ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Russian Orthodox Church, with occasional references to the Evangelicals and others. The Nikita Khrushchev era of jolts and bolts was replaced by nearly two decades of Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksi Kosygin's "normalization," which, as far as the Orthodox Church was concerned, was not unlike that of Czechoslovakia after 1968. The Orthodox of the Moscow Patriarchate, the Roman Catholics, the Jews, the Muslims, the official Baptists, and the Lutherans are among the legalized religious groups of the USSR. Mikhail Gorbachev's decision to join Ligachev's antireligious bandwagon may have been caused by a desire both to placate the party establishment and to prove his Marxist orthodoxy as a counterweight to the unorthodox economic reforms. That Gorbachev meant business was evidenced both by the Soviet government's announcement that it was going to scrap the river-reversal plans and by the formation in November 1986 of the Culture Fund.
