The inter-confessional interaction and «struggle for congregation» in a migrant village of Siberia at the cusp between the 19th and 20th centuries

The research area of published academic research papers regarding history of Siberian region in the period of mass migration of people at the turn of the XIX and XX centuries is wide. And besides traditional topics, which are related to the emergence of new migrant villages and establishment of peasant households, author of the article are interested in the spiritual sphere of migrant and long-term residents communities. In this regard, the consideration of interactions of different migrant groups, varying in their religious affiliation by the example of one of the Siberian territories - Tomsk-Chulim region, became the aim of this article. In order to achieve that aim the following tasks were defined: to trace the way different confessional communities were consolidating; to characterize their interactions and methods of «struggle for congregation» in the circumstances of mass migration. The corpus of official synodic and consistorial materials became the base of research sources. While comparing its content with basic principles of the «social trust» concept, which propose to estimate the effectiveness of «struggle for congregation» methods with the help of correlation of «socially generalized expecta-tions» and «fulfillment of promises», we have made the following conclusions. Firstly, the effectiveness of actions of one or another confessional group for the expansion in number of congregation and the increase of self-empowerment depended on several circumstances: the presence of a strong and authoritative leader, a placement for worships, holy artifacts; the availability of financial and human resources; the division of people into «long-term residents» and «new settlers»», because in the situation of high competition among confessions, whose faith was aimed to constant renovation of behavioral strategies, the duration of living had the significant effect. Secondly, the remaining documentary material discover factors of formation (the accessory to the long term residents part of population, which historically formed the strong core of old-believers, the presence of the more competitive confessional alternative, the absence of necessary resources in the struggle for congregation) and levels of the «social trust» system functioning in the investigated region: inner and outer. In the first case the «straggle for congregation» was unfolding within one confession and, for example, for old-believe agreements it meant, before everything else, the numerical maintenance of the existing group of followers; in the second case it was happening among different confessions (at that the dominant and representing the state power of Russian Orthodox Church, because of the local specificity, had no advantages in this confrontation).

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