Peggy Fletcher Stack forgets to mention in her otherwise very informing articles that Russia is a very successful land grabber.
Once we were the tiny Moscow Principality, which expanded by absorbing and annexing other territories to become the largest country on earth. Only an ideologically united state could have achieved that. So, religiously, my country is like a restaurant with all tables booked.
That’s why most Russians learn about the LDS Church as I did, from reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet,” never to hear of it again.
And, quite frankly, even those creeds allowed by the Kremlin are far from thriving due to our intrinsic atheism.
I discovered it while visiting Western capitals. In your hotels you traditionally find a copy of The Bible, but never in Russian hotels. Besides, our calendars, unlike yours, never note religious holidays, and we always disagree on when, say, Passover is.
And our president is a divorcee who believes that the world will end in 4.5 billion years and not on the Doomsday.
We have a very good saying in Russian: No matter how much you feed a wolf, he is always looking at the forest. That means that no matter how much Western missionaries preach to a Russian, he is remaining a non-believer. And that was the case long before Columbus discovered your continent.
Mergen Mongush, Moscow, Russia