We cannot think of an Orthodox point of view unless we know where the observer is located. Orthodoxy is not only present in Eastern Europe and the Middle East; it is known to every continent, being represented to a certain extent in countries with varied political histories. I consider it an honour to share with you my experience, which is that of the Russian Orthodox Church. It is symbolic that the topic offered for discussion by our section, Wind of Change, was named after a song by the band Scorpions, a fragment of which we heard at the beginning of our meeting. The band wrote the song in Moscow during the year 1989, a year of great change: it listened to the wind of change. The upheaval brought about by the political event now well-known as the Russian perestroika in the 1980s was fateful for the Orthodox Church. Atheism, which had been predominant in the Soviet era, lost its status as a state ideology in Russia and other countries of the so-called socialist camp, that is, very nearly the whole of Eastern Europe. It is true that the church always sought to engage in missionary activity and often succeeded in its endeavours, but authorities in the communist states obstructed this activity in every way. One might thus have thought, twenty years ago when the great changes took place, that the main barrier was destroyed and the future triumph of the Christian mission was assured. In fact, political freedom proved pregnant not only with new opportunities but also with numerous problems. Most of these problems were underlain by a misunderstanding of Christian unity. On the one hand, the problem of proselytism emerged: crowds of zealous missionary activists, mostly from across the ocean, poured into Russia as if the country had not had a thousand-year history of Christian culture of its own. On the other hand, Orthodox believers, ignorant en masse of the practices of the missionary ecumenical movement, would not accept the idea of ecumenism because they did not believe it was a cooperation in the cause of Christian mission. Ecumenism was understood at best as part of official external interactions by the Russian Orthodox Church approved by the state, as a set of tactics used to improve the domestic situation of the church in the context of an atheist state in the 1980s--not as an internal motivation of the church. Post-communist society would have been likely to become conscious of the need for inter-confessional cooperation more readily if in 1961 the WCC had entered the IMC, not the opposite. Let us hope that the centenary of the Edinburgh conference helped many to understand the missionary task and strategy of the search for Christian unity. Till now, church circles in Russia have not come to understand clearly the historical design, the divine providence of political changes. The Russian empire, an heir to the Byzantine empire, collapsed in 1917 to be replaced by a communist empire, the USSR. Today it is important to trace the origin of the events, to discover the logic of their development, so that we might not repeat the same mistakes. We must learn to recognize the wind of change as the breath of God's will. …