ABSTRACT
For all those who believed that God was dead, and religion outdated, the flowering of religion in the waning years of the Soviet Union showed the endurance and power of faith. Even after decades of official state atheism and religious suppression—based on Marxist belief that religion was nothing but the “opium of the masses”—the practice of Christianity and Islam re-emerged. It was Communism that died; indeed, its vision of creating a new man had been doomed from the beginning by its denial of God. The following essay, written in 1992, appeared in a local newspaper and generated some public discussion at the time. It has been revised slightly for the purpose of this book.
