The Old Believers of Burytia in the 1920s and 1950s: Transformations of the Way of Life

Khomyakov Sergei Vasil'evich PhD in History Junior Research Associate, Institute of Mongolian, Buddhist and Tibetian Studies, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences  670045, Russia, Republic of Buryatia, Ulan-Ude, Tretyakov str., 25A, sq. 29 khomyakov777@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

The lifestyle of the Trans-Baikal Old Believers of the 1910s and 1920s was the subject of study by both pre-revolutionary (Y.D. Talko-Gryntsevich, A.M. Selishchev ^{[21, 20]}) and Soviet researchers (A.M. Popova, A. Dolotov ^{[11, 5]}), who noted the development of crisis phenomena of religious identity to varying degrees, the first did the emphasis on the growing internal contradictions, the latter pointed to the exceptional role of Soviet ideology in this. As for the period of the 1950s, no major works of this decade of Semeysky's life were found, a new galaxy of scientists (F.F. Bolonev ^[1], V.M. Pykin ^[16] and many others) were mainly focused on the study of the pre-revolutionary, early Soviet, or perestroika periods.  

Transcripts of meetings of the regional committee of the Buryat-Mongolian CPSU (b) devoted to anti-religious, party and cultural work in the "Semey" areas, stored in the State Archive of the Republic of Buryatia and the State Archive of the Trans-Baikal Territory, as well as materials of the Buryat-Mongolian Pravda (issues of the 1920s and 1950s), were important for solving the tasks of the study.x years.).

The 1920s became the first decade of the realization of a grandiose task for the communist government. It assumed not only the unification of the peoples of the former Russian Empire into a single Soviet society, but also the inclusion of heterogeneous, specific in their way of life (military service, religious factor, etc.) identities, ethnically part of a particular nationality, but mostly living in isolated enclaves. Examples of such identities include the Cossacks reorganized by the Bolsheviks, as well as the Old Believers, which "arose as a result of the split of the Russian Church and became a clear sign of the division of a hitherto unified Orthodox society" ^{[23, p. 16]}. Moreover, the Old Believer communities (like the Cossacks) historically lived compactly at fairly large distances (Pomerania, Ukraine, Moldova, Altai, Transbaikalia, the Far East), differed in their identity from each other, adapting to local climatic, social, and political peculiarities. This forced the Soviet government to find specific approaches in breaking the "old" way of life for each such structure, although along with this, universal methods were widely used among the Trans-Baikal Old Believers in class struggle, anti-religious propaganda and ideologization.

The Old Believers living in the Buryat-Mongolian ASSR, formed in 1923 and called "family", appeared here in the 1760s, after the so-called "expulsion" (after a series of decrees by Catherine II on the return of fugitive "dissenters" ^{[16, pp. 9-11]}) of large families from an area called Vetka (near Gomel). "Polish settlers will have to serve the "roadways", i.e. the philistine underwater chase to the Nerchinsk mines and silver smelters, provide them with agricultural products" ^{[16, pp. 11-12]}. The traditional way of life of the local Old Believers (where the main component of its integrity was the Ancient Orthodox religion) was undergoing significant transformations by the 1920s (and later). They were expressed in the gradual loss of understanding of the specific religious features of the "old" rite for the coming generations of immigrants and the inevitable bringing to the fore of the colorful ethnographic specifics created around the Ancient Orthodox creed (material culture, everyday life, festive rituals, etc.). The Soviet government here is not seen as the root cause that provoked the weakening of the positions of the former way of life of the Old Believers, since According to Professor A.M. Selishchev, who was in 1919 in the Semey villages of Verkhneudinsky district, the Bolsheviks will face a radically changing reality here. "Young people would find a way out in school. This is not the case, and young people are drinking, debauching, hooliganism, not to mention smoking" ^{[20, p. 17]}. The presence of many interpretations and agreements, texts of sacred books arbitrarily interpreted by the charters, the low literacy of the population – all this made the way of life of individual settlements of Old Believers isolated not only from the outside world, but also from each other, condemning the creed not to development, but to extinction. The loss of the unshakable authority of parents and, in general, the elderly among young people, manifested since the 1900s, the parallel withering away of prohibitive practices (shaving beards, abstaining from alcohol and smoking, marriages strictly between one's own), the upheavals of the 1910s – intensified the objective crisis of identity. All this, coupled with decades of Sovietization of the Semey household, has led at the present stage to the broadcast mainly of their external cultural characteristics, cuisine, song traditions, ditties and all that little that, in principle, people who were not indifferent to their past managed to preserve.

