Rural Religiosity Among the Middle Volga Muslims by the Social Surveys in Soviet Period

Abstract

Religion is one of the foundations of rural life. The most important events in the life of a peasant (births, marriages, funerals) are religious in their nature. In the Soviet period, rural religiosity was considered as a relict phenomenon, and in the post-Soviet period – mainly as a phenomenon of cultural, folklore, ritual character. In our opinion, it is relevant to study rural religiosity as a functional phenomenon that affects not only the everyday life of the villagers, but also their economic, socio-political life. The purpose of the study is to give a sociological description of rural Muslim religiosity in the Middle Volga region during the Soviet period. This requires the involvement of a large amount of historical and sociological material. Due to the study it’s became possible to identify a number of conditions favorable to the preservation of religiosity in an atheistic state, including the homogeneity of the socio-professional structure of society, the size of a rural settlement, compact living outside national autonomy as national and religious minority. The problem of sustainability of rural religiosity is part of a broader problem - the task of preserving the Middle Volga village as a sustainable ethno-social organism. High religiosity in places densely populated by the Tatar population had consequences also in such a modern phenomenon when the most devout Tatar villages in the Soviet years are the most economically developed and demographically stable today.