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Whereas the Soviet Union was noted for being a state that sought to repress all forms of religious expression, the Russian Orthodox Church continued to exist in a weakened form throughout Russia’s communist era. Following the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991, Rusian Orthodoxy has re-emerged from its slumber to reassert itself in the nation’s culture and institutional structure. How has it fared over the past two decades? Bradley Murg, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington, explores this question revealing much about the nature of religion in Russian society as well as a thing or two about its evolving political structure.

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The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 heralded what many thought would be a new era of liberty in a region of the world that has known little freedom for most of its history. However, many of the new regimes that emerged from the Soviet rubble have slipped back into autocracy. We review these political developments and what this has meant for religious freedom in the region with Prof. Ani Sarkissian (Michigan State University). Interestingly, we observe a fairly wide variation in how governments react to religious organizations with some governments supressing all faiths whereas as others picking and choosing which religions to allow and which to repress. Albania, of all places, emerges as the most religiously free of the post-Soviet “competitive dictatorships.” Find out why.

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