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The thing is, to be of good use in Russia these days, evangelicals have to work with—and sometimes within—the Russian Orthodox Church. But winning souls—or even just being considerate of souls—is tricky.

Christianity in Russia is a much tougher sell than it was during the elation of the early '90s, when, as a charismatic church's pastor told me, one could preach on a street corner one day, invite people to church, and the following Sunday see almost everyone show up for a service. While heartfelt Christianity, especially that of the evangelical sort, is much more influential and prevalent than the official numbers give it credit for, people are more suspicious of the gospel. The social conditions that had flung the hearts of Russians open to the gospel—rejection of Communism, an excited curiosity about democracy, a grateful embrace of globalization and, with it, Western ideas, including Western-style evangelicalism—are no longer here.

"Until recently, Russia saw itself as Pluto in the Western solar system, very far from the center but still fundamentally a part of it," writes Dmitri Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, in Foreign Affairs (July/August 2006). "Now it has left that orbit entirely: Russia's leaders have given up on becoming part of the West and have started creating their own Moscow-centered system."

There are at least two reasons for this newfound gall: oil and natural gas. For now, the fortune these fuels earn covers over—or distracts foreign investors from—the country's multitude of social sins: lack of medical and education reforms, widespread corruption, the fastest growing rate of HIV infection in the world, recklessness toward the environment, dreadful abuse of many of Russia's 700,000 orphans, homelessness of 1.2 million children, terrorism, favoritism toward the Russian Orthodox Church, anti-democratic tactics from the days of Communism, disturbances and hate crimes committed by the country's 50,000 skinheads, xenophobia, and religious discrimination.

Throughout Russia, fresh flowers adorn the often renovated or recently polished monuments of Stalin and Lenin. While many Russians in their 20s and 30s seem focused on material pursuits, their older compatriots tell me that they long for the good old days of Communism. Why? Order, they say. Stability. Knowing "that our children won't blow up at school," said a group of women I spoke to in Beslan, the site of a school siege by terrorists, which took 344 lives. Everywhere you look, as Peter Baker and Susan Glasser describe in Kremlin Rising, Soviet retro is a part of the landscape. Russian is in; foreign is out. The new architecture echoes Stalinist style. It started in the late '90s, when Nasha Pizza ("Our Pizza") kicked the butt of Pizza Hut. Is it just a sentimental streak of the Russian soul? What if the admiration of everything Western genuinely needed a correction? That may be the case. I'm afraid, however, that the Soviet nostalgia epitomizes not just a simplistic desire for a return to the stability of the Communist era, but also the resurgence of nationalism with xenophobic undertones. This is ultimately bad news for Russia's 1.5 million Protestants.

One reason foreigners fell out of favor with Russians is that the anti-Russian "color revolutions" in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan were infused with Western money. Quipped Stephen Kotkin, director of the program in Russian and Eurasian studies at Princeton University, in The New Republic last May: "Receiving Western money may be criminal, but being independent is really unforgivable."

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November 2006, Vol. 50, No. 11