ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the meaning of Christianity and democracy in the Soviet Union during the first seventy years of its existence, from 1917 to 1987. One fundamental element of the system that prevailed in the Soviet Union from 1917–1987 was its propagation of a doctrine called Marxism-Leninism, and one fundamental element of that doctrine was militant atheism. The chapter provides some impressions of Russian Christianity that will help, perhaps, to explain its survival and its power. It suggests that one important reason for the collapse of the Marxist-Leninist conception of socialism in the Soviet Union was the survival of Christian faith in the hearts and minds of the Russian people. In 1987 and 1988, when the Soviet people were given the first opportunity in their entire history to say publicly what for many years they had been saying to each other privately, their resentment, their alienation, their anger, surfaced—and increased.
