This paper examines various ways in which lay Orthodox women — as mothers, wives, workers, and daughters — navigated the challenges and opportunities they encountered with respect to their faith in the early Soviet period. It centers on two questions: How did women’s faith impact their experience of the Revolution under Bolshevik rule? And how did women’s religious beliefs, behaviors, and faith‑based relationships influence how the Revolution was “lived”? Moving beyond the problematic category of “backwardness” traditionally assigned to female believers in the revolutionary context, it privileges women’s perspectives and highlights a diverse set of responses to socialist rule. And by encouraging a rethinking of the interrelationship between gender and faith in early Soviet society, it aims to open up new avenues of inquiry with respect to the experience of “lived socialism”.