WHEN the editorial board of the journal" State, Religion, Church in Russia and Abroad " asked me to write a few pages with an overview of the state of affairs in the field of studying religiosity in the USSR, I had to think hard about whether this request was feasible and whether I could add something to what was said earlier.1 In the mid-1990s, when I first turned to this topic, I knew about twenty people inside Russia and hardly more than five outside of it who actually did something in this area. In the early 2000s, their number grew to hundreds, primarily due to the emergence of young historians and anthropologists, the publication of the achievements of the middle generation of historians who spent the 1990s in (mostly provincial) archives, as well as various "diocesan" historians belonging to different religions and denominations. A large conference on Soviet religiosity organized in February 2012 at RSUH gathered about 150 applications from people from different countries of the world who are ready to take part in it at their own expense. This figure can be safely increased even further if we take into account those who did not apply for participation in this conference, and then we can imagine the approximate number of academic and confessional-oriented researchers currently engaged in religious research in the USSR.
Mitrokhin N. 1. Sovetskaya vlast, tserkva i verushchie v posleboennoi period [Soviet power, the Church and believers in the post-war period]. [http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2008/3/mi10.html].
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At the same time, familiarity with the work of colleagues, as well as, of course, applications for the mentioned conference (I had to review them as a member of the Organizing Committee) allows us to talk about the depressing monotony and serious, primarily source-related, shortcomings of about 90% of them. This is what I want to dedicate the pages provided to me by the magazine.
In principle, Russian religious studies and the study of religion now looks quite good, if we compare some Russian academic publications (and speeches at major conferences), monographs and collections published in prominent Moscow and St. Petersburg publishers of intellectual literature, with publications in major Western journals devoted to this topic. At the very end of the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s, groups of researchers associated with the RSUH Center for Religious Studies, the European and Smolny Institutes in St. Petersburg, as well as the Carnegie Moscow Center and the Franco-Russian Center for the Humanities made a serious methodological breakthrough. It led to a sharp expansion of the range of topics studied and the range of sources used, gave historians of religion the methods and methods of anthropological and sociological research, equalized the status of classical "archival" sources and oral history, and allowed them to start a conversation on equal terms between Western and Russian religious scholars.2
Another question is that this breakthrough affected a very limited group of Moscow and St. Petersburg religious scholars and historians of religion, as well as their graduate students - only a few dozen people. In addition, this trend did not affect classical Russian historians (for example, from the historical institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Moscow State University Faculty of History) who turned to the topic of Soviet religiosity. Their approach preserved the features of the Soviet legacy - to write only about what was read in documents found preferably in reliable state archives. As a result, if modern Western historians formulate the problem (list of questions) that they intend to consider before starting their research, then Russian "classical" historians continue to deal with a more or less detailed retelling
2. Here I will have to emphasize once again that we are talking specifically about historians of religion in the USSR. Historians of religion who study antiquity, the East, or pre-revolutionary Russia have their own successes and their own dynamics of relations with world religious studies.
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found documents. Thus, the issues that are not reflected (more or less obviously) in the documents they found completely fall out of their field of view.
The set of such documents stored in one of the funds studied by the researcher is far from complete, and often even fragmentary. But what is more significant is that the studies that have already been carried out clearly show that the main part of religious life took place outside the direct control of the authorities, at least of the party and state bodies. The documents practically do not reflect the whole system of invisible threads connecting various parts of religious organizations and groups of believers. Even the system of informal control of the state (and the party) and informal agreements with religious organizations they reflect very, very poorly. And the recently published correspondence between Karpov and Patriarch Alexy I, as well as earlier publications of recordings of conversations between these figures, shows that it was through such contacts that real interaction, intervention, and management took place.
It is good if the "classical historian" tries to expand his horizons with sources from other archives or use other types of sources - for example, the press of this period, memoirs, diaries, and other types of documents of personal origin. However, most of the research in the field of studying Soviet religiosity, unfortunately, took a different, as simple as possible path.
The reason that caused the appearance of dozens, if not hundreds, of similar and boring studies, I call the "disease" of the commissioner's fund"3. The liquidation of the Institute of commissioners of the Council for Religious Affairs and the transfer of surviving documents to the collections of local and central archives throughout the former Soviet Union, as well as the comparative openness of these funds against the background of the greater or lesser "closeness" of the funds of other ideological institutions of this period, caused, in my opinion, the explosion in research which I have to write now. And they got carried away with reading
3. Hereafter, "commissioner's fund" is a metaphor in a certain sense. Authorized representatives of the Council for the Affairs of the Orthodox Church( SDRC), the Council for Religious Cults (SDRC) and the Council for Religious Affairs (SDR) and their funds appeared after 1943; for historians dealing with an earlier period, such funds were documents from the archives of the OGPU-NKVD, Central Executive Committee, etc.
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The materials of the "commissioner's fund" are used by both local and a significant part of foreign researchers. As a result, we now have literally a mountain of book and magazine publications that describe what our colleagues have read in these funds. Some interpretations of this material based on new methodological approaches (for example, the question of "people's religiosity") are interesting, but most authors deal with the interpretation of scattered facts, which consist in the fact that collective farmers in the village of such and such an area applied for the opening of a church (prayer house/mosque) and were allowed to do so or that the commissioner has written to the bishop such and such a response to such and such a request. Often, the interpretation of this material clearly depends on the author's political views, ranging from the well-known claim that "the KGB was a human rights organization"4 to religious fundamentalism.
In principle, such work is not useless. An analysis of several dozen similar studies conducted in different regions of the country may allow other authors to come up with some valuable generalizations. However, this is not what we are talking about now, but what such authors are missing and what can significantly improve their work.
