Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy: Religion, Politics, and Strategy by Dmitry Adamsky

Reviewed by: The Orthodox Church and Civil Society in Russia, and: Russian Society and the Orthodox Church: Religion in Russia after Communism, and: Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov': Sovremennoe sostoianie i aktual'nye problemy [The Russian Orthodox Church: Contemporary Condition and Current Problems] Irina Papkova Wallace L. Daniel , The Orthodox Church and Civil Society in Russia. 251 pp. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006. ISBN 1585445231. $29.95. Zoe Knox , Russian Society and the Orthodox Church: Religion in Russia after Communism. 257 pp. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005. ISBN 0415320534. $170.00. Nikolai Aleksandrovich Mitrokhin , Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov': Sovremennoe sostoianie i aktual'nye problemy [The Russian Orthodox Church: Contemporary Condition and Current Problems]. 648 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2004. ISBN 5867933245. Post-Soviet Russia has been characterized by a visible resurgence of the country's arguably most important cultural institution, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). After seven decades of alternating persecution and soft repression by the atheistic Soviet state, the Church has experienced a remarkable renaissance, both in terms of recovered physical infrastructure and in social status.1 Visitors to today's Russian Federation will observe the ongoing renovation and reconstruction of church buildings, the proliferation of kiosks selling religious materials on many city streets, the ubiquitous Orthodox clerics offering commentary to the mainstream television stations, and other daily manifestations of Orthodoxy's pervasive public presence. President V. V. Putin is, according to reliable accounts, a practicing Orthodox Christian, as are an increasing number of officials in the government apparatus.2 Accordingly, scholars have begun to explore both the extent [End Page 481] and the implications of this phenomenon. Broadly, analysts have looked at the following issues: the degree to which Russian society can really be called Orthodox; the relationship between the Church and the political regime, specifically Orthodoxy's role in democratization; the position of the Russian Orthodox Church within civil society; and the contribution of Orthodoxy to the creation and maintenance of a cohesive post-Soviet Russian identity.3 The deepening of the research agenda can be easily traced: if at first scholarship on post-Soviet Russian Orthodoxy found expression exclusively in academic articles or conference anthologies, since 2004 several serious monographs on the subject have been published both in Russia and in the West, three of which are reviewed here. The disciplinary background of scholars currently working on today's Russian Orthodoxy is quite varied; it includes sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and, less frequently, historians. The methodological difficulty historians experience in tackling a modern-day subject hardly needs to be stated; at the same time, two of the three authors reviewed here—Nikolai Aleksandrovich Mitrokhin and Wallace L. Daniel—are historians by training, suggesting the timeliness of an assessment of the ways that history is employed in the scholarly analysis of the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church. This review, then, focuses not just on how the three monographs treat the subject of their inquiry but also on aspects of these works that should be of particular interest to Kritika's audience. Specifically, the review stresses the pitfalls inherent in the (unavoidable, to be sure) interpretation of a contemporary phenomenon through a particular reading of history; it also brings attention to the need for a critical reassessment of the way in which scholars (historians or otherwise) in general treat fundamental assumptions regarding the historical pattern of church–state relations in Russia. All three books are welcome contributions to our understanding of the post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church. In terms of institutional analysis, Nikolai Mitrokhin's 650-page volume is the most impressive. Based on eight years of research in over 40 dioceses, the book devotes attention to almost [End Page 482] every imaginable aspect of the ROC's activities. Mitrokhin begins by dissecting the membership of the Church, critically assessing the actual number of active Orthodox believers in Russia and their socioeconomic backgrounds and analyzing the inner workings of parish communities (35–75). He then looks at the organizational administration of the Moscow Patriarchate, its economic activities, and the internal divisions among various Orthodox factions vying for control over the Church's spiritual and political agenda (76–234). The second part of the book analyzes such related issues as the...

