WAR AND FAITH: THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SOVIET PEOPLE IN THE YEARS OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR
The article is devoted to the problem of religious identifcation of Soviet society in the years of the Great Patriotic War. The author updated the socio-spiritual, moral and moral aspects of the attitude of the 48 baptized part of Soviet society on the eve of the war. At the same time, the main focus of the research was placed on the mental characteristics of the baptized Russians, as a state-forming ethnic group. Considerable attention is paid to the dynamics of religiosity of the Russian-Soviet society of the 20s, 30s. and on the eve of the war. The offcial data on the number of believers in Soviet Russia since 1924 are given, their contingent is indicated: there were soldiers, offcers of the Red Army, commanders, generals, marshals, draftees, townspeople, peasants, schoolchildren, etc., according to the published offcial statistics on the number of believers in the USSR, which allows to deny the total atheism of the Soviet people. The statistical documents include documents from military units to the Political Administration of the Army, the conclusions of the anti-religious commissions of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, the department of cultural enlightenment of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, evidences of the highest hierarchy, opinion polls of the authorities and, fnally, the census data of 1937-1938. The collected statistical and sociological material allowed the author to substantiate the idea that by the beginning of World War II, the Soviet baptized society was a large layer of Soviet society, which had a defnite infuence on the identifcation of people. The main author's attention is paid to the conceptually signifcant topic of an open, deep revival of faith in the war years. The work examines the processes, types and forms of churching people, the motivation for the revival of religious feelings, as well as cases of miraculous salvation and signs at the front, in the trenches, during the fghting. To confrm his scientifc position, the author used numerous documented evidence of front-line soldiers, partisans, war heroes, memoirs and epistolary literature. The author’s refections on the combination of the mentality of the baptized, believ-ers, and church-going society of ideas of sacrifcial love for the Soviet homeland, including the Russian priesthood, are of a special, innova-tive nature. The article summarizes some of the results, the main one is that the traditionally distinctive patterns of the attitude of the baptized Soviet people remained the same as in the pre-Soviet past. Depending on the sociopolitical contexts, the religiosity of the Soviet people sometimes plunged into the subtexts of Soviet culture, then appeared openly, as in the years of the Great Patriotic War.