From urban landscape to national culture: Russia’s conspicuous religious simulacra and enduring, if fragile, secularity

Abstract

This article considers the place religion holds in post-Soviet Russian society, and most importantly, the case of the dominant Russian Orthodoxy. It shows that the gap between low everyday religiosity and high public profile of religion is the key to a specific Russian version of secularity. How religion’s spectacular appropriation of physical and social space, up to the imaginative space of the national culture as such, does not cancel the strong counterweight of deeply ingrained secular cultural arrangements – either genetically linked to some European variations or specifically related to (post)communist experience.