First of all, these are, oddly enough, archives. However, to do this, the authors need to stop sitting in their "favorite" fund, wait for the publication of the available material and think about who else the state of affairs in the field of religiosity in their region depended on. Local party and Komsomol organizations, the local KGB department, and if you think about it again, the local branch of the Znanie society, district executive committees and regional executive committees, the regional press, various "councils for atheistic education" and other pseudo-social organizations somehow participated in the definition and implementation of policies regarding religious organizations. However, a rare author who is familiar with the "commissioner's fund"remembers them and even more uses the materials of their archive. However, these documents are often quite accessible. For example, I found a significant number of documents on the topic of religiosity submitted by
Maslova I. I. 4. Russkaya Pravoslavnaya Tserkva i KGB (1960 - 1980 gg.) [The Russian Orthodox Church and the KGB (1960-1980 gg.)]. 2005. N 12. pp. 86-96.
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a wide variety of organizations, starting with the Supreme Court, in the fund of the Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU for the RSFSR, stored in the RGASPI 5. These documents, as far as I know, were not used by other researchers, although they were declassified a decade and a half ago.
In addition, the authors practically do not use the documentation of the religious organizations they study themselves. Yes, it is often not preserved, or there are huge difficulties in using it due to the position taken by modern heirs of once-persecuted clergy, but most of the colleagues I asked about the reasons for not using such documents told me that they did not even think about such a possibility, let alone make efforts to obtain admission to them.
But in addition to classical archival documents, there are other groups of sources. I have already mentioned press materials and documents of personal origin. In the last two decades, religious organizations have made great efforts to restore their own Soviet history. There are entire historical works, case studies devoted to specific individuals, events, objects (for example, temples), a lot of newspaper and magazine publications (including quite decent, scientific level), various collections of testimonies. A huge amount of material, which is quite accessible thanks to the Internet, but, alas, is extremely rarely and sparsely used (not to mention the seemingly obligatory attempts for a researcher to track as much as possible all the literature, including on the Internet, on the problem/ topic that he is engaged in). Very often, as an editor or reviewer, I have to ask the author to look at at least the publications in the local diocesan newspaper in the process of publishing someone's article in a journal.
Both Russian and, alas, Western authors completely ignore such sources of information as the emigrant press, scientific literature and samizdat materials that have come to the West. What was the main source of information for researchers in the 1960s and 1980s is now lying dormant in Western archives and some Russian libraries (Historical,
5. Some of them published: Mitrokhin N. Religiosity in the USSR in 1954-1965 through the eyes of the apparatus of the Central Committee of the CPSU / / Inviolable reserve, 2010. N5 (73) [http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2010/5/re8.html].
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NIPC "Memorial"), although at one time it was the only way (especially for Protestant denominations and Orthodox oppositionists) to transmit and store information about the daily life and practices of religious communities and their relations with the state. 6
As a person who has been engaged in oral history for more than twenty years, I can only rejoice when I meet in publications attempts to use interviews with former participants of events to get new information. However, they are, firstly, extremely rare, and secondly, it seems that most researchers are considered as a kind of pen test, and, as a rule, not very successful, since this work requires a lot of effort and time, and they start "working" when the collected array of interviews is quite large - at least 15-20 testimonies on some topic. In the case of a smaller number (and lack of experience in working with this type of source), the researcher often falls into a strong dependence on the informant, which is expressed in uncritical (and excessively frequent) quoting of this source.
Finally, I am most surprised by the fact that researchers of Soviet religiosity ignore each other in their publications. Despite the amazing similarity of topics and approaches, and the personal acquaintance of many of them with each other, the list of references to scientific works usually contains a couple of names of French cultural scientists and one or two names of colleagues from the inner circle. Western colleagues (with a number of exceptions) are much more likely to refer to the names of their (also Western) colleagues, often ignoring their predecessors who wrote even in the 1980s, and almost completely ignoring Russian specialists, with the exception of two or three names of authors of books that ended up in Western libraries.
The fact that Western colleagues, especially young ones, do not search for or read the vast majority of Russian and Ukrainian works, even those related to their own topic, is obvious. The illness of the" commissioner's fund " has also affected them. But they have in mind the knowledge of the current methodology and they are aware of the main directions of development of historical science-otherwise they would not have survived in the competitive environment of Western universities. Why is it ignored
6. An attempt to compare "samizdat" sources with modern information about the same events was made by me here: Mitrokhin N. Russian Orthodox Church in 1990 / / New Literary Review. 2007. N1(83). С. 300 - 349 [http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2007/83/mi21.html].
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It remains a mystery to me whether the Russian authors who first transfer to the computer a digest of what they read in the "commissioner's fund" and then try to "break through" a publication in a decent magazine or a speech at a solid conference do not try to improve their own works with their help.
Bibliography
Maslova I. I. Russkaya Pravoslavnaya Tserkva i KGB (1960 - 1980 gg.) [The Russian Orthodox Church and the KGB (1960-1980 gg.)]. 2005. N 12. pp. 86-96.
Mitrokhin N. Religiosity in the USSR in 1954-1965 through the eyes of the Central Committee of the CPSU//Inviolable reserve. 2010. N5 (73) [http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2010/5/re8.html].
Mitrokhin N. Russkaya pravoslavnaya tserkva v 1990 godu [Russian Orthodox Church in 1990]. 2007- N1(83). С. 300 - 349 [http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2007/83/mi21. html].
Mitrokhin N. Soviet power, the Church and believers in the post-war period//Inviolable reserve. 2008. N3 (59) [http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2008/3/mi10.html].
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