In the summer of 2005, during an ethnographic study of religious life in the Mari El Republic, I visited the family of a friend who lives in a village 50 km from the capital of the Republic of Yoshkar-Ola. When I got ready to go back, my hosts arranged for me to get a ride - so I met the former chairman of the local collective farm, who was driving to his home in the suburb of Yoshkar-Ola. This man had been chairman since the early 1980s, and when we got into the black collective farm Volga (he sat next to the driver and I sat in the back seat), he told me that it was thanks to his efforts and influence that the road we were supposed to travel was paved. The teachers ' family, where I stayed, also spoke about the chairman as a person who did a lot for the village and continued to defend the interests of rural areas of Mari El in the government of the republic.

However, much to my surprise, the memoirs of this successful champion of socialist modernization were not limited to such things as laying roads or implementing technical projects. Among other things, the chairman of the collective farm had to be able to work with paperwork; and this was a very difficult job, especially if it was necessary to report on the loss of cattle. For example, if a certain milkmaid showed clear success in fulfilling and exceeding the plan, other milkmaids "knew ways" to make her cows sick and die. The Chairman knew for a fact that the cause of death was witchcraft. But for an official report, he had to give other reasons that would be acceptable to you-

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six-year-old bosses. The illness and death of dairy cattle could put the collective farm in an unfavorable light, and as chairman he was torn between the understanding that these cases were the inevitable consequences of inequality caused by socialist competition, and the biological and medical language of official reports.

This story once again demonstrates what any researcher working with Soviet archives knows very well: written documents reflect only a small part of what actually happened (especially when it comes to how citizens understood non-human and supernatural forces and how they entered into certain relationships with them). In a state that was actively engaged in promoting an atheistic worldview, only a few official archival documents can give an undistorted image of people for whom divine and magical powers represented a possible reality. As the case of the kolkhoz chairman shows, these documents can contain only a part of how certain events were interpreted by the authors of these documents, even if these authors were loyal servants of the Soviet state.

Nevertheless, researchers of the religious life of the Soviet period turn again and again to the archives containing the correspondence of the commissioners of the Council for Religious Affairs - in addition to the materials of the Propaganda and Agitation Departments of the local CPSU committees, secret service agents who monitored religious life, and public organizations engaged in promoting atheism (such as the Znanie Society)."). A significant number of publications clearly show how valuable information can be obtained from these sources.1 However, problems may arise if information about religious life from official sources is accepted, so to speak, at face value, as fact, if one does not pay attention to those ideological and institutional aspects of religious life.-

Chumachenko T. A. 1. Church and State in Soviet Russia: Russian Orthodoxy from World War II to the Khrushchev Years. Armonk/London: M. E. Sharpe, 2002; Huhn U. Mit Ikonen und Gesang, oder Ein Bischof auf der Flucht vor seinem Kirchenvolk: Massenwallfahrten in Russland unter Stalin und Chruschtschow//Jahrbuch fur historische Kommunismusforschung. 2012. P. 315-333 (see Russian translation in this issue); Kolymagin B. Crimean Ekumen. Religious life of the post-war Crimea. Saint Petersburg: Aleteya Publ., 2004; Shkarovsky M. V. Russkaya pravoslavnaya tserkva i sovetskoe gosudarstvo v 1943-1964 gg.: ot peremiriya k novoy voynoy [Russian Orthodox Church and the Soviet State in 1943-1964: from the Truce to the New War]. Saint Petersburg: DEAN-ADIA-M Publ., 1995-

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the framework in which authors collected, interpreted, and transmitted information.

Other researchers prefer to ignore the state archives (or look at them more skeptically) and turn to alternative sources, such as materials from Samizdat and tamizdat, published memoirs, and oral interviews with believers. This approach also produced many excellent works, especially when oral sources were supplemented and included in the dialogue with archival materials.2 But in some cases, the appeal to oral history is motivated by the view of personal "memory" as a morally blameless correction of the official repressive "history"3. If the official archives do not tell us about the milkmaids who bewitched their competitors, or about the sufferings endured by many committed believers, then there is a great opportunity to present oral interviews as a heroic correction of these omissions.

