The samizdat (“self-published”) journal Obshchina 
(Community) (1978), together with the underground Christian Seminar on the Problems of Religious Renewal for which it served as an official journal, pursued several interrelated aims: to build a genuine Christian community in the USSR, to restore Orthodox education for laypeople, and to lead people back from materialism and nihilism to the truths of the Gospel. The article examines various dimensions of the journal’s existence, including its editorial orientation, its relationship with state oversight bodies, its engagement with Soviet ideological discourse, and its interaction with the liberal dissident milieu. It argues that, for the first time since the 1960s, the work of Obshchina’s editors and the seminar’s leaders (A.I. Ogorodnikov, V.Yu. Poresh, and others) helped reconstruct a social Christian worldview in Russia in which Christian truths became the primary criterion for social and even political reflection. At the same time, the author contends that Obshchina, despite being uncensored, should not be classified as a dissident publication. The Orthodox intellectuals associated with it did not call for the overthrow of the regime, emigration, or other forms of outright rejection of the state. Rather, they sought to gradually bring the Soviet state and society into the life of the Church, in the expectation that broader transformations would then occur organically. Uncensored social Christian thought thus found itself caught between two forces: the Soviet security apparatus and the spiritual-intellectual pressure of the liberal dissident environment. Social Christian groups were often compelled to reproduce familiar liberal modes of opposition to the Soviet regime, although this dependence was gradually overcome. Their eventual emergence onto an independent path contributed to the later flourishing of Orthodox social traditionalism in the 2010s–2020s. The legacy of Obshchina is valuable above all because it allows for a more impartial view of the forerunners of today’s Orthodox traditionalists.  

This article explores the tragic life and legacy of Dmitry 
Dudko (1924–2004), one of the most prominent and controversial figures associated with the Orthodox patriotic movement in the Soviet Union during the 1970s. It traces his trajectory from that of a peasant’s son who endured his father’s arrest, wartime and occupation — to a student of the Moscow Theological Academy who was arrested in 1948 and sentenced to ten years in labour camps for poems published in a collaborationist periodical during the occupation. Particular attention is given to Dudko’s active pastoral ministry in the 1970s. Father Dmitry became widely known for his bold and emotionally compelling sermons, in which he combined the exposition of Christian doctrine with open criticism of the moral and social problems of Soviet society, including the disintegration of the family, alcoholism, and corruption. He also spoke publicly about the Stalinist labour camps and the pressure exerted by the KGB (Committee for State Security) on the Church. His informal “conversations” following all-night vigils, initially at the Church of the Transfiguration Cemetery in Moscow and later in the villages of Kabanovo and Grebnevo near Moscow, attracted hundreds of listeners, most of them young people, and constituted a unique phenomenon in the religious and social life of the period. Many contemporaries came to regard Dudko as a spiritual leader of an underground Orthodox patriotic movement that positioned itself in opposition both to official Soviet ideology and to liberal dissident circles. His activities, reflected in the publication of his books in the West and in the samizdat newspaper “In the Light of the Transfiguration”, provoked a harsh response from the state authorities. The article details the systematic pressure exerted on the priest by the KGB and church leadership, including forced transfers to remote parishes, harassment of his spiritual followers, and ultimately his arrest in January 1980. The culmination of Dudko’s story was a dramatic personal and ideological rupture. After six months of imprisonment in Lefortovo Prison, he appeared on Soviet television and in other media outlets to deliver a public repentance and renunciation of his earlier activities. This act, widely interpreted by contemporaries as the result of coercion and tortures, led to a definitive break with most of his former associates. In the final period of his life, Dudko’s views changed markedly: he drew closer to neo-Soviet nationalist circles, beFcame a spiritual mentor to the newspaper “Zavtra”, and expressed openly favourable views of Stalin. Despite the contradictions of his biography and the painful conclusion of his public ministry, the article argues that Dmitry Dudko is remembered above all as an exceptional preacher and man of prayer who brought thousands of people to faith during the Brezhnev era.

This article analyzes the strategic vision of the Renovationist movement in the USSR during the 1920s, which sought a radical transformation of global Orthodoxy (and subsequently of world Christianity) through the mechanism of regularly convened and democratically elected “ecumenical councils”. Initially, the Renovationists planned to rely on Greek reformers when convening such a council. Later, however, they envisaged using the state resources of the Soviet Union to integrate this project into the broader process of world revolution through a comprehensive revision of Christianity. In this sense, the initiative functioned as a messianic project aimed at sacralizing revolutionary modernity. The institution of the “ecumenical council” was conceived as the final stage in the construction of a system of ecclesiastical electoral democracy. The project was to begin with the ecumenical legitimization of the decisions of the so-called Second All-Russian Local Council of 1923, which introduced a married episcopate and permitted second marriages for clergy. However, the Renovationists’ ambitions extended much further. Their proposals included strategies for the permanent transformation of Church Tradition, a complete restructuring of canon law, the creation of a new “official confession of faith”, and, ultimately, the reduction of dogma to the minimalist formula “Jesus Christ is the Son of God”. Although the planned “ecumenical council” would not have been a genuine Ecumenical Council in the canonical sense, unanimous support from the participating Local Churches could have made it a powerful instrument for dismantling global Orthodoxy. Nevertheless, the uncompromising stance of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church (who, even after the death of Patriarch Tikhon, categorically refused to consider union with the so-called Renovationist “Russian Orthodox Church”), prevented the movement from presenting itself as the legitimate fullness of the Russian Church before the wider Christian world. In this way, the act of moral courage of these figures became a means of preserving Orthodoxy itself.

