Alexey Beglov

Alexey Lvovich Beglov (born 17 April 1974) is a Russian historian and senior research fellow at the Centre for the Study of the History of Religion and Church History, Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He specialises in the History of Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
== Biography ==
In 1997, he graduated from the Faculty of Philology of the Lomonosov Moscow State University.
In January 2004, under the guidance of Professor Olga Vasilieva at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, he defended his doctoral thesis titled The Church Underground Movement in the USSR in the Context of Church-State Relations, 1920s-1940s.
Since 2004, he has been working at the Centre for the Study of the History of Religion and Church History of the Institute of World History, Russian Academy of Sciences. He teaches at both secular and church educational institutions.
Since 2012, he has been a member of the editorial board of the quarterly academic journal, State, Religion, Church in Russia and Worldwide/Gosudarstvo, Religiia, Tserkov' v Rossii i za Rubezhom (indexed in Scopus since 2012).
==Research interests and academic works==
His research expertise encompasses the history of Russia (USSR) during the twentieth century, the relationship between the state and religion in Russia, the historical development of the Russian Orthodox Church and the ascetic tradition in Russia from the 19th to the 20th century. His research also focuses on the social aspects of religion and the influence of state policy on religiosity.
Since 1996, he has been engaged in the study of the records pertaining to the clandestine monastic communities that existed during the Soviet era. He edited the books of Nun Ignatia (Puzik) 'Elderhood in Russia' (1999) and 'Elderhood in the Years of Persecution' (2001), the collection 'The Path to the Perfect Life: On Russian Elderhood' (2005), as well as a number of her articles. He also undertook an investigation into the phenomenon of the 'catacomb church', which he subsequently detailed in his 2008 monograph, entitled In Search of "Sinless Catacombs": Church underground in the USSR.
He co-authored a textbook on the fundamentals of Orthodox culture as part of the Fundamentals of Religious Cultures and Secular Ethics course. He himself noted back in 2007: "The objective of our textbook is to facilitate the introduction of children of different nationalities and religious traditions to their neighbours. In the current educational context, there is a notable absence of verified information on religious issues provided to schoolchildren. The textbook was developed by scholars, rather than clergymen, who sought to adopt an objective cultural position. The intention was to present an account of the contribution of different religions to national and international cultures".
In the 2010s, he conducted research on the subject of parish life in the Most Holy Synod|synodal period, a topic that had previously been largely overlooked in academic studies. He has published a number of articles on this topic. In 2020, he successfully defended his DPhil thesis, entitled The Orthodox Parish in the Russian Empire at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: State, Discussions, Reforms.
He has authored four monographs and over a hundred articles.
== Selected works ==
* Russian Orthodox Church. The 20th century. (Sretensky Monastery, 2008). Co-authored with O. Vasilieva, A. Zhuravsky (In Russian)
** Russian Orthodox Church. The 20th century. (Sretensky Monastery, 2015). (In Russian)
* In Search of ‘Sinless Catacombs: The Church Underground Movement in the USSR (Publishing Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, ‘Arefa’, 2008). (In Russian)
** In Search of ‘Sinless Catacombs: The Church Underground Movement in the USSR, 2nd edition (ROSSPEN, 2018). (In Russian)
* Orthodox Parish in the Russian Empire at the End of the Nineteenth Century: Status, Discussions, Reforms (Indrik, 2021). (In Russian)
==Awards==
On 2 October 2009, he was awarded the Youth Prize in memory of Metropolitan Makarii (Bulgakov) of Moscow and Kolomna by Patriarch Kirill for his work In Search of "Sinless Catacombs": The Church underground in the USSR.
Category:1974 births
Category:Moscow State University alumni
Category:Russian historians