The government of Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) - the country’s predominant religious group - recently underwent back-to-back changes in each institution’s respective leadership. This coincidence of timing has afforded a unique opportunity to reexamine the status of constitutional secularism and church-state relations in the Russian Federation. In the short space of two years, the partnership of President Dmitri Medvedev and Patriarch Kirill has further entrenched a discriminatory three-tiered status system for religious groups and - perhaps more significantly - has generated multiple new channels of influence for the ROC in Russian social and political life, including handing the Church its long-coveted prizes of access to the public education system and the military. While these developments represent a significant blow to constitutional secularism in Russia, they do not tell the entire story. As the following article demonstrates, the ROC’s influence is increasingly evident beyond the realm of domestic policies. The Patriarch today enjoys the ear of Russia’s Foreign Ministry and plays a key role in both formulating and advancing Russian interests abroad. Consequently, the breakdown in the constitutional principle of secularism so evident in the domestic realm has spilled over into Russia’s foreign policy, leading to the bizarre reality whereby a secular state is advocating on behalf of Orthodoxy and traditional values abroad. By assessing the various points of cooperative overlap and commonality shared by the ROC and Russian government on this plane, this article posits that the practice of mutual reinforcement in foreign policy objectives as between the ROC and government of Russia not only undermines respect for the Russian constitution, but actually risks exacerbating already adverse domestic conditions related to freedom of expression and freedom of religion or belief, as well as destabilizing international consensus concerning universal human rights and related norms.

Bringing the religious space of Russia into conformity with the Constitution requires replacing the patience in the matters of faith as a principle of the organization of the religious sphere by religious tolerance. Among the religious communities of the country, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) should play an important role in this process. The study of the role of the ROC in the constitutionalization of the religious space of Russia was not of great interest to science. The special cultural, historical, and spiritual role of Orthodoxy for Russia creates the prerequisites for the leading place of the ROC in this process. Meanwhile, a number of obstacles prevents the ROC from taking this place. The purpose of the study is to identify such obstacles and propose approaches to overcome them. The basis of the research methodology is the dialectic, supplemented by elements of a number of other approaches. Research methods are historical, relatively legal and logical analysis, synthesis, surveys. During the study, the authors interviewed more than nine hundred respondents in six countries, including about 700 individuals who identified themselves as persons of faith. The study showed a reduced level of respectfulness from persons of a different faith for the ROC in comparison with their respectfulness to the Orthodox faith. To change the situation, the ROC should begin by recognizing the historical mistakes of Orthodoxy towards people of a different faith, refusing patience in matters of faith in favor of religious tolerance, and establishing the real number of observers of Orthodox faith in Russia. The relevance of the study is due to the accumulation of prerequisites in a society of disrespect for the ROC. In addition, with the adoption of the UN GA Resolution on Religious Tolerance, supported by Russia, the role of the ROC in bringing the religious space into accordance with the Constitution of the Russian Federation should increase. In conclusion, possessing the potential signs of a religious leader in bringing the religious space of Russia in accordance with the Constitution, the ROC is in fact not fully prepared for such a role. It is necessary to take a number of measures to change the situation.

The churches—and Russian Orthodoxy in particular as Russia's dominant Church—have been hard pressed to cope with the rapid change in the environment. The modernization of the Russian Orthodox Church has, in effect, been a function of its approach to church-state relations. So far from attempting the modifications and innovations normally associated with modernization, the Russian Orthodox Church has moved further and further away from innovation and experimentation. In 1917 Russian Orthodoxy was one of the world's more reactionary churches: it reacted against change, innovation and modernization in society. The modernization of the Russian Orthodox Church is a side effect of the primary, overwhelming problem facing all forms of institutionalized religion in the USSR: church-state relations. The churches own preference for church-state relations was to act as society's conscience. The Russian Orthodox Church was quick to comply with the state's official demand of separation of church and state.

The essence of a war is in its justification. In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the state has turned to Patriarch Kirill and the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) to assemble a tranche of religio-legal justifications for the war in Ukraine. Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor was instantaneously colored by theological proclamations from the Kremlin and the Patriarchate. While powerful as mere propaganda, much more is at stake. In March 2024, the ROC officially declared Russia’s “special military operation” to be a “holy war,” the first time the ROC has made such a statement since the Russo-Japanese War under Tsar Nicholas II. This article argues that the decree is the logical reverberation of a broader urge to revivify Russian imperial mores, particularly in the legitimation of warfare against Ukraine. Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill have instrumentalized one another. Patriarch Kirill gives religious substance to the Russian president’s claims of geopolitical slight, while the latter buttresses the ROC’s relevance amidst modernization. It is a partnership as nostalgic as it is pragmatic, rooted in the symphonic heyday of tsars and primates. An examination of the historical relationship between the Russian state and its church (as the ROC has come to be known) offers a multitude of lessons in the maintenance of the Kremlin’s power, the stateward trend of ROC theology, and the lengths to which states go to legitimate revanchist acts.