This article analyzes the transformation of state confessional policy in the late Soviet Union, examining its causes and consequences. Drawing on archival materials, it demonstrates significant shifts in state–church relations that occurred on the eve of the millennium of the Christianization of Rus' and in the period following the official celebrations. The analysis shows that the weakening of state pressure on the Church was largely driven by the political considerations of the Soviet leadership. However, the liberalization of state–church relations initiated in the late 1980s became the foundation for a fundamental reassessment of the role of the Church in the life of Russian society and the state. The dismantling of the system of total state control over the Russian Orthodox Church and the abandonment of state atheism required formal legal regulation. New legislation was developed within a secular and liberal framework, without sufficient regard for the cultural and historical specifics of Russian state formation. This, in turn, created the risk of further secularization of the Church and the deepening fragmentation of a weakened post-Soviet identity. The active stance of the Church, its current Primate Patriarch Kirill, and a number of deputies of the State Duma made it possible to revise Soviet-era legislation and to ensure a gradual shift in the Russian state’s approach: from a secular-liberal model of state–church relations toward a historically rooted symphonic model.

This article examines how, in the years immediately 
preceding his arrest in 1930, Aleksei Fyodorovich Losev developed a philosophical apology for Imiaslavie (“deification of the name”) and formulated his interpretation of the theology of the uncreated energies. The relevance of the study lies in the fact that hesychast asceticism constitutes an important component of Orthodox spiritual and moral values, and its objective scholarly understanding is essential. The article demonstrates how Aleksei Losev offers an essential–energetic interpretation of the highest hesychast experience and, for the first time, analyzes his account of the gradual “de-essentialization” of human energies in the process of hesychast ascent; the “ladder method” is employed for this task. From the standpoint of historical contextualization, the author notes that Losev’s writings on Imiaslavie were composed before the major twentieth-century philological and theological studies of hesychasm, grounded in extensive source material. Consequently, his philosophical and theological essays of the 1920s could not offer an impeccable interpretation of hesychasm. During that period, “hesychasm” was often equated with “Palamism” and even regarded as a particular expression of Imiaslavie, whose origins were traced back to biblical times. The article argues that Losev’s interpretation does not present hesychast experience as a movement oriented toward synergic union with God, but rather as an experience shaped by the correlates of synergy, such as the sacralized invocation of the Divine Name, the appeal to a sophianic mode of being, and the use of ontologically significant symbols. Losev’s synthesis of Neoplatonic philosophy and hesychast theology proved significant not only for his own philosophical project. A similar reading of hesychast texts can later be found in Vladimir Bibikhin’s translation of The Triads by Gregory Palamas. The author concludes that the method of philosophical synthesis — so strikingly exemplified by Vladimir Solovyov and creatively adapted by Losev — does not provide an optimal framework for understanding the distinctiveness of hesychasm. A proper interpretation of the theology of the uncreated energies requires something different: the transformation of ancient philosophical tools and an attentiveness to the logic of synergy, which is characteristic of the Orthodox ascetic tradition.

This article examines the creative legacy of “Makovets”, an artistic and literary group active in the early twentieth century. The author argues that the group was grounded in the idea of the unity of Russian culture, with its spiritual foundations shaped by reinterpretations of Christian tradition. The “Makovets” society worked within what might be called an archaeo-avant-garde approach, seeking to bring past and future, tradition and innovation, into organic conversation. Rejecting the principle of “Art for Art’s Sake”, its members advanced the slogan “Art is Life”. The leading figure of the group, Vasily Chekrygin, authored its main manifesto. He developed concepts such as the integrity of the artistic image, the religious nature of the creator, conciliar (sobornyi) art, “naïve realism”, and the interconnection of spirit and form, painting and philosophy. Chekrygin pushed art beyond a purely aesthetic category, insisting that its true purpose lies in the transfiguration of the world. At the center of his thought stood the idea of the synthesis of the arts. The article shows that, within Russian culture, this idea is often interpreted through the problem of anthropodicy, and compares Chekrygin’s position regarding the synthesis of the arts with that of Pavel Florensky, one of the intellectual supporters of “Makovets”. It also considers the influence of Nikolai Fyodorov’s works on Chekrygin’s philosophy of creativity. The article also pays particular attention to the legacy of Sergei Romanovich, Lev Zhegin, and Raisa Florenskaya. The author concludes that, a century later, the central idea of “Makovets” — the unity of culture grounded in enduring values — has regained new relevance.

During the Soviet period, samizdat (the underground 
press) was not limited to political or literary texts. Religious samizdat also existed as a significant phenomenon. Believers printed and circulated religious literature for themselves and likeminded people under near-underground conditions, relying on secrecy, concealment, and various informal strategies to evade state control. To shed light on how these practices were organized, the editorial team of the “Orthodoxia” journal spoke with a direct participant in these events, Pavel Rogovoy, who was one of the leading figures of underground Orthodox samizdat in the Soviet era and the general director of the “Palomnik” publishing house