“Krasnodrakonovtsy”: on identification of a religious movement

Currently, religion, on the one hand, is one of the components of spiritual and moral education and social development, and on the other hand, it is an element of marginalization of individual groups. In the 1920s and 1940s, this was an ordinary phenomenon in the USSR, especially when it came to the main ideological competitor of the ruling party. State structures, based on external attributes, united independently existing Orthodox groups into an integral organization. The example of “Krasnodrakonovtsy” members is illustrative in this regard. The purpose of the study is to analyze the role of the “Krasnodrakonovtsy” movement in church life in the USSR, including its prevalence, essential characteristics and place in the hierarchy of religious organizations. Materials and methods. The research is based on archival and published materials. Unpublished sources and facts from previously performed scientific papers enabled us to representatively reveal the problems of the emphasized issue. The scientific principles of historicism and objectivity served as the conceptual basis. General scientific and special scientific methods were used for practical implementation of the research objectives. Results. In Soviet times, due to insufficient exploration maturity and haste in classification, “all groups of believers hostile” to the government, even those who “had not yet managed to branch off” from the Orthodox Church, were enrolled in the category of sectarians. Moreover, there were two trends: localization of individual associations or their scaling. A typical example is “Krasnodrakonovtsy”. Official statistics and some experts (employees of the Museum of the History of Religion under the USSR Academy of Sciences and some employees of atheist organizations) described them as a sect with a specific geographical reference as a “minor sect of Voronezh region”. The documents prepared in the system of Soviet anti-religious and punitive bodies (the Anti-Religious Commission under the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (of Bolsheviks), the All-Union State Political Administration) were characterized by an expansive approach. As a result of this generalization, in the materials of the investigative records management of state security agencies in various parts of the country, groups of “religious people” are recorded under a unifying name. Subsequently, the terminology of official documents migrated to scientific publications and, as a result, the distribution area of the “Krasnodrakontsy” was not a small area, but actually throughout the entire territory of the USSR. Moreover, the term “Krasnodrakontsy” did not serve as a self-determination of any of these groups of believers, but was used by representatives of government and supervisory authorities as a characteristic of the most radical religious groups united on the principle of extreme rejection of the existing socio-political regime in the country. The name itself came from an image found in biblical texts: the Soviet government was compared to the Apocalypse dragon. The place of the “Krasnodrakontsy” members in the hierarchy of religious organizations is highly controversial: some researchers consider them as a purely sectarian movement, while others – as an “extra–ecclesiastical Orthodox movement,” and others – as one of the groups of the “true Orthodox.” Their association with the “true Orthodox” seems to be the most correct. This conclusion is based both on the testimony of the movement participants themselves and on a comparative analysis of their views. Conclusions. The analysis of the history of the “Krasnodrakontsy” movement shows that there is an ambivalent attitude towards this religious movement in Russian historiography. There are concepts of its localization (consideration as a local territorial group) and scaling (extensive interpretation in relation to different groups throughout the USSR). The movement arose in the Soviet times and became a reaction to the actions of the new authorities in the confessional sphere. From the ruling elite, the “Krasnodrakontsy” were unconditionally perceived as an extremely hostile religious movement to the regime. Having been formed on an Orthodox basis, it was subsequently classified as sectarian.