This paper examines the enactment of soft/sharp/evil power by the Russian Orthodox Church and its leaders during a month before the major exertion of hard power by the Russian military and one month after the invasion of Ukraine. In the period from January 25 until March 25, 2022, 27 messages of the leading actors in the Church–Patriarch Kirill and Metropolitan Hilarion, head of the Department of External Church Relations (DECR)–are closely examined. The results are presented and discussed in four thematic sections: 1) soft power: the religious approach to the Russian World; 2) Sharp power: the territorial expansion of the Church with the help of the Russian state; 3) Evil power: Church leaders on war and peace; 4) Comparison with the messages of Russian political leaders (President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov). The soft power the Russian Church exercises for the benefit of Russian foreign relations is manifest in the strong emphasis on the spiritual unity of Russian and Ukrainian people within the religious narrative of the Russian World. This soft power takes the form of sharp power vis-à-vis the Ukrainian invasion and vis-à-vis those, who recognize the autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine. The influence of the Russian Church in support of the Russian government’s invasion has also a dimension of evil power, that is, power exercised in service to immoral or unethical state actions such as the unwarranted invasion of Ukraine by Russian military forces. Finally, both religious and political leaders are similar in denying the agency (including autonomous existence) of the nation-state and the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, they consider both the Orthodox Church of Ukraine and post-2014 Ukrainian government to be tools of outside forces (be it the West, the United States, or the Ecumenical Patriarch), and they threaten and attempt to punish everyone who supports those whom they have selected out as targets.

When the Soviet system collapsed and the new “faith” that had dominated that society, Marxism-Leninism, was abandoned, it was not surprising that Orthodoxy was considered as the faith to replace it. Historically, in Russia, Orthodoxy and the state recognized each other's roles and always maintained a close relationship. Until just before the Russian Revolution, the Russian Orthodox Church was influential in all strata of society, including the intelligentsia. During the Soviet period, the Orthodox Church was forced to give way to the new communist ideology as a state ideology, and Orthodoxy, as a fundamental part of the system, was to be extinguished. However, during World War II, Stalin enlisted the Orthodox Church in the fight against Nazi Germany, and the Church and the state were restored to a cooperative relationship, and Russian Orthodoxy was able to survive in an atheistic Soviet society because of its political usefulness. In the post-Soviet period, Russian Orthodoxy was revived as an alternative to fill the ideological vacuum, gradually regaining its pre-revolutionary status in Russian society and becoming very close to the powers that be. Since Putin's rise to power, a number of phenomena have been observed in Russia, including the rise of nationalist tendencies in various sectors of Russian society, and the Russian Orthodox Church has joined the movement. The most prominent phenomenon is the fact that Russian nationalist ideology in the post-Soviet period has been linked to the Russian Orthodox Church, and the policies of the Putin administration, especially with regard to religion, can be interpreted as state-centered nationalist tendencies. The most characteristic of these phenomena is the role of Russian Orthodoxy in the spread of anti-Semitic ideology in modern Russia. This study examines the anti-Semitic tendencies of the Russian Orthodox Church, focusing on the publication of the Protocols of Zion.

A conservative turn in Russian politics has made the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) a key beneficiary of the new policy. Within the framework of Peter Berger's theory of desecularization, the ROC increased its influence through an alliance with the Kremlin. This made it possible to move smoothly from the model of «selective cooperation» to the model of «state religion», according to the classification of state-church relations proposed by Kristina Stoeckl. By early 2020, the ROC was perhaps at the height of its political influence. However, the COVID-19 pandemic seems to have paused the strong alliance of the Kremlin and the ROC. When the government announced lockdown measures and demanded that all churches cease services with the public, not all priests agreed to comply. The church-state crisis manifested in two divisions: between the Church and the state, between loyalists and fundamentalists within the ROC. We argue that although these cleavages posed a threat to the Patriarchate’s stability and power, the church leaders managed to maintain the loyalty of most believers. The authors show that the ROC proved its political loyalty to the Kremlin. Using individual-level data from the Values in Crisis project, the effect of religiosity on the support of government public health measures is explored. The findings reveal that higher religiosity is associated with higher levels of political loyalty. However, the COVID-19 crisis illustrates that the illusion of an equal partnership between the state and the church vanished.

