The interaction of the institute of rural community and the parish of the Russian Orthodox Church is considered on the materials of Yenisei Siberia. The Siberian community, unlike the community in European Russia, has retained the basic principles of self-government and economic initiative due to many factors. The study of the functioning of peasant society within the Orthodox parish is of great interest from the standpoint of assessing it as a kind of institution of civil society in Russian conditions. The institutional potential of the community is assessed in a broad sense: as a self-governing economic unit within the boundaries of its territory and as an important socio-cultural and religious element of the Siberian village. The assessment of the vital activity of the community and the church parish as an inseparable whole makes it possible to better understand the problems of the Russian countryside and the nature of the cardinal transformation of the rural community and the Orthodox parish after the revolution of 1917. The crisis of the parish life of the Russian Empire, noted by contemporaries, had a destructive effect on the peasant community. At the same time, the Siberian rural community maintained a high level of amateur activity in church life, which was based on the real principle of electability in solving the current life of the parish, the availability of a public budget for church needs, mutual responsibility of parishioners, solidarity not only in economic practice, but in holding common holidays.
For citation:
Shushkanova E.A. The role of the Siberian peasant community in the Orthodox parish of the Russian Empire, Ivanovo State University Bulletin, Series: Humanities, 2023, iss. 2, pp. 132—138.