Elena Koroleva

Church, Society, and State in Russia Before the 1917 Revolution Elena Koroleva

Is it possible to "measure" a person's piety? Is there a need for external control of religious faith and its public expression? The book attempts to answer these questions. The focus is on the relationship between the state, church agencies and the Orthodox population in public and private life. The authorities' regulation of the religious and moral sphere, aimed at ensuring order and preventing blasphemy, is inherent in traditional society. The next period of modernization in Russia meant a transition from patriarchal to liberal society. The correlation of tradition and innovation is examined in a number of phenomena such as legal provision of religious practice of the population, church and monastery construction, trusteeship activity, spiritual and moral state of the estates. The study of socio-cultural processes in pre-revolutionary Russia is concretized on the example of one of the outlying provinces of the empire - Orenburg. Since the Church and religious life have a dual nature, acting as an object of study, deserve special attention and approach in the study. The book is addressed to students, ethnographers, researchers interested in this topic.