Against the background of such a vivid contrast between official history and popular memory, those aspects in which official ideology influenced the thinking of all citizens of the USSR, including believers, remain unnoticed. Similarly, changes in beliefs that occur during an individual's lifetime are overlooked: anyone who studies post-Soviet religious communities will see that the percentage of their adult members who were religious throughout their lives is negligible, whereas many current religious activists were once conscious members of Soviet organizations and sometimes were not. they even describe themselves as former atheists.4 In the course of my research, which was conducted in res-

Naumescu V. 2. Modes of Religiosity in Eastern Christianity: Religious Processes and Social Change in Ukraine. Berlin: Lit, 2008. Wanner C. Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007; Project "From Collective Farm to Jamaat: The Politicization of Islam in Rural Communities of the former USSR, 1950s-2000s" led by K. Plak and S. Dudoanyon, www.uni-bielefeld.de/geschichte/abteilung/FlyerBerlin-i.pdf.

3. This strongly resembles the initial impulse of the oral history movement in Western Europe and North America, where "oral history" meant collecting the voices of those who were excluded from official history, such as workers and women. See Niethammer L., Trapp W. Lebenserfahrung und kollektives Gedachtnis: die Praxis der Oral History. Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1980; Le Goff J. Histoire et memoire. Paris: Gallimard, 1988.

Pelkmans M. (ed.) 4. Conversion after Socialism: Disruptions, Modernism, and Technologies of Faith in the Former Soviet Union. New York: Berghahn, 2009; Quijada

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In a public populated by people of different faiths, I have often found, for example, that those who started practicing religion during and after Perestroika reject atheistic beliefs about their own denomination, but at the same time reproduce stereotypes about other religious groups - stereotypes that they have become familiar with through the use of religious beliefs. soviet education. For example, pagans and Lutherans from Mari spoke of the Russian Orthodox Church as an instrument of colonization and ethnic discrimination. Representatives of faiths with a long history in the republic (Orthodox Christians, Muslims, and Mari pagans) repeated stories that Protestant groups (especially Baptists and Pentecostals) endanger the mental and physical health of their members or submit to foreign missionaries seeking material benefits. Far from being an alternative discourse, the oral narratives of modern believers often resemble textbooks and reports from the Soviet era.5
The purpose of this article is to consider how to combine different sources related to the religious life of the Soviet era, in order to draw the most complete picture, while maintaining awareness of the contradictions between these types of sources, as well as omissions in each of them. In order to recall the characteristic features of official Soviet documents dealing with religious life, I provide detailed quotations from the report of the Commissioner for Religious Affairs from the Mari ASSR (as Mari El was called before 1991), dated 1967, and also consider some difficulties in interpreting this report. I then explore three types of relationships between archival and oral sources: complementarity (when archival sources involve raising questions that need to be explored through oral sources), convergence (when oral and archived IP addresses are used as a basis for research).-

J. What if we don't know our clan? The city tailgan as new ritual form in Buriatiia//Sibirica. 2008. Vol. 7. No. 1. P. 1 - 22; Rogers D. The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009; Wanner C. Communities of the Converted.

Luehrmann S. 5. Recycling Cultural Construction: Desecularisation in Postsoviet Marii El//Religion, State and Society. 2005. Vol. 33. No. 1. P. 35 - 56; Luehrmann S. Secularism Soviet Style: Teaching Atheism and Religion in a Volga Republic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. P. 39.

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sources mutually confirm and explain each other), contradiction (when both types of sources offer radically different views on a particular phenomenon).

