. Before the tenth century,
Russians practised
Slavic religion. As recalled by the
Primary Chronicle, Orthodox Christianity was made the state religion of
Kievan Rus' in 987 by
Vladimir the Great, who opted for it among other possible choices as it was the religion of the
Byzantine Empire. Since then, religion,
mysticism, and statehood remained intertwined elements in Russia's identity. The
Russian Orthodox Church, perceived as the glue consolidating the nation, accompanied the expansion of the
Russian Empire in the eighteenth century. Czar
Nicholas I's ideology, under which the empire reached its widest extent, proclaimed "Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nation" (
Pravoslavie,
samoderzhavie,
narodnost') as its foundations. The dominance of the Russian Orthodox Church was sealed by law, and, as the empire incorporated peoples of alternative creeds, religions were tied to
ethnicities to skirt any issue of integration. Until 1905, only the Russian Orthodox Church could engage in missionary activity to convert non-Orthodox people, and apostasy was treated as an offense punishable by law.
Catholicism,
Islam and other religions were tolerated only among outsider (
inoroditsy) peoples but forbidden from spreading among Russians. Throughout the history of early and imperial Russia there were, however, religious movements which posed a challenge to the monopoly of the Russian Orthodox Church and put forward stances of freedom of conscience, namely the
Old Believers—who separated from the Russian Orthodox Church after
Patriarch Nikon's reform in 1653 (the
Raskol)—, and
Spiritual Christianity. It is worth noting that the Russian Orthodox Church itself never forbade personal religious experience and speculative mysticism, and
Gnostic elements had become embedded in Orthodox Christianity since the sixth century, and later strengthened by the popularity of
Jakob Böhme's
thought in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Orthodox seminaries. By the end of the eighteenth century,
dvoeverie ("double faith"), popular religion which preserved Slavic pantheism under a Christianised surface, found appreciation among intellectuals who tried to delineate Russian distinctiveness against the West. On 17 April 1905,
Tsar Nicholas II decreed that religious minorities had the right to publicly celebrate their respective liturgies. At the dawn of the twentieth century,
esoteric and
occult philosophies and movements, including
Spiritualism,
Theosophy,
Anthroposophy,
Hermeticism,
Russian cosmism and others, became widespread. At the same time the empire had begun to make steps towards the recognition of the multiplicity of religions that it had come to encompass, but they came to an abrupt end with the
Russian Revolution in 1917. After the revolution, the Russian Orthodox Church lost its privileges, as did all minority religions, and the new state verged towards an
atheist official ideology. Under the
Soviet Union, the Russian Orthodox Church lived periods of repression and periods of support and cooptation by the state. Despite the policies of state atheism, censuses reported a high religiosity among the population; in 1929, 80% of the population were believers, and in 1937 two-thirds described themselves as believers, of whom three-fourths as Orthodox Christians. The Russian Orthodox Church was supported under
Joseph Stalin in the 1940s, after the
Second World War, then heavily suppressed under
Nikita Khrushchev in the 1960s, and then revived again by the 1980s. While it was legally reconstituted only in 1949, throughout the Soviet period the church functioned as an arm of the
KGB; many hierarchs of the post-Soviet church were former KGB agents, as demonstrated by the opening of KGB archives in the 1990s. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1987–1991, the Russian Orthodox Church has struggled to regain its erstwhile monopoly of religious life, despite it and other Christian churches which existed since before the Revolution have found themselves in a radically transformed context characterised by a religious pluralism unknown before 1917. During the Soviet period, religious barriers were shattered, as religions were no longer tied to ethnicity and family tradition, and an extensive displacement of peoples took place. This, together with the more recent swift ongoing development of communications, has resulted in an unprecedented mingling of different religious cultures. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a renewal of religions in Russia, with the revival of the traditional faiths and the emergence of new forms within the traditional faiths as well as many
new religious movements. The
amendments of 2020 to the constitution added, in the Article 67, the continuity of the Russian state in history based on preserving "the memory of the ancestors" and general "ideals and belief in God" which the ancestors conveyed. File:S.George (16th c., Pskov museum) 2.jpg|
Saint George and the Dragon, 16th-century icon from
Pskov. File:Троица 1729.jpg|
The Trinity (1729), icon by an unknown artist from
Tobolsk. File:Solovetsky Monastery Uprising.jpg|
The Rebellion of Solovetsky Monastery (1885), by
Sergey Miloradovich. File:The Molokane (A).jpg|Group of Molokans, 1870s. File:Club of Young Atheists.jpg|Circle of young atheists at a school in
Murom, 1930s. ==Study approaches==