This article is devoted to an analysis of institutional changes in religious administration of Muslims of the former Russian Empire during 1917 and early 1918. Its focus is the Muslim clergy and the Tatar population inhabiting European Russia, the Volga‑Ural region, and Siberia that were under the jurisdiction of the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly. The Muslim congresses (including the first Turco‑Tatar national parliament, the Millät Mäjlise), as well as the Tatar‑language press, discussed a variety of key social and political issues.

The article deals with the process of political self‑determination of the leaders and believers of Russian evangelical denominations — evangelical Christians and Baptists, during the years of the Revolution and the Civil War in Russia (1917–1922), as reflected in the confessional periodicals. The author studies this question through changes in the views of denominational leaders.

The Buriat Buddhists who constituted the majority of the Buddhist population of the former Russian Empire did not stay away from the revolutionary events. The secular segment of the Buriat society viewed the collapse of the monarchy as the unfolding opportunity to get rid of the colonial legacy, including discrimination of their religion. However, already in 1918 the deviation of the positions of clerical and secular segments of the Buriat society became obvious.

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”?

At the end of Russia’s old regime, the transformation of society initiated by the Great Reforms of the 1860s had also transformed the Orthodox Church. After the Emancipation, former serfs found new opportunities as laborers, factory workers, entrepreneurs, and even priests, monks, and holy men. Vasilii Karpovich Podgornyi was one such serf who, after Emancipation, became a successful businessman. Inspired by traditional piety he used his entrepreneurial skills to create networks of religious communities, primarily composed of pious women.