The historical stages of the legends about Belovodye of Old Believers of Altai: a historiographical aspect of research

XX centuries. In the minds of the Old Believers Belovodye was located in various territories — from Bukhtarma to China and Japan. Thus, each stage was distinguished based on changes in ideas about the territorial location of Belovodye. The article also focuses on the religious aspects of the legend, thanks to which it was determined that in the XVIII century the legend about Belovodye, adopted by the Siberian Old Believers, first formed the basis of the ideology of the ethnographic group of the Altai "kamenschiks", and then spread among the Old Believers of the Urals and the European part of Russia. It was also noted that the distribution and transformation of the legend of Belovodye was significantly influenced by political events in the Russian Empire, such as the transfer of the Kolyvano-Voskresensky factories to the Cabinet and the repressive actions carried out in relation to the Old Believers under Nicholas I. Thus, thanks to the dynamic, multilateral and non-linear changes inside the old believers XIX — beg. XX centuries the legend of Belovodye does not appear as a general picture.