Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2021 number

The study is devoted to a rather unusual regional issue of confessional history implemented exactly a century ago in the east Asian part of Russia. Parishioners of the Catholic community of Nikolsk-Ussuriysky, seaside town, realized the need to build a classic stone church building instead of a chapel. Felix Ivanovich Stetskevich, a local resident, declared himself a sponsor, promising to give the community a land plot to build the church. His intentions changed during the construction process facilitated by the external events’ background, namely the revolutionary events in the country. The conflict between Stetskevich and the community members was caused by changes in the “patron”’s worldview. The conflict resulted in the court decision that made Felix Stetskevich the sole owner of the church building. The study object is the national confessional community of Poles, Roman Catholics, who lived in Nikolsk-Ussuriysky town, near Vladivostok. The research subject is changing worldview of the religious community’s brightest member who claimed to be the group leader. The investigation’s temporal frames are defined by the event’s extreme dates (in this case, the start and end dates of the temple building’s construction), and cover five years at the turn of epochs: from the empire to the change of political regime in the east of Russia. The study objective is to reveal relationship between the motivations that guided the “patron” and their implementation in practice. The work’s methodological basis is a broad approach to social history using the historical-genetic principle, as well as methods of archeography, content analysis of sources. The author has studied and analyzed materials transferred by the Catholic religious community of Ussuriysk to store in the Russian State Historical Archive of the Far East. The paper concludes on external events influencing mental attitudes, the consciousness secularization in the situation of ideological choice.