From nyet to da pdf

Jerry is retired from the newspaper business but continues to travel to Ukraine as a missionary. He has two married children and five grandchildren, all of whom live in Arizona. About Publish Join Sign In. Readers Benefits of registering Where are my ebooks? Ask it above. Career and volunteer missionaries from the West have been presenting a Christian morals and ethics curriculum to public school teachers in Ukraine since The life stories of some of those key leaders are told in From Nyet to Da.

Read how Valentyna, a former Communist, was told to convert Christian students to atheism -- and failed badly. As long as Lenin was alive , it was all right with the Soviet Union You enjoy freedom of speech A child runs to the place the musical instrument is hiding and the teacher takes the cloth off with In doing so he offers a window into the state of history today — and points to exciting new ways of writing the past.

This is a book about the craft of history, about both doing research and writing it. Posted on Social Science Posted on It was then that hunger hit. I had not eaten since a light lunch on my flight and was looking forward to a snack at the hotel bufet, a sort of Russian snack bar.

But to eat at the bufet I first had to change my dollars into rubles, since Soviet currency in those years could not legally be brought into the Soviet Union.

Making my way down the long dim hall, I approached the dyezhurnaya person on duty for my floor. A feature of many Russian hotels, they are the women who keep the keys, control access to rooms, and provide hot water for tea or instant coffee. Inquiring about the location of the currency exchange office, I was told that it had closed for the day. Shrugging her shoulders, the old woman looked me over indifferently.

Here was the making of a classic confrontation between a Western visitor and the Soviet system, which was not designed to serve individuals with special requests. Had I been a member of a tour group, there would have been a guide to tend to my needs, and dinner would have been planned for the group at the hotel restaurant, paid in advance, and there would have been no need to change money.

But here I was, a lone traveler who had to get something to eat before falling into bed to catch up with the eight-hour time change from New York. From past experience in Russia I knew not to retreat, so I stood my ground, changed the subject, and began to converse with the woman. We talked about my long trip from the States, the purpose of my visit, the Moscow weather, where I had learned to speak Russian, her children and mine, and how nice it was for me to be back in Russia again.

After a while, I returned to the subject of my hunger and asked if she had any suggestions as to what I might do before the snack bar closed for the night. A kind Russian grandmother had taken pity on a hungry American and lent him a few of her own rubles so he could get some khleb, sir, i chai bread, cheese, and tea before retiring for the night.

Welcome to Moscow! But Russians respond to a human approach, and they can be warm and helpful once a good interpersonal relationship has been established. When that point is reached, their word is good, nyet becomes da, and deals can be done. That is the key to understanding the Russians. In this Rus the ideas of goodness, honor and freedom are understood as in the West.

This last Russia made despotism and fanaticism its ideal. Kievan Rus was a part of Europe, Moscow remained the negation of Europe. Europe does extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains, and Russia—at least a part of it—is indeed in Europe. But through much of its history, Russia has been isolated from or has rejected Europe and its Western ways. From the northern rivers in the ninth century came Viking raiders and traders from Scandinavia who became the rulers of Rus, the city-principality of Kiev and the forerunner of the Russian state.

Kievan Rus converted to Orthodox Christianity in , and Constantinople became its link to the Mediterranean and the West for commerce as well as culture. But scarcely a century later that linkage was threatened by repeated onslaughts of mounted marauders from Asia moving westward over the great Eurasian steppe.

When those invaders reached the Kievan Rus state and threatened its capital, the Rus began to migrate north, seeking protection in remote forests inhabited at that time by Finnish tribes. Power gradually shifted from Kievan Rus to Russian Muscovy. The Mongols called Tatars in early Russian sources invaded Russia in the mid-thirteenth century.

While the Mongol-Tatar conquest did not make Asians of the Russians, it did delay their becoming Europeans. When Moscow liberated itself from the Tatar yoke in , the modern Russian state was born. Distant from Europe, the new state was cut off from Constantinople, which, in , had fallen to the Muslim Ottoman Turks. The Russian Orthodox Church, isolated from the rest of Christianity, developed independently as a national church.

