The legal aspects of the creation the theological institute in Petrograd

The revolutionary events of 1917 raised the question of the forms of existence of theological education in Russia, and the first legislative initiatives of the Bolshevik government indicated both confrontation with the Church and changes in educational policy. Despite the rejection of such a policy in general and legislative acts in particular on the part of the highest church authorities, the closure of the Petrograd Theological Academy forced the church community of the capital to look for new forms of theological education that could be implemented under the new regime. The article is devoted to the analysis of the Statute of the Theological Institute in Petrograd, approved by Patriarch St. Tikhon in 1920, in the context of the formation of Soviet legislation concerning the life of the Church and the functioning of higher education. Along the way, a comparative analysis of the Regulations with the Charter of theological academies of 1884, which was in force until the end of 1917, was carried out in order to find out which traditions of theological education the founders of the Theological Institute tried to preserve, and which traditions they managed to defend. The author came to the conclusion that the drafters of the Regulations tried to take into account the wishes of the Soviet authorities as much as possible in order to facilitate the registration of the institute in the People’s Commissariat of Education, but at the same time they made the most of all the loopholes in the legislation in order to preserve part of the traditions of pre-revolutionary theological education.