Chelyabinsk catholic church in the early 20-th century: the national and social structure according to the parish registers

The article reveals the national and social structure of the Chelyabinsk Catholic Church parishioners, analyzes the directions of Catholic migration flows to the South Ural region and determines the geography of Catholics origin. It pays attention to some social processes (such as internal migrations, vertical mobility) and demographic trends in this confessional community. The study is based on a statistical analysis of the Chelyabinsk Catholics database of the parish registers for 1907-1914, which were first introduced into scientific circulation. The author divides the parish into two parts: urban, which mainly consisted of Poles in the Chelyabinsk city community, and rural, represented by Catholics in the counties and mainly composed of Germans. The study showed that the majority of the Poles-parishioners were from the Siedlce province, while the Germans mainly came from the Taurida, Kherson, and Ekaterinoslav provinces. The confessional community of Chelyabinsk Catholics was multi-ethnic, so the subject of the analysis in the article is also the Belarusian, Ukrainian and Lithuanian Diasporas of the city. The study reveals that the peasant class predominated in the Chelyabinsk community and the parish as a whole. A significant percentage of Chelyabinsk residents of the Catholic confession were lower-middle class (13,1 % of all men marked in the registers) and nobles (9 % in the same category of persons). However, the town’s Catholic congregation is considered to be a peasant-commoners community.