Contributors

Two major religions of the Federation of Rossiia (Russia), Russian Orthodoxy and Islam, together represent the majority of the country's believers. In the past decade of post-Soviet life, the politics of that representation has been changing, as well as the images of each religion. Political change is both reflected in and caused by two contrasting laws on religion, the liberal "freedom of religion" law of 1990 and the more restrictive law of 1997. Few legislative processes give as serious an insight into the sometimes painful politics of culture and religion in Rossiia as the debates surrounding these two laws, each of which are in turn reactions to decades of Soviet antireligious propaganda.1