Missionary Activity among the Old Believers Performed by the Priest Alexander Amerikov as a Member of the St. Basil Brotherhood

The history of missionary work in the Ryazan diocese is rather poorly studied. This statement applies to the study of the activities of the St. Basil Brotherhood, which was one of the most serious missionary organizations in pre-revolutionary Russia. When considering the history of the Brotherhood named in honor of St. Basil, Bishop of Ryazan, there is an urgent need to study the missionary activity of its members, since it was they who embodied the goals and objectives. At present, only fragmentary information on this issue is available to the masses, and the entire layer of narrative material is in the archives or in special collections of libraries, which are not always accessible to the researcher. This article is dedicated to one of the most active members of the Brotherhood — the priest Alexander Amerikov, who was a zealous worker on the mission field, as evidenced by the fruits of his activity (the number of conversations with the Old Believers, the number of people converted to Orthodoxy). It was he who had the honor of becoming the first diocesan missionary of the Brotherhood. The article is written primarily on the basis of archival materials. Also, actively involved were materials published on the pages of the Ryazan Diocesan Vedomosti.