My goal is to justify a more developed methodological approach to the use of sources, in which nothing is excluded and, on the other hand, no exclusive preference is given to any one type of source. I proceed from the interpretation of archival documentation as a kind of literary product with specific social consequences. With this approach, a significant part of the work of historical interpretation consists in understanding the characteristics of individual genres, the process of creating a document, and the many layers of authorship that many materials contain.6 As in the case of documents that were created, for example, in early Modern Peru by lawyers for their illiterate clients, 7 Soviet documents also show different layers of authorship. As Boris Ananyich has shown, the confessions presented in the NKVD materials are the result of "forced co-authorship" of the accused and the interrogators. 8 Similarly, the voices of believers recorded in the reports of the religious commissioners are the result of an unequal dialogue between Soviet officials and citizens whose beliefs went beyond the Soviet ideological consensus (while this dialogue was filtered through the filter of officials ' ideas about what their superiors in Moscow would like to hear).

Describing a religious enemy

As an example of the format of an official report to higher-ranking officials in Moscow on the state of religious life in a particular region, I will cite a few excerpts from the upol report-

Davis N. Z. 6. Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987; Fitzpatrick S. Supplicants and Citizens: Public Letter-Writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s//Slavic Review. 1996. Vol. 55. No. 1. P. 78 - 105; Vatulescu C. Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.

Burns K. 7. Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Ananich B.V. 8. The Historian and the Source: Problems of Reliability and Ethics//Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory/Edited by WG. Rosenberg and F. X. Blouin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. P. 490 - 496.

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Commissioner for Religious Affairs V. I. Savelyev, compiled based on the results of his business trip to the Zvenigovsky district of the Mari ASSR in August 1967. 9 The object of inspection was settlements located along the railway connecting Yoshkar-Ola with Kazan and Moscow; these settlements were founded already in the Soviet period, did not have religious buildings, and - Theoretically , they should have been free from all forms of religious life. However, Savelyev prefaced his report with a general comment that " sectarianism is developing freely in the region." "Sectarianism" for Savelyev is a term that has a very broad meaning: it includes all forms of unauthorized religiosity. There are Seventh-day Adventists in the village of Mochalishche. Muslims gather in private homes. In the same area, "a woman in her 50s and 60s wearing black clothing and black glasses appears very often, she is called the presbytery, but her identity has not been established." In Suslonger, Saveliev counted three Adventist women with children and six Pentecostals, six adherents of the underground True Orthodox Church, and also found unregistered mullahs and priests:

In the same village lives a wandering mullah Suleymanov Shakir at the age of 75 years. In order to attract people to religion, Muslims at the Suslonger station organized the improvement of the cemetery, and the pos [fir tree] The Council stayed away. In the same village, collective worship is organized by Badanov, Mazanov, Bichurov, Nikitin.

In the Soviet Union of the 1960s, the term "sectarianism" was more often applied to groups that broke away from officially recognized Protestant churches because they refused to abide by the rules that the Soviet state imposed on religious organizations (for example, the rejection of pacifism or the baptism of teenagers).10. In another village, Savelyev drew attention to one of these groups, Seventh-day Adventists, who were colloquially referred to as "subbotniks." He again highlights the contrast between the modern social structure of the countryside and the rise of a type of religiosity that seems to have denied the achievements of socialism:

9. GARF. F. R. 6991. Op. 6. D. 80. L. 224-228.

Chumachenko T. A. 10. Church and State. P. 161.

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Sectarianism is most freely and rapidly developing in the Shelanger village Council. Take the village of Spartak. There are only 32 yards here. The village is home to: 2 teachers [ ... ], head of the library of the Shelanger secondary school [ ... ], chairman of the executive committee of the village council [ ... ], four party members live in the same village. Nevertheless, subbotniks have firmly taken root in the village. [ ... ] August 7, 1967 Ivanov received water baptism. He goes from house to house and agitates the collective farmers to go to the sect. In support of his agitation, he tries to prove that Ivanov was allegedly a disabled patient, and thanks to joining the sect, he became completely healthy. According to the story of the foreman of the collective farm named after Ulyanov, this subbotnik calls communists Antichrists and sold their souls to Satan. His daughter Galina says that everything that is good is supposedly from God. And now the alleged end of the world is approaching, as evidenced by earthquakes, floods, and wars. The fact that chickens hatch from eggs is, she says, all thanks to God. Galina considers herself a sincere believer. Ivanov, in an interview with a correspondent of the Mari Kommuna newspaper, said that God had provided for two days off earlier in the week than the Soviet government, and his daughter repeats this.

