The Fall of Communism and the Orthodox Revival

By the 1980s the Church in the Soviet Union survived, but only barely: a small remnant of open parishes, a handful of monasteries, seminaries kept deliberately tiny, and a hierarchy watched and pressured at every turn. The change came gradually and then all at once. Under Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of openness in the late 1980s, the state began returning church buildings; the celebration in 1988 of a thousand years since the Baptism of Rus' became a public turning point, marking the faith no longer as an enemy but as part of the nation's heritage.

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the persecution was over. New laws guaranteed religious freedom, and the Church stepped into the open for the first time in three generations. What had been hidden could now be spoken, taught, and celebrated. The long night described in the entry on the Soviet persecution had ended.

The rebuilding was astonishing in its speed. Tens of thousands of churches destroyed or shuttered under Communism were reopened or rebuilt across the former Soviet lands, at times at a rate approaching a thousand a year. Monasteries that had stood empty filled again with monks and nuns; closed seminaries reopened and new ones were founded; Bibles and service books, once smuggled or copied by hand, were printed freely. The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, dynamited by Stalin in 1931, was raised again stone by stone and consecrated in 2000.

The recovery was not Russia's alone. Across Eastern Europe — in Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Georgia, and beyond — churches long constrained under Communist governments returned to open life. The year 2000 also saw the glorification of the New Martyrs and Confessors, as the freed Church honored those who had not lived to see the freedom. In 2007 a long breach was healed when the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Church Outside Russia, separated since the years of persecution, restored full communion.

Freedom brought its own trials. A Church that had spent seventy years simply surviving now had to teach a population that had grown up with little or no religious knowledge, form clergy in enormous numbers quickly, and speak again to modern society. Many who returned to Orthodoxy did so more as a mark of national and cultural identity than of settled faith, and the Church has had to labor to turn nominal belonging into living discipleship. Its new closeness to the state has also raised old questions about the right relationship between Church and civil power.

The post-Soviet decades reopened jurisdictional disputes as well, most painfully in Ukraine, where the question of church independence remains contested among the Orthodox — a matter the tradition asks be spoken of with restraint and without partisanship. Yet the central fact of the revival stands: a Church that its persecutors had confidently expected to bury outlived them. The Orthodox see in this the pattern of Pascha itself — the dry bones of Ezekiel's vision knit again into a living body — and a vindication of those who kept the faith through the dark.