Moscow, moreover, saw itself as the third and last Rome, successor to Rome and Constantinople, the two capitals of the Roman Empire, which in turn had fallen to barbarians and infidels. Russia was regarded by its religious and lay leaders as a holy land with an imperial mission—a new center of Christianity destined to unite the peoples of East and West. It was at that time that Russian rulers began to use the title tsar, derived from the Latin Caesar. In the West the middle class was in the forefront of reform.

Cut off from the West, Russia remained a vast, backward, largely agricultural empire, regimented and ruled by an autocratic dynasty with a holy mission to defend its faith against the barbarians of the East and the heresies and pluralism of the West.

The pluralism of the West, moreover, was seen by Russia as chaotic, a cacophony of voices without harmony, a disunity of thought and purpose. To that West, nevertheless, Russia would come during its periodic attempts to modernize, seeking science, technology, and administrative know-how, but rejecting at the same time the Western ways that came with the modernization it so sorely needed. To remote Russia many things Western have come late—manufacturing, higher education, science and technology, the management sciences, and computers, as well as blue jeans and rock music.

Other things Western have not yet arrived—good government, transparency, and efficiency. Those come from a West that Russia has openly disdained but secretly envied, and from which it is today again trying to learn.

There, society is the fruit, not of human pleasures, not of interests and passions easily satisfied, but of a will ever persisting and ever thwarted which urges the people to incomprehensible efforts. There, if individuals unite together, it is to struggle with a rebellious nature, which unwillingly responds to the demands made upon her.

Actually, the snow is not that deep in Russia, and winter there is known more for its frigid temperatures, which Russians find invigorating. Russians seem to enjoy their cold winters, but those winter temperatures can become unbearable when the wind blows across the open land and the windchill factor plummets. Russia is a northern country. Its most southern port, Novorossisk, on the Black Sea, is on the same latitude as Minneapolis. Nature has not been kind to Russia.

Autumn is brief, followed by a long and cold winter. Summers are short and hot. In old Russia, where the economy was mostly agricultural, peasants could do little during the winter months, and they more or less hibernated, holed up in their huts, seeking to survive while awaiting spring and the sowing season.

When spring did arrive, there was much to be done in a short span of time. During those precious few months, Russians over the centuries have worked almost around the clock to produce the food needed to get them through the following winter. According to one popular theory, that explains why Russians often appear inactive for long periods of time and then show intense bursts of energy.

The stagnation of the Brezhnev era, for example, can be seen as a long winter of hibernation, and the perestroika of the Gorbachev years as a short spring and summer of frenzied effort.

The harsh climate also explains the strength of Russians, their ability to endure extreme hardship, and their bleak outlook on life, as well as their patience and submission. Climate has also made them cautious. In an agricultural society where survival depends on the weather, it is imprudent to take chances. And as in all traditional societies, the test of time is preferred to the risks of the new and untried.

Does climate still make a difference in the early years of the twenty-first century? Over millennia, people everywhere have adapted to their environment, and today some have even tamed it. American culture and character today are not much different in Minnesota than in states with milder climes. Until recently, most Russians have lived much as their ancestors have before them—in small villages, distant and isolated, their freedom of movement restricted, and without the comforts and labor-saving tools provided by modern society.

The cold north is very much in their bones and psyches. A Russian winter has to be lived through to be really appreciated. Winter starts in October and continues through March, with November to January the darkest months. Petersburg, at the winter solstice, has only five and one-half hours of daylight, and on days with overcast skies and smog there is often no sun to be seen.

In the Russian far north during the dead of winter, the sun never rises at all. Anger, hostility, fatigue, and depression increase, as well as the demand for psychiatric services. Vodka consumption rises, alcoholic treatment centers overflow, and suicides rise. Hundreds of homeless people die of hypothermia. Political discontent reaches its peak. The United States has six, and Americans in the East who watch a football game in California know that there is a three-hour time difference.

