Believers, Atheists, and Others

In 1990-92 I had the opportunity to participate in a large-scale sociological study of religiosity in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, the results of which were published in a series of articles. (See D. Furman, "Religion and Politics in the Contemporary Mass Consciousness," Voprosy filosofii, 1992, no. 7; S. Filatov and D. Furman, "Religion and Politics in the Mass C~IISC~O~SSo~ts~i-S S," ologicheskie issledovaniia, 1992, no. 7; L. Vorontsova, S. Filatov, and D. Furman, "Religion and Politics in the Contemporary Mass Consciousness," in Religion and Politics in Postcommunist Russia [Religiia i politika v postkommunisticheskoi Rossii] [Moscow, 19941.) Afterward, the participants in the study ended lheir research-they lacked the resources and the money (and, most importantly, the resources to procure money). At the same time, however, a group of Finnish and Russian scholars under the direction of K. Wiainen, who had conducted all-Russian surveys in 1991, 1992, and 1996 (the sample for 1996 comprised 1,664 per...