For example, the distinct eschatological tradition of the Trans–Baikal Old Believers, expressed in the widespread dissemination between generations of the content of the biblical Apocalypse (in book and oral versions), which they understood as a gradual falling away from Christ of all churches in the world, except the Old Believers, gradually dissipated (like many other elements of spiritual heritage). The author of the study often listened in childhood to a fragmentary story about the future strong war in the East, about the "end of the world" from his grandmother, semeyskaya S. Nadezhino, Tatyana Kupriyanovna Khomyakova (1933-2023), who said at the same time that she herself (as a "girl") listened to "passions" from her mother (Avdotya Pegasyevna Pavlova (1897-1986)) with much more details that she herself does not remember for a long time. The semantic component of prayers with prostrations and simultaneous sorting of beads sewn from cloth in the hands also gradually faded into the past during the XX century. Grandmother (a representative of the youth generation of the 1950s) bowed, she had a rosary, but she no longer used them when praying, saying that she prays as she knows how. Meanwhile, in early childhood, when she often took me to old people's funerals, at funeral services ("old women came to wail") I managed to catch an even older generation, perfectly synchronizing and meaningfully fingering the rosary in accordance with one or another part of the prayer for a couple of hours.   

Of course, there was an active initiative on the part of the Soviet government to significantly strengthen the decline of identity, starting in the 1920s, which would be consistent with the personal task of the Buryat-Mongolian regional Committee of the CPSU (b) to integrate into the new social structure absolutely all communities of the republic - from the Verkhneudinsky proletariat to the "dark", "deaf", "ossified" family. The charters and scribes were censured (in the 1920s), and then persecuted (in the 1930s), the most active, strong-minded and educated Old Believers were repressed, who in the new reality "became" wealthy exploitative fists. The introduction of positive technical innovations, the construction of cultural facilities and schools, in the 1920s and 1950s, went along with the ideological agenda, it seemed to the population as impossible without the communist restructuring of everyday life. The extinction of people's unequivocal ignorance in terms of distrust of civic education and medicine was firmly linked to the remnants of a strong religious worldview. Hence, it seemed very interesting to me to try to trace the transformations of the Old Believers' way of life not only in the 1920s, i.e. at the initial stage of Soviet events that intensified crisis phenomena in the community, but also in the 1950s, among the first post-war generation of Semey, in a rather poorly studied period of their existence, to see further trends in their attitude to life, the processes taking place around them, their self-identification.

