WRITTEN REPORT

RELIGIOUS ISSUE IN RUSSIA

NAME: RAZ, POLHYNNE KATE B.

GRADE AND SECTION: 12 HUMSS-3
TEACHER: MS. CRISELDA T. CEBU
References:
https://www.britannica.com/place/Russia/Religion
https://www.advantour.com/russia/religion/buddhism.htm
http://www.asrie.org/2019/05/islam-in-russia-and-the-fight-against-
terrorism-meeting-with-albir-krganov/
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Russian-Orthodox-Church
https://www.state.gov/reports/2019-report-on-international-religious-
freedom/russia/
 RELIGIOUS ISSUES IN RUSSIA
RUSSIA. THE LARGEST LAND MASS
Russia- russia is the largest country in the world, this country is rich in oil
and natural gas so it is the reason for economic growth and has become the
way of life of the people who live there, racial tourism has also become a big
part to more This country developed, it started with local tourism until it
became recognized on the international level and became more recognized
as one of the fastest growing economies in the world.
OFFICIAL NAME
Russian Federation, Formal Name:
Russian Federation (Rossiyskaya
Federatsiya).
FORM OF GOVERMENT
The 1993 constitution declares
Russia a democratic, federative,
law-based state with a republican
form of government. State power
is divided among the legislative,
executive, and judicial branches.
Diversity of ideologies and
religions is sanctioned, and a state
or compulsory ideology may not
be adopted.
OFFICIAL LANGUAGE
Russian/Ruso
OFFICIAL RELIGION
Russian Orthodox
URBAN-RURAL POPULATION
Urban: (2020) 74.75%
Rural: (2020) 25.25%
Although ethnic differences
in Russia have long contained a religious element, the position of religious
organizations and of their individual adherents has varied with political
circumstances. In the 10th century Prince Vladimir I, who was converted by
missionaries from Byzantium, adopted Christianity as the official religion for
Russia, and for nearly 1,000 years thereafter the Russian Orthodox
church was the country’s dominant religious institution. After the
communists took power in 1917, religious institutions suffered. The church
was forced to forfeit most of its property, and many monks were evicted
from their monasteries. The constitution of the former Soviet Union
nominally guaranteed religious freedom, but religious activities were greatly
constrained, and membership in religious organizations was considered
incompatible with membership in the Communist Party. Thus, open
profession of religious belief was a hindrance to individual advancement.
More-open expression of Christian beliefs was permitted during World War
II, when the government sought the support of Christians and Jews in the
fight against fascism, but restrictions were reimposed when the war ended.
In the 1980s, under the reformist regime of Mikhail Gorbachev, a policy
of glasnost (“openness”) was declared, allowing greater toleration for the
open practice of religion. The subsequent dissolution of the Soviet
Union made religious freedom a reality and revealed that large sections of
the population had continued to practice a variety of faiths. Indeed, Russian
nationalists who emerged beginning in the 1990s identified the Russian
Orthodox church as a major element of Russian culture.

What is the main Religion in Russia?

Today Russian Orthodoxy is

the country’s largest
religious denomination,
representing more than half
of all adherents. Organized
religion was repressed by
Soviet authorities for most
of the 20th century, and
the nonreligious
still constitute more than
one-fourth of the
population. Other Christian
denominations are much smaller and include the Old Believers, who
separated from the Russian Orthodox church in the 17th century, and
Baptist and Evangelical groups, which grew somewhat in membership during
the 20th century. Catholics, both Western rite (Roman) and Eastern rite
(Uniate), and Lutherans were numerous in the former Soviet Union but lived
mainly outside present-day Russia, where there are few adherents. Muslims
constitute Russia’s second largest religious group. In 1997 legislation was
enacted that constrained denominations outside five “traditional” religions—
Russian Orthodoxy, several other Christian denominations, Islam, Judaism,
and Buddhism—restricting the activities of groups not registered in the
country for at least 15 years. For example, groups not meeting this
requirement at the time the law was implemented (such as Roman Catholics
and Mormons) were unable to operate educational institutions
or disseminate religious literature.

