“The Praying People were Quite Distressed...”. Towards the Results of the Cultural Revolution in the Kama Countryside.

By means of the case study method the problem of revealing the results of the 1930’s Cultural Revolution in the leisure-time behavior of the rural youth has been posed in the article. The Cultural Revolution is understood by the author as a large Soviet project which was started in the 1920s and finished in the post-war decade with the formation of the Soviet man, who mastered the Bolshevik journalese and the necessary public ritual practices along with the symbols of the Soviet system. Antireligious agitation was an integral component of the Cultural Revolution; in fact it was its core. As the subject of the historical reconstruction it was chosen an incident in the Cathedral of the Transfiguration of the Savior in Gamovo village during the Easter holiday 1953. A document with the description of the incident compiled by P.S. Gorbunov, plenipotentiary for the Russian Orthodox Church in Molotov Region has been analyzed in detail. For the solution of this problem the author applied the resources which hadn’t been introduced for the scientific use earlier: materials from Party conferences and meetings; information from the Administration of the MGB in the Molotov region, letters and written requests to the Regional Committee of the CPSU. The original thesis of the article is stated as follows. As a result of the Cultural Revolution it was formed a new type of the Soviet person who according to the basic characteristics was divided into two types: the urban inhabitant living by his on private interests, and the hooligan from the workers' suburb, a violent and disruptive troublemaker. In the article it is reconstructed the events which took place in the village church on the night from the third to the fourth of April, 1953: intrusion of the drunken young men, their outrage on the porch and in the church fence, a knife-fight and, finally, a murder. The author has offered a hypothesis making possible to explain their licentious behavior by the fact that in the culture of working (rural) youth the boundaries between different kinds of space were erased. The Orthodox Church and the village club were identical for them in their leisure value. The norms of street and courtyard culture were applied to them equally. The status of the temple was lower than that of the club. Young people equated the church with something backward, boring, and old. The party and punitive agencies did all they could to alienate the new generation from any form of religious life. As a result, young people either stood aside the Orthodox Church or treated it with contempt, or, in exceptional cases, outraged within its bounds.