ABSTRACT
O n Monday evening, 18th May 1992, I arrived in the city of Yekaterinburg after a 27-hour train journey eastwards from Moscow. This was the third successive year in which I was a guest lecturer at the university there, but on my arrival I was told that I would be lecturing later in the week because they thought I would probably like to attend an academic conference on religion which was being held over the next couple of days. Boris Bagirov, the dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the university, said that I did not need to pay anything for the conference as it was being sponsored by “the Church.” Both he and I assumed this was the Orthodox one.
