ABSTRACT
The sweeping away of official atheist ideology with the Soviet state from 1987–91 proved one of the twentieth century's defining watersheds. In just a few years, a nation identifying the Communist Party as ‘the conscience of the people’ recognized individual freedom of conscience. 1 Millions flocked to previously shuttered places of worship, including Orthodox churches. Yet the Moscow Patriarchate appeared strangely unenthusiastic about the 1990 legislation that secured protection from suffocating government control. Instead of supporting religious freedom for the faiths with whom Orthodox had suffered under atheist rule, Church leaders soon clamoured for exclusive state patronage.
