THE OLD BELIEVERS OF THE KIROV REGION DURING THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR OF 1941–1945 (BASED ON THE MATERIALS OF THE IMPLEMENTED PROJECT OF THE PRESIDENTIAL GRANTS FUND)

The article is devoted to modern grant work in the Old Believer community, aimed at collecting memories of the participation of relatives of older generations in the Great Patriotic War. The research was carried out within the framework of the implementation of the winning project in the Presidential Grants Fund competition, in 2019–2020 in the Afanasyevsky district of the Kirov region by the local community of the Russian Orthodox Old Believers Church. The specifics of the history of Old Believers in the region include secondary settlement from the Urals in the XIX century, ethno-confessional mimicry in the Soviet period and the ethno-confessional Renaissance of the late XX – early XXI centuries. Within the framework of the project under consideration, the community of the Russian Orthodox Old Believers Church in Afanasievo and other residents of the district conducted historical and local history research on the topic, including interviews with war veterans, home front workers and the so-called “children of war”. The research was carried out in the district museum, archive, etc. As a result, valuable materials were collected and began to be processed. It was revealed that the asceticism, religiousness, discipline and hard work inherent in the Old Believers helped them survive during the hard times of war, fight at the front and work in the rear. The distribution of household responsibilities among children, grandmothers and grandfathers, given the enormous employment of mothers on collective farms and the battles of fathers at the front, helped not only to survive, but also to reveal a fairly good standard of living in multi-generational Old Believer families. Such grant-funded work significantly complements fundamental research. The study of the contribution of Old Believers communities to the victory over the enemy during the Great Patriotic War can be supplemented by comparative studies of the role of other regional and ethnoconfessional communities in common Victory, including by the efforts of people from these cultural environments.