As an archived document, this report contains several layers of information. At the level of a bureaucratic function, it belongs to the report genre, the task of which is to document the activity and usefulness of the Commissioner for Religious Affairs for higher authorities. To do this, religiosity must be presented as both a marginal phenomenon of Soviet social life (teachers, librarians, and Party members are certainly not religious) and, at the same time, widespread enough to retain political significance. At a time when the instructions of the Religious Affairs Council directed all local commissioners to combat sectarianism, 11 the commissioner who conducted an inspection of the peripheral area and found no religious sects there could be suspected of negligence. Having found your own

11. See, for example, the "circular instructive letter" sent to all authorized representatives by the Chairman of the Council, Puzin (June 1965). The letter has the title "On certain facts of violations of socialist legality in relation to believers", but it requires an account of violations on the part of believers, for example, by "schismatic Baptists" (GARF. F. R. 6991. Op. 4. D. 170. L. 14a).

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Savelyev could lay all the blame on officials from local councils - due to the fact that they do not fulfill their duties to promote atheism and do not explain to the population that good things are done not by God's power, but by the Soviet government. Contrary to what might be expected, the materials of the Council on Religious Affairs do not always belittle or downplay religiosity. Rather, by focusing exclusively on religious life in his report, Savelyev presents these localities as more religious than they would appear if he gave a full description of their social and economic life.

On a discursive level, the report tells us quite a lot about the premises on which Soviet secularism was based: the situation when someone claimed that God intended some good long before Soviet rule, or when religious groups took on the task of improving the village while the village council was inactive, looked shocking. As a result of discursive analysis, religion appears as an inconvenient "Other" of Soviet modernization, which, it would seem, should be forgotten or "domesticated" 12, but instead shows activity again and again. When read in this way, archival documents may reveal more about the anxieties and unfinished facets of Soviet modernization than about actual religious practices. 13 However, archival documents will speak a very different language when read together with other sources; and this is exactly what I'm going to do next.

Complementarity. Interpreting one source through the lens of another

There is a different way of reading the above source - a way that emphasizes the relationship between Soviet and religious perceptions. An Adventist schoolgirl reads

Dragadze T. 12. The domestication of religion under Soviet communism//Socialism: Ideals, Ideologies, and Local Practice/Edited by C. M. Hann. London: Routledge, 1993. P. 148 - 156.

13. This type of discursive analysis is a common strategy for interpreting archival documents related to colonial materials. For an example of this approach, which also includes a critical review of the literature, see Staler A. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.

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Soviet newspapers and concludes from what he has read that the end of the world is approaching. Savelyev, for his part, treats religion as an area of comparable practices that go beyond individual denominations - and thus approaches the perception of religious residents of the Volga region, which is also found in documents compiled in the pre - and post-Soviet periods. If wandering mullahs, a mysterious woman dressed as a nun, and Adventist preachers are considered under the general category of "sectarianism," this is only partly due to the Soviet Union's characteristic ignorance or indifference to theological differences. This approach also reflects the pattern of religious parallelism in this multi-confessional region, which has been supported by historical sources since at least the late 19th century and continues to this day14.

Soviet officials were particularly concerned that this world of religious parallelism and ethnically defined spiritual practices extended to multiethnic localities that had already emerged in the Soviet era. According to their planners 'intention, the absence of religious buildings or sites in these localities also meant that they were not labeled as "Russian", "Tatar" or" Mari", as was the case with the old villages of the region. The appearance of a mass of unregistered religious figures of various ethnoreligious origins who began to work in the multi-ethnic environment of new settlements shows that the settlers took more from their rural past than the well-known Marxist expression that "being determines consciousness"allowed .15 In addition to such unofficial custodians of ethnic traditions, those denominations that were relatively new to the region (such as the Adventists who emerged during World War II) could thrive in these new settlements, where so-called traditional religions did not have institutionalized support.