Although there is some degree of correlation between language and religion,

the two do not correspond entirely. Slavs are overwhelmingly Orthodox
Christian. Turkic speakers are predominantly Muslim, although several Turkic
groups in Russia are not. For example, Christianity predominates among
the Chuvash, Buddhism prevails among large numbers of Altai, Khakass, and
Tyvans, and many Turkic speakers east of the Yenisey have retained
their shamanistic beliefs (though some have converted to Christianity).
Buddhism is common among the Mongolian-speaking Buryat and Kalmyk.

Jews long suffered discrimination in Russia, including purges in the 19th

century, repression under the regime of Joseph Stalin, and Nazi atrocities on
Russian soil during World War II. Beginning with Gorbachev’s reformist
policies in the 1980s, Jewish emigration to Israel and elsewhere was
permitted on an increasing scale, and the number of Jews living in Russia
(and all parts of the former Soviet Union) has decreased. Prior to the
breakup of the Soviet Union, about one-third of its Jewish population lived in
Russia (though many did not practice Judaism), and now about one-tenth of
all Jews in Russia reside in Moscow. In the 1930s Stalin established
the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Soviet Far East as a Jewish province,
though by the early 21st century only about 5 percent of the province’s
population was Jewish.

Buddhaism

Buddhism is the traditional religion of the three regions of Russia: Buryatia,

Tuva and Kalmykia. According to the Buddhist Association of Russia, the
number of people practicing Buddhism is 1.5-2 million.
Buddhism (Lamaism) came to Russia in the 17th century, when pastoralist
tribes Buryats and Kalmyks came to the lower reaches of the Volga and
Transbaikalia from Dzhungaria (China). In the second half of the 18th
century a part of Kalmyks left back to Dzhungaria; the remaining ones
settled along the the Ural, the Terek, and the Kuma. At that time Buryats
had at least 17 «lamaist temples» and 150 lamas. The influence of Buddhism
was especially noticeable in 1914 following the annexation Tuva with 22
monasteries to Russia. After 1917 Buddhist clergy was under persecution;
lamas were denied the right to land; schools and monasteries were closed,
churches were looted and their property was handed over to museums.
However, when during the Great Patriotic War the Buddhists took patriotic
positions, in the 1940s the USSR created «the Central Spiritual
Administration of Buddhists»; lamas were released from prisons and camps,
the Buddhist communities resumed their activities in Tuva, Kalmykia and
Leningrad.
In January 2003 in Russia there were 218 Buddhist organizations. Kalmykia
Buddhists Association operates in Kalmykia; in Tuva - Kamba Lama of Tuva
Office. In the republic of Buryatia there are two Buddhist monasteries
(datsans), which have survived from more than 40 monasteries and 150
churches.
Judaism

Judaism began to have an influence on Russian culture and social attitudes

in the sixteenth century, shortly after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain
by Queen Isabella in 1492. In the centuries that followed, large numbers of
Jews migrated to Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belorussia. Much of the
anti-Semitism that developed subsequently among Russian peasants came
from the identification of Jews with activities such as tax collection and the
administration of the large estates on which the peasants worked, two of the
few occupations Jews were allowed to pursue in tsarist Russia. Anti-
Semitism followed the Jews from Western Europe, and already in the
sixteenth century the culture of Muscovy contained a strong element of that
attitude. When Poland was partitioned at the end of the eighteenth century,
large numbers of Jews came into the Russian Empire, giving Russia the
largest Jewish population (about 1.5 million) in the world. For the next 120
years, tsarist governments restricted Jewish settlements to what was called
the Pale of Settlement, established by Catherine II in 1792 to include
portions of the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belorussia, and the northern shore of
the Black Sea.

Islam

Islam is the nation’s second most widely professed religion in the Russian
Federation. According to official data and the nationwide survey, the number
of Muslims in Russia is approximately 20 million people. In the capital
Moscow there are four mosques while in the entire country the number of
mosques is around 8 thousand. The Russian president Vladimir Putin stated
that Russia is a Muslim country which sits as an Observer State in the
Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and traditional Islam is an essential part
of the country’s spiritual life.

The Islamisation of the Russian territory started in the 7 th-8th centuries

during the Arab conquest in Dagestan and the Caspian region (the South of
Russia) and lasted in the 19 th century when the Tsarist Empire conquered
the Caucasus and Central Asia and faced the opposition of the local
population.

