c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) My wife Marcia and I recently returned from a two-week river cruise between Moscow and St. Petersburg with four stops along the way. Even a brief visit confirmed Winston Churchill’s description of Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

With that in mind, here is my view of that “riddle.”

Russia is experiencing a strong religious revival. One sign of the Russian Orthodox Church’s renaissance is the large number of people in big cities and small villages who wear crosses.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, once a Soviet KGB official and until recently Russia’s president, has recounted that his mother gave him a baptismal cross in 2005: “I did as she said and then put the cross around my neck. I have never taken it off since.“

For some, the cross is a symbol of sincere religious belief. But as I discovered, for many others it is a public assertion of traditional nationalism that is inextricably linked to Russian Orthodoxy. An expert on the history and religion of the former Soviet Union told me that non-Orthodox citizens of Russia _ Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Muslims and Buddhists _ are not fully accepted as authentic “Russians” because they are outside the national church.

Everywhere we looked, Orthodox churches were being rebuilt or restored to their pre-Communist glory. My love of historical irony was evoked with a visit to the most prominent church in Yaroslavl, where the communists used the church to teach officially sanctioned atheism. Today, it is a focus of Orthodox veneration and devotion.

There is extraordinary public interest in both the iconic art that is central to Russian churches and the Romanov dynasty, which ruled Russia for 300 years as obscenely rich autocrats until Czar Nicholas II abdicated in 1917.

The czar’s family, including the famous princess Anastasia, was executed by the communists the following year. Now the remains of Russia’s last royal family are interred in a St. Petersburg crypt _ now a major tourist attraction _ near Peter the Great and other Russian rulers.

I have serious concerns about the Russian Orthodox revival. Will it enhance true spirituality and religious liberty, or mark a return to the ugly tyrannical past? My feelings were especially aroused when I viewed the massive church in St. Petersburg built on the site of the 1881 assassination of Czar Alexander II.

Although he was an early political reformer, in his last years Alexander became a repressive czar. Following his death, a series of cruel anti-Jewish laws were enacted that led to lethal pogroms and a massive Jewish exodus. Russian church leaders collaborated with the Romanovs in a systematic campaign of virulent anti-Semitism.

My grandparents were among those who fled the persecution and emigrated to America following Alexander’s assassination. My maternal grandfather always said the czar’s death effectively ended any hope of political reforms. However, one of Marcia’s grandmothers remained in Russia and became an anti-czarist revolutionary until she, too, immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1900s.

While in Moscow, we visited the Choral Synagogue, a central rallying point for the recent Soviet Jewish movement that resulted in nearly a million Jews leaving the former USSR for Israel, the U.S. and other countries. Although free to emigrate, many Jews still remain.

I was pleased to see a rabbi conducting a Talmud study class in the Moscow synagogue for a group of young and old students. The St. Petersburg Synagogue is one of the largest in Europe, and because the Germans never captured the city during World War II (despite a bitter 900-day siege), the grand edifice remains intact.

Finally, we visited the chief communist “religious” shrine: Vladimir Lenin’s eerie mausoleum in Red Square, which still draws large crowds. It was a ghoulish experience to enter the darkened catacomb situated two floors below street level. There was the embalmed body of the communist leader lying in repose, dressed in a business suit. Was it really Lenin or a wax model?

The answer “is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)

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