V. V. Shiller The course of the Soviet government’s confessional policy and its assessment  indicators in the Kuzbass from the  1920s to the 1960s

Abstract: The article addresses the system of indicators, which characterize the course of the Soviet government’s confessional policy in the period from 1920s to the 1960s in the Kuzbass. The set of considered indicators includes structural elements and practical ties of the Christian communities, among which: the system of governing, the social and ethnic stratification, the gender and age structure, the resettlement of the members of religious communities, as well as the confessional and ethnoreligious system of interaction, which was established between communities and subjected to change under the influence of the governmental policy and the political situation of the moment. The methodological basis for this article is the systematic approach that regards religious communities as functional, hierarchically subordinated systems, endowed with complex internal structures, and for which the policy of the state acted as an “external environmental factor”. A correlation analysis has been applied to estimate the representativeness of the data in the complete records of the religious communities in the Kuzbass. And the historical-comparative methodology, in a diachronic manner, has been adopted to determine the set of structural elements and the practical ties of the religious communities that act as indicators of the state’s confessional policy. The scientific novelty of this work lays in the introduction of mass sources, constituted by the complete records of the protestant religious communities in the Kuzbass from 1920 to the 1960s, as well as the presented system of indicators, which include a series of structural-functional elements of the religious communities, allowing for an assessment of the direction and effectiveness of the state’s confessional policy in this specific time period. This research shows that a series of socio-demographic determinants of the religious communities, designated in the article, belong to the set of the most r eliable indicators.

Keywords: