Three-quarters of a century of official state atheism in the former Soviet Union and its Central and Eastern European satellite nations has all but evaporated in a resurgence of faith since the fall of the Iron Curtain, a new Pew Research Center study shows.
From 1917, when Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks took power in Russia, until 1991, when the USSR crumbled, religious faith — though technically constitutionally protected — was treated with at best ambivalence and often persecution as being incompatible with Marxist rule.
Read Full Article »