The Spread of Orthodoxy on the Territory of Sayano-Altai in the Second Quarter of the 19th - Early 20th Century in the Writings of Russian Researchers
The article examines the opinion of historians and researchers on the topic of the spread of Orthodoxy in the Sayano-Altai region. The active religious conversion of the region's population was associated with the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church, namely, with the founding of the Altai Spiritual Mission, which operated in 1828-1919. The impact of the mission on the indigenous population remains a debatable issue to this day. The central topic of this article is the analysis of the assessments of the activities of the Altai Spiritual Mission among the peoples of the Altai Mountains. The assessments of the mission's work varies in different historical epochs, depending on the socio-political and ideological situations, as did the theoretical and methodological approaches to its study. Thus, chronologically the historiography on this topic is divided into three categories: pre-revolutionary, Soviet and modern. Researchers of the pre-revolutionary period generally viewed positively the work of the mission on the territory of the Altai and criticized only some of its aspects: mainly those related to the ill-conceived policy of the relocation of the nomadic and semi-nomadic population. In the Soviet period, due to the state's atheistic ideology, the negative perception of the mission's activity prevailed. The researchers considered the spread of Christianity superficial and tied it to government policy. At the present stage of historiography, in connection with the liberation of science from Soviet ideology, new, comprehensive and more balanced works on the history of the Altai Spiritual Mission have appeared. Accounting the colonization function of the mission and the negative aspects of its activities, modern-day researchers pay attention to the role of the church in the development of education, linguistics, medicine, agriculture in the region. The Altai ideologists express the extreme point of view: Christianization had led to deethnization and lumpenization of resident population. Thus, the process of familiarization of the Altai peoples with Christianity can be called contradictory, having both positive and negative sides, and it is difficult to give an unambiguous assessment of its activities.