Vladimir Vasil’evich Pervushin,
Postgraduate Student, Institute of History of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The Image of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Pravda Newspaper in 1920
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2023-2-19
In the long history of State-Church relations, of particular interest is the period of the 1920s. At that time, young Soviet Russia had already taken the path of separation of the Church from the State. However, for a decade, the basic principles of antireligious policy were formed and approved, with active antireligious propaganda intended to create the public’s negative attitude toward the Orthodox Church being an essential part. Periodicals played a significant role in solving this problem. The paper presents the characterization of the image of the Orthodox Church based on the analysis of materials from the newspaper “Pravda” in 1920. Although “Pravda” was not a specialized antireligious periodical and covered church topics less frequently than other topics, it was one of the major organs of the RKP(b) and could not ignore such an urgent issue for the State. The study focused on the substantive content of the image of the Church. It was found that despite the statements about the tolerant attitude of the authorities toward the Orthodox Church made by the Bolshevik Party representatives, the Church was generally mentioned negatively. The study has revealed that the image of the Church would be constructed through the image of a priest comprehensible to the reader. Also, the methods used by the authors of the materials in question have been identified. These include denouncing the activities of the Church (both laity and clergy) and endowing them with a set of stable negative qualities, demonstrating the inseparability of the Church, the autocracy, and the Whites movement, mockery, and denigration of its importance to the workers. The most common way of communicating the image of the Church to the reader was found to be brief mentions in articles devoted to other problems or short notes discussing episodes in the life of peasants and workers, with themes of religion and the Church dominating.
Publishing: 28/02/2023
The article has been received by the editor on 27.01.2023
How to cite: Pervushin V.V. The Image of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Pravda Newspaper in 1920 // Historical Courier, 2023, No. 2 (28), pp. 235–242. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2023/ISTKURIER-2023-2-19.pdf]
The article was made on the topic of the state assignment “Memory of the Past in Written Sources of the 16th–20th Centuries: Updating Events, Broadcasting Cultural Traditions, Research Practices” (FWZM-2021-0005).
Links: Issue 2 2023
Keywords: the image of the Russian Orthodox Church; historical imagology; the Party periodicals; the newspaper “Pravda”