"Republicans Have Found Their Dream Leader and His Name Is Vladimir Putin"

[go west young man]

36. No I'm back...

Excerpt rom your own RIA Novosti link.

The number of Russian Catholics and Protestants has remained roughly the same, at about 1 percent.
About one in five Russians, or 19 percent, said that they had no religious belief compared to 75 percent in 1989, when the official position of the state was atheist, and 53 percent in 1991, after the Soviet collapse.
Most Orthodox believers are not regular church-goers, with only 4 percent saying that they attended services once a week. Some 35 percent said that they never went to Church, while 17 percent said that they attended services a few times a year.



The whole argument of the OP is mute as your own link clearly states christians and protestant equal 1 percent. Once again your pulling info from PEW polls that are obviously biased as technically the whole country is "under" the Russian Orthodox church with no one actually believing or attending. The CIA fact book cites this.

The last PEW poll you cited for Russia had half the population against alcohol, premarital sex and gambling. PEW may not be a very good source for info on Russia unless you seriously believe Russian abstain from all those things. Having been there 7 times I can say without a doubt Russia is not what PEW thinks it is unless they just polled that 1% in a church. Russia is a crazy country with a lot of religious symbolism but the people don't give a shit about any of it. And what logical explanation would there be for an entire country of Atheists to suddenly all be religious in 23 years. It makes no sense whatsoever.

Here's a link to Wiki religion in Russia page with completely different statistics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Russia

Here's an excerpt completely contradictor to your PEW poll.

Out of a population of 142,800,000 the survey found that 58,800,000 or 41% are Russian Orthodox, 9,400,000 or 6.5% are Muslims (including Sunni Islam, Shia Islam, and a majority of unaffiliated Muslims), 5,900,000 or 4.1% are unaffiliated Christians, 2,100,000 or 1.5% adhere to other Orthodox Churches (including Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian and other churches), 1,700,000 or 1.2% are Pagans (including Rodism or "Rodnovery", Ætsæg Din, Caucasian Neopaganism and Uralic Neopaganism) or Tengrists (Turco-Mongol shamanic religions and new religions), 700,000 or 0.5% are Buddhists (mostly Vajrayana), 400,000 or 0.2% are Orthodox Old Believers, 300,000 or 0.2% are Protestants, 140,000 are adherents of Eastern religions including Hindus and Krishnaites, 140,000 are Catholics, 140,000 are Jews.[1][2] The Bahá'í Faith in Russia (Вера Бахаи , according to Association of Religion Data Archives was estimated at about 18,990 in 2005.[8] The remaining population is made up of 36,000,000 or 25% "spiritual but not religious" people, 18,600,000 or 13% atheist and non-religious people and 7,900,000 people or 5.5% of the total population who have deemed themselves "undecided".[1][2