The atheistic campaign among the Old Believers of Buryatia in the resolutions of the party commissions of the 1920s was presented as the most important means for the successful process of positive and necessary cultural modernization for people (construction of schools, medical centers, cultural centers, reading rooms, etc., aimed at gaining the trust of the Semeyskys in education and medicine, conducting a variety of leisure activities). Its potential success would open up the possibility for the emergence of a fundamentally new Soviet personality, which was necessary for the Bolsheviks to justify the permanent victories of the socialist revolution. Moreover, in this case, it would be a demonstration of the powerful potential of communist ideology, capable of educating ideologically impeccable people, new Soviet atheist citizens, even among the traditionally hostile to external invasions and deeply religious community as Old Believers. "The degree of adherence to old customs, and hence the degree of resistance to the measures of the Soviet government, is felt in areas with a denser Old Believer population and vice versa, the Old Believer population in settlements with a significant number of "Siberian" population is gradually leveled, quickly perceiving school, hospital and other cultural and social events" ^{[12, d. 1420, l. 32]}. Cultural innovations really found a wide response among the very generation of the Semeyskys, who were already subject to various behavioral transformations, separation from the religious dogmatization of their daily lives, manifested in resistance to the elderly when they were forbidden, for example, to study in zemstvo schools. "Religious inertia, the influence of charters and initiators determines mainly the attitude of the Semey population to the cultural work that is being carried out among them by public education and health institutions. The attitude towards school has changed significantly in comparison with pre-revolutionary times and the first years of the republic's formation towards a more tolerant attitude, and even in some places the population stands up for it (Mukhor-Tala, etc.). Despite this, the belief that the school is a "heretical" institution has not disappeared among the Semey population" ^{[12, d. 1420, l. 33]}. Only here the ideological orientation of youth education (class design, characteristic speeches of teachers), cultural events (red corners, performances on anti-establishment and revolutionary themes), rallies, lectures in reading rooms, etc., was often perceived by the population as a particularly unnecessary, but necessary factor for the accessibility of a renewed life, which also influenced loyalty to the representatives of the new government. "The attitude of the population towards communists is different: the poor are certainly sympathetic, the middle peasants are also friendly, but some of the middle peasants in some villages still fluctuate between communists and the kulaks, and sometimes they are clearly anti-communist. Young people are closer than the adult population, women are set up in the same way as adults" ^{[7, d. 1420, l. 65]}. Newspaper notes about the Semey youth of the 1920s clearly demonstrate the decline of religiosity, not only the deep foundation of the old rite, but also the daily practice of going to chapels and churches. "Especially in religious terms, young people become completely "godless" in the words of the elderly. The fact that churches are visited exclusively by old men and old women and the number of believers decreases every day, melts like spring snow" ^{[18, p. 2]}. Indeed, similar facts are recorded by field researchers of the Semeysky way of life, for example A.M. Popova ^[11], in 1928, indicating that young Old Believers from the village of Nizhny Zhirim were "too lazy" to get up early on Sundays, unlike their parents. On the other hand, such newspaper articles had a clear tendency to absolutize "godlessness" for the entire younger generation, meanwhile, the reports of the regional committee of the republic indicated cases of denunciation of church trips, prayers "for display" not only for ordinary people, but also for many village Komsomol members ^{[17, d. 1420, l. 101]}. In addition, the trans-Baikal Old Believers, in principle, got used to "home" prayers, since in the XIX century their chapels and houses of worship were sealed by the authorities for many decades, or destroyed ^{[19, 1765, l. 48]}. It cannot be denied that the community was making a powerful shift towards its social transformation, away from religion as such (which was actively promoted by the government) and the following example shows this well. "In Semey districts, where the population is the most ignorant, we observe such cases as a funeral without a priest in the village of Staraya Kurba" ^{[9, p. 2]}. However, the religiosity of the population (including youth) was simplified to certain immutable boundaries, such as principled faith in God among their family and relatives, whereas the propaganda of the 1920s, based on similar examples, hastened to show that it remained only in the form of old man's habits, including rural communists But this phenomenon also took place in the 1950s. In the information field available for analysis ("Buryat-Mongolian truth"), there is a complete disregard for this problem, a statement of its absence as such.        

