The Issue of State Participation in the Conversion of Sectarians to Orthodoxy (On the Example of the Activity of the Orthodox Blessed Virgin Mary Brotherhood in Blagoveshchensk)

The article poses a problem of the limits of state participation in the action of in the reversion of sectarians to Orthodoxy in the late 19th — early 20th centuries. Also it defines the function of such interaction with the Church. The experience of the Blessed Virgin Mary Brotherhood’s activity is used as an illustrative material. This Brotherhood was created in the Russian Far East by the bishop Guriy (Burtasovsky). Based on the archive documents described are the cases of the Brotherhood’s state-supported opposition to the Molokans’ communities. Given are an analysis of these cases by the bishop Guriy (Burtasovsky) and some proofs of their necessity. Also, taken are into account the specificity of the mentioned historical period, all social contradictions aggravated because of the modernization, ideological and politic disputes, which reduced to the activation of the anti-state tendency among they who fell apart from God. The material of this article allows us to consider closely at both the role of the Orthodox Blessed Virgin Mary Brotherhood, and the traditional Church- State collaborative mechanism. And then it allows us to review the objects of the Russian Orthodox Church’s mission in the Far East.