Renovationist Metropolitan Alexander Vvedensky and the Culture of Debate in the USSR in the 1920s

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to find out the places of religious disputes in the context of the described epoch with reference to the personality of A. I. Vvedensky (1889-1946). The research involved the materials of the debates contained in a number of issues of the journal «Church Renewal», as well as in the works of A. E. Krasnov-Levitin. Chronological, retrospec­tive and ideographic methods of historical science were used. This historical period represents a unique phenomenon — a transitional stage in the history of Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church. The old state structure and social foundations were already a thing of the past, opening up certain freedoms: and in this context, the phenomenon of disputes on religious and ideolog­ical topics between believers and atheists arose. At the same time, a Renovationist schism oc­curred in the Russian Orthodox Church, supported by the Bolsheviks. Consideration of Alexander Vvedensky’s participation in the debates reveals many nuances of his activity as a renovationist ideologue, speaker, disputant, employee of the Soviet government, politician and schismatic.