The Russian Orthodox Church, the largest and most powerful religious institution in Russia, has become one of the central pillars of Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism. While church attendance remains low, the religiously inspired rhetoric of traditionalism has come to dominate the mainstream political and media discourse. Has Russia abandoned its atheist past and embraced Orthodox Christianity as its new moral guide? The reality is more complex and contradictory. Digital sources provide evidence of rising domestic criticism of the Russian Orthodox Church and its leadership. This book offers a nuanced understanding of contemporary Russian Orthodoxy and its changing role in the digital era. Topics covered within this book include: • Mediatization theory; • Church reforms under Patriarch Kirill; • Church–state relations since 2009; • The Russian Orthodox Church’s media policy; • Anticlericalism vs. Church criticism; and • Religious, secular, and atheist critiques of the Church in digital media. Using contemporary case studies such as Pussy Riot's Punk Prayer, this book is a gripping read for those with an interest in media studies, digital criticism of religion, religion in the media, the role of religion in society, and the Russian Orthodox Church.

Current trends in Russian political and social life are directly influenced by transformational processes that have arisen under the influence of a number of geopolitical factors and domestic political realities. The position of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) as an influential social institution plays a key role in this context. Church-state relations, representing a diverse set of forms and types manifested in all spheres of public life, express the state of the socio-political space. The current stage of development of interaction between the two institutions is often viewed in the context of a «symphonic» type of relationship. Top Russian officials, senior hierarchs of the Orthodox Church, and public figures have stated that close ties, expressed in close cooperation, have been established between the ROC and the state. This phenomenon not only influences socio-political processes but also demonstrates the value vector of Russia’s development. The purpose of the study is to characterize church-state interaction at the current stage as a political phenomenon. This work provides a comprehensive analysis of the positions of the Church and state on the issue of establishing a «symphony» and provides assessments from authoritative experts in the field of church-state relations. Specifically, it examines B.K. Knorre’s work, «Russian Orthodoxy: Post-Secular Institutionalization in the Space of Power, Politics, and Law.» In it, the author thoroughly analyzes the current state of church-state relations, paying particular attention to the institutional aspects of cooperation. Knorre’s study introduces the term «sovereign-Orthodox project,» which comprehensively interprets the current stage of church-state dialogue. Patriarch Kirill, who succeeded Alexy II, became the main actor in the ideological changes within the Russian Orthodox Church. Metropolitan John (I.M. Snychev), in his work «Overcoming the Time of Troubles,» presents the position of the orthodox part of the Orthodox Church. In his understanding, Russian power is incapable of functioning without a religious component, which the Russian Orthodox Church fosters in Russia. According to the hierarch, divine law is primary; it is on its basis that secular laws exist. One of the most authoritative researchers of church-state relations, D.V. Uzlaner, in his work «The Post-Secular Turn: How to Think About Religion in the 21st Century,» identifies key trends and aspects of the interaction between church and state institutions. According to D.V. Uzlaner, this cooperation has been transformed, which is manifested through the prism of public life by the Church’s growing influence and its expanding role in the country’s socio-political life. The combination of these interpretations confirms the relevance of the «symphony» theme in the context of church-state relations. Clearly, the interaction between the state and the leading religious actor primarily influences the socio-political sphere, shapes the ideological landscape of Russian society, and expresses significant value foundations.