Russia, however, has eleven time zones and is almost twice as large as the United States, stretching six thousand miles from west to east. Moscow is 1, miles from Paris, and before the age of the railroad, such an arduous and dangerous journey could take several months. Distance and isolation also deterred development of a mercantile tradition.

Self-sufficient in agriculture and natural resources, and with no great need to trade with other countries, Russia became inwardly oriented. Geography also made Russia vulnerable to wars—literally hundreds of them—along her lengthy borders, which have no natural defenses.

To the east, the great Eurasian steppe served as a highway for waves of invaders from Asia who, in ancient times, repeatedly swept into Russia. And to the south, Russia has had continuous wars over the centuries with Turkic tribes. As a result of that constant border warfare, Russia became the largest state—actually an empire—on earth. Its expansion, moreover, resulted in even longer undefined borders as well as heightened suspicion of neighboring nations.

With such a vast territory to govern, Russia evolved into a state ruled from its center and organized along paramilitary lines. Service to the state was a duty for both nobles and peasants.

Surrounded by hostile powers, Russia became dependent on the use of force in its relations with neighboring states and obsessed with security, traits that still survive. But that fear is perhaps understandable, considering the economically expanding China with more than one billion of its people on one side of an indefensible and oft-contested border, and a vast and relatively empty resource-rich Siberia on the other side. Visitors to Russia should avoid making comparisons with China, which can provoke visceral reactions among Russians.

As others see it, Russia has taken advantage of weakness or instability in neighboring states to annex territories along her periphery. One sharp critic of Russian territorial aggrandizement in the midnineteenth century was a London-based correspondent of The New York Tribune named Karl Marx.

The total acquisitions of Russia during the last sixty years are equal in extent and importance to the whole Empire she had in Europe before that time. Periodic attempts to introduce European technology and Western ways met with the sullen resistance of most of the Russian people. Suspicion and mistrust of foreigners—and the West in particular—have been a recurring theme in both Russian and Soviet history, and the Iron Curtain of the Soviet era was its most recent manifestation.

New ideas have come late to Russia, when they have come at all. The United States has also been a continental power and expansionist, but with a maritime and commercial tradition. The Atlantic and Pacific oceans served as natural defenses, providing protection from foreign aggression and ensuring the stability necessary for economic development at home and trade abroad. The objective of both countries has been to ensure stability and well-being at home.

The oceans, moreover, have been bridges for the United States, providing easy access to other countries and cultures.

New ideas have usually been welcomed, or at least not opposed, and the oceans served as highways for waves of immigrants who came in peace and with hope, turning their backs on the rigid class divisions of the Old World to seek a better life in the New. They brought vitality and talent to a constantly changing and dynamic society.

Russians, moreover, have been living in their native environment from time immemorial, and change has come slowly. The new has been welcomed in America; the old has been revered in Russia. Community was seen so near to the ideal of brotherly love, which forms the essence of Christianity and thus represents the higher mission of the people.

In prehistoric times Russians banded together to fell the forest, till the soil, harvest the crops, and protect themselves from invaders and marauders. Tools and weapons were primitive and life was harsh, but those handicaps could be overcome and survival ensured—although just barely—by the collective effort of living and working together.

The zadruga, a clan or greater family commune, served as the nucleus of a tribal society. In time, it evolved into a larger unit, the mir, an agricultural village commune also known as obshchina based on territory and mutual interests. Member families lived in small hamlets, in huts side by side. The surrounding land was held in common by the mir and was unfenced.

Each family, however, had its own hut, maintained a small plot of land for a family garden, and took its meals at home. The mir determined how much of the common land each family would work, depending on its size and needs. It decided which crops would be grown and when they would be planted and harvested. It collected taxes and settled local disputes.

The word mir, in fact, has three meanings in Russian—village commune, world, and peace—and for its members it symbolized all three. That little world of the Russian peasant—the bulk of the populace—was a world apart from, and at least a century behind, the lifestyles of landowners and city dwellers. Decisions of the mir were made in a village assembly of heads of households.

