Russian Religious Life in the Soviet Era

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the history of Russian religious life from the October 1917 Russian Revolution, when the Bolsheviks seized power and imposed their radical secularist agenda, to 1991, when Soviet rule ended and, with it, the atheist campaign. It charts the major political developments that religious institutions, individual believers, and faith communities were forced to respond to and which underlay theological debates both in the Soviet Union and in the Russian diaspora. Recent scholarship has overturned the widely held view that in the communist period Russian Orthodoxy was out-dated, irrelevant, and marginal as a facet of identity, and in its place a scholarship has emerged which recognizes the variety of experiences within the Orthodox tradition and beyond it, of churches functioning openly and operating underground. Religious communities were forced to react to policy and practice emanating from the communist party, making a survey of Soviet religious policy critical for understanding Russian religious thought since 1917. The chapter also outlines key developments affecting believers in the years immediately after the collapse of the USSR and highlights the profound influence of the Soviet era on religious life and thought and on church–state relations in post-Soviet Russia.