Russian Orthodoxy is one of the most mythologized and difficult for scientific research fragments of modern Russia’s social life. Thus, the statements still exist on the universal Orthodoxy of the Russian people, because the State statistics does not really characterize a condition of the population or its different groups religiosity (rare exception is few indicators in the reports on periodical population census). Moreover, the researcher constantly faces polar estimates of the same situations in Russian Orthodoxy, both in publications of its irreconcilable opponents and apologists, while analysis of dichotomy “religiosity/ secularism” often goes beyond the boundaries of scientific discussions. At the same time these difficulties shouldn’t be overestimated. Splendid works by domestic sociologists have emerged that characterized actual religiosity of our contemporaries, formation of Church statistics has begun, reliable information on real events in Orthodox life have begun to be published regularly in the materials of cathedral and diocesan assemblies, Orthodox mass-media are becoming more and more informative and analytical (including Internet) and so on. Euphoria in connection with religious life legalization in Russia is passing off, the attitude to what is taking place in the sphere of Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) – the clergy and laity – is becomingmore realistic, while problematic situations are becoming an object of open discussions and for the most part of them appropriate solutions are being found. Along with all the unshakeable fundamentals of Orthodoxy, dynamism of modern Orthodoxy life is very high, as it is shown in the article. Russian Orthodoxy goes far and in various ways beyond Church boundaries. In the article an attempt is made to throw light on just several aspects of this phenomenon. These are estimates of a number of people leading an Orthodox way of life, parameters of rapid expansion of Church institutions and increase of the clergy number, innovations in Church education, ROC’s attitude to non-Orthodoxy and adherence to different faith, problems of real separation of Church and State and the place of Orthodoxy in modern culture. ROC’s role in social and political life of Russia is clearly in contrast with the situation in a number of Western countries and it seems to be one of significant but unfortunately, weakly accented problems of modern politological analysis.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 resulted in much more than a political crisis. It also caused the collapse of Russia's social foun dations, creating a vacuum that might be filled by any number of possi ble ideologies. The atheistic, communist worldview was essentially dead, although the trauma of replacing it with something new for a while caused many Soviet old-timers to call for a return to communism. But since the Marxist-Leninist ideology on which the state was founded in 1917 had long ceased to function as a credible belief system for most Russians, the search for an alternate belief system got underway quickly. Democracy emerged only because of the demise of commu nism, not because Russians found in it any sort of deeply rooted mean ing. Not surprisingly, Russians began to look to religion for a credible belief system. Religion offered an attractive alternative worldview, es pecially since it had been so severely repressed during the Soviet era. In the words of New York Times writer Serge Schmemann, writing in April 1992, Today the search for spiritual content is everywhere evi dent. . . . On television, for every rare program of economic reform, there are at least ten evocative commentaries on the church, the vil lage, or some other cultural heritage, in which the invariable theme is Russia's urgent need to recover its dukhovnost, its spirituality. After experimenting a few years with opening its doors to all manner of reli gions, including all varieties of Western Protestantism, even welcoming Western missionaries of a seemingly endless variety, Russians soon wearied of this endeavor and began looking to its own traditions, some thing that better fit the Russian soul. The Russians turned, not surpris ingly, to the Russian Orthodox Church. How has this strategy, this new dependence on the Russian Ortho dox Church, fared? Not all Russians, of course, agree that Orthodoxy should define Russia, and therefore wait for other more nuanced pos sibilities to emerge. Nevertheless, there is little question that Russian Orthodoxy is now the center of the emerging ideology of Russia. What does this mean for the new Russia? What specifically is the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia today? What is its political role, and how much influence does it carry in shaping the direction of

ABSTRACTThis article examines the history and current state of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) in China. It analyses both the declared and actual approach of the Chinese authorities towards Orthodox believers in China, as well as the attitude taken towards that approach by the authorities in Russia, where the ‘Orthodox factor’ plays an increasingly prominent role in domestic and foreign policy. The author shows that Russia’s most senior political leaders assist the ROC to strengthen the status of the Chinese Autonomous Orthodox Church (CAOC) and create better conditions for Chinese Orthodox believers. That effort has elevated the ‘Orthodox question’ to become an important issue of bilateral relations. As a result, and despite a lack of enthusiasm from the Chinese side, conditions could be created in the coming years for the normal functioning of the CAOC. At the same time, the Chinese Government is likely to consider it not as an autonomous part of the ROC (as the Orthodox canon considers it) but as one of the ‘patriotic religious organisations’ registered first at the provincial, and possibly later at the national level.

