The social makeup of Church parishes of Shchyolkovo industrial area of Moscow region in the 1920s as evidenced by documents on the renewal of registration of religious societies, 1923‒1926

The article deals with the topical issue of the social composition of parishes and parish councils of the Russian Church of the 1920s. The importance of this topic is due to the fact that the arguments about the social composition of parishes were actively used by the Bolsheviks, who planted the opinion that the members of the Church are exclusively backward strata of the population and representatives of counter-revolutionary-reactionary circles.Based on archival materials of the re-registration of religious societies initiated by the Soviet authorities in 1922-1923, the author of the article managed to identify meaningful documents reflecting the social composition of the parishes of the temples of the settlements of the Shchelkovsky industrial bush, which was an advanced region of the textile industry in the Moscow province. The workers of this region were not only participants in the revolutionary demonstrations in 1905 and in October 1917, but also the heroes of the first issue of the revolutionary underground newspaper Iskra in 1901. Bolshevik agitation strenuously attributed to the "real proletarians" of such factory districts stable anti-religious beliefs. However, the study of this problem showed that in the religious communities of those settlements of the Shchelkovsky bush, next to which large textile industrial productions were located, there were former ones. Fryanovo Wool-spinning Manufactory Partnership, former. The Partnership of the Gorodishchenskaya Cloth Factory of Chetverikov and a number of other large factories - workers made up a significant part of the active parishioners who acted as founders of religious societies in 1923, and were part of the parish councils. It is also worth noting that the process of re-registration of religious societies coincided with the most acute phase of the Renovationist schism caused by the organization of the Renovationist Council of 1923, which adopted a number of anti-church decisions. The identification - based on documents from local archives - of the names of active believers at the most difficult moment in the history of the Russian Orthodox Church, associated with the attempts of the Soviet government to destroy the Church by the hands of Renovationists, can open additional ways for church historical work on the ground and actualize for the descendants of these people the church past of their surnames in the 1920s.