If Russia is neither tsarist nor Soviet, and yet is not “at home” in the West, then what is Russia's twenty-first century identity? V.V. Alekseev's introduction to this question and its secular and theological dimensions is our first selection in the current issue of the Russian Social Science Review. The Orthodox Church looms large in this discussion, although not because the Russian people are particularly pious (they are not), but symbolically and instrumentally. Orthodox Christianity is not governed by a central, papal authority, and most Orthodox churches are identified with a particular national community, including diasporas, with the result that they tend to lack insulation from political power. Articles by Boris Dubin, Aleksandr Kubyshkin and Aleksandr Sergunin, and M.D. Suslov explore the dynamics of this relationship in the case of contemporary Russia. Finally, Viktor Elenskii traces the complex history of Ukraine's fractious Orthodox churches in the context of Russian–Ukrainian relations in the period leading up to the EuroMaidan protest in the winter of 2013–14.
