Religion and Politics in Postcommunist Russia*

Abstract

The end of communist rule and of the USSR itself brought an end to the restrictions upon freedom of worship with which Russian religious believers had previously been obliged to contend. 1 There had certainly been significant changes in the position of believers and their churches in the late communist period. Mikhail Gorbachev, it emerged, had himself been baptised; his mother was a regular worshipper. 2 An early gesture of some importance was the return of the Danilov monastery in Moscow to the Orthodox Church; refurbished, it played a central role in the millennium of the Orthodox Church in 1988, which brought church and state more closely together than at any time in the recent past. Speaking at this time the patriarch described the communist party programme as 'highly humane' and 'close to the Christian ideal';3 Gorbachev himself met the patriarch during the celebrations and noted that church and state shared a 'common interest' in protecting public morality.4 In December 1989 Gorbachev had met the pope, in what was the first encounter of its kind; the following year diplomatic relations were formally established with the Holy See.5 In 1990 the Communist Party adopted a new set of rules allowing religious believers to join its ranks. Believers, even priests, began to appear in the press and electronic media; the first religious leaders were elected to the Soviet parliament in 1989; a weekly religious newspaper was launched; and a religious presence began to establish itself in charitable and educational work. The last months of communist rule, in 1990 and 1991, extended the liberties of believers through a series of more formal measures. The Law on Property, approved in 1990, gave the churches full rights of ownership,6 and a Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organisations, adopted later in the year, affirmed the right of believers to practise and of parents to give their children a religious upbringing. The churches, for their part, had the right to participate in public life and establish their own media outlets, although not to establish or finance their own political parties; and they had the right to establish their own schools and higher educational institutions, and to produce and sell their own literature.7 The USSR parliament, in one of its last acts, adopted a Declaration of the Rights and Freedoms of the Individual which guaranteed freedom of religious belief and practice, including the right to evangelise and to conduct religious education.8 The Russian parliament, meeting in November 1991, adoted a more specific set of 'rights and freedoms of the individual and citizen', and in April 1992 they were incorporated into the Russian constitution. The