The Politics of Religion in Postcommunist Russia

Abstract

"Russians lost a state and a ruling party in 1991. But more than this, they lost a belief system that had defined their entire existence. Whether or not they had internalised its values, Marxism-Leninism explained the place that Russians occupied in the world in which they lived: their place in their own society, and the place of the USSR itself in a wider process of global change. It had been the official ideology for more than two generations; and by 1989, when the last Soviet census was conducted, fewer than 10 per cent had been born before the October Revolution and fewer still had any conscious memory of a different society. I Official theory suggested that, as time went on, religious superstitions would die out along with other attitudes and values that arose from presocialist socioeconomic formations that were contrary to the principles of communist morality.2 Western social scientists, for their part, agreed that a regime was likely to have established itself firmly once it had become the predominant influence upon the political memory of more than half of its adult popu- lation, a condition the USSR had satisfied by the 1960s."