The article discusses the reactions within the Russian Orthodox Church to the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020. Based on materials from the press, religious and secular Internet‑resources and online forums, the article systematizes the variety of responses of Orthodox priests, laity and church leaders to the unprecedented interruption of liturgical cycle and church sociality in the period of sanitary restrictions.

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”?

This article introduces a distinction in the paradigm of multiple modernities between a comparative-civilizational and a post-secular perspective. It argues that the first, comparative-civilizational perspective, helps to understand modernization-processes in large cultural-civilizational units; whereas the second, post-secular viewpoint, focuses on actors and cultural domains within civilizational units and on inter-civilizational crossovers. The two perspectives are complementary.