Introduction

The relationship between religion and modernization in the Soviet Union is an overlooked subject. For many Western observers the term "modernization" conjures up ideas of huge factories, bulging cities, and secularized education, almost anything but religion, churches, and believers. Given the patent discrimination against Soviet believers and the lack of data on Soviet religions, it is problematical whether religion actually has revived only within the past few years or whether it has been a powerful if latent force throughout the course of Soviet history. The chapter addresses the question of conflict or compatibility of religion and Westernization in the USSR, focusing chiefly on Russian Orthodox religion and Westernization viewed under such headings as cultural in a broad sense, political, and technological. Alexander Solzhenitsyn attitudes to the Orthodox church past and present are not all simple. He defends the Old Believers against the established church of the day, perhaps there venturing onto thin ice historically in his specific observations.