Christianity

Christianity was apparently introduced into the East Slavic state of Kievan

Rus by Greek missionaries from Byzantium in the 9th century. An organized
Christian community is known to have existed at Kiev as early as the first
half of the 10th century, and in 957 St. Olga, the regent of Kiev, was
baptized in Constantinople. This act was followed by the acceptance of
Christianity as the state religion after the baptism of Olga’s
grandson Vladimir I, prince of Kiev, in 988. Under Vladimir’s successors, and
until 1448, the Russian church was headed by the metropolitans of Kiev
(who after 1328 resided in Moscow) and formed a metropolitanate of
the Byzantine patriarchate.

Russian Orthodox Church

One of the largest autocephalous, or ecclesiastically independent, Eastern

Orthodox churches in the world. Its membership is estimated at more than
90 million. For more on Orthodox beliefs and
practices, see Eastern Orthodoxy.

While Russia lay under Mongol rule from the 13th

through the 15th century, the Russian church
enjoyed a favoured position, obtaining immunity
from taxation in 1270. This period saw a
remarkable growth of monasticism.
The Monastery of the Caves (Pechersk Lavra) in
Kiev, founded in the mid-11th century by
the ascetics St. Anthony and St. Theodosius, was
superseded as the foremost religious centre by
the Trinity–St. Sergius monastery, which was
founded in the mid-14th century by St. Sergius of
Radonezh (in what is now the city of Sergiyev Posad). Sergius, as well as the
metropolitans St. Peter (1308–26) and St. Alexius (1354–78), supported the
rising power of the principality of Moscow. Finally, in 1448 the
Russian bishops elected their own metropolitan without recourse to
Constantinople, and the Russian church was thenceforth autocephalous. In
1589 Job, the metropolitan of Moscow, was elevated to the position of
patriarch with the approval of Constantinople and received the fifth rank in
honour after the patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch,
and Jerusalem.
 In the mid-17th century the
Russian Orthodox
patriarch Nikon came into violent
conflict with the
Russian tsar Alexis. Nikon,
pursuing the ideal of a theocratic
state, attempted to establish the
primacy of the Orthodox church
over the state in Russia, and he
also undertook a thorough revision
of Russian Orthodox texts and
rituals to bring them into accord
with the rest of Eastern Orthodoxy. Nikon was deposed in 1666, but the
Russian church retained his reforms and anathematized those who continued
to oppose them; the latter became known as Old Believers and formed a
vigorous body of dissenters within the Russian Orthodox Church for the next
two centuries.

In 1721 Tsar Peter I (the Great) abolished the

patriarchate of Moscow and replaced it with
the Holy Governing Synod, which was modeled after
the state-controlled synods of the Lutheran church
in Sweden and Prussia and was tightly controlled by
the state. The chief procurator of the synod, a lay
official who obtained ministerial rank in the first half
of the 19th century, henceforth exercised effective
control over the church’s administration until 1917.
This control, which was facilitated by the political
subservience of most of the higher clergy, was
especially marked during the procuratorship (1880–
1905) of the archconservative K.P. Pobedonostsev.

In November 1917, following the collapse of the

tsarist government, a council of the Russian Orthodox Church reestablished
the patriarchate and elected the metropolitan Tikhon as patriarch. But the
new Soviet government soon declared the separation of church and
state and nationalized all church-held lands. These administrative measures
were followed by brutal state-sanctioned persecutions that included the
wholesale destruction of churches and the arrest and execution of many
clerics. The Russian Orthodox Church was further weakened in 1922, when
the Renovated Church, a reform movement supported by the Soviet
government, seceded from Patriarch Tikhon’s church, restored a Holy
Synod to power, and brought division among clergy and faithful.
After Tikhon’s death (1925) the government forbade patriarchal elections to
be held. In 1927, in order to secure the survival of the church,
Metropolitan Sergius formally expressed his “loyalty” to the Soviet
government and henceforth refrained from criticizing the state in any way.
This attitude of loyalty, however, provoked more divisions in the church
itself: inside Russia a number of faithful opposed Sergius, and abroad the
Russian metropolitans of America and western Europe severed their relations
with Moscow.

