ABSTRACT
Many foreigners imagined post-Soviet Russia to be a religious wasteland in 1992, picturing it as a country fiill of "godless communists" yearning for salvation. I vividly remember a telling scene from that summer. During lunchtime one day, an eager group of young American missionaries, dressed all alike in (ironically) red tshirts silkscreened with crosses, massed together in front of the Izvestiia building on Pushkin Square in central Moscow. As a curious crowd gathered, they began to act out in pantomime the story of the death and resurrection of Christ. Afterwards, they passed out pamphlets proclaiming the "Good News". The Russian bystanders reacted mostly with amusement, although some took offense. Did these young people not know that Christianity had been introduced to Russia over a thousand years earlier, and that Christian imagery permeated Russian literature, painting, and culture? Moreover, did they not realize that the recent revitalization of religion in Russia had begun not with the Soviet collapse, but with Gorbachev's introduction ofglasnost and perestroika in 1986?
