This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991 ended seven decades of state atheism and active suppression of religion across its former territory, a suppression that had closed, converted to other uses or destroyed the great majority of the church's own buildings and dissolved its seminaries and monastic communities. The Russian Orthodox Church rebuilt its institutional standing within a single generation afterward, chiefly under the leadership of Patriarch Aleksy the Second, who led the church through the transition itself, reopening monasteries, seminaries and parish churches that Soviet policy had closed or destroyed.
A major Pew Research Center survey, with fieldwork conducted from 2015 to 2016 across the region, found 71 percent of Russians identifying as Orthodox Christian by that point, with Orthodox identity closely bound to national identity across the wider post-Soviet region rather than confined to active religious practice alone, a finding published in a broader comparative study of religious belief and national belonging across Central and Eastern Europe.
What this changed for Christianity's spread was a striking reversal within twenty five years of a state that had spent decades trying to eliminate religious practice altogether. The scale and speed of the church's institutional rebuilding, reaching most of the population's stated identity within a single generation, has few parallels anywhere else in modern Christian history.