At the end of May - beginning of June, Doctor of Historical Sciences, professor, leading researcher at the Department of Regional Studies of Russia, National and State-Confessional Relations of Altai State University Alexey Gorbatov conducted research on unique historical sources in the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow.
As a result, he managed to identify a number of valuable archival documents related to the international cooperation of religious organizations of the USSR, including from Siberia, within the context of religious policy of the Soviet period.
Alexey Gorbatov commented on the results of his work:
“My primary focus was on studying the documents of the Council for Religious Affairs under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, this is the main body of the Soviet period of the 1960s - early 1990s, which was responsible in the USSR for the implementation of state-confessional policy in the country as a whole, and representatives of this body, the so-called authorized persons in the regions. There were representatives of this council in every administrative entity in Siberia, whose activities are of interest to my research.
My study included reports, certificates, information and correspondence with representatives of the Council on the activities of religious organizations during the so-called period of “stagnation”, specifically in the Buryat Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, Altai and Krasnoyarsk regions, Irkutsk, Kemerovo, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Tomsk, Tyumen regions for 1975 and some other years. Of particular interest are documents relating to the foreign policy activities of religious organizations of the USSR in the context of religious politics. The research identified informative materials related to foreign relations of the Central Spiritual Administration of Buddhists of the USSR, materials of the General Conference of the World Brotherhood of Buddhists and the Asian Buddhist Conference for Peace. No less interesting were the reports of representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church on their participation in the work of the World Council of Churches.
In the last days of work, I found more valuable sources in the form of reviews of speeches in foreign media about the situation of religion and the church in the USSR in the second half of the 1970-1980s. As is known, in the USSR the situation of religious communities in the USSR was not simple, although the state-confessional policy of the Soviet government itself underwent significant changes from militant atheism to the principles of freedom of conscience during the period of “perestroika”. In this regard, it is important to study the opinion of foreign media in terms of objective coverage of religious processes, especially if we take into account modern realities and information wars.”
The work in the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow was carried out within the framework of the Russian Science Foundation grant “The influence of the imperial policy of acculturation and the Soviet model of state-confessional relations on the situation of religious communities in the border regions and national autonomies of the Asian part of Russia” (No. 23-18-00117, led by Candidate of Historical Sciences, an associate professor E.A. Shershneva).