Popov N. S. 14. On the Mari pagan prayer//Ethnogaphic review. 1996. N 3. С. 130 - 145; Werth P. At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia's Volga-Kama Region, 1827 - 1905. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. P. 30; Luehrmann S. Secularism Soviet Style. P. 27 - 29.

15. This is also true for those who have moved to large industrial cities. See Urazmanova R. K. Life of oilmen-Tatars of the South-East of Tatarstan (1950s-1960s): ethnosocological studies. Almetyevsk: Almetyevskaya entsiklopediya, 2000.

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For researchers of Soviet religiosity, official descriptions of the unforeseen vitality and diversity of religious life in new cities and settlements thus raise questions that can best be viewed through a combination of oral history and archival work: what were the patterns of ritual activity in these settlements and how did they affect more general patterns of interethnic coexistence? Who were the elusive ritual experts described in the report, and who used their services? What exactly did they and their clients think about the relationship between ritual observance and participation in Soviet life? Is it possible to detect some fundamental difference between those families and individuals who remained faithful to the religion of their ancestors in the secular environment of Soviet settlements, those who converted to Protestantism or other new denominations, and those who stopped practicing religion altogether? While there were undoubtedly some "sectarians" who preached that Communists had sold their souls to the devil, I expect such research to show that the heroic resistance of believers to official atheism was not the norm. Rather, we will hear many stories about the type of everyday coexistence that was observed, for example, in the case of the Muslims of Suslonger's attempt to improve the cemetery as a kind of public place; an attempt that was carried out, quite possibly, with the tacit approval of the village council.

These questions for oral history research concerning life in the multinational railway settlements of the Middle Volga region are examples of how finds in archives can inspire oral history. Conversely, the memories of living eyewitnesses can help researchers working in archives see written evidence in a new light. For example, many people I spoke to in Mari villages recalled that traditional sacrifices in sacred groves were performed throughout the Soviet period, especially in the east of the Mari ASSR. Although these rites were officially banned as religious activities carried out outside registered religious buildings, many local officials turned a blind eye unless there were witnesses from the district center or if some new party secretary or new police chief did not show much zeal. "No one came, no one drove," biv explained-

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A certain party and club worker from the Morkinsky district of the republic, born in 1953, when I asked him how the prayers were held in the sacred grove near his native village: "As a member of the party committee, for seven years, I went there every year in July [on the Mari holiday of Surem - S. L.], stood, listened. After all, they prayed for a common cause, so that people would have happiness, but for people, they did not ask for themselves. So that combine harvesters work on the collective farm, so that there is grain." For this Mari communist, Soviet and religious practices complemented each other. The district committee also knew about the prayers, problems arose only "if some district committee secretary changed or a person moved from another department and said to destroy it all."

Having read such memories, the researcher will be wary of archival reports about the termination of rituals. But archival documents may provide an answer to the question of why the new secretary's attention was drawn to such and such prayers and in such and such a particular village. Which agency compiled the event report, to whom these reports were sent, and what action did the document take as it passed through the bureaucratic chain? Both the correlation of oral and written sources can help in raising new research questions, and the comparison of materials from different institutions (for example, the Council for Religious Affairs, the regional or district party committee, and the internal affairs bodies). together with identifying where a given event leaves the greatest paper footprint, it can be very useful for the researcher 16.

Convergence. Cemetery as a religious space "by default"

When archival and oral sources unanimously point out the importance of a certain phenomenon, while describing various aspects of it, then it is quite reasonable to say that something very important really happened. In the Volga region and beyond, cemeteries are good examples of the convergence space between archival and oral sources.

16. Cf. various reports on the 1927 protest against revelations in Uzbekistan: Northrop D. Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. P. 139 - 163.

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Savelyev's case of a group of Muslims who entered into negotiations with the local government for the improvement and use of the cemetery is far from unique. Since the mid-1940s, archival documents of the Mari Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic have mentioned cemeteries as places of public worship, especially among Muslims who had only one officially functioning mosque in the republic, and in a village isolated from the main centers of settlement of followers of Islam17.

