“I consider religious decline to be the reason for hooliganism in the village...”: priest Vasily Yagunov’s report to the dean of the 33rd district of Tomsk and Altai diocese (1913)

Abstract

In this work, a source study of the report of priest Vasily Yagunov to the dean of the 33rd deanery district of the Tomsk diocese, written in 1913, was carried out. It is permanently stored in the State Archive of the Novosibirsk Region, in the collection of the Siberian Commission of Eastpart. This source is interesting, first of all, because it reflects the contradictory social processes that took place in the distant Siberian province in the chronological period preceding the First World War, the Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War. The increase in the number of archeographic works on the history of the Russian Orthodox Church determines the relevance of the chosen research format. This allows not only to introduce new sources into circulation, but also to make them useful for research on related scientific aspects. Through the analysis of the text of the report, the problem of the decline in the religiosity of the Siberian peasantry, which took place in the early 1910s, was studied. The published source allows you to identify the causes that caused the described phenomenon. In the introductory part of the work, the connection between the issue presented in the publication and the general historiography of the problem under study is given. The theoretical basis of the study was the anthropological approach, the principle of consistency, biographical and historical-genetic methods. This methodological totality made it possible, after an overview characterizing the personality of the author of the document (priest Vasily Yagunov), to analyze the process of moral and religious deviations, which was gaining momentum in the Siberian peasantry, using the example of everyday hooliganism of young people in churches. The published historical source may be of interest to a wide range of readers who study the history of the Russian Orthodox Church, social history, provincial everyday life and Siberian local history.