The Russian Orthodox Church, state and society in 1991–1993: The rest of the story

Abstract

The year 1991 should have been the happiest one for the Russian Orthodox Church since 1917. The church finally saw the end of a state which had fought or obstructed it for 70 years. Even after the legal restoration of religious freedom in October 1990, when ideologically based restrictions on religion were abolished, the state apparatus of control had continued to exist in the shape of the Council for Religious Affairs and the KGB's department for the church. By the end of 1991, when the Soviet state as such was abolished, these institutions also disappeared. For the first time since the revolution, the churches in Russia were now really free to perform their religious task without any hindrance by governmental control. The dissolution of the Soviet state, however, in contrast to that of communist ideology, has paradoxically led to new external and internal problems for the Russian Orthodox Church. The institutional interests of the Moscow Patriarchate had always corresponded with those of the multinational Soviet state. The collapse of the Soviet Union into a number of independent states confronted the Russian Orthodox Church not only with organisational problems with regard to the Orthodox Church in former Soviet republics but also with a kind of political identity crisis in the new pluralistic Russian society.