All members could speak and discussions were lively, but no vote was taken. The objective was to determine the collective will, and after an issue had been thoroughly discussed and opposition to it had ceased, a consensus evolved that became binding on all households.

Modeled on the mir, artel members hired themselves out for jobs as a group and shared the payments for their work. Hundreds of thousands of workers lived in this way in the generation or so before the Bolshevik Revolution. That communal way of life persisted well into the twentieth century, lasting longer in Russia than elsewhere in Europe.

Tsarist Russia encouraged the mir because it served as a form of state control over the peasants and facilitated tax collection and military conscription. Because the mir affected so many people, and for such a long time, it played a major role in forming the Russian character. In the late s, for example, when Soviet students began to come to the United States and were assigned in groups to American universities, they would often pool their stipends, live off a small part of their pooled funds, and save as much as they could for later purchases.

Even death is beautiful in common. The emancipation of serfs was accompanied by a land redistribution that enabled serfs, in principle, to purchase land outside the commune. However, land distributed under the reform was actually given to the mir, which held it in common until its members could make redemption payments.

That freed the serfs but preserved the mir, and peasants once more found themselves bound to the land they worked, since most of them were financially unable to leave the commune. Service to the state also continued. The emancipation was accompanied by a reduction in the length of obligatory military service for former serfs and the lower class of townspeople.

After , the length of duty for those selected was reduced from twenty-five to sixteen years! A later reform, in , made military service compulsory for all able-bodied males over age twenty; the tour of active duty was further reduced to six years but was followed by nine years in the reserve and five more in the militsia police.

The mir endured in various forms until the early s, when it was replaced by yet another form of communal life, the Soviet collective farm. The objective was to ensure an adequate supply of food for the cities, which were to grow under the industrialization of the Five-Year Plans.

The immediate result, however, was famine and the death of millions in the countryside. The contrast between Russian communalism and American individualism can best be seen in the differences between Russian peasants and American farmers.

In contrast to peasants of the mir, American farmers lived behind fences that marked the limits of their property. The Americans, moreover, were entrepreneurs in the sense that they managed their holdings individually, taking economic risks and regulating their own affairs, independent of the state. The United States also has had its communes—and still has some today—an indication of some innate human urge to band and bond together.

These communes, however, have existed on the fringes of society rather than at its center. To Russians, the commune is native. Individualism is esteemed in the West, but in Russian the word has a pejorative meaning. Steeped in the heritage of the mir, Russians think of themselves as members of a community rather than as individuals.

Communal spirit helps to explain many of their characteristics—behavior in crowds, for example. Physical contact with complete strangers—anathema to Americans and West Europeans—does not bother Russians. In crowds, they touch, push, shove, and even use elbows without hard feelings—except in the ribs of those who are competing with them to obtain access to something. Visitors to Russia should not take such pokes personally. Politeness takes different forms in different societies, and behavior in crowds can vary.

A crowd of passengers attempting to board a ship in Odessa in the early s caught the attention of British traveler Laurens van der Post. The crowd pushed and jostled but never lost its temper. Although it shouted at the officer and elbowed him out of the way, he did not appear irritated, nor did he attempt to call them to order. Taxis may seem more convenient, but they are expensive and the price should be negotiated before you get in.

And do not enter if there is another passenger in the car. Safety first! Accustomed to close physical contact, Russian men, as well as women, touch when talking. Women dance with other women if there are not enough men to go around or if not asked by a man for a dance. Russian men embrace and kiss each other, on the lips as well as cheeks, as I learned once when I had a male kiss planted on my lips, much to my surprise, at the end of a long and festive evening.

Recreational activities are often arranged in groups, as in the artel. After working together all day, factory and office employees will spend evenings in group excursions to theaters and other cultural events organized by their shop stewards.

Russians seem compelled to intrude into the private affairs of others. Older Russians admonish young men and women—complete strangers— for perceived wrongdoings, using the patronizing term of address molodoy chelovek young man or dyevushka girl. On the streets, older women volunteer advice to young mothers on the care of their children.

