A good deal of scholarly attention has recently been given to the impact of religious belief on political attitudes and behaviour in postcommunist Russia. On the pages of this journal Richard Sakwa has traced in considerable detail the emergence and development of the various parties and organisations which over the past few years have presented themselves to the Russian public as the representatives of a coherent 'Christian Democratic' tradition capable of informing the reconstruction of the country's social and political institutions.' This renewed interest in the potential significance of religion as an influential factor on Russia's future development should not of course be a matter for surprise. The dramatic collapse of the Soviet state in the early 1990s created a need for a sustained process of institution-building in the successor states; and the manifest failure of Marxist-Leninist ideology which had for decades served, at least at a rhetorical level, as the formal source of legitimacy for the communist ancien regime also created a kind of 'ideological space' which was quickly filled by a large number of doctrines and Weltanschauungen ranging from classical liberalism to neo-Stalinism. Christian Democracy would at first glance seem to have been well-equipped to compete in the new intellectual market-place. The traditional motifs of Western European Christian Democracy, with their emphasis on social and national reconciliation, appear admirably suited for a country like Russia, suffering from a 70-year legacy of savage social division and fragmentation. And, it is almost superfluous to add, any attempt to import into the political arena values grounded on a metaphysical conception of human existence seemed calculated in the early 1990s to meet with a positive response from a population which had suffered for decades at the hands of a government that looked askance at almost any manifestation of spiritual life. Even so, as Sakwa has shown so well in his second article on the subject, the early hopes which accompanied the birth of the various Russian Christian Democratic parties just a few years ago have faded with bewildering speed. The largest and most important of these, the Russian Christian Democratic Movement (RCDM) headed by Viktor Aksyuchits, moved rapidly to the right, and before long found itself associating with Russian nationalist groups of various kinds. For this reason, the RCDM lost members to other organisations, and the whole Christian Democratic movement fell victim to the kind of squabbling and in-fighting that has been a hallmark of postcommunist politics in Russia. As has so often proved to be the case in Russian history, a commitment to Christian values became intimately associated with a commitment to the territorial integrity of the state,