Reports from the Tatar ASSR also record the use of cemeteries for prayer meetings during Muslim holidays, which was probably due to holes in Soviet religious laws that excluded cemeteries from the general ban on holding religious services outside registered religious buildings. In 1972, I. A. Mikhalev, the Commissioner for Religious Affairs in the Tatar ASSR, asked the authorities to clarify the status of cemeteries as places of religious rites. Assuming that the law intentionally established the right to conduct burial rites for officially registered religious communities, the Commissioner regrets that local officials often interpret it in a broad sense and allow services in cemeteries and unregistered groups to hold various holidays that are not directly related to the burial of the deceased. 18 Back in 1961, Mikhalev's predecessor Mangutkin was forced to make an excursion into Islamic theology, explaining, in response to a request for permission for collective prayer at the cemetery in the district center, that "according to Muslim custom, a believer can read the Koran over the grave of a person close to him, without gathering in groups. Collective commemoration of the dead in a cemetery is contrary to Sharia law. " 19
Although the commissioners were not always ready to speak out about Sharia law, the general obligation to maintain cemeteries in proper form led to extensive contacts between believers and the Soviet government. Another letter from the Tatar ASSR contains an appeal to the local Council of PO-

17. См. Luehrmann S. Secularism Soviet Style. P. 52 - 53.

18. Letter of the commissioner Mikhalev to the Chairman of the Council Kuroyedov on October 10, 1972 (GARF. F. R. 6991, Op. 6. D. 470. L. 236-38).

19. Letter of Commissioner Mangutkin to the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Bondyuzhsky District Council, June 26, 1961 (NART. F. R. 873. Op. 1. D. P. L. 21).

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On another occasion, Mangutkin responds to a complaint about an unknown tramp who was allegedly buried in a Tatar village cemetery, with a cross placed on his grave, which provoked a protest from Muslim families. [20]

These archival records show that cemeteries and other burial sites, such as tombs, served as a kind of refuge for religious practices that the Government tried to restrict but could not completely eradicate.21 Oral sources dating back to the Soviet era also describe cemeteries as stable places of encounter with the supernatural. When I asked a former collective farmer, a Mari woman born in 1927, if she had observed Mari holidays and rituals in her youth, she replied that she had been cutting wood since she was fourteen: "they brought it in on the moors, it was hard work." Although there was little time left to observe religious traditions, the informant remembered that three times a year it is necessary to "remember the old ones": in the spring on the holiday of the variety (Orthodox Maundy Thursday), then in the summer and autumn. Immigrants from rural areas to the city visited the cemetery of their native village when they came to visit relatives, and thus kept in touch with the ritual traditions, sometimes even without knowing it. A teacher born in 1945, who worked near Yoshkar-Ola, told about trips to visit her mother in the more remote Morkinsky district: "I also didn't know how to behave at the cemetery before. I came from the city, my mother and I went to the cemetery. But it turns out that there, too, you need to know your own rules. (...) Here our people go to semik. Where the husband is buried, go to the Intercession day." A neighbor after the death of her mother saw in a dream how all the dead are standing at the main entrance to the cemetery and waiting for it in semik. "So, for some reason, they chose a certain day. That's all you have to do on this day."

20. NART. F. R. 873. Op. 1. d. 11. l. 50; ibid. l. 37.

Grant B. 21. Shrines and Sovereigns: Life, Death, and Religion in Rural Azerbaidjan//Comparative Studies in Society and History. 2011. Vol. 53. No. 3. P. 654 - 681. The relative stability of funeral rituals in a situation of rapid secularization has parallels in Western Europe and North America, where rituals associated with the burial of the dead also persist for a long time after other rituals have lost their religious framework. See Sullivan W. The Impossibility of Religious Freedom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

