"The Russian Orthodox Church, established in 988 AD, is witnessing renaissance and is playing a more active role in the social arena."
Stalin took this organization over in the 1930s, but I guess we can trust them now, especially with them coming clean and giving us this big news flash at all. That's probably the church Putin attends and I hear he's pretty devout.
"Saving Grace" is a good, but overlooked documentary.
It's a well-done look at the oppression the Soviets visited on
Catholics and Protestants via their proxies in Czechoslovakia.
One nice scene was a priest that attended an underground seminary;
he had the biggest smile when talking about how Reagan stood up to Moscow.
http://www.savinggracefilm.com/info.html
Among the multitude of books that deal with Bolshevik persecution of religion one by Martin Amis ("Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million"), is particularly vivid and graphic. He quotes Lenin in 1922: "We must now give the most merciless and decisive battle to to the clergy and subdue its resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for decades to come...The greatest number of the reactionary bourgeoisie and reactionary clergy that we will manage to execute in this affair,the better."
For that year alone, "Church records show that 2691 priests, 1962 monks and 3447 nuns were killed." One of the things people often are not aware of (because he died in 1924 and didn't live or rule long enough to spread terror on Stalin's scale) is that during his lifetime Lenin set the pattern for the vicious persecutions that were to follow - and he was as ruthless and implacable as Stalin, albeit on a smaller scope.