I don't have any iPhone pictures to post on this topic. And I have no access to a card reader to download pics. So, no pics for now!!!
In Moscow I saw more than a few icons hanging from rear view mirrors in cars. To my western mind these looked like Russian St. Christopher medals.
More than a few times I wandered into churches in Moscow or Irkutsk where I saw active worship going on.
Along the Moscow River last week, I was excluded from a church because I was wearing shorts. ( So I zipped on my legs, went back in, and watched about three hundred parishioners as a herd of priests conducted some really solemn mass--incense, procession, call and response chanting, a full choir..., really glorious.)
Today on Olkhon Island, I am in one of the five holy shamanic places in the world. (I don't know what that means, exactly. But it has religious significance. ) This place has prayer flags hung around nearly every vertical support--tree, fence post, whatever.
Irena, the Moscow tour guide, says she was secretly baptized when she was a child, as many others were.
And next week I am going to Mongolia. Although it is now an independent country, it was one of the former Soviet Socialist Republics for most of the last century, and therefore in the same boat as Russia itself under the communists. And my "list" for Mongolia includes a few monasteries.
Suffice it to say that, despite atheistic communist rule for seven decades, religion survived. I'm not saying it was easy. Stalin had more than a few churches destroyed, one famously because it impeded the flow of processions into Red Square. And Irena's baptism was "secret."
Other churches and monasteries were turned into museums of religion.
One of the things Russians were talking about, I was told, around the time they were first exploring space was whether the cosmonauts would be able to see god. When Gargarin said yes, that he thought he could, Kruschev suppressed the comment.
In general, while there was little that said one could not actually practice religion, the church itself suffered, and its more vocal supporters were marginalized.
Part of Marx's seminal Communist Manifesto decried religion as "the opiate of the people." So there was a philosophical basis for the communist government to disparage religion. The Manifesto's reason for its attitude towards religion is interesting: the problem with religion is that it made people give up on improving things in this world because they were interested only in the next. Marx felt people should concentrate in this world. But religion dulled that sentiment just as opium dulls the real needs if the addict. It is hard to get the proletariat to throw off their chains if they know chains are only in this world, and they care only about the next.
Curiously, this philosophical argument was not the real reason the church suffered under godless communism. The communists did not like religion mostly because the church had power. It was, along with the czar, the Establishment. If the communists wanted to take over, they had to cut off the church's power, just as they had eliminated the czar.
If the church had not been also a political power, it would probably have been ignored. So, what the communists focused on was breaking its influence. Once that was done, the church was left somewhat alone. People were even allowed to practice their religion. I attended a mass forty years ago, and saw dozens of young seminarians studying in Yaroslavl at that time. And, as Irena is proof, people were being baptized in 1988.
Watching a Russian orthodox service is pretty difficult. Some of it takes place behind an iconostasis that hides the action. It takes hours. (When I said I saw a mass back in 1973, I should have said I saw part of one in an hour or so.
i have some pics to illustrate se of this, but it will have to wait for a better Internet connection.
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