This is all because of Beslan. Putin went after the terrorists hard and has killed multitudes of them in Russian, Chechnya, etc. We do not hear about it because it would have got in the way of discussing Bruce Jenner or one of the Kardashians. But the Russians know what he is doing and support the iron hand all the way.
The Russian Federation is building lots of orthodox churches and cathedrals. The evangelical protestants have more worshippers though. The Orthodox Church is the STATE church of russia. There is no separation of church and state there. So the priests have their finger on the nuclear trigger sort of kind of.