As the Soviet Union disintegrated there was bound to be an ideological vacuum. It was relatively easy to reintegrate the Orthodox church in the new Russian ideology. The church were permitted to exist under Communism, admittedly under strict controls. Leading church dignitaries up to the very top were KGB informers. Independent priests were persecuted, sometimes arrested and sent to the Gulag. Under Boris Yeltsin much more freedom was granted to the church, which gave unconditional support to the government. This was widened further under Vladimir Putin. The church shared the governmental anti-Westernism and its conservative ideological orientation. Patriarch Kyrill accused Western European elites of being anti-Christian and anti-religious. As Father Vsevolod, head of the synodal department, declared in January, the Western models of society had become increasingly marginal for the rest of the world, incapable of coping with the challenges of the modern world. He envisaged growing resistance against the West based on a coalition of the Orthodox church, China, Africa and the rest of mankind. What form of resistance he left open — partly, apparently, spiritual partly military. This "spiritual response" of the church impressed Solzhenitsyn and others but they were not entirely convinced: how quickly the church had turned from being a tool of the KGB to an independent force.

There were certain bones of contention between state and church. The Orthodox church wanted supervision and control over all religions, not just the Pravoslav, but this the secular authorities could not give them. In recent years preparations have been made to reintroduce military chaplains in the Russian armed forces and even mobile churches. But this raised problems: would other religions, for instance Islam, be given similar privileges? Why should there be no mobile mosques? The number of Muslim recruits amounts, according to estimates, to 25 per cent in certain regions (the Caucasus, the lower Volga region, perhaps even in Moscow).

Under Patriarch Aleksei II (1990-2008) and his successor Kirill no serious conflicts developed but there were some curious mishaps, perhaps the inevitable result of less intervention by the organs of state security. There was the curious case of the priest Vyacheslav Polosin, who headed the parliamentary committee dealing with religious affairs. He converted to Islam and has devoted much of his time and energy in the years since to attacking the Rothschilds and George Soros who, he claimed, were the real forces behind the Arab Spring, which he thought an exceedingly nefarious phenomenon.

Another scandal was caused by a leading but controversial Moscow cleric who claimed that within the church a powerful homosexual lobby was active. But if there was indeed such a lobby it seems not to have been very effective since it failed to prevent anti-gay legislation in 2013. Putin and former President Medvedev as well as the Moscow mayor have paid respect to the Orthodox church by attending services on various occasions, notably at Easter. But such gestures were not sufficient to prevent widespread riots with a religious-ethnic background in southern Moscow, especially in Biryulyovo, a neighbourhood of markets, in 2013.

Not all supporters of the Russian extreme Right are practising Christians. There has also been a certain influence of neo-paganism, especially among neo-fascist groups and also in the teaching of Aleksander Dugin, perhaps the most influential single theoretician in these circles. But the church has history on its side and an organisation dating back many centuries. Hence the neo-paganists have been cautious not to stress their Orthodox deviations.