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But even for the urban population, cemeteries became places of unexpected meetings. For example, not far from Yoshkar-Ola there are several cemeteries where, according to archaeological data, victims of repressions of the 1920s and 1930s are buried.It is said that light comes from some graves in these cemeteries, and people are cured by praying at them. Orthodox believers who told me about these graves in 2005-2006 consider these phenomena to be evidence that priests who were shot were buried there. Since the early 2000s, Yuri Eroshkin, a member of the diocesan commission for the canonization of saints in Yoshkar-Ola, has been collecting similar stories and looking for confirmation in documents of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the KGB in order to present priests - victims of Stalinist repression-for canonization as locally venerated saints.22
You can find similar examples outside the Volga region. In the cemetery of the Novodevichy Monastery in St. Petersburg there is a bronze statue depicting Jesus in a long cloak, erected at the beginning of the XX century. on the grave of the wife of a military officer. Initially, this statue was the size of a man, but then its legs were sawn off from the knees and below. According to parish legend, this happened during the war communism era of the 1920s, when the statue was supposed to be melted down. The worker sawed off her legs below the knees and went home, intending to finish the job the next day. However, on the way, he was hit by a tram, which cut off his legs in the same place. So parishioners who show the cemetery to visitors of the monastery explain why the statue of Christ still stands with its legs cut off.

Statues are not among the common images revered in the Russian Orthodox tradition, and the use of a statue instead of a cross as a grave marker was typical of the St. Petersburg elite, which was under Western European influence. However, this particular grave marker, after an attempt to scrap it failed, became a place of unofficial worship. When I researched the work of an Orthodox charitable organization based on the monastery in 2010, members of the organization went to worship the monument after the service in the monastery church and claimed that this was how the faithful prayed in the cemetery while Mo-

22. On the canonization of new saints, see Semenenko-Basin I. V. Svyatost ' v russkoy pravoslavnoi kul'tury XX veka: Istoriya personifikatsii [Sanctity in the Russian Orthodox Culture of the XX century: The History of Personification].

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nastyr was closed. Thus, post-Soviet religious traditions agree with archival sources that cemeteries were a place of religious traditions and religious innovations, and were used not only for officially authorized private commemoration of loved ones, but also for individual and collective rituals that are not directly related to certain dead people, but are focused on entering into communion with the divine forces in the future. overall.

Contradictions. Events and consequences

Although there is agreement between archival and oral sources on the question of religious practices in cemeteries, information about light coming from graves or about a worker who died after trying to destroy a grave monument could hardly have reached the Soviet state archives, except as a report on superstitious rumors. This brings us into the realm of the contradiction between written and oral evidence: the consequences of measures to destroy holy sites and sites. Official reports often list "measures taken to enforce Soviet laws on religious cults," measures that included the closure and destruction of religious buildings, the destruction of sacred objects, and the obstruction of popular pilgrimage to holy sites. The main purpose of such reports was to inform higher authorities about the actions taken; if the consequences of these actions were mentioned, it was only in terms of a decrease in religious activity in the region.

On the contrary, popular memories of conflicts between representatives of the Soviet government and religious institutions tend to focus on the long-term consequences for these representatives, interpreted as evidence of the danger of conflict with spiritual forces. All over Russia, Stalin's anti-religious campaigns sparked rumors that people who destroyed churches, tore down bells, or exhumed relics were struck by lightning, paralyzed, etc. - in short, they somehow became victims of sudden death or serious illness. In the 1920s, some of these rumors appeared in the NKVD files as evidence of popular discontent, but I did not find any mention of this in the post-war reports of the religious affairs commissioners.

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such stories (probably because the threat of popular resistance to the Soviet government is a thing of the past)23.

On the other hand, during my research in Mari El in 2005, old-timers told me similar stories about workers who cut down sacred groves, or about policemen who disrupted the course of Mari prayer rituals or prevented pilgrimage to springs that were equally revered by Russians, Mari people, and Tatars. A retired teacher from the Morkinsky district told me that the house of a member of her gardening association, which was built from trees cut down in a sacred grove, burned to the ground. Another Mari woman, born in 1963, who was raised in the Orthodox tradition, but later converted to Islam, claimed that her father, the secretary of the local party committee, died in a car accident because he threw the icons out of his new home. The ethnic Russian, who worked as a forest ranger in the 1980s, said that she and her colleagues made a lot of effort to find old sacred groves and cemeteries and avoid cutting down trees in these places, so as not to cause damage to themselves.

