Britannica Guide to Russia

The rise of Russia and the return of a specifically Russian national consciousness from the late 1980s on was accompanied, and fostered, by an at first hesitant rediscovery of the tsarist past. Gorbachev's policies of perestroika ("restructuring"} and glas- nost ("openness") had facilitated an examination of many hither­to closed chapters of Soviet, but also pre-Soviet, Russian history. In intellectual and political circles the search was on to recover what many felt had been lost, to pick up where Russia's mod­ernization, they felt, had been artificially arrested in 1917.

Old, and sometimes embarrassing, groupings crawled out of the rotten Soviet woodwork around this time, including mon­archists, anarchists, and the openly anti-Semitic nationalist group Pamyat ("Memory"), whose adherents paraded on the margins of the pro-democracy demonstrations of 1989-91. A self-styled Liberal Democratic Party, created and led by the rabble-rousing Vladimir Zhirinovsky, capitalized on Russia's national sense of grievance and a growing mood of xenophobia to become, for a time, the third-largest political grouping - in terms of votes received - after the centrist Russian party of power (now called United Russia) and the rump of the once all- powerful Communist Party.

One of the greatest beneficiaries of the new embrace of Russian national sentiment was the Russian Orthodox Church, whose dignitaries became a fixture at national events, starting from Gorbachev's inauguration in 1989. Soviet-era restrictions on church-building and church services were pro­gressively lifted. Congregations across Russia raised funds and rebuilt churches despoiled and desecrated in successive waves of Soviet-era persecution. The reappearance on the rural horizon of freshly gilded domes was an early sign of Russia's national renaissance.

At state level, Russia's spiritual rebirth was symbolized by the rebuilding of the vast Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in central Moscow, which had been notoriously dynamited by Stalin in 1931. The project was initiated by Yeltsin, as Russian president, and the popular mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov, and completed - thanks to almost superhuman effort - within the decade. It was paid for by voluntary contributions, raised in part from Russia's new rich - the "oligarchs" and smaller entrepreneurs who had profited from the disorderly privatiza­tions of state industry in the early 1990s. But there were gifts from Russia's "old rich", too - the descendants of noble families who had fled abroad from Soviet power. Their names, as benefactors - linking old Russia and new across a century - are inscribed in the cathedral entrance.

But the visibility of the Orthodox Church in Russia today is not only, or even primarily, an expression of Russians' reli­gious faith. Only a minority claim to be believers or attend church regularly. It is at least as much an expression of

Russianness. In Soviet times, church weddings or christenings tended to be confined to rural areas and were, even then, acts of personal defiance. Today, the number of church weddings, christenings, and funerals has soared. As president, Yeltsin was a regular at services on Russian holidays, and he re­instated Christmas and Easter as national holidays. Vladimir Putin and now Dmitry Medvedev have followed suit, the former having apparently disclosed early in his presidency that he had been christened and still wore the pectoral cross given to him by his grandmother.

But the revival of interest in pre-revolutionary Russia extends far beyond the reintegration of the Orthodox Church into the life of the post-Soviet Russian state. And it goes far beyond simple nostalgia. With the communist system demonstrably bankrupt in every sense and the accelerated free-market reforms of the 1990s summarily ended by the crash of the ruble in 1998, there has been a quest to find other, Russian, ways of doing things. Pyotr Stolypin, the great reforming prime minister under the last tsar, Nicholas II, has been a particular object of study. He and other political and judicial luminaries of the early twentieth century are frequently cited as reference points by, among others, Russia's current president, Dmitry Medvedev,

Class and money are also back as strands of national life, if not in the mass return of aristocratic families and those who sought intellectual freedom in die emigration, then in a revival of some of their ways. Etiquette and formal manners are in the ascendant. Winter balls, modelled on those described so graphically by Leo Tolstoy, are a feature of the social scene. Even the language is changing, as Soviet concepts and formulations are dropped, to be replaced by more elegant, often older, turns of phrase.