The Role of Religious Art in Post-Communist Russia

Abstract

The following chapter will consider some aspects of the role of Orthodox religious art in post-Communist Russia. It will be shown that the connection between art and religion that the Bolsheviks had attempted to sever was re-established during and after the Gorbachev era. At the same time, the religious art of the past, just as Russian religious philosophy from the 19th and early 20th centuries, was burdened with the task of filling in the ideological vacuum left by the collapse of Communism. In this chapter, I will suggest that while these expectations have largely proved fruitless, the approach towards religious art as a visual model of the unity between religion and secularism could lead into a more promising direction. This is where Russian religious philosophy could prove useful.