Then, in 1943, benefiting from the sudden reversal of Joseph Stalin’s policies
toward religion, Russian Orthodoxy underwent a resurrection: a new
patriarch was elected, theological schools were opened, and thousands of
churches began to function. Between 1945 and 1959 the official organization
of the church was greatly expanded, although individual members of the
clergy were occasionally arrested and exiled. The number of open churches
reached 25,000. A new and widespread persecution of the church was
subsequently instituted under the leadership of Nikita
Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. Then, beginning in the late 1980s,
under Mikhail Gorbachev, the new political and social freedoms resulted in
many church buildings being returned to the church, to be restored by local
parishioners. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 furthered the spiritual
progress, and in 2000 Tsar Nicholas II, the Russian emperor who had been
murdered by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution of 1917, and
members of his family were canonized by the church.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 had severed large sections of the Russian

church—dioceses in America, Japan, and Manchuria, as well as refugees in
Europe—from regular contacts with the mother church. A group of bishops
who had left their sees in Russia gathered in Sremski-
Karlovci, Yugoslavia (now in Serbia), and adopted a clearly political
monarchist stand. The group further claimed to speak as a synod for the
entire “free” Russian church. This group, which to this day includes a sizable
portion of the Russian emigration, was formally dissolved in 1922 by
Patriarch Tikhon, who then appointed metropolitans Platon and Evlogy as
ruling bishops in America and Europe, respectively. Both of these
metropolitans continued intermittently to entertain relations with the synod
in Karlovci, but neither of them accepted it as a canonical authority.

After World War II the patriarchate of Moscow made unsuccessful attempts

to regain control over these groups. In 1970 it finally recognized an
autocephalous Orthodox Church in America, thereby renouncing its former
canonical claims in the United States and Canada; it also acknowledged
an autonomous church established in Japan that same year. Following
the collapse of the Soviet Union, discussions concerning the reunification of
the churches were initiated. In 2007 the churches were reunited when
canonical communion was restored between the Russian Orthodox Church
and the church outside Russia. In October 2018 the Russian Orthodox
Church severed its ties with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople,
the honorary primacy of Eastern Orthodoxy, after the latter approved the
independence of an autocephalous church of Ukraine; Bartholomew
I formally recognized the independence of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine
from the Russian Orthodox Church in January 2019.

Religious Freedom: Democratic People’s Republic in Russia

The constitution provides for freedom of religion, equal rights irrespective of

religious belief, and the right to worship and profess one’s religion. The law
states government officials may prohibit the activity of a religious association
for violating public order or engaging in “extremist activity.” The law identifies
Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism as the country’s four “traditional”
religions and recognizes the special role of the Russian Orthodox Church
(ROC). Throughout the year, authorities continued to enforce the Supreme
Court’s 2017 ruling that banned and criminalized the activity of Jehovah’s
Witnesses as “extremist” by raiding homes, seizing personal property,
detaining hundreds of suspected members, and sentencing individuals to
prison. There were reports that authorities physically abused Jehovah’s
Witnesses and members of other religious minority groups in detention.
According to Jehovah’s Witnesses, human rights nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs), and media reports, on February 15, Investigative
Committee officials in Surgut detained seven male Jehovah’s Witnesses. The
detainees said that during their interrogation, authorities put bags over their
heads, sealed the bags with tape, tied the men’s hands behind their backs,
beat them, stripped them naked, doused them with water, and shocked them
with stun guns. Authorities continued to fine, detain, and imprison members of
other religious minority groups and organizations for alleged extremism,
including individuals belonging to the banned Islamic organization Hizb ut-
Tahrir. As of the end of the year, the human rights NGO Memorial identified
245 persons who were imprisoned for their religious beliefs or affiliation, an
increase from 177 in 2018. The majority were Muslim, including 157 detained
as of October for alleged involvement with Hizb ut-Tahrir. The European
Association of Jehovah’s Witnesses estimated between 5,000 to 10,000
members had fled the country since the start of the government’s crackdown
and related societal violence in 2017. Reports persisted that local officials fined
members of religious groups for using land, including private homes, for
religious services. On November 14, the Constitutional Court ruled providing
residential premises to religious organizations for worship “does not constitute
a violation of the law and cannot serve as the basis for prosecuting citizens
under [the administrative code].” Critics said the court’s ruling, which included
limitations based on the rights of neighbors and health and safety
requirements, was vague and gave law enforcement too much discretion to
stop home worship activities. Authorities continued to fine, arrest, and
prosecute individuals under the Yarovaya Package, a set of legislative
amendments passed in 2016 that prohibits, among other things, “unauthorized
missionary activity.” Authorities fined a Buddhist man for organizing a
meditation meeting at a boathouse without a permit, and a Baptist pastor for
publicly baptizing a new congregant in a river. Officials continued to delay
and/or prevent minority religious organizations from obtaining land, and denied
renovation or construction permits for houses of worship. They also continued
to deny religious organizations ownership of property expropriated during the
Soviet era, such as churches and church-affiliated schools. The government
continued to grant privileges to the ROC not accorded to any other church or
religious association, including the right to review draft legislation and greater
access to public institutions. The government fined and issued deportation
orders for foreign nationals, including a Baptist pastor from Germany, for what
authorities said was illegal religious activity.

