Abstract: The subject of this research is the transformation of the traditional way of life of the Old Believers population in Buryatia at the beginning of the 20th century on the example of its younger generation. The article's research object is the youth Old Believers in Buryatia. The authors consider such aspects of this topic as: the objective state of the social climate in the “family” village at the beginning of the 20th century; cultural, political and ideological transformations of the Soviet government, directed primarily towards young people; and the reaction to them from different generations of Old Believers.
The authors applied the historical-genetic method, which involves the study of changes of phenomena over time, as it was necessary to characterize the lifestyle of "family" young people in the pre-revolutionary period and in the 1920s. The historical-comparative method, which provides a comparison of the sides of various phenomena and which reveals their general and specific features, was also used, in particular, to compare the education of young people in the rural communities and the Soviet government. The authors come to the conclusion that the involvement of the Soviet government as allies of the “family” youth became one of the main goals in the matter of assimilating this closed religious group of the population into the actively building single Soviet society. And as for the youth itself, these years were a period of opportunities to change their lives, to increase their literacy, to independently choose their occupation, and to move to urban spaces. The novelty of this research lies in that for the first time in historiography new archival materials are introduced into the scientific circulation that contain stories of previous "family" villages about the pre-revolutionary lifestyle of young people. This allows to present a clearer picture of the dramatic changes that occurred in the future of this social group of the Old Believers in Buryatia.