Believers, Atheists, and Others

Abstract

In 1990-92 I had the opportunity to participate in a large-scale sociological study of religiosity in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, the results of which were published in a series of articles. (See D. Furman, "Religion and Politics in the Contemporary Mass Consciousness," Voprosy filosofii, 1992, no. 7; S. Filatov and D. Furman, "Religion and Politics in the Mass C~IISC~O~SSo~ts~i-S S," ologicheskie issledovaniia, 1992, no. 7; L. Vorontsova, S. Filatov, and D. Furman, "Religion and Politics in the Contemporary Mass Consciousness," in Religion and Politics in Postcommunist Russia [Religiia i politika v postkommunisticheskoi Rossii] [Moscow, 19941.) Afterward, the participants in the study ended lheir research-they lacked the resources and the money (and, most importantly, the resources to procure money). At the same time, however, a group of Finnish and Russian scholars under the direction of K. Wiainen, who had conducted all-Russian surveys in 1991, 1992, and 1996 (the sample for 1996 comprised 1,664 persons), began a study of Russian religiosity. The questions asked by the Finnish investigators, who were applying the framework of the World Values Survey, were somewhat different from our questions, and, it seemed to me, were not always appropriate for Russia. Nonetheless, our results are filly comparable, and I am very grateful to K. Kiiiiriainen-and to H. Heino, I. Sihvo, and V. Andreenkovdor giving me the opportunity to peruse and to utilize the material of their 1996 survey. The purpose of the present article is in part to interpret the findings derived by the Finnish scholars by camparing them with the results of our earlier studies. A more complete analysis of these materials will be published in English in Finland.