In the Old Believers' environment in these decades, the transition from hostile protest due to the inevitable invasion of their existence to the practices of socially approved behavior took place and strengthened. Since the mid-1920s, it has become an increasingly widespread principle of relations with the authorities. The gradual adaptation of the younger generation to the perception of anti-religious propaganda and communist ideology, in the context of the beginning collectivization of farms, could be explained by several reasons, the most important of which is the severe need for daily work in the fields, forcing people to be indifferent, but not hostile to the ideological design of everyday life (although the strengthening of this factor refers more to the 1930s.) At the same time, the religious worldview remained obligatory for young Old Believers in the sense of the fundamental need to believe in God, even when moving away from prohibitive practices and, in general, the specifics of Ancient Orthodoxy. From the grandmother's memories of the life of her parents – Kupriyan Pimanovich (1896-1986) and Avdotya Pegasyevna mentioned here, it can be distinguished that, although the icons and crosses in their families were removed in the 1920s from a prominent "red" place, they were simply moved to the bedrooms, "out of sight", then the relics were transferred into the Pavlov family, and already in the 1950s, some of them went to their grandmother's family. Morning and evening prayers in front of icons of both women and men, bowing to the ground – was a mandatory phenomenon in the families of my great-grandfathers in the pre-war decades, as evidenced by both personal memories passed on to my grandmother, and the fact that these practices passed into the everyday life of the generation of the 1950s, although in the case of my family this was already common among the female half. My grandfather, Trofim Kuzmich Khomyakov (1935-2021) joined the CPSU from the 1950s. He was a party organizer of the kolkhoz of S. Nadezhino and that in his youth, that in his old age he did not call himself a religious person, like most of his male peers, communists and non-partisans, however, he recalled that in important moments of life he addressed "to the Mother of God," he was baptized, although he no longer knew a single prayer. Of course, in the 1920s, as in the 1950s, in some cases there could clearly be a desire not just to live "in a new way", but to sincerely strive to become real "atheists", as indicated by the appearance of anti-religious ditties in the folk genre: "No matter how much I fasted, I did not go to the saints I got there, no matter how hard I worked before, but I was always starving" ^{[18, p. 2]}. However, based on personal memories taken from Semeysky's stories about his life in the 1950s and about the life of their parents in the 1920s, it is possible to state a similarity in attitude to his religion (despite the loss of understanding of the specifics of Ancient Orthodoxy). It lies in the fact that the creed was "hidden in a back room," and the new ideology was perceived by people to exactly the extent that was necessary for a more or less peaceful life and work. In terms of differences, it is possible to highlight the continuation of the decline of religious identity in the 1950s, expressed in the preservation of the fundamental foundations of the Christian faith, already predominantly among the female population. Since the end of the 1920s, such a model of behavior of Old Believers' youth gradually replaced the passive resistance of the elderly to innovations, allowed them to divert the attention of the atheistic authorities from the implicitly preserved religious everyday practices. By the 1950s and 1960s, the Semeyskys firmly occupied their place in the Soviet society of the Buryat ASSR as advanced grain growers, skilled and hardworking workers of forestry enterprises. Accordingly, the anti–religious campaign is radically weakening both during the Great Patriotic War and against the background of the public demonstration of new victories of Soviet ideology (in particular, among the Old Believers - after the repressions of the charters in the 1930s). Atheization loses its relevance, degenerating in the 1950s into a set of theoretical recommendations for filling the leisure space of collective farmers and employees of the forestry industry. "Tarbagatai aimag. The youth working on the farm have committed themselves to work, study and live communistically, “in a new way”, lectures are given on the culture of behavior, young people get acquainted with the norms of communist morality. Lectures on scientific and atheistic topics are planned" ^{[3, p. 3]}. Religious holidays (primarily Easter), which in the 1920s were declared a relic of the past, which will go away with the elderly, while young people will celebrate the "first furrow" in the field these days ^{[14, p. 3]} and go to the house of culture for anti–religious performances - since the 1950s. They are being celebrated more openly and without any sanctions from the party. Again, the author provides answers to the questions of the grandparents about the celebrations during their youth. They got married in 1955. (despite her husband's soon-to-be-a-communist status), they liked to celebrate Easter by summoning relatives and neighbors, which, according to their recollections, all residents of the village did. Nadeino, going out in the evening to "walk" through the streets. However, there were no notes in the Buryat-Mongol Pravda about the inappropriate religious lifestyle of Communists in the "Semey" districts, of which there were quite a lot in the 1920s issues. Upon careful study of the 1950s numbers, no mention was found, as well as in general references to the struggle against the Old Believer religion, as if the authorities considered that this issue has been removed from the agenda.

In favor of this statement, we note the fact of the almost complete disappearance in the Buryat-Mongolian Pravda of the mention of the terms "Semeysky", "Old Believers" in the 1950s, we are talking about milkmaids, machine operators, tractor drivers, loggers of Tarbagatai and other aimags. I.e., definitely Soviet people who stand out by the specifics of the profession. "Khandagatai. In 1943, Comrade. Koryagina was accepted as a member of the CPSU (b). She remembers the day of joining the ranks of the party as the most important step in her life, then she was nominated as an instructor of the Buryat-Mongolian regional committee of the CPSU (b). In 1950 she became the director of the Khandagatai forestry enterprise. An ardent patriot of our Motherland, a worthy daughter of the Soviet people" ^{[15, p. 2]}. In general, as for the ideologization of the Semeyskys (as an integral element of the ongoing cultural modernization) in the decades under review, its real success was possible only in connection with the parallel success of atheization, which was never achieved. An additional difficulty turned out to be the need to form rural party and Komsomol cells with as many of the most sympathetic to the innovations of the Semeyskys as possible, which could work on the loyalty of the population to ideology, through their subordination to "their" powers. But the obvious weakness of ideological training on the part of the "first generation" of the same local Komsomol members, their desire not to complicate relations with fellow villagers while maintaining their special position, manifested themselves in the 1920s in adapting new statuses to the surrounding reality. "Big Kunaley. In the same village, the cell, by its decree, restored Vasiliev to the Komsomol, who was expelled by the Republic of Kazakhstan during the inspection of the social composition, as a prosperous Kulak element. In the cell, Vasiliev was considered a Komsomol member, the asset in the cell in the person of Novitsky and Petrov trusted Vasiliev – they gave him a rifle" ^{[4, d. 542, l. 100]}. The fears of young people were often unfounded. "Kulak elements reach the point of violence – they force parents to expel Komsomol members from home, threaten them in every possible way (there are cases of beating a Komsomol member in Kuitun)" ^{[4, d. 542, l. 101]}. The state of the local communists by the end of the 1920s also did not correspond to the plans stated in theory for the spread of Soviet ideology among the Semeyskis through those carriers who were "their own" in identity. "Mass work is almost not carried out, and if it is carried out only once or twice a year, it is clear that with such a statement of work you will not get far. There are only 3-4 communist cells in the "Semey" districts, they are unable to serve all the villages, and besides, the Communists themselves are trailing behind the non-party ones" ^{[7, d. 1420, l. 66]}. Accordingly, based on the too slow speed of the "soft power" of influence, the government objectively switched in the 1930s to radical methods of implementing the task of creating a more or less homogeneous Soviet society in Old Believer villages, to a repressive policy towards a wealthy minority and uniting the labor resources of the rest through collectivization, forcing the identity to adapt.