This explanatory model was shared even by members of the Communist Party. For example, a former second secretary of the district committee from the Sovetsky district (born 1952) told me that she got her post in the 1980s because her predecessor was paralyzed after he kicked a pipe that was leaking water from a sacred spring. She told me about this as something self-evident, as an indubitable fact, when visiting the same source where we read the akathist to the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God at her request. Although she claimed that she could never understand why it was necessary to fight religion, she nevertheless believed that the years of working in the district committee were the happiest in her life.

Stories of such accidents are not part of the heroic resistance discourse that persisted among people opposed to the Soviet regime. They were one of the ways in which religious ontologies and explanatory models were introduced into the evolving structure of Soviet social life. If archived before-

Greene R. 23. Bodies like Bright Stars: Saints and Relics in Orthodox Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009. P. 183 - 85; Young G. Power and the Sacred in Revolutionary Russia: Religious Activists in the Village. University Park: Penn State University, 1997.

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If the documents do not contain such stories, this circumstance is probably explained by the fact that local officials were aware of their uselessness and unreliability for their superiors. Similarly, the chairman of the collective farm, who explained the loss of livestock by referring to medical causes rather than witchcraft, knew that any mention of "non-human", "unscientific" forces was taboo for an official report. The everyday status of such stories at the level of oral recollections indicates that a significant number of Soviet citizens continued to consider these forces quite real. Since the local population had to live with the consequences of the destruction of holy sites long after the interest of the state and the party in these events had already faded, it was only natural that they focused on the long-term consequences for those who committed these destructions.

Conclusion. The case for reflexive methodological pluralism

The examples given in this article are taken from a single Russian region, but the problems of historical interpretation they raise are applicable to the study of religious practices in any republic of the Soviet Union. What we can know about religious life in the Soviet era is limited by the biased nature of official documents, the complex relationships between religious perception and the modernization process that was supposed to exclude religion, and the problems of retroactive judgment and selection that are present in any study of oral history. The answer to these limitations and challenges can be to use all available sources-with respect and care, and with an understanding of the circumstances under which they were created. Such methodological pluralism would be reflexive, because the researcher takes into account the peculiarities of creating each kind of source and gives them the opportunity to enter into a dialogue, the opportunity to contradict and complement each other.

Official Soviet reports, for example, were key means of positioning the official who compiled them in the local, regional, and union hierarchies, and allowed the author to demonstrate his loyalty and the political significance of his work. When reading these oaths-

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They should pay as much attention to the functions they performed as to their actual content.

Oral history documents are created at the moment of interaction between the researcher and the" Zeitzeuge", as they are called in the German tradition. The power differences between the interviewer and interviewees are hardly as great as they were between the Soviet Commissioner for Religious Affairs and ordinary believers. However, the interview conducted by a friendly researcher is also guided by the current policy, the interlocutor's ideas about what the questioner wants to hear, as well as what can be conveyed to him and to a wider audience. For example, an Adventist girl told Commissioner Saveliev that chickens hatch from eggs only thanks to God, and he reported this conversation in his report. When the interviewees told me about the powerful forces of sacred sites, they could not only express the triumph of faith over atheism, but also try to convince me, a non-Orthodox foreigner, of the superiority of the Russian spiritual tradition.

Archives, as well as interviews, reflect the multi-voice and multi-layered nature in which different interests may have collided. Both archives and interviews are integral parts of the historical process rather than passive reflections of it. The best we can count on is probably Savelyev's openness to the sudden appearance of unexpected evidence in unexpected places, as well as his ability to preserve a trail of surprising encounters in written documents.

Translated from English by Alexey Appolonov

Bibliography

Archive materials

State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF).

F. R. 6991 (Council for Religious Affairs).

National Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan (NART).

F. R. 873 (Fund of the Authorized Council for Religious Affairs in the Tatar ASSR).

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