A December 2017 opinion poll by the independent Levada Center, however,

found that approximately 10 percent of the population held negative views
about Jews. According to the Levada Center poll, approximately 15 percent
held negative views about Muslims. Jehovah’s Witnesses reported they were
harassed at their workplaces and in some cases dismissed or forced to resign
when their coworkers became aware of their religious beliefs. According to the
NGO SOVA Center for Information and Analysis (SOVA Center), there were 19
reported cases of religiously motivated vandalism during the year, compared
with 34 in 2018. These included individuals setting fire to Russia’s largest
yeshiva, located in the Moscow Region, as well as unknown individuals
knocking down a cross at the site of a tenth century Christian church near
Stavropol, defacing the grave of a 19th century rabbi in Kaliningrad, and
damaging 13 headstones in an Islamic cemetery in the Astrakhan Region.
According to the SOVA Center, national and local media, including state-run
media, continued to publish and/or broadcast defamatory material about
minority religious groups, shaping the public perception that certain religious
minorities were dangerous.

During the year, the U.S. Ambassador and embassy officials met with a range
of government officials to express concern over the treatment of religious
minorities, particularly the use of the law on extremism to restrict their
activities. The Ambassador also met with representatives of the ROC and
minority faiths to discuss concerns about religious freedom in the country. In
June senior officials from the Department of State met with the chairman of the
Religious Board of Muslims of the Russian Federation to discuss the status of
the Muslim community in the country. Representatives from the embassy and
consulates general in Yekaterinburg and Vladivostok met regularly with
religious leaders and representatives from multiple faiths to discuss legislation
impacting religious liberty, government practices, and specific religious
freedom cases. The embassy organized speakers and programs designed to
promote religious tolerance and used its social media platforms to highlight
religious freedom concerns. On September 10, the U.S. government imposed
visa restrictions on two members of the Investigative Committee in Surgut for
their involvement in “torture and/or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or
punishment of Jehovah’s Witnesses” held in detention there in February.

On December 18, in accordance with the International Religious Freedom Act of

1998, as amended, the Secretary of State again placed Russia on a Special
Watch List for having engaged in or tolerated severe violations of religious
freedom.

Anti Religious in Russia

Joseph Stalin, as the second leader of the Soviet

Union, tried to enforce militant atheism on the
republic. The new “socialist man,” Stalin argued,
was an atheist one, free of the religious chains
that had helped to bind him to class oppression.
From 1928 until World War II, when some
restrictions were relaxed, the totalitarian dictator
shuttered churches, synagogues and mosques
and ordered the killing and imprisonment of
thousands of religious leaders in an effort to
eliminate even the concept of God.

“He saw this as a way of getting rid of a past that

was holding people back, and marching towards
the future of science and progress,” says the
historian Steven Merritt Miner, author of Stalin's
Holy War: Religion, Nationalism, and Alliance
Politics. “Like most of what Stalin did, he
accelerated the violence of the Leninist period.”

