traditional communities of Old Believers and Cossacks of Buryat Mongolia in the 1920s were subjected (to varying degrees of influence) to a political, social and cultural transformation of their identities - moderate for the former and radical for the latter. By the early 1930s, it provoked the transition to practices of approved behavior, as the only option for non-public preservation of the meanings of their "deep" specificity, and in the case of the Cossacks, external forms of cultural identity. The novelty of the research lies in the study of the ideological policy of the Soviet government in the early years of its existence, based on a comparison of two specific communities of Buryatia – Old Believers and Cossacks, as well as the introduction into scientific circulation of sources of personal origin – the memories of family old-timers and descendants of military Cossacks.