Video from Slice
"With the fall of the monarchy, the trial period began for the Russian church. With the beginning of the revolution the policy of violent imposition of atheism spread in Russia. The looting of several temples became the result of this fact. State pressure on the church weakened in the last months of 1941, after a series of military failures of Soviet troops in the war with Germany. The war of 1941-1945 united believers and unbelievers. After the disintegration of the USSR in 1991 the Russian Orthodox Church began to be reborn, and with it the persecution of believers, widespread in Soviet times, ceased. The reconstruction of old temples and the building of new Christian temples began. Extract from the documentary: "Wonders of men - Russia: The Cathedral Saint-Basile-the-Blessed" Direction: Bruno Victor-Pujebet & Delphine Cohen Production: ARTE France & ZED " from video introduction.
"We now see Vladimir Putin on CNN gleefully pushing a button launching a hypersonic nuclear missile into the stratosphere, claimed to be “unstoppable” and capable of reaching any city in the United States. Rather than fading away, Russia is confronting the United States, and the two countries have returned to a simmering Cold War-like state of coexistence. Princeton professor Stephen Cohen says that for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, a nuclear war threat is real.
A greater mystery than Russia’s newfound political prominence is Russia’s sudden role as the world’s leading defender of Christianity. It seems inconceivable that former KGB operative Vladimir Putin now chastises Western nations for abandoning their Christian roots. Putin says:
"The people in the West are actually ashamed of their religious affiliation and are indeed frightened to speak about them. Christian holidays and celebrations are abolished or neutrally renamed as if they were ashamed of those Christian holidays. With this method one hides away the deeper moral value of theses celebrations. And those countries try to force this model onto other countries, globally. I am deeply convinced that this is a direct way to the degradation and primitivization of culture. This leads to a deeper demographic and moral crisis in the West."
Putin has not only talked the talk of defending Christianity; he has backed up his talk with military intervention. Russia has repeatedly made the assertion that his country’s move into Syria to support the embattled government was, in part, motivated to protect Christians sects who were victims of genocide at the hands of ISIS.
The disturbing irony of the spiritual awakening in Russia is the sudden embrace of religious bigotry by United States media and many powerful members of Congress who represent this country with the motto “In God We Trust.” “The dogma lives loudly within you,” opined Senator Feinstein, unhappy that the person she was speaking to was Catholic. Senator Kamala Harris went in for her own kill shot by expressing her outrage toward a judicial nominee for being a member of a Catholic volunteer organization that would dare to have religious beliefs..." from the article: No One Saw It Coming: Rise of Christianity in Russia Baffles US Establishment