From Vladimir's baptism to Soviet atheism, Russian faith refused to disappear
In 987, according to the Primary Chronicle, Vladimir the Great made Orthodox Christianity the state religion of Kievan Rus', picking it because it was Byzantium's faith. Religion and statehood have stayed tangled ever since, and even under official Soviet atheism, a 1929 census counted 80 percent of the population as believers.
Before the tenth century Russians followed Slavic religion. In the empire, the Orthodox Church served as the glue of the state; Nicholas I built his ideology on the slogan Orthodoxy, autocracy and nation, and law enshrined the church's dominance. Until 1905 only Orthodox clergy could seek converts, abandoning the faith was a legal offence, and religions such as Catholicism and Islam were tolerated among non-Russian peoples but barred from spreading among Russians.
The monopoly was never complete. The Old Believers split away after Patriarch Nikon's reforms of 1653, and Spiritual Christians also went their own way. Folk religion kept older Slavic beliefs alive beneath a Christian surface, a blend called dvoeverie, or double faith, which some late-18th-century intellectuals praised as a mark of Russian distinctiveness. On 17 April 1905 Nicholas II allowed religious minorities to celebrate their liturgies in public, and occult currents such as Theosophy and Russian cosmism flourished.
The 1917 revolution stripped all faiths of privileges and steered the state toward atheism. Yet surveys kept finding believers: two-thirds of people in 1937, three-quarters of them Orthodox. The church was backed under Stalin in the 1940s, hit hard under Khrushchev in the 1960s and revived by the 1980s, while functioning throughout as an arm of the KGB; archives opened in the 1990s showed many later hierarchs had been agents.
Since 1991 Siberian shamanism, often mixed with Orthodox elements, has revived, alongside Hinduism, Neopaganism and many new movements; the scholar Eliot Borenstein dubbed Russia the Southern California of Europe. Russia today has the world's largest Orthodox population, and its constitution acknowledges Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Judaism as part of the country's heritage, with a 2020 amendment adding references to God.
Source: Religion in Russia
