ABSTRACT
Do religion and spirituality facilitate growth in social cohesion in today’s multiethnic and multifaith Russia? Do they help to establish civil society in Russia, as they did at one point in the United States? These questions are not easy to answer. On the one hand, the post-Soviet period immediately following Gorbachev’s perestroika became an era of true freedom of worship, unique in Russian history. However, on the other hand, freedom of worship was supported only by incomplete legislation and was used by those who wanted to make as much money from it as possible. Many felt depressed and confused, and all types of “fishers of men” tried to profit from this. As a result, instead of social cohesion, we saw growing atomization of society. After ten years of Yeltsin’s reforms, Russia has gotten nowhere close to having a functioning civil society, or one in which social initiative originates from the bottom. On the contrary, the state is striving once again to take control of all aspects of the lives of its subjects, including their ideological and religious preferences; a number of the “traditional” religions are using the state to fight against their competition and to receive all sorts of benefits. Today, when religious extremism is growing in the world, these trends are exceptionally dangerous, particularly in a country whose entire history has been one in which the lack of freedom has been ever-present.
