Volyn Hubernia confessional landscape evolution under the conditions of the russian autocracy

Abstract

The purpose of the research is to determine affiliation of Volyn population to certain religious denominations based on the analysis of archival materials and statistical data and to illustrate how the quantitative composition of the above-mentioned denominations changed during the 19th – the beginning of the 20th centuries. The Methodology of the Research. The study is based on the principles of historicism, scientificity and authorial objectivity, there have been used general scientific methods (analysis, synthesis, generalization, comparison) as well as special historical (historical typological, historical systemic) methods. The method of criticism and classification has been applied while analyzing the archival materials, and the author used the statistical method for determining quantitative indicators. The scientific novelty consists in the fact that in the research there has been not only identified the main denominations to which the population of Volyn hubernia belonged, but there has been also elucidated the process of changing the local population affiliation to different denominations, and it has been determined that as a result of a purposeful ecclesiastical and religious policy of the tsarat some denominations disappeared or weakened, instead the Orthodox Church became dominant in the region during the long 19th century. The Conclusion. As a result of the three partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a significant part of the Ukrainian lands were under the Russian Empire rule. The Russian authorities, in order to incorporate the Ukrainian lands as soon as possible, carried out not only their territorial and administrative registration at the legislative level, but also implemented an active church and religious policy. The essence of this policy was to weaken the Roman Catholic Church as much as possible and to eliminate the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church completely, which was achieved already in the first third of the 19th century. At the same time, the authorities were also engaged in solving the Jewish issue, because the territory of Volyn hubernia was classified by the Russian government as the one where the representatives of the Jewish nationality had the right to live – a strip of the Jewish settlement passed through the territory of the hubernia, which was introduced by a decree of Catherine II back in 1791. From the second half of the 19th century the confessional composition of the hubernia population also changed due to the fact that Protestantism began to spread among the local population, initially such as Baptistism, and from the beginning of the 20th century – and the Seventh-day Adventists.

All these denominations were under a strict supervision of the Russian authorities, who adopted restrictive laws in such a way that at the beginning of the 20th century, in Volyn hubernia, the vast majority of the population were parishioners of the Orthodox Church which was acceptable by the state