American parents in Moscow have been accosted by Russian women and accused of not dressing their children properly for the severe winter. One intrusion that is appreciated, and expected, is to inform others when they show the telltale white skin blotches that indicate the onset of frostbite. They routinely offer overnight accommodations to friends who are visiting their cities, a gesture based not only on their tradition of hospitality to travelers but also on the shortage of affordable hotel accommodations.

Americans who are accepted as friends by Russians will find that they too may receive unexpected visits and requests for lodging from their new friends. Sumner, A Short History of Russia No greater mistake can be made by a visitor to Russia than to assume that every Russian-speaking person encountered will be an ethnic Russian.

The Russian Federation, the name of the new Russia, is a multinational state comprising people of many different nations whom, as British historian B. Sumner reminded us, the Russians conquered and intermingled with in their expansion throughout history. Also of concern to Russians is the ethnic consciousness among some of the minorities and their desire for autonomy or self-rule.

How to deal with those nationalities in a vast empire ruled from its Russian center has been a challenge to Russian tsars, Soviet commissars, and now the elected leaders of the new Russia. Throughout much of modern history, the Russians were a bare majority in their own country. Petersburg formerly Leningrad to the Sea of Japan, comprising three-fourths of the territory of the former Soviet Union, with little more than half its population but with most of its natural resources—oil, gas, coal, gold, diamonds, and timber, among others.

Together, these entities comprise about half the area of the Russian Federation and contain most of its natural and mineral resources. In some autonomies, however, ethnic consciousness is high, as in Chechnya, a non-Slavic, largely Muslim republic in the Caucasus Mountains.

Chechnya is the size of Connecticut and has a population of 1. Russia brought Chechnya under its control and annexed it in , after a bitter guerrilla war that lasted several decades. But nationalism remained high, and in , during World War II, Joseph Stalin exiled the entire Chechen population to Soviet Central Asia, from which the survivors were allowed to return only some ten years later.

In , Chechnya declared its independence from the Russian Federation, and a civil war followed in which more than , Chechens and Russians were killed before a truce was signed in Despite several cease fires, fighting resumed in and continued as Russia once more sought to impose a military solution on a political problem. The movement for autonomy or self-rule is also strong in areas with Russian majorities where local leaders seek increased independence and financial gain by loosening political and economic ties with the Moscow central government.

Ethnic and local consciousness is on the rise in Russia, and people who interact with Russians and other ethnic groups should appreciate its significance. Other major Soviet nationalities with a Christian heritage were Georgians and Armenians, 3 percent; Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians, 3 percent; and Moldovans, 1 percent.

And in the far north lived Arctic peoples with cultures similar to those of their North American cousins. Nationality and religion are interrelated. Russians and Belarusians are Russian Orthodox. Ukrainians may be Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, or, in western Ukraine, which for centuries was a part of Poland, Ukrainian Catholic Uniate , a church that uses the Eastern rite but is in union with the Roman Catholic Church in recognizing the authority of the Pope.

Armenians and Georgians, who have their own churches, have been Christian since A. Lithuanians are Roman Catholic by virtue of having been part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth for four centuries.

Latvians and Estonians are Lutheran, a heritage of their German colonization and Swedish rule. Moldovans, like their fellow Romanians, are Orthodox. Birobidzhan, however, has never attracted many Jews, and today they number only 3 percent of the local population. Belarus and western Ukraine, as noted earlier, were under Polish rule from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and western portions of those lands were again a part of Poland between the two world wars. As a result, many Ukrainians and Belarusians appear more Western than do Russians.

Ukraine, moreover, is located in a southern, more temperate zone and was known as the breadbasket of Russia and Europe.

The three Baltic republics were recognized as independent by Moscow in September And on 14 August the Georgian parliament, in response to the Soviet invasion of Georgia, voted unanimously to withdraw from the CIS, a decision that requires 12 months to implement. There, they are a potential source of conflict with local governments, and the Russian Federation feels responsible for their welfare. In many parts of the Russian Federation there are also Germans, Poles, Jews, and other nationalities that do not have their own designated territories.

