«Pensioners, Housewives and Other Citizens»: to the Question of the Orthodox Believers’ Social Composition in the USSR of the 1940–1970s

Abstract

The work is devoted to the peculiarities of the social composition of Orthodox-oriented citizens in the USSR in the post-war period. It is shown that this problem was not only scientific or practical, but also ideological in the 1940–1970s. From the Marxist-Leninist point of view, the circle of social groups to which Orthodox citizens belonged should have been constantly narrowing. As a consequence, the Soviet ideological discourse generated a "natural" social portrait of a typical believer, endowing him with such characteristics as old age, lack of education, low degree of involvement in Soviet cultural and industrial practices. At the same time the author demonstrates that the real state of things did not fully correspond to ideological attitudes. Representatives of all the main Soviet society categories demonstrated a greater or lesser degree of communion with Orthodoxy. At the same time, interest in traditional confessional culture on the part of the intelligentsia intensified towards the end of the Soviet era.