Statistical accounting of religious groups: some data on the history of Old Believer statistics in the Olonets and Arkhangelsk provinces

The article examines the features of the statistics of accounting for religious groups in the Russian Empire on the example of the Old Believer community in the Olonets and Arkhangelsk provinces in the XIX century. A brief digression is made into the history of the formation of statistics in Russia within the framework of the XIX century. This allows you to see on what data the registration of believers took place, as well as who and how it was conducted. Within the framework of the study, special cases of statistical accounting of Old Believers in the Olonets and Arkhangelsk provinces are considered, demonstrating the difficulties encountered in this matter. In particular, statistical tables are provided for a number of counties, which show discrepancies in the data. Such discrepancies became possible due to the difference in approaches to accounting for Old Believers among officials, the police and the clergy.   The research is based on the analysis of archival data from the National Archive of the Republic of Karelia and the State Archive of the Arkhangelsk region. Materials from the funds of the provincial statistical committees are compared and compared. The author comes to the conclusion that despite all the standardization of state statistics and the importance of the issue of accounting for religious groups of the population, the statistics of the Old Believers in the northern provinces had a number of difficulties. They concerned both the field accounting itself and the data consolidation into single tables. In particular, the question of who more accurately counted representatives of other religious groups that do not belong to official Orthodoxy remained open. The statistical tables provide data from both the police and the priests of local parishes. They are often very different. Another point that the author comes to in the study is the importance of comparing data over several years and the moment they are reflected in statistics. The research was carried out at the expense of a grant from the Russian Science Foundation No. 23-28-10260, https://rscf.ru/project/23-28-10260 / conducted jointly with the Republic of Karelia with financing from the Venture Capital Investment Fund of the Republic of Karelia (FVI RK).

old belief, Old Believers statistics, European North, Olonetsk province, Arkhangelsk province, northern frontier, religious groups, Old Believers, government statist, Russian Empire