Although interest in local languages has increased in recent years, Russian is still the lingua franca of the CIS, the language Uzbeks use to talk with Russians, and Armenians to Azeris when they are talking to each other. The difference lies in two almost contradictory aspects of American culture. Within a few generations the old-world languages of the immigrants were largely lost, and cultural ties to the old country became mostly a matter of sentiment.

In recent years, an influx of Hispanics and Asians has created a large body of Americans who take pride in their cultural and linguistic diversity; Americans, however, recognize that theirs is a pluralistic society composed of different backgrounds and races, and they pride themselves on their ability to create unity in diversity.

In Russia, ethnic diversity is a completely different phenomenon, based on centuries of residence by various nationalities in their historic regions of origin and on the determination of many of them to preserve their distinct languages and cultures. In Western and Central Europe, nationality as a political issue was largely resolved during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To be sure, the formation of new nation-states and the redrawing of national borders, particularly after World War I, did not impose perfect solutions.

But, with the exception of Yugoslavia, nationality differences have not threatened the existence of those states. In the East, however, nationalism and ethnicity reemerged in the s to threaten the stability of several states. Attempts by Moscow at Russification are resisted today by some as strongly as they were under the tsars and the Soviets. In response to those ethnic stirrings, there has been a resurgence of Russian nationalism and a renewed interest in Russian Orthodoxy.

Most Russians regret the breakup of the Soviet Union, and there is considerable Russian sentiment for a union of Russia with Belarus and Ukraine in a greater Slav state, including perhaps the northern half of Kazakhstan, where some five million Russians live and where the population is largely Russian.

Rising Russian nationalism, unfortunately, has been accompanied by emerging ethnic and racial violence. Newly found freedoms have enabled Russians to express previously repressed prejudices. People from the Caucasus and Central Asia, as well as others who do not appear to be Russian, are often victims of abuse, harassment, and violence. Blacks may also be victims of verbal abuse and assaults on the streets.

Anti-Semitism, long latent in Russia and at times not so latent , has also resurfaced. The number of Jewish communities is believed to be about one hundred, and they are found in all regions of the country. People of Jewish descent are prominent in science, medicine, literature, and the arts, as well as in politics and public life.

AntiSemitism, once state policy under the Soviets, has been disavowed by the Russian government. The main perpetrators of ethnic violence are skinheads, young men in their late teens who shave their heads and dress in combat gear. Some are affiliated with groups of futbol soccer fans; others are linked to a neo-Nazi movement.

Russians and other citizens of the former Soviet Union are very much aware of their nationality. Proud of their ethnicity, they are also curious about the national origins of persons they encounter.

They will be pleased to tell foreign visitors about their own nationality, and visitors should not hesitate to ask. In every ethnic Russian there is an Orthodox heritage, and it can emerge when least expected. Russia had an estimated population of approximately million in July , but there is no reliable data that breaks down the population by religious belief.

Muslims are the largest minority, with estimates ranging from 14 to 23 million, comprising up to perhaps 15 percent of the population. However, Muslim communities in the Volga-Urals region differ so much culturally and, in some cases, theologically from those in the Caucasus, that the two groups could be considered as separate communities. Protestants of various denominations are the second largest group of Christians, with more than two million followers. Catholics are estimated by the Catholic Church to number from , to 1.

Buddhists are estimated by the Buddhist Association of Russia to number between 1. Petersburg, following large-scale emigration over the past two decades. In seven republics of the Russian Federation, Muslims are a majority, and their birth rate is higher than that of ethnic Russians.

In Chechnya, rebels who began their rebellion with a focus on sovereignty or independence now identify with Muslim fundamentalism.

