ABSTRACT
The image of the Soviet Union as not just an atheist state, but one inhabited by peoples of different religions, has probably encountered fewer cultural and ideological barriers in permeating the Western public mind than the perception of the USSR as a multinational empire. The impressive growth in Western scholarship on both aspects of the Soviet state has yet to be matched by a comprehensive examination of the inter-relationship between religion and nationality in the Soviet political and social context. The nature and mutability of the interrelationship between institutional religion and ethnicity in the contemporary USSR varies not only from one nationality to another and amongst religions, but also within individual nationalities; in virtually all cases it has been affected to a greater or lesser extent by political, social and demographic changes. National churches represent a unique symbiosis of religious and national identities which sustain and reinforce each other.
