Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2015 number

The epoch of revolution and civil war in Russia in 1917-1922 attracted to the political life huge numbers of people whose cultural background in its essential part was shaped by religious forms; the “sacralization of politics” took place. No wonder that in studying the political realia of revolution and civil war, researchers often use theological concepts. One of them is a concept of “political hagiography” that involves the life stories of “great men” - objects of certain “political cults”. These life stories performed functions of indoctrination and promoted this cult within and beyond the “political community” using the specific set of symbols. Hagiography is generally a genre that exhibits stability in the canon. The characteristic feature of hagiographic canon is the stable inner structure of a text. Manifestations of hagiographic canon can provide unique data about a “political ideal” communicated to the “political fold”, and about ideological structure of a given “political cult”. To prove this hypothesis the author used the published materials - brochures and leaflets with biographies of A.V. Kolchak, the leader of the Anti-Bolshevik movement in Eastern Russia. The study revealed considerable similarities between these biographies and the lives of saints in terms of their inner structure. Text structure followed hagiographic canon and had relevant functions. Previously, these effects were registered only in the materials of communist propaganda literature and practice. The political history of Russia of both revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods cannot be understood without the reconstruction of complicated and multidirectional interactions between the elite and mass perceptions, interrelationship between the “secular” and “sacred” meanings, the religious and political cultures of the Russian society. Histories of “political cults” in Russia are yet to be written.