Russia's Journey from Orthodoxy to Atheism, and Back Again [View all]

[guillaumeb]

From the article:

In Russia, there is a religious revival happening. Orthodox Christianity is thriving after enduring a 70-year period of atheistic Soviet rule. In 1991, just after the collapse of the USSR, about two-thirds of Russians claimed no religious affiliation. Today, 71 percent of Russians identify as Orthodox...….

Russia was transformed from a bastion of conservative Orthodoxy in the nineteenth century into the world’s leading promoter of atheism in the twentieth. This historical backdrop of Russia’s remarkable journey from Orthodoxy to atheism, and back again, is chronicled in Victoria Smolkin’s A Sacred Space is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism.....



Under Lenin and Stalin, new atheist organizations like the League of the Militant Godless waged war on religious institutions. Although churches and monasteries were technically legal, officials found ways of shutting them down, and they transformed some of them into cathedrals of atheism.

To read more:

https://religionandpolitics.org/2018/10/16/russias-journey-from-orthodoxy-to-atheism-and-back-again/

The pendulum swings. And yet another example that intolerance is deeply rooted in human society.