On a personal level, Stalin was well-acquainted with the church. As a young

man in his native Georgia, he had been first expelled from one seminary and
then forced to leave another, after he was arrested for possessing illegal
literature. As the young seminarian grew increasingly disillusioned with religion,
“the all-encompassing nature of Marxism, almost religious in its universality,
was tremendously appealing,” writes Oleg V. Khlevniuk, in his 2015 biography
of the dictator.
That all of human history had been leading up to the “higher stages” of
socialism was a seductive prospect, and one that “endowed the revolutionary
struggle with special meaning,” he writes. By this view, the end more than
justified even the most extreme means.

By the time Stalin came to the height of his power, in the 1920s, the Russian
Orthodox Church remained a powerful force, despite more than a decade of
anti-religious measures under Vladimir Lenin. Russia’s peasants were as faithful
as ever, writes Richard Madsen in the Oxford Handbook of the History of
Communism, with “the liturgy of the church” still “deeply embedded in [their]
way of life,” and “indispensable for their sense of meaning and community.” A
powerful church was a risky prospect, and one that might threaten the success
of the revolution.

The “Godless Five-Year Plan,” launched in 1928, gave local cells of the anti-
religious organization, League of Militant Atheists, new tools to disestablish
religion. Churches were closed and stripped of their property, as well as any
educational or welfare activities that went beyond simple liturgy.

Leaders of the church were imprisoned and sometimes executed, on the

grounds of being anti-revolution. The few clergy who remained were replaced
by those deemed to be sympathetic to the regime, rendering the church still
more toothless as a possible focal point for dissent or counter-revolution.

There was a relatively simple idea at its heart of this plan, explains Madsen: It
was possible and desirable to eradicate “traditional national consciousness,” in
order to “create a society based on the universal principles of socialism.” More
than that, the steps were replicable: The plan was eventually exported to other
communist countries that had chosen to ally themselves with the USSR.

On the ground, social reforms and pro-atheism publications sought to eliminate

religion from day-to-day life altogether. Launched in 1929, the new Soviet
calendar initially featured a five-day continuous week, designed to do away
with weekends and so revolutionize the concept of labor. But it had a
secondary function: By eliminating Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, the days
of worship for Muslims, Jews and Christians, the new calendar was supposed to
render observance more trouble than it was worth.

Stalin appeared to have had absolute conviction in his anti-religious war. “I

have no doubt that he was a thoroughgoing atheist,” says Miner. “He just
thought [religion] was stuff and nonsense, and a way to throw dust in the eyes
of people so you can control them—really, that it was childish to believe
something else.”

Meeting Franklin D. Roosevelt, Stalin seems to have been genuinely surprised

to learn that the president attended religious services, asking the diplomat W.
Averell Harriman “whether the president, being such an intelligent man, really
was as religious as he appeared, or whether his professions were for political
purposes.”

Even as Stalin’s measures succeeded in sucking the center out of the Russian
Orthodox church, they had minimal impact on people’s actual faith. As late as
1937, a survey of the Soviet population found that 57 percent self-identified as
a “religious believer.” Stalin’s central belief—that every rational person would,
as Miner puts it, “naturally discard religious superstitions just as a baby
outgrows its rattle”—proved misguided.

Even after World War II, the anti-religious campaign stormed on for decades,
with Bibles forbidden and little to no religious education. Still, by 1987, the New
York Times reported, “Soviet officials have begun to admit that they may be
losing the battle against religion.”

Culturally speaking, urban Bolsheviks had had little in common with rural
peasants who made up much of the general populace. For the peasants,
militant atheism was never quite captivating enough to replace centuries of
religious practice, especially as the memory of the 1917 revolution, and Stalin’s
rule, grew increasingly dim.

SUMMARY:
Russia is the largest land mass but today we’re talking about how they’re
religion works. Russia has a lot of history when it comes to religion in fact there
are more than 10 religion to it including the others, but today we are only
covering Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Russian Orthodox and, their
protesters Anti-Religion.

Buddhism is the traditional religion in 3 regions in Russia. Buddhism came to

Russia in 17th century. Judaism began to have an influence on Russian culture
and social attitudes in 16th century. Christianity was introduced into the east
slavic state of Kievan Rus by Greek missionaries in 9th century. Russian
Orthodox lay under Mongol rule from 13th through the 15th century. Anti-
religious in Russia was held by Joseph Stalin, Joseph Stalin is the second leader
of the soviet union. Joseph started an Anti-religious in Russia because he saw it
as a way of getting rid of the past that holding his people back.