"Church keys seized": church closure in the context of the social policy of the Soviet government in the Piterka district of Saratov region in 1930–1937

Church buildings in pre-revolutionary Russia served as centers of ritual and social activity. The most active villagers united around them and played an essential role in maintaining the village's ecclesiastical infrastructure. While discussing the anti-religious politics enforced after 1917, researchers highlight its ideological component. The presence of this aspect is beyond doubt, but in the current paper we see the closure of the Orthodox churches as a part of the social politics of the new government, aimed at building «Soviet society» as opposed to the pre-Revolutionary system of social institutions. The subtraction of church buildings as a physical representation of the old order was an inseparable part of this policy. In this paper, we analyze the strategies of the local Soviet authorities aimed at closing the churches in the villages of Small Uzen’, Mironovka, Aleksashkino, and Piterka (the modern Piterka district of Saratov region). The paper’s aim is twofold: we seek to first reconstruct the chronology of events that led to the churches’ closure. Second, we aim to trace the strategies, methods, and practices used by local authorities to destroy civilecclesiastical social structures through the seizure of church buildings. Another important aim of our study is to highlight the resistance shown by village communities and document the names and individual stories of the people connected to the ecclesiastical infrastructure. The research uses previously unknown documents from the state archives of the Samara and Saratov regions, the archive of the Administration of the Federal Security Service in the Saratov region, supplemented by villagers’ memories.