Believing In Russia Religious Policy After Communism

As unease mounts over Russia's direction under Presidents Putin and Medvedev, how free are her faith communities? Drawing upon hundreds of interviews with religious and state representatives across Russia, this book explores religious policy as both a gauge of Kremlin commitment to democratic values and a reflection of national identity.

Specialists from Europe and the US investigate the current and changing role of religion in post-communist Russia. Drawing upon Eastern Orthodox, Protestant and Roman Catholic points of view, they examine the Russian religious attitudes, activities and institutions, and explore the ways in which religion will significantly impact emerging social and political questions there. The volume should be of use to scholars of Russian politics, society, and religion and for anyone interested in the emerging culture of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Essay from the year 2001 in the subject Theology - Comparative Religion Studies, grade: 1.0 (A), University of Leeds (POLIS), language: English, abstract: The distrust of organised religion is a phenomenon of post-Soviet Russia. It is a likely result of developments that characterise the coming of the modern age as introduced to Russia in its full scale by post-communist liberalisation and pluralisation and is therefore comparable to earlier developments in the West. In Russia the specific experience of atheist totalitarianism as well as its collapse has enhanced several aspects of this "modernity factor" in relation to religious institutions. The essay discusses these and other factors that influenced distrust of organised religion in Russia in the 1990s.

Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent is the first book to fully explore the expansive and ill-understood role that Russia's ancient Christian faith has played in the fall of Soviet Communism and in the rise of Russian nationalism today. John and Carol Garrard tell the story of how the Orthodox Church's moral weight helped defeat the 1991 coup against Gorbachev launched by Communist Party hardliners. The Soviet Union disintegrated, leaving Russians searching for a usable past. The Garrards reveal how Patriarch Aleksy II--a former KGB officer and the man behind the church's successful defeat of the coup--is reconstituting a new national idea in the church's own image. In the new Russia, the former KGB who run the country--Vladimir Putin among them--proclaim the cross, not the hammer and sickle. Meanwhile, a majority of Russians now embrace the Orthodox faith with unprecedented fervor. The Garrards trace how Aleksy orchestrated this transformation, positioning his church to inherit power once held by the Communist Party and to become the dominant ethos of the military and government. They show how the revived church under Aleksy prevented mass violence during the post-Soviet turmoil, and how Aleksy astutely linked the church with the army and melded Russian patriotism and faith. Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent argues that the West must come to grips with this complex and contradictory resurgence of the Orthodox faith, because it is the hidden force behind Russia's domestic and foreign policies today.

Translated from the Russian. These essays were written over the course of more than 40 years. Their authors--Pushkarev, Rusak, and Yakunin--have all been exiled or imprisoned for their outspoken views.