In the 1950s, in parallel with the practical non-viability of atheistic propaganda, the regional committee's control over the ideological training of the CPSU and Komsomol cells (which had increased in numbers) weakened, placing greater emphasis on ensuring their economic performance. The author's grandfather (T.K. Khomyakov) recalled that for years, being a trade union organizer of the Iskra collective farm in the village of Nadezhino, he did not think about any ideological work, since it was necessary to fully focus on the main profession of an agronomist, in fact, he held a formal party position and did not see anything reprehensible in this, because "they put forward I'm welcome." Accordingly, newspaper articles of that period demonstrated an almost complete profanation of cultural and ideological work in traditionally Old Believer areas. "Chelutai. Party, Komsomol and trade union organizations have withdrawn themselves from the leadership of this most important area of ideological work. With an excellent base of clubs and libraries, educational and political work is reduced to showing films, clubs work unplanned, there are no mobile libraries" ^{[10, p. 3]}. Komsomol members, like in the 1920s, copied the example of an older organization for them, considering the reality prevailing on the ground to be normal. "Not all Komsomol organizations conduct mass explanatory work among young people, and Komsomol meetings are not held in a number of collective farms. The organization of the enlarged collective farm named after him is not working well. Lenin in the Tarbagatai aimag" ^{[6, p. 2]}.

Cultural workers, teachers, and medical center workers had to be perceived by the population as secondary (after the official authorities in the person of the party cell, chairmen of village councils and collective farms, Komsomol members) agents of ideologization, who could gradually direct the everyday worldview of the villagers in the vector needed by the authorities in everyday conversations "on equal terms". This method of ideologization also proved ineffective in the 1920s, due to insufficient training and unwillingness to do this among the specialists themselves, who understood the realities of life with people in the same settlement, similarly to local cells who sought to build non-conflict relations, not to stand out from the environment by refusing to spend the usual holidays and festivities together. "In c. The new Trash is a zemstvo apartment. Footsteps, songs, games late into the night every day. The hostess “for fun” keeps the teacher M. and the midwife O. in the apartment. Village youth with an accordion and songs walk through the village, the midwife O. in front, her sonorous voice covers everything. Such "enlighteners" and "cultural workers" will not do well to the village, it is better not to have them" ^{[9, p. 2]}. One can cite as an example the facts of ignoring by both the population and cultural workers the semantic component of the red corners, which were conceived by the party as the main visual demonstration of the essence of communist ideology. "It's fun. In the People's House, the red corner is visited mainly by children and young people, few people are interested in books and newspapers. Some people come just to mess around. Visitors sit in hats, smoke, spit on the floor, etc. The noise and uproar do not subside, this prevents those who would like to have a reasonable rest. Sometimes drunken guys do not forget about the red corner. The evening games there are demoralizing. Local workers do not struggle with these abnormalities" ^{[22, p. 3]}. There is no reason to believe that in the 1950s the situation in this area changed dramatically, in some cases it was a banal stop of cultural and educational work in individual villages, which shows not only the lack of people's time for leisure, but also the degree of their interest in the substantive side of Soviet ideology. "According to a group of authors, the Tarbagatai House of Culture is under lock and key all the time. This is well known in the department of cultural education of the executive committee, but they do not take any measures to revive its work" ^{[2, p. 2]}. It can also be noted that such an attitude of the Semeyskys to the activities of cultural institutions continued in the 1970s, as evidenced by the memoirs of the author's father, Vasily Trofimovich Khomyakov, born in 1963."We ran to the club as boys to watch movies every week, we didn't need anything else, a corner – I don't remember approaching it."

