Celebrating religious holidays was in the core of religiosity of rural Central Russia. Before the Revolution, the holidays contained a tension between the strict following of church calendar and the specific local sacral rhythm and collective memory. The paper explores the changes in the Soviet times, in particular in the postwar period until the early 1960s, when the tradition underwent a deep transformation. The paper draws upon the documents of the state Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, Party and local institutions, Komsomol, as well as the ethnographic data.

In this article the problem of the collision of different paradigms of religious and national identity in a multinational and multi-confessional Russian Empire is shown on the example of a debate about the model of the Orthodox parish in Finland. The debate revealed a conflict between the two legal systems — imperial and that of the Grand Duchy of Finland. The Finnish legislation was perceived in the Grand Duchy as a guarantee of national identity.

Focusing on the concept of human dignity, the article compares the views of Eastern Orthodox theology and “western” approaches with further distinction between secular, generally neutral models, and Christian theology. Analysis of Eastern Orthodox theology, of the idea of theosis (deification) in particular, shows that theological foundations of “human dignity” in East and West are often closer to each other than it is usually assumed. Consequently, the actual borderline apparently runs not so much between East and West, but rather between secular and religious approaches.