It’s very refreshing to see people who actually know what they are talking about:
Though huge numbers of Russians (75 percent) claim to be Orthodox, only a tiny number of them (four percent) actually go to church. Of those who claim Orthodoxy as their religion, 30 percent don’t even believe in God.
Judging by the glee with which the denizens of the Russian Empire destroyed churches and murdered priests back in 1917 and in the first decades of the USSR, there wasn’t much religiosity in those regions even before the Revolution. And in the century that passed since then, people have lost all interest or need in practicing the extremely demanding and complex Orthodox Christianity.
The other day, I spoke to this missionary preacher fellow from Iowa who had spent some time in Russia and who tried to convince me that Russian people were massively religious. When I told him it was not true, he accused me of badmouthing Russians to make Ukrainians look better. As happy as I always am to badmouth Russians, I had to explain that there was zero difference in terms of religiousness between Ukrainians and Russians, and I consider this to be a great thing.
Clarissa's Blog 
“zero difference in terms of religiousness between Ukrainians and Russians, and I consider this to be a great thing”
Is it? I’m as non-religious as they come but I think the Polish attachment to catholicism helped the population enormously in navigating the turbulence from communism to what came after.
It was the only eastern bloc communist country with anything like a functioning opposition (though it never had that official status) and almost any system that people trust and that tells them to think about wrong and right is better than no system doing that (which is what there seemed to be in former USSR countries).
Of course the church overplayed its hand badly after communism and people are slowly drifting from it but overall I’m glad it was there (and will be again if needed).
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I’m aware of no organized religion that asks anybody to think. Usually, it just tells people what to think.
The first time I actually met people who grew up in religious societies was after I emigrated and that’s when I realized what a great thing it was that I didn’t have all this crazy religious conditioning in my head that I needed to argue with and overcome. There is this fellow I know who grew up in a very Catholic family. He’s been living with his girlfriend for a quarter of a century but they are not getting married because this is his way of sticking it to the Catholic Church. I mean, get married, don’t get married, it’s no business of mine. But it is so pathetic when a grown person is constructing his life as a response to the Church dogma. And it doesn’t matter whether he accepts of rejects somebody else’s vision of life. It just sucks that his own vision of life has been substituted with this endless dialogue with the Church.
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When I wrote “think about” I didn’t mean ‘contemplate from some philosophical viewpoint’ I meant more ‘compare your actions to what we say is good’.
So… ordinary Poles at least had authority figures they mostly trusted reminding them that lying is bad, theft is bad, murder is bad (and less useful stuff too but that’s beside the point).
What authority figures were saying that in the USSR or its successor states? And how much did people trust those authority figures?
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More on the Ukraine from the odious Mr. Kunstler:
“Ukraine became a failed state due to a coup d’état engineered by Barack Obama’s state department. US policy wonks did not like the prospect of Ukraine joining Russia’s regional trade group called the Eurasian Customs Union instead of tilting toward NATO and the European Union. So, we paid for and enabled a coalition of crypto-fascists to rout the duly elected president. One of the first acts of the US-backed new regime was to declare punishment of Russian language speakers, and so the predominately Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine revolted. Russia reacted to all this instability by seizing the Crimean peninsula, which had been part of Russia proper both before and through the Soviet chapter of history. The Crimea contained Russia’s only warm water seaports and naval bases. What morons in the US government ever thought Russia would surrender those assets to a newly-failed neighbor state?
Was Vladimir Putin acting irresponsibly in this case? The opposite would be a much more logical conclusion. And what interest does the United States have in Ukraine? Surely no more than Russia would have in Texas. And when else in the entire history of the USA all the way back to George Washington did any government official declare Ukraine to be America’s business? Answer: Never. Reason: we have no legitimate interests in that corner of the world. So why in the early 21st century are we making this such a sore spot in our foreign relations? Because our waning influence in the world, in turn a product of our foolish inattention to our own economic problems and failing polity at home, is driving America crazy.”
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/enter-jeb-and-hil/
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It is VERY weird to see an English translation of Putin’s propaganda. This is verbatim the narrative that Putin promotes. The good thing is that , at this point, only a minority of people in the US finds this narrative persuasive.
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Ehh, not to state the obvious, but many, if not 80%+, of the people doing the killing in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, where Jewish Marxists. A good portion of whom, immigrated to the Soviet Union from New York. Yes, many Jewish American families, have a great grand uncle, aunt, or two, that was responsible for the worst mass murder in human history, the Red Terror. Your article is the worst form of genocide denial-ism, I have ever read.
Do not believe a word I say, and look it up for yourself, the truth speaks volumes beyond what I ever could.
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And this is one of the more insane examples of America-centrism.
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