Islam and the Russian Orthodox Church in Post-Soviet Russia

The Russian Orthodox Church as moral norm entrepreneur

Conflicts over religious symbols in the public sphere, gay marriage, abortion or gender equality have shown their disruptive potential across many societies in the world. They have also become the subject of political and legal debates in international institutions. These conflicts emerge out of different worldviews and normative conceptions of the good, and they are frequently framed in terms ...

Saints Into Soviets: Russian Orthodox Symbolism and Soviet Political Posters

Visual archetypes from Russian Orthodox iconography shaped a widely understood visual vocabulary with politically important cultural meaning. Icons derived their symbolic authority from their status in Orthodox doctrine as divinely revealed sacred truth. Although the Bolsheviks who seized power in 1917 officially denounced organized religion, revolutionary artists nonetheless recycled iconic ar...

Religious Culture: Faith in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia

Migration and Restructuring in Post-Soviet Russia

W hen Russia became independent in 1992, it inherited from the Soviet Union a spatial distribution of its population that was incompatible with its emerging market economy. Internally the largest migration stream has been out of the overpopulated Russian north and Far East toward central Russia. At other geographic scales, as a result of decades of Soviet labor policy, there were numerous citie...

New Realities: Libraries in Post-Soviet Russia

The transition away from communism toward a more democratic society and the move to a market economy had profound effects on Russian libraries. Using the main public library in Bryansk, the Bryansk Region Scientific Library, as a case study, this article examines the changes in library service, including information access and the opening of previously closed collections, funding issues, the li...