The Landscape of Interfaith Intolerance in Post-Atheist Russia*

The officially atheist Soviet Union did not tolerate any open manifestations of faith except for the rare ones it overtly allowed and covertly controlled. Since all religions were almost entirely suppressed from above, there were no visible manifestations of inter-religious intolerance “from below,” i.e. among the adherents of different faiths. Yet our paper shows that in less than two decades after the demise of the Soviet state and its official atheism, there emerged in Russia an entirely new landscape of widespread and strong interfaith intolerance from below. We describe that landscape using the data from our representative national survey conducted in Russia in 2005.