Stanley Kurtz asks: has atheism killed Russia? A round-up of thoughts on the subject:
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In the “Life of the Moscow Starets Fr. Aleksei Mechev”, now a saint, the Nun Juliania wrote about the “collapse and the demise of Church life”, about the “religious coolness, indifference, the absence of Christian love, an overall detachment and a burrowing into the narrow circle of personal or family interests” which was taking place in Russia at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. “The life of the Church, with all the wealth of its spiritual treasures, with all its beauty and faithfulness to the proper Divine services, flowed like a weak, hardly noticeable little stream, of little interest not only to the lay folk but to the pastors of the Church as well,” observed Mother Juliania, making exceptions only for the monasteries. The contemporary theologian Hegumen [now Bishop] Hilarion Alfeyev likewise bears witness to this: the majority of believers came to Church and made their confession once a year – during Great Lent. Such was the crisis of Church life.Link:
According to Lev Gudkov, a sociologist who heads the department of social and political studies at the Yuri Levada Center, creationism signals a desire to reject anything associated with Soviet times: "It is definitely a post-Soviet, exaggerated, insistence on pre-Soviet traditional views. This is observed mostly among young people and among the elderly. We discern an overall tendency towards imitational traditionalism that emerged as a reaction to the vacuum of ideas and beliefs that followed the disintegration of Soviet ideology."Link:
....the most difficult thing to understand about the present situation in Russia is what he calls the mentality of the people. Only this, he insists, will explain where the country will go. Naumov is convinced that the mentality of the people is conditioned by their exhaustion, not their frustrations or expectations. It is shaped by a past, which, as much as they try to escape it, has taught them patience and providential self-protection. Despite the flood of foreign goods, democratic vistas urged on by advertising, and dreams of quick money, it is a psychology of scarcity, frugality, making do, and self-effacement.Link:
In nearly all of his major writings, Solzhenitsyn appeals to the indispensability of the spiritual qualities of “repentance” and “self-limitation” for a truly balanced individual and collective life...He is not, however, unduly sanguine about the prospects for these virtues in the contemporary scene. As he writes in November 1916, “In the life of nations, even more than in private life, the rule is that concessions and self-limitation are ridiculed as naïve and stupid.” Solzhenitsyn thus has no illusions about repentance and self-limitation becoming the explicit and unchallenged foundation of free political life.Link:
Pearce: Do you believe that the West is in the same blind alley and also has nowhere to go?
Solzhenitsyn: Over the last twelve years I have stopped viewing Russia as something very distinct from the West. Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word "modernity" if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China. With the exception of those areas we should not use the words "the West" but the word "modernity". The modern world. And yes, then I would say that there are ills that are characteristic, that have plagued the West for a long time and now Russia has quickly adopted them also.
Pearce: What is the present position of Christianity in Russia?
Solzhenitsyn: After the permission was freely given for people to practise their faith the number of Christianity's adherents has grown. Many under an atheistic press, a vice grip, had forgotten their faith so there is now something of a return to Christianity yet simultaneously there is a decay of values which accompanies the rise of consumer society. It is a simultaneous process.
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