And elsewhere in the Caucasus and in Central Asia, resurgent Islamic extremism worries governments there as well as in Moscow. Religious belief among Russians, growing from year to year, is related to gender, age, and education. Women, the elderly, and those with incomplete secondary education rank more as believers than do other groups. Rural residents are not significantly more religious than urban, but religious belief differs substantially between regions: more in the Trans-Volga heartland area of Russia, for example, and less in northwest Russia.

Despite their religious beliefs, Russians still reflect much of their pagan, pre-Christian past. A superstitious people, there are certain things they just do not do, and neither should visitors. Whistling indoors brings poverty.

Sit at the corner of a table and you will never marry. And when you make a new purchase, you must drink to it or it will be lost, stolen, or vandalized. Many of these beliefs reflect fascination with the occult, which has been noted throughout Russian history and is now experiencing a revival. Half of all Russians are said to believe in prophetic dreams and omens. Literature on astrology, palmistry, numerology, and the interpretation of dreams can be found in bookstores and sidewalk kiosks, and the interest in such subjects is not limited to common people.

Sorcery and witchcraft also have many believers in Russia. Newspapers advertise the services of clairvoyants, witches, and sorcerers. And in the Duma parliament elections of December , astrologers were consulted by newspapers, businesspeople, and politicians seeking to ascertain the prospects of the various candidates.

All this occurs in a country that has been Christian for more than 1, years but where the pagan past persists. Because of its Byzantine beginnings, the Russian Church regards itself as a direct descendant of the early Christian communities. From Byzantium also came the belief that Orthodox Christianity, as James Billington has written: had solved all the basic problems of belief and worship.

Changes in dogma or even sacred phraseology could not be tolerated, for there was but one answer to any controversy. Sobor, the Russian word for cathedral as well as council , indicates a coming together of congregants who share common Christian values. Catholicism is seen as authoritarian because each Catholic believer and each national church must submit to the authority of the Pope.

Protestantism is too individualistic because each national church can make its own religious doctrine and can be further splintered from within. Russia was the first nation to have a national Orthodox church, and its example was followed by Greece, Georgia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, and others.

While autonomous, they are all members of the one Eastern church. Russian Orthodoxy is also seen as egalitarian, a fellowship uniting all souls under a single and correct religious rite. Easter, the principal Russian religious holiday, has a special meaning for Russians, who become euphoric as their long and harsh winter comes to an end.

Historically, the end of two centuries of Mongol rule is seen as a resurrection of the Russian people, achieved through their Christian faith. Only those who have been present at this service can realize all that the Resurrection means to the Russian people. Under the Soviets, atheism became the official doctrine, and the Orthodox Church, with its tradition of submission to state authority—another legacy of Byzantium—proved easy to suppress and vulnerable to control.

From a historical perspective, in old Russia there was one church, one truth, and little tolerance for dissidents. In the Soviet era—at least before — the Communist Party replaced the Church, and Party ideology supplanted religious truth, while intolerance of dissidents greatly increased and became state policy. As a substitute church, the Communist Party established a cult of Lenin, the founder and father of the Soviet state, and his portraits and busts became the icons of the new religion.

Every school, workplace, and many homes had a krasny ugol holy corner , in which an image of Lenin hung where religious icons had once been placed. And when Lenin died in , he was embalmed and interred in a granite tomb next to the Kremlin, where his mummified remains still are on view to the public. After , the antireligious policies of the Stalin years were reversed. A law on freedom of conscience was passed in , and Russians, responding to a rebirth of interest in Russian cultural traditions, are showing renewed interest in their Church.

To endorse the renewed role of Orthodoxy in Russian life, and to confirm his cordial relationship with the Church, Prime Minister Putin has admitted to being baptized as a child and has openly asserted that he is a believer. Russia in had more than 23, Orthodox parishes, more than triple the number in , and more were being added despite the shortage of trained priests. Religious institutions are again free to do charitable work, and the Church has also branched into business activities such as banking, hotels, and light manufacturing.

Orthodox Christmas—which falls on January 7 under the old Julian calendar—is once more a state holiday, as it was prior to Orthodoxy is again a force in Russia.