Finally, the technical side of the cultural modernization of the Semeyskys' way of life began its development in the 1920s and finally became the main element of their work in the 1950s. There is a point of view that the appearance of any technique in the life of the Old Believers of Buryatia was accepted by them with hostility, associated with the actions of the Antichrist, as well as the need to fill out metric records and any official documents, as A. Dolotov wrote in the 1930s ^[5]. This does not quite fit in with the natural desire of the Old Believer for sound management, the initial desire to cultivate arable land as efficiently as possible in the harsh trans–Baikal climate, mow mows, harvest more crops than it could be and at the same time - starting to receive technical means. On this occasion, it is worth pointing out the opinion of Myalo K., who wrote: "In the Old Believer society, peasant life was not at all hostile to technology and improvements in life. As a rule, the Old Believer peasant aspired to be an economically independent, strong owner, therefore not only did not resist the innovations that increase the efficiency of management, but was keenly interested in them, willingly introduced them" ^{[8, pp. 252-253]}. In the conditions of work already familiar in the 1950s on the collective farm and at machine and tractor stations, the family quickly mastered new equipment: in 1955, my grandfather was the first in the village to get a tractor "Belarus", my grandmother recalled how, as a very young girl, she replaced men on the night shift, driving a tracked tractor with a girlfriend. Newspaper articles can serve as confirmation of this trend, unlike rarely published problems in the cultural and pedagogical sphere, working successes were constantly demonstrated, shifting the focus on the essence of the Soviet man in the Semey village of the 1950s (however, as everywhere in the Buryat-Mongolian ASSR) from poorly grafted ideological markers to the image of economically efficient rural A "Stakhanovite", a fighter for exceeding any plans, who knows how to use the full potential of the received equipment. "Tarbagatai MTS tractor driver V.T. Medvedev has been working in the fields of the Krasnaya Zarya collective farm for four years. He achieves high performance every year by using his technique well. The unit was modified by him and consists of two cultivators, two seeders and two rollers. It sows 40-45 hectares daily instead of 22 according to the norm" ^{[13, p. 3]}. A similar technical renovation of farms was also taken for granted by the women of the family, while they were interested in completely separate issues. "The collective farm named after. Kalinin Tarbagatai aimag. It was about the widespread introduction of mechanization and automation into production. The livestock workers clearly understood the importance of mechanization of labor-intensive work on the farm, that the use of mechanical milking of cows frees the milkmaids from the burden of manual milking. Milkmaids expressed fears that if the machine does everything, then people will earn little" ^{[3, p. 3]}.

Thus, in conclusion, the following conclusions should be noted. The transformation of the way of life of the Old Believer population of the Buryat-Mongolian ASSR in the first half of the 20th century clearly had a negative impact on the further preservation of the community's self-identification, bearing in mind the decline of its religious component as the core of identity. The gradual loss of understanding by the inhabitants of the specific aspects of Ancient Orthodoxy inevitably occurred with each new generation, which took place even before the establishment of Soviet power here, having intensified in the 1920s. Based on the personal memories of the generation of the 1950s, we can talk about the modification of the creed into a versatile set of everyday practices. At the same time, the insufficient degree of influence on the Old Believers of the anti-religious agenda and the processes of ideologization in the 1920s and 1950s shown in the article can be explained by the powerful potential of the Semeysky cultural identity, which initially arose around the religious core and remained stable both in the Soviet period and in modern times. People could forget the elements of the religious rites of their ancestors and the oral heritage of the old faith, lose their abbots, as well as the handwritten books carefully preserved by the elderly, but they were well aware in the 1920s and 1950s of their mental involvement in the Old Believer community, the similarity of the material (home decoration, costume and jewelry, kitchen, etc.) and spiritual (dialect, historical memory, sayings and omens, festive tradition, everyday habits, etc.) culture, not to mention a clear knowledge of which settlements of Buryatia and the Chita region co–religionists live in.

Soviet propaganda of the 1950s in this regard demonstrated a demonstrative disregard for the persistently preserved contours of community, not even mentioning the term "family" in newspapers, however, with direct interaction with them at the primary level, the authorities, as well as cultural workers (who arrived or even more "their own") adapted to reality, formally following ideological instructions Moreover, the former emphasized coherence in agricultural work and the implementation of plans. On the part of the community, there were processes of mutual adaptation to the ongoing processes, people were not against calling themselves Soviet citizens (understanding by this the obligation to work honestly for the benefit of the state on collective farms, to protect it, but not to be atheist materialists), to use technical innovations, the benefits of affordable education and medicine. The article was prepared within the framework of the state assignment (project XII.191.1.1. "Russia and Inner Asia: dynamics of geopolitical, socio-economic and intercultural interaction (XVII-XXI centuries)", No. 121031000243-5.