For most of the 20th century, the Russian Orthodox Church in the post-emancipation era was dismissed as a handmaiden of the state, a moribund institution, a purveyor of empty rituals, increasingly isolated and irrelevant in the context of industrial modernization and secularization. The last decade has witnessed a renewed interest in the Church among cultural and social historians of late imperial Russia. Gregory Freeze has recently observed that in its preoccupation with social and political factors in the revolutionary process, the traditional historiography has "ignored its cultural and especially religious dimensions; apart from examining the ideology of the intelligentsia, it has otherwise discounted the role of culture, especially in configuring popular perception and behavior."1 Seeking to redress the balance, Freeze contends: "the Russian Orthodox Church, without question, provided one of the major cultural dynamics in the Russian pre-Revolution ... it claimed a strong hold over the faithful ... and subjected the laity to a constant barrage of liturgies, sermons, publications, and religious instruction in schools."2 [End Page 451] The present article addresses a narrow but important component of this religious discourse: the stigmatization of religious dissent. Alarmed by the growth of sectarianism in post-emancipation Russia, the servitors of spiritual purity increasingly drew on languages of illness and contagion to illustrate the scale and nature of the threat to the Church. Here I discuss the Church's representation of religious dissent not to make a case for its role in "configuring popular perception and behavior"—although that role is by no means discounted—but to explore the ways in which discursive innovations within the Church both reflected and creatively appropriated significant contemporary developments in secular understandings of the social order and the threats posed to it by the spread of moral deviance. Languages of illness and contagion have historically formed a stable part of the lexica of European churches in their attempts to stigmatize religious dissenters, and I make no claims for particularity in the existence of this language in Russian Orthodoxy.3 What does appear particular to Russia is the persistence of this preoccupation with the purity of faith right into the 20th century and its coexistence with the secular, scientific languages of epidemiology, psychology, and psychiatry. The church authorities drew on these disciplines to emphasize the contagious properties of religious deviance. In so doing, they increasingly moved away from a traditional insistence on the virtues of therapeutics, understood as pastoral care, to calls for a prophylactic quarantining of the infected in the interests of collective health. Such a strategy would inevitably require the intervention of the state as it lay beyond the institutional capacities of the Church. Anxious therefore to encourage the expansion of the state's involvement in the persecution of the sectarians, leading church figures sought to stress the intimate relationship between religious and political dissent through a secular language of criminal deviance that stressed their fundamental equivalence. Not only were the state authorities uniquely capable of dealing with the sectarian threat, but they also could not afford, any more than the Church could, to ignore it. Thus the medicalization of religious deviance in late 19th-century Orthodox discourse constituted part of a sustained campaign to summon the secular arm of the state to crush the sectarian movements. On the very eve of the religious liberalization of 1905, the Church's secularization of its rhetoric paradoxically illustrated a reinvigoration of traditional concerns with spiritual and moral purity as the foundation of a secure socio-political order. The Church's resort to medical and secular remedies in the campaign against spiritual nonconformity leads us at the end of this article to reconsider the links between religion and revolution, Orthodoxy and Bolshevism, a disputed issue that has long been debated but has recently been addressed by a...

Religion has an essential effect on the development of any society since it impacts religious norms and models of behaviour, establishes priorities and values, influences gender relations, predetermines gender roles, and influences the establishing of certain traditions, laws, and customs. This article is a review of the historic position of the Russian Orthodox Church – the dominant religion in Russia – its past and current status in Russia, and the issues relating to women in Russian socio-cultural and religious community. While there is a lack of research on the Russian Orthodox Church and its influence on Russians and, particularly, Russian women, the increased religiosity in Russia within the last decade requires us to study the Russian Orthodoxy and its impact on people’s lives and its attitude to gender. This article provides a deep analysis of the impact of the Russian Orthodox Church on the image of women in Russia. It has been argued that Russian national character and heritage was formed by the Russian Orthodox Church and the existing gender stereotypes in Russia have been significantly impacted by the Russian Orthodox Church and have mainly been derived from the interpretation of the New Testament by the Russian Orthodoxy and its clergy. Particularly, gender roles and the perception of family, and marriage are understood to be in compliance with the values of the Russian Orthodox faith. For the faith the most important purpose of marriage is the birth and raising of children and the chief responsibility and duty of a woman is to care for her husband and children as these are considered as a way of the woman’s service to society and to God.