Never Far beneath the Surface: Christianity in the Mature Soviet Society

Commentators, social scientists, and historians have been puzzled by the seemingly explosive return of Christianity in the former Soviet countries of Russia and Ukraine. Using archival as well as untapped sources from personal records and oral interviews, this paper argues that this confusion is caused by a misunderstanding: Christianity did not so much return as resurface. While it is true that the official projection of Soviet society was atheistic, the claims of the regime did not match the reality, especially outside the metropolitan centers. Even educated, urban professionals were still very much connected to the villages, and in those villages, their mothers and grandmothers seldom gave up the faith. Icons hung on farmhouse walls throughout the Soviet period, bibles were treasured, priests quietly ministered to the faithful, and sometimes grandfathers even began both daily dinner and seasonal planting with prayer. Children from the “big city” who spent holidays and summers with their grandparents quite often learned a love of God and a veneration of icons and traditions at the same time that they learned how to cut hay and milk goats. Back in the city centers the rest of the year, they did not display their beliefs; but then again, they did not display their goat-milking skills, either. This paper seeks to prove that the “explosion” of Christian belief under the free society of the 1990s was not something new—it was something that was no longer hidden.