| Russia Table of Contents
Islam, professed by about 19 percent of believers in the mid-1990s, is numerically the second most important religion in Russia. Various non-Orthodox Christian denominations and a dwindling but still important Jewish population complete the list of major religious groups in the Russian Federation. In general, Russians of all religions have enjoyed freedom of worship since the collapse of the communist regime in 1991, and large numbers of abandoned or converted religious buildings have been returned to active religious use in the 1990s.
The Russian Orthodox Church 
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Source: U.S. Library of Congress |
The chief religion of Russia is Russian Orthodox Christianity, which
is professed by about 75 percent of citizens who describe themselves as
religious believers. Because the concept of separation of church and
state never took root in Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church, a branch
of Eastern Orthodoxy, was a pillar of tsarist autocracy. During the
communist era, the church, like every other institution in the Soviet
Union, was completely subordinate to the state, achieving a modus
vivendi by ceding most of its autonomous identity. Under the officially
atheist regimes of the Soviet Union, no official figures on the number
of religious believers in the country were available to Western
scholars. According to various Soviet and Western sources, however, more
than one-third of the citizens of the Soviet Union regarded themselves
as believers in the 1980s, when the number of adherents to Russian
Orthodoxy was estimated at more than 50 million